What Is Your Digital Strategy? 3 Tips For Making 2018 Your Best Year Yet: a blog around planning your digital marketing strategy both long term and short term followed by a measurement plan. Email Marketing Ideas You Can Start to Implement Today: A list of email marketing tools for business owners. Are you looking for the best tools for email marketing? Here is our list of the Top 3 email marketing tools.
ActiveCampaign
Best for small businesses & enterprises
Once an underdog, ActiveCampaign is now one of the most popular email marketing tools with over 130,000 small businesses customers.
ActiveCampaign offers a collection of customer experience automation (CXA) tools – from SMS & email marketing to site messaging and CRM functionality.
ActiveCampaign’s intuitive drag-and-drop email marketing designer
At the heart of ActiveCampaign’s platform is the automation builder; A visual canvas for building automated marketing sequences across channels.
ActiveCampaign’s automation builder makes building automation easy, similar to reading a flowchart
Unlike some tools that require expensive consultants and training to use, ActiveCampaign’s intuitive design enables anyone to craft powerful email automation sequences from scratch or by importing one of their 500+ automation recipes.
While email A/B testing is offered by most tools in the top 10, ActiveCampaign goes one step further by allowing you to run A/B split tests of entire automation sequences. This means you can test anything – from the number of touchpoints to the delays between emails and beyond. All of this ensures that your marketing improves with time – on autopilot.
Advanced automation capabilities like split actions and A/B testing make it easier to optimize your performance
As an all-in-one sales and marketing tool for small businesses, ActiveCampaign comes with an in-built CRM system to manage your sales, live chat, and of course email marketing automation in one place.
A built-in sales CRM makes it easier to manage deals but also connects to ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation engine
And, incredibly, they’ve done all of this with a price tag that’s 1/10th of many email marketing tools featured in this guide – starting at $9/month.
Our survey respondents using ActiveCampaign were overwhelmingly positive about it – and it was one of the most likely tools that businesses of all sizes were likely to move to.
What are ActiveCampaign’s Key Features?
- 125+ Email templates
- 500+ Automation recipes
- 800+ Integrations
- Landing pages
- SMS messaging
- Custom reporting
- Web personalisation
- CRM
- Split actions and A/B Testing
- Predictive content
- Predictive sending
- Goal tracking and attribution
For the vast majority of small businesses looking for a great email marketing tool that’s easy to use and affordable, ActiveCampaign is likely the best balance of power, affordability, and ease of use.ActiveCampaign has grown in popularity over the years and is now one of the most favored email marketing tools. It allows users to create email automation sequences as well as manage sales, live chat, and email marketing with an in-built CRM system. Starting at $9 a month, ActiveCampaign is a great choice for all-sized businesses.
Automation A/B Testing – While most email marketing tools allow you to split-test subject lines, send times, and content, ActiveCampaign is one of the only services that allow you to split-test automation sequences.
This means you can split test radical changes like sending ten emails to new leads versus only four, to see which sequence has the highest conversion rate.
Conditional content – ActiveCampaign is one of the only email marketing services that allow you to include conditional ‘IF X is true, show Y’ content blocks inside email campaigns.
We use this for localizing pricing (i.e. show $ in the United States, £ in the UK, and € in Europe), and displaying different recommended articles to different customers based on their plan or engagement level.
Global variables – We have over 200 automated emails set up in our ActiveCampaign account. What happens if, for example, I want to change something in my email signature? Or update the pricing of one of our plans?
With other email marketing tools, you’d have to go into each email and manually update the changes one by one. This is where global variables are a big time saver. Instead of inserting the actual price in an email campaign, you can enter %price% and it will replace all variables with the actual price when the email is sent out.
Downloadable automation recipes – ActiveCampaign is one of the only email marketing tools to offer a range of automation ‘recipes’. Instead of spending days building an elaborate sequence of upsell emails, you can just use one they’ve already made, and then adjust the content so that fits your brand.
In addition to saving a lot of time, these recipes are a great source of inspiration.
Email Newsletter Tool – MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms due to its ease of use and ability to create great-looking emails with a drag-and-drop user interface.
And it’s perfect for your email newsletters.
For small businesses on a limited budget, the free version of MailChimp allows up to 2K contacts, one audience dashboard, segmentation tools, basic email templates, and basic reporting.
Another reason to consider using MailChimp as a small business is that the platform is scalable as you grow and can afford more of its features and services.
The winner of our top 100 email marketing tools is MailChimp! Not only is MailChimp so easy to use, but it’s fairly priced too. We’ll break down why we love it so much. Firstly, the pricing alone is enough to earn it the top spot. For a new business, it offers a free service, and even for those looking to grow, it only charges $9.99 (£7.27) a month. For a premium account (the most expensive), it will cost around $299 (£217.43) a month.
Not only will MailChimp let you reach your marketing list directly, but it also offers easy-to-understand analytics. Everything from average open rate and average click rate, to how many subscribers in total you have. It integrates a smart mailer system, which helps you target your mail contacts with ads, site visitors, or even contact those who’ve abandoned shopping carts online. It’s an intelligent system that includes adverts from your social media and Google AdWords campaigns too. The features of this tool also include making reports, that’s why it’s favored by digital marketing agencies. The design features allow you to create unique and eye-catching emails for your mailing list, it’s functional and so easy to use.
Sendinblue
Best for transactional email
Sendinblue is best-known as one of the leading transactional email services. Building on this reputation they built an email marketing automation product.
We use Sendinblue to send transactional emails for two of our ventures (Leadformly and Serene), as they’re one of the few email marketing providers with servers in the European Union (which helps with our GDPR compliance) and they have good deliverability rates (we’re currently at 98%).
While I can’t comment on their marketing automation features from first-hand experience, it’s evident from our customer surveys that it’s good, but lacks some of the more advanced features (such as goal tracking, native integrations, and annotations).
If you need an email marketing tool with a solid API to get your emails into inboxes with a good deliverability rate, Sendinblue’s pre-built developer recipes make it an excellent choice.
What are Sendinblue’s key features?
HERE ARE SOME OTHER ONES YOU COULD USE:
Email Marketing Automation Tools – Autopilot
Autopilot is a visual marketing automation tool that helps companies create journey maps for their customers.
The software has multi-channel marketing capabilities, including email, in-app, online, and snail-mail communications.
With Autopilot, you can automate emails at the right time by using triggers based on behavior and interest.
For example, when a website visitor submits a demo request form or abandons your shopping cart without making a purchase, you can trigger emails specific to that user and their experience.
The self-service tool comes with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for users to automate workflows and set up personalized messages.
Autopilot also includes features such as measuring campaign ROI and optimizing the revenue funnel based on real-time performance. The software integrates with Salesforce and other applications like InsideView, GoodData, Zapier, Slack, and Twilio.
Aweber
Finally, at number 10, we have Aweber. Like the other aforementioned tools, it allows you to directly reach the right customers on your mailing list. It includes segmentation, auto-replies, reports, etc., and offers customer support for the user (that’s you). With a free trial, you can try it before you buy! There are loads of great resources available to you, to help you streamline your email marketing. It’s a service like the others, but with a little extra support. The pricing ranges from $19 (£13.29) a month to around $149 (£104.23) a month, dependent on the package you want for your business.
Whilst this is our top 10 favorites, there are so many other email marketing tools available to you! See our list below for rankings from 11 – 100.
MailerLite
MailerLite is used for creating more than just newsletters. It includes email automation, landing pages, and pop-up features too (for your website). Again, MailerLite is priced based on your desired subscriber list. With up to 1000 subscribers for free, packages range from $10 (£7), to $140 (£97.93) per month – for larger businesses. It’s a perfect way of creating a marketing strategy, looking to bring more traffic to your site, as well as boost conversion rates too. By creating optimum landing pages and pop-up features, you can better reach your audience and sway them into signing up to your mailing list – to be contacted in the future. It’s a great tool to bring traffic to your website via email marketing.
Conclusion
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