How to choose an email marketing tool for small business owners
Before you go jumping into writing and designing your email campaigns, you need to choose an email marketing tool. Email marketing is important for small businesses to build relationships with customers. Here’s how to choose an email marketing tool for small business.
Email marketing is a way to directly communicate with your customers who trust in your brand and love what you do. There are different types of email marketing campaigns that you can create.
Choosing the right email marketing platform
If you’re a small business, startup or entrepreneur looking to grow your customer list and stay engaged with them, using a free or low-cost email marketing platform is the way to do it when you’re starting out. The whole point of using email marketing is to drive traffic to your website and get visitors to complete a conversion. Whether its the sale of a product, a file download or to read a blog post, your emails should direct recipients to your website to do something.
You may be thinking, “Oh, I’ll just use Gmail or Outlook to design my emails and send them because they’re 100% free.” Well, you can and you can’t.
Although you can still send emails with them, Gmail and Outlook are primarily email domain providers. What this means is they’ll supply you with an @gmail.com or @outlook.com email address that you can use to send emails but they aren’t able to:
- Design pretty emails that include your branding
- Segment your email list to provide more relevant content to your email recipients
- Create meaningful emails that can be sent automatically on a schedule
- Send email blasts to customers without being flagged as spam
There are many software solutions out there that act as a single email marketing solution or an all-in-one marketing automation solution. Below are popular email marketing platforms in the market right now based on market share data from datanyze.com.
Things to consider
Before you go researching some email marketing tools for your business, determine what you want do and look for the features that fulfill your needs at your budget.
- Do you want to be able to create email campaigns that have your branding on it? Ensure there’s some form of customizable templates to add your branding.
- Do you want to be able to send specific messaging to different groups of people based on what they last bought from you? Find out if the platform’s limited in how many list segments you can create to build separate email campaigns.
- Do you want to see which email campaigns are performing the best? Ensure analytics is included.
- Do you want to automate an email campaign that sends on a schedule after a customer does something on your website? Check out a platform’s demo to see if you like the interface.
What to do if you have specific questions about a platform
In some cases, you already know what you’re looking for but have specific questions about what you want to accomplish on the platform. What you want to do is look for documentation or a support center on their website like the one below from ActiveCampaign.
Perusing through the Help Center or Documentation is a great way to understand what you can and can’t do on a platform. Good documentation and help centres have enough information to help you make informed decisions and are there to help you understand what the platform is capable of doing to identify any workarounds you might need to implement if the platform doesn’t let you do what you want to do natively.
Think critically about what goals you want to achieve with email marketing so that you can make an educated decision on a platform.
What platform can I start learning with?
MailChimp is the most used email marketing platform for small businesses owners who are starting out. Their platform has a free plan that anyone is able to use and learn email marketing. Their free tier includes a ton of features that small business owners are able to learn about and try like list segmentation, behavioural targeting, reporting and analytics. The image below is a snipper of what you’ll get as a free member of MailChimp as of June 11, 2020. View more features on Mailchimp’s website.
Other considerations
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a relatively new player in the email marketing space but has pretty good offerings at the lowest tier. Like MailChimp, they offer a free plan but has more flexibility in terms of the features that it comes with.
ActiveCampaign
MailChimp such as marketing automation, list management and successful
delivery rates. Its usability and experience may be better for users who
have been using MailChimp for a while.
It arguably has a better automation interface making it easy for anyone to start building an automation workflow. It also includes a CRM tool that MailChimp doesn’t have. ActiveCampaign is also positioned for business owners or marketers who are looking to do more with their email marketing. You can take a look at Email Tool Tester’s comparison of the two platforms to see the differences in platforms.
Email Marketing for eCommerce
If you have an eCommerce store on Shopify or Squarespace, you can take advantage of their native email marketing platforms. Shopify Email and Squarespace Email are new platform additions this year. It makes it easy for users to do all their marketing in one place.
