What to consider when choosing an email marketing tool for your business

There are many digital marketing options, and one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to promote your brand and increase sales of your goods and services is e-mail marketing. Social media, in particular, Facebook and Instagram involve high costs and other complexities, and TV or radio ads require you to have a fairly large budget to spend on marketing.

The joy of email marketing

• It allows you to deliver your business' message accurately, targeted and personalized for specific audiences - list segmentation and personalization.

• You get the most comprehensive overview of your contacts and campaign results - Analysis and reporting

• For all digital marketing strategies, email marketing has the highest Return on Investment.

However, for you to achieve this, there are certain rules attached to it.

• Choose the right email marketing platform. In this guide, I will highlight in detail the factors to consider before committing to a platform.

• Build a quality email list by collecting relevant contacts.

• Use segmentation and personalization, most platforms often offer this feature. This will help with the much needed personalized and targeted messaging.

• Invest time in creating an appealing subject line that will trigger the audience to open the email.

• Craft compelling email content to increase your chances at sales.

• Emails designed should reflect your brand.

• Understand the difference between Transactional and Promotional emails.

• Clean your mailing list regularly to make sure to keep relevant contacts.

• Connect your email marketing platform to your e-shop. The email marketing tool should be able to easily integrate this.

Factors to consider before choosing an email marketing tool for your business

1. Your business size and sending volume

Any business owner should be honest about where the business is right now and where it intends to be in the next 12 months.

• This helps predict costs of scaling that may often turn out to be dramatic.

• Look out for transparent tier pricing and double cost 2 times your current list size to help you determine how you would be able to easily scale with the platform.

• Consider your business needs, a one-man team consultancy that sends monthly newsletters to 500 people has considerably different needs from an e-commerce business that sends out daily promotional emails to 10,000 or more subscribers.

  
  

  2. Ease of use and learning curve

A platform with powerful features does not add any value to your business if you are unable to use it. It becomes a wasted resource.

It's important to

• evaluate the drag and drop editor and predesigned templates

• find out how intuitive the campaign set up flow is

• easily navigate the interface for someone

3. Automation and workflow capabilities

Automation not only saves time but also resources since emails can be sent with no need for manual effort. The tool should have the ability to automate sequences based on user behavior

• Welcome series for new subscribers

• Abandoned cart reminders

• Re-engagement flows

4. Segmentation and personalization features

Relevant and targeted messaging creates a very effective campaign.

• The marketing tool should allow you to segment your audiences by

  -demographics

  -purchase history

  -engagement level

  -geographical location

  -self defined tags

  
  

  5. Deliverability

Your emails are of no use if they land in the recipients' spam folder

Ability to reach inbox varies depending on the tools. An effective tool should support

• Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARK)

• You should also research the platform's sender reputation.

• They should offer dedicated IP addresses for large volume senders.

• Community reviews should also be given great consideration.

6. Integration with existing business tools

E-commerce businesses should be keen on this.

The tool of choice should support

• Integration with e-shops like shopify, WooCommerce

• Syncing with your CRM for better list management

• Connecting with your website to better manage lead generation from website visits.

• Integration with payment processor to complete the purchase cycle

7. Analytics and reporting

Analytics help measure performance of the campaign and also track insights during the campaign. Data driven campaigns open room for great strategies that lead to a high Return on Investment.

Metrics to focus on are:

• Open rates

• Click through rates

• Conversion rates

• Bounce rates

• Unsubscribes

• Revenue attribution especially for e-commerce businesses that sell multiple products.

  
  

  8. Pricing and affordability

For most SMEs, pricing is always the underlying decisive factor for any purchase.

Look out for

• Platforms that offer free plans to start

• Platforms that allow you to pay for only for what you use.

• Underlying costs for business that want to utilize the other channels like SMS and WhatsApp

9. Multi-channel communication

   Some platfrims like Trembi unify your digital marketing strategy by unifying it across Email, SMS and WhatsApp. This widens your customer reach and helps you find your audience on the channel they are most comfortabe with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOm2RpMb59M

Some of the email marketing platforms that can elevate your email marketing campaigns and register high Return on Investment

Tool	Best for	Key strengths	Automation features	Pricing model
Trembi	Multi-channel messaging and CRM combo	Inbuilt CRM, powerful automation, client lead generation, real time metrics	Email automation, SMS and WhatsApp triggers and message scheduling	Only pay for what you need
Mailchimp	Businesses that need an all-in-one marketing platform	Advanced templates, ease of use, strong analytics	Advanced workflows, A/B testing	Free plan and tiered subscription
Brevo	Budget conscious businesses that need multi-channel marketing	Unlimited contacts, CRM SMS and WhatsApp support	Marketing automation, Transactional emails	Free plans, scalable pricing based on email volume
Hubspot	Growing business that need deep CRM integration	CRM, sales pipeline and marketing automation ecosystem	Advanced workflow automation across sales, marketing and service	Free plan for limited users and premium enterprise tiers

In conclusion:

Different tools work for different types of businesses at different levels

• Startups need affordablity and simplicity to kick start their journey

• Growing e-commerce brands need deep integrations and behavioral automations

• Scaling businesses need advanced automations and segmentation

The goal should be to pick a tool that fits perfectly with your business needs, how it operates and its growth goals.

Email marketing tools work most effectively when intentionally used to achieve the maximum Return on Investment.