Turning Subscribers into Buyers: How Email Marketing Tools Stack Up
Have you recently invested money in a marketing campaign that fell flat? As any business owner is aware, in order for consumers to engage with and respond to your brand message, you must capture their attention with dynamic content. With unique personalization techniques, email marketing tools and templates allow clients to make bold statements that foster relationships with consumers, encouraging them to invest in your company time and time again. An engaged customer is a happy customer – which translates to dollars for your business.
By investing in marketing automation software, clients gain access to tools that allow them to not only connect with customers but also anticipate customer needs based on behaviors, past searches, and purchase history. Below you will find examples of three of the email marketing platform leaders on the market today and see how the tools they offer turn subscribers into buyers.
Campaign Monitor
As one of the leading email marketing platforms who focus on automated personalized content, Campaign Monitor has really pushed the boundaries of expectations within the realm of customer engagement. The platform gives marketers the ability to integrate other business tools like CRM, landing pages, and Ecommerce solutions to aggregate the data needed to deliver personalized 1:1 marketing messages. By collecting data on individual customers like age, gender, location, and transaction history, marketers are able to create customer journeys which reflect the interest of the viewer, thus increasing engagement rates.
For example, if you are marketing a cosmetic eyelash enhancer, there is most likely no need for your older male demographic to receive this promotion. Using already collected subscriber data and segmented lists, this promotion can be delivered to only your 18-35-year-old female customers. You could further personalize the offer email using transactional history to deliver different eyelash enhancer products based on what a customer has purchased in the past.
Part of Campaign Monitor’s success has been in their unparalleled customer service. Users have access to 24/7 support and there is a customer success team on hand to help o implement email marketing best practices.
[Tweet “3 #emailmarketing tools your #smallbiz should definitely be considering.”]SendGrid
SendGrid’s cloud-based solutions and are well suited for businesses that are positioned for growth or use a remote workforce. In addition to drag-and-drop features and diverse template choices, they specialize in transaction emails that promote customer engagement with automated messages for account creation, purchase receipts, and even social media updates such as follower notifications. This has been found successful in increasing open rates.
While this platform offers many great features, some elements require a bit more technical savvy than their competitors. SendGrid focuses on their robust API that gives developers the flexibility they need to customize the integrations with internal systems. For many marketing departments this is more involved than they would like in an email marketing platform and instead look for more turnkey solutions.
MailChimp
This platform is particularly useful for small businesses and freelancers. Their bare bones and easy to use interface allow users to upload email lists for basic segmentation as well as drag and drop email template creation. They boast third-party integrations to many major digital marketing platforms for users to pull in relevant information. The downside is that MailChimp lacks advanced personalization and automation capabilities when compared to other email marketing platforms on the market.
By providing a free initial subscription service, the software is a great opportunity for growing businesses that don’t have a lot of startup capital to invest. MailChimp even offers apps that make networking at conferences a breeze.
Email marketing is the most profitable channel for business; for every dollar spent on an email marketing campaign, the average return is $38. Data projections have predicted that by 2019, more than 90 percent of all customer engagement will be done through email services. With that in mind, the question isn’t if you should invest in email automation, but why you haven’t done so already?