Some believe that email marketing is long gone due to the later advancements in technology that have prevailed in the business world.
However, email marketing, being a rooted method of online marketing, has already proven its cost-efficiency. Given that people are using email extensively, email marketing is still one of the easiest and cheapest ways to promote a business.
With a well-thought email marketing campaign, you can raise brand awareness and improve sales for your business. Email marketing gives you full control and makes it possible to directly get in contact with your customers.
Regardless of how easy email marketing is, it is widely accepted that working with an agency for email marketing gives the most promising results. Nimble agencies are what makes email marketing an effective channel for companies from various sectors.
Digital agencies mostly utilize some helpful tools to maintain a well-functioning email marketing strategy. Since there are many of those tools in the market, choosing email marketing platform is a requiring task. Below we will give some ideas to help you find which tools are the most suitable for different agencies.
What Do Email Marketing Platforms Achieve?
We can begin by talking about the content of email marketing platforms. Email marketing mostly operates through an automation process.
Email marketing automation enables you to send bulk emails that are personalized and targeted without a lot of work. What email marketing platforms do is helping you with this automation process.
An email marketing platform should handle various parts of your email marketing strategy, such as engaging with the target audience, creating email newsletters, sharing brand messages, selling products and services, helping your customers at different stages of the sales funnel.
Managing the contact list and tracking the performance of the email marketing campaigns are among the other tasks that email marketing platforms undergo.
A successful email marketing platform ensures that your email campaigns are always far away from the spam folders of your customers’ emails. In addition to satisfying your existing customers, it also attracts potential ones by delivering targeted content to them.
For an agency to provide you with the best email marketing solutions mentioned above, email marketing tools that align with your company’s business goals are required. We will consider some essential factors to discover the best tools for agencies.
Segmentation
You have customers whose tendencies vary a lot. So, there is no point in treating them as if they are all the same. Email segmentation means arranging your contacts into groups so that you can deliver targeted email marketing content. Segmentation makes it possible to send personalized emails to your customers.
You can segment your email lists based on different criteria. For example, you can address your customers based on geographic factors including city, language, and climate.
Age, gender, occupation, and marital status are among the myriad of segmentation ideas given by demographic data.
Behavioral patterns of your customers can also be useful, like grouping the customers whose previous purchases are similar. Solid tools are needed to successfully segment your email lists.
Agencies should also consider the fact that industries should focus on different segmentation techniques. For ecommerce companies, it is important to collect every piece of information for their webshops.
Email marketing platforms for ecommerce can particularly help them build a layered segmentation strategy, for example, based on the weather conditions in a country where some of the customers live.
Agencies should choose email marketing tools that place importance on dynamic segmentation. Because static segmentation is like grouping a part of customers and freezing the information.
That is not what businesses need. In contrast, dynamic segmentation uses real-time data to keep the information about the customers updated so that the customers can move in and out of the target segment groups.
Email marketing segmentation helps businesses build an ever-improving email presence. When your agency utilizes the correct email marketing tools, you will target the right consumers and your personalized emails will make them feel special.
Integration
Email marketing is only a part of your marketing strategy, of course. It is best to use it by integrating with other beneficial tools to come up with a complete and effective strategy for your business. Integrating your email marketing campaigns with other powerful tools can help you achieve better results.
It is time-consuming to put various pieces of information in one place. Email integrations contribute to the way you collect contracts and build your mailing lists. It pays well to use email marketing platforms that can easily collect information and sync them with your email lists.
Integrating social media marketing and email marketing is one of the most powerful ideas.
For example, you can integrate your Instagram with email marketing to create customized ads that offer visitors an easy one-click sign up option. If people sign up through your integrated ad, they will directly be added to your mailing list and your CRM. Selecting an email marketing tool that integrates with your CRM is a great idea.
Ecommerce companies also heavily rely on email marketing. Say, you want to find an email marketing platform for Shopify, you should look for the ones which offer direct integrations and allow you to access your store data directly from the platform itself.
Best Shopify agencies look for platforms that add value to their email campaigns by offering effective integration.
Additional Features
We can say that automation, segmentation, and integration are among the essentials of email marketing. There are also some additional features provided by email marketing tools to help your business grow.
Some important ones include providing email testing tools and giving assistance in creating email landing pages and designing subscription forms.
Analytics is another important aspect of email marketing. The way you measure your campaign’s success is significant to see what can be improved.
Reporting the very basic analytics is not sufficient in today’s marketplace. You should look for the platforms that offer solid analytical tools and data exporting options even though you do not need to tackle too complex data.
Good quality software is needed to come up with the best possible results, so you should check the type of software that the email marketing platforms use.
Remember, the best email marketing tools provide agencies with the most functional software services.
With your partner agency in email marketing, you should decide on an email marketing platform that allows you to manage valuable content, update customer data, and provide you with an overview of important metrics like critical KPIs including open rates, and click-through rates.
Cost of Email Marketing Platforms
There might be excellent agencies and email marketing tools around you, but your budget is usually limited depending on the size of your business. That is why it is quite crucial to find platforms that will match your specific purposes, and worth all the money you pay them. You should be careful to choose the platform and package that works best for your business.
Every email marketing program is unique and contains many factors that impact the pricing models used by the email marketing platforms.
These platforms offer various types of services such as creative services, technical services, and account management. As the number of the type of services you require increases, the associated costs will go up as well.
Another significant driver of cost is the number of emails generated. The pricing can be on a weekly or monthly basis. The cost of a single email is generally impacted by the email complexity, such as dynamic elements, number of content areas, number of links, templates, segmentation, testing, and so on.
Even though automation drives the email marketing process, there is still a need to monitor, manage, and optimize the campaigns.
It is sometimes costly to meet this ongoing attention requirement. However, in the long run, automated email programs will require less effort than regularly produced newsletters, announcements, or promotions, even though they take more time to set up.
Furthermore, obtaining data can dramatically alter the cost of email marketing tools. The number of data sources and the methods used for accessing data is among the primary elements of pricing.
If there is a single data source that is integrated with the email platform, the setting might come at a relatively low cost. But in larger businesses, key customer data is spread throughout the organization, which needs more time to handle integrations and report the data.
Awesome post.