Why Email Marketing?

In times like these, where everything has evolved well beyond what it was in the past, you must be wondering why email marketing still exists. That such an ancient and simplistic technique is still being used comes as a shock to many, but here’s what’s the truth: Email marketing still continues to be one of the most powerful ways of connecting to your audience.

Despite the growth of social media and a flood of spam, email is still the most effective tool to nurture leads and convert them to customers.

Sponsored emails sent out through your organisation to high-quality targets are an indispensable part of an integrated lead generation strategy. It is through this that the triple purpose of attracting the target audience, extending your reach, and increasing your database is achieved.

One of the most startling facts is that email marketing has an ROI as high as 4400%. This means that for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you get $44 in return.

Following are some goals for which email marketing is used:

  • Lead nurturing
  • Increasing sales 
  • Driving website traffic
  • Raising brand awareness

Email marketing has the greatest impact when it is personalised. The purpose of sending bulk emails in a planned manner can be achieved through Email marketing tools.

Top Paid Email Tools

What are the Features you should look for in a Good Email Marketing Tool?

The tool must enable you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface.

Ideally, you should be able to send out bulk emails that are also personalized and targeted, without much hassle; something that is also referred to as marketing automation.

Your tool must also enable you segment users into groups, manage your contact list, and effectively track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Most important of all, a good email service provider needs to ensure that your emails do not end up in the spam folder.

Here are the top 5 tools that would be great choices to assist you in your own e-mail marketing campaigns:

Mailchimp

One of the leading email marketing providers, Mailchimp is a simple to use email marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses. It has a huge user base owing to its free plan that allows upto 2000 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month.  You can upgrade your Mailchimp account to essentials, standard and premium plans starting from as low as $10 to $300.

It is a tool that is constantly upgrading, with new features cropping up all the time. It also provides decent chat support. Advanced email marketing features such as autoresponders, app integration, A/B testing and even social media integration are also available through the tool.

Sendinblue

A powerful tool for those with budget constraints, Sendinblue also comes with a free plan that allows the user to access its basic features. While the free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails per day for unlimited number of contacts, if you wish to avail the advanced features you can subscribe to its paid plans which range from $25 to $66 per month.

The tool also includes features such as list management, campaign reporting, email layout optimization in addition to a variety of third party integrations.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the largest email marketing services out there. It is one of the best platform for small businesses. On the basis of the number of customers they need to reach, they have different paid plans. Starting from range from as low as $20 to $95 per month. It also offers a 60-day risk-free trial for you to test the tool yourself. The tool offers excellent support over email, chat or call.

This service continues to expand its offerings to suit the environment and boasts of features such:

  • as event management and social media tools,
  • a host of niche-specific templates to use,
  • a dashboard to allow you to view the most important email metrics etc.

Hubspot

An email marketing and CRM tool provider, that has advanced email marketing features such as automation tools, segmentation enablers, tracking as well as analytics functions.

Hubspot has both free and paid subscription models with charges ranging from $50 to $800 per month. The advantage of using hubspot is a wide range of CRM features which only get better with the premium subscription. Hubspot works best for small and medium sized businesses who want to advance their email marketing plan so as to expand their reach and grow exponentially.

Drip

Drip has angled itself towards bloggers and E-Commerce driven businesses. This tool is increasingly useful towards deciphering consumer behaviour and consumer intent. Through its efficient metric tracking feature, E-Commerce owners might find it very easy to keep track of visitors and their behaviour.

Overall, it is a simple and easy-to-use tool with efficient marketing automation features. It has a free plan as well as paid premium plan covering subscribers up to 5000 and enterprise plan for subscribers beyond 5000.

It depends on you as to how wisely you use your email marketing tool to get the best possible ROI from your target audience. Remember that ultimately it is personalization which brings in the best possible results.

Thanks Ayush, Rajdeep, Piyush, Prabhu Krishnamoorthy, Praveen, Prashik, Deb, Jatin, Dheer for contributing their thoughts.

These were the highlights which summarise the discussion that happened in our Growth Folks group. The folks who have shared their views are themselves the Growth Marketers/Hackers. We would like to thank all of them for sharing this valuable growth learning.

Are we missing anything important? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything to add, do put down your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here.

Also Read: Top 5 lead magnets to skyrocket your lead gen.