For many years now and including 2021, email marketing has been and still is the best marketing method. Some of the benefits of email marketing include the generally low cost of marketing services in addition to its effectiveness in driving sales, acquiring new customers, and keeping those customers around. Plus, people really like opening emails to find some kind of promotion from a trusted business they already patronize, especially when those promotions involve a deal of some kind (discount code, coupon, buy-one-get-one, free gift etc.). This blog will introduce you to some of the better and more popular email marketing platforms you can choose from that will fit your business.
There are other benefits of email marketing, one being the ease of targeting and personalizing content within the email. Using segmenting, a marketer can add highly specific content to target an equally specific audience focused on their preferences. There is so much statistical and useful information that can be gathered about an audience including age, sex, marital status, income level, religion, race, and geographical location. These all contribute to targeting and personalizing content within a marketing email, thus making the email more likely to be opened and read.
What do businesses look for in email marketing platforms?
When choosing a platform to handle your email marketing service, businesses are mainly looking for value. They want a product that works and offers a return without wasting their money. They often want to use the service themselves without having to rely on someone else’s assistance, especially when they have to pay for that assistance while relying on someone else’s schedule instead of their own. Users want to have control where they can manage the email campaigns including content and subscribers, and they want to have direct contact with their customers. Additionally, they want good deliverability rates with their emails getting delivered to the inbox instead of being trapped in a useless spam folder. Otherwise, they’ll feel like they have been paying money for ‘damaged goods’.
What are the best email marketing service providers?
Some of the most popular features in email marketing services include being able to create engaging newsletters, automatically sending personalized bulk emails, easy management of subscribers, tracking, and drag-and-drop capabilities. Of the services we will list in this blog, most have these features in addition to others to make them stand out. Take a look and see which sounds best for your business.
Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the most popular email marketing services on the market. Automation is their specialty and makes it easy for a non-IT person to create personalized emails with little effort and have them automatically sent. Hubspot assists your email efforts with premade templates, drag-and-drop capabilities, and simple optimization. Their platform allows easy customization, calls-to-action, image insertion, and branding capabilities.
Hubspot has tools to personalize your emails and help maximize chances of them being opened. Their system uses data from the contact list to find the most pertinent content available to target the subscriber and produce the highest open rates. They have an effective A/B testing tool to provide a business with the appropriate email analytics to inform the user what works and what doesn’t.
Prices, Education, and Training
Hubspot services are free if you only send up to 2000 emails or less per month. Upgraded plans start at $50 per month. They have blogs, e-books, guides, consulting services, and free courses with certifications. They also offer full-day courses in the range of $500.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the better-known email marketing platforms that also helps your business sell products, build a website, and set up an online store. It is one of the most popular email marketing services and boasts being the easiest to use and most beginner-friendly email marketing service. Their email service allows easy management of your marketing calendar, email list, email templates, and contacts.
A Constant Contact account offers an unlimited number of emails, social media tools, tracking and reporting capabilities, a free image library, and more. The ‘Plus’ package is included with features like easy automation, surveys & polls, A/B testing, drip campaigns, and the ability to receive online donations.
Pricing, Customer Support, and Training
Constant Contact boasts “unmatched” customer support including live chat, phone support, email, community support, and a resource library. The training includes video tutorials, free webinars, a blog, YouTube tutorials and webinars, online training, in-person live seminars, and professional marketing services. Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial followed by plans starting $20 per month.
Aweber
Aweber is a hugely popular email marketing service that has most functions any business would need, and its pricing strategy is completely dependent on the number of subscribers in your list. Therefore, if someone has between 1 and 500 subscribers, they’ll pay less than someone with 501 subscribers or more. Regardless of which plan you are on, you’ll have access to all of their features. This makes their platform affordable to most anybody, even the little guy.
Some of the features Aweber offers include a drag-and-drop-editor and builder, unlimited landing page templates, a landing page builder, a pre-stocked image library, an additional library of free built email templates, and they will automate and personalize your email with prebuilt campaigns. If your design skills are not so hot, they have an AI-powered design assistant. And to track how your campaign is performing, they offer detailed reports and split tests.
Aweber doesn’t stop there, they also have a sign-up form generator that will create opt-in forms, leading to capturing email addresses and growing your list. Additionally, Aweber allows you to design customization to match existing brand, and you can tag and segment subscribers.
Customer Support, Training, and Pricing
The Support System at Aweber includes a 24/7 solution consisting of phone calls, live chat, and email with Aweber certified experts. There are also video tutorials, webinars, podcasts, and a knowledge base page of common issues and questions. Aweber has a free program consisting of allowing 0-500 subscribers and 3000 sent emails each month. Then the starting plan is $19 per month and up, depending on the number of subscribers you have.
With the right email marketing platforms, your company could take off. Email marketing is still considered the best marketing tool in the business, and the three companies mentioned here are all outstanding and have impeccable reputations. If you’re not sure where to start, call their customer service numbers and chat with an expert to see how they can help your business.