In the world of software, there are many different categories and types. In this blog, we’re going to talk about two closely related categories: email marketing software and application software.
These two types of software are similar in certain ways—and different in other ways. They’re both types of computer programs that make your life easier by automating certain processes. But the way they do it is different. Email marketing software helps you automate your email marketing campaigns, while application software helps you with a variety of other tasks by processing data for you and helping you create or view things like documents, images, or videos.
Email marketing software is all about helping you reach customers and potential customers through email. When you use email marketing software, it saves you the time it would take to manually send emails, organize your contact list, analyze data from your email campaigns, etc., and makes it much easier to do all these things automatically.
Application software is designed to help you complete tasks that have to do with creating or viewing something on a computer—for example, a word processor helps you create documents, while a photo editor lets you edit digital photos. It also includes things like office suites (like Microsoft Office), which contain multiple programs designed to help users complete common office tasks
Email Marketing Software Vs Application Software
In 2022, marketers have more channels than ever before to reach customers. Savvy marketers use every combination of social media, direct mail, chat, display ads, SMS, web landing pages, and even the metaverse to get their messages in front of consumers. But it may surprise you to learn just how central email is to many successful digital campaigns.
According to recent research from HubSpot, one of our Editors’ Choice winners for email marketing tools, fully 64% of small businesses use email to reach customers—a higher rate than for any other digital channels save social media and websites. And whether it was due to isolation during the global pandemic or for some other reason, 77% of marketers saw increased customer engagement with email in 2021 versus 2020. It’s little surprise, then, that four out of five survey respondents said they’d rather give up on social media than on email.
To succeed at email marketing, however, takes more than a spreadsheet full of email addresses. You’ll need tools to help you compose, send, and track your emails, and even to integrate data from your email campaigns with your other backend systems. Fortunately, plenty of help is available. In this roundup, we tested 11 of the top email marketing platforms and rank the best ones. But what makes them the best? Here are some topics to consider.
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether these were opened and read. Options range from text-based template solutions that marketers can quickly make their own to more complex HTML or JavaScript templates. The good news is that it doesn’t cost much to get started, nor is it an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup have affordable starter plans, and some even offer onboarding services for new customers.
Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide their most effective marketing tactic is a value-add newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others might want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, so they can provide special offers and deals to recipients.
Each approach requires different tools for creating the source email and sending it to recipients. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographic slices and engagement levels. And you’ll probably want to integrate with other back-end systems, such as the accounting system, the customer relationship management (CRM) system, and the inventory management system.
The Best Email Marketing Practices in 2022
Marketers have many more channel tools available to them these days than they did even just a few years ago. Social media, mobile and text marketing (see below), and even video campaigns compete for marketers’ budget dollars. With all those options available to them, many wonder if it’s time to give email the boot.
Statista global market valuation forecast for email marketing through 2027
(Image courtesy of Statista)
As we’ve said, email remains the most pervasively used communications channel in the world outside of verbal communication. According to market research firm Statista, the number of global email users will grow to about 4.5 billion in 2022, up from around 4 billion in 2021. That trend is reflected in Statista’s forecast of email marketing’s global market valuation through 2027. That forecast projects email marketing to grow to almost $18 billion by 2027. So let’s put thoughts of email’s demise behind us.
However, one important change for email marketing has been the increase in engagement on mobile devices, rather than PCs. Mobile users access emails throughout the day and wherever they are. Thanks to Apple Pay and Google Pay services, smartphones have also evolved as mobile payment solutions. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop allowing customers to go from marketing to purchase in a single session.
The increasing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should provide at least a preview of how your email will look on a typical mobile device, and better yet, on several screens of varying sizes. Even better, the designer should also automatically render your email in a responsive format, meaning the HTML will correctly size images and other elements depending on the device used to view them.
You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may force you to create custom reports to see this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.
That leads us to another modern trend in email marketing tools, which is integration with other systems, most notably CRM. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. It makes sense, because both types of software deal with managing and communicating with customers. Other email marketing systems will be able to plug directly into your existing CRM.
There is also a rising trend towards third-party e-commerce integration. You’ll find this in several of our contenders, including Editors’ Choice winner Mailchimp. These email marketing services generally offer several different but compatible services. You can create a store, process payments, and move it along with dedicated marketing and sales tools when you combine them.
Getting Creative: Email Plus More
So far, it might sound as though email marketing means the same staid, static messaging that everyone is used to, but this isn’t the case. Today’s marketers are finding innovative ways to combine traditional email marketing with other channels, including mobile and social media.
For example, SMS marketing is increasingly popular because it exploits an even more personal line of contact with customers. According to recent research, SMS has a 90% open rate compared to straight email marketing, hovering between 20-25%. That’s a clear difference, and it’s making marketers flock to platforms that support it. Email marketing vendors that have it right now include the likes of GetResponse and Mailchimp, among others.
But it’s risky for marketers to approach customers up through a channel they trust but is used mainly by friends and family. Some customers will react badly no matter what, but almost all of them will want to unsubscribe if they suddenly start getting ongoing SMS messages from people or organizations they don’t even know. That’s why savvy marketers don’t simply jump on new channels like mobile or SMS. They carefully consider the form those portions of their campaigns should take and the rules around creating compelling content, especially if it’s headed for smaller screens.
One way marketers can build more trust in their email messages is by incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into them. One popular example of UGC is a customer review of a product, like those you’d find on e-commerce sites like Amazon. However, UGC can also draw from other channels, including social media posts and comments in online forums, including your own support forums. According to a study by digital marketing tools vendor Tint, 62% of consumers say they are more likely to click on an image in an email when it’s a customer photo, rather than an image generated by the brand.
Still, other innovative ideas are being introduced to the realm of email marketing all the time. Take GetResponse, for example. It’s built a one-button live chat feature you can incorporate directly into your emails, which allows customers to go from reading an email to having direct interaction with sales or support people in a single experience.
AI and Email Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a big part of many digital marketing efforts, especially email. AI improves email marketing mechanics such as A/B testing and more intelligent audience segmentation. This can help you almost immediately since it quickly improves efficiency and lets you make better strategic decisions around building the right campaign for different customers.
AI can also help personalize email content right down to the individual customer level, depending on how much information you can feed it from your CRM and sales systems. With the correct data, AI can choose different content, modify customer experiences on the fly, and even interact directly with customers via an AI-enabled natural-language chatbot. If any of that sounds attractive, you need to look very closely at how a prospective email marketing service has implemented AI and what kinds of features it offers.
Another area where AI can help is with the marketing automation capabilities that most of these email suites offer to some degree. Automation technology is best suited for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. But an important aspect here is tracking the customer journey and the various touchpoints customers face from initial contact to closing the sale. AI excels in these scenarios since it can drill down to an individual customer and process the exact data for the vast customer volumes that top global retailers might get.
Getting Started at the Right Price
For most businesses, the good news is that the cost to reach prospective customers via email is generally low, while the potential for profit is high. Estimates of the typical return on investment (ROI) for email campaigns vary, but most suggest it is somewhere around $40 per dollar spent. That’s one of the highest rates of return of any digital marketing category.
The email marketing contenders we review here have a vast price range. They start at about $3 per month to send out 500 emails per month in Zoho Campaigns, and they range to as much as $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts in Salesforce Pardot.
Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails each month and bill you based on subscribers. If you have a small list, then look for a company that offers a free plan, a low-cost plan for several hundred subscribers, or even a pay-as-you-go plan. On the flip side, many of these services also offer high-volume plans with up to 100,000 or more contacts. Sometimes this requires a custom plan that has to be arranged directly with a sales rep. If you’re willing to commit, look for the companies that offer discounts if you pay yearly rather than monthly. A few also offer money-back guarantees.
Getting started shouldn’t be daunting. Generally, you’ll know right away whether you like a user interface (UI) or not, and most of the contenders we reviewed offer free trials so you can poke around before dropping any cash. Luckily, most of these services have modern-looking graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not the complex business software UIs of yesterday.
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Be sure to look at the tech support details, too, since several vendors don’t make support as available as we would have liked. You’ll find that some offer 24/7 phone support, live chat, and email help, while others leave you to rely on online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-serve help resources—where you can search FAQs and articles to find your answers—as well as live support via chat or phone when you can’t solve an issue yourself. We cover all of these concerns in our reviews, plus you can get an overview in the feature chart.
The Secret Sauce: Email and Automation
Beyond sending newsletters, the best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These help you stay in touch with your contacts with automatically generated emails based on special occasions (such as their birthday or anniversary), welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank-you emails for recent purchases, to give some examples.
The most advanced email marketing services offer custom workflows to specify triggers based on actions (such as opening an email or making a purchase) or on inaction (such as ignoring emails). With these services, you can also set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to segments of users, and you can pause or stop a campaign at any time. You can also move contacts into new segments once they’ve completed their tutorials.
This kind of email marketing automation trick is mapping out what marketers call “the customer journey.” That journey amounts to the sequence and conditions your email marketing app must consider before sending out an automatic email. Depending on the app, this can be as easy or as complex as you’d like, but planning is critical.
A small retail business, for example, might want to send an automatic blanket email to all its customers before every holiday sale. They might also extend that to specific brands too. Suppose a customer bought an item from Vendor X, for example. In that case, the business might want to automatically send that customer an email if there’s a new product from the same vendor, especially if it’s on sale.
Those are basic examples. More complex possibilities include crafting several emails with the same message but optimized for specific subsets of your customer list. These optimizations could be around the products they’ve purchased, their location, or whether they’ve ever called your product support line, to name just a few. Whatever information you’ve collected about them can be relevant.
This level of customization can get very complex, so it’s important not to get overwhelmed at the start. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with what you want to tell customers, when you want to say to it, and why. Follow that plan, and you’ll quickly build a journey that might start with a welcome email post-purchase and gradually drill down to ever more targeted offers as your relationship with that customer grows.
As you’re planning that journey, you’ll come across all the details you need as you go, like which customer segments should be on different journeys, what those journeys need to look like, and mainly how to track your automated campaigns.
Tracking Your Performance
Launching email campaigns isn’t much help unless you can track your successes and failures to make adjustments quickly. All of the services covered here offer some level of tracking, whether it’s simple open and click rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, or even integration with Google Analytics. Once you’ve got some data on your campaign, you can tweak your content to see what works using features like A/B testing, where one part of your audience receives an email built one way and another set of people get the same email built differently.
In addition to A/B testing, many services now offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of an entire campaign to test which one performed best. Services that offer this feature include Campaigner and Mailchimp. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important factor for content and landing pages. The right keywords can directly lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website.
(Editors’ Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)
Whether you’re looking for a simple email marketing solution or one with full automation and advanced capabilities, there’s a wide range of solutions out there, and one of the contenders we’ve reviewed here should be a solid fit. You’ll see vendors focused on expanding their internal features while others develop significant partner and integration ecosystems. What’s the constant? Email marketing remains the foundation and the starting point, making it a great place to start your digital marketing journey.
best email marketing software for ecommerce
Is email still the best marketing method? Although you see obituaries for it now and then, email is still the winner. With so many social media channels, it’s easy to forget that email is still the most powerful promotional method available to online retailers, whether you’re going off clicks, conversions, or overall ROI. In fact, email had a median ROI of 122% which is four times greater than any other marketing method including social media, direct mail, and paid search.
Ecommerce customers who received multiple abandoned shopping cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete the purchase than those who receive only one follow up email.
Experian
Email marketing is vital because it:
Provides a direct link between businesses and customers
Allows retailers to ride the growing trend of personalization
Permits gathering and testing data-driven insights
Is the best way to segment and target customers with customized offers and promotions.
To leverage the benefits of a quality email campaign requires a robust platform that can handle the segmentation demands of current marketing trends.
7 Email Marketing Tools Driving eCommerce Sales
We’ve selected seven top email marketing platforms proven to work for eCommerce campaigns.
1. MailChimp
Email Marketing Platforms Blog MailChimp Screenshot
MailChimp has over 14 million customers and is popular with small and medium-sized businesses. It gained a reputation for ease-of-use and its focus on eye-catching, beautifully designed email templates, and opt-in forms.
MailChimp also integrates with a wide array of third-party tools, including many eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, to name just a few. Features include trigger-based messaging, spam score checking, and a full array of reporting. You can also preview your messages in various email clients, use geo-targeting and time-zone-based delivery.
Pricing: Free for up to 2000 subscribers, around $5/month for every additional 500 subscribers. They charge $199/month for enterprise-level features.
2. Constant Contact
Email Marketing Platforms Blog ConstantContact Screenshot
Constant Contact stands out for its intuitive dashboard and easily-accessible features. It’s user-friendly and comes with support over the phone or live chat. They offer extensive training materials. They include a variety of templates to run surveys, coupons, invitations, and add video. It is also a complete contact management system.
Pricing: Plans begin at either $20/month (for the basic plan) or $45/month (for the “Plus” plan), each for up to 500 subscribers. The monthly price increases incrementally with more subscribers. One month free.
3. Klaviyo
Email Marketing Platforms Blog Klaviyo Screenshot
While most platforms are designed to send email, Klaviyo was designed to capture customer data from eCommerce sites and leverage it for personalized email campaigns. They include multiple abandoned cart follow-up sequences to increase conversions and sales.
Klaviyo integrates with all eCommerce web designer customer designed and standard CRM platforms to maximize your lead generation. It offers a complete automated marketing system that includes emails and ads. It is highly customizable for any targeted segmentation.
Pricing: Starts at $25/month for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails.
4. AWeber
Email Marketing Platforms Blog AWeber Screenshot
AWeber is another considerable email service provider and was one of the first email marketing tools to enter the market. Like MailChimp, one of its main strengths is the number of integrations it offers with eCommerce platforms.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with access to top-quality support and a wealth of training materials, AWeber is a solid choice. It integrates with BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify along with a host of other eCommerce-related apps and CRM platforms.
Pricing: Plans start at $19/month for up to 500 subscribers. For a subscriber base above 25,000, custom plans are available, and they offer a 30-day free trial.
5. Active Campaign
Email Marketing Platforms Blog ActiveCampaign Screenshot
Active Campaign provides a multi-faceted platform. Dynamic campaign content helps maintain relevant content to your segmented lists. They offer unlimited personalization. Every custom field you create automatically becomes a new personalization tag.
It has fifteen tools including on-site and SMS messaging, CRM tools, extensive site, and email analytics.
Pricing: They have a sliding scale tool to display the pricing based on volume. However, the beginning level or “Lite” plan starts at $69 per month. They offer free migration from another platform.
6. HubSpot
Email Marketing Platforms Blog HubSpot Screenshot
Hubspot’s email marketing tools are part of their much larger Marketing Hub plan, which includes everything from lead analytics to blog content management. It’s an intuitive platform, with all the features you would expect, and is ideal for those looking for a full suite of tools, not just an email marketing solution.
Pricing: Basic plans start at $200/month, and contracts must be pre-paid for a year. Enterprise plans start at $2,400/month. The free plan does not include email marketing. They offer a free demo.
7. Keap
Email Marketing Platforms Blog Infusionsoft Screenshot
Much like Active Campaign, Keap is a full-fledged solution for managing all aspects of your email marketing campaigns. Designed for smaller businesses, it includes features for segmentation, tracking, and automation. There are also hundreds of integrations with CRM systems, eCommerce platforms, and third-party software providers. They offer a 10-minute, webinar or one-hour live demo.
Keap’s features benefit online retailers, such as product promotion templates, payment integrations, and re-engagement campaign automation.
Pricing: Basic plans start at $85/month but increase to $174/month if you add the “eCommerce” and “Sales pipeline” features. There is also a one-time $299 fee “for new user training not included in the monthly quote.”
Email Still Rules Don’t Miss Out
Email is still the best marketing strategy available to online retailers. And if you’re not leveraging it as much as possible, then you’re missing out on sales and revenue.
The tools on this list provide a set of features that enable you to get the absolute maximum from your campaigns. There are software solutions to meet a range of goals, whether you’re looking for a streamlined way of regularly reaching your customers, or a fully comprehensive package with CRM integrations, artificial intelligence, automation, and more.
Conclusion
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