In its simplest terms, email marketing is the process through which businesses send marketing information and identify prospective clients, via email. It’s used by companies to establish an authoritative voice, solicit sales, send direct advertisements for specific products or services and increase revenue through the smart application of communications technology.
How Does Email Marketing Software Work?
Email marketing platforms – also known as Email Service Providers (ESPs) – allow you to draft sales emails, either from a template or as a custom one-off email, and send them to groups of email addresses known as a ‘distribution list’.
Most providers offer an intuitive ‘drag and drop’ interface that allows you to easily create emails based on numerous style variables, font sizes, colours and images that are tailored to your branding requirements. This provide a unified look and feel, in conjunction with your standard product offering.
What Are the Common Features?
ESPs make use of a wide range of features that encompass formatting, data analysis and cross-platform integration.
Message automation
Emails are triggered by certain actions taken by prospective or existing customers and tailored to the buying process. A common application of message automation is to send a welcome email to a customer when they sign-up to a website or sales offer, containing basic product information or advice on upcoming offers and promotions.
HTML emails
Almost all ESPs offer the ability to compose emails in HTML format, allowing companies to craft highly detailed, branded emails that also incorporate cascading style sheets (CSS) and complex layouts.
Built in compliance tools
The ‘Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing’ (CAN-SPAM) Act governs the sending of commercial emails and grants the Federal Trade Commission rights of enforcement. ESPs make sure that their clients stay on the right side of the law and offer advice on prevailing legislation.
Transactional emails
A transactional email is an email that is sent to a recipient following a commercial transaction, or specific action, such as a purchase or a password reset request.
What Are The Drawbacks of Email Marketing Platforms?
Most users view unsolicited email as spam and often ignore it or mark it as junk. However, you can improve your open rates by using creative headers, clear pre-headers, and targeted distribution lists. Also, design for versatility—emails are read on desktops, mobile devices, and more, so layouts should offer a consistent look across platforms to ensure a cohesive experience for recipients.
How Can Email Marketing Be Used to Increase Sales?
Email marketing eliminates the need for physical mailouts and can reach thousands at the cost of an ESP subscription. It supports sales funnels, strengthens customer relationships, maintains client lists, and showcases brand aesthetics with customized content. This approach builds authority and brand loyalty while providing valuable insights into customer behavior. Each campaign offers data to refine sales tactics and better understand customer sentiments and buying habits.
Top Email Marketing Platforms
MailChimp
Most popular
MailChimp is the go-to ESP for thousands of businesses all over the world, from start-ups to SMEs and enterprise-level organizations. The platform offers an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface that is perfect for beginners while offering a broad range of customization features and additional coding functionality.
MailChimp adapts to a wide variety of email formats and even allows for the sending of different email templates within the same campaign.
MailerLite
Best for non-marketing staff
MailerLite sells itself on being the easiest to use ESP on the market. It benefits from a stripped-back, concise GUI while maintaining a healthy bank of pre-configured templates from which to kickstart your email campaigns. Though the platform suffers from a lack of CRM integration and minimal plug-in support, it’s remained a popular choice for businesses that don’t require complex marketing tools and just need to be able to send customized emails to their customer base.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Best for cross-channel marketing campaigns
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM provider who also offer an ESP service alongside their standard SaaS product. HubSpot’s major selling point is the ability to collate all marketing interactions into one concise dashboard – including email campaigns, social media activity, Google Ads and more.
ActiveCampaign
Best customer service
If it’s automation you’re looking for, ActiveCampaign stands head and shoulders above most of the competition when it comes to producing customized campaigns on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis. The platform benefits from helpful, friendly support staff and a range of integration tools across over 300 third party applications.
Moosend
Best basic option
Moosend’s email marketing plan has the distinction of containing most of the core features of most other ESP paid plans, without compromising on usability or front-end functionality. Whilst the platform offers limited third party integration, there is still widespread support for custom data fields and a useful set of automation tools.
Choosing the Best ESP
When it comes to email marketing, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Each company has their own set of requirements based on how they interact with their customer base, the nature of their product offering and how diverse their CRM/eCommerce operation is to begin with.
Email marketing software is what you make of it – from sending simple one-off plain text emails, to accommodating multi-channel sales funnel activities that make smart use of data and draw on the successes (and failures) of previous campaigns.