Abdallah Al-Hakim - عبدالله الحكيم

What I learned from running my first newsletter campaign

This week I launched my first ever newsletter campaign using MailChimp (subscribe here). The experience was enjoyable and it effectively demonstrated, at least to myself, the multitude of tools that are now available to individuals (or small businesses) to run an effective online campaign. I thought it might useful to share with you some of the tools that I am relying the most on for this newsletter.

The point of this is not to advertise any of these tools versus their competitors, which there are many, but rather to show some of the options available for small businesses to get them up and running with their marketing campaigns.

Obviously these tools are only as good as the hands that yield them and there is no replacement for the creative and hard working individuals behind the scene.

Here is the list in no particular order:

MailChimp: to run and organize my newsletter campaign. It is relatively straightforward to use and is free for campaigns directed at 2000 or less subscribers.

Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook): the best platforms for broadcasting updates to my newsletter

Hootsuite: to schedule the broadcasting of my newsletter campaign on all the social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). Another good one to use is Buffer App which also tracks the number of clicks on twitter postings.

Tumblr: torun my personal blog site where I archive all the past newsletters editions as well as provide biographical and other information that might be of interest to the newsletter readers. All the important links to the blog are provided in the newsletter.

Google analytics: to track the number of visitors and clicks that my newsletter is receiving. This integrates very well with MailChimp and I also have Google analytics embedded on my tumblr blog site.