EMAIL MARKETING TOOLS

How to Choose the Right Email Tool for Your Business 

Here are some tips and best practices to help you choose the best email marketing tool for your business.

Benefits of Using Email Marketing Tools

With a reputable email marketing program you can:

• Communicate to new and existing customers
• Generate leads or direct sales
• Create auto responder communications
• Improve deliverability of newsletters, sales and customer service emails

Essential Email Features for Small Businesses

When choosing a good email marketing service, some of the most important features for small businesses include:

• Easy-to-use email formatting – the interface should be intuitive and easy to edit content, images, links and format
• Variety of template options – a good selection of pre-designed templates by industry and/or type of email (such as newsletters or retail coupons)
• Integration of social media sharing – ability to insert social media sharing icons (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+) into the email, as well as sharing the email on social media networks when launching a campaign
• Deliverability of email – service should offer high deliverability rates for email campaigns Subscriber forms and list management – tools to help build your email subscriber list from your website (or social media pages) as well as uploading customer lists or segmenting lists for campaigns.
• Reporting and analysis – ability to get real-time reports on email campaigns, view/download opens and clicks, see social media impact and more.

Costs for Email Marketing Services

Most email marketing services offer tiered pricing plans that vary based on the number of emails you plan to send – either based on the actual number of emails sent or number of subscribers/contacts in your database. Some providers even offer a pay-per-email (or pay-as-you-go) pricing structure that can be very cost-effective for smaller email databases.

Compare and evaluate cost structures based on your email database (customer and prospect email contacts) and email frequency plans (i.e. weekly or monthly) to determine the best pricing deal based on how you plan to do email campaigns.

Free Trial Offers

Almost every email marketing provider offers a free trial offer to test-drive their service. Because features and benefits of each service can seem so similar, it’s very important to try out several multiple email marketing services before choosing one. While price is important, you also want to make sure the program is easy-to-use and meets your expectations before signing up.

It is also easy to switch providers if needed – most services offer a monthly payment plan that you can end at any time. You can simply download your email subscriber information and upload to a new service. So if you are not happy with the functionality or cost-structure of your current email marketing tool, start a free trial of another service to evaluate if it is right for your business.

Signing up for more than one free trial at the same time is also a good way to do a side-by-side comparison of email marketing services to decide which one is right for your business.