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Imagine if there were a single channel that companies could use to achieve a 3,800% return on investment. This is $38 per dollar.
Email is the magic marketing channel. Email. That insanely high average ROI is just one of many email marketing statistics that has held up for years.
Although it is commonly believed that email is a time-sink, statistics show otherwise.
If email marketing campaigns were too labor-intensive, the average ROI would be less than 1/1000.
Finding the right email marketing company is key. This will allow you to send more emails and do less work. You can also see how your campaign is performing. Find out what works well and adjust your messaging to make it stand out from the rest.
Here are my top five recommendations, followed by a buyer's guide that will help you choose the right service.
#1 Constant Contact Review – The Best For Ecommerce
Constant Contact provides top-quality email marketing services and solutions for ecommerce.
They have a 97% average deliverability rate. This is possible only because the mature platform combines powerful behind-the scenes functionality, such as blocklists, proactive monitors, and multiple forms authentication, with an intuitive UI that allows teams to create effective messages that don’t bounce.
Constant Contact can be set up quickly and will take away much of the work associated with email marketing.
You can automate product recommendations by sending shoppable emails that are based on what items customers have in their carts, the weather or the tendencies of similar-minded shoppers.
This task would take a lot of time without an email marketing service. The process can be automated with Constant Contact by almost anyone.
Some other reasons why millions of people keep in constant contact are:
- Unlimited email sends
- Templates for custom and branded designs
- Monitoring campaign performance
- Subject line A/B testing
- Drag-and-drop email editor
- Rich ecommerce capabilities
- Subscriber management, segmentation
- Survey, poll, and RSVP
Constant Contact also helps with lead generation via landing pages, pop-up forms that can be customized, and free web hosting for a responsive website. You can also create a blog where your email content can be used for SEO.
Constant Contact offers three pricing levels for email marketing services. The price you pay depends on how many contacts you have. These plans:
- Email – Starting at $20/month
- Email plus: Starting at $45/month
- Pro – Starting at $195/month
Email Plus and Constant Contact Email are two of today's most popular email marketing tools.
Constant Contact Pro makes use of AI-driven marketing automation in order to deliver personalized product recommendations, smart subject line suggestions, behavioral segmentation capabilities and more advanced workflows.
If you're thinking about marketing automation but don't want to commit to a heavyweight product such as Pardot and Marketo, I recommend a Pro subscription.
#2 — Sendinblue Reviews — The Most Ease-of Use
Sendinblue integrates chat, Facebook, SMS and email marketing platforms. It has a lot of features that are easy to use.
This means that there are many tools and very little training. Drag-and-drop editing makes it easy to create personalized email campaigns that are on-brand.
Every Sendinblue subscription, including Lite and Free, comes with a CRM, marketing automation, real time reporting, advanced segmentation, and much more.
What's that for an out-of-the box function? But don't worry. But wait!
Popups, landing page, and chatbots make it easy to build your contact list and turn website visitors into your next lead.
Sendinblue offers a lot of great tools for nurturing leads, building customer journeys and communicating effectively with everyone involved. These are the key features:
- Unlimited contact with any plan
- Mobile-friendly visual email editor
- Retargeting ads
- Monitoring campaign performance
- A/B Testing
- Sign up forms that can be customized
- Transactional emails
- Email API, SMTP Relay and other core API features
- Advanced email automation
Sendinblue offers a forever free version and paid plans at various pricing tiers.
- Lite starting at $25/month
- Premium – Starting at $65/month
- Enterprise: Contact sales
Your tier and how many emails you send each month determine the amount you will pay. The price does not change if you store as many contacts or as few as you like.
Sendinblue's Pay-as-you Go plan has the same great features and benefits as any tier, with the exception of the phone support. You won't find this in any other options like Zoho Campaigns.
Sendinblue is easy to use, even without any technical skills or knowledge.
#3 — Zoho Campaigns Reviews — The Best For Simple Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns, a cost-effective and lightweight email marketing tool, comes with all the essential features.
Everything has been reduced, but not diluted, in Zoho Campaigns. You can still achieve 80-90% with an email marketing service that costs three- to four times the amount.
It is comparable to agile project management software such as Trello in terms of ease-of-use. Non-technical users can navigate Zoho Campaigns and can even master their domain.
These features can be controlled intuitively:
- Drag-and-drop editor for email and template builders
- Email autoresponders
- Email automation
- Merge tags
- Management of subscribers
- A/B Testing
- Collaboration in teams
- Analytics in real-time
Remember that Zoho Campaigns integrates with many CRM, ecommerce and contact management products.
These data sources can be used to better target your emails and personalize them, but Zoho Campaigns will still be very easy to use.
Google Analytics can be used to enrich customer data and provide data visualizations that help you understand relationships over time.
Zoho Campaigns pricing is simple:
- Email-based plan starting at $3/month
- Subscriber-based plan: Starting at $4.50/month
- Start at $7/month
I love the Subscriber-based plan because it offers email automation. This is not available with either the Email-based or Pay as you go Plans. Automation will pay for itself many, many times over at $263 per month for 100k contacts under the Subscriber-based plan.
The Zoho Campaigns forever free version is also available. You can only subscribe to 2,000 people, but it includes many marketing and content management tools, plus the opportunity to test the interface to see if you like it.
#4 — Marketo Engage Review – The Best For Segmentation And Personalization
Marketo Engage from Adobe is a complete-service marketing automation system that supports your strategy in any channel.
You can centralize and analyze customer information in an intuitive environment that allows you to send email campaigns with fine-grained segmentation or dynamic personalization.
Marketo allows you to create complex workflows by using behavioral triggers.
Each feature is fully-bodied. For example, A/B/n allows you to test multiple versions of the same website or email. This is a major advantage over binary A/B testing which many products do not allow.
Adobe Sensei uses AI and machine-learning to personalize content. Sensei analyses the performance of your assets and learns which content is most effective for each person. It then updates emails accordingly.
Marketo's email marketing features also include the following:
- Drag-and-drop workflow creator
- Score your account and lead
- Performance analytics and deep engagement
- Dashboard for Attribution & ROI
- Customer lifecycle management
- Cloning done in one click
- Champion/Challenger testing
- A/B/n Testing
Marketo will provide a quote. Although it will have a higher cost per user than dedicated email marketing services, you can still get superior segmentation and personalization from this service.
#5 Pardot Review – The Best B2B Marketing Automation
Pardot, a marketing automation platform by Salesforce specifically designed for B2B marketing, is Pardot.
Are you ready to hear more or are you satisfied? It is as deep and good as you think.
Pardot boasts over 2,000 integrations, a wide feature set and an intuitive UI. Pardot is far ahead of the competition in dedicated email marketing.
Pardot will take time to set up the backend. However, once everything is in place, you have unrivalled visibility into your campaigns.
Pardot can help you if you feel your workflows are lacking in sophistication or your data visualization tools don't give you the insights you need into campaigns, Pardot could be the solution.
Some advanced features of email marketing include:
- B2B Marketing Analytics
- Engagement history dashboards
- Merge fields
- Visual lead nurturing designer
- Social profiling
- Reporting on ROI
- Multi-touch attribution models
- Developer sandbox
Pardot isn't cheap, but it is a good investment in the service of high-growth campaigns.
There are four pricing levels:
- Growth: Starting at $1,250/month
- Plus Starting at $2,500/month
- Advanced starting at $4,000/month
- Premium starting at $15,000/month
Marketo is just one of many marketing automation solutions that will be available at this price.
Although there are many email marketing platforms that can be purchased at a fraction of the price, they won't offer the same level of customization and oversight as Pardot.
What I Did to Look for the Best Email Marketing Service
Email marketing services have many features that will help you save time during every stage of your campaign.
Each step.
My top products make it easy to get back minutes on any task. They make it easy to use professional templates, drag-and drop email editors, and list management tools.
An email marketing service can automate many of the most tedious campaign processes.
You can turn minutes saved into hours, especially if your campaigns are large.
More efficient campaigns. Less effort. This is the goal.
Let's take a look at the key features of email marketing services to help you decide which product will deliver the best results.
User-friendly
It's important to have a tool that everyone can use, even if your marketing team isn't doubled as developers.
Pay attention to the pre-set workflows and templates offered by every email marketing service as you browse. Do you want to use them or create your own templates? Email marketing services can lose their ease-of-use reputation if you go beyond their pre-determined paths.
Visual design tools are a plus when your solution allows you to create emails and workflows. The editor is easy to use and can be used immediately by those who require it. They don't require any training and can use the editor right away.
The best email marketing companies also offer support, documentation and walkthroughs to help users understand their product and make sure that it is truly self-service.
Reviews that indicate slow customer service or difficult to find answers should be flagged.
Integration and Implementation
It is important to ask the following question: How easy will your email marketing service mesh with your existing stack?
Integration with your existing products will speed up deployment and reduce the likelihood of problems in the future. This applies especially to your existing customer relationship management software (CRM), and other customer data sources.
Sendinblue and other products come with their CRM, which is a nice option for companies who don't need multiple products to support their email campaigns.
Email Deliverability
Your emails must reach the inbox of your recipient. That's it.
I would be concerned about email campaigns that deliver less than 95%.
Two things are guaranteed by email marketing services that deliver high quality emails:
They authenticate email with DKIM and SPF as well as SenderID. In addition, they work with internet service providers to ensure that customers' IP addresses aren’t blocked.
Quality platforms will also provide pre-made email templates that are visually appealing and compatible with privacy and antispam laws.
Email marketing services can help you create compelling subject lines and content to encourage customers to open your messages . You can also use their tools to manage subscribers and keep your list clean.
Customer Journeys and Email Automation
The sophistication of your email marketing service's workflows is one of its most important features.
Automate the welcome sequence of emails to new subscribers with entry-level tools.
You will need a larger tool if you plan to add conditional or logical triggers to branch out the customer journey in more personalized ways.
Also, you will need to learn a lot more about your audience. Good list segmentation tools will help you target your automation better.
Segmentation is a great way to automate personalized email campaigns. To ensure customers receive only the most relevant messages, you can create workflow triggers that respond based on customer engagement, shopping habits and other tendencies.
Subscriber Management
Email marketing services that are high quality come with many tools for managing subscribers. They can help you:
- Import list: Easily integrate contact lists from CRMs or other databases.
- Maintain a clean list: Identify remote inactive subscribers, and traps that decrease deliverability
- Generate leads – Create new contacts using pop-ups and landing pages. These multi-channel tools allow you to start a conversation.
- Segment your List: Group subscribers automatically based on many criteria. These include everything from where they live to how they signed-up, all the way down to their time zone.
Campaign Performance Monitoring
Email marketing strategies should be flexible.
Each service we have reviewed has the ability to track traditional KPIs such as:
- Rate of bounce
- Click here to see the rate
- Conversion rate
- Deliverability
- Forward/share rate
- List growth rate
- Rates open
- Unsubscribe rate
Companies can adjust their campaigns by monitoring these metrics.
Many email marketing services provide A/B testing which allows you test different subject lines and emails to determine which performs best.
This is a great way to adjust campaigns in the right direction over time.
Advanced email marketing services can help you tie traditional metrics with revenue. They'll let you see ROI per email, as well as other important metrics, and allow you to see how content is performing using click heatmaps which will show you where customers spend the most time.
These features will likely cost more, but can be very useful and pay for themselves.
Pardot's marketing automation software allows you to visualize every touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle. Marketing attribution is a powerful tool that helps you grow your business and inform your future campaigns. It highlights the key elements of each customer interaction.
Summary
The sooner you locate the right email marketing service, then the better. It empowers employees and engages customers. This service will also help you grow your business.
Take a look at my top picks and then explore these products more:
- Constant Contact – The best for ecommerce
- Sendinblue – Best ease-of use
- Zoho Campaigns – Best for simple campaigns
- Marketo Engage – Best for segmentation & personalization
- Pardot – Best for B2B Marketing
This list is full of many different products, so make sure to read my reviews.
Zoho Campaigns can be a great place to start. These tools are simple to use, and many of them come with free lifetime options.
Sendinblue is a great platform for companies who need greater visibility to their campaigns, but don't want the hassle of navigating a new platform. Even at the premium tier, it's not prohibitively costly.
Constant Contact, a great option for small businesses, is also available. This is especially true for ecommerce. While it does not have the same functionality as marketing automation software, it is still very easy to use.
Budget for the marketing automation and business intelligence capabilities of Pardot and Marketo. After a certain point dedicated email marketing services won't be able to handle the automated trips you want.
Pardot or Marketo can give you sticker shock but you still want real marketing automation. Freshmarketer is one of the best marketing automation software options.
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By: Neil Patel
Title: Best Email Marketing Services
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/best-email-marketing-services/
Published Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2021 15:00:00 +0000