If customer acquisition was compared with a game of chess, email marketing would be the queen—the most powerful player in the game of chess. Like the queen, email marketing often makes the difference between a winning strategy and a losing one.
According to a survey, 81% of small and midsize businesses are still leveraging email as their primary customer acquisition channel.
Another study estimates that by 2023, 4.3 billion people will be active email users. That’s why email marketing can be a gold mine for those who know how to use it wisely.
When it comes to building high revenue-driving email marketing campaigns, personalization is one of the top priorities. The digital customer expects highly targeted content tailored to their buyer persona.
“Personalization – it is not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.” – Dan Jak
How can marketers keep up with the needs of the modern customer?
As John Caldwell once said: “To get the right message to the right person at the right time you first need to get the right data to the right database at the right time.”
In other words, the success of your email marketing campaigns depends on multiple factors, and leveraging the right tools in this context is of utmost importance. Let’s have a look at the most reliable and easy-to-use email marketing solutions that can help you improve the efficiency of your campaigns.
Constant Contact
This tool designed to revolutionize email marketing strategies offers a suite of options for organizing and managing marketing campaigns. Creating visually-complex emails has never been easier. Users can import contact lists from other apps and use features like email automation, scheduling, and dynamic signup forms to enrich their marketing outcomes.
Moreover, its analytics capabilities allow an easier ROI measurement from different marketing campaigns and help the users improve their conversion rates.
Constant Contact can be purchased either as an email tier offering the basic features discussed above or as an email plus account, which comes with split testing, dynamic content, and more.
Zoho Campaigns
This email marketing platform suits a wide range of tastes. As stated in a customer review: “Zoho Campaigns compares all your email campaigns. The application is very affordable, and they ensure great analytics.”
This has-it-all marketing application offers features like list management, report tracking, and automation—at a reasonable price. Its ready-to-use templates allow users to easily create emails, leaving them with more time and energy to focus on relevant content.
The application’s great integration options make it a winner on the market, as they allow many third-party integrations (G Suite, WordPress, Facebook, etc.) at a relatively inexpensive cost. However, there is a Forever Free plan that allows users to send up to 12,000 emails a month, which comes at a higher price.
MailChimp
This veteran in email marketing platforms has been helping professionals craft eye-catching marketing emails since 2001. With its built-in designer offering a wide selection of templates and edit options, MailChimp is a platform that sustains the users’ marketing efforts without them needing to pay for it. However, this free tier includes a MailChimp logo in the footer, so other premium packages are available for those who want to remove it.
On the integration front, MailChimp is also a winner, especially for online retailers, who are allowed to link to services like Shopify or Magento to send targeted campaigns.
Vertical Response
Best used by small businesses, this email marketing tool provides:
- A/B testing capabilities
- Email scheduling
- Campaign tracking
- Easy-to-use template editors
- Automation features
These are just a few of the wide range of services that Vertical Response offers for the modern marketing professional. This tool is known for being rather inexpensive, given the plethora of features that it contains. The platform’s analytics capabilities provide access to important data, such as click rates, geolocation, device, and browser types, allowing users to create more targeted campaigns.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a powerful tool for building and maintaining long-lasting customer relationships. Brands that thrive at putting the customer first remember that content builds relationships, relationships build on trust, trust drives revenue. So, leveraging the right tools for creating content that retains customers is a strategy that can make the difference between success and failure.
