All small businesses (not just online businesses) are looking for ways to market themselves both online and off-line. Over the years, SMBs have developed a new set of tools and skills to meet their needs in this area. Among those growing skills is implementing email marketing strategies and incorporating that type of marketing into a business plan.
You may have heard countless times that email marketing is an important part of your small business’s marketing repertoire. However, it isn’t the only way to make sure you get your information out there, and part of that is making sure you have the best email marketing software at your disposal. This can be time-consuming if you do not have the right software for your needs.
If you run a small business you must be using email marketing. This is the single most effective way to reach customers and to get sales. It’s also the most expensive way. Email marketing software for small business solves those problems for you by automating email creation, sending and tracking, and allowing you to access your subscribers information whenever you need it.
These are the best free tools that you can use to improve your email marketing. Also, they’re some of the most popular tools among businesses all across the world. If you want to grow your business, then you need to start using these free tools right away.
What is a drip campaign?
An email drip campaign is a series of automated emails that sends out to your email list subscribers, based on a specific set of predetermined parameters. These automations can be as simple or complex as you need them to be.
An example of a simpler drip email sequence is a free email course: someone signs up for the course on your website and receives daily emails with the course content written inside.
Other drip automations, like an abandoned email cart sequence that reminds people to come back and complete their purchase, are more complex since they require a few more considerations to run properly. Not only do you have to consider what might incentivize people to return and finish shopping (a picture of the item in the cart? a limited time coupon code?), but you’ll also have to include exit goals that will ensure the emails don’t continue to send once the order has been placed.
Note: We’re partial to the term “drip campaign,” but this marketing tactic goes by many names, including automated email campaigns, lifecycle emails, autoresponders, and marketing automation.
How to pick an email marketing app to send drip emails
I’ve been using email marketing apps for the past eight years, and it continues to impress me when I see how many great options are available—and accessible—for every type of email marketing need. If you want to use drip marketing automation to optimize your funnels, you’ll need to choose between a number of really strong options, from tools that “just” send emails to full-featured CRMs with marketing automation that happen to include drip email features.
To give you a head start in finding the best solution to fit your email marketing needs, I spent several days testing a few of the best drip email marketing apps, many of which I use in my day-to-day work as a content marketer.
I signed up for each drip app, configured an opt-in form, integrated with my website, and started building a test list of subscribers. Then, I created a welcome drip automation that would send out whenever the opt-in form was submitted, which allowed me to not only test the setup features, but also get to see what kind of data and tracking analytics were available.
This research took me down a few rabbit holes and allowed me to identify the strongest standout features of each tool. In addition to those unique aspects, all the apps on this list offer at least the following features:
- Email personalization, so you can create a more intimate experience for your list subscribers. (“Hey you” might be a… fine way to begin an email, but using the subscriber’s first name is really powerful.)
- Segmentation, so the emails are only sent to relevant subscribers. At the most basic level, this might look like a four-email welcome series to new subscribers. More advanced segmentation techniques use tags to identify subsets of subscribers who’ve purchased a specific product, clicked a link in an email, and so on.
- Analytics, so you know what’s working and where you can improve. Most of the tools on this list include basic analytics like open rates. Some offer more advanced options, like A/B testing capabilities, email list health, and more.
- Affordability, because you don’t need to break the bank to get results. All the apps on this list have a reasonable starting price point, and most charge by the number of subscribers. This is where you’ll have to do your own research to see if your #1 pick will still make sense financially as you increase your email list size.
- Integrations that allow you to link your email drip campaign software with the other tech tools in your stack. This allows you to fine-tune your email sending strategy and reduces the manual work involved.
Mailchimp
Many email marketing apps offer a free option for small lists, to give you the opportunity to onboard and start building your lists before having to pay. But these free tiers are typically very limited in the number of subscribers you’re allowed to have or the number of emails you’re allowed to send, as well as the features that you have access to without paying.
This is where Mailchimp stands out, with a free plan that allows up to 2,000 subscribers, with up to 10,000 monthly emails. The number of monthly emails is especially important when you’re sending out welcome emails to new subscribers along with frequent newsletters.
Mailchimp has been a big name in the email marketing industry for a while, and it continues to deliver well on its features. You’ll find everything from the basic email sending and automations to more unique options like sending out postcards, and the Creative Assistant, which auto-creates branded marketing graphics based on your website’s imagery. All these features are starting to cramp Mailchimp’s “for beginners” style, but the navigation is still pretty straightforward, so you can quickly jump from reviewing your audience to creating new opt-in forms or landing pages and setting up your drip campaigns.
Keep in mind that the free version of Mailchimp limits you to a one-step automation. That’s great for automating your welcome email and other similar drips, but you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan if you want to take advantage of their full automation builder with multi-step drip campaigns that include time delays, conditionals, and more. When you do decide to upgrade, the cost increases based on the number of subscribers you have. But the other apps on this list that offer a free plan only allow 500 emails/month (Omnisend and Klaviyo) or don’t offer drip at all on the free plan (ConvertKit). So while the limitation of one-step automations isn’t ideal, it’s still much more generous than any other free plan for drip functionality.
Since Mailchimp integrates with Zapier, you can shave off the manual work hours by automating tasks like adding new form submissions or leads to your email list.
Mailchimp price: Free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 monthly emails. Paid plans begin at $11/month with 500 contacts.
Customer.io
Building Drips:
Customer.io provides a visual workflow builder to create your drip sequence logic. It’s easy to drag-and-drop different blocks. You can also combine different ways of sending messages (emails, SMS, and push notifications) to your users.
To create your emails you can choose from existing templates or start from scratch. If you start from scratch, you can use a drag-and-drop editor, rich text editor or HTML code.
They have a visual workflow builder that allows you to drag and drop components like emails, delays, conditional branching, segments etc., into the canvas to build your journey.
If you just want to send & track drip campaigns and don’t care about all other email marketing features, then you can choose from these selected platforms:
Reporting:
You can see the metric related to each step of the workflow in the sequence builder itself
To see how people are moving through the campaign, which emails are working, and which ones need optimization, you can go through the journeys metric.
You can export these reports as CSV and store them in your database.
Pricing:
They have a base price starting from $150 and you can send emails to up to 12K customers.
If you want to try before committing, they offer a 30-day free trial. You get access to automation and drip campaigns during the trial too.
SendX
Building Drips:When you are creating your drip campaign, on each screen of SendX, you will clearly know what action to take so it’s very intuitive to use. Your drip campaign will be up and running in 4 simple steps.
In the email editor, you can choose a pre-existing template, add custom fields, timer (to show scarcity), images, videos etc.
You can customize all your emails to look like an extension of your website/brand by editing the HTML code.
Some interesting features that SendX provides are:
Skip Weekends:
If you don’t want to send emails on Saturday or Sunday, you can just check this option. No messy rules or manual intervention required.
Track Replies:
Check this box to track people who replied to any of the emails in the drip sequence.
Auto-generate UTM parameters:
This will automatically convert the links in your drip sequence to links with UTM parameters. This will help you track the website/page traffic coming from these campaigns. E.g. a link www.sendx.io can be converted to
Reporting:
You can optimize your emails further by analyzing data provided through intuitive dashboards and heatmaps.
Dashboards give you key metrics – open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribers – for the overall campaign as well as hourly performance.
Heatmaps give you data on which CTAs and links are people clicking the most so you can use these patterns across your campaigns and even broadcasts.
Pricing:
Unlike other email marketing software where drip emails, modern templates are behind high-priced plans, with SendX, you get access to everything even if you are on your free trial.
Even after the free trial ends, you can access all editor functionalities, templates, 24×7 customer support (through email) for as low as $7.49/mo.
Benefits of drip campaign software
First off, many businesses underestimate the use of email automation software for building brand awareness. Too bad!
Research suggests that 86% of customers would love to receive emails at least monthly, while 61% prefer getting emails weekly. Not to mention that almost 30% don’t mind receiving emails a few times (!) a week.
You’ll never know what’s the best email frequency for you until you test it out. But based on these statistics, sending out emails every week is one of the ways to strengthen your brand.
Use the power of regular mailouts that tackle your leads’ pain points with useful, relevant content. This will help position you as a reliable source of information in your niche and build people’s trust in your future business offers.
Besides, effective drip email software can bring your company to a new level by:
- Saving your time and money.
- Providing targeted market segmentation and personalization.
- Helping you build and nurture strong relationships.
- Boosting audience engagement & loyalty.
- Helping you convert leads more easily and smoothly.
- Re-engaging inactive contacts.
- Helping you distribute valuable content.
- Establishing your brand awareness.
- Helping complete purchases from shoppers who abandon their shopping carts.
Conclusion
Email drip campaign software simplifies the process of sending out personalized marketing emails to a large or small list of contacts. With email drip campaign software, you can easily manage your contact lists, design and personalize emails, and schedule automated delivery.
These are the best free tools that you can use to improve your email marketing. Also, they’re some of the most popular tools among businesses all across the world. If you want to grow your business, then you need to start using these free tools right away.