A Direct Marketing Association report says that email marketing fetches nearly 4300% return on investment on average for businesses in the U.S. That’s because email marketing can be easily managed, gives you absolute control, and lets you contact your customers directly.
It is no wonder that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes and nature.
However, much of your success with email marketing depends on the email marketing software that you choose because they play a crucial role in the delivery of your emails. If you aren’t careful with your selection, you might end up paying a lot of money for fewer marketing features and abysmally low email delivery rates.
So, here are a few email marketing platforms that you should check out to give your business the headstart it needs to tread on the success path.
1. Constant Contact
If you haven't used an email marketing service before, Constant Contact is for you. You can use it to easily manage your email lists, email templates, contacts, and marketing calendar. You can get access to tracking and reporting, free image library, Facebook ads integration, and built-in social media sharing tools.
Also, you can use their Email Plus accounts for drip campaigns, email automation, online donations, coupons, and surveys & polls. This would allow you to send targeted emails, thereby maximizing your open rate.
Moreover, it is backed by top-notch customer support with email support, phone calls, and live chat to assist you in every possible way. If you reside in the United States, you can attend in-person seminars apart from online training to leverage this tool better.
And guess what? You can have all this for as low as $20 a month. But before that, you can use their 60-day free trial to get the hang of this software. Seriously, could it be more amazing?
2. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a rapidly growing email marketing software in Europe that is quite easy to use and is equipped with mind-blowing tools that can help you create beautiful and highly engaging emails. If you have no experience in email marketing, their drag-and-drop email editor is definitely going to catch your attention.
It offers fantastic marketing automation tools that can help you create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, send transactional emails, and segment users according to your business needs. Also, you can choose the ideal time for sending bulk emails using its AI algorithms to ensure flawless email deliverability.
With SendinBlue’s SMTP bulk email marketing service, you can power transactional or automated emails from your WordPress site. This can come in handy if you own a large website and to equip it with automatic and real-time content-based emails.
You can use SendinBlue’s free email marketing plan to send up to 300 emails every day. The paid plan, which starts at $25 per month will include additional features like SMS to your account, landing page builder, CRM, Facebook ads integration, and live chat.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot offers a blend of sales and marketing services, that include email marketing, CRM, marketing automation, landing pages, and pretty much everything that exists in between.
By using Hubspot as the foundation of your marketing and sales campaigns, you can easily channel every dollar generated in revenue back to the marketing campaign, which would subsequently influence sales.
Backed by a high and rapid rate of email deliverability, Hubspot can help you send thousands of emails customized according to the recipients’ category such as device, country, etc. If you own a B2B company where you have to provide your clients with in-depth reports on their marketing funnel, Hubspot is ideal for you.
However, unlike certain other email marketing tools in this list, Hubspot doesn’t come cheap. Honestly, if you’re only looking for an email marketing tool, Hubspot is undoubtedly an overkill. However, if using Hubspot is part of your wider plan to boost your marketing efforts, simultaneously enhancing performance across the entire sales funnel, Hubspot is your best bet.
4. Omnisend
Omnisend was designed primarily to help eCommerce platforms with their marketing across multiple channels. Through its various features like automated email, integration with Google & Facebook ads, Instagram, Whatsapp, SMS, and push notifications, it has become a favourite amongst most eCommerce businesses.
Omnisend has developed innovative email templates, which have been specifically designed to drive repeat buyers and reduce cart abandonment. Also, it claims to have at least ten times higher click-through rates than email.
Its top-notch workflow automation is something that most users find appealing. However, Omnisend goes a step further in its integration with loyalty, review, and help desk platforms like ReCharge, Smile.io, and Yotpo. This enables you to trigger email and social campaigns based on your customer behaviour to boost repeat buyers, lower down cart abandonment, and drive more product reviews.
You can purchase an Omnisend PRO account at $99 per month for up to 10,000 contacts. While it’s not the cheapest tool available, it’s an excellent option for eCommerce brands that want to use a single email marketing software to target multiple channels.
5. Mailchimp
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, simple tracking for analytics, and easy contact segmentation into groups. Also, it allows you to fix the delivery time of the email according to the recipient’s time zone setup segmenting based on geolocation.
With years of improvement that have gone behind it, Mailchimp now includes different tools and landing pages for advertisement. It has support in over 170 countries, so you can use it pretty much everywhere in this world.
Also, Mailchimp’s easy integration with over 300 different platforms makes its usage with platforms like Magento, Shopify, and WordPress absolutely effortless.
However, Mailchimp doesn’t offer features like advanced segmentation and send-time optimization. Also, support is only restricted to email. However, that might not be much of an issue considering that Mailchimp offers a forever free plan, allowing you to send 12,000 emails to up to 2,000 subscribers.
In case you want more features and advantages, consider going for Mailchimp’s paid plan starting at $10 per month for up to 500 subscribers.
So, Which One Is Your Pick?
There are dozens of wonderful email marketing tools out there, many of which did not make it to this list. While Constant Contact offers the best email marketing services for small businesses, SendinBlue is an awesome combination of email marketing, SMTP bulk emails, and SMS messages. You can try Omnisend if you own an eCommerce business.
However, if you really want to choose the right email marketing tool, go for progress instead of perfection because making progress is more important than wasting an indefinite amount of time in finding the perfect tool. Try a tool, use it for some time, monitor your progress over a substantial period, and then take a call over whether you want to continue using it or junk it.
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