Email marketing should be a key part of any online marketing effort. Email marketing is often undersold and carries a negative connotation due to it automatically being associated with the irritating spam mail that turns up in our inboxes. Effective email marketing campaigns are very different from spam and email marketing platforms like MailChimp have gone to great lengths to ensure that spam mail cannot be run through their system. Email marketing is a targeted marketing effort that gives a group of subscribers information about products or services that are directly related to their interests.
Marketing automation gives marketers the benefit of being able to set up a campaign and then have it automatically delivered. Marketing automation can also be set up to only target certain customer profiles so you don’t waste time and resources campaigning to the wrong people. It frees up a lot of time so that you can focus on growing your business. Marketing automation is almost like setting up an automated coffee machine, you spend a bit of time setting the grind and the length of the pour, and then after all that you have to do is press a button for the perfect cup of coffee.
Marketing automation tools can play important and effective roles in your online marketing campaigns aimed at streamlining and simplifying the entire process.
Marketing Automation Tools
Pardot: This B2B platform allows you to move prospects through the sales funnel by creating automatic targeted messaging based on previous prospect activity. Offers a full range of marketing automation services, including ROI reporting, lead nurturing, lead scoring and grading, CRM integration, social posting and email marketing.
Genius: This software system tracks online sales leads and the sends personalized campaigns and tracks website visits and email opens. The system is very popular for firms that have long and complex marketing cycles.
Marketo: By integrating email, social media, offline events, content and other inputs, Marketo is able to prioritise your prospects based on how each prospect behaves and interacts with the listed inputs. Marketo is the only marketing automation solution that unifies all digital channels. It aims to assist you in generating demand, creating relationships, building sales and providing analytics on your marketing efforts.
HubSpot: Will automatically create personalised landing pages, emails and web pages. Builds its workflow around your marketing goals, helps to grow your customer list and uses analytics to create marketing campaigns that are relevant you’re your customer list.
Email Marketing Tools
Constant Contact: Assists you in creating professional-looking email campaigns, managing your contact list and tracking the results of your campaign. Comes with social media tools and a feature for creating online surveys. Drag and drop editing makes it very user friendly and will save you time by automatically deleting any names that unsubscribe or bounce from your list
Campaign Monitor: Allows you to customise the provided templates to create unique email templates. Has the benefit of having built in A/B testing functionality so you can test different templates, content and campaigns against each other. Can also be integrated with your blog.
Vertical Response: Completely free tool that assist companies in creating emails and newsletters that are compatible on all platforms and devices, by incorporating responsive design elements. This means that the emails will automatically adjust so they look exactly the same on PC, Apple, Tablet, iPhone or Android. Also has a tool that will resend an email to any customers that didn’t open up the first one.
MailChimp: MailChimp is arguably the grandfather of email marketing software. Incredibly easy-to-use and it also incorporates elements of marketing automation by targeting customers based on behaviour, preferences and previous sales. You can make use of the segmentation feature to create custom rules for each campaign so that future sends will only target a portion of your contact list. This will save you a lot of time as opposed to adding each contact individually.
Read our blog on How to Use MailChimp
All of these tools could be the difference between middling marketing and a game-changing campaign that opens up as whole new customer base or drives sales amongst your existing customers. Online marketing is a hotly contested territory. Anything you can do to stand out and mark out your own little is worth spending some money on. So, embrace email marketing and trust a robot to do a little bit of the thinking and planning for you.