It is 2016 and email marketing continues to be among the most effective medium for customer reach out. With an average open rate of more than 20% and click-through rate higher than 3.5%, email marketing provides the best opportunity for businesses to get customers and prospects engaged. In this article, we will look into the top email marketing tools available in the market today and how you can use to make the most of your marketing campaigns.
GetResponse
Email marketing is used by freelancers as well as enterprise businesses and GetResponse has features that caters to both these ends of businesses. With easy to create landing pages, email template creators as well as webinar marketing solutions targeted at B2B users, GetResponse has a comprehensive suite of features that make it unnecessary to invest in affiliated software products. Other features on the product include A/B testing, autoresponder marketing and smartphone apps for iOS/Android that help managing email marketing campaigns on the move easy.
MailChimp
With nearly 12 million users, MailChimp is one of the more popular solutions available in the market today. The product is well-integrated with a number of ecommerce solutions like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce that make marketing integration with your online cart easy. There are a wide variety of email building and automation features available that tell you why MailChimp is used by a lot of people. It can however be a little pricey and the costs can easily add up if you are not a corporate customer. The cost to reach out to a relatively small group of 25,000 customers can easily reach $160 a month which is not something all businesses can afford.
SendGrid
For small businesses that do not want to pay for a solution yet, SendGrid has a free plan that can accommodate up to 12,000 emails a month. Another benefit of the product is that it is a neat blend between transactional email and typical email. It is consequently a great product to consider if you are an enterprise customer who needs to send automated custom-designed emails for your customers. For others, email design templates and marketing tools are available with reports and management tools.
Constant Contact
As a marketing tool, ConstantContact comes with a host of features that includes personalized autoresponders, contact management, reporting tools and list building tools. There are also a few innovations here with tools like custom text and QR code that will let your customers to subscribe to your newsletters from their mobile phones. The drag and drop interface for building email newsletters is on par with the options from the other providers and is hence a good option for your business. However, price could be a hurdle especially if you are a bootstrapped startup. Prices for their email marketing package that includes the necessary features like custom templates can start at $45/month which can be a lot for bootstrapped startups.
Overall, email marketing as a business need has matured quite significantly over the past few years and the list of features available today is a testament to this evolution. As a marketing strategy too, email marketing has moved away from a stand-alone strategy to something that is much more integrated with other avenues of marketing like webinars and content marketing. Tools like GetResponse already have started moving in that direction and it will be interesting to see how these marketing tools evolve over the next decade.
What is your favorite email marketing tool? Share it in the comments.
