Social media marketing is popular, but email marketing is still used by a lot of businesses and is a very effective method of connecting and engaging with your customers.
Why Use an Email Marketing Service?
There are many benefits of using an email marketing service to connect with your customers, including:
- Inexpensive: Many email marketing services are very cheap or even free to use, with the capacity to reach thousands of potential and existing customers.
- Effective: In 2019, studies found that there are around 3.8 billion active users of email worldwide, with a huge percentage of adults using email daily.
- Customizable: You can easily automate and customize your email campaigns to tailor the experience to certain customer groups and personalize the content to individual customers.
- Measurable: It is easy to use tracking metrics provided by most email marketing services to clearly determine how emails are performing in terms of clicks, opens, or unsubscribe numbers.
- Actionable: You can construct certain emails to achieve specific actions, whether you want to encourage customers to provide more information with a survey or make a purchase from your website.
- Accessible: More and more people are now viewing their emails on both mobile devices and personal computers, with most of the best email marketing software providers allowing you to easily create emails that keep this in mind.
Questions to Ask Before Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service Provider
Choosing an email marketing service provider can sometimes be tricky with so many options to choose from. Before you determine the best one for your business, it’s a good idea to get the answers to these questions:
Who Is Your Audience?
Before you choose an email service provider, it’s important to understand your needs in terms of your audience. Consider the size of your email distribution list and the support tools that you may need to help you build that list. Think about how much you know about your subscribers and how differently you will need to treat different segments of your subscriber list. Chances are that your email strategy is going to be different for onboarding new prospects compared to how you engage with existing customers, for example.
What Are You Sending?
The next step after determining your target audience is to figure out the type of email that you are going to send them. Look for an email marketing platform that offers ease of use when it comes to creating emails, along with the option to fully customize your content. Consider whether you will be sending the same email to everybody on your list or whether you will need to further personalize the content for different segments.
Do You Need Email Automation Services?
It’s also worth considering whether you need some emails to be triggered or automated, and how easily this can be incorporated into your service. Perhaps you need to send emails such as shipping notifications, abandoned cart reminders, or purchase confirmations.
When and How Often Will You Send Emails?
Most email marketing providers have pricing models that are based on cost per thousand emails sent (CPM). It’s important to calculate your RPM (revenue per thousand emails) to evaluate how much will be too much. To do this, it’s important to not only determine the size of your email marketing audience but also consider how quickly you anticipate that it is going to grow.
Why Are You Sending Emails?
Some companies get a lot of success from email marketing and less success with social media marketing. One main factor to consider when selecting the right email marketing software is the level of social media integration that you need for your email marketing program. Combining various channels such as email and social can often achieve better results compared to a single-channel approach, along with allowing for two-way conversation in your direct marketing. Adding share buttons and other social media features can turn one-way conversations into more engagement with your customers.
What to Look for in the Best Email Marketing Services
It’s important to consider the service, support, and features that you are going to need when choosing an email marketing platform. Not all providers are going to offer the same level of service. You can expect to get at least the basic tools from the majority of options along with options for submitting support tickets. Some provide additional or full-service options at a higher cost. Consider how complex your email campaigns are and how user-friendly the provider’s email building and sending features are to determine if you need more than the basics. It is also worth considering how much time you have to allocate to each email that you send on a long-term basis.
What the Best Email Marketing Platforms Offer – Email Campaigns Services to Look Out For
Before choosing an email provider, it’s a good idea to consider what the best options offer. A good email marketing provider should include the following:
- Unlimited Emails: Whether or not you need unlimited emails will depend on the size of your business. How many emails you want to send per week or month should help you determine the best email marketing provider for you. However, it may not be a good idea to choose a service that limits the number of emails that you can send for each email marketing campaign, especially if you expect your subscriber list to grow.
- Templates: The best email marketing providers will provide email templates that you can easily use to create emails for your campaign. If like many business owners you don’t have the time to create your own email campaigns from scratch, prewritten email templates provided by your service can be very useful. Choose a provider that offers a wide variety of professional templates designed with numerous tasks and outcomes in mind.
- Custom Autoresponders: Whether your subscribers request more information or want to be removed from your mailing list, it’s important to have an effective response prepared and ready to go. Choose a service that allows you to set up custom autoresponders for every potential request that you might receive.
- Image Library: Don’t overlook the value of having access to a large selection of stock photos and images that you can use to create your emails without the need to worry about copyright infringement issues.
- Multiple Users: In the majority of business situations, there may be multiple individuals working on email marketing campaigns. Choose an email marketing service provider that allows for multiple users of their product or service.
- Tracking, Reporting, and Analytics: One of the most important features to look out for when choosing an email marketing provider is the ability to effectively track, analyze, and report campaigns both during the campaign and once it is complete.
- A/B Testing: Choosing an email provider that allows for A/B testing is important to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
- Signup Forms: If you are sending emails with the main purpose of increasing membership of a certain program, it’s important to choose a provider that offers signup form templates.
- User Segments: The ability to tailor emails to certain customers is a vital customization feature that every business needs today. Segmenting the message allows you to significantly increase the effectiveness of your email campaign.
- Survey Apps: If you are launching an email marketing campaign with the main purpose of conducting surveys to find out more about your customers, choose an email marketing service with a range of customizable survey applications.
- Spam Filter: Most email marketing services will offer some kind of spam filter. You should choose a provider that offers templates and tools designed to bypass hurdles presented by standard spam filters.
- Opt-in and Opt-out: Every email that you send should allow customers the option to opt out of any future marketing emails if they wish. You should also choose a provider that offers the option to opt into specific marketing emails that the customer prefers.
- Mobile Compatibility: Many of your customers are going to be viewing your emails on a mobile device. Choose a provider that offers platform responsive email templates.
- Social Media Integration: Many small businesses will benefit from an email marketing campaign that is coordinated with similar social media campaigns. Choose a provider that offers features and tools that help you integrate and coordinate across both email and social media.
- CRM Integration: If you have an established CRM system, it’s important to choose a vendor that supports integration with your existing system.
- Inbox Previews: The best email marketing services should allow you the ability to preview what an email is going to look like once it has been sent to the customer.
- Compliance: Email marketing campaigns use private customer data which means that they fall under many privacy regulations such as GDPR. It’s important to always choose a vendor that is compliant.
How to Determine Which Email Marketing Solutions You Need
Not all businesses will need every service listed above. Before choosing a software provider, it’s important to spend some time coming up with your must-have and nice-to-have features, to find a provider that fits your needs.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of engaging with customers, offering various features and options. Keep these factors in mind to find the best email marketing service for you.
