A carefully optimized email marketing campaign will have a spectacular ROI. For every dollar marketers Investing email, they can expect to earn $44 back. But that doesn’t mean that email marketing is easy. Email marketers face three major challenges:
- Optimizing email campaigns requires months of split-testing and a large budget.
- Campaigns require a lot more setup than a typical AdWords campaign would.
- There are a lot of moving parts in an email marketing campaign, which makes maintaining them rather difficult.
There isn’t anything you can do about the first challenge. Developing a high converting email funnel is going to require an investment of your time and resources. Fortunately, there is a number of great tools that can help you tackle the other two challenges on this list.
Here are three of the most affordable email marketing software applications. Review them carefully so you know which ones to incorporate into your campaign.
Campaign Monitor
Since 2004, Campaign Monitor has been one of the leading email marketing automation platforms. It stands out from most other email automation platform is with its intuitive, user-friendly interface and robust array of features.
The benefits of Campaign Monitor are even more noticeable in the mobile era of email marketing. All designs are responsive, so you don’t need to spend hours optimizing a design for every possible device. Most other marketing automation platforms are still geared primarily towards desktop users, which is a problem since desktop users only account for about 35% of all email traffic these days.
However, the real edge with using Campaign Monitor is personalization. The company recently acquired customer data company Tagga. This means that Campaign Monitor customer will be able to create more robust profiles of their customers to send increasingly personalized content and offers to. For example, travel company Flight Centre uses Tagga to aggregate data from different streams into segmenting customer emails.
We decided to stream a ton of other channels into the platform – we also have phone and website leads going through Tagga, as well as our social channels. We’ve then used this information to learn about our email subscribers, and we can use Tagga to export data instantly into the Campaign Monitor platform.
CRM and Data Manager, of Flight Centre
MailChimp
MailChimp is a very popular email marketing platform. It currently serves 16 million customers around the world and increased its subscriber base by over 30% over the past year.
MailChimp doesn’t have the same depth of features available to Campaign Monitor or other top-tier marketing automation platforms, but its cost effectiveness is a very strong selling point. The low-priced packages make MailChimp an ideal solution for small businesses with limited budgets. MailChimp appears to be the only marketing automation solution that offers a free subscription plan, which allows you to engage with up to 2000 customers every month.
For such an affordable platform, MailChimp has surprisingly detailed analytics reports. The only downside is that you need to manually refresh your browser for new insights, but this is a small consolation.
MailChimp is also great for brands promoting membership sites. You can easily integrate MailChimp with your site’s subscriber dashboard.
SendGrid
SendGrid isn’t an end-to-end email marketing platform, but it still plays a valuable role for brands that use email to engage with their customers. Many companies use SendGrid deliver transactional emails. It is useful for sending automated emails when:
- Customers need to reset their passwords
- Brands need to send receipts to customers that purchased the product
- The branch want to welcome new customers or subscribers
- Customers need to be informed about new developments or changes to the terms of service
SendGrid isn’t a standalone tool for brands that want to coordinate a Sophisticated email marketing funnel. However, it still has plenty of valuable uses.
Choose the Right Applications to Boost Your Campaign
Building a successful email marketing funnel is difficult, but is worth the investment. Fortunately, it will be much easier with the right tools in your arsenal. These applications will make it much easier to develop a stable and high-converting email marketing campaign for your brand.
