Because of increasing market competition, offering quality products is no longer enough to attract customers and boost sales. There’s more to the game! What you need is a solid email marketing strategy that lets you promote your products as well as stay in touch with customers.
Email marketing lets you build lasting relationships with your customers, new and old. You get a chance to speak directly to them, through their inbox, at a time that’s convenient for them. You can even personalize communication for your target audience. If you use it right, email marketing can serve as one of the most cost-effective channels to connect with your audience.
If you’re new to email marketing, we’ve created this guide to help you understand everything there is about the technology. We’ve also listed five popular email marketing tools for you to try. But first, let’s refresh our basics and have a glance at what email marketing tools are.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing technique that lets you target prospects and customers via email messages. It helps you nurture leads, promote your products and services, and increase brand awareness.
There’s a lot you can do with email marketing—welcome new customers, share business updates, promote your blogs and articles, sell products, run contests and offers, or just check in with your customers. You can also follow up after sales and invite customers to share their experiences.
What are email marketing tools and their benefits?
Email marketing tools are software applications that help you plan and execute email marketing campaigns as well as monitor their progress. They let you build email templates from scratch, segment your contacts, create custom mailing lists, send bulk emails, track the real-time performance of campaigns, and measure key metrics such as the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Some tools also allow you to run A/B testing for your email campaigns. In this process, you create two email variants for the same campaign and send them to two different groups of subscribers to check which variant gets a better response from the audience.
Some of the benefits of using email marketing tools are:
- Create automated email lists: You can send email messages only to those customers who’ve agreed to receive or subscribed to your emails. But manually tracking which customers have signed up and which haven’t is time-consuming. Email marketing software can create dedicated email lists to automatically send messages only to your subscribed customers.
- Deliver targeted messages: Sending the same email to every subscriber is not a good idea. An email marketing tool allows you to segment your contacts based on demographics, geographic locations, purchase history, and more, so you can target them through personalized messages. Segmented communication also leads to better email engagement.
5 popular email marketing tools
We’ve shortlisted five popular email marketing tools (listed alphabetically) from Software Advice’s 2020 FrontRunners report for email marketing software. To learn more about the methodology we used to feature these products, click here.
1. Klaviyo
User rating: 4.67/5
Number of reviews: 186
Klaviyo is a cloud-based email marketing tool that allows you to send targeted messages to your customers based on their purchase and browsing history, engagement with your previous emails, and more. It can integrate with your existing software applications such as ecommerce, payment processing, marketing, and point of sale (POS) systems.
The tool’s reporting dashboard lets you track the real-time performance of your email campaigns—the number of downloads, orders, website visits, views, etc. You can also add your brand logo and colors to the promotional emails you send to customers.
The software offers a free plan in which you can send 500 emails to up to 250 contacts. You have to upgrade after exceeding the limit. Other key email marketing features of Klaviyo include:
- An email autoresponder
- Customizable email templates
- Campaign analytics
- Mobile-optimized emails
Segmenting email contacts in Klaviyo (Source)
2. Moosend
User rating: 4.79/5
Number of reviews: 131
Moosend is a cloud-based marketing automation tool that helps you create custom email templates, segment contacts, manage subscriber lists, and send targeted messages and product recommendations. Its email automation feature allows you to set up events, filters, or actions that trigger automated emails to your contact list.
You can check how many people opened your email, how many clicked on a link, how many forwarded or shared it, how many unsubscribed, and more. With the location reporting functionality, you can also identify where your subscribers are located and track engagement by country or region.
The software offers a free plan that lets you send unlimited emails. Other key email marketing features of Moosend include:
- Spam checking
- A/B testing
- Lead scoring
- Contact management
Analytics for an email marketing campaign in Moosend (Source)
3. Omnisend
User rating: 4.77/5
Number of reviews: 436
Omnisend is a marketing automation and email marketing platform that allows you to combine your email marketing campaigns with other channels such as social media or SMS marketing. It offers a campaign booster that resends emails at specific intervals as well as an email content editor that helps you create engaging drip emails.
The tool can automatically segment your customers based on their interests, consumption habits, demographics, previous engagement, and more, so you can target them better.
The software offers a free plan that lets you send 15,000 emails per month, with a limit of 2,000 emails a day. Other key email marketing features of Omnisend include:
- Sales reporting
- Split testing
- Reporting and analytics
- Mobile-optimized emails
4. Robly
User rating: 4.56/5
Number of reviews: 405
Robly is a cloud-based email marketing tool that lets you send targeted emails to your subscribers. It can also automatically resend follow-up emails to those subscribers who didn’t open your first email. These emails can be sent anytime between one to ten days after the first email.
The software offers Robly AI, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based module that analyzes your campaign metrics to predict the time your subscribers are most likely to check their email. It then automatically sends emails at that exact moment.
The tool doesn’t offer a free plan; its paid plan starts at $19 per month. Other key email marketing features of Robly include:
- An email autoresponder
- Template management
- A/B testing
- Automation workflow setup
Creating templates for an email marketing campaign in Robly (Source)
5. SALESmanago
User rating: 4.53/5
Number of reviews: 155
SALESmanago is a cloud-based marketing automation and email marketing platform that allows you to personalize email content and delivery time for each of your email contacts. It lets you create customized email templates and uses AI and machine learning (ML) to make personalized recommendations for customers.
You can use customers’ behavioral and transactional data to create offers tailored for them. This increases the chances of upselling, cross-selling, and retargeting, thus improving your marketing efforts.
The tool offers a free plan that lets you send unlimited emails. Other key email marketing features of SALESmanago include:
- Lead generation
- A/B testing
- Template management
- Reporting and analytics
Creating and sending personalized emails in SALESmanago (Source)
Ready to select an email marketing tool?
Not convinced with the email marketing automation tools given above? Check out our complete list of products along with user reviews from real people like you. And here’s our email marketing software buyers guide to help you make an informed choice.
Need more help? Have a one-on-one conversation with one of our software advisors, who’ll help you narrow down your options in 15 minutes or less. Click here to schedule a phone call, or start a live chat here.
Methodology
We shortlisted the most popular products from Software Advice’s 2020 FrontRunners report for email marketing software. Each selected product had a 4.5+ overall rating and 100+ reviews as of Nov 05, 2020.
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