Essential Email Marketing Tools to Elevate Your Outreach Strategy

Email marketing is all about taking your prospects through the customer journey via an email marketing funnel - whether you are sending them bulk or drip campaigns.

However, you need to know which email marketing system to use because it's not just about hitting send or just looking at the cheapest price.

E-commerce businesses have other requirements while businesses offering in a small exclusive niche require a different email marketing process.

You need certain email marketing add-ons that can help you with a number of tasks such as welcome messages, sales automation, web push notifications, designing and implementing your entire marketing funnel, and optimising your campaigns (but that's definitely not all).

Also Read: The Cost of Email Marketing: Is It Expensive?

Let's look at which email marketing solutions would be herculean to your email campaign.

1. Constant Contact

When you are analysing different email marketing providers, you are hoping to land a great deal, if not find the best email marketing service. Most email marketing tools are available for a small price, it's the advanced add-ons that count.

Besides the basic ability to create email marketing campaigns, you need several other features such as marketing automation capabilities, drag and drop builder, email templates, audience segmentation, landing page builder, drip campaigns, and other cool tools.

Constant Contact is a great option and here is why:

The email marketing service has been around for over 25 years and has a significant market share now. It's an all-in-one digital marketing platform that lets you scale your digital marketing efforts because of its easy-to-use interface and impressive marketing tools.

Having everything in one place and being able to manage your social media posts, your list growth, and your email marketing campaigns through one platform is definitely an advantage.

However, Constant Contact does not have a free version. You can only avail of a free trial for 7 days.

The Core Plan starts at $9.99 per month and is a simple plan with basic digital and email marketing features such as the ability to manage social media platforms from one place, a large array of email templates, some amazing integrations, and chat and email support.

It's a good choice for small businesses with a low budget but the larger your email list gets, the more you pay and the plan goes all the way up to 50,000 contacts at $300 per month.

However, if you don't need any premium features, you can use Constant Contact at $10 for 500 contacts. It all depends on how many subscribers you have and how many people you plan to send an email to.

If you need advanced marketing automation features, the ease of drag and drop editor to simply pull products from your online store, more in-depth list segmentation, social media marketing, and personalised consultation, you would have to go for the Plus package which starts at $45 a month.

The Plus plan also has tier-based pricing based on the number of contacts in your email list.

Let's move on to the next one: Mailchimp!

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is probably one of the most popular email marketing services out there and its brand name just arouses a sense of familiarity as a reliable email marketing solution. The best part about this platform is that they give a feel of what you can get with a free plan.

If you have up to 500 contacts and want to send a maximum of 2,500 emails a month, you can do it without spending a cent. They also have 300+ integrations, a landing page and form builder, a creative assistant, and ready-to-use templates in this package. That's not a bad deal at all!

If you want more advanced features, they aren't very pricey. For just $11 a month you can get everything in the free package plus the option to remove Mailchimp branding from your emails, A/B testing, email scheduling, and the option to build automated customer journeys.

Pay a little more for the $17 per month package and get even better features such as pre-built journeys, custom coded- templates, send-time optimisation, and dynamic content. If you have advanced email marketing needs, the best one out of the paid plans is the Premium which I at $299/ month.

This package includes everything in the previous with a special dedicated onboarding assistant, multivariate testing, advanced segmentation, and unlimited contacts. You have the opportunity to send 150,000 emails a month.

Mailchimp is the best email marketing software and is ideal for eCommerce platforms that have to send plenty of emails and have thousands of contacts and for medium-sized firms that have plenty of transactional emails to send - it's an exceptional marketing automation platform and its features can help increase your click-through rates.

Mailchimp is also great for smaller enterprises as it has very affordable pricing and a very responsive team.

However, we are going to give you one more option.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is also a highly acclaimed email marketing provider and provides several of the best email marketing tools such as segmentation, the ever-popular drag-and-drop email editor, website builder, branded templates, a free image gallery, sign-up forms, transactional email options, and several other features that are common in most email marketing platforms.

If you want send-time optimisation to build a killer email marketing strategy, you will have to opt for the Premier package at $149 a month. The package has many other benefits including unlimited emails and premier support. The other packages are the Unlimited package at $99 per month and the Basic package at $45 per month.

You can send unlimited mail with the Unlimited package as well but if you want email marketing software that gives you the latest and greatest features, you will have to opt for Premier.

It is a great email marketing platform for large businesses that have the need to send emails in bulk and need to send many emails. Mailchimp may be on the higher end for larger businesses while Campaign Monitor is priced more reasonably.

However, you can start out with a great free plan on Mailchimp if you are a small entrepreneur or don't have any advanced email marketing needs such as A/B testing, landing pages, drag & drop, etc.

You can choose the email marketing tool you want, but we have one extra for you to consider.

Warm-up your domain

So you have the email marketing chops: list, customer data, copy, email domain, email service provider, images, CTA, everything. Now, you are ready to press Send and see the money rolling in. But wait, what if no one sees your email?

If you look at your personal inbox you will notice that many of the emails lands in spam, especially if they have a promotional message. To prevent that, you need to warm-up your email domain and improve your sender reputation.

GoCustomer can help you do that and it won't cost you much! Check out our price plans and maximize your email marketing ROI.