As a successful e-commerce business owner with a thriving online platform, you know by now that using email marketing software to execute your email campaign is a seamless way to increase your returns on investment. It also allows you to measure results and improve your strategies’ efficiency.
This valuable investment optimizes your email marketing strategy for effectiveness and efficiency and helps you observe how your campaign performs with the vital solution metrics as they happen!
If you are looking to exceed your sales goals and increase your ROI, then choosing the right email marketing software for your business, whether it’s one with simple automation or one with advanced marketing features, can help you achieve it.
So, here are a few advantages of using an EMS right now.
Benefits of a Good Email Marketing Software
With various tools that sort recipients into groups, schedule emails, generate feedback reports, make configuration, and personalize triggered and targeted messages based on your subscribers’ behavior or demographics, there are many benefits of using good email marketing software.
- Smart and efficient email automation – you have a business that caters to over 1,000+ customers, and you have to send emails to all of them. Just imagine sending over 1,000 emails, sorting email addresses, pasting the message, and sending emails manually in one sitting. You will wear yourself out. With an EMS, you can automate the entire campaign process!
- Affordable and effective target reach – using your robust built-in mailing list, email marketing software allows you to reach more of your target audience at significantly lower costs than traditional outlets like tv, print, and radio.
- Accurate metrics and ROI – an EMS will give you more detailed post-campaign analytics and report for each campaign, promote accountability in your campaigns, and generate immediate revenues. You can track each campaign’s key metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, deliverability rate, and engagement level.
- Increases customer loyalty – you can easily launch various campaign series to stay in touch with your customer base. With an EMS, you understand your buyer personas, and you’re able to provide relevant content that matches the recipient’s interest and helps them in their buyer journey.
- Fewer risks – using one of its features, an A/B testing tool, which shows the key metrics among different campaigns, you can sort and choose the best method among a set of tested email campaigns.
You can use email marketing software (EMS) for various purposes, and choosing the right one for your business is crucial for success, or ask yourself, “Are my emails killing my business?”.
To help you make the right decision, we’ve included a few key pointers to consider when choosing an email marketing software for your business.
Features of a Good Email Marketing Software
Choosing the right email marketing service can significantly impact your marketing campaign’s success, and pricing isn’t the only factor that should influence your purchase decision.
It’s important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose because they are responsible for making sure that your emails get delivered.
Here are a few features to look out or before you choose your EMS –
- A robust email builder – it’s the era of DIY marketing, and no one has the time to take training courses on the go. You need an email builder that’s intuitive and easy to use, with simple drag-and-drop features, built-in templates, responsive format, photo editing, and more that saves your time. A what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIyour business’sYG) email editor that has an easy user interface and lets you see how your email appears before launching.
- Integration – Updating lists and sending emails manually is time-consuming, so the email marketing software you choose must integrate seamlessly with your CRM and Apps to provide you with a hassle-free solution for managing valuable content and customer data. Your apps give you a ton of valuable customer insights like purchase history, demographics, preferences, and more.
- Mobile optimization – these days, most people check their emails on their smartphone, and this means the email marketing tool you choose should have functionality and mobile-optimized templates.
- Email list management – your EMS must make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track your email marketing campaigns’ performance.
- A/B Testing Tools – This feature allows you to send different email sets to small groups to measure feedback on the subject line, design, and copy. The results give you the option of choosing the best-performing email version to your mailing list.
- Autoresponders – regardless of your business size, responding to emails is very important. The email marketing software you choose should allow you to send automated responses based on their engagement level.
- A rich selection of email templates – Your email marketing software provider should have a rich selection of email templates that serve many different email marketing purposes that can be easily customized to fit your branding.
- Spam testing – your EMS should be able to show how your email content performs against the most powerful spam filters and fix possible deliverability problems before sending your email campaign.
Email Marketing Software Options
We have listed the benefits and features of a good email marketing software; now, let’s look at some of the best tools available for the job –
Mailchimp
This is one of the most recognizable and accessible email marketing platforms globally, with around seven million users worldwide, primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan. MailChimp has all the modern features that can run an email campaign successfully.
- It comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. You can build your email in plain text, custom HTML code, customize emails, and add designs with ease.
- It also allows you to set up delivery times based on the user’s time zones, and you can set up segmenting based on geolocation. It also has critical tools like merge tags, custom forms, spam filter diagnostics, and social sharing.
- It can easily be integrated with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
- If you’re looking for a tool that allows for a little more back-end development, the MailChimp platform is quite limited to marketing automation features.
- Support is restricted to email only, and as a business owner, you need reliable support that you can count on.
- Although they offer a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers, it is limited in the features you get, and you’re also required to display their branding in your email.
- Paid plans start from $9.99/month, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers.
GetResponse
It is another top-rated email marketing software that offers you a high return on investment. It is effortless to use as it simplifies email marketing for small businesses.
- It comes with some unique marketing automation tools that allow you to create smart, automated campaigns and access thousands of free stock photos and an integrated Shutterstock gallery.
- It has user-friendly editing software with 500 pre-designed templates, including intuitive list-building tools that allow you to create fully-integrated, interactive campaigns with limited technical knowledge.
- Using it’s drag and drop builder, you can create effective email campaigns to boost your profits campaigns, segment your contacts, and send any amount of emails designed for specific groups.
- It has some of the best SalesForce integration software on the market, and it also integrates with third-party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc.
- It comes with a phone, live chat, and email 24/7 customer support. Their help section is full of free learning material, including tutorial user guides.
- It allows you to export files from several formats and offers in-built statistics, including best-performing emails and cart abandonment rates.
- It provides you with visually appealing responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, unsubscribe tracking, and autoresponders.
- GetResponse offers you a 30-day free trial, and their pricing starts at $15/month.
ActiveCampaign
It is an all-in-one, user-friendly marketing platform for businesses worldwide, offering a broad suite of tools designed to help small to medium-sized companies acquire, retain, and ultimately engage their customers.
- It’s drag and drop interface provides an effective way of building content-rich email campaigns with speed and accuracy.
- It makes adding contacts to email lists easy with options to insert them individually, importing email contacts in bulk from a file, automatically transferring your list from another EMS, or copy-pasting.
- It has a wide range of sophisticated market and sales automation features like the A/B testing tool, drag and drop design tools, email and marketing automation, dynamic content options, opt-in forms, and social media integrations.
- It has a vast library of free stock images, image hosting, and real-time analytics for you to monitor your ongoing email campaign performance.
- It offers chat and email support during business hours and an additional phone support option available with a higher-tier plan.
- ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial with some limited feature, and pricing starts at $9/month,
SendinBlue
This EMS is beneficial for e-commerce businesses. It has most of the modern features that will enable you to take advantage of the latest trends in email marketing and be a powerful asset for your e-commerce business.
- It offers user-friendly email design tools and loads of back-end scope if you’re looking to add extra functionality to your email campaigns.
- It allows you to synchronize contact lists from most major platforms and manage your content with ease.
- It offers detailed analytics, including insights on where emails have been opened and device type, and its transactional email options are more advanced than most email marketing software available.
- It also offers targeted SMS messages that work in conjunction with your emails and the tailored messages to customers. Messages like – ‘you left items in your shopping cart’ and more.
- It provides you access to an unlimited number of contacts and details, an intuitive drag and drop based design tool, email personalization, mobile-friendliness, customer segmentation options, and custom email automation rules.
- Using SendinBlue, you get a fully-functional sales CRM, a live chat plugin, and access to modify Facebook ads directly in Sendinblue’s campaign management platform.
- It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
- SendinBlue offers you four different plans: Free, Lite, Premium, and Enterprise, and pricing starts at $25/month.
Drip
It is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for e-commerce business owners who want to maximize their marketing efforts by offering a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
- Its intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual workflow builder set it apart from other EMS’s.
- With its seamless third-party platforms and social media integrations, you can easily add pop-ups and sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.
- It allows you to send bulk emails, connect and engage with every customer personally using their smart e-commerce marketing automation.
- It provides you with live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides, and excellent documentation.
- Drip offers 24/7 email support with their plan, a free trial, and pricing starts at $49/month, including all their features.
AWeber
This is one of the oldest and most popular email marketing platforms globally. They offer a variety of tools that assist small and medium-sized businesses in managing their email marketing campaigns.
- It is perfect for beginners, and it integrates easily with most platforms, including WordPress.
- Its unique feature is the AI-powered email template designer that makes the whole process of creating your email effortless.
- It gives you access to ready to use HTML email templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.
- It offers you fantastic 24/7 customer support over the phone, email, live chat, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
- AWeber offers a free and a paid plan, and its free plan is limited to 500 subscribers.
- With AWeber, pricing starts from $16.15/month, and you choose to pay monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- It also offers you a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Conclusion
There are many email marketing software out there, and choosing the best for your needs to get the best value out of your email marketing campaign can be tricky.
As you explore your options, ask yourself the right questions, set clear and measurable goals, take the time to understand your options before you select the one which includes all the functions and features you require for your business.
We hope this article has been immensely helpful and useful, and you have learned how to pick and choose the best email marketing software to assist you with your email campaigns.
If you still find the process tricky, you can also reach out to us to help you determine which EMS works best for your business.