Neil Patel Email Marketing Software

If you’re looking for an email marketing software that makes it easy to create and manage email campaigns, we’ve got the answer.

Our platform is the backbone of many of the most successful email campaigns in the world. We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of businesses grow their revenue by creating custom, targeted emails that are more likely to convert.

With our drag-and-drop editor and our real-time analytics dashboard, you can easily build beautiful emails that look great on every device. Our templates are designed by professional designers so you know they’ll look amazing in any inbox!

We offer free trials so you can try before you buy and see how powerful our software is for yourself!

Neil Patel Email Marketing Software

It may be one of the oldest forms of digital communication, but email still reigns supreme when it comes to usage.

Sure, there are other newer methods of communicating with your audience and customers. Communication methods like social media, live chat, and many others. However, with a user base of over 4 billion people, email is the king of marketing channels.

Additionally, email marketing has an ROI of $38 for every dollar spent, meaning it deserves a place in every marketer’s toolbox. 

Email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating out social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing.

Why is that? With all the hype over new channels, why is decades-old technology still one of the most effective marketing strategies?

Despite the rise of social, people use email more than other platforms. After all, what’s the good of marketing to someone if they’re not there?

Data shows that most people are on email—and the number increases every year.

In addition, with email marketing you own the connections—you don’t have to worry about algorithm changes tanking your reach.

That’s why building a successful email marketing campaign is more important than ever.

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There’s a problem—most people don’t know how to do it right. (In fact, you’ve probably seen those people in your email box.)

This post will walk you through tips and strategies for executing impactful email marketing campaigns.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of sending promotional messages to people in mass quantities. It typically is to generate sales or leads and it may contain advertising.

Remember: You’re a Guest in Their Inbox

People are inundated with interruptions, pitches, and advertisements everywhere they look.

Though you might think your email is special. To the reader, your email is one in a million—and not in a good way.

This is why it’s important to remember where you are and use good manners.

Getting into someone’s inbox is like being invited to their home for dinner. If they ask you to take your shoes off, you respectfully do so.

It’s the same with email marketing, so before we begin I’d simply like to remind you to be on your best behavior at all times and remember… you’re a guest in their inbox.

Now, let’s talk about how to build your email marketing strategy from the ground up.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing is one of the top-performing strategies, in no small part because it’s fairly intuitive and often automated.

In its basic form, an effective email marketing campaign requires three essential elements:

1. An Email List

For you to pull off successful email campaigns, you need an active email list. This is a database of email contacts who have expressed interest in receiving marketing communications from your brand.

There are many ways to build an email list. One of the easiest is to create a lead magnet (also called an offer) your target audience is interested in, like a coupon, in exchange for their email addresses.

2. An Email Service Provider

An email service provider (ESP), also known as an email marketing platform, is software that helps manage your email list. It also helps design and execute automated email marketing campaigns.

Using an ESP allows you to automate actions triggered by your target audience’s behaviors. These enable you to personalize each interaction with them, meaning engagement and conversion rates generally improve.

3. Clearly Defined Goals

You can use email marketing to achieve many business goals. For example, you can use email marketing to:

• drive sales
• boost brand awareness 
• generate and nurture leads
• keep customers engaged
• increase customer loyalty and lifetime value

To execute an effective email marketing campaign, your email list, ESP, and goals must align. Then, you can get to work.

The first step is to segment your email list according to subscriber demographics or actions.

Next, create an email or series of emails designed to get consumers to do something (your goal).

Finally, use your ESP to send emails and monitor the campaign automatically.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Just like any other marketing channel, email marketing has pros and cons. Let’s briefly dive into some of the more significant ones:

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email Is Permission-based

When a customer trusts you with their email address, it’s the virtual equivalent of being given the keys to their house. Gaining permission to enter rather than showing up uninvited increases the chances of engagement and conversion.

Affords You Direct Access to Your Audience

You can communicate directly with subscribers on their schedules. In addition, because people check their emails daily, your email is likely to be viewed.

Gives You More Control

With most other marketing platforms, you don’t own the platform. If the platform ceases to exist, all your hard work sinks with it.

With email, you own the relationships you forge with your subscribers.

More Personalization Capabilities

You can use demographic or psychographic data to create personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns. Research shows segmented and personalized campaigns increase revenue by as much as 760 percent.

Measurable

Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is crucial, and automated email marketing makes measuring your campaign a breeze.

Scalable

Email marketing campaigns can scale without putting a strain on your resources or compromising quality.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Tough Competition

Standing out in a cluttered inbox can be quite a challenge. You have to be creative to ensure your emails get noticed and opened.

You Need an Email List

With email marketing, you must already have an email list for your campaigns to be effective.

Tricky Rules and Regulations to Navigate

There are a lot of rules governing the use of email for commercial purposes. Common examples include GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA. All of these state you can’t send unsolicited emails.

Unfortunately, some subscribers also report your emails as being spam even after they subscribed to the list. As a result, your sender reputation takes a hit.

Delivery and Deliverability Issues

Getting your email to land in receivers’ inboxes is not guaranteed. To run effective email marketing campaigns, you must contend with delivery and deliverability issues.

Email Marketing Examples

Let’s briefly look at a couple of email marketing examples for a bit of inspiration.

Teaonic

Teaonic is an e-commerce brand specializing in organic, healthy teas.

Subject line: Getting Low On Wellness?

What does this email get right?

• Great subject line: The subject line focuses on the target audience’s main pain point, i.e., improving their health.
• Leverages color psychology: The bright, warm colors trigger feelings of health and happiness.
• Well-timed: The email is targeted at people who have purchased the product and is sent when the customer’s supply is about to run out.

Bluehost

Well-known for its hosting services, Bluehost decided to try its hand at creating a website builder.

Subject line: Bluehost’s new Website Builder makes building simple.

• Sells the benefits, not features: Focusing on the benefits makes the copy more compelling.
• Clean design: The simple design makes the email aesthetically pleasing and easy to read.
• Excellent targeting: Bluehost knows their audience is mainly made up of small business owners without technical expertise. The email uses language targeted at this demographic.

How to Automate Your Email Marketing

While the automation process varies from one ESP to another, there are some universal steps to automating your email marketing.

Define Your Segments

Effective email marketing campaigns start with list segmentation. Use the data you have about your subscribers to group them. This allows you to create more personalized campaigns.

Design an Efficient Workflow

After segmenting your email list, it’s time to design a workflow. This is the series of emails to fulfill the objective of the campaign.

Determine the Right Triggers

Once you’ve designed your workflow, determine the triggers that will set off the following email in the sequence. Examples of triggers can include customers opening your email, clicking on a link, or not opening it at all within a predetermined time frame.

Best Email Marketing Strategies

To succeed with email marketing, you have to be strategic in the way you design your campaigns. Here are some of the best email marketing strategies you can employ.

Use the Right List Building Strategies

The success of your email marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your email list. To build such a list, you must use list-building strategies designed to attract your target audience. For example, a case study promoted on LinkedIn may help a B2B brand build a list of engaged subscribers but flop when used by a B2C brand.

Practice Good Email List Hygiene

Another essential email marketing strategy is practicing good email list hygiene. Cleaning out inactive subscribers and email addresses that are no longer in use will ensure you have a good sender reputation.

Keep Your List Warm

Regularly send emails to your list to keep your subscribers engaged (warm). However, sporadic emailing could result in subscribers forgetting who you are and lead to low conversion rates.

If some of your subscribers go cold, you can run a re-engagement campaign.

Focus on One Objective

Design each campaign and email to focus on one objective. Trying to kill two (or more) birds with one stone doesn’t work with email marketing. It only confuses your audience and reduces your conversion rates.

Define and Track the Right KPIs

Email marketing is more than sending your subscribers a couple of emails. It also entails tracking the performance of your campaigns. To do so, you must define and track the right key performance indicators (KPIs).

Top 7 Email Marketing Tools Every Marketer Should Know

To pull off a successful campaign, you need to leverage email marketing tools to optimize your processes. Here are the top seven you should know:

Email Service Providers (ESP)

One of the most critical email marketing tools you need is an ESP. Some top ESPs are:

• Constant Contact: This is best for e-commerce email marketing campaigns, thanks to features like automated product recommendations and shoppable emails. Plans start at $20/month.
• Sendinblue: Sendinblue is best for small businesses running simple email campaigns. It has a rich feature set with a CRM, live chat, and SMS, among others. Plans start at $25/month.
• Pardot: B2B email campaigns require a platform specifically designed for the B2B buyer journey. Pardot fits the bill perfectly. However, to build high-growth email campaigns with Pardot, be prepared to part with at least $1,250/month.

Deliverability Tools

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an ESP to place emails in your receivers’ inboxes successfully. The wise email marketer will have an email deliverability tester in their toolbox. Here are some of the top ones:

• MailGenius: MailGenius inspects your emails for possible spam triggers. You can use it to run deliverability tests to ensure your emails reach their intended recipients’ inboxes. MailGenius is a free tool.
• GlockApps: GlockApps shows your delivery results in real-time, including whether your email landed in the Inbox, Spam folder, Gmail’s Promotional or Social tabs, or if it was never delivered at all. Personal accounts are free, and prices go up from there.

Testing and Tracking

Testing and tracking the campaign performance helps you create optimized iterations of your campaigns. Which email marketing tools are best for testing and tracking?

• Litmus: You can use Litmus to test and track your emails in traditional web clients and popular mobile devices.

Email Personalization Tools

Take your personalization game beyond just using your recipients’ name by using a personalization tool.

• Hyperise: When it comes to personalizing email marketing campaigns, no tool does it better than Hyperise. It helps you add dynamic, personalized images to each of your emails, including profile images from social media platforms.

How to Write Email Marketing Copy That Drives Results

Whatever your email marketing goal is, it all hinges on email marketing copy.

That’s why you must write yours well. To do that:

Know Your Audience

The first step to crafting compelling email marketing copy is knowing your audience. This will help you better segment your list and create hyper-targeted email copy.

Craft a Hard-to-Ignore Subject Line

The subject line is one of the most important elements of email copy as it helps readers decide whether to open your email. To craft a hard-to-ignore subject line:

• use keywords
• make it benefit-driven
• use active voice
• personalize as much as possible

Get the Preview Text Right

Email preview text appears immediately below or beside the subject line. Limited to a maximum of 140 characters (email client dependent), it acts as an elevator pitch to convince people to open your email. An optimized preview text is an extension of your subject line and reinforces your value proposition.

Make It Easy to Read

People are busy. That’s why you should write your email copy so it’s easy to read and understand. Do this by:

• using short sentences and paragraphs
• avoiding jargon and complicated words
• using bullet points

If your readers find your emails easy to read, they’ll likely engage with them more.

Leverage Storytelling

Stories are a powerful way to grab attention and get your message across. That’s why you should leverage storytelling in your email copy.

Use Psychology to Your Advantage

Human beings are wired to react in specific ways. Use psychological triggers to direct your readers towards fulfilling your campaign objectives. Examples of such triggers include:

• fear of missing out (FOMO)
• color psychology
• social proof

Used well, these triggers can help you craft email effective copy.

Email Marketing Step 1: Build Your List

Before you can start sending out emails, you need people to send emails to. How do you get started building your list? Start by adding a banner or form to your website simply asking people to subscribe.

Then, follow these tips.

1. Offer An Incentive

Think of email addresses as a currency: you wouldn’t give money away for free, right? Offering an incentive is the simplest way to gather email addresses.

There are many ways you can do this, of course. Some prefer to give something away for free while others simply offer a newsletter or product updates.

For example, the business newsletter Morning Brew offers readers a simple benefit: their fun, interesting updates every morning.

Search Engine Journal uses a small form in their right sidebar offering daily news—they also ask which topics the user is interested in, which helps them send more valuable content.

You can also offer a checklist, ebook, white paper, or another downloadable asset. Contests and giveaways are another great way to convince people to share their email addresses.

I can’t tell you which is the right or wrong path for your business, but I can tell you that it’s important to have a clear purpose when asking for an address.

This is where a strong call to action comes into play, and copywriting is super important.

Establish your credibility, explain what the emails are for, and get people interested in receiving them.

Simply posting “enter your email for updates” isn’t going to get anyone excited. Instead, share specifics.

By sharing a specific call to action or benefit to providing their email address, you can get more people to subscribe.

Some common ways to entice people to sign up include:

• email series
• free downloads
• free white papers or eBooks
• update lists, like new releases and product updates

Whatever that incentive is, make it clear and enticing, and don’t be afraid to promote it.

2. Follow Email Marketing Laws and Regulations

You’ll also want to make sure your emails follow local rules and regulations, including CAN-SPAM and GDPR.

Don’t let all the legalese scare you—just make sure you never buy email lists and consider using double opt-in options so people know what they are getting into. Finally, make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

Email Marketing Step 2: Provide Great Content

Email marketing is all about expectations, and it’s up to you to set them.

If your call to action is strong, and your follow-up is consistent, then you can count on a successful email campaign.

However, if you promise to send one email per week and instead send them daily, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

On the contrary, if someone is expecting daily updates or critical product updates and you don’t deliver, then they are likely to be just as upset in that case, too.

This is why the first follow-up email is so crucial to the success of your email marketing efforts.

Send an Introduction Email

For example, here’s a basic welcome email from Airbnb to a new host. It explains the basics of the process and what you can expect to receive from Airbnb.

Spotify sends out a similar email that confirms the subscription and lets them know what they can expect.

Almost all email service providers give you the option to create an automated welcome sequence, so take advantage of it.

The initial follow-up email should be sent immediately as a way to introduce yourself and detail what you plan on doing with your new subscriber’s email address.

It’s better to be long-winded and detailed than it is to be quick and unobtrusive, but if you can pull off quick and concise, then more power to you.

From here, it’s simply a matter of living up to their expectations.

Don’t Pitch Right Away

You’re not running an email list just for the fun of it—you’re there to engage customers and make sales.

Transitioning from an email list that provides tons of free value into a list that pitches a product for money can be a tricky switch to make.

To do it effectively, it’s a good idea to think in advance about your pitching. You don’t want to surprise everyone with a pitch all of the sudden.

You’ll have a much more successful campaign if people expect sales pitches every once in a while.

If you’re going to get in the habit of selling often, try to put yourself in the reader’s shoes.

Ask yourself if your messaging is consistent with the expectations you’ve set. If possible, understand what the customer has shown interest in before, and send similar offers down the line.

Those that send blind offers are far more likely to lose permission to keep doing so.

Again, each business has different needs, and there aren’t any hard and fast rules as to how often you can pitch or provide content.

Just remember that an email list is a permission asset and it’s better to err on the side of caution than to play it loose and reckless.

How to Write a Great Email Newsletter

Let’s talk about the difference between a good newsletter and a bad newsletter.

The first sign that you’ve received a bad newsletter is that you don’t recall ever asking to receive it.

Typically, this happens when a business either fails to maintain a regular email routine or manually adds someone to their list after receiving a business card or personal email.

Make sure everyone remembers you—the best way to do this is not to let your emails lapse for too long. Try to send an email at least once a month, or once a week if you can.

I find the most compelling newsletters are those that do a great job of mixing messaging and updates.

For example, while the email might contain a list of product updates and images, it’s balanced by a personal message or friendly memo.

Use your newsletter as a way to further your relationship with the reader/customer rather than to pitch them.

Save the pitch for unique updates, offers, and announcements.

Use Email Automation Carefully

If you’re just starting out with an email list, it’s easy to imagine you’ll have time to personally respond to every new subscriber.

Once you start getting more than a handful of subscribers, it becomes next to impossible to keep up.

You’ll start to get more and more complex campaigns, and following through with everyone all the time is impossible.

Top marketers seem to do this exact thing. How?

Their secret is email automation.

It automatically sends out emails that you schedule in advance.

By scheduling a set of emails to send in advance, you can prevent “going dark” for any length of time.

Oftentimes, companies plan out a series of emails—ranging from a few days to a few months—that automatically deliver, warming up anyone who signs up for your list.

That way, when you do need to announce a new product or sale, you can count on the fact that they are paying attention.

Since you’ve built up a relationship over several weeks or months, you’re much less likely to annoy your readers.

Email Marketing Step 3: Analytics and Segmentation

Now that you understand the basics behind an effective email campaign, let’s talk about how to take things to the next level.

Specifically, using segmentation and analytics to refine your broadcasts and generate even better results than a basic campaign.

How To Understand Email Analytics

We’ve talked before about the importance of analytics in web copy, and email is no different.

Every email service provider I’ve ever worked with provides complimentary analytics.

Though they’re all important, the three most important are open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribes. Let’s break down each one and see what there is to learn from it.

First, your open rate explains how many people open your emails. It’s based on a single invisible tracking pixel that loads when someone clicks on your message.

When looking at open rates, it’ll usually tell you how well you’ve built your relationship with readers. Ideally, people are excited to read your emails and open them quickly.

If your open rate is low, it usually means you have a lot of unengaged subscribers. You need to work harder on providing value and managing expectations. Here are a few tips on raising your open rate.

Next, your click-through rate, or CTR, shows how many people clicked on a link (if any) in your email.

If your CTR is low, it means that your message is either not targeted enough, or simply not getting through. In this case, focus on improving your copy.

Finally, your unsubscribe rate tells you how many people have clicked the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of your email.

If your unsubscribe rate is high in relation to your opt-in rate, then you’ve passed the point of building value and writing good copy… you’ve got some serious work to do.

Essentially you’ve built a sieve and people that sign up eventually leave. If this is you, try to examine when people are leaving and take action based on those leaks.

If they’re leaving after a certain automated email, then re-work it. If they’re leaving after marketing messages, then re-work the way you present offers.

If they’re leaving early on in your email funnel, then you need to fix your original call to action so that it’s in harmony with what you’re sending.

Email analytics are critical because, if you’re paying attention, they’ll give you very specific clues as to what you’re doing wrong.

Of course, the key here is “paying attention.”

How To Segment Your Email Marketing List

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, email segmentation is the practice of splitting up your email list into more targeted groups.

Here are a few ways to segment a larger list:

• customer list (in comparison to leads who haven’t bought)
• newsletter subscribers
• daily email list (in comparison to weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc)
• demographics, such as age, location, or job title
• interests, such as marketing or sales topics

Just like targeting in paid ads, dividing your list gives you the ability to send more targeted communications.

For example, some customers want both product and sales updates, while others might only want to hear about new versions. Sales team leads might want to hear about a new sales feature but not a new marketing tool.

Plus, you can send specific emails to buyers thanking them for their purchase, like this email from Chrome Industries thanking people for making a purchase.

With segmentation, you can send a broadcast only to those that didn’t open your last message (ask them why), or to those that showed interest (a second pitch).

You can also split test messaging amongst different groups to A/B test titles, content, or best practices.

As you can see, segmentation isn’t rocket science, but it is work, which is why most don’t take the time to do it right.

If you do, you’ll immediately separate yourself from the pack.

How Much Is Your Email List Worth?

Your email list is one of your most valuable resources, and if you learn how to treat it right, it will pay for itself many times over.

Over time, you can start tracking how much money people on your list spend on average. This will tell you how much your list is worth.

If a list of 10,000 people usually spends $50,000 on a campaign, and you run two of those campaigns each year, you could average it out and say that each subscriber is worth $10 a year.

When you do the math like that, it is easy to see how losing several hundred subscribers could be dangerous to your bottom line.

Email Marketing FAQs 

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing can help businesses reach a wider audience, drive sales, recover abandoned carts, and further develop your relationship with your audience.

How do I build an email list?

You can offer a downloadable asset, host a giveaway, or provide a free email course.

What email marketing regulations are there?

CAN-SPAM and GDPR (for Europe) require you to protect user’s privacy and avoid sending emails to purchased lists.

What is email automation?

Email automation allows you to create complex email campaigns that send emails based on actions, such as when a subscriber adds an item to their cart or downloads an asset.

How do I segment my email list?

Use your email tool to split subscribers based on demographics, interests, or customers versus non-customers. Then, send customized messages to each segment.

Email Marketing Conclusion

If you’ve been ignoring email marketing, it’s time to reevaluate your strategy.

Email marketing delivers huge returns for marketers willing to learn how to do it right. It doesn’t have to be too complicated.

First, remember you’re a guest in the inboxes of your subscribers. Your emails are always just one click away from losing their interest forever. Be polite, respectful, and deliver value.

As you get started, you’ll need to ask permission. Of course, it’s the right thing to do. In the era of new data protections, like the EU’s GDPR, it’s also a legal requirement.

You’ll want to follow through with the promises you make. Provide people with what they’ve asked for and email regularly to line up with their expectations.

There’s no formula for boosting email automation. It’s all about what works best for you and your company’s voice and style.

Finally, you can move on to email segmentation and analytics once you’ve mastered the basics. Start sending separate types of emails to different groups of people so you can deliver more useful emails.

neil patel email marketing software

#1 – HubSpot Review — The Best Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing Automation Software

If you’re looking for an easy way to supercharge your sales, customer service, and marketing processes with automation, HubSpot is an excellent solution. 

It goes beyond automating your business processes. Integrate and optimize different departments in one centralized location, streamlining your entire business’s workflow. 

See How My Agency Can Drive Massive Amounts of Traffic to Your Website

• SEO – unlock massive amounts of SEO traffic. See real results.
• Content Marketing – our team creates epic content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic.
• Paid Media – effective paid strategies with clear ROI.

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Teams don’t have to jump from software to software to get the information they need and you can automate the data transfer process from one team to the next. 

HubSpot has long made its reputation in this field. Their marketing automation capabilities are powerful, with fine granular control.

Set up a drip campaign (or multiple) as complex as you like with delays, triggers, dependencies, and more. You can let email followups and campaigns run automatically with no fear.

Beyond email, automations within HubSpot can apply to contact and client organization, team notifications, lead qualification, data management, and much more.

All your workflows benefit from the HubSpot platform’s clean visual interface. See how all the disparate parts of your marketing department and campaigns can link and work together, plus find new ways to take advantage of automation through visualizing unique team and action connections.

No matter how complex your sales journey or pipeline, HubSpot has the tools and features to not only add useful automation, but improve every part of the customer lifecycle.

And, by using one of HubSpot’s suites, you also get access to essential features like:

• Blog post and SEO planning
• Ad tracking and management
• Social media management
• AI-powered live chat
• Forms and landing pages
• Revenue attribution reporting
• A/B split testing

HubSpot offers basic features, like emails, landing pages, forms, and live chat capabilities for unlimited users absolutely free. So, you can try it the platform without spending a penny. 

Alternatively, you can sign up for a free demo to see all of their advanced features in action. 

The Starter Suite (sales, marketing, CRM, and customer service) starts at $50 per month for two users and up to 1,000 contacts, making it extremely affordable for most businesses. You can add another 1,000 contacts for $11.25 per month, and additional users cost $6 per month.

However, keep in mind you only get access to HubSpot’s Starter version of their Marketing Hub. So you’re going to be somewhat limited in automation capability. Some features you’ll only be able to use so many times per month; others are missing entirely.

The heavy-duty plans above Starter cost a good bit more, but remove those restrictions if you need everything HubSpot offers by way of automation:

• Professional — $1,780 per month ($1,600 per month if you pay annually)
• Enterprise — $5,000 per month for everything HubSpot has to offer

Professional starts with 2,000 contacts, and you can add contacts in increments of 5,000 for $250 per month. Enterprise starts with 10,000 contacts, and it’s only $100 per additional 10,000 contacts.

There’s also the ability to build your own bespoke HubSpot product bundle. You can set which how many features you want for each Hub.

If you want to go heavy on marketing automation, but don’t need as much for sales, customer service, or operations, make your own bundle that includes the Enterprise-tier of Marketing Hub but Starter tiers for the rest.

Plus, if you’re a current member or alumni of HubSpot’s approved incubator, accelerator, or Venture Capital partners with a round of Series A funding under your belt, you can get up to 90% off your first year. 

#2 – Constant Contact Review — The Best for Engaging Social Media & Email Prospects

Modern marketing doesn’t happen on one channel. It’s happening all across the internet on a wide array of devices, all at once.

There are many multichannel solutions for marketing automation, but Constant Contact takes the cake for most businesses that need an easy way to join email and social media efforts.

With its unified dashboard that anyone can use, Constant Contact lets you stay on top of both marketing fronts with ease.

You can push new social posts and reply to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from the same place you can set up automated email sequences and drip campaigns.

Schedule out social posts for next month or quarter and then sync that messaging up with your email campaigns.

Plus, with the platform’s intensely customizable emailer, you can segment messaging with individual sequences that are based upon what you know about your contacts.

Whether you’ve gathered crucial info about your list members manually or you use Constant Contact’s custom form builder to capture it on your landing pages, you can set up individual email sequence tracks based on any of it that will automatically send based on triggers that you set.

So, set up a series of social media posts about the big game, then have unique email sequences for folks on the east coast rooting for one team and then a separate one for the Pacific coast dwellers rooting for the other.

That’s just a super simple example—with Constant Contact, you can make these nested, unified marketing campaigns as intricate and complex as you’d like.

Social monitoring, messaging, and posting is available on all of Constant Contact’s plans. But its most useful email features come in the Plus plan. In it, you can set up automated behavioral and welcome sequences, plus include dynamic content in your emails.

The Plus package from Constant Contact starts at $45/month for up to 500 subscribers, with the price scaling upward alongside the number of additional contacts you need.

If you just want unified email and marketing without all the advanced automation, you can still get unlimited email sends and automated email resends to non-openers with the standard Email plan. That’ll run you $20/month for up to 500 contacts.

Unify your social and email campaigns by getting started with Constant Contact.

#3 – EngageBay Review — The Best for Improving Your Customer Support

How does marketing automation help your support team? EngageBay knows you can’t have sales, marketing, and support existing only in siloes, especially if you sell a product or service where post-sale engagement is every bit as crucial as getting to a sale in the first place.

Specifically, EngageBay’s automation capabilities help your customer service in a couple of ways. First, the same automation tools that allow you to set up triggers, email sequences, and drip campaigns are also available to support reps.

In this platform, you can set up automations based on several service triggers:

• Ticket creation
• Ticket status change
• Ticket priority change
• Assigned rep change
• Tags added or removed

EngageBay has an easy-to-use automation builder that allows you to set actions or conditions based on those triggers, making it easy to streamline the flow of support requests and lessen the pressure on your reps to handle backlog.

Priorities and assignees are set clearly and updated automatically, taking a lot of manual work off your plate. And that same convenience can be had in marketing and sales by automating lead segmentation, email personalization, and more.

That speaks to the second, and perhaps bigger, benefit: how well this integrates with marketing and sales automation to create a better customer experience from start to finish.

EngageBay’s automation tools can start from the moment a prospect expresses interest by joining your list. From there, through your sales funnel and beyond the purchase, this CRM can take care of routine touchpoints, nurturing, warming up, and more.

With all that information and interaction gathered, your support reps are well-prepared to handle anything your customers can throw at them with ease and grace.

That’s big, especially if your service team is handling more than troubleshooting issues.

Maybe your service team also provides continuing customer training (something that’s common in B2B SaaS) or often puts on their sales hats to handle adding services or upgrades.

With all of EngageBay’s automation tools capturing each customer’s entire journey, your support team is never without context or key information, so they can keep impressing the people who buy from you.

Maybe best of all, EngageBay can be tried out for completely free. They have a free-forever package that lacks the automation tools, but allows you to get used to the platform and dashboard.

For the full array EngageBay’s marketing automation features, you’ll need at least the Growth plan. That can cost as little as $39.99 per user per month if you pay for two years up front. That can handle up to 10,000 contacts and 25,000 branded emails per month.

Paying for a single year at checkout raises the monthly per-user rate to $44.99. If you want to pay month-to-month, you’re looking at $49.99 per user per month.

Need more contacts? Upgrade to Pro for $79.99 per user/month (for a two-year commitment) to have no limits on the number of contacts, plus get double the monthly emails that Growth offers and more advanced features.

Bring together your three core departments and provide them all the same useful automation tools by signing up with EngageBay today.

#4 – Sendinblue Review — The Best for Bolstering Your Ecommerce Efforts

Marketing automation isn’t just about marketing efforts. The same tool you use to generate interest in your company in the first place can also be your most powerful weapon for not losing out on important sales opportunities.

Sendinblue’s powerful automation features will help you seal up the holes that allow leads to drop out of your sales funnel.

For a lot of folks, their prebuilt automations will be enough of a life saver. With just a few clicks of your mouse, Sendinblue will set up a workflow to kick in when, say, a visitor leaves your website with items still in their shopping cart or when they’ve clicked on or visited a specific part of your site.

Then, all you have to do is build the email message that gets sent when the trigger action occurs.

And with the depth available in Sendinblue’s email features, you can craft the perfect message to capitalize on the moment.

Personalize the content based on who they are, what they considered purchasing, or where they clicked, then embed unique offers, add effective flair to the email design, and schedule sending based on when it will be most effective. You can even A/B test options to gather data on the smartest way for you to wield these automations.

Not afraid of getting your hands dirty? That’s great—the custom automation builder opens up a world of different ways to construct trigger and action sequences. You can even have multiple entry points feeding into one action or get really granular with qualifying conditions to make sure each action is tailored to proper audience segments.

What does this mean for ecommerce? Well, you can deliver coupons to people who abandoned their carts, personalize deals for previous customers that are delivered at just the right time (like needing to restock or the anniversary of a purchase), and much more—especially when you start building your own automations in the platform.

Sendinblue offers automation capabilities on all of their pricing plans. With the free forever and Lite (starting at$25/month) packages, you will be limited to targeting up to 2,000 of your contacts in your automated workflows.

Upgrade to either Premium (starting at $65/month) or the custom-priced Enterprise plans to get unlimited use of Sendinblue’s marketing automations.

You don’t have to resign yourself to chalking up every abandoned cart as a loss or thinking of each purchase as the end of the sales journey. Sendinblue’s automations can help you seize on missed opportunities that boost your ecommerce revenue today.

#5 – ActiveCampaign Review — The Best for Email Marketing Automation

Email is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. All the tools on this list include email marketing in one form or another, but ActiveCampaign specializes in it.

So, it’s an excellent option if you want to hone in and focus on improving your email marketing strategy. It’s also a super affordable tool that includes numerous automation features for leads anywhere in your funnel.

With that said, they also offer omnichannel automation, including instant messaging and SMS, live chat, and Facebook. 

So, you’re not limited to just email marketing automation with ActiveCampaign. 

Their most popular features cover leads at every point in the funnel, including:

• Engage – Automation maps, site tracking, and subscription forms
• Nurture – List segmenting, dynamic/predictive content, and event tracking
• Convert – Contact and lead scoring, split actions, and win probabilities
• Support – Predictive sending, SMS, A/B split testing, and ecommerce 

You can also set up numerous types of emails like autoresponders, targeted or triggered emails, broadcasts, scheduled emails, and automated funnels. 

And you can design those emails using their intuitive drag and drop designer, or start from one of their 25+ pre-made mobile-responsive design templates. 

Whether you’re just getting started or interested in scaling and optimizing your email marketing strategy, ActiveCampaign is an excellent choice. They offer everything you need to capture, nurture, and close leads at scale. 

ActiveCampaign offers four plans, with the price of each starting at:

• Lite — $9 per month with up to three users
• Plus — $49 per month with up to 25 users
• Professional — $129 per month with up to 50 users
• Enterprise — $229 per month with unlimited users

Each tier includes more advanced features, and pricing is based on the size of your list, starting for up to 500 contacts. 

So, keep in mind that you will have to pay more than the prices above as your list grows. 

#6 – Freshworks CRM Review — The Best for Small to Midsize Businesses

Freshmarketer was one of my favorite marketing automation platforms. There was a lot of customizability to get campaigns just right, but it wasn’t required. I never had to hire a professional service to babysit the software in order for it to work.

Freshmarketer is now Freshworks CRM, and it’s phenomenal. Now, intelligent marketing automation is just one part of an exceptional platform that anyone in the office can use.

SMBs don’t have to worry about hiring a team of super-users just to run campaigns, but they get a lot of the marketing automation features they need to attract customers, nurture their audiences, understand their needs, and drive conversions.  

It’s my #1 recommendation for most users—and for a good reason.

From awareness to retention, you get all the automation features you need to gain more leads, turn those leads into customers, and keep those customers around for life. All while doing less work with better results. 

Plus, you don’t need any technical skills or a dedicated support team to get started. And it takes about a minute to get up and running. 

You also get access to incredible features like:

• Email campaigns and contact management
• Visual drag and drop customer journey builder
• Website, form, and offline event tracking
• Conversion rate optimization tools
• A/B and split testing
• Advanced personalization
• Dynamic heat maps
• Audience segmentation
• Real-time funnel analytics

Furthermore, the software seamlessly integrates with Freshworks’ other tools, so it’s an excellent choice if you currently use or plan to use any of their business software. 

You can try Freshworks CRM on their limited free forever plan or a 21-day free trial of their paid plans, which are incredibly affordable and accessible for businesses of all sizes. However, they depend on the number of contacts you have, so keep that in mind. 

They offer Growth, Pro and Enterprise plans of the full Freshworks CRM, or just the marketing services. Plans for the full CRM start at $29/month for 1,000 active contacts. Plans for Marketing Cloud start at $19/month for 500 contacts.

#7 – Pardot Review — The Best for B2B Businesses

As a B2B business, you market to other companies, which presents a unique set of marketing challenges. As such, you need a marketing automation tool built for the job. 

Pardot exists to help B2B companies build relationships and turn those relationships into revenue. You get a suite of tools perfectly designed for this mission, so you can accommodate an extended buying process and manage complex pipelines.

Plus, it’s a fantastic marketing automation software built around Salesforce the world’s #1 CRM. 

So, you know you’re in good hands. 

From lead generation to sales alignment, the software offers a wide range of features, including:

• Dynamic content and data-based personalization
• Lead-nurturing email automations
• Prospect and lead scoring
• Visual multi-part automation creator
• Advanced segmentation
• Landing page builder
• Smart forms + drag and drop builder
• Social media scheduling, profiling, and analytics
• Lead activity tracking
• Campaign performance reporting
• Lifecycle and funnel reporting
• Pardot Einstein for lead and behavior scoring

Furthermore, over 2.8+ million worldwide users rely on Pardot for their marketing automation needs, making it one of the most popular platforms on this list. 

But it is a bit expensive, so it’s best suited for larger businesses. Their paid plans include:

• Growth — $1,250/month for up to 10,000 contacts and basic features
• Plus — $2,500/month for up to 10,000 contacts with deeper automation + analytics
• Advanced — $4,000/month for up to 10,000 contacts with AI and all features
• Premium — $15,000/month for up to 75,000 contacts with supercharge features

They also offer a few add-ons that come free in the Premium plan. Those add-ons include Salesforce Engage ($50/user per month), Analytics Plus ($3,000/month), and Engagement History ($300/year). 

All plans and add-ons are billed on an annual basis.

Oh, and one last thing: Pardot pronounced par-dot. The “t” is not silent.

Get in touch with Pardot today.

#8 – Acoustic Review — The Best Enterprise-Grade Multi-Channel Marketing Automation Software

Acoustic offers an array of marketing automation products for centralized cross-platform multi-channel marketing. From personalization and email campaigns to web content management and experience management, they offer something for everyone.

Acoustic Campaign is their marketing automation tool, encompassing mobile apps, push notifications, SMS, group chats, social media, ads, email, print campaigns, and more. 

You can also combine this with Acoustic Personalization and Acoustic Analytics for a powerful combination of campaign management, data, and using that data to deliver the right message at the right time. 

With Acoustic Campaign, you get access to powerful features, including:

• Drag and drop campaign builder
• Action, logic, and AI-recommended triggers
• Seamless mobile and digital channel campaigns
• Lead management and scoring
• Split A/B testing
• Customer journey mapping
• Planning and budgeting
• One-to-one ads and lookalike audiences
• Advanced personalization
• Reporting and analytics

Furthermore, they have a community forum where you can publicly ask questions. They also provide an online academy packed full of educational videos and training so you can get the most of your custom automation package. 

Note: Acoustic is built for moderate to large volume campaigns with countless moving parts. So, it’s perfect for businesses managing complicated campaigns across numerous channels. 

But it’s overkill for a lot of businesses and anyone running single-channel campaigns. 

Pricing isn’t available online, and you have to schedule a consultation to learn more. So, keep in mind that you won’t be able to sign up and get started immediately. 

#9 – Act-On Review — The Best for Marketing Agencies

As a marketing agency, you handle marketing campaigns for several clients (if not hundreds of them) at any given time. As such, you need marketing automation software with the ability to manage everything, including your own marketing campaigns, in one place. 

And Act-On offers the perfect solution. 

Their scalable software features unique child and parent campaign capabilities, meaning you can easily manage and handle all of your client accounts from a single Act-On login. 

Plus, you can completely brand and customize everything to deliver custom reports to clients in just a few clicks. 

With Act-On, you can learn more about your clients’ audiences to personalize and tailor their message to match. Not only does this make their life easier, but it also means your team can work less to produce better results. 

When you sign up, you get access to powerful marketing features, including:

• Automated engagement programs
• Website and landing page tracking
• Customer/prospect scoring
• Behavior and demographic segmentation
• Pre-built email, form, and landing page templates
• Interactive reporting dashboards

Plus, you can build custom real-time analytic dashboards for internal and external use, so you and your clients always know what’s going on. 

Furthermore, you can use this information to improve customer ROI, build better technology stacks, and optimize entire marketing campaigns on behalf of your clients. From lead gathering and nurturing to transferring contact information to sales, you’re in good hands. 

Sign up for a free demo to learn more and get started today!

What I Looked at to Find the Best Marketing Automation Software

I stand behind all of my top recommendations, but as you can tell, these are very different products.

Finding the right tool for the job is extremely important. Marketing automation software that serves one company perfectly might be a poor fit for another.

Below, I’ve laid out the major criteria you should use to evaluate each option. Use this guide to narrow your search down to a solution that meets your company’s marketing challenges.

Type of Business

B2B businesses have different marketing needs than D2C companies. 

Furthermore, marketing agencies present a new set of marketing automation challenges. Because of that, specialized software may be necessary to meet your specific needs at a reasonable price point. 

The size of your business matters too. Large companies run complex, massive-scale campaigns and have bigger pockets. So, small business tools aren’t a good match.

However, smaller companies will probably find enterprise-grade features confusing and wildly out of budget, which is why those small business tools exist in the first place. 

So, pay attention to who the software is built for when making your final decision. 

Number of Contacts

Most pricing plans depend on the number of contacts or leads you have. The larger your list, the more you need to pay to maintain it and stay in touch with them. 

If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of contacts, enterprise-grade solutions are probably more cost-effective. However, that’s not the case if you have a few hundred or even a few thousand leads on your list. 

Just be sure to keep this in mind and remember that specific plans may limit the maximum number of contacts you can have. 

And if you hit those limits, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher plan or pay an extra fee.

Your Marketing Channels

Different marketing automation software supports various marketing channels. 

From SMS and email marketing to social media and push notifications, it’s crucial to choose a software that handles everything you need.

Smaller businesses with simple campaigns may not utilize a wide range of channels and can get away using a more affordable tool. 

However, large businesses with complex campaigns spanning numerous channels need something more robust to manage all the moving parts. 

Furthermore, some software includes varying channels in different pricing tiers. So, you may start on one level and need to move up to gain access to more marketing channels. Or you may need to move to (or integrate) a new tool altogether. 

It may help to map out your upcoming campaigns and decide which channels you plan to use.

Automation Features

Automation is at the heart of every tool on this list. But some offer more advanced automation features than others. 

Do you need to score leads and prospects? Maybe you want to combine SMS, email marketing, and Facebook ads in the same customer journey. Or perhaps you need the ability to send hyper-targeted emails on autopilot. 

Regardless of the complexity of your campaigns, don’t forget to consider:

• Split A/B testing
• Automated email campaigns
• Event and website tracking
• Contact management
• Visual customer journey mapping
• Automated segmentation and personalization
• Prospect and lead scoring
• Dynamic content
• Transactional emails
• AI-powered recommendations
• Action and logic-based triggers
• Reporting and analytics

You may not need all of them, and some tools don’t include them. So it’s critical to understand what you need (and don’t need) before making your decision.

Additional Features

It’s not uncommon for marketing automation software to include a handful of features typically found in a CRM tool, like live chat or customer support capabilities. 

Before making a final decision, it’s essential to understand which additional features you need to fill the gap between marketing and sales or customer service. 

You may already have these systems in place. So, you won’t need these additional features. But if you don’t, you might be able to save money, hassle, and time by choosing a software that includes everything you’re missing under one roof. 

HubSpot is an excellent example of this. 

It includes customer service, sales, and marketing automation tools in a centralized location to streamline data movement and foster automation across your entire business. 

types of email marketing

Most Common Email Marketing Types 

1. Welcome Emails

Initial contact with prospects typically finds them unready to do business. In fact, research shows that only 25% of leads are immediately sales-ready, while 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. Nurturing, therefore, is critical for pushing your leads closer to the buying stage.

Welcome emails show better open and click-through rates when they offer a personal touch and introduce your organization without slathering on the sales pitch. Don’t introduce a new product or service before you’ve built a relationship. Simply work on giving off a good first impression — one that illustrates your industry knowledge and expertise — and pave the way for future contact.

Advantages Of Welcome Emails

• The Start Of A Business Partnership: When you fire off that first welcome email to potential prospects, it’s the first step in forming a relationship. When done correctly, this will be a positive experience for them and will leave them more receptive to future emails. In fact, subscribers who read an initial welcome email will read 40 percent more content from a sender over the subsequent 180 days. 
• Boost Metrics: Welcome emails have higher open rates and click-through rates than standard marketing emails. This can be a good way to kickstart your email marketing metrics for the better.

Disadvantages Of Welcome Emails

• Bad First Impressions: A welcome email is the first communication you will have with a potential buyer and if you don’t nail it right out of the gate, you can blow any chance of closing a deal. 

2. Email Newsletters

Many businesses and organizations send email newsletters to stay top of mind for their recipients. Most industrial businesses actually use email newsletters as the foundation of their email marketing program because they are great tools for educating customers and prospects about your business and showcasing employee profiles, company passion projects, and relevant graphics. 

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details of creating email newsletters, you will need to determine your goal. What is it that you want your email newsletter to achieve? You might want to nurture your existing contacts and become the first brand they think of when they need a product or service in your industry. Or your goal might be to increase sharing so that you attract new people to your list. As you define your goal, think about what metrics you can use to track your progress.

Read More: Marketing Goals Vs. Marketing Strategy

Newsletters are great not only for marketing to prospects, but also for nurturing your existing customers with company news and events, product announcements and feedback requests. Such ongoing communication will help you retain happy customers and collect valuable insights about them, so make sure you’re using a marketing CRM like Hubspot to send your emails and track metrics. 

For example, if your goal is to drive traffic to specific pages, you would need to closely monitor click-through rates (CTR). A CTR measures the number of times someone has clicked the link versus the number of people who viewed the link.

➡️ How Are Your Open Rates? See 2020 Industrial Marketing Benchmarks

What kinds of links do they click on the most? Can you upsell to them at all? Which email subject lines have a high open rate? What time of the day is better to send an email? Without a marketing CRM, these questions are left unanswered — and actually one of the top pitfalls industrial sellers and marketers experience.

(Need a refresher on marketing terms? Check out The Essential Dictionary Of Industrial Marketing Terms You Should Know.)

As you work on your newsletter layout and content creation, stay mindful of your goal and make sure you are working towards meeting it by prioritizing the design and placement of calls-to-actions.

Advantages Of Email Newsletters

• Brand Awareness: Similar to newspapers, newsletters create certain anticipation in readers. Whether it is a daily newsletter or a weekend communication, readers get into the habit of receiving it. So if you’re considering sending email newsletters, make sure you’re sending them on a regular cadence. If readers enjoy the content, they will most likely stay subscribed to the newsletter. Building a habit in your email subscribers enables them to recognize your brand and associate it with a positive sentiment.
• Repurpose Content: Newsletters generally contain information that you have already published. Many companies do quick summaries of their most popular blog posts and link to the articles from their newsletter. In this way, they bring subscribers back to the company website and engage them with more company content.
• Diverse Content: Email newsletters give you the freedom to include different content types all in one email that might be important to your organization. For instance, the same newsletter can contain a popular blog post, a new offer, an announcement of an upcoming event, information about a discount and a link to a survey. There might even be a video embedded in the email. (We’ll touch on videos in a bit!)

Disadvantages Of Email Newsletters 

• Diluted Call-To-Action: Due to their format — a long compilation of information — newsletters can be overwhelming with multiple calls-to-action. If you include a series of blurbs or article summaries, the attention of your recipients will most likely be spread across these tidbits of information as opposed to staying focused on a certain element. Of course, you can address this by prioritizing the most important information at the top of the newsletter and include a clear call-to-action after/alongside each block of text.
• Design: With newsletters, the layout becomes a much more complicated task than with dedicated email sends. You’ll have to spend some time deciding on the right placement of images and text, alignment and prioritization of information. This is where A/B testing comes into play.

3. Dedicated Emails 

Dedicated emails, or also known as stand-alone emails, contain information about only one offer. For instance, you can notify your target audience about a new whitepaper you have released or invite them to attend an industry event that you are hosting.

Dedicated emails help you set up the context to introduce the main call-to-action. In this sense, they are similar to landing pages. Dedicated sends are generally used to reach out to your entire email database — a practice that is not necessarily efficient in optimizing conversions and minimizing unsubscribes.

While there are instances when all of your subscribers should be notified, such as a timely new offer or an unprecedented national emergency, in most cases you would want to segment heavily based on your subscribers’ different behaviors and interests.

Another Angle: How To Stay Connected With Customers During The COVID-19 Outbreak

Advantages Of Dedicated Emails

• Focused Call-To-Action: Unlike newsletters, dedicated sends can focus on really driving results for one call-to-action, because there is just one message and one goal.
• Easy To Build: Once you have your email template in place, building dedicated sends should be easy. You will generally grab some of the information already on the landing page, make a few tweaks to it and spend most time nailing down the subject line. 
• Fast To Measure: Naturally, if you have one main message and call-to-action in your dedicated send, it will be easy for you to track progress. You can quickly check the email CTR, landing page views and conversions, and follow the long-term ROI.

Disadvantages Of Dedicated Emails

• Less Consistency: With newsletters, marketers generally stick to a specific schedule. For instance, you might create a weekly newsletter that goes out on Tuesday mornings. Or your company might be sending a weekend newsletter summarizing information published throughout the week. With dedicated sends, the schedule is less clear and, potentially, less consistent. You might use dedicated emails to publish a new offer (and new products or services are not always launched regularly). Even if you decide to maintain a specific schedule, your subscribers might not realize it or expect communication from you because there is no clear connection between the separate sends.
• Homogenous Content: As dedicated sends contain one message, it’s tough to include a shout-out about some other campaign that might also be important to your organization. Use the landing page your email is linking to showcase other relevant information. If you’re sending an eBook offer, include other offers on your Thank You page, as seen in the example below.

See More: 33 Industrial Lead Generation CTA Tips, Tricks, And Ideas

4. Lead Nurturing Emails

As an inbound marketing tactic, lead nurturing is all about understanding the nuances of your leads’ timing and needs. That’s why it’s important to define your buyer personas to reach your target audience effectively. Otherwise, your emails get left unopened or deleted.

Lead nurturing introduces a tightly connected series of emails with a coherent purpose and full of useful content. In this context, lead nurturing offers more advantages than just an individual email blast.

Promotional emails are a multifaceted beast. They can be designed to promote a number of things, from marketing materials, such as blog posts, webinars, and eBooks, or discounted service offerings. These types of emails can also serve to inform your customer about what’s happening within your organization. You can even send out these emails using an automated system, cutting down on time and labor needs.

Be sure to create different types of promotional nurturing emails to suit the needs of your users based on where they are in the marketing funnel. This ensures you’re providing directly useful content to all prospects, at the right stage of their buying journey. The overall goal here is to guide them through the sales cycle to move them down the funnel and, ultimately, convert them into loyal customers.

Learn More: 11 Content Marketing Ideas For Manufacturers & Industrials (With Examples)

Advantages Of Lead Nurturing Emails

• It’s Timely: Study after study shows that email response rates decline over the age of the lead. You need to use lead nurturing campaigns to take advantage of the dynamic between subscriber recency and CTR. What that means is that if you have a new lead, don’t wait to contact them!
• It’s Automated: Once you set up lead nurturing, emails are sent out automatically according to your schedule as new leads come in. This leads to a high return on a low investment. You might launch the campaigns and forget about them, but the emails will be doing the work for you, helping you qualify leads and push them down the sales funnel faster. See what we mean by needing a marketing CRM platform? Take a look at our Must-Have Digital Marketing Apps And Tools (Including Free Ones).
• It’s Targeted: Studies show that targeted and segmented emails perform better than mass email communications. Lead nurturing enables you to tie a series of emails to a specific activity or conversion event. You can craft your follow-up email based on the action a lead has taken on your website, thus showing that you know their interests in the topic and what they might need next. Lead nurturing emails can highlight reconversion opportunities that tie back to their earlier interests based on this information.

Disadvantages Of Lead Nurturing Emails

• Generates Less Concurrent Buzz: With dedicated sends to your email database, you can generate a lot of buzz around your brand. If you’re sharing a brand new product or service, there is usually an increase in engagement resulting from simultaneous forwarding and social media sharing (especially if you have Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter sharing links in your email). Lead nurturing cannot quite achieve the same buzz effect because it is programmed to schedule fewer emails to segmented audiences. So while there will still be sharing, you won’t see a huge spike in traffic and conversions on a specific day. Rather, the visits and leads will trickle in.

Dive Deeper: How Marketing & Sales Pros Can Build Effective Prospect Lists

• Passive Tracking: Because lead nurturing is automated and marketers often forget about it after they’ve set it up, it also tends to be underreported. Make sure your lead nurturing campaigns include unique tracking tokens. Remember to revisit your marketing analytics often to evaluate performance and prove the ROI of your efforts.

Learn how emails and inbound marketing together drive growth for manufacturers and industrial companies.

Learn More About Inbound Marketing  ▶

5. Sponsorship Emails 

All the types of marketing emails we have discussed so far are under the assumption that you are sending communications to your own email database. If you want to reach a different audience and gain new leads, you might try out sponsorship emails with display ads. A sponsorship usually entails you paying to include your copy in another vendor’s newsletter or dedicated send.

Sponsorship email campaigns are one component of a paid media strategy, including pay-per-click (PPC), display advertising, mobile advertising, affiliate advertising, etc.

In this paid media universe, you benefit from being super specific when describing the target audience you want to reach.

Read More: Display Ads Vs. Search Ads Vs. Social Ads

Generally, you’ll have to design your email copy or ad placement according to the specifications listed by the vendor. Check if the partner has any size restrictions or image suggestions. Provide them with both the HTML and plain text versions of the copy in advance.

Ensure you trust that they are a credible partner and understand your manufacturing business needs (if you’re not already in a business relationship).

Advantages Of Sponsorship Emails

• Highly Targeted: The biggest advantage of sponsorship emails is that you can be specific in defining the segment you want to reach. Getranular in identifying the different characteristics of your target audience — number of employees, geographic location, their interests and challenges, etc.
• Exact ROI: There is a very specific investment in sponsorship emails — you know how much you are paying the vendor. Now you only need to track the results you are getting (visits, leads, sales) to determine your return on the cost you have paid. Knowing the exact ROI will help you fit it into your marketing budget and build accurate marketing reports at the end of the quarter.

Reach 300,000+ buyers today with a display advertisement in the daily email newsletter, Thomas Industry Update.

See Advertising Campaigns

Disadvantages Of Sponsorship Emails

• It’s Paid: Sponsorship emails are sent to people you haven’t earned as subscribers (they didn’t opt-in to your list). In this context, you have to pay to get content in front of them. Vendors offer different payment packages and here you enter the land of negotiation. Some of the most popular options are paying a flat free, paying based on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model or paying per new lead acquired.
• Dedicated Resources: Sponsorship emails and management of the vendor relationship require a big marketing effort and tight control. In addition to brand synergies, you’ll also need to understand the data behind their emails. If your industrial business has a small marketing team, this type of email marketing can be difficult to execute. 

Toagosei America Inc., a manufacturer of Aron Alpha industrial adhesives drove more than 73k impressions with one newsletter advertising send. Learn more here.

6. Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are the messages triggered by a specific action your contacts have taken and enable them to complete that action. For instance, if you sign up for an industry webinar, you will fill out a form and receive a transactional (thank-you) email, which gives you login information to join. If you are using a double opt-in, people will receive an email asking them to click on a link to confirm their registration.

Transactionals are also the messages you receive from eCommerce sites that confirm your order and give you shipment information and other details about your recent purchase.

Advantages Of Transactional Emails

High CTR: Recipients anticipate transactional emails because they help them complete an action, and that is why they open them and click on them. Take advantage of this dynamic and include a highly customized call-to-action (maybe even as a P.S.) to leverage that the subscriber is fresh and very actively engaged with your email communication.

Disadvantages Of Transactional Emails

Creates An Obstacle: Sometimes the idea of taking yet another action discourages contacts from completing their activity altogether because it seems to them like they are jumping through hoops.

7. Re-Engagement Emails

If metrics show that a portion of your subscribed client list has been inactive, it may be time to send out a re-engagement email to re-establish contact and goodwill. Asking for feedback is an excellent way to bring your business back to their minds, and if they respond, it’s a win-win; they’re again actively aware of your business, and you’ve got fresh feedback to work with for improving processes and marketing tactics.

And even if they wind up unsubscribing, there is a bright side: Your email engagement rates will improve overall, and your email reputation will see a boost among internet service providers (ISPs).

Advantages Of Re-Engagement Emails

Turning A Loss Into A Win: According to Active Campaign, turning an inactive subscriber into a customer is five times cheaper than acquiring a brand new customer.

Clean Up Your Lists: Worst case scenario is that your re-engagement emails don’t reel these prospects back in. The silver lining is that no matter the outcome of this send, you’ll be able to clean up your email lists.

Disadvantages Or Re-Engagement Emails

Don’t pester: If a contact has become unengaged once before, maybe they don’t want to be contacted again. Sending a re-engagement series is definitely worth it because we all have to shoot our shot to win new business, but be sure not to pester your prospects again if they’re not ready to partner up. 

8. Brand Story Emails

Storytelling can be a powerful tool to get your point across to customers and prospects by taking advantage of emotional responses. So ask yourself this: Is there a personal story behind your brand? Do you have a company profile video you’d like to share?

Maybe your business has a unique history. For Thomas, our brand, in a nutshell, is this:

From the dominant big green books of the Thomas Register to today, when the Thomas Network is the go-to resource for product sourcing and supplier selection, our singular focus has been on helping to fuel the success of the industry.

Across our emails and other marketing collateral, this story is evident and we use our history to display reputation and showcase our focus on industry to prove purpose. This unique story gets the point across to our audience of who we are, what we do, and how we can help them.

Maybe you haven’t been manufacturing or distributing products for over a century, but every business has a unique story to tell. It’s good to start with your unique selling proposition. Here’s an example of how a manufacturer shares their brand story on their website making it easy to share this page in emails to connect with more customers:

Manor Tool is a metal stamping company, specializing in punching, bending, forming and deep drawn stampings. They published an interactive timeline on their About Us page to showcase the innovative milestones through the history of the company. Manor Tool was founded more than 60 years ago and this page reaffirms its deep roots in the industry. Tell your customers and prospects about it in an email if you’ve made a newly designed website page like this! The email will drive website traffic and hopefully nurture a lead into a sale.

Advantages Of Brand Story Emails

Emotional Connection: Emails that tell your brand story and trigger an emotional response with your subscribers can help drive purchase decisions and customer loyalty. 

Disadvantages Of Brand Story Emails

Don’t Spam: It can be hard to figure out what your business brand story is. Every email you send should have a purpose so you aren’t spamming your customers’ and prospects’ inboxes. If you don’t have a fully developed brand story, then wait it out until you do. No customer or prospect wants to receive emails from a company with inconsistent messaging.

Learn More: Why Brand Marketing Is Important For Manufacturers

9. Video Emails

Video emails go a bit hand-in-hand with brand story marketing. They can more creatively share your company story and expertise. You can email:

• A factory tour video
• A Product/project spotlight video
• A Company overview

Incorporating your videos in email marketing is a smart strategy because 95% of a video message is retained versus only 10% when reading text. They simply get high engagement! Wistia performed A/B testing on their email marketing campaigns and discovered a 21.52% increase in clicks from image to video thumbnails. Here at Thomas our marketing emails to professionals in the manufacturing and industrial industry that shared video content converted 14% more than eBook promotion.

Advantages Of Video Emails

• Videos Are Super Engaging: Endless studies reveal how consumers and buyers prefer interacting with videos. For example, 89% of viewers are likely to purchase a product after watching a product video. That’s because some services or products can be complex — videos help explain the value and showcase the products more clearly.
• Videos Aid In Marketing ROI: According to HubSpot, Marketers who incorporate video into their content strategies have seen 49% faster revenue growth than those who don’t. 

💡 Thomas Tip: Suppliers who advertise with videos (like the one below) on their Thomasnet.com Company Profile get increased engagement & RFQs by 32% — with some seeing increases as high as 70%.https://play.vidyard.com/oJ99r9yL4LUuncnKbXUF6j?disable_popouts=1&v=4.3.3&gdpr_enabled=1&type=inline

“Thomas is an accountable partner for our digital advertising,” said Brad Godwin, CEO of E2Global, a provider of turnkey consumable manufacturing services. “The amount of quality leads being generated is too many to mention.” Read How E2Global Saw 4X Revenue Growth Through Online Efforts.

Advertise Your Business For Free  ▶

According to our sourcing activity, every second, a buyer or engineer visits Thomasnet.com to source products and look for new suppliers. But they can’t contact you if your company isn’t listed — so list yours for free today.

Disadvantages Of Video Emails

It Can Be Confusing: Video content is not the same as traditional text. You have to decide how much equipment to invest in, what story to tell, the components you’ll film, any graphic elements, and even music. We’ve created this beginner’s guide here, but we also offer free video production with an advertising program for manufacturers & industrial companies.

“I can’t believe how awesome the video turned out. Even all the captions describe us exactly. It’s almost as if people from Thomas have worked here before,” said HPL Stampings.

Get Started  ▶

10. Review Request Emails

According to Pew Research & Merit, millennials make up the largest generation of the United States workforce, meaning that 73% are involved in making purchasing decisions for their companies. Aligned with the industrial buying cycle, these buyers aren’t making purchase decisions until they’re 70% of the way through the buying process before speaking to a supplier. We often see these buyers reference reviews sites like, Glassdoor, G2Crowd and Google Reviews to research companies based on what past customers have said. By requesting reviews of your business on these sites, you can build credibility and help boost your search engine results.

A good place to start is by requesting reviews from your top and most happy customers. It also doesn’t hurt to include an incentive like a chance to win a gift card if it’s within the scope of your budget.

💡 Thomas Tip: A Google My Business profile increases your reach to local buyers in your region. Make sure your profile is complete with your business name, address, and phone number so they can contact you. To learn more about winning business from local buyers, get this free guide.

Advantages Of Review Request Emails

Credibility: With more buyers educating themselves on the businesses they might want to partner with, reviews sites are one of the first stops. If a buyer is between two suppliers, a handful of positive reviews may be the thing that sways them to choose you or your competitor.

Search Engine Optimization: Some review sites will have outstanding domain authority levels and including links back to your site, will only help boost the authority of your site. Reviews will help create new and unique content about your company that is keyword rich and hopefully improve your rankings on search engines.

Disadvantages Of Review Request Emails

Bad Reviews: The obvious disadvantage here is reaching out for positive reviews and a customer responding negatively instead. With these types of emails, it’s smart to segment your send list to the customers you know are happy with the partnerships you’ve had.

Email Marketing Nurtures Leads To Customers

These types of emails are a great way to diversify your content and experiment in your email marketing strategy. How are your emails faring? Check out how your open rates and click-through rates compare against others in the industry in our 2020 Industrial Marketing Benchmarks article or contact our team to run a free Digital Health Check on your online presence. We’ll score your efforts to see where you can improve and how you compare to competitors.

Let us help you turn those prospects into customers — we’re manufacturing and industrial experts too with degreed engineers on staff to turn your complex services into compelling content that engages buyers. 

“Partnering with Thomas has been a tremendous success. We are seeing 1-3 inquiries a week now and are working on expanding our supply base to support the new opportunities,” said an executive at Conformance Coatings & Prototyping.

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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