An Insider’s Guide to the Best Email Marketing Software
By Alexandra Tachalova
As confirmed by many studies, the majority of internet users prefer to communicate with retailers via email. It grants them more control over the communication frequency and depth, and is less intrusive compared to other promotion channels.
On the other hand, brands favor email marketing as one of the easiest channels to assign attribution to. According to research from Ascend2, 44 per cent of respondents find email marketing easy to analyze for attribution and claim that it should be included in a successful marketing attribution strategy.
In particular, email marketing is appreciated by small companies that can’t take advantage of massive promotion budgets. It has one of the highest ROIs as compared to other promotion channels and creates results faster.
But to achieve substantial results in email marketing, your efforts need to be backed up by the right email marketing tool, one that is customizable and easily tailored to the needs of your business.
Hint: Another critical factor is the budget you can allocate for email marketing. Industry leaders recommend that around 20 per cent of your marketing budget should go toward email marketing, including the cost of licensing.
How do you choose the right email marketing platform?
Step 1. Analyze your current business needs
Any software selection should begin with an analysis of your current business requirements and the expectations your business has for your email marketing software.
Here are several critical questions you need to ask.
What’s the size of your current database? The software that you choose should be able to accommodate your subscribers database and scale according to your needs.
How often do you plan to send emails? The tool should be reliable and capable so you can run intensive email marketing campaigns.
What kind of information would you like it to capture and manage? For example, do you plan to differentiate email segments according to geolocation, demographics, or previous site behavior? To find out, have a chat with the development team to find out the coding behind capturing a lead and how long it takes for them to implement it.
For better segmentation options, your email marketing software needs to be able to store and process the following data:
- Customer status, which notes whether a user is your customer or not
- Their history of purchases
- Their recent purchases so you can send them only the most relevant offers
- Data from Google Analytics, such as the sources of your website traffic. With this information, you can adjust your email strategy accordingly.
- Business-specific data. For instance, businesses that have an affiliate program often want to be able to exclude those users coming from the affiliates’ pages from other email campaigns.
Do you want to be able to send marketing messages based on the user’s previous behaviour on your site? For instance, if a website visitor clicks on a certain page or abandons their shopping cart, the software that you choose should allow for email marketing automation — namely, email drip campaigns.
Do you want to use leadgen forms and create gated content? Gated content is specific or special content that users get access to only after they enter their contact details in a leadgen form. The email marketing platform of your choice should collect this contact information with a record of the page that the user came from.
Do you want to set up email marketing funnels based on how users are engaging with your emails and browsing your site? For instance, if a subscriber hasn’t opened any of your emails, you can prompt them with different messaging and try to re-engage them.
Do you want to connect it to your CRM system? When your email marketing software is connected with your CRM platform, your sales staff will be aware of all the company’s emails that a particular user has ever received and engaged with, which will make their sales efforts more precise.
Hint: Don’t put all the research on just one person. Ask your team about the features they think email marketing software should have. In particular, it makes sense to gather insights from marketing, sales, customer success, and operations.
Step 2. Prioritize the requirements
If email marketing is not your main task at your company, it can be hard to decide the features that are most important and which are not. In order to select the right software and not be overwhelmed by the choice, prioritize your system requirements according to the value they bring to a business.
The main prioritization parameters should be:
- How critical the requirement is to your business
- The ease of its implementation
- Costs associated with it
To simplify the decision, make it more visual: Create a table with all the requirements you’ve selected and indicate how critical each is for business, how fast your development team will be able to implement it, and how much it will cost. In the end, it might look like this:
Step 3. Request a demo
To find the right email marketing software for your company, you need to see it in action. Always ask for a demo to evaluate the software’s main functions. If the trial functionality doesn’t allow you to fully appreciate its potential for your business, you can ask for extended trial — a full version or a longer trial period.
Run several email scenarios in the system, including the most frequent and the most critical campaigns you need. Upload sample emails and try setting up several funnels.
Evaluate the software’s interface and its ease of use. If you’re the person who will be using the software, it should be clear to you how to perform the main functions.
Things may look good on paper, but issues like insufficient functionality or inconvenience of use can only be spotted during actual field testing
Step 4. Evaluate the support service, including responsiveness, quality of help, availability, etc.
Any piece of software, especially one as complex as an email marketing system, tends to have glitches and issues from time to time. Software providers usually guarantee the availability of their platforms with SLAs, but that’s not always the case. When things go down, you need to be able to receive quality assistance from the software provider’s support team.
It’s important to evaluate how responsive the support team is and how well they can assist you with your needs. There’s no better way to do it than to place a sample request and see how well it’s processed. Things like 24/7 chats, support request forms, and in-app and on-site announcements guarantee that the software provider takes your wellbeing seriously.
The questions and steps listed in this article can help your marketing team select the best email marketing software for your company. A powerful platform will help make your email campaigns more precise, easier to measure, and optimized for more conversions.
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