According to Hubspot,
“99% of consumers check their email every day.”
In other words, merely 1% of total consumers do not check their emails every day, which means if you are not using email marketing, you are missing out on connecting with 99% of your leads, customers and potential customers.
No matter how successful a business is, increasing sales on a consistent basis is the key to remain at the top of the game. And if you are a startup or a small business, you cannot afford to miss the chance of marketing your products/services to 99% of your target market, can you? Of course, not.
If you thought email marketing is dead or investing in a great email marketing software is not worth your money, you cannot be more wrong than this.
Being the CEO/manager, it is pertinent that you take aid of all the marketing channels available to get the most out of your investments. In this article, we will be covering why you should be using a email marketing software and some of the best ones you can find in the market.
Table of Contents
“In 2019, global email users amounted to 3.9 billion users”.
– Statista, 2020
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book. One of the reasons why it is still popular today is that email marketing is a cost-effective solution.
Businesses are enabled to reach their customers at a place, which is most frequented by internet users; their inbox. It is used by businesses to promote their services and products to leads, customers etc.
Why businesses need email marketing
Email marketing is a sub-branch of outbound marketing. Email marketing is used for multiple purposes such as:
Building credibility
Credibility is one of the driving factors behind customers deciding to make a purchase from a certain brand. If a potential customers believes the business is not credible enough, they will never buy from them.
Email helps businesses in building credibility among audience. The founder of Ahern Donor Communications, Tom Ahern shared some insights about it:
“For years, in large part to the newsletter I think, I’ve never had trouble attracting new clients and the right kinds of clients. People will read my newsletter and be able to tell if I’m the right person for the project before they even call me.”
Strengthening relationships
The difference between a good and great business is the relationship they share with their customers.
Once an individual has bought from you, it does not mean their relationship is over with you, rather it is the right time to make it even stronger. Email marketing plays a significant role in strengthening relationships of businesses with their customers.
By sending newsletters every once in a while about the latest products/services, new deals or exclusive deals for loyal customers – businesses take advantage of email marketing to build good relationship.
Increasing sales
The purpose of launching any business is to do as much sales as possible. All CEOs want to boost their sales, increase their revenue and amplify the profits.
This is the very reason why marketing came into existence; to get more customers. With email marketing, you can see an evident difference in your number of sales, if done right.
Customers who have checked the ‘opt in’ option to receive updates about your business are the ones who are interested in what you sell. Every time you launch a new product/service, sending them a newsletter will boost your sales immediately.
“73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.”
Adding personal touch
The digital market is absolutely saturated. No matter what product/service you are selling, there will be tens of competitors in the industry, working tirelessly to make their impact. To close a sale and grab a customer has become much more difficult in 2020 than it was 10 years ago.
With more competition, it becomes important that businesses use every trick in the book to get attention of their potential customers. Doing marketing with a personal touch makes marketing much more fun and exciting for the end-consumers.
When you send people emails based on their interests/behaviours/locations etc., include their name and reference their last purchase with you, it feel more human and increase the chance of closing a sale.
Getting results fast
You design a newsletter and send it your intended audience. You will be immediately able to see how many people actually opened your email, how much time they spend, if they visited your website and made a purchase too. Unlike other marketing channels, you don’t have to wait for the marketing campaign to end to track the results rather you can do it instantly.
Along with this, email marketing gives you an instant boost in your website visitors number.
Over 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI.
-Hubspot
Why you can’t use your Gmail account to send marketing emails?
Now that you have realised the importance of email marketing, you might be wondering how do I send business marketing emails to my customers and leads? Your first instinct might be to log into your Gmail account and start sending emails to your list. Well, before doing any of that – hear us out first!
Once you are have garnered enough subscribers for your email lists, it is time to start sending emails to them. While everyone has an Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail account already, these accounts cannot be used to send regular emails or run proper email marketing campaigns. Here are some of the common reasons why:
Little to no email design/editing
While you can format your text (bold/italic/change font style), add images and do some other basic stuff, the editors that come with these free email services do not offer much room to design a newsletter or email. Especially when you compare them to more modern and mail editors, you will see a vivid difference.
With an email marketing service/software intended for marketing, you are able to design the email as you like; from having multiple columns, creating custom templates, personalise existing templates to adding design elements where you like.
Time consuming
The idiot ‘time is money’ is not just a fancy phrase but rather absolutely true. When you try to design an email campaign on Gmail or any free email service (which are intended for personal use), they take a lot of time. Moreover, you will be unable to find a list of rather common features found in email marketing services, missing in Gmail, Outlook etc.
You cannot save a template, if you want to send an email similar to the last you sent to your subscribers, you would need to design it from scratch.
Contact segmentation
An email marketing campaign can only be successful if it is run for the intended audience. If you design a campaign about baby clothes and send it to subscribers who have never shown interest or purchased them, you will end up wasting your time and resources. Segmenting your contacts in the right lists and designing appropriate newsletters for them is the key to a winning email campaign.
On the contrary, email marketing services let you segment your contacts based on a number of factors such as interests/behaviour/age/location/gender etc.
Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
– Hubspot
No personalisation
Another reason why using your personal or business email account is not the best option to send emails to your subscribers and lists is that you are unable to do any personalisation. The chances of a person opening an email with a subject line that is customised for them compared to a generic subject line are substantially more.
The more personalised your email feels to the end-reader, the more chances of them reading the email till last and taking the intended action.
No reporting/ analytics
Reporting and analytics are the backbone of every successful marketing campaign, be it social media or email. Now that you have invested your time in somewhat designing a template, manually entering all the contacts and sending emails to your list, how do you know if it was successful or not? When you use a service like Outlook or Gmail, you get limited to no reporting or analytics about how well your email marketing campaign did.
Even if you use a Gmail plugin, you would still not get any thorough information about how your email was perceived. One of the reasons why businesses now prefer digital marketing over traditional marketing is that it gives deep insights about the campaigns.
But if you don’t use an email marketing service, you won’t be able to get a better grasp over which email campaign was more successful, what subject line garnered more email open numbers etc.
80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
– Emarsys
Email marketing software
Now that you have realised that you can’t send emails from your personal email account or marketing and business promotion purposes, it is important to look for an email marketing software that is built specifically for this reason.
An email marketing software essentially helps businesses in doing email marketing in a much more efficient and proactive manner. Much of the trivial tasks are handled by the software while you can take care of the creative side of email marketing campaigns.
From automating emails to setting up quick responses to users, email sequences and having vast options to design the newsletter/email as per business requirements are some of the things that an email marketing software does.
What to consider when choosing an email marketing software
Email marketing software industry has boomed exponentially in the last few years.
While they were initially perceived with dubious eyes, now the majority of marketers consider them important for a business to be successful in the digital world.
Although it is tempting to get a software that has the fanciest of features, it is equally important to know that you might never use the out-of-this-world features of the email software anyway.
Your primary goal needs to choose an email marketing software that has the essential features to make your email marketing easier and optimal. It varies from business to business because every business has its own unique requirements. Along with this, your business goals and milestones also play a vital role in choosing a good email marketing software for your business.
Here are some of the most important features of an email marketing software are:
Editor & designer
One of the main reasons why a marketer or CEO looks for an email marketing software is to have the ability to style and customise the email as they like.
The majority of email marketing software have drag and drop editors so that anyone can design emails without any technical assistance.
When deciding to buy an email marketing software, thoroughly look at its editor and designer.
- Is it drag and drop?
- Is it easy to use?
- Is it one of their hot selling features or not?
- How much customisation does the editor allow?
Another feature along with the editor that email marketing software have is pre-built templates.
These templates have some great newsletter already, belonging to different industries and niches. You should be able to personalise these templates as you require.
Message automation
Email message automation features is again a must-have for an email marketing software. Evident by its name, this feature enables marketers to automate emails in response to a particular action.
For instance, when a new users signs up for a business – the marketer can set an automated message in response to that, welcoming the user to the business and sending other introductory material to them.
Some of the things that you should look for are:
- Can you send automated messages?
- Can you set an email sequence in advance?
- Does order confirmation and shipping confirmations emails can be configured?
- Can a person without being tech-savvy set this?
- If answer to all these questions is a ‘Yes’, you are at a good start.
The average email open rate for all industries is 20.81%.
Analytics
The most crucial feature of every email marketing software is its analytics feature. Without a great, reliable analytics/reporting feature, there is literally not point of getting it in the first place. The measurement of your campaign’s success is only possible with analytics.
Some of the common analytics that your email marketing software should provide are:
- What is the open rate of email?
- How many users took an action?
- How many emails were received?
- Click-through rate?
- Email sharing or forwarding rate?
- Bounce rate?
- Number of unsubscribes?
All these stats will help you in designing your next newsletter in a better way, in the light of these stats. You can compare which email campaign worked better and which had a low open rate etc.
List maintenance
Adding new subscribers to lists, deleting them or shuffling them to other lists is a mandatory feature of a good email marketing software. Instead of having to manually delete or add subscribers, your email marketing software should be able to do that itself.
Efficient management of your contacts is also vital for saving time. Once the contacts are sorted out in their respective lists, it makes the sending part quite easy.
You can design separate newsletter for separate lists and send them accordingly. For instance, one list can be of ‘New Subscribers’, the other list can be ‘Loyal Customers’ etc.
Some of the key aspects to look for might be:
- Can you create lists?
- Does the sod software sort out contacts on its own?
- Can you send separate emails to separate lists easily?
Easy integration
When you are working as a digital marketer, working with multiple third-party services and software is a must.
Choosing en email platform that can be easily integrated with other third-party apps help you in saving considerable amount of time and resource.
Therefore, it is important that the email marketing software can be easily integrated with other applications such as CRM, Analytics, Inventory, Order management etc.
Some of the points to consider are:
- Does it have easy-to-use APIs?
- Can you integrate it with Google Analytics?
- Can you connected it with cloud-based email verification services?
- Can you integrate it with other mobile & social apps?
The answers to these questions will help you in deciding if an email marketing software is worth investing your money or not. Another thing to keep in mind is your business. Every business has unique requirements and you might not need all of them.
In 2018, 17.75% of clicked through emails resulted in a purchase.
Best email marketing software of 2020
In 2020, a simple Google search on email marketing software will bring tens of software solutions to you. This can be quite over-whelming for someone who is new to email marketing and does not know what software to choose.
To help you in that, we have compiled a list of some of the best email marketing software that are trusted and credible.
Let’s get started:
MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing software in the digital marketing world right now. They have a user base of more than seven million people around the globe. Businesses, whether are small or medium-based, use MailChimp to send their regular newsletters, run marketing campaigns and other news and information.
Along with that, MailChimp can easily integrate with third-party apps such as WordPress, GA, Salesforce, Facebook, Hootsuite etc.
Pros:
- You can customise the pre-built templates easily
- Efficient contact list creation
- Easy scheduling of email sequences
- Great analytics and reporting tool
Cons:
- For a newbie, it takes some time to get a hang of how MailChimp works.
- There isn’t a dedicate app for phone, using which marketers can design and send emails to their subscribers.
- It offers limited backend development options.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue again is a good option for e-commerce businesses. One of the best features of SendinBlue is that users can sync their their contact list from the majority of digital platforms with their SendinBlue account, making it easy to send emails and newsletters.
SendinBlue is equipped with the functionality of being integrated with third-party apps such as WordPress, Hootsuite etc.
Pros:
- Detailed analytics and reports about email campaigns
- Easy to setup and configure
- The price is pretty low when compared to other email marketing platforms
- Can do A/B testing with the tool
Cons:
- If you want to do more customisation, need to a bit tech-savvy
- Technical information on how to use the tool is not available much
- Sometimes, there is a lag in sending/receiving of emails
Right Mail
Right Mail is your perfect companion in making your email marketing a huge success. The secure email service enables you to send emails to your customers, leads and new potential target markets in a quicker fashion.
Pros:
- Bullet-proof security: unparalleled security to offer you an uptime of 99.99%. It is a secure email hosting platform that is protected with double encryption at both ends
- Custom domain: create your own custom domain to send emails to your customers and leads. The custom domain will help you in establishing a professional and business impact for your target market.
- Automation: automate your email campaigns. Set up your custom automation process for new subscribers, leads, loyal customers etc. and save your valuable time.
- Schedule: create a complete campaign and schedule to send it on a later day/hour.
- Insightful data: the real-time insights will aid you in keeping track of everything and designing better email campaigns in the future. The mail reporting features tells you about: open rate, sent emails, failed emails, opened emails, received emails.
- Mail Agents: set external mail agents like MailChimp so that you no longer have to switch to different email platforms, rather work from just one interface.
- Right templates: when you have no graphic designing sense and experience, the professionally designed templates will do your job perfectly.
You are 6x more likely to get a click from an email than from a tweet.
-Hubspot
Bottomline
We hope reading this article helped you not only in understanding the importance of an email marketing software but also in choosing the best-suited bulk email software for your business.