Email Marketing remains a major channel for many businesses – and for good reason. Reach your customers directly and effectively with these email marketing tools.
Email is old school, right? It’s one of the oldest digital marketing channels out there. It’s full of phishing scams, spammers, and dreaded GDPR opt-in requests. You might think that… And you’d be mostly wrong! (Though, those GDPR opt-in requests did get old fast.) In fact, email marketing can be one of the most cost effective marketing channels available for businesses of all shapes and sizes, and gives you a direct line of communication with new leads and current customers alike.
For businesses with high lifetime value customers, email can be an effective means of generating and nurturing potential leads for your services. Alongside this, email onboarding campaigns can be used to trigger customers to return to your service and educate them on key features and advantages of your product.
In addition, collecting your customer information into a single, centralized database is an essential practice for businesses today. It’s often noted that you will generate 80% of your revenue from 20% of your customers. Not having a direct line of communication with your most engaged customers is a huge barrier to growth. Unlike other communication channels, email is extremely versatile and (outside of tooling costs) free.
For example, let’s consider the steps required to reach your social media audience. You could post on Facebook about a new product launch, but it’s extremely unlikely that the post would organically reach all of your page’s followers. In all likelihood, you would need to “boost” (read: pay for) the post in order to reach all your current followers.
Meanwhile, with a modest CRM system, you could easily segment out your customers based on their behavior and send bespoke emails to each base – and sending each email wouldn’t cost a cent.
However, email marketing – like most digital channels – can open up a fire-hose of data to review, refine, and act upon. It’s nearly impossible to run effective email marketing campaigns without some sort of tool or infrastructure running underneath it.
Thankfully, there are a multitude of tools to help deliver email marketing campaigns – whether you’re just sending a monthly newsletter or managing a CRM with tens of thousands of customers. These tools help in all sorts of ways, including analyzing campaign performance, sending customized nurture and sales emails, auditing deliverability of your sends, and automating ecommerce upselling campaigns.
There are a number of things to consider when deciding upon a particular email marketing tool. When selecting a tool or platform, you should bear in mind: pricing and plan levels, functionality, required features, customer service, and available learning resources to help you get the most out of the tool. These aren’t always easy to compare across all the tools that are out there. As a result, making an informed decision can often take hours of research. At least… it used to!
What type of Email Marketing tools are available?
There are a variety of tools available to marketers to aid in managing and optimizing email marketing campaigns. Some of the most popular tools aid with deliverability reporting, email automation, tracking and analytics, and ecommerce drip campaigns.
Where should I start with Email Marketing?
The first place to start is by building up your email lists, and the best way to do that is to include email capture as one of your product or service’s touchpoints. Whether it’s an interstitial pop-up on your website, or requiring users to sign-up with an email address, you will need to collect email addresses somehow!
From there, it becomes an exercise in experimentation and optimization. Rather than treating your customer base as a single pool, think carefully about the kinds of customer segments that might exist within your email lists. Once you’ve got a few segments, start sending emails and always be sure to keep an eye on open rates and click through rates to see which content best resonates with each group.
How do I pay for these tools?
Usually tools are paid for on a subscription basis. However, most tools do offer a discount if you buy an annual subscription compared to a monthly one. Payment options often include credit/debit cards and/or bank transfers. Don’t forget to add your VAT ID if you have one!
How often should I send email?
This really depends on the kind of product that your company offers, and who will be receiving the emails. If your service has a lot of different features, it can be helpful to schedule multiple onboarding emails in the first few weeks to help explain these features, or suggest that they can schedule a call with a sales agent for a demo.
On the flip side, it’s important that you don’t overwhelm or spam your audiences – it’s easy to see diminishing returns if you rely too much on frequency to achieve your business goals. Always keep an eye on key engagement metrics – if you see your open rates starting to consistently drop… maybe hold off on that next “one-time offer” email.
Can I add multiple users to the same account?
Most tools allow unlimited users. However, some can have limits on the number of users you can add. This is always worth double-checking before you create an account to make sure it’s a good fit for your business.
We include a range of email marketing tools in our comparison tables. In these comparisons, you will be able to find platforms and providers that are suitable for small sites and blogs, medium-sized businesses and digital agencies, all the way up to multinational e-commerce sites.
We encourage you to read through the pros and cons of each tool to find the one right for your business needs – there is often no one-size-fits-all approach!
Email Deliverability Tools: Your email campaigns won’t convert much if they’re going to the spam folder. These tools will help you gauge the health of your email deliverability and raise alarms if they fail to deliver.
Email Marketing Automation Platforms: These tools will help you build automated journeys for customers based on actions they’ve taken within your service or on your site. Personalizing each touchpoint can significantly help raise conversion rates.
Email Marketing Tools: These tools are the bread and butter of email campaigns. Create customer lists, schedule and send campaigns, and view reports on every email you send.
Email Analytics Tools: As with any digital marketing channel, there’s always plenty of data to review – and sometimes the default email analytics tools just don’t cut it. These tools will help you dig into the data and review your competitors’ campaigns.
Email Drip Marketing Tools: Similar to other automation platforms, these tools will help you follow-up with high value customers at scale.
