Email marketing is the most effective way for businesses and brands to drive better marketing results. With this in mind, you might even be asking yourself Is email marketing still relevant in 2021? And the answer is yes!
Businesses that choose to incorporate email campaigns into their marketing strategies can benefit from lower marketing costs that result in increased sales, better customer retention, increased customer loyalty, and brand recognition. So, in shorter terms, if you are looking to lower your costs and increase your return on investment (ROI), email marketing will be your best marketing strategy.
When you start thinking about building your first email campaign you can’t help but feel overwhelmed. After all, there is a lot to think about; How do I want to communicate with my clients? How do I manage my contacts? How do I find interested prospects? … And truthfully manually building your email list and sending thousands of emails through your personal inbox wastes your most precious resource, your time.
This is why incorporating an email service provider (ESP) as part of your marketing tools will be crucial to your success. ESP’s have been specifically created to help businesses and brands automate their email campaigns, manage their contacts, create enticing sign-up forms, and much more!
There is an abundance of email marketing platforms for your agency or brand to pick from. In this blog, we will go over our top three email marketing platforms for 2021!
Must-Have Features For An Email Marketing Platform
Most email marketing platforms have the ability to do a lot more than just basic email sends. If this is the first time you are looking into incorporating an ESP in your business, here are some must-have features to look out for:
Campaign Types: When searching for your email marketing platform, make sure to choose a platform that can support multiple campaign types. The four most common campaign types include email newsletters, promotional emails, retention emails, and acquisition emails.
Automation: Email automation allows you to create a sequence of emails that are triggered by specific actions or user behaviors. When selecting an email marketing platform make sure to review the basic capabilities of their email automation to ensure it is in line with your needs.
Lead Capture Forms: If you are using a tool to specifically focus on email newsletters, it is good to pick a platform that includes the ability to easily create forms to capture leads. Most platforms that do include this feature will give you the option to either create and design a specific landing page or embed a form to the backend of your website.
Integrations: Email marketing will work in combination with your other marketing strategies. To ensure your team is getting the full picture of your overall performance, your ESP should have the ability to link to the other marketing platforms you are using.
Templates: Most email marketing platforms will provide you with a template library to help you get started on the account. Make sure that the platform you choose includes templates that cater to your specific use case. Templates are specifically designed and created to help reach better results and are a great way to help you further familiarise yourself with the tool!
Knowledge Base: This may seem like an obvious thing to look out for, but when selecting your email marketing software, always pick a platform that offers an extensive knowledge base to help you navigate your account. Some tools might additionally offer email support or live chat and some might offer all three, which would be ideal!
Best Email Marketing Platforms Of 2021
Let’s take a look at the top three email marketing platforms for 2021:
1. Hubspot
Hubspot takes the lead as the 2021 top email marketing platform as it is a great all-in-one solution that enables you to connect and analyze data from multiple marketing channels and campaigns. By connecting all your marketing platforms to Hubspot you can easily monitor how each contact in your email list has interacted with your previous emails, social media posts, and ads to gain further insights into your buyer’s journey.
Working with such a powerful tool enables you to focus on creating more tailored email campaigns to improve your customer’s experience. Let’s take a look at some of Hubspot’s email marketing features:
Workflows: Workflows in Hubspot enables you to automate your email campaigns through the use of specific contact triggers and conditions. Any contact that meets the trigger will then be enrolled into the relevant workflow. The triggers selected will depend on the goals of how you plan to tailor your customer’s interactions.
Personalization: Personalization tokens on Hubspot allow you to work on personalizing your email campaigns according to the contact’s history. This advanced feature enables you to personalize emails based on engaging subject lines, content, CTA’s, links, and much more.
Lead Capture: Using Hubspot’s tracking code you can make use of this powerful lead capturing technique. Installing the code to your website enables you to create engaging pop-up forms that are triggered when a user visits your website. Once a user submits their contact information, Hubspot will collect data related to the user’s interactions with the website and frequently visited pages.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular tools for small businesses as not only does it include all the features that businesses need, but it also has a very generous free plan. Its intuitive interface makes it easy for a non-experienced user to schedule campaigns, test email copy, set up email automation, and more. Let’s take a look at some of Mailchimp’s email marketing features:
Templates: Mailchimp offers an extensive template library to help you easily and quickly set up your email campaigns. These templates include a range of pre-designed themes and layouts that can be easily customized to reflect your brand.
Automations: Automations on Mailchimp have been designed to help agencies and brands reduce the manual workload. Templated automations are also available in the template library to help you quickly create your first campaign. Automations on Mailchimp can be split into four categories: Customer Journey, Transactional Emails, Retargetting Ads, and Postcards.
Reports: Mailchimp offers extensive insights into the performance of your email campaigns, helping you manage and create segments effectively.
3. Drip
Drip is a popular email marketing channel amongst e-commerce brands as it includes marketing features that make it the perfect solution for targeted shopping campaigns. Its interface is extremely flexible, allowing users to easily edit and build email campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of Drip’s email marketing features:
Automation: Drip offers a range of pre-built automations with specific e-commerce functions in mind. Automations are easily editable giving you freedom in your process. The automation builder is also extremely intuitive, making it easy for a user to start from scratch without needing any previous experience on the platform.
Personalization: Drip enables you to track a contact’s activity as they browse your website to help you create a more personalized customer journey. Its e-commerce tracking system is perfect for any brand that is trying to maximize sales.
Integrations: Drip allows you to connect to the most popular social media integrations helping your paid search efforts by offering more extensive personalization.
Start Your Email Marketing Journey…
Now that you have a better understanding of the features that make these three platforms the best email marketing platforms of 2021, it’s time for you to start your email marketing journey. Selecting the right email marketing platform is the first step in creating your email campaigns and perfecting your marketing strategy.
To learn more about email marketing, check out the blog section on our website!
