Is email marketing still a big thing? A lot of companies were obsessed with email marketing when email first became mainstream. Huge mailing lists were a way to reach new customers, but as spam filters became more effective, a lot of companies started to ditch their email marketing.
In the modern age, it has become one of many channels to reach new customers and to engage with your existing ones. In this guide, we explore how you can personalize cold emails to take your business to the next level, and some essential tools to consider on your journey.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Although there are plenty of security issues with emails, and people are thankfully becoming more wary due to phishing, mailing lists are a way to directly reach customers. People can easily do a reverse email lookup to check that the sender is legitimate if they are concerned.
You can benefit from all of the following:
- Alerting customers of new products
- Sending out promotions
- Encouraging customers to complete abandoned purchases
- Thanking customers for their loyalty
- Sending out updates
Picking the Right Email Marketing Tool
How do you choose a tool to run your email marketing campaigns? Some of the tools out there have certain strengths and weaknesses when compared to others. Some are more likely to suit your specific business needs.
The following criteria should be considered:
- Pricing. How much does it cost? For instance, if you’ve got a big mailing list you really don’t want to be paying per email you send, so a monthly allowance built into your plan could be ideal. Similarly, you don’t want to be paying for a huge monthly plan if you are just sending a couple of hundred emails per run.
- User friendliness. It shouldn’t be too difficult to use, for you, your employees, or for people who need to change their details or unsubscribe.
- Mobile version. Being able to sign up, or even to control emails via your mobile, is a beneficial feature for any marketing tool.
- Integration with CRM/CMS. Integrating with your existing website service or CMS can allow you to create a quick and easy system for signups, but also to create a way to send out emails from within your existing systems.
- Added features. Many providers will give you graphic templates to use, allow you to personalize every email, or even allow you to access customer support should you have any issues.
5 Tools To Enhance Your Email Marketing Campaign
The five tools below are excellent for building an effective campaign.
- MailChimp. MailChimp is scalable, and allows businesses large and small to send out personalized emails to their lists. You can build a mailing list for free and the flexible plans suit both huge enterprises and brand new startups.
- ActiveCampaign. This is a clever modern tool to automate multiple aspects of your email marketing and more effectively reach certain demographics.
- ConvertKit. ConvertKit is another tool that can allow you to host your mailing list, but it also has a lot of tools for getting more conversions and signups, plus creating a much more visually appealing way to hook people in.
- MailJet. MailJet has powerful analytics, and an easy-to-use email builder to create email campaigns that are visually appealing without a great deal of prior knowledge. You can also use the software via an API, so it can connect with all aspects of your business.
- Hubspot. Hubspot is an amazing enterprise-level tool that you can use for a number of different marketing applications, including email marketing. It’s incredibly powerful, and in the right hands can improve your inbound marketing, sales, and customer service.
Conclusion
With the right tools, email can be one of the key methods you use to reach existing and new customers. Building a ‘funnel’ of new subscribers can allow businesses to grow, and improve their relationship with the public.
Used correctly, an email list is one of the most cost-effective tools there is, as you don’t have to pay for advertising space to reach customers, and you can increase repeat custom by sending promotions and rewarding shopper loyalty. With the tools in this list, it’s easy to take your email efforts up a notch.
Author:
Ben is a Web Operations Executive at InfoTracer who takes a wide view from the whole system. He authors guides on entire security posture, both physical and cyber. Enjoys sharing the best practices and does it the right way!
