Email marketing is an important tool for business marketing. By using this tool, it is easier for the small business to promote the product or service to their customer. A large number of people still use email services for client and customer communication. They can either use free or paid email marketing software. There even is a separate software with advanced features to provide a better result. In this article, we will be discussing all the points which are related to email marketing platform, its features and tools, you will learn what you should do to make more people subscribe to your mailing list and how you can effectively communicate with your customers using email marketing.
The email marketing software is in a class of its own. The biggest reason for this is the possibility to interrupt your customer with your ads and offers when they are most likely to be interested. But how are you supposed to pick the right email service provider? After all, there is an ocean of offers and all look good. This article will help you choose the best email marketing platform or free email marketing software that works for you.Nowadays, there are so many email marketing software, it can be hard to find the right one. Each service offers unique features that can help you make your business grow. That’s why an email marketing software comparison is so helpful.
Nowadays, there are so many email marketing software, it can be hard to find the right one. Each service offers unique features that can help you make your business grow. That’s why an email marketing software comparison is so helpful.
If you’re looking for a simple way to keep in touch with your customers, email marketing may be the solution. There are many software products that can help you manage a successful email marketing campaign. This article will look at what to consider when choosing the best email marketing platform for your business.
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software enables users to create, send, and track emails to their list of subscribers. Using software makes it easier to create well-designed emails, and also allows you to see key metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. Advanced platforms allow you to automate sends based on user behavior, which increases the likelihood of engagement since the email is more personalized to their interests.
Email marketing is an effective marketing tool for almost any industry. For example, an e-commerce store can automate a follow-up email if a user leaves an item in their cart, reminding them to make the purchase. A SaaS product can encourage users to demo a product and decide how persistently to follow up based on whether the lead takes them up on their offer. While email marketing is not by any means a new technique, it has proven its effectiveness year after year in industry reports.
What Does Email Marketing Software Cost?
Email marketing software typically has variations of plans based on the number of contacts you have. The cost of the lowest-priced plan typically ranges from free to $50 per month. The cost of the highest-priced plan can be thousands of dollars per month. Most plans have at least a two-week free trial and offer discounts to users that pay annually.
How much you pay really depends on how many features you need and how actively you engage in email marketing. This is because most software charges either by the number of emails in the database or by the number of emails you send out. Therefore, it’s important to keep a close eye on your activity in order to monitor whether your monthly costs are increasing.
Does CRM Software Include Email Marketing?
Some CRM software does give you the functionality to email contacts within the database. However, it does not have the robust set of features that software dedicated to email marketing will have. The email marketing tool in a CRM is really for people that just need to send the occasional email and don’t need a design or automated campaigns.
If you want to increase engagement with your subscribers through automations or get more advanced reporting, then it makes sense to get a separate email marketing software from your CRM.
What Does Email Marketing Software Typically Include?
Almost all email marketing software allows you to design emails, upload contacts, schedule email campaigns, and see data on how your emails are performing. Advanced software lets you A/B split test aspects of the email, segment your contact list based on interests, and automate emails based on how contacts interact with any of your marketing channels. There are also typically lead generation capabilities such as putting lead forms on your site and creating landing pages to get more subscribers into the database.
Improve Your Email Deliverability
All the email newsletter tools that we have shared in this article have great email deliverability rates.
However there are few things you can do to make sure that your marketing emails always get delivered.
1. Use a Professional Email Address
Email platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and others have algorithms that look for spammy behavior. One of them is the sender email address.
As a business, it’s important that you use a professional business email address (like yourname@yourcompany.com) and not a generic hotmail or gmail address.
This will help make sure that your email deliverability rate is higher than industry average.
2. Send Targeted Emails based on Interests
It’s very important that you personalize your emails based on user segments. Email marketing software like Constant Contact and HubSpot allows you to easily group your subscribers into segments such as most active, not-active, interested in specific topics, custom segments, etc.
This will help your email marketing campaigns have the highest open rate and click through rate which is a big factor in future email deliverability.
We always recommend sending a personalize welcome email to all new subscribers and then segment users accordingly based on their interests.
It’s also important to have a clear unsubscribe link for users, so they can unsubscribe rather than marking your emails as spam.
Omnisend
A good option for medium-large e-commerce brands
Omnisend is quickly becoming one of the leading marketing platforms for e-commerce stores.
Designed to help e-commerce brands control their marketing across multiple channels, Omnisend offers automated email, SMS, push notifications, and most impressively, integrations with Google Ads, Instagram, Facebook Ads, Messenger, and WhatsApp – which they claim have 10X higher click-through rates than email.
By focusing purely on e-commerce, Omnisend has built innovative email templates designed to reduce cart abandonment and drive repeat buyers. From ‘wheel of fortune’ offers to virtual scratch cards and birthday discounts, it’s evident that Omnisend’s built by a team intimately aware of what works in e-commerce.
As you’d expect of an e-commerce email marketing tool, Omnisend hooks into most e-commerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Where Omnisend goes one step further is in integrating with review, loyalty and help desk platforms, such as Yotpo, Smile.io, and ReCharge.
This not only enables Omnisend to report on how your campaigns impact sales, but enables you to trigger email, SMS and social campaigns based around your customer behaviour to reduce cart abandonment, increase return buyers, drive more product reviews, and more.
If you want the features that make Omnisend stand out, you’ll need a PRO account which starts at $199/month for up to 10,000 contacts. While not the cheapest, nor the easiest to use, Omnisend is a good option for e-commerce brands that want one multi-channel platform to rule them all.
What are Omnisend’s key features?
- Visual email builder
- Email, SMS and Push notifications
- Transactional and marketing emails
- Dynamic discount codes
- e-commerce Segmentation
- Retargeting
- Surveys and Polls
- Reporting
- Popups and forms – wheel of fortune, scratch cards etc.
- A/B Testing
Autopilot
A good option for marketing automation
Gone are the days where email marketing is about sending bulk newsletters.
In today’s digital landscape, it’s essential for email marketing to be smart; sending the right messages to the right leads at the right time, automatically.
That’s why all of our top ten email marketing providers provide marketing automation. As the name would suggest, this is Autopilot’s forte. To boot, they have one of the best-designed canvases for building email automation sequences.
Anyone who has ever built an email automation sequence knows how quickly they can become confusing. Autopilot solves this in a rather quirky way, allowing you to annotate your automation sequences with emojis, stickers and explanations, making it easy for teams to collaborate on building sequences.
Yes, it can get messy – but I’d rather that and be able to understand what’s going on, than having beautiful automation sequences that take half an hour to interpret.
Another feature I love about Autopilot is its ability to trigger actions in your other tools inside Autopilot. This saves having to configure integrations using a tool like Zapier and makes your sequences much easier to understand.
Autopilot’s reporting is also excellent, though, I’ll go into this in more detail in our section on reporting and analytics below.
Starting at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, Autopilot is far from the cheapest option, particularly considering that Autopilot does not offer an in-built CRM. However, Autopilot is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we had to move from ActiveCampaign, this is likely where we’d go.
Benchmark
A good option for agencies
Benchmark is an interesting option for any business looking for a well-designed and easy-to-use email marketing tool.
While not quite as well known as other tools in the top ten, they’ve become an increasingly popular response to “Which tool are you moving to?” in our survey.
Benchmark do everything pretty well and are reasonably priced, but there’s one thing that really sets them apart from other email marketing tools – and that’s design.
Everything from their templates to the platform itself is beautifully-designed – and not just visually attractive, but great user experience. While that may seem trivial to some, it makes all the difference when it comes to understanding your data and creating the right impression with contacts.
Benchmark is a good choice for any small business that needs simple, easy-to-use email marketing and automation software. It’s likely to be a particularly good choice for small agencies and consultancies where design is important both from a staff training perspective – and also providing a good experience for clients.
What are Benchmark’s key features?
- Visual email builder
- Marketing automation
- 1,500+ Integrations
- Landing pages
- Surveys and Polls
- Reporting
- Sign-up forms
- A/B Testing
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most well-known softwares in the CRM and email marketing space.
Their email marketing service is free to start, and it comes with a lot of powerful automation features designed to grow your business.
You can use their easy drag-and-drop email builder and a selection of templates to create a completely custom newsletter that matches your brand’s personality and colors.
Because of the native integration with the HubSpot CRM, you can personalize your emails for each subscriber based on things like device type, country, list membership, or any other custom information you might have on the individual subscriber.
HubSpot comes with all the powerful feature you’d expect from an enterprise level email marketing software such as send time optimization, high email deliverability, A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.
One of the main reasons why small, medium, and enterprise customers choose HubSpot is because they offer an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builder, operation hub, and more.
Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan, which includes the CRM and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools.
The free version allows you to send 2,000 emails and store an unlimited number of subscribers. You can create custom signup and popup forms, build landing pages, manage and track your online ads, and more. It has all the tools you need to get started.
If you need more advanced capabilities, then their paid plans starts at $45/month.
How much does email marketing cost?
Your email marketing cost will entirely depend on the number of subscribers you have, the number of total emails you send per month, and the email platform you use. On average, a small business email marketing costs is around $20 – $300 per month on email marketing given that they manage their own campaign. If you use an email marketing agency, then your cost might be closer to $500 per month or higher.
Conclusion
Email marketing software is the backbone for any company’s successful communication with their customers. It allows you to create, send and track targeted emails from anywhere in the world. Boost your sales and gain more profit, by using email marketing software.
If you are planning to a sell a product online, then an effective email marketing campaign is the key to achieve this. What’s more, nowadays many individuals are using email service providers such as yahoo, gmail and hotmail for their personal purposes. This means that you can get them all as your target market through send them emails using email marketing platform.