Email marketing is a way to reach your potential or current customers via electronic mail. This is done by a collection of email addresses by newsletter sign up or contact form. Then emailing them by sending updates or information. It is an effective channel to generate the lead by sending time to time emails including offers, newsletters or launch of a new product or service.
Is email marketing a priority for your business? Are you looking for the email marketing software? Choosing the best email marketing service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign. In this article, we will review the 4 best email marketing services for small businesses
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tool. It is easy to manage, gives you full control and allows you to establish direct contact with your customers.
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers. They offer a very easy to use interface with great tools and awesome support. It integrates beautifully with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms
MailChimp also comes with easy email creator, merge tags, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking and analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on user’s time zones and setup segmenting based on geolocation.
MailChimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for upto 2,000 subscribers. Their paid plans start from $10/month.
Because of their free plan, we rate MailChimp the best email marketing software.
ActiveCampaign allows you to create drip emails that are driven by subscriber interaction, behavior, interests, location, history and more. With this tool, you can automate the entire life cycle of a subscriber or customer.
You can also use ActiveCampaign Tags + OptinMonster to activate drip campaigns based on the subscriber’s behavior on your website.
This is a multipurpose email marketing platform for the small and mid-sized businesses. It works best with list sizes in the mid-tens of thousands down to a thousand or fewer recipients.
With a staunch reputation in the marketing industry, GetResponse offers a wide array of features such as AB testing, responsive templates, email segmentation and even landing page creation.
GetResponse offers a 30 day free trial. Their pricing starts from $15/month.
Best for small businesses and startups wanting an affordable all-in-one email marketing, CRM, and automation platform.
If there’s one tool that I recommend above all other solutions it’s ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign is the backbone of all of our ventures here at Venture Harbour. It’s easy to use, and easily the most feature-packed email marketing / marketing automation tool for small to medium-sized businesses. On top of that, it’s also one of the most affordable tools.
What sets ActiveCampaign apart is the fact that it has its own CRM system for managing leads, and marketing automation for nurturing your leads into customers. In short, it’s an all-in-one platform for handling small business sales and marketing. Unlike some of the other tools that do this, ActiveCampaign is affordable starting at $9/month .
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, and more.
Each account gives you access to easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, an image library and 1GB of storage for your own files.
Constant Contact offers unmatched support with live chat, email, community support, and a vast library of resources.
Constant Contact has a 60 day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.
Why Email marketing?
Email has larger reach
The total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and projected to reach 4.9 billion by 2017, according to Radicati
Email is Personal
Email allows you to land into a user’s inbox. There is no ranking system limiting your reach. It is very direct, personal, and casual.
Email is Purposeful
To get your email a user needs to signup for your email list and confirm their email address. Someone doing this much work is obviously interested in hearing from you, and they are much more receptive to your message.
Email is Targeted
As we mentioned earlier the user has already shown interest in your products / content. Since you already know what they like, you can deliver them highly relevant content and offers to get better results.
Email is One-on-One
People read email in the privacy of their inbox. The message is not on a public timeline or newsfeed. They can ask you questions directly in private with confidence. This helps build trust and connection.
This is precisely why every smart business in the world has an email list.
Big name brands learned this lesson a long time ago, and that’s why they spend thousands of dollars on social media campaigns to get people to sign up for their email lists.
They understand that email marketing is the best long term investment with a much higher return. Because people will continue to get their message at a very low cost for a longer period of time.
While this might seem surprising at first, think about your own online behavior: When you sign up for a website (like an online store), you have to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account. What’s more, Facebook and Twitter use email to notify users of activity like when someone is tagged in a photo.
Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who is online has an active email address. So when it comes to connecting with your prospects and customers, there’s no channel with a wider reach than email.
Email delivers your message
If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list, or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time, says Forrester Research.
There are two key reasons why:
First, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox,
This is a big deal when it comes to getting your messages seen.
If you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers at least 9,000 of them would receive it in their inbox.
This means your message is 45 times more likely to be seen using email than Facebook.
Secondly, your email subscribers have explicitly told you they want to hear from you when they signed up for your email list.
Email is the proven marketing channel to ensure your audience gets your message.
Email drives conversions
Most marketers are laser focused on driving conversions. Regardless of whether this is in the form of leads, sales, memberships, or a metric unique to your business strategy, the ultimate goal for marketers is to turn potential customers into paying customers.
And when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email.
In fact, the average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients), As discussed earlier, your email subscribers have told you they want to hear from you – and this isn’t typically the case with social. 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to
What’s more, email is highly measurable. Campaign Monitor customers have real-time access to metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, forwards, social shares, and more.
Email is the preferred communication channel
For many, social networks are a very personal form of communication used to keep up to date with friends & family. Email on the contrary, is a much more professional medium and people expect to receive information about products and services through that channel.
Email has a higher ROI
Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it would make sense that email is also the most effective marketing channel to drive ROI. Email marketing yields an average 3,800% return on investment for businesses and for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $38.
It’s clear from these statistics that email is cost-effective channel for marketers, but why does it outperform other channels so significantly when it comes to ROI?
It comes down to delivering highly personalized and relevant messages. email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications. The more data you have about your customers in an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor – including insights pulled in from integrated systems like your CRM, customer service solution, etc – the more targeted you can be.