Stay in Touch! "Email Marketing"

Many forms of marketing exist in the digital world, one of the first and effective forms was via email! Everyone has at least a few subject lines reading "50% of whole online purchases", or "take this quiz and see if you qualify as a genius" in their email inbox. These are examples of email marketing in full swing. Recently, a lot of large companies have realized how important email marketing is because it is a direct line of contact with their customers, in fact email marketing can sometimes increase sales by up to 35%. With a lot of focus on this practice, companies are focusing on finding experts that can optimize their emails for increasing conversions and retain current customer interest in the brand.

Email Marketing Tips

Several ways exist to improve your email marketing. Believe it or not, there are a few unique ways to be practically an expert at email marketing.

Your Subscribers are Valuable

The people who subscribe to your emails are really interested or had an awesome experience with the business. These consumers should be treated with the highest respect and should basically receive special treatment considering they read your stuff and can buy again.

Useful Content

Most consumers have a lot of subscriptions, there are times when the cleaning process begins and they unsubscribe from what they lack interest in. Those who are invested in your company may share similar interests to the content you provide and will be interested in reading what you send out.

Keeping it Short & Concise

More often than not, people get tens or hundreds of emails a day mainly from other companies trying to promote products and other content. There is a lot of competition out there and that's when time becomes a very precious resource. So making sure you get your point across and don't take up too much time of your customer/client, the better you will look in their perspective.

Email Automation

Sending out emails is a fantastic way for a company to stay in touch with their customers and constantly keep sales and promotion in front of them to increase your sales and hold up conversions. Sometimes sending several emails can be very difficult with hundreds and thousands of customers. So in short, email automation can save a lot of time by creating emails, creating funnels for different customers who are in specific stages on the buying process to target them with unique emails, and test different emails to improve conversions. According to Constant Contact, 98.4% of consumers check their email once a day! So being on top of email is absolutely crucial for businesses.

Email Software & Tools (Mailchimp vs. Constant Contact)

With email being such a big deal for a majority of companies that are focused on their customers/clients, some big players made some big moves and created some tools that can optimize, automize, and overall improve emails being sent from companies to customers. This is very important because not only this allows for business emails to appear more professional so they can be distinguished from casual emails, but it also manages to make life easy for marketers to send.

MailChimp

As mentioned prior, new technologies began to enter the scene of email marketing when there was potential for many businesses to see use in emailing customers. Mailchimp was founded in 2001, right around the dot com bubble. Today the company successfully helps businesses run email marketing campaigns, optimize messages, and even A/B test different emails. The company now sends 10 billion emails per month on behalf of users and gains roughly 14,000 new customers every day. Mailchimp particularly focuses on mainly emails, but also offers tools for landing pages, Facebook ads, post cards, signup forms, and Google re-marketing ads. MailChimp also offers the unique ability to stay connected with online store platforms like Shopify or Woo Commerce, the data from those platforms syncs with MailChimp to provide updated analytics on customers, email lists, and conversions.

Constant Contact

Another effective and very popular email automation platform is constant contact. This tool offers countless templates for designed the perfect email for your targeted market, collects email addresses from multiple platforms to diversify email campaigns and get as many leads as possible, and tracks real time success with an automated data analytics tool provided effective information and insights on email campaigns. Constant Contact also offers auto responders to emails which is a great email automation asset that saves so much time for businesses and marketers. A very unique feature in Constant Contact is the interactive event email setting where the recipients of the emails can interact with scheduling and events right in the email itself, this aspect makes it very easy for customers to engage with the business right on the newsletter.

Which is Better?

Several metrics can be used to see which email marketing automation platform is better for marketers, but it really comes down to the functionality and ease of use when determining which platform to consider. In fact, both of the softwares are so developed and easy to use considering they offer templates and the navigation is very easy. Specifically the navigation along the bottom of MailChimp leads emails all the way from choosing recipients to designing the template, to confirming it. When it comes to design, Constant Contact offers a lot more templates for emails, however MailChimp allows you to import code from URL or a .zip file, also you can get creative with how you display images and social media options, showing shares and likes on your page. When it comes to registration forms, Constant Contact lets you change the font, image banner, and background color. Unfortunately the fields are limited to standard tick boxes for first name, last name, and company; but you can create a QR code that links to your sign up form, which is pretty cool. Lastly reporting is far more superior and diverse on MailChimp because it offers geo-tracking, social media reports and click maps. Most impressive of all, they offer a unique e-commerce conversion tracking that lets you know when products are sold through your store, and how.

So while MailChimp might be superior at reporting, and Constant Contact might have more templates; it really depends on the type of business you are running and the end goals of the businesses' email marketing campaign.