Email marketing is one of the most lucrative tools for businesses trying to connect with their customers. It allows you to connect with the right customer at the right time with the right message. However, it’s not an easy job. On average, marketers spend around 20 hours per week on email campaigns that they manage manually. They first have to plan out the campaigns, get the email design and content ready, and then send it out to each name of their list.

How To Find The Right Email Marketing Tool? Sounds cumbersome, right? Not just that, they then have to manage responses to the emails, if any, and reply actively otherwise your prospect or customer might get disinterested in the brand. So, you’d probably need a person to just manage marketing emails who’d have to be on their feet 24X7 manually setting up emails and sending them out from time to time. As the world moves towards automation in all walks of life, email marketing automation has also become commonplace. So, you can just offload all the management of your marketing emails to a right email marketing tool that allows email automation.

Source: Salesforce

Before diving any deeper into email marketing tools, let’s first understand what Email Automation means.

Email automation is the ability to send pre-decided emails that are triggered based on specific customer behavior. For instance, when you sign up for a trial version of some online app, you soon get an email about why you should upgrade to the paid version. That’s email automation. It allows you to get send out the right message to the customer at the right time without having to manually do the work each time.

To get email automation, you need a third-party email marketing tool. While there’s no right or wrong tool out there, choosing an adequate tool requires research and clarity. To get you going on that, here are 10 things that you should consider while selecting the right email marketing tool for your business.

10 Things To Consider While Finding The Right Email Marketing Tool For Your Business

Customizable Templates

It’s futile to invest in an email marketing tool that doesn’t help you in creating the emails for your marketing campaigns faster and better. So, you should look out for tools that have built-in templates for you to use and generate emails instantly. That being said, you don’t want to be completely restricted by the tool. Therefore, ensure that the tool also allows for an ample amount of customization in these templates. That way, you can pick a template, modify it to suit your brand language, and create emails in a jiffy.

HTML Coding

In the present times, if you want to stand out in the competitive market, you need to go beyond simple designs and create emails that are nothing short of being webpages themselves. They should be well designed, clickable, and even have embedded multimedia elements to engage the customer. To get this kind of customization in your marketing emails, you’d probably sometimes need to code your emails in HTML. For that, you need a tool that’s compatible with HTML coded emails.

Event Registration

Imagine you’re hosting a webinar and you create an amazing landing page for people to register at. Now, you’d want people to get details about the webinar or the link for the webinar instantly on their email once they’ve registered. To do that, you need a tool that allows you to create event-specific forms through which you can set up automated emails specifically for the event. If your company does online and offline events often, you should strongly consider tools that allow event registration.

Footer Specifications

Most marketing tools have certain pre-specified messages for all emails that are sent out via that tool. These messages not only include options to report and unsubscribe from the email list but also have small promotions for the tool itself. Clearly, you’d not want your marketing emails to promote another tool, right? So, while choosing a tool, you also check whether or not there is an option to change the standard footer message. Ideally, you should go for a tool that gives you the liberty to customize footer with your social media links and add endnotes like in Mailchimp.

Reporting Features

You spend so much time figuring out your email marketing campaigns. The effort would be futile if you are unable to know the impact your email has had. While all tools give you some sort of analysis about the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts, you should take time to check out tools that have clear metrics that they report. A good tool would tell you the open rate, click-through rate, and the bounce rate of your emails.

SPF and DKIM setup

You also want the ISPs to know that you are worthy of sending the email and you are who you say you are. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), are the verifications you give to the ISPs confirming the identity and authenticity of your email domain. When you select a tool, you should also read whether or not they have these verifications in place, or else you’d easily fall victim to email spoofing (somebody taking control of your email domain)

Pricing

Lastly, it is important to consider the pricing that each tool has. Depending on your budget, you should compare the services provided by each tool and choose one that fits your needs but is also affordable. Most email marketing tools either charge you on the basis of the number of campaigns or one the basis of the sender list. If you think you are going to be sending a lot of emails but to a handful of quality leads only, you should go for sender-list based pricing. On the other hand, if you think you would be doing more of cold outreach to long lists of recipients, going for campaign-based pricing is preferable. Also, do not forget to check out any available offers on the pricing. Often, email marketing tools have some discounts available.

In the End: Try Before You Buy

While you should check all these features of different email marketing tools and compare them with one another, it’s better to try them out before making a purchase. Tools like Mailchimp allow you to explore all it’s features and pay only when you actually send out a campaign email. So, you can create templates, manage lists, and get comfortable with the tool before investing in it. Always remember to start small, use a tool, and then upgrade/purchase as per your business requirements. To summarize, there is no perfect tool out there, just the right tool that fits your needs.