HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT EMAIL MARKETING PLATFORM

MARIA | 2020-12-11 09:14:20+00:00

Today’s marketers have gone beyond the one-off email blasts that blanket subscribers with promotional emails and deals to entice them to convert. Subscriber lists are now carefully segmented to elicit a specific response from a specific audience with targeted campaigns. And those efforts are greatly improving email engagement. Couple that with advancements in automation and drip campaigns, and brands are making sure the content gets to the right audience at the right time. 

For instance, an email marketing platform may have over billion monthly content views and million monthly unique visitors. If this platform treated all those users as a single audience, their engagement would suffer terribly.

Instead, they could develop a few types of email newsletters for specific audience interests to personalize their experience with the online brand. To access features like segmentation and automation, your brand requires to be paired up with the right email marketing platform first.

Why is the platform important?

Not all platforms are bundled with the same features. In some cases, the features that are important to your online brand may be available but require an additional investment if they’re considered an add-on premium feature.

The features you need most for your email marketing platform are largely dependent on your goals and how you intend to use them.   Around 80% of retail brands indicate that email marketing is their best driver for customer retention next to social media, but only about 7% of retail brands use email marketing as a brand building tool. Establish your goals, what you aim to acquire from email marketing, & then review the following features that you should consider while choosing a platform.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is otherwise called split testing email crusades. In the event that you're running any sort of conversion campaign with value-based emails, at that point discover a stage that offers this. You can do it physically with a touch of legwork, yet A/B testing incorporated into the platform implies you can immediately run a campaign one next to the other with various factors to perceive how it performs with comparative subscribers. You're not restricted to split testing conditional emails. Really, you can split test any email campaign for things like: 

  • Subject line variation 

  • Layout 

  • Call to action buttons 

  • Personalization 

  • Body content 

  • Specific offers 

 

While your audience shares similar interests and problems, each contact is unique. To ensure your emails have the most impact, you want to get the messaging right. That’s where list segmentation comes in. 

List Segmentation

Segmenting your list permits you to just send important proposals to the opportune individuals. The exact opposite thing you need to do is bombard your beneficiaries with messages they're not inspired by. That is the thing that makes individuals withdraw or even most exceedingly awful, hit the spam button. Fragmenting your list guarantees you're sending the correct emails to the right individuals. 

 

Most stages uphold list segmentation. Some are more robust than others, be that as it may. For instance; some only let you segment by database fields, while others you can segment dependent on associations with passed crusades. 

 

It can get tedious trying to manually handle all that, but it’s something you want to do. Segmented email campaigns have an open rate 14.3% higher than generic emails and a 100.95% higher click-through rate. Find a platform that makes list segmentation easy, sorting your contacts and communication with those segments in just a few clicks.

 

Customized Sign-up Methods 

Having a pick in structure on your website or membership alternative during checkout is guaranteed, with email advertising, yet you're passing up opportunities to pick up subscribers. Leverage each opportunity to get new endorsers by utilizing an email stage that offers you a wide scope of sign-up forms.

This includes: 

  • Social media tabs

  • Adding a sign-up button on Facebook 

  • Lightbox pop-up opt-ins 

  • Footer opt-in forms 

  • Sidebar opt-ins 

  • Mobile opt-ins 

  • General landing pages (link from email signatures and other places) 

  • Exit intent popups 

3rd Party Integration 

Integration may not be a necessity for small businesses and startups but, for larger online brands, you need automation to allow your marketing and communication to run smoothly.

3rd party integration with your email platform eliminates or greatly reduces manual input. The integration you need greatly depends, again, on how you’ll use your email platform, but it can include things like: 

  • Social integration for developing target ads and retargeting campaigns or social promotions 

  • CRM integration 

  • Integration with content management systems and eCommerce platforms 

  • Integration for importing Gmail 

  • Google analytics or integration with other analytics platforms 

Subscriber/Campaign Insights

There are extremely numerous advertisers who focus on developing open rates and click rates yet dismiss different measurements that should be followed, observed, and used to upgrade the performance of email promoting campaigns. Each choice you make concerning refining and improving your missions should be driven by information, so pick an email stage that offers the most robust data reporting. This way, you can also effortlessly monitor and review: 

  • Bounces (broken down by types of bounces like hard and soft bounces) 

  • Delivery rates 

  • Inbox placement 

  • Earnings per click or per email 

  • Forward rate 

  • Churn rate 

  • Unsubscribe rates 

  • Frequency and quality of email engagement 

  • Individual contact activity

Surveys 

While  data-driven showcasing is significant, it can just take you up until now. You actually need to peruse that information and settle on taught choices (and best suppositions) about the significance behind some of the information. Once in a while the best source of data is directly from the client—that is the place where studies prove to be useful. Knowing precisely how clients feel about a specific point lets you utilize that criticism to improve your business, your products, and the general client experience. Built-in survey tools or survey incorporation improve the way toward focusing on explicit audience sections and in any event, sending automated surveys to request input when they hit a specific point in the purchaser's journey. 

 

Automation and Response Handling

 

For online retail brands, there are some normal automated messages that get conveyed, similar to arranging affirmations, subsequent follow-ups and review requests, and relinquished cart triggers to win back lost clients. 

The correct email stage will give you undeniably more authority over building more grounded associations with your clients by means of email automation. Here are a few different ways you could utilize automation and respond handling to improve and smooth out your email marketing: 

  • Welcome email or onboarding email series for new subscribers 

  • Behavioral triggers to automatically email content related to what contacts view in your funnel 

  • Expanded engagement workflows for contacts that return on regular basis

  • Lead nurturing emails, especially for products that have a longer buyer cycle, such as high-value products 

  • Re-engagement workflows for customers where engagement and purchases have fallen off workflows based on past purchases 

  • Automated emails depending on survey responses & customer happiness

 

Scalable Pricing and Features

The ROI on email marketing can be significant with the correct methodology, however you actually need to factor in the expenses of your email platform, alongside the recurrence of messages and how much income they can create—or the amount they can add to the lifetime estimation of your client. The membership cost for email marketing stages is commonly founded on the size of your email list and the quantity of messages you send month to month. Those costs can change broadly starting with one platform then onto the next. 

Whatever email platform you pick, do as such in light of development. What highlights will be significant as you keep on developing your rundown and extend your email marketing methodology? Will the administration have the option to help your development? A few stages are more qualified for small to mid-sized Businesses, while others are planned explicitly to serve enterprise level associations.

CONCLUSION

The best email marketing platform will be the one that provides the most value based on your marketing automation and content needs. Different organisations will portray different requirements from their email strategies. Choosing the best provider will require careful consideration of the offerings and capabilities available, the price and the individual requirements of your organisation. Taking the time to define your goals and your plan and how email needs to integrate with your business (and where) will make it infinitely easier to make the right choice.

Getting this right is the key to creating a successful email marketing strategy.

Alternatively, the email marketing experts here at FellaFeeds can design and maintain a specialized email marketing campaign tailored perfectly to the requirements of your company. Get in touch with us today to find out more.

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