In today’s competitive market, email service providers (ESP) are essential tools used by businesses to communicate with their customers. It's one of the most lucrative marketing channels and should be one of the heavily relied on digital marketing services. However, choosing the right ESP can be tricky.
Whether you’re just getting started or already have an established customer base, there are a few things you should consider when selecting an ESP to implement your email marketing strategy.
In this post, we look at some of the top factors to think about when selecting an ESP. We’ll also share our top five picks for each category, including pricing, features, support, integrations, and more.
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Email marketing software, are tools that allows you to send emails (and more frequently SMS) from a single platform. These platforms usually include features such as autoresponders, email templates, analytics, list segmentation, and more.
Everything you could need to reach out and capture the hearts and minds of your target audience.
ESP tools help you automate your email marketing campaigns, making it less time consuming and more effective. They also allow you to track every interaction with your subscribers, giving you the ability to measure ROI and improve your campaigns accordingly.
Most email marketing companies offer free trials, so you can test them before committing to any long-term contracts. To find the best ESP, simply ask around within your industry, or reach out to your digital marketing agency contact for help.
If you don't have a digital marketing agency, or a retainer with one of the many email marketing agencies, to handle your email campaign management, read below to find our recommendations for SMB's and tech startups.
First off, let’s talk about the basics. If you’ve never used an ESP before, then you probably don’t realize how much work it takes to keep up with the latest trends and tricks.
There are plenty of free options available, but the best ones aren’t always the cheapest. So how do you know whether you should spend money on your email campaigns?
Since there are quite a few email marketing solutions, you can always go with the cheapest option, or see what your competitors are using for email campaign management. You can usually find their sign up landing pages if you know where to look.
All you need to do is find a service that meets your needs. If you’re looking for something cheap, you might consider SendGrid. They offer free plans up to 2,000 messages per month, and they also provide powerful analytics tools.
If you’d rather spend money than time, try MailChimp. Their pricing ranges from $5 – $15 per 1,000 subscribers, depending on how much data you want to collect.
Luckily, there are plenty of affordable options available. Here are the best email providers for small businesses.
Each will offer easy access to create an email template design that will become your signature newsletter/product release look. If e-commerce is your thing, then each of these platforms have introduced SMS to further your digital strategy and boost conversion rate.
For (tech) startups, the list will vary slightly, though most email marketing companies offer a lot of similar options. Here are our picks for more startup oriented businesses.
While you should always keep your eye on the ball when it comes to building a business, there are times when it pays off to go “off-base” and try something different.
That’s where email service providers come into play. They offer a range of services designed to help you grow your email list, boost conversions, and automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on what matters.
You may think that running an email campaign is only for larger companies, but startups should definitely consider investing in a quality email platform.
Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of the best email service providers for startups. These services offer everything you need to start building your own successful email marketing campaigns.
A startup, especially a SaaS startup will also want something that will help them automate much of their workflow. One of the staples of effective email marketing campaigns are getting out the awesome stuff your marketing team has done through content creation. So, you'll need something that fits into your current digital strategy and allows for tracking customer engagement.
With that in mind, these are the service providers we recommend that have the infrastructure to grow and scale with your startup.
Here are five of the best email services available today that we recommend to our clients based on their budgets and marketing automation needs.
MailChimp offers a free trial to anyone interested in learning how to build and send emails. They offer a variety of templates, auto responders and analytics tools. They've expanded multiple times to include landing pages
While you can’t go overboard with sending emails, Constant Contact offers a variety of templates that allow you to customize your messages. Their toolset includes autoresponders, drip campaigns, and automated follow ups. All of this makes it easier than ever to build a successful email list.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Active Campaign. If you haven’t, then you should know that it’s the most popular email marketing tool on the market today. It’s so popular because it does everything you could possibly ask from an email marketing platform. And if you’re looking for something else, ActiveCampaign has many marketing automation uses. That said, it’s a robust platform that allows you to do almost anything you could imagine.
Sendinblue is a powerful email marketing tool that allows you to send emails to your subscribers from any web browser. It’s free to sign up and start sending emails today. You can easily set up your email list by importing your existing contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Hotmail, etc. Once you’ve imported your contacts, you can then choose to send either daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly emails.
GetResponse is a powerful email autoresponder service that allows you to send emails from any device, anywhere, and track opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. It’s perfect for sending out newsletters, promoting products, and building relationships with customers. With its powerful features, simple interface, and affordable pricing, GetResponse is a must-have tool for any business owner who wants to grow his/her list.
Whether you're trying to increase sales, gather leads, or grow your brand, email marketing can help. As a result, many people are turning to email service providers to manage their emails for them. These companies offer a variety of different plans based on the number of subscribers you have and the frequency of sending messages. Expert help comes with many helpful things that make email marketing successful, like list validation, and ensuring landing pages are all setup with analytics pixels.
Here are our final tips to consider when choosing an email marketing provider:
We hope this brief article has been helpful for you, and if you need further expert help, we are a full-service email marketing agency – so don't hesitate to contact us! We offer a wide range of email marketing services that will help boost your email deliverability and further your business goals.
