MyNewsletterBuilder

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The Quick Take

MyNewsletterBuilder is unique among the services we reviewed because of its multiple online partnerships with the other services owned by parent company JBA Network. When you sign up with MyNewsletterBuilder, access to these other services helps you create richer multimedia emails, perhaps giving your email marketing efforts a higher profile. (The downside of all these options is that MyNewsletterBuilder’s web site is almost too packed with information and can be overwhelming at first). MyNewsletterBuilder seems a little more geared towards rock bands and other creative professionals than do the other services we reviewed – with a lot of music-related extras and services. Service starts at $10 a month and you can start out with a 30-day free trial.

Key Features

• Integration with JBA Network’s other services
• “Instant Import” lets you share content across accounts and web sites
• Lets you easily embed audio, music, and video in your emails

Details

Background

Based in Asheville, North Carolina, JBA Network’s goal is “to be your one-stop-shop for all things Internet and music marketing.” MyNewsletterBuilder  is  integrated with a number of JBA Network’s other services, including BuzzSEO (Internet marketing services), JukeboxAlive (web sites for musicians, artists, venues and event promoters), and eNewstand (syndication services).  With this integration, you can get good bang for your buck when creating your newsletters and campaigns. For example, when you send a newsletter created by MyNewsletterBuilder, it gets published on eNewstand, thus raising your online visibility. JukeboxAlive lets you do cool things with photo and audio, such as adding music and creating a photo montage. MyNewsletterBuilder also offers a wide variety of custom services.

Pricing

MyNewsletterBuilder offers three pricing plans: Unlimited, Bulk Email, and Standard. Surveys are included in your monthly fee.

The Standard and Unlimited Send plans both offer prepay discounts.

Contact Management

Adding contacts in MyNewsletterBuilder is a little more confusing than it is in other services, at least at first. That’s because many different tasks can be completed on one page, whereas in other services you have to click around to other pages more frequently. For example, in MyNewsletterBuilder, you can add contacts manually, upload a list (in CSV format), create category names for your contacts, and do other related tasks all on one page.  

Once your users are signed up, they can update their own account information via MyNewsletterBuilder’s Self Management System.

As with other services, MyNewsletterBuilder has robust list management features that help you keep track of bounces, detect and filter out invalid or duplicate email addresses, and keep your lists clean and updated. For example, after every campaign, MyNewseletterBuilder sends you a bounce summary by email, and the system automatically removes hard bounces after two returns (which prevents blacklist penalties and improves delivery to your other email addresses).

Campaign Creation   

Creating a campaign is not quite as straightforward as it is in other services because you have so many different options with MyNewsletterBuilder. There is contextual help on most pages, though, which can clarify things if you get overwhelmed.

When you click the My Newsletters tab to start creating a new campaign, you’ll see three buttons – Create Newsletter, Create Audio/Video, and Create Auto-Series.  The Auto-Series feature allows creating a sequence of automated emails that you can choose to send to subscribers. The Auto-Series Editor walks you through the process of creating the series. Clicking the Audio/Video button takes you to a series of templates that allow you to add video and audio to your emails via JukeBoxAlive (another service owned by JBA Network).

When you choose Create Newsletter, you’re taken to a page full of pre-designed, customizable templates that you can either scroll through or view by category. The templates are organized into about 15 different categories, including Coupon/Promotion, Retail, and Press Release. MyNewsletterBuilder does not allow you to create your own HTML emails from scratch like some other services do. You can, however click to view and edit the HTML or convert entire newsletter templates to HTML for custom editing if you choose.

The process of creating a survey is a little more straightforward, though still slightly confusing.  Again, instructions are close at hand to help you complete your survey-related tasks. 

Sending

When you create your campaign using the pre-designed layouts, MyNewsletterBuilder does not present you with a WYSIWYG editor, which seems odd.  Instead, a wizard walks you through a series of text fields and checkboxes. You have to “preview” your email to see what it looks like. The wizard makes the email creation process faster in some ways, but if you want to see what it looks like as you’re creating it, this approach might annoy you. We didn’t like that the preview feature appears in a pop-up window, requiring you to disable your pop-up blocker in order to see it. We had some problems trying to do this and ended up losing one of our emails when attempting to preview.

Once we did get the preview working, we appreciated that you could view the HTML preview, plain text, and online versions on the same page. You can also send yourself previews of any one of these versions right from the preview page, which is a convenient way to test them. 

When sending, it appears at first that you can only choose the day but not the time to send. Upon further inspection, however, we realized that MyNewsletterBuilder defaults to its “SmartSend” technology, which lets you schedule the day, but then picks the most optimal time of day for you.  You can, however, use the Manual Send option to pick the day and the time yourself.  Once your email goes out, you receive a confirmation email from MyNewsletterBuilder.

MyNewsletterBuilder does not offer a spam check tool, which would rate your email campaign for its likelihood of getting tagged as spam based on its content. As with all the services we reviewed, however, MyNewsletterBuilder promises compliance with anti-spam requirements and builds in a lot of prompts to ensure that your email follows regulations.

Reporting

MyNewsletterBuilder’s reports might not be the prettiest we’ve seen, but they get the job done. At a glance, you can see how many people have opened a particular email message, and how many have clicked a link on it; you also can find out how many people have subscribed to or unsubscribed from your list via that email, and how many times it has bounced. You can drill down on these numbers to get more details, and can also export your reports to a CSV file.

Support and Resources

You can get in touch with MyNewsletterBuilder support via phone, email, or live chat from 4am-7pm PT Monday through Thursday, and 4am-6pm PT on Fridays.

The MyNewsletterBuilder web site also provides a great deal of information.  We found the site’s contextual instructions to be especially helpful (if a bit on the dense side) as we walked through the process of creating email campaigns.  MyNewsletterBuilder also features a Knowledge Base, a Getting Started Guide, helpful FAQs, a Tips and Tutorials Guide, and Quick Start webinars.

Other Services

More so than other services we reviewed, MyNewsletterBuilder offers a wealth of custom services. These services include writing, design, site development, sales force integration, search marketing, and “turn-key managed email marketing programs for individual, business and large organization marketing communications.”  You can also hire MyNewsletterBuilder to edit campaigns that you’ve already created, and to add music and video to your emails.