Table of Contents
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing helps you increase your brand awareness by getting your email messages into the inboxes of potential new customers. The more consistent your communication is with your email subscribers, the more likely they will be to think of your business when they are looking for your products or services.
Why is Email Marketing Important in Businesses?
Email marketing is important in businesses because it helps to build relationships with prospects, leads, current customers, and even past customers, it gives you a chance to speak directly to them, in their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them. Be friendly and personable.
Advantages of Email Marketing
The benefits of email marketing include:
- Cost- effective – the costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs.
- Permission-based – your marketing list will be made up of people who have actively chosen to receive email communications from you. Customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business.
- Flexible design – you can send plain text, graphics or attach files – whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding.
- Scalable – email marketing can be used to reach large audiences or smaller targeted lists.
- Personalisation and segmentation – with email marketing you can personalise messages. You can also segment your marketing list, so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in – this will help boost their engagement with you.
- Shareable – it’s easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.
- Conversions and increased sales – if you have a new promotion people can click on links and follow your call-to-action immediately. Email marketing is also effective at every stage of the buying process. For example, you can influence someone to choose your product, nurture the customer relationship post-transaction and also encourage future purchases.
- Measurable – you can evaluate the success of a campaign by using web analytics software. You can easily test different copy, subject lines and designs to see which is most effective. This allows you to optimise future campaigns.
- Benchmark – you can compare your results against others in your industry. There are many free email marketing benchmarking reports available – you will find these by searching online. Benchmarking data can help you to evaluate and prioritise improvement opportunities.
- Test before you send – A/B testing of subject lines, calls-to-action, personalisation, email copy, images or messages ensure your email content is as effective as it can be before you send it.
- Less intrusive – unlike telephone marketing, recipients can read your message at a time that suits them. Customers can also update their preferences if they would like to receive different messages from you or unsubscribe if they feel they no longer want to receive your email communications.
- Environmentally-friendly – email marketing is better for the environment than direct marketing by postal mail because nothing is printed.
- Time-saving – through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website – eg. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if user abandons an online shopping cart. Once you have developed a template you can reuse for numerous email campaigns.
- Real-time marketing – through email marketing you can connect with customers in real-time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchase or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and with the right offer.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Some of the potential problems of email marketing include:
- Spam – commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers. If your messages aren’t targeted to the right people, the recipient may delete your email or unsubscribe. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is properly targeted at people who want to receive it. The ‘click through rate’ for untargeted emails is likely to be very low. See email marketing and privacy law.
- Undelivered emails – poorly designed emails may not get delivered. Emails that use certain spam keywords or characters in the subject heading or content of the email, eg £££s, FREE, click here, are likely to be filtered out by email software and internet service providers. If you don’t keep your marketing lists up to date, you will find incorrect email addresses mean your messages won’t reach the right person.
- Design problems – your email must be designed so that it appears as it should across multiple devices and email providers. You may encounter a trade-off between design and functionality. Some people opt to receive text-only emails, consider how your message will look if this is the case.
- Size issues – files need to be small enough to download quickly. Emails containing many images may take too long to load, frustrating your audience and losing their interest.
- Resources and skills – for a successful email campaign you must ensure that you have the right copy, design and marketing list. If you don’t have the time or skills in-house, consider outsourcing some of these elements.
Best 10 Email Marketing Service Provider
There are lots and lots of Email Marketing Service Providers but some are really not effectives that is why we decided to include the current list of best email marketing services for small businesses that should make your decision a lot easier.
1. SendinBlue
This hassle-free bulk email sender software to send bulk emails is a good choice for small businesses. It not only allows designers to send out bulk emails but also offers a template to design the same. The software sends out automated triggered campaigns which push the brand more. It also has the facility to let the user send out bulk SMS. It gives the user a dashboard which has updated information on the number of sent emails, deliverability rate, open rate and click rate to name a few. This bulk email software is economical and thus easy on the pocket. Sendinblue also provides Inbox testing and free plan also. It is available in 6 languages.
2. SendBlaster
SendBlaster has been a popular option for years as the bulk email software. This bulk mail sender software is simple and easy to use. It not only helps send out bulk emails but also set up campaigns. The beauty about this software is that it caters to all the basic tools required by a business. It is ideal for enterprises which mostly use emails to communicate. Some of its features include, strong spam check and easy transfer of contacts from various formats like excel, Access, Outlook etc. It also offers a set of basic templates. If you are seeking a frill free software to send out bulk emails then SendBlaster is the ideal software. It lets the user personalize emails and add features like unsubscribe link. The tracking tool of this software helps keep a tab on the number of people who open the email.
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3. MailChimp
The list of best software to send mail in bulk would be incomplete without MailChimp. It has been offering email marketing services since the year 2009. Apart from sending out bulk emails, the software offers tools like A/B testing of campaigns, time-warp function and contact management. A/B testing allows the user to send out different emails to a group split in two. The email which gets a higher open rate is then sent to emails of the group which got lower open rate. This will allow the user to effectively market their brand. Time warp function allows the user to set a specific time to send out the bulk emails based on the time zone of the contacts.
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Must Read: Steps to Manage Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
4. Thunder Mailer
Thunder Mailer is a popular choice amongst bulk email sender software that can send out bulk emails. The free bulk mail sender software is easy to understand and simple to operate. It is the go to software if you are a beginner even if you don’t have the technical know-how. At the same time, it offers a plethora of tools for the advanced users. It offers features like sending out personalized emails (which is the need of the hour in digital Marketing) , analytical functions which sift unwanted emails and categorization of contacts. This software is most suitable for all types of businesses.
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5. AWeber
The list of best software to send mail in bulk would incomplete without Aweber.This reasonably priced software is suitable for if you have a large contact list to send emails to. The software lets the user to import contacts from various file types such as xls, xlsx, tsv, csv and txt format. The best feature of AWeber is the support that they offer to their clients. While most of the providers in this category offer only email support, they offer phone, email and live chat support. Like the most in this list, AWeber offers many templates to its user to create customized emails. It also has much-needed features like autoresponder and split testing. The software allows easy and useful segmentation of the client database.
6. Mad Mimi
If you are on a budget or looking for an easy to use platform to start bulk emailing, Mad Mimi is the perfect software for you. Mad Mimi has its pricing divided into 4 categories, Basic, Pro, Silver and Gold. Each category has many more options based on number of email addresses that user wishes to add. Interestingly, higher the package higher is the speed at which mails are sent out. Apart from the usual features it also allows the user to integrate third party apps such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Facebook (signup page), Capsule CRM etc. This feature compensates for the tools that are not incorporated in it.
Must Read: 10 Importance of business rebranding
7. VerticalResponse
If you require to send bulk emails with images then Vertical Response is the best in this category. The software offers advanced editing tools to create attractive emails to send out to clients. The designer can send pre-designed HTML emails as well as use the tools offered by VerticalResponse. The software allows to send out campaigns as per the location of the customers of an enterprise.
8. GetResponse
GetResponse software is simple to use and can be considered if your emails do not involve many images. It has many templates to offer to its user. There are four plans, Email, Pro, Max and Enterprise. Pro Plan and above offer split testing feature as well. Email is the basic plan which allows you to send out bulk emails. Apart from bulk emails, GetResponse has worthy features like analytics tool, auto responder, e-newsletter template and split testing. Other features include, landing page creator, webinars, CRM and 24*7 customer support.
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9. EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus has integrated Amazon SES transactional email service to send out bulk mails. The services are available at very low rates as compared to others in the league. It allows the user to create HTML email templates and sends out customized emails the client list of the enterprise. The software can be integrated with WordPress site. It offers 4 plans, Shrimp, Tuna, Shark and Whale. A cost-effective software, with Email Octopus you can send emails to 250k email ids.
10. Digitaleo-
Digitaleo is one of the finest bulk email sender software with a customer loyalty program. It uses the real-time evaluation of the service, thus charging for only the work done. This software does not require any installations making it easier to use. It incorporates email marketing and text messaging. Use it to send bulk emails with over 500 modules available to select from. Customize the emails and make it responsive to keep the communication open if required as per your need. It keeps on evolving by adding the improvements in its services which benefits the customer. Also providing the automatic backup which supports the customer to check whenever they want to access it.
