Email marketing is a huge sales driver for e-commerce companies. Social media is also a great tool, but those sites measure their users in the millions while email providers measure theirs in the billions.
According to a study by The Radicati Group, there are approximately 3.8 billion email users worldwide. That’s more than the estimated 2.77 billion from all social media outlets combined, according to Statista in 2017.
Related: 11 things to consider before your next email campaign
Because so many considerations go into a good email marketing campaign, there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. Fortunately, there are tools available that make the heady world of email marketing far less complicated. Here’s a round-up of our 8 favorites—and let’s start with the one closest to home.
1. Lucidpress
When you’re getting started with e-commerce, one of the hardest parts of email marketing is finding a template that works well. Unless you’re particularly artistic, it’s hard to envision a good format that’s both practical and visually appealing. That’s where Lucidpress comes in with a line of free newsletter templates.
Not only does Lucidpress provide plenty of newsletter ideas for your inspiration, but it takes very little time to get started. Its drag-and-drop design platform is dead easy to use, and you have a variety of options for sharing your newsletter: downloading it, embedding it, or generating its HTML code. And because it’s free, new e-commerce companies can save the time it would take to come up with their own style—and the money they might have spent for the same service.
2. Constant Contact
Constant Contact effectively organizes and personalizes the emails you send out to customers. If you look at their website, you’ll see examples of email messages for welcomes, birthdays and membership anniversaries.
You can track the success of your emails in real time, seeing just how many people are clicking through your links and taking action because of your email.
3. The Hemingway App
Having the right format, fonts and style is crucial to a good email campaign, but in the scramble to get all that right, it’s easy to overlook the actual words that will be in the email. The Hemingway App is there to make sure your writing is concise and easy to understand.
Being clear and concise is not always easy. As a brand marketer, you know your products in and out, including niche vocabulary. And while some customers will appreciate the jargon, others won’t. Instead, they’ll be confused or disengaged when reading your emails. Hemingway helps you write email copy that anyone will easily understand.
4. MailChimp
MailChimp bills itself as the “world’s largest marketing automation platform.” Using it, you can mix and match different aspects to essentially create your own email templates.
It has more than just templates, though. There are also automation tools that the service uses to “welcome, re-engage and follow up” with customers. Having said that, it’s a fierce competitor to Constant Contact, so you’ll have to compare them both to decide if one is right for you.
5. AWeber
Alongside automated emails and responses, AWeber has a feature that triggers certain emails based on which links subscribers click on. Generally, you’ll trigger emails for everyone, but for some, when they look into the promotions you send out, AWeber can help you automate follow-ups.
Like many others, personalization is a big priority on this email marketing platform. Putting in people’s actual names (instead of something generic like “Valued Customer”) and tweaking emails to reflect personal preferences are the little extra touches that make these tools worth the money.
6. GetResponse
Automation is a huge time-saver, and that’s where GetResponse puts its focus. To them, automation isn’t just about sending mass emails. There’s a whole world of communication built on how to respond to emails and when to send them.
Every customer is different, and people are more likely to engage with emails at different times. GetResponse can track these things for each person and send them emails at the best time for them.
One of the keys to effective marketing is knowing your audience. It’s little details like these that can make a small but notable difference in how well your email campaigns do. If they don’t seem to be working, a simple tweak in timing might make the difference.
7. Answer the Public
This is a unique tool that can help you generate newsletter ideas surrounding your product. Basically, what this website does is show you the kind of questions people ask search engines.
For instance, I typed in “boots” and got this:
Answer the Public gives you the most popular questions about a topic—things your potential customers might be curious about. One way to use this information is to craft email subject lines that allude to one of these questions, then answer the question inside. This will make them far more likely to click on links and engage with your emails.
8. Litmus
Besides the common email automation features, Litmus offers spam testing. Getting your email caught in a spam filter essentially wastes all the time and effort you spent getting customers to sign up and subscribe, as well as the time and money spent crafting the email itself.
Litmus’ spam testing goes through your email and checks for anything that will trigger spam filters, so your email is ready to send out—as seen in this preview on their website.
Don’t let your emails get caught on the wrong side of the spam filter. People aren’t going to search through their spam folder to find your newsletters; they’ll likely forget they even subscribed to your content.
Key takeaway
We hope these tools give you guidance on how to effortlessly navigate through the world of email marketing. Email is essential for marketing consistency and commitment, which are some of the most important principles of persuasion marketing.
