Any marketer looking to scale knows the value of using the right resources in their marketing deck.
According to Gartner, almost one-third of marketing budgets are now allocated to marketing technology.
This growing figure shows that marketing leaders are becoming increasingly aware of the value of building scalable workflows that drive sustainable success. As one of the top drivers of ROI, a solid email marketing platform needs to be a key element in your marketing stack.
The Salesforce 2018 State of Marketing Report highlighted email as one of the most important channels in generating engagement and returns across the entire customer journey, from acquisition to retention and upselling. And if you want to up your email marketing game and raise sales, investing in the right technologies should be a no-brainer for your company.
Yet with more products and resources on the market than ever before, finding the best option to suit your unique business needs can be a time-consuming and downright stressful task – but it doesn’t have to be!
1. Responsive Design
60 percent of emails are accessed on phones. This means that mobile-optimized emails are no longer good to have – they are non-negotiable.
People not only like enticing communications from all platforms – they expect it. Poorly-formatted emails are a sure-fire way to lose loyal clients and miss out on lucrative chances to attract new customers too.
2. Email Templates
When it comes to email marketing, one of the most important items to remember are the emails themselves.
Choosing a provider with ready-made, customizable email templates would help you to build emails quickly and easily, without the need for design expertise and without losing efficiency.
If you are searching for even more efficient interface solutions and personalization enhancement, then select a provider with a sample script.
A prototype language helps you to take your emails a step further for interactive personalisation. You can present unique content to your recipients based on communication attributes or transactional criteria, such as a personalised title, document, or photograph.
As personalisation is high on the email marketing agenda this year, using a modeling language to tailor your email to each individual user could really set you apart from the competition.
3. Contact Management
Growing and maintaining an active client list is one of the most critical aspects of the email marketing campaign.
With more and more marketers competing for attention in the customer ‘s inbox, the opportunity to deliver the right message to the right contacts will be a leading factor when it comes to selecting the email marketing services company.
Studies indicate that 66 percent of customers unsubscribe from emails because they aren’t appropriate. For the right service, you can prevent your clients from pressing ‘unsubscribe’ by skillfully segmenting your email list.
Through grouping your email contact list into smaller, more oriented lists, you can create more tailored and meaningful content based on the desires of and group. Emails are not one-size-fits-all.
Although one email may cater to certain people on your list, others might require a totally different address. For a lot of organizations, this is one of the most difficult moves, but with the right vendor, this can be a straightforward process by simply keeping the right characteristics in the contact list. Segmentation may be based on common preferences, backgrounds, or characteristics.
The ability to pinpoint certain contacts in your list with search filters is also a valuable functionality to look out for.
Hey, you want to give a message to even your biggest customers? And even those who didn’t open your previous email? Search filters help you to reach these different audiences with a message that’s personalized directly to them.
It is a perfect way to build personal bonds for your clients by listening directly to their needs and providing real meaning. Implementing successful segmentation and searches would help you to optimise interaction, create greater customer satisfaction, improve deliverability, and better track the performance of your different marketing campaigns.
4.Automation
Marketing automation is one of the fastest-growing technologies in terms of acceptance by digital marketers – and with good reason!
Think of the most repetitive jobs – the things that you have to constantly perform – day in, day out. Now consider that you could create a workflow to automatically activate these tasks so you can spend your time more strategically. Marketing automation helps you to build workflows to optimize and scale the most critical activities, including delivering perfectly-timed newsletters, advanced segmentation, re-engaging dormant subscribers, and so much more.
Through automation, you can take your contact list segmentation to the next stage by building dynamically generated segments based on items like website actions, past email interaction, and lead score.
A simple automation workflow will allow you to automatically add contacts to specific lists if and when they meet a certain set of criteria.
By automating workflows you can also ensure that you ‘re not just sending the right message, but that you ‘re delivering it at the right time too.
Marketing automation can increase open rates by 71 percent, so the ability to create custom workflows that perfectly-timed messages is essential to optimise the customer experience and maximise the success of your campaigns.
If you want to scale your efforts quickly and build sustainable success, then this feature should be top of your list when searching for the right email marketing services provider.
5. Customer Support
You want to find an email marketing service provider that acts as an extension of the marketing department – and that means smooth and efficient contact.
Of course, while finding the correct service means the need for care is lessened, we all need to call for assistance every once in a while.
Implementing successful segmentation and searches will help you to maximize interaction, create greater customer satisfaction, improve deliverability, and better track the various marketing strategies’ performance.
6.Pricing
Where email marketing companies are concerned, the solutions vary from free basic platforms to highly costly providers with loads of specialized functionality.
Your aim will be to find a cost-effective resource that can also offer the features and ROI you need to scale up. This is easier said than done, especially for small to medium-sized businesses where it can be difficult to predict the growth trajectory. That’s why you want to use a scalable pricing model provider, so you can start as small as you need and expand as large as you want without changing the services.
Of starters, when it comes to handling your connections, rapidly growing companies need a method that can scale quickly as the company expands.
Many email marketing service providers base their pricing on the number of contacts on your lists, which means you can need to update your contract as soon as possible.
Opting for a package that provides limitless contacts and bases the price on email volume rather than contact number may be a more cost-effective choice for rapidly expanding companies.
It ensures that when you are able to ramp up the shipping frequency you will keep increasing the contact list in the background and update.
Choosing the right supplier of email marketing has the potential to make or break your marketing campaign. You want a solution that not only suits your market needs now but can also encourage the deep consumer loyalty you need to raise sales and drive growth.
Want to find out more about the best email marketing service for your business? Check out our blog to compare the features and prices of the top four providers of email marketing services and help you find out which one is right for you.