There are many excellent email marketing software platforms you can choose from. Out of the dozens we reviewed, the following five stood out and would make excellent additions to any short list of potential vendors you create.
Active Campaign
Many ecommerce businesses find email marketing challenging because they can’t base their campaigns on live customer data like order history or pages visited. So, instead of offering products their customers are most likely to want, they’re forced to rely on generic or outdated information. Active Campaign solves this through its smart integration with 850 ecommerce platforms, including major vendors like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.
This eliminates guesswork for marketing teams as they get data on campaign performance and customer behavior. Active Campaign’s ecommerce dashboard helps them to create personalized and highly targeted email campaigns quickly from the platform’s selection of 125 customizable templates. We were impressed by the volume of emails you can send to – an unlimited number up to 250,000 contacts. We loved the automation tools, especially ‘goal actions’ and ‘go actions,’ which take email recipients to the next sales stage if they choose an action like making a purchase before, for example, a drip campaign ends. Marketing teams can also score contacts based on factors like location and email opens as well as build specific landing pages for campaigns to generate better responses.
iContact
The steps between plans offered by many email marketing platforms can be steep. For example, moving from paying for 2,000 emails and contacts up to the next plan with 10,000 emails or contacts pushes the price, denting campaign profitability until subscriber numbers increase.
We love iContact’s approach to this. You can start with a free plan and scale up gradually (750, 1,500, 2,500, 5,000 contacts) with small and manageable increases in price ($8.50, $27, $41, $73). We also appreciate how iContact makes every feature available to subscribers at all levels.
There was a lot else we really liked about this platform when we reviewed it. The drag-and-drop email designer was one of the easiest we’ve used. Their library of customizable and professional templates is also very generous. Sending out campaigns takes no time. We also thought the real-time reporting on live campaigns was excellent, which gives marketing teams instant insights into engagement and revenue.
Campaigner
A major revenue source for many mid-sized and large businesses is email marketing. An issue many face when choosing an email marketing platform is finding one that’s flexible and open enough to integrate closely with the CRM systems, e-commerce platforms and other key business apps they use.
Campaigner addresses this pain point very well thanks to its mixture of API, custom integrations, and Zapier connections. This makes the ability to share and analyze real-time data much easier, helping them build successful marketing strategies and create effective campaigns based on the latest customer and sales information and trends. We also appreciated how the software supports lists of up to 100,000 contacts, crucial for businesses needing to reach a wide audience.
We loved the drag-and-drop email automation workflow dashboard. You use this to create targeted and unique customer journey roadmaps based on customer motivation and needs. Other features that impressed us include the intuitive A/B testing and the in-depth reporting and analytics, particularly the behavior analysis.
Click here for our comprehensive Campaigner review.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
When creating campaigns for use across different media like email, SMS, and social media, marketing teams face a major challenge. They need consistent data to build coherent marketing campaigns across all touch points. This is often difficult because they use different platforms to run campaigns on different media – for example, one for email, one for WhatsApp, one for SEO, and so on. When reviewing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we were impressed at how well that platform solved these issues. Underlying the system is the core CRM product and its powerful and constantly-updated customer and prospect database. This becomes the central source of truth for all your sales, marketing, and customer service data, helping them to inform, direct and unify their marketing efforts.
We love how easy Marketing Cloud makes creating, launching and reviewing data-driven campaigns across multiple channels from one dashboard. For the purposes of this review however, we’re focusing on the app’s excellent Email Studio. It excels at personalizing messages with live customer data – this level of customization strengthens customer relationships and keeps conversations ongoing. We appreciate how easy it is to build powerful, effective pieces with Marketing Cloud’s stylish drag-and-drop content blocks. Creating segmented lists for more targeted campaigns is a breeze on the platform too.
The reporting and analytics features are excellent – you can track campaigns in real-time or run reports to monitor your progress over time. For businesses with more complex marketing and operational needs, Salesforce Marketing Cloud should be a candidate for adoption by your company for all of the reasons set out.
Click here for our up-to-date review of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
