- Contest Factory
- December 21, 2021
eMail Platform Selection: What’s the Right Size?
Every brand should have email marketing for both pre-sales, post-sales as well as transactional emails confirming the purchase and shipping. Determining which email platform is right for your brand is quite the daunting task as you see the matrix above has hundreds of options for email service providers; and sometimes it’s more than just email you’re diving into as some of these platforms are full customer relationship management platforms. We’ll help you look into the top providers by need.
Brands that are offering services will want a different type of email platform than eCommerce providers. When marketing a service you are typically building your relationship through value add content. When you are selling online, you want to position your products in your email and this uses a different type of platform. Also, be wary of the platforms that say they do it all. Niche always outperforms the generalist.
And don’t think because everyone uses it that it must be the best. Mailchimp was early to market and made available for free to clients with less than 2,000 connections. First thing is that the cost should be a low priority when deciding who to use for email marketing – you will earn your costs back ten-fold when adding email marketing to each step of your funnel. You want a dynamic email platform that integrates well with your existing website or CRM. Or maybe in fact you need a CRM; and you do if you are offering services.
Determining whether your transactional emails come from your email service provider is a financial choice (typically upside) that you should run the numbers on; oftentimes your eComm provider has limitations in what your transactional emails can do. This will also give your branding a boost as you can smarten up how your emails display and provide more value with content that takes your customers back to your website for further branding.
eMail Platforms for Service Providers
Service providers want an eMail platform that enables customer segmentation to market to different segments with different content and offers. You will want to associate click level data with your prospects rather than aggregate data. Your emails should have the capability of being extremely dynamic with content that could reflect personal data, such as looking forward to seeing you at (insert the event you know the client registered for) and a personal note or incentive to get in touch at the event.
Sales Force eMail Studio
Sales Force eMail Studio is a module in Sales Force cloud with mobile responsive interface that supports in email video delivery. Your brand can create timely and highly relevant messages to engage and re-engage customers. Drag-and-drop tools make it easy to create emails using simple content blocks. Sales Force eMail Studio enables you to use advanced segmentation for unique content blocks and multi-variate testing.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a top performing eMail platform provider that enables easy drag and drop eMail communications builder. You may segment your lists by finding like qualities in behavior and create targeted sends. However, you must manage your own cadences as there is no smart sending that prevents over-mailing. However, there are some fun bells and whistles that come with this email platform; you can build landing pages to collect eMail or provide a highly customized experience.
You can also share your emails to your social channels – though this would not be a best practice as now you are speaking to your whole audience when hopefully your email is segmented to speak to one of many audiences in your segmentation.
Sendinblue
This is your low-cost leader with the maximum bells and whistles. Sendinblue has very low subscription fees along with drag and drop email creation. You may use an existing template, build your own, or drop in html.
Sendinblue’s real power comes from the flexible and versatile marketing automation platform. The Sendinblue Tracker script lets you track web behavior from your contacts and use this information, as well as email engagement and data from your contacts, to create complex automation workflows that can save you time and help you scale and grow your business with no work at all.
eMail Platforms for eCommerce Providers
When you are selling online and looking for the ultimate in email opportunity, you really want to check under the hood. You want an eMail platform that hooks right into your eCommerce. At a minimum you want to load products directly from your catalog in your segmented blasts. You also want to be sure to have the following automations available:
Abandoned Cart eMail
Browse Abandon eMail
Welcome eMail
1st Purchase eMail
Back in Stock
Listrak
This advanced eCommerce email platform provides everything you need to intelligently market to your prospects and customers alike. From easy drag and drop creation which is the least of folks worries these days. This email platform also includes insights, accelerated growth email collection tools for your website, behavior triggers, and customer unification.
Klaviyo
The whole shebang. Klaviyo allows all the automations referenced above as well as the opportunity to create your own custom flows. Klaviyo also has advanced insights into your customer data. You can go to your customer activity and see who has been on your website in the last several hours, frequency of visits, source of acquisition, and email opens and clicks at the user level. The data is extremely rich here and with an analyst may help you create rich customer segmentation. Klaviyo has many pre-built templates with drag and drop functionality as well as the ability to connect your eCommerce store directly to Klaviyo to populate SKUs. Klaviyo also has smart sending to help you keep your list healthy.
While there are many options with different nuisances, the one sure piece of advice is to start emailing; once you start the basic, you can only go up from there. Start a drip campaign to your prospects and then you may start customer segmenting, automations, and advanced analytics to really sell to your prospects, customers, and uber fans in the best possible way.
