Email marketing software makes it easy to design, send, and track your email campaigns without hiring someone or doing it all yourself. But with many options out there, how do you know which one to choose? Here are four things to consider when choosing the best email marketing software for your business’s needs.
The Basics
Before even thinking about email marketing software, you should know what you want your campaign(s) to accomplish. For example, do you want your emails to be a glorified newsletter or would you like them to help drive sales or website traffic? Do you want a simple autoresponder series for follow-up with subscribers or are more advanced features like personalization and tracking important? Once you’ve answered these questions, it will be much easier to find email marketing software that matches your needs.
Ease of Use
When you’re signing up for an email marketing service, make sure it has an intuitive interface. You should be able to figure out how to use all of its functions without assistance from a knowledgeable professional or a tutorial video.
Report & Analytics
One of your top priorities as a marketer is keeping tabs on how your business is doing. You want to know where your traffic is coming from, what channels are leading to conversions, and how much you’re spending on advertising. If you don’t know what you’re doing with an email marketing provider, it can be hard or impossible to measure any results, which makes it very difficult (if not impossible) to optimize your efforts.
Account Types
The first thing you’ll want to consider is what type of account you need. Are you just a business-to-consumer (B2C) company? Business-to-business (B2B)? Or do you work with both B2C and B2B clients? Each business should choose an email marketing provider that specializes in its particular industry. This will help avoid confusion over various features and integration options down the line.
Customization Options
There are a number of different options for email marketing software, from free services like MailChimp to industry-specific tools like Campaigner. Depending on your needs and budget, you may want a variety of features from campaign tracking and personalization tools to A/B testing capabilities. Regardless of which tool you use, make sure it’s easy for recipients to unsubscribe. This is crucial for mitigating any future legal issues with your email list.
Customer Support
As with most products and services, you’ll want to make sure you have a good system in place for customer support before launching. By proactively reaching out and responding quickly to user questions on your website and social media platforms, you’ll be able to help keep your customers happy—and that’s key in any business. Once your users are receiving helpful responses within minutes of asking a question, they’re more likely stick around, even when there are hiccups along the way.
Pricing Plans & Subscription Lengths
You’ll find that many email marketing software services give you a few different pricing plans and subscription lengths to choose from. It’s important to consider how much time you want your business-to-consumer (B2C) email marketing campaign or business-to-business (B2B) email marketing campaign to run, as well as what type of data reporting and segmentation tools you need.
