Best Email Marketing Software of 2024

What is email marketing software?

Email marketing software helps you manage your contact list, design and send engaging emails, and track whether your emails are opened and read. Options range from text-based template solutions that marketers can quickly create their own, to more complex HTML or JavaScript templates. The good news is that it’s not very expensive or difficult to get started. Many of the solutions in this roundup offer free trials or affordable starter plans, and some even offer onboarding services for new customers.

Email marketing comes in several forms. For example, some companies may decide that the most effective marketing tactic is a value-added newsletter delivered to a gated community of subscribers. Others want to connect their emails directly to products and sales engines so they can offer special offers and sales to recipients.

Each approach requires different tools to create and send source emails to recipients. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographics and engagement levels. And you’ll also need to integrate them with other backend systems, such as accounting systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and inventory management systems.

Will email marketing still work in 2024?

There is a perception in the market that email is becoming obsolete and being replaced by new channels such as social media, chat, SMS, web landing pages, and even the Metaverse. That’s true to some extent, and modern multichannel marketing campaigns should definitely utilize as many of these channels as possible. That’s no reason to ignore email.

According to market research firm Statista, the use of email remains virtually ubiquitous. In 2020, approximately 306 billion emails were sent and received every day, and there were 4 billion email users worldwide. This is equivalent to about half of the world’s population. Furthermore, these numbers are expected to increase to 376 billion daily emails and 4.6 billion users by 2025. Based on its market share, it’s clear that email marketing can be not only an effective technique, but an important one.

(Credit: Statista)

However, what teeth What’s changing is how email users access their inboxes. According to statistics from Statista, the number of emails opened on desktop clients has decreased to just 18%. These old-school clients were replaced by webmail (39% of opens) and mobile email clients (43% of opens). In fact, the most popular email client around the world was the iPhone email app, accounting for 29% of all email opens. With mobile email becoming so popular, you need to make sure your email marketing software pays special attention to this channel.

How much does email marketing cost?

The good news is that the cost of reaching prospects via email is generally low and the potential profits are high. Typical return on investment (ROI) estimates for email campaigns vary, but most suggest around $40 for every dollar spent. This is one of the highest return rates of any form of digital marketing.

Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails per month and are billed based on the number of subscribers. If your list is small, look for companies that offer free plans, low-cost plans for a few hundred subscribers, or pay-as-you-go plans. However, many of these services also offer high-capacity plans that include 100,000 or more contacts.

As a result, the prices of the email marketing candidates reviewed here vary widely. Starting at around $3 per month for sending 500 emails per month with Zoho Campaigns and rising to $1,250 per month for sending up to 10,000 contacts with Salesforce Pardot. In some cases, you may want to negotiate a custom plan directly with your sales representative.

How to start email marketing

Getting email marketing software up and running isn’t difficult. Generally, you can tell right away whether you like a product’s user interface (UI). Also, most of the contenders we reviewed offer free trials, so you can play around with them before dropping any money. Fortunately, most of these services have modern-looking graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not his UIs for complex business software from yesterday.

Be sure to also check how your vendor offers technical support, as some vendors don’t provide as much support as we expected. Some services offer 24/7 phone support, live chat, and email support, while others must rely on online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-service help resources (like FAQs and articles you can read to find answers) and live support via chat or phone if you can’t solve the problem yourself.

Finally, consider regulatory compliance issues. For example, if you plan on marketing to a European customer, make sure your software helps him with GDPR compliance. Meanwhile, in the United States, HIPAA mandates how certain protected health information can be used in campaigns, but other laws govern how marketing to minors under 18 years of age. Talk to potential vendors to see if they can help you. together with regulations applicable to the organization.

Does email marketing work on mobile devices?

As mentioned earlier, one of the big changes in email marketing is the increase in engagement on mobile devices rather than PCs. A mobile user accesses his email throughout the day no matter where he is. Thanks to payment services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, smartphones have also evolved as e-commerce tools. This allows mobile email to become a one-stop shop where a customer can go from marketing to purchasing in her one session.

The growing importance of mobile means you need to pay special attention to the email designer and analytics section of your email marketing service. The designer should be able to provide a preview of how the email will look in a responsive format. This means that HTML sizes images and other elements correctly depending on the device used to view them.

You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may force you to create custom reports to display this data. This means you may need to export data to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.

In addition to email, direct SMS marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Especially as they leverage more personal means of contact with their customers. Recent research shows that SMS open rates on mobile devices are 90% higher than regular email marketing, hovering between 20-25%. This is a clear difference, and marketers are flocking to platforms that support it. However, be careful not to promote your SMS channel too aggressively. Research shows that many people prefer to reserve it for friends and family.

Can email marketing be integrated with other software?

Another recent trend in email marketing tools is integration with other systems, especially CRMs and e-commerce tools. Some of the more advanced email marketing services are similar to CRM systems. This makes sense since both types of software deal with customer management and communication with customers.

One tactic marketers are increasingly using to increase the credibility of their email messages is incorporating user-generated content (UGC). For example, an email may include customer reviews of a product, such as those found on e-commerce sites such as Amazon. UGC can also come from other channels, such as social media posts and comments in online forums, including your own support forums. According to research by digital marketing tools vendor His Tint, 62% of consumers say they are more likely to click if the image in an email is a photo of a customer than one produced by a brand. I am.

Still, other innovative ideas are constantly being introduced into the realm of email marketing. For example, consider GetResponse. It has a built-in one-button live chat feature that can be integrated directly into your emails. This allows customers to read emails and then interact directly with sales and support representatives in one experience.

How is AI used in email marketing?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a big part of many digital marketing efforts, and email is no exception. AI improves email marketing mechanisms such as A/B testing and audience segmentation. Depending on how much information you can feed from your CRM or sales system, it can also help you customize email content to the individual customer level.

With the right data, AI can select content, modify customer experiences on the fly, and even interact directly with customers via AI-enabled natural language chatbots. If any of these sound appealing to you, you should take a closer look at how prospecting email marketing services implement AI and what features they offer.

Another area where AI can help is in marketing automation features, which most email suites offer to some degree. Automation technology is ideal for long-term email-based interactions and drip campaigns. A key aspect of this is tracking the customer’s journey and the various touchpoints they face from initial contact to the end of the sale.

How can I customize my email campaign?

The best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These include automatically generated emails based on special occasions (such as customer birthdays, anniversaries, and past purchases), welcome emails for new subscribers, and thank you emails for recent purchases. Helps you stay in touch with your destination. Here are some examples.

Most modern email marketing services offer custom workflows that specify triggers based on actions (such as opening or purchasing an email) or inaction (such as ignoring an email). These services allow you to set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to a subset of your users, and to pause or stop your campaign at any time. You can also move your contacts to a new segment once they complete the tutorial.

This level of customization can be quite complex, so it’s important not to get overwhelmed at first. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with figuring out what you want to say to your customers, when you want them to say it, and why. If you follow that plan, you’ll quickly build a journey that starts with a post-purchase welcome email and gradually drills down to more targeted offers as your relationship with your customer deepens.

Boost your email marketing strategy

Sending campaigns won’t do you much good unless you can track successes and failures and make quick adjustments. All of the services in this roundup offer some level of tracking, including simple open and click rate data, color-coded graphs and statistics, and even integration with Google Analytics. Once you have data about your campaign, you can tweak your content and use features like A/B testing to see what works. In this test, part of your audience receives an email created one way, and another part receives the same email created another way.

In addition to A/B testing, many services now offer multivariate testing. This involves using multiple variations of your entire campaign to test which ones perform best. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important element for your content and landing pages. With the right keywords, you can direct your subscribers to your website via email directly from her platform.

Whether you’re looking for a simple email marketing solution or one with full automation and advanced features, there’s a wide range of solutions out there. One of the candidates reviewed here should definitely be a good fit. While other vendors are developing integrated ecosystems with key partners, we are seeing some vendors focus on expanding their internal capabilities. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that email marketing is still the foundation and a great starting point for your digital marketing efforts.

Check out the best marketing automation software to learn more about how to reach your customers and prospects.