Among the many email marketing services, GetResponse is one which enables plenty of campaign tracking and subscriber behavior prediction possibilities. The highlight is thus on campaign design and development. This service doesn’t boost great customization options, and it seems that for them the question of how it is distributed is more important than what is distributed.
Email marketing services are on the rise and many platforms pay special attention to providing new customers with the best ways to make their beginnings easy. Campaigner is a good example in that regard. But it doesn’t mean advanced users will face limitations. What this platform does best is respecting the user’s perspective in developing their products and offers.
Mad Mimi is an email marketing service which does things so differently that compared to all other services might appear as look-a-likes, and it is not just about the look. Behind the delectable look of the website and interface there is a different approach to the service, too. Originally founded as a startup in NYC, by a couple who did not like what other email platforms offered them, it is now part of GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest web hosting providers.
With its Free Forever plan and extreme ease of use MailChimp is the most common choice of beginners in email marketing. This is why MailChimp is among the first, if not the first email marketing provider by market share. The use of this service doesn’t require special IT skills, most computer users will be able to configure it and set up effective campaigns.
On a highly competitive market such as email marketing, some companies simply don’t want to boost leadership in certain aspects of the service, leaving other services lacking in effectiveness and quality. Pinpointe offers just a moderate, average service at an average price, plus, it has strict anti-spam policies which would secure your email sender reputation, so you don’t have to worry about potential legal consequences.
Among many email marketing platforms, Benchmark Email is one of the few that emphasize strong design capabilities, which bundled with plenty of integrations and campaign management options makes a great service. Add to this the fact that it’s one of the few services to offer free-for-life plans. Benchmark Email might be a great provider, but there is still room for improvement.
As one of the longest living email marketing services, Aweber sports an incredibly simple pricing, quite affordable and comprehensive plans, but a bit outdated infrastructure and approach to email marketing when compared to other newer platforms. Aweber, though, has recently made significant efforts in order to catch up with the latest trends in the industry.
With its pricing and possibilities, Constant Contact can be sorted as a premium email service provider. Although it has affordable plans, these are very limited and don't bring anything new to the market. However, those who can budget the full suite will be able to create awesome newsletters and other content and lead very effective campaigns with very high message reception. This service is ideal for those who want good results quickly.
For some, most email marketing services may look a bit complicated and messy, while many people will not require much more than just some basic sending options; something that will not take out much time to learn, configure, set up and manage. Even better if it offers a broad range of plans and product customizations, so the users only pay what they’re actually using. This is the strategy of Vertical Response, which also includes certain features to keep the pace with most of the other email providers.
Doing more things for the same amount of money is the main idea of iContact. It is a fully dedicated email marketing platform with a huge number of features and supportive services which are sold as options in customized plans. Icontact is trying hard to remain afloat as one of the top few email marketing services, through offering much more than just email marketing.
Last updated April 12, 2024
While we witness the social media revolution and presence of social media in our life, email still remains in a wide use. For most of us checking email is still among the first things we check once we log onto the Internet. While social media can cater for a vast array of informal and formal relations, email is kept for some bit more serious things. Let’s just say, to make a profile on whichever social network, it is first needed to verify it through email. Bank statements, bills, job applications, commercial pitching and many other forms are still distributed primarily via electronic mail. As a result, most people still check their email inbox more often than they check their Facebook and Twitter accounts. In the business to business communication, email is largely dominant way of communication and there seems to be nothing that si going to change that in the near future
As long as there is email in everyday use, there will be email marketing. And with this high usage, email marketing will remain one of the most effective ways of communicating clients and prospects of a business. Using email as a marketing channel means dealing with hundreds, if not thousands of users. Hardly anyone would try to make it manually. Add to that the fact that old school traditional methods of email marketing are now prohibited by law. Email marketing platforms make emnail campaigns automated and make sure these campaigns are in accordance with regulations.
As in any other aspect of the Internet marketing, the “content is the king” saying is correct in the email marketing, too. Leading email marketing solutions can assist you in creating content that sells. The business will get help in organizing the copy, text layout, text format, graphics, photo, other media and files you want to send to your customers and future prospects.
On top of all, email marketing platforms offer testing environment, analytics and integrations with other business IT solutions spanning from customer relationship management (CRM) software to social networks. That all helps the business make a good marketing strategy, which can be used for other communications channels as well, not just email.
Depending on the user, their relation to your business, their consumer preferences and habits, and the overall marketing strategyy as well as the general business strategy, you can send different types of emails to different senders. First time buyers from a business should be approached differently than regular and key customers.
Despite all its power and abilities to get businesses huge boost in sales for little money invested, many companies still refrain from using email fearing it can make them look spammy to people, and because they are unsure about how to make sure their email campaigns will be in accordance with regulations.
While email marketing tools will give you a high control over the campaign’s legality, they can also let you warn if your actions become excessive or any other way wrong, email marketing platforms can warn you reach certain limits or if your campaign looks like it will have a high bounce and/or low conversion rates. Using some of these platforms will make your email campaigns work without worries, provided that you know what you’re doing and know when to stop. To speed up th whole process, anyone in charge of leading and managing email campaigns in your company will have to thoroughly read all the accompanying documentation and have it at hand to check what can be done and what can’t before launching an email campaign.
Most email platforms work as Web-based Platform-as-aService (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. Customers of such services pay a monthly rate for using them and the belonging resources. The rates are defined by the level of service offered and by the size of the mailing list. Being Web-based, these services are subject of constant development and upgrades, and are generally systems that learn from experience through upgrades by humans or through the “machine learning” process so the system is steadily improving. This yields constantly high delivery rates and lets your staff learn more about how to pursue an effective, painless and easy email campaign that converts and sells.
After years of looking at email marketing as the least effective way of sending commercial messages most recipients have regarded to as to spam, email marketing services brought a true revolution and aspired a new life into the use of email for business promotion purposes. Since the early 2000s, laws and other regulations have been prohibiting many commercial emailing practices that are generally considered spam, and drove most businesses out of even thinking about use of email to anyone not anticipating it. However, it doesn’t mean “cold email” is forbidden per se, and email marketing tools help you make highly effective email campaigns in a legal manner.
Thanks to these tools, many companies today grow their businesses through managed emails that reach both existing and prospective, potential customers. Most email marketing tools also offer an opportunity to address subscribers and other anticipating users. The weapons email marketing services are using in order to boost your sales and exposure include:
Beyond making your emails compliant with laws, you now have an opportunity to make custom email messages which are sent as copies to certain groups of recipients, depending on their relation with your business. Messages you send to your suppliers normally differ from those you need to send to your clients. Furthermore, messages sent to major clients differ from those who buy small amounts of your goods regularly. And those who buy from you regularly shouldn’t be communicated in the same manner as those who buy from you occasionally. The result is more personalized approach with little work.
Graphic customization is another important factor in boosting sales. Besides text, images and attachments, you can customize the layout, look, headers and footers for every recipient group or subgroup. Automation needs to allow you to define technical aspects, such as the sending time, CC, BCC, and, of course, your sender name and the subject title.
Marketing and sales operations are closely connected in all businesses. And in many businesses those two are integrated, performed by the same staff on the same desks and computers. CRM integration is thus a must for any serious email marketing service. Existing customers can be mailed whenever you respond to a request by them and make an action involving them. The best examples for this would be scheduling a delivery to their location, or when you address their suggestions and complaints via a CRM in the form of a ticket. In both these cases, the client gets notified straight to their mail inbox without need to log onto your internal system until they receive it.
For all others, and also your existing, long term partnerships, a CRM integration will be a better way of welcoming them, representing what you have to offer and making sales. Additionally, this kind of platform integration can yield you a plenty of useful data for analysis, such as customer demographics, spending habits and market trends within your industry.
In the time when everything alters at a cheetah speed, your business can grow and change much faster than you should predict. The sudden growth of your business shouldn’t be hindered by techbicalk limitations. A fully scalable email marketing platform therefore needs to be able to conform and adapt to any changes in a company’s size, revenue, organization, the market and this company’s approach to it.
During an email campaign, you send a vast amount of messages throughout a plenty of email servers, ISP and corporate firewalls and encounter a number of inactive (closed, blocked or simply invalid) email addresses. In many, if not most cases not all messages manage to get into every recipient’s inbox. Whilst the delivery success is mostly in your hands and your ability to make a compelling subject and effective message content, sometimes the service used for campaigning can be causing a problem. Take a special attention to the ability of a service to successfully deliver to major free email services: Gmail, Yahoo! And Outlook. To assure this, send mail to your company’s addresses on such services, or to those of your staff members.
Once you’ve successfully tested the delivery rate, the focus goes on the content. A/B tests are the most common way of email template testing. First it’s needed to make two different types of email copy. Second, you choose two smaller groups of recipients from your whole recipient pool, with as little difference between the two as possible. Third: send the test emails and await responses. Sounds simple? With a good email marketing service, it will look exactly like that. You will just needs to define the templates and group, the rest is done automatically, along with the full stats about the success of both options.
The pricing of an email services is expressed in two things: the number of contacts and extra features. Most email services express their prices as a matrix of these two elements. There are usually three or four feature tiers, with several contact list size defined pricing ranges. Some providers offer a single tier with simple pricing structure that depends solely on your contact list size, some others will go into a deeper customization option and let you choose features a la carte. Most email services have simple pricing structures, and planning email campaign budgets will be easy. Pricing differences among services isn’t significant.
Plenty of money and effort is invested in making email software and platforms stable and easy for use. Even if your staff gets along well with email marketing tools, issues do happen, as well as some changes which may affect your campaigns. Most serious email marketing platforms provide a full support suite that includes live chat, phone support, email support (where you can take a glimpse of the service from a customer’s point of view), and onsite content in the form of user guides, tutorials and blogs.
