Email marketing is beautiful. If you use it, and have had success with it, you know why. But for those who are uninitiated to it, let us tell you. Whether your goal is to reach the masses, or send personalized communication to a select few, emails are a great, personalized way to reach existing and potential customers. According to Hubspot, 4 in 5 marketers say they would rather give up social media than email marketing. This is especially relevant in the B2B world. Communication and the right kind of engagement is priceless to businesses. Emails also generate an insane ROI of 42,000%, which means that for every 1 rupee spent, you get 42 back.
In the world of endless social media creatives, videos, webinars and landing pages, email remains the most effective communication channel. It comes as no surprise. There are 4 billion email users worldwide, and with the use of some smart tools, emails can be personalized, designed, automated, segmented, and sent to your audience without too much of a hassle.
In this article, we unveil the secret sauce to email marketing, the tools that simplify the effort and boost the chances of success to help you get started.
Send in blue - For transactional emails
Send in blue is an excellent marketing communications platform. So, if your business mainly relies on transactional emails like password resets, abandoned cart reminders or onboarding emails, this might be the perfect tool for you.
Send in Blue has simple and effective email design functions, over 70 design templates and extensive developer APIs. You’ll have access to these, as well as A/B testing, contact management, workflow editor, and real-time reporting with their free plan. Their other features include a built-in CRM and a landing page creation tool.
Mailchimp- For great templates and insights
Mailchimp is a very familiar name in email marketing, and one of the leaders in the industry. It offers seamless integrations with ecommerce platforms and CMS software. While the free plan offers basic features like email creation and scheduling, it comes with MailChimp branding in the email footer. Their paid plans offer features like premium support, send time optimization and advanced audience segmentation. The prices vary depending on the number of contacts you wish to engage with. Designing emails on MailChimp is easy, using their content manager. The software also lets you automate emails at important steps of the buyer journey and enable seamless communication.
Moosend- For easy use and automation
Moosend is perfect for people just starting out with email marketing. There are a lot of features included in its free plan, which makes it ideal to start with. It includes a drag and drop editor, which is very easy to use, automation, real time analytics and list segmentation- which increases open rates and CTRs. Although Moosend does not offer a CRM, it’s a very good tool to begin with if you’re solely looking to market via email. Moosend also has excellent performance reporting to better optimize campaigns and drive results.
Omnisend- For seamless integration and beautiful newsletters
Omnisend is a robust tool that integrates all your communications platforms in one place including email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and more. It is great for ecommerce businesses. Although its free plan includes only email, it offers a full suite of email marketing features that small and medium sized businesses would require. It boasts a behavioral trigger automation feature, a drag and drop visual builder that is great for newsletters and promotional emails, email capture tools and a ton of templates for both automation and workflows.
Hunter- For cold email lists and scheduling
Hunter is a simple and powerful tool for sending out cold emails. You can search for and find the emails of your target audience(s), verify the addresses, build lists, personalize, review, schedule, and send emails and follow ups- all with a free plan. You cannot however, design the emails sent with hunter- which shouldn’t be a problem in the case of cold emails. You will only ever need to upgrade hunter, should you wish to search for or verify more than 25 emails/ month.
Mailmodo- For interactive emails
Mailmodo is a full-fledged email marketing solution. The best perk of using Mailmodo are the interactive emails. All actions can be taken inside the emails itself which drive higher conversion rates. Anything from simple forms to polls, surveys and webinar bookings and more can be achieved by creating AMP emails. With Mailmodo, users can create beautiful emails, without code, schedule and send them to millions of contacts and even avoid the spam folder. They do not have a free plan, although you can sign up for a free trial to try it out and also get in touch with them to tailor-make a plan for you.
Kickbox- For email verification
Kickbox verifies your email lists to ensure your emails are reaching your target customers in their primary inboxes. Major email providers measure bounce rates when deciding whether to route your message in the inbox or in the spam folder- Verified emails help drastically reduce the bounce rate and increase your sender authority. Kickbox combs through your email lists and weeds out misspelled or outdated emails to keep your lists concise and accurate.
Basically…
Emails are great and there are so many tools out there (even more than we have listed here) to help you with achieving that tempting 4200% ROI. While most tools have free plans, we recommend you to sign up for free trials of the premium versions as well, and get a feel of what works for you according to what you’re looking for.
If you are new to email marketing- finding the right tool is only the beginning. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Do you have a favorite tool for email marketing? Write to us to let us know!
