Email marketing has been a practise for at least 40 years. You’d think anything modern would lessen the effectiveness and effects of this type of marketing, but that is not the case. This strategy for business growth is still among the best and most cost-effective ones today.
Today, a successful business virtually ever operates without an effective email marketing strategy. According to research, 89% of marketers utilise email as their main method for increasing lead generation. Businesses build their email lists, make a lot of effort to persuade new people to sign up for messages, and then send compelling emails to the intended audience.
Email marketing is a strategy that has a lot of potential, but that doesn’t make it easy. There is a lot to do if you want your plan to succeed, and today the majority of firms use aid. We’re referring to an email service provider or email marketing platform (ESP).
Due to the substantial demand for ESPs, marketers have a wide range of options. Pricing, reputation, and most crucially, features, vary widely across them. You must not take this success lightly because the marketing platform you use will affect how well your strategy works.
This post will outline the criteria you should use to select an email marketing platform for just that purpose. But let’s talk about your options first.
Alternatives to Expensive Email Marketing Platforms That Work Best
There is a widespread misperception that an email marketing platform will be extremely expensive for your company. Quality does have a cost, but your entire budget shouldn’t be used to cover it. There are excellent alternatives if popular tools like Constant Contact are too expensive for your sizable contact list or you want a different set of features for your marketing strategies.
The best Constant Contact alternatives are affordable, have a wide range of features, and offer high-quality analytics. One of the email marketing solutions with the quickest growth on the market right now, Flodesk, is at the top of the list.
The most beautiful email templates you’ll ever see, automation options, outstanding newsletter designs, lead creation and conversion capabilities, and excellent customer service are all features of Flodesk. The best part about it is that Flodesk provides a reasonable flat pricing plan that won’t keep going up as your email list expands.
Top features of an email marketing platform
Let’s move on to the following parts, which discusses the main features to search for, now that you are aware that an email marketing platform is a worthwhile investment with the proper tool. You need to locate something that will make your job a thousand times easier because you’ll be depending on the platform to optimise your marketing strategy. Today, the following features will be most helpful:
Flexibility in design and styling
The tool should simplify your job rather than make it more difficult. In light of this, your main criteria should be a platform that offers a wide range of options for email and graphic design. It must be an easy-to-use and manage tool with a responsive design that makes it simple for you to integrate your HTML campaigns.
You should search for a tool with basic capabilities, such as a drag and drop feature, to manage this the best way possible. After all, you’ll have plenty of other things to complete in order to optimise your email, including writing the content, checking and editing it for grammar, and conducting endless research to maximise your audience. The less time you spend creating your messages, the easier the tool will be to use.
Collection of quality and varied templates
This is crucial: many email marketing solutions offer customizable templates that you can use. Not everyone has the skills or time to spend meticulously creating each message from scratch. A fantastic and quick approach to make engaging emails is by using templates.
Even so, even if practically every platform offers you a few templates to choose from, only the best will provide you a high-quality selection. With this and the above-mentioned simple features, you can finish your messages quickly.
Pre-designed templates need some customising, but you may combine them together to quickly create campaigns that are uniform. To maintain consistency, you can make changes to the same template or look for templates that are comparable to keep your message consistent throughout emails.
Assistance and reliability
Security is one of a marketing strategy’s most crucial things. Each day, there are more and more companies that become the number of phishing and other online scams.
Selecting a trustworthy email marketing platform is one of the security precautions you should take to safeguard your company. Make sure it is trustworthy and that you are not jeopardising the success of your campaign and the reputation of your business before you commit to one.
Regarding reliability, a tool’s reputation can notify you of whether or not you can rely on it to refrain from using your personalised templates, divulge your personal information, or fail to deliver the services you paid for.
As a result, pay attention to information on system updates, backups, and deliverability monitoring. Additionally, you should look at the support options and quality in case you run into issues in the future.
Automation
The primary motivation for businesses to adopt email marketing software may be automation. They may maximise the impact of their strategy and save a tonne of time by using automation. A survey conducted in 2019 revealed that more than half of the companies using automated marketing strategies were successful.
Consider what this could mean for you. You can specify the interval at which your audience will get your emails. The email list can be segmented, and each message sent to them can be automated. Additionally, you may customise messages and employ automation for things like completed sales, subscription cancellations, and abandoned shopping carts.
Automation is a fantastic tool for managing your messages to your target audience, churn reduction, newsletters, and user onboarding.
Integration
Any marketing strategy that is successful will need to use more than one tool or medium for communication. As an result, you ought to search for software that integrates well with other programmes. Integration will minimise down on the amount of time needed to plan out your entire campaign, and you can gather information from many sources for analytics and decision-making.
You can boost your marketing with integration. Integrations with your social media, customer relationship management systems, website provider, etc. are features of a strong email marketing platform.
You may combine your email campaigns with purchases using this platform, for instance, by sending a thank-you note after a consumer makes a purchase, etc.
Personalization
74% of marketers agree that personalization boosts customer engagement based on their own observations. People are pickier than ever nowadays, therefore businesses always struggle to provide them with high-quality goods and services. What do they prioritise most? It is individualised.
Having said that, you want the ability to customise the messages you send to your customers through your email marketing platform. This makes it simpler to get in touch with the relevant people and achieve particular goals.
For instance, you may personalise campaigns based on the subscriber’s location, the date of their subscription, or any other information. It can be done with marketing software, and it will make little of your time and effort.
Reporting and analytics
On precise data and insights, successful email marketing tactics are based. Most of the time, marketers are undertaking research to identify and influence their audience. This is one of the best features of an email marketing platform: data analytics and reports.
You can use a feature like this to pinpoint your strategy’s weak points. They will give potential prospects and provide you with stats reports, such as click rates and open rates.
With such a feature, you can discover things like:
- If the receiver clicks on one of your messages, which one will they choose?
- How much time do they spends reading the email’s content?
- Do they forward or delete your emails?
Segmentation
Last but not least, contact segmentation is a necessity for every marketer who wants to send tailored, targeted emails. By grouping your subscribers based on their actions and demographics, an email marketing tool can help you segment your list. The tool, for location, can be used to automatically segment people based on where they are located or their purchasing habits.
You may increase the pen rate, personalise your messages, and ultimately increase the effectiveness of your strategy by segmenting your contacts. You won’t have to spends a lot of time manually performing all of this if the email marketing platform already includes a feature like that.
Have you already made your decision?
When marketers invest in these solutions, they are typically looking for one or two features that they currently require. They neglect the possibility that they may select anything with successful other features in addition to these, which would increase the success of their job and efforts. Check out this list of features to make sure the email marketing platform you are picking is worthwhile before you commit to pay for it.
