Email marketing is still a highly valuable tool for all types of marketing. Despite all the hype about the importance of social media marketing, most retail professionals find that email drives the highest level of customer engagement and. Email marketing is a proven success, but what’s surprising is that so many marketers are still not using email marketing services.
Known as email marketing providers (EMP) or email services providers (ESP), email marketing services help you design and manage your business emails. An ESP platform includes both software and hardware that manages your contact list, helps you design better emails, and gives you the tools to analyze your progress on a far bigger scale that you could through a personal or business email program.
What are the benefits of email marketing services?
Here are the top 9 reasons you should use an email marketing service:
1. Design better email newsletters
Email marketing services make it far easier to produce beautiful email newsletters and emails of all types that match your business branding and are eye-catching and appealing. Consistent branding is important, so ESP templates make that easy to deliver. The best ESP providers offer a range of templates and drag-and-drop elements that make it simple to design an attractive e-newsletter or sales emails. With email marketing services you can include images, video content, and many different fonts, and place them in exactly the right spot for maximum effect.
2. Ensure your email will always display correctly
Email templates provide more than good looks. When you send a marketing email, you’ll have to be very careful about the coding so that it displays correctly in every email client. Email programs are not very forgiving if you mess up the coding, and vary far more in their layout and presentation than web browsers.
If you design emails on your own email platform, you’ll need to be proficient in coding and willing to spend a lot of time making sure that you’ve got it exactly right on every email. But with an email marketing services provider, you can rely on the templates to keep everything lined up and coded correctly. Don’t forget that about half of all emails today are opened on mobile devices. Email marketing services help make sure that your email will render correctly on every device.
3. Save time organizing your contacts
Collecting contact information can quickly accumulate. It extends well beyond the subscriber’s name and email address, and maintaining all that data in a separate spreadsheet consumes time and is burdensome. Email marketing services, however, automatically handle your contacts, organizing their data to provide you with quicker and easier access.
4. Built-in analytics
It’s difficult to track the success of your email marketing campaign from your Yahoo or Google email address. Email marketing services provide built-in analytics that guide you on how to keep improving your customer engagement and retention rates by showing you exactly which emails succeed. Without analytics, you’re really just emailing blind. These analytics reveal how many of your emails reached the recipient’s inbox, how many of those emails were actually opened, and how many links were clicked in the body of your email. Email analytics can also help you develop insights into why your email bounced or which subject lines are the most successful.
5. Manage your lists more effectively
As your email list grows bigger, it gets harder to manage it using a standard personal or business email account. A good ESP helps you assign subscribers to different lists so that you can use segmentation more effectively, and prevents the dreaded possibility of accidentally putting your whole list in the open CC field. It’s also far easier to comply with the
CAN-SPAM law (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing law) that requires that you make it easy for people to unsubscribe and to process their request within 10 days. Email marketing services unsubscribe recipients immediately and automatically.
6. Avoid the risk of being blacklisted
If you send emails from your Gmail or Yahoo account to too many people at once, or your emails contain content that is thought to be spam, your email address and entire IP location could be blacklisted as a spam address by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That means that every email you’d send in the future could go straight to the recipient’s spam folder, even if it’s not a marketing email. Email marketing services monitor the final destination of your emails. They take steps to make sure that emails aren’t marked as spam and protect you from becoming blacklisted by the ISPs.
7. Send your emails at the best possible time
Studies have shown that certain days of the week and particular hours of the day are the optimum time to send different marketing emails. But what if you’re in Paris on business and the best time to send an email to your US clients would be 3am? Email marketing services let you schedule emails to be sent at whatever time you like so that you don’t need to set timers to make sure you catch that important email window.
8. Easily and quickly scale up
Every email platform has a limit to the number of contacts you can email at one time. As your business grows, you’re going to want to be able to send emails to hundreds of recipients in one go. Email marketing services platforms can expand to accommodate thousands of contacts and permit you to send bulk emails to myriads of recipients at once. With an email marketing platform you can easily scale up your business without worrying about hitting a wall.
9. Automate your email campaigns
Automation is the hot topic of 2018. Most ESPs enable some level of email automation such as autoresponders. Autoresponders can be set to send a customized, tailored email to individual contacts when they carry out a specific action. For example, you can set autoresponders to send an email when your contact celebrates a birthday, or when someone subscribes for the first time, or even when someone buys an item from your website. Autoresponders save you time while delivering a personalized email service at scale.
How email marketing services help your business
Email marketing services can directly improve your business. For starters, the built-in CAN-SPAM law compliance means that you won’t have to worry about falling foul of the law. Only contacts that have explicitly opted in will be added to your email lists and every email will automatically include the necessary unsubscribe options so that you adhere to anti-spam regulations.
Most email marketing providers include split testing or A/B testing in the platform so that you can test multiple elements including different subject lines, the inclusion of video content, different email formats, and many other aspects. Split testing is one of the best ways to optimize your email marketing and nearly half of marketers use it to test alternate subject lines. By taking advantage of the split testing capabilities of your ESP, you can increase your email open rates and engagement success.
If you are running a small business without a large marketing or IT department, email marketing services give you another level of resources and support to draw on without paying to expand your business team. From suggestions about the best way to design your emails to one-on-one customer support in troubleshooting difficult email marketing challenges, your email services provider is another valuable player on your team.
One of the most successful tools in the email marketers’ toolkit is segmented email lists. This means dividing your contacts according to their age, hobbies, location or other factors so that you can send more targeted emails that relate more closely to their interests. Segmented emails have an open rate that is about 15% higher than non-segmented emails and a click-through rate that is over 100% higher. One study found that more than 50% of all revenue is generated by segmented emails. Having all of your customer information in the same place as your email program means that you can apply segmentation based on almost any feature you like. Never mind targeting your customer base by age or demographic, with an email marketing platform you can send emails according to whether or not your recipients opened your previous email or how they joined your email list. The more targeted and relevant your emails are, the higher your click-through rate and user engagement will be.
Mass personalization and customization is one of the biggest marketing trends for 2018 across all verticals and media. Email marketing services enable you to hop onto that bandwagon by making it easy to send automated personalized emails that are triggered by a specific action, such as when a customer makes a purchase or opens a customer service ticket. With email marketing services it’s easy to send every client an email with a personalized subject line, which has a 6% higher open rate than emails without personalization.
Bottom Line
The best email marketing services provide valuable features that help you make the most of your email marketing campaigns and improve your business in a number of ways. Using a top-rated email marketing service such as
aWeber or
GetResponse lets you take advantage of better email design, contact organization, analytics, and segmentation while avoiding the risks of being blacklisted as a spam account. Learn more insights and compare email marketing platforms on Website Planet.
