Best Email Marketing Software – 2020 Reviews & Comparison
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What Exactly Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing is one of the best ways to market in the modern age. If you only look at popularity alone, it’s certainly the top choice and probably the most widespread marketing technique ever used in history. However, that doesn’t really explain what email marketing is or how you can use it to get your products and services ahead of the competition. To help you get started, here’s the breakdown.
It can be convenient to think of email marketing as physical mail where you don’t have to pay for fees, stamps, envelopes, or printing costs. Just like with traditional mail, email marketing helps you connect with customers in the comfort of their own homes. However, email has the added benefit of being able to reach customers wherever they are. After all, most people have phones with constant internet connections, allowing you to reach them any time of day and no matter where they are.
One other major difference between the two that comes down as a benefit for email is trackability. When you send an envelope in the mail, you can’t really get a lot of data from what happens after that. A lot of it comes down to crossing your fingers and hoping that the recipients take advantage of the offers you sent. With email, you know exactly what happens with the digital information you send. You can identify how common it is for users to click through the email and head to your site, plus you can identify exactly when and how they use the discounts and offers contained therein. This can allow you to make better email marketing campaigns in the future that build on your experience.
In order to organize your email marketing efficiently, you will need to make use of email marketing software. It can allow you sort through a vast amount of data, make complicated changes with a few short clicks, and automate a lot of processes that you would have to otherwise do manually. Once the emails have been sent, email marketing software can also track how your emails are received, what users do with those emails, and how their responses to your emails change over time.
Here, you will learn about how email marketing software systems work and exactly what they can do for you. Once you have that information in hand, you will be better informed when it comes time to decide which software is best for your needs. We will be covering what email marketing software is, common functions of email marketing software, and key considerations to keep in mind.
In a general sense, email marketing software is designed to make, launch, then evaluate email marketing campaigns. They allow you to use email as your primary vector for addressing your audience. A successful email marketing campaign builds your leads and keeps your product and/or services firmly in the mind of the target audience. In particular, email marketing software automates some of the simple, repetitive parts of organizing an email campaign, allowing you to focus your valuable time and effort elsewhere.
What Are The Typical Features of Email Marketing Software?
Many email marketing programs have the following features:
- Lead Capture – tracks, identifies, and catalogues lead information from a variety of sources, allowing you to use that data later.
- Basic Segmentation – splits up and organizes your audience in a way that makes it easier to address each individual group and maximize marketing effectiveness.
- Email Templates – saves frequently used formats so that you don’t have to waste time searching for the right choice every time.
- Mass Email Delivery – provides the ability to send out emails to a massive group all at once.
- Drip Email Delivery – allows you to send out emails later, rather than today, allowing you to schedule marketing campaigns weeks or months in advance. Drip email marketing also lets you follow up with your audience, keeping your brand at the front of their minds with perfectly timed emails.
- Open and Click-through Rates – keeps track of how well individual email campaigns do with regards to the audience opening emails and then clicking on what is contained within.
- Analytics – organizes and summarizes your data in a way that makes it easy to plan out future campaigns.
Ideas to Keep in Mind
How Your Audience Interacts With Your Brand
One of the first things you need to pay attention to is exactly what kind of mediums and devices your customers are using. In this day and age, there are so many different ways to check emails that you can’t expect everyone to be using a standard internet browser on a laptop or desktop. Now more than ever, you want to make sure that your emails are formatted so that they can be easily viewed on the go and at home. If possible, try to give your customers an easy way to integrate their engagement with your brand with their social media presence. Give them an easy way to share experiences on social media platforms about positive experiences with your products.
How Much Personalization You Want
You also want to make sure that you have a clear and consistent vision when it comes to personalization. At the simple end of the spectrum, you can just send out a monthly newsletter. For that, all you need is a simple system that can send out mass emails, probably with drip email functionality if you want to keep your audience engaged. If you want to take a more thorough approach with your audience, then consider a more powerful piece of software that allows you to send personalized emails based on past data. Strong segmentation tools are quite necessary if you want to do that.
How Much Integration Is Necessary
No marketing campaign stands on its own, so you need to make sure that your email marketing software can be integrated with your brand as it already exists. You don’t want to have to start the rest of your system from scratch when you could instead pick out a program that fits perfectly with what you already have. One of the easiest ways to do this is to get new software that has native integration with customer relationship management products. Plug-ins are another easy way to ensure that the different pieces of your business work together as seamlessly as possible.
How Your Business Will Change in the Future
You may think you only need a way to organize email campaigns right now, but if you plan on growing in the future, then it may be wise to examine other aspects of email marketing software as well. From social media integration to mobile marketing opportunities and marketing automation, there are many different tools that you may find yourself wishing you had in a future. Pay close attention to whether a piece of email marketing software is just a simple program for sending out emails or a powerful array of functions that can meet all your needs in the future.
