The best email marketing tool can be a matter of personal preference, but there are a few features that you probably want to look for. Below, we will discuss the top five email marketing platforms based on these criteria.
Features
First off, you want to make sure that the email marketing tool you are looking at offers a decent array of features. It’s not always the case that the more features a product has, the better it is. Some simple email marketing tools offer a basic set of functionality that you might not need. As a brand manager looking to set up email marketing, you certainly don’t want to waste your time with a product that doesn’t have enough features to help you do your job effectively.
However, the more features a product has, the more complicated it can get. If you’re not familiar with the technical workings of a product, you might struggle to figure out how to use all of its features. Aside from being a pain to use, some products with a lot of features can also end up being a pain to develop for. If you’re going to be using a product professionally, you don’t want to waste your time with a complex tool that doesn’t offer enough features.
Ease of Use
Even though you want to pick a tool that is the best, most features-packed option available, you still want to make sure that the UI (user interface) is simple and easy to use. In simple terms, user-friendliness is how easy it is for someone who is not a professional user to use a product. If you’re selecting this option for your personal use, you might be more concerned with how fast and easy it is to set up an email campaign, than you are with how well the product functions overall.
Intelligence
Depending on your specific needs, you want to make sure that the email marketing tool you are considering uses intelligent automation to send out new email campaigns to your subscribers. You don’t want to use tools that rely on hard-coded emails or spammy tactics to send out messages. Building an email campaign manually is a tedious and time-consuming process that can often result in errors. Having an email marketing tool that is able to intelligently adapt to your needs is, therefore, a preferred option. The more you use it, the more it will adapt, learning from your previous emails and taking into consideration your likely future actions so that you can always find the best offer for your needs at all times.
Reporting & Analytics
You want to make sure that the tool you are considering provides you with some form of analytics data so that you can monitor how well your campaigns are performing. This is important because without numbers, you’ll never know if you’re actually getting the results you’re looking for. The best tool for email marketing analytics should be able to give you a clear indication of open rates, click-through rates, and conversions for each campaign that you run, along with a comparison of these numbers against benchmarks (baselines).
Reporting is even more important when it comes to paid campaigns, as you’ll need to be able to see the results of your efforts in terms of sales generated, cost per acquisition, and more importantly, in terms of the amount of people that are opening and acting on your messages. Without solid reporting, you’ll never be able to prove the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize future spend on this channel.
Additional Considerations
Apart from the above, you want to make sure that the email marketing tool you are considering offers additional considerations. These are tools that have a few extra perks that make them stand out from the crowd. For example, do you want to be able to create a better experience for your subscribers by offering a live chat function or are you more concerned with delivering the best possible content to your audience?
Some tools are better at catering to certain types of users. Do you already use social media for your personal brand and would you like to take this opportunity to drive sales via social media? An ideal tool would allow you to integrate social media platforms into email marketing, so you can effectively create a hybrid strategy that utilizes both channels.
What does all of this mean? Essentially, the best email marketing tool is the one that suits your needs best. Some tools are simply faster, easier to use, and offer additional features that others do not. When it comes to selecting the best email marketing tool, therefore, you want to look for features that you need and for which you can find a use case. When developing your strategy, you want to make sure that you’re using a tool that is reputable and has a good reputation for delivering quality messages. A tool with a good feature set and UI will usually give you a good impression of how functional and user-friendly it is. When choosing a tool for your personal use, you want to make sure that it is simple to use and that the support is responsive and capable of solving any issues you might have.
To help you make the right choice, we have compiled a list of the best email marketing tools based on different criteria. Hopefully, this will help you to find the perfect tool to support your business and marketing goals.