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findings re: email & web hosts
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Faves
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Background: early contact management methods, the advent of social networking, and the discovery of CRM.
I have been in business since 1996. Before that, when I was a college student, I kept track of contacts in a paper address book in the back of my Daytimer pocket calendar. Around the time I started my business, the address book got full and dog-eared, and I moved my contacts to a home-made, flat database file. It worked fine for my purposes. Over time, I developed this database into a crude Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
In 2000, I went online, established my current business domain makinendsmeet.com, and began my web site. Without any comparison shopping, I lucked out and chose Network Solutions as my web and email host.
In 2003, I wondered whether there might be a better way of managing contacts than my own home-made database. I did a little research and discovered that CRM was "A Thing" and, through more dumb luck, discovered crmpro.com, which had just launched that same year. However, because I felt apprehensive about storing and managing contact information on the Internet, I didn't use it. I just made a note of it.
During the economic downturn of 2007-2009 when clients' phones stopped ringing and they became interested in more proactive marketing and sales tools and techniques, I did some research, built the Marketing Plan and Improve Income pages, dusted off my 2003 CRM findings and, beginning with my own businesss, deployed the CRM solution I had found then. During that process, I learned about Post Office Protocol (POP) email integration and legitimate email campaigns.
Around this same time, Social Networking was in its infancy, people were fed up with SPAM, and we were all yearning for better ways to interact as groups. Yahoo was on the decline and Google and Facebook were on the rise. All of them were experimenting with their own ways of facilitating group interaction . . . and they still are.
The one common denominator among all of these social networks was, and is, an email address. Some social networks required user names in their signup process, but eventually this practice was abandoned because it necessitated one more thing to remember. More progressive social networks abandoned the user name convention, and used email addresses instead as user names.
Now, the irony that I notice is how, in our attempt to shift group interaction away from email and toward other methods, they're still totally email-centric - so much so, that our very identity in social networks IS our email address.
The Problem: lost in a crowd
Now social networks are well established and we're all used to newsfeeds and smart phones. But the problem is, social networking is so pervasive that we all feel lost in a big crowd, and individual interaction and relationship management have fallen by the wayside. Now, instead of managing relationships with individuals, we manage relationships with our social networks.
Social network providers struggle to monetize. Some are never profitable. They offer a free service for a while as they burn through venture capital, and eventually fizzle out and fall by the wayside. Others sell advertising to stay afloat, but to make the advertising effective they must understand their members . . . and members don't want to be understood or "sold" anything. They tolerate advertising as a necessary evil, but they don't like it, and they don't like being studied. They feel violated. There are a lot of privacy concerns. Nobody wants to feel like they're being "watched" by a "Big Brother."
The Solution: own our relationships
The solution, as I see it, is for us to own our relationships and, instead of depending on social networks to manage them for us, to get smarter about managing them ourselves by tooling up to give the people in our lives the tender loving care and attention that they really deserve. Both on and off the job, it is about paying attention and caring.
Like using a calendar to remember a loved one's birthday, paying attention and caring require the use of certain tools. Over the years I've been studying the CRM space, I have discovered that, if it's used by caring people, CRM has the potential to be one such tool.
I have been spreading the CRM Gospel since 2008. At first, it didn't seem to resonate much. But lately, as they've discovered the limits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the extremely low rates of engagement in social networks - the whole "lost in a crowd" problem - just as I deployed one in mine, clients have shown more interest in deploying CRM solutions in their lives and businesses.
I have been helping them by writing Marketing Plans and using CRM to perform them, and, through POP integration, connecting their CRM tools to their email accounts and equipping them to do smart, targeted email campaigns to audiences who really want to receive what they are sending.
Meanwhile email itself has become a free commodity, a sort of loss-leader that is used to establish relationships between providers and users. Clearly, the relationship structure between providers and users of free email is, respectively, that of vendor and customer.
If users of free email accounts try to shift the relationship and become vendors themselves, although the provider may play along by offering token small business services like web design, the real, underlying agenda that I've seen is to keep email users firmly in the role of consumer, not producer. It's a kind of trap. Two obvious evidences of this agenda are small, arbitrary mailout limits, and lame site design tools.
Breakthrough. To break free from this trap, all we need to do is own our communication channels. Reject the "free" gift that isn't really free, that costs us by trapping us in a consumer posture, and for a very modest sum, purchase a communication channel that we can really own and that really works for us, that gives us the freedom to interact with our tribes, on our terms.
Quality, not quantity. The pretext of these limits is SPAM prevention. But SPAM is in the eye of the recipient. There is no magic number that defines it.
The SPAM problem is qualitative, not quantitative. If recipients resent it, it's SPAM. If they appreciate it, it isn't. One could send a message to just two people; and if one of them resented it, in their eyes it'd be SPAM.
In my view then, the solution to the SPAM problem is qualitative. We have to fight fire with fire not by imposing arbitrary quantitative limits on legitimate messages, but on improving their quality and precision.
This is the beauty of CRM. It's all about quality and precision.
A peculiar juncture
Now, in 2014, we find ourselves at a peculiar juncture:
- Although earlier CRM applications were "clunky" and "user-unfriendly", designers in the CRM space have learned from past failures and produced newer applications that are much improved. (For examples, please see the Improve Income page.) There is a vast proliferation of well designed, affordable CRM applications, many of which are predicated on some kind of email connectivity, and the ability to send out email campaigns to large groups.
- Free email services like Gmail have become so popular that some CRM developers are designing their applications to "live" inside Gmail or integrate with it.
- Meanwhile Gmail imposes severe and fickle constraints on group emailing, effectively nullifying the advantages of such applications.
- Popular web hosts like Godaddy and Comcast have proven to be inadequate, with unreliable web design tools and unhelpful customer service.
A few remarks about it:
Criteria. I respect the talents of professional web designers. I also recognize the importance of web site ownership. While owners can hire designers to do beautiful designs, they still own the site, and should understand the Content Management System (CMS) well enough that they can, for whatever reason, switch designers or work with them on editing. For this reason, I sought web design solutions that were both owner- and designer-friendly (criteria 4 & 5).
Providers. There are hundreds of web hosting companies. The main criteria I used to choose these providers were their appearances on other reviewers' favorites lists, and their willingness to respect business owners' professionalism by letting them communicate freely and directly with their groups, allowing 3,000 - 5,000 messages per day. These mailout limits were never disclosed on any of their web sites. In every case, to learn their limits I had to contact them and ask.
- The first recommendation, iPage.com, uses the Weebly site design tool which is fairly new, launched in 2006 by three college students. I like its fresh look and complete list of features. iPage gets mixed reviews, but overall they're quite favorable, making #1 on several review lists. If, however, for some reason you decide to leave iPage, you can take your Weebly design skills elsewhere. They're transferable.
- The second and third recommendations are sort of two in one, like a recent marriage. Web.com is highly recommended in its own right, and has its own proprietary site design tool; and it recently acquired the grand-daddy of the Internet, Network Solutions, which goes all the way back to 1979 and was the original Internet domain name registrar. I have used them for fourteen years and have always been happy with both their site design tool and their email service. I'm familiar with most, if not all, of their site designer's features, so if you decide to go with NS, I can help you a lot. (Update, February-March 2015: after chronic site publishing difficulties at Network Solutions, I switched to Weebly.)
- The fourth recommendation, Fatcow.com (an unfortunate name, IMHO), got a lot of love in the reviews I read. I have no direct experience with it, but to be fair and complete and offer a little variety, I thought I should include it.
For help with any of this, please contact me.
Respectfully submitted,
Kris Freeberg, Economist
Making End$ Meet
