Running your own business is complicated when it comes to creating the right advertising campaign that gives you the best return on investment. Among the glut of marketing options, you should consider email marketing. It allows you to reach out to current and prospective customers and keep them updated on the latest deals and news about your company. Bulk email services have the benefit of being able to test customer retention and loyalty with intensive reporting.
Email marketing services enable you to create specific marketing for each segment of your audience. These services let you spread news about your company and bring in new customers in an efficient and reportable way. The best email marketing services are iContact, Benchmark Email and Pinpointe. If you'd like some tips on running better campaigns, check out our articles on bulk email marketing.
Email Marketing Services: What to Look For
Creating an email campaign can be as simple as adding names to a database, customizing an easy-to-use template, and looking at how effective your emails are via simple pie charts and bar graphs. Look for services that offer intuitive tools to help you quickly upload your list of contacts. You'll also want the flexibility to adjust the designs on your email marketing messages so that they reflect your company's image.
In addition to finding up-to-date designs, focus on products that are easy to learn and use so you can spend your time with your customers instead of with tech support. Below are the criteria we used to rank the best email marketing software.
Contact Management
It's important that you choose a service that is easy to use. The appearance and simplicity of the dashboard are going to determine how often you access the program to create campaigns. The ability to import existing mailing lists from other services, whether they are social media or email providers, is a big plus. The best email advertising services allow you to create custom demographic segments so you can reach the right customers with the most applicable message.
Email Creation
Before choosing a service, you'll want to make sure you can upload images, type your text, manipulate how your text displays, and add links and a social media share bar, among several other features. An effective email marketing company offers the professional features you need to create customer surveys, newsletters and other event emails.
Many email marketing solutions offer the flexibility to work either in a design format or directly with HTML. With most products, you can create an email message from scratch or choose from a large list of creative templates.
Sending & Reporting Features
Email marketing services provide reports, graphs and statistics that show you how your email campaign is doing. You can see how many customers open your emails and even which links they click on. You can see how many people unsubscribe and how many forward your emails to others. These reports also let you know how many emails bounce, meaning they didn't reach their intended destination, and you can tell how many are still unopened.
Some email services work with Google Analytics to give you even more data you can use to increase the success of your campaign. Most email marketing services help you maintain your list of contacts by automatically deleting email addresses that bounce.
Help & Support
A top-notch email marketing service provides help options to get you started, including a user manual, a wizard to walk you through the creation and monitoring of your email campaign, FAQs, a blog, tutorials and articles that explain how to create effective campaigns. Support should include the ability to contact the company by email, phone or live chat.
The reasons to invest in an email marketing service are easy to see. You can save money and have online reporting keep track of new and returning customers. Once you use it, you'll never be able to go back to outdated options like direct mail advertisements.