Why Use Email Marketing?

In the era of social media, you may be inclined to ignore email marketing, considering it fruitless.

Here’s something that might change that.

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Alexander reports that every dollar spent on email marketing provides an average return on investment of $36. With a 3600% ROI, it is the highest ROI across all marketing strategies.

Email marketing’s importance has increased further due to the pandemic and continues to grow as delta variant goes rampant in 2021.

Is email marketing a priority for your business in 2021? Are you looking for the best email marketing software?

Choosing the right email marketing service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign.

In this article, we will review and compare the 7 best email marketing services for small businesses.

Why Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service is Important?

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategy for small businesses. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States.

This is because email marketing is easy to manage, gives you full control, and allows you to establish a direct contact with your customers.

Not convinced on email marketing? See these 6 reasons why building an email list is so important today.

It’s important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose because they are responsible for making sure that your emails actually get delivered.

If you aren’t careful, then you will end up paying a lot more money for fewer marketing features and terrible email deliverability rates (which causes you to lose even more money).

What to Look for in a Good Email Marketing Tool?

A good email marketing service should enable you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor).

You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation.

Aside from that, your email marketing service must make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Most importantly, a good email service provider ensures that your email campaigns do not end up in the spam folder.

Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the most popular email marketing service providers and how they stack up against each other.

1. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.

You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and more.

Each account gives you access to unlimited emails, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.

Their Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.

Constant Contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources.

Aside from online training, they also offer in-person live seminars across the United States. This allow small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro.

For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.

Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.

WPBeginner users can use our Constant Contact coupon code to get an additional 20% off.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.

It is an extremely easy to use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.

SendinBlue includes beginner-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users. It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.

SendinBlue offer a completely free email marketing plan unlimited contacts. Their free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day, but all your emails will have their branding.

Their paid plans start from $25 per month for Lite. You can also include SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary based on your sending requirements.

They have improved their premium plan recently to include more advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means users now get more value for the same price.

SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice functionality to have if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.

3. Drip

Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.

Their email software offer seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.

What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual automation workflow builder. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.

Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides and excellent documentation.

We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.

Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.

Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.

Drip offers a free trial, and their plans starts from $49 / month which includes all their features.

Recently, they’ve added SMS notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channel. This makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.

Now that you know how to start email marketing, it’s time to learn how to make the most of your email marketing efforts.

The average effective marketing email is just 125 words. To capture your audience’s attention in such a short amount of space, you’ll need to ensure you’re using engaging, punchy copy and sending valuable emails to your customer.

You can use your buyer personas to optimize your emails.

Personalized email subject lines or body copy can be the difference between opening an email to take an action and closing an email to delete it. https://www.bluehost.com/track/davidwill/

By using your email marketing lists, you can connect with your audience by sending emails that resonate with their interests and desires.

7. Evaluate Your Data

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The only way to know if your email marketing campaign is successful is to keep track of the data.

Essential metrics you should monitor are:

• Open rate: The number of people opening your email

• Clickthrough rate (CTR): The number of people clicking a link in your email

• Unsubscribes: The number of people unsubscribing from your email

Using these three metrics, you can know if an email strategy is working as desired or if it needs changing.

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to see what you can improve in your emails. Use an A/B test to see which changes net you a higher open rate and low unsubscribe rate.

Final Thoughts: How To Start Email Marketing in 7 Effective Steps

Thanks to its high return on investment, getting started with email marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business.

Launching an email marketing campaign begins with a thorough understanding of your audience and your goals. With that out of the way, you can leverage tools like email marketing services and lead magnets to grow your email list.

A professional domain and address build on that by improving your open rate and click-through rate. https://www.bluehost.com/track/davidwill/

to use a credible email address while interacting with your customers.