Email marketing is still one of the most powerful marketing methods available, even if you have heard it’s a dying trade. In fact, email marketing is also one of the most profitable and convertible methods out there. On average, for every £1 a business puts into email marketing they get £44.25 in revenue. Of course, it’s not as easy as that, and you’ll have to ensure your email marketing campaigns aren’t only legal but also not a complete waste of time.
One way of making email marketing campaigns effective is to use an email marketing tool. Here are a few of the features you’ll get with one.
Contact Management
Contact management is important when it comes to email marketing. It’s all about trying to gain further interest in the products and/or services you offer, so being able to contact the right customers at the right time is crucial.
Contact management will give you access to a portal of those customers who are interested, those who have responded, and even those who have read your emails but have since deleted them. It’s also one of the key features if you have a bulk list of contacts that you have legally obtained and you’re looking to import them for future use.
Email Design Templates
Email design templates is another feature the majority of email marketing tools offer. If your emails do not look attractive, it will not matter what information is inside them because they won’t get looked at further. So, having the option to spruce up your emails to make them look attractive could be the difference in more custom or turning more customers away.
Campaign Monitoring
Email marketing tools make it very easy for you to manage campaigns so you can see which ones are working, which ones aren’t, and which ones need a bit more work to be more effective. Campaign monitoring features will give you insight as to what you need to do more of to convert more contacts. You’ll have access to the contacts who have opened your emails, deleted them, read them, and even blacklisted them so you can no longer contact them. It will make your email campaigns much more effective and, ultimately, it will help you determine who’s worth contacting again in the future so you’re not wasting time and money.
Platform Integration
If you already base your website on a platform like WordPress or Drupal, you’ll be happy to know a lot of the top email marketing tools out there easily integrate with them. This will give you instant access to a lot of the above features, so you can run your email campaigns effortlessly through your standard web admin control panel. It will make managing your website and email campaigns much more efficient if you can do it in one control panel.
E-Commerce Features
Whether you’re planning email marketing for small business or large business enterprises, the e-commerce features will almost guarantee you more conversions in the long run. For example, trigger marketing will help you automate sending emails to those customers who have purchased more than £100 worth of products/services within the last month or so. Such features are very easy to change so you can stay in complete control of those customers you think will have interest in buying products from you in the future. It means you can concentrate on the customers that really matter and you can automate the whole process, so you have more time with other business operations.
Inbox Testing
Inbox testing is another good feature if you have huge email lists and you’re not looking to waste time and money sending emails to potential customers who aren’t going to get them. Top email providers like Gmail and Hotmail all have restrictions in place to ensure businesses aren’t taking advantage of bulk email tools for spamming objectives.
Most email marketing tools now come with inbox and spam testing features, so you can put your email campaigns through the ropes to ensure the top email providers are going to process them. The last thing you want is to spend hundreds on an email campaign and not have access to more than 50% of the customers because of the restrictions in place.
Conclusion
Email marketing tools truly are the difference in being able to create a successful email campaign. If you do not have access to a good one, you are likely losing out on a lot of features that will make your campaigns more effective. You could also be losing out on a lot of custom because you don’t have access to some of the above important features.
Research some of the top email marketing tools online and you will find email marketing is an effortless task that could take you minutes instead of hours to accomplish.