Email marketing is an extremely valuable asset for any business. It can help you create efficient relationships with your contacts, drive conversations, and drive your business’s growth.
In reality, email marketing brings at least a 4,300% return on investment for businesses. It is true, and the ideal way to advance your success is by utilizing one of the best email marketing tools and services.
You may have observed that there are many email services on the market. It can feel overwhelming trying to navigate picking the perfect one by yourself. Also, it is quite tricky when you are only beginning to learn email marketing and not confident about what you need to launch your success.
We’re here to make this process a lot simpler for you. We will talk you through some of the best email marketing tools that can support you to be as successful as possible in your efforts and share our suggestions for the best of the best.
Let’s begin.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that utilizes an email service provider to send massive amounts of emails to an email list. Its goal is to motivate the recipient to click or make purchases straight from that email.
That action is also referred to as a conversion and is one of the most helpful metrics of how successful your email campaign is.
Looking over your email inbox and seeing the mountain of emails, you may be thinking: “Does email marketing actually work?”
Of course. When done properly and with the best email marketing practice in mind, it can convert prospects into customers at an excellent rate. Email marketing generates a high return on investment, with $42 for every one dollar spent.
Following the best practices mentioned in this guide will help you prevent the common mistakes and pitfalls of email marketing and build yourself as a valuable presence in your recipient’s inbox.
Why It’s Important to Choose the Best Email Marketing Service?
Remember that email marketing services are built to help companies grow their customer bases and promote their products and services. The best email marketing tools make it simple to make professional and well-thought emails, smooth workflows, and updated mailing and contact lists.
Further, email marketing services are dedicated platforms that strive to take the stress and legwork out of your email marketing efforts. They work by delivering a platform that facilitates not only sending and receiving emails but support you with more innovative features, such as:
- Offering valuable analytics
- Making dynamic content
- Giving ready-made and personalized templates
- Sending automated and bulk emails
- Managing and segmenting email lists
- … and so much more!
You see, email marketing tools help you send the ideal messages, to the ideal people, at the ideal time. It allows you to create real relationships with the folks behind your contact list.
That’s the most crucial part of email marketing: making relationships. When you are only starting, it can be captivating to stick to a free account you’re used to, such as Outlook or Gmail. Nonetheless, your marketing efforts will be limited by those.
Probably, the most crucial difference between an average email account and an email marketing service is deliverability. A standard email address could put you in your recipient’s spam folders, throwing your marketing efforts in the trash bin.
How can you build relationships with people if your communication efforts aren’t reaching them? Also, you can’t reach too many people simultaneously without an email marketing tool. With the proper email marketing strategy, you will be shocked by how fast your email list can develop and how faster you will need to upgrade.
What to Look for in a Good Email Marketing Tool?
Note that each email service will have a unique set of features, pricing, and pros and cons. The ideal one will also depend on your needs. Therefore, what factors should you consider when selecting the best free email marketing tools?
- Customer support
- Price
- Ease of use
- Deliverability
- Features
It’s a smart idea to evaluate your business level and determine your goals from the beginning to help you understand which factors meet your requirements.
Specific criteria such as customer support, deliverability, and user-friendliness will be essential to look for when choosing your email service platform. However, weighing things like price and features will help if you know what will suit your business now and as you scale in the future.
Which One Is Best For you?
Here, in no particular order, are eight of the best email marketing tools and services for ecommerce stores.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a highly-integrated marketing tool that could be an excellent option for your business. This platform goes beyond email marketing software and functions as an all-in-one customer relationship management platform.
Once you sign up, you’ll get access to different features from chat, forms, marketing automation, email marketing, landing pages, ad analytics, and emails, among other integrations.
The platform utilizes a drag-and-drop editor, so you make polished landing pages and emails. They also enable you to customize and direct your content to specific users, helping you engage them more efficiently.
One of HubSpot’s major features is the data analysis feature, where it’s simple to see your metrics. Since the platform is all-in-one, you can easily monitor your customer interactions with your website, landing pages, emails, and how they correspond.
Anyword
Anyword is a good AI copywriting tool with tons of features. According to different studies, optimizing email subject lines can alone accomplish major results in email marketing campaigns.
Be it promotional email series or a general email, Anyword can help you recommend better high-opening email subject lines.
If you’re a professional email marketer or utilize email marketing as a sales-driving network for your business, Anyword can help you in different ways, such as:
- Get more clicks to your solo ad business emails.
- Include personal touch to your business emails and receive direct sales while containing the brand identity.
- Get higher CTR in paid newsletters.
- Add emotion to your email subject lines.
- Convert generic newsletter subjects into appealing ones.
Omnisend
Omnisend is perfect for merchants who do not wish to spend a huge amount of their time creating automated email campaigns. This email marketing service enables you to make stunning emails with a visual drag-and-drop campaign builder that is 100% HTML customizable.
If you don’t have the skills and knowledge, you can efficiently utilize their builder that allows you to make something more sophisticated. Where this tool stands out is its omnichannel marketing automation.
Constant Contact
Merchants that are more concerned with sending newsletter-type and transactional campaigns instead of revenue-driving emails can benefit from Constant Contact. The platform was one of the oldest email marketing providers, dating back to 1995. In those years, it achieved one of the simplest drag-and-drop editors accessible.
Constant Contact seamlessly communicates with Shopify’s ecommerce platform, even though other users report dissatisfaction with the platform’s revenue tracking features, making it less suitable for ecommerce.
Even though this email marketing tool might not be as sophisticated as HubSpot, they are surely a solid marketing tool and one of the most reasonable.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit makes organizing your email list and setting up autoresponders simple and user-friendly. It is a strong email marketing platform that does an amazing job at automating processes in email list management, enabling you to concentrate your efforts elsewhere while it hums along superbly.
This email marketing tool is simple and built from the ground up to be simple to set up, use, and understand. Also, the statistics they provide are excellent, making it straightforward to see exactly what is going on in all your broadcasts, campaigns, and forms.
Snov.io
Snov.io is a dependable email marketing tool that allows you to create leads and use various emailing tools to simplify your outreach campaigns.
This inclusive toolset provides numerous email search features from email tracker, text personalization, and triggered drip emailing campaigns to seven-step email verification and integrations with Zapier and Pipedrive for smooth email export.
Also, with a modest budget, the platform provides merchants with different tools such as CRM, email verifier, email finder, email tracker for Gmail, email drip campaigns, and more.
GetResponse
GetReponse is widely utilized by businesses of all sizes, including B2B businesses offering services and ecommerce shops selling physical products. Their email template library is packed with templates that freelancers and small businesses can use to create polished, professional email campaigns right out of the box.
You should use the drag-and-drop feature to personalize the templates by including your text, images, and branding. You can also test and preview them before sending them to your recipients.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an excellent option for creating your list and simply starting with email marketing software and services. They provide a forever-free plan that allows 12,000 emails and at least 2,000 subscribers every month.
Source: mailchimp.com
They have some of the evident features: autoresponders, a drag-and-drop email builder, landing pages, segmentation, a form and website builder, and standard tracking for analytics.
Just remember that they do not provide customer support for their freemium plan, even though you can find a comprehensive FAQ library with tutorials and guides.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
Compared to other forms of digital marketing, the goodness of email is that your audiences choose to opt-in to receive your content. That indicates your audience willingly enters their email address into the sign-up list, whether through your landing pages, social media, website, or elsewhere.
Brands often provide a welcome incentive or voucher to motivate this, but loyal customers might subscribe without.
Best Email Marketing Practices
Remember that every email campaign provides a new opportunity to make changes and improve. Adding automation and incorporating multi-channel marketing into your strategy are ways to do that.
- A/B test your emails
Doing A/B testing lets you see the kind of messaging or content resonating best with your audience. Testing variables fall into either timing, design, or content variables.
- Send emails at optimal times
When is the perfect time to send emails? It depends. No two email lists are identical, and each will respond differently to email campaign times.
Are you planning on sending B2B emails? It would be better to send them during working hours. But when you send ecommerce emails, your audience may be planning to do more online shopping during weekend hours. Testing will give you the best send time for your campaign.
- Keep your users engaged
Keeping all your users engaged with your emails will keep delivery rates high and convert into higher converting emails and more value to the brand. You should make sure you’re sending desired, wanted, and valuable emails at the highest level.
- Add automation
Did you know that adding automation to your email campaign is an excellent way to help you save time and send more personalized and valuable content to your users? You can start with a simple triggered campaign such as a welcome email if you are only starting.
It’s easy to get carried away with various possibilities and workflows. But you risk losing your recipients if they find themselves on different automated workflows.
- Provide personalized email content
You don’t need to always deliver promotions to your email list. You can simply nurture an email campaign to keep in touch with your recipients without becoming demanding or pushy. Your subscribers will come to know and trust that you are not only sending sales emails if you continuously send valuable content.
Conclusion
New and efficient online and email marketing tools appear every day, expanding well beyond those on this list. However, your goal must be not just to find a solution that is more than simply a good email marketing service. But it would be best if you also had a solution that is the best email tool and service for your email campaign, working for your business and customers, helping you drive engagements, more loyalty, and more sales.
We hope this guide has given you a practical idea of where to begin. Today is the time to enjoy those free trials and test the waters so you can begin putting email marketing to work for your business, large or small.
