There’s no question about it: email marketing works. In fact, email has been touted as the most effective marketing channel for revenue generation and customer retention.
If you’re looking to drive sales, you could add value through staying in touch by sending coupons or discount codes to your customers for their use in-store or at your online shop. You could also send out emails with personalized product recommendations, which may entice the recipient to act on your offer.
Businesses who use email to share their company’s milestones or stories not only succeed in keeping their customers informed, but also in establishing emotional connections with them.
Indeed, marketing teams are utilizing email to the hilt, so you’ll need to make wise choices to stand out from competition. While there’s no shortage of email marketing tools that can help you accomplish a variety of tasks, you’ll want to use those that can truly help you work smarter.
User-friendliness, versatility, functionality, efficiency – these are time-saving features that can help increase your number of email subscribers as well as average engagement rates. That said, the best email marketing software services are those that make it easy for you to automate your campaigns, personalize your messages, and understand email marketing data.
Check out this list of top email marketing tools for businesses:
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Hemingway Editor (Link)
You may be way too familiar with how your product or service works, but your customers might not completely understand it when you try to communicate that information to them.
This free browser-based and downloadable app solves that problem, as it lets you check the readability of your copy. Your goal should be to get a readability score of Grade 9 or lower.
Once you launch the app, you’ll simply need to write or paste the text that you intend to include in your marketing message. When you click the “Edit” button, the app will show the phrases or sentences that you could simplify. It will also show you alternatives to complex words in your copy. You might want to get rid of adverbs and passive sentences from your copy as well, as the app flags those offenses.
Since the success of your email marketing campaign is always going to be based on how well you’re able to get your message across, this tool can work wonders for your clickthrough rates.
Oh. Just so you know, the Hemingway Editor has given this post a Grade 8 readability score.
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MailChimp (Link)
Hands down, MailChimp is one of the most popular and widely used email marketing service providers there is. Its user interface is plain and simple, but it’s power packed with features and great customer support capabilities.
MailChimp’s formula for success is quite straightforward. The software lets you do basic stuff in email marketing through its email and landing page creator, as well as an autoresponder. If you’re thinking of a good subject line, there’s even a Subject Line Researcher tool you can make use of.
At the same time, MailChimp has automation tools that let you schedule your email’s delivery times based on your customers’ location. The free version of the app allows for simple tracking and analytics of key metrics such as open rates and link clicks, as long as you’re sending less than 12,000 emails a month to less than 2,000 mailing list subscribers.
Last but not least, MailChimp plays nice with popular e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and WordPress, so integration issues can be easily avoided.
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Litmus (Link)
Litmus is a code editing tool especially designed to help you build, edit, and preview your emails on Gmail or other email clients.
Since message previewing is possible on Litmus, you can see if there are issues with your email message. You’ll then be able to make the needed changes and test each version of your emails until you’re sure that they load properly on any mobile device or web-based email applications.
This email software also comes with spam detecting features, which let you check if your emails are compatible with certain guidelines for different email service providers.
Litmus also boasts very detailed email analytics. You’ll not only know how many people opened your emails, but you’ll also see how many times they were forwarded to another person or how many times customers printed your promotional coupons. With these insights, you can refine your email campaigns and boost your engagement rates further.
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Constant Contact (Link)
Constant Contact is fast becoming the email marketing solution preferred by small businesses. As these companies try to familiarize themselves with how email marketing works, Constant Contact offers them a user-friendly experience to get them started.
There are multiple tools for list segmentation, template emails, email tracking and reporting, and social media sharing to mention a few. Customer support is easily available from chat or email to community forums, live seminars, and other online resources.
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AWeber (Link)
Whether you’re looking for a basic or more advanced email marketing service, AWeber’s various service levels have your needs covered.
With AWeber, you’ll learn how to set up your signup forms on your website and your email newsletters step by step. Its reporting tools will also show you some of the most important data in email marketing such as open or click-through rates (CTRs). You could even integrate AWeber with most online products and services such as your customer relationship management (CRM) software or favorite e-commerce platform.
As a bonus, you’ll also get RSS-to-email functionality that lets you automatically publish or update your blog posts in email form, which may be how some customers prefer to receive your content.
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GetResponse (Link)
This tool offers helpful features for beginner and advanced email marketers alike.
If you’re just starting on email marketing, you’ll definitely appreciate that there’s a huge library of attractive email templates to help you create your first ever newsletter in a breeze. Its drag and drop builder lets you organize your email campaigns and easily choose to which contacts to send them to.
Testing your email campaigns can be a complicated process, but with GetResponse, this task is not only possible, but also very simple. It has an impressive suite of A/B testing tools that can help you optimize your email’s body content, subject line, and the like.
In the automation department, GetResponse allows you to add, remove, or move contacts between lists based on the actions that your leads or customers make. Thus, a lead who makes a purchase is automatically moved from the leads list to the customers list. This is a convenient way of personalizing the type of messages that those in your contacts list should be receiving in the future.
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ActiveCampaign (Link)
It can be quite a challenge to meld both email marketing and marketing automation in one platform, but ActiveCampaign delivers very well in these departments. This is because ActiveCampaign has a CRM system built into its platform, which lets you manage and nurture your leads automatically.
Everytime someone in your email list performs an action on your website, ActiveCampaign can track that and follow it up with a sequence of emails. You then have a new opportunity to engage your email contacts further until they eventually convert into paying customers.
It’s even more amazing that ActiveCampaign’s user interface makes it easy for you to launch behavior-based marketing and sales campaigns without too much frill to bog you down.
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InfusionSoft (Link)
InfusionSoft takes a spot on this list, as it comes complete with automation functionalities and a full CRM system. With these kinds of tools, you can systematize your marketing and sales functions, making them far more intuitive and efficient to use.
You might particularly like how InfusionSoft uses a flowchart-style campaign builder that lets you add if/then rules to help you segment your contacts, automate your emails, and send targeted follow-up messages.
InfusionSoft’s email marketing service also tops the competition in terms of high deliverability rates, so you know your emails don’t end up in the Spam folder and that there’s a good chance that your subscribers will get to read them.
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EmailOctopus (Link)
EmailOctopus is perfect for people who want to grow and engage their audience with simple, powerful tools that are quick to master.
The dashboard is clean and uncluttered, which means you can focus on setting up your campaigns and delivering great content to your subscribers. When you want to implement more advanced marketing tactics, there’s segmentation and automation features to enable that.
And not only does EmailOctopus help save you time, it also saves you money – it’s one of the most affordable email marketing tools on the market with a generous free plan up to 2,500 subscribers.
Summing Up
Summing up, email remains a vital marketing strategy for businesses of all forms or sizes. With the right email marketing tools, you can accomplish all the nitty-gritty and so much more in less time but with bigger and better results for your company.
Just remember that personalization is still key. Don’t let the introduction of automated processes stifle your creativity. The best companies don’t just use email tools to save time, they identify relevant processes where value can be added for the user. Keep everything customer-focused!
