What to Look For in an Email Marketing Service
If you are already using email marketing to successfully promote your business, congratulations!
And if you already know the incredible value and benefits of email marketing, but you’re just now getting started, you may have a number of questions about what to look for in an email marketing service.
Apart from their long-term stability and reliability, professional email services also offer plenty of fantastic features their free counterparts do not.
For instance, most offer a user-friendly dashboard that shows you the real-time status of each mail you send out to your list. This means within seconds of kick-starting your email campaign, you’ll be able to see exactly how many have opened your mail, forwarded it and clicked on the links within the body of the message.
You will also gain access to a wide range of well-designed opt-in forms, customizable email templates, a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, campaign report stats and other great features that will make sending an email to your list of subscribers a breeze.
Here are 6 more features you should look for in your email marketing provider.
1. Unlimited Autoresponders
This is an extremely valuable feature if you plan on managing several email campaigns simultaneously. As you may already know, an autoresponder series is a great way to get in front of your subscribers on a completely controlled and timed basis. You will also be able to create special messages to be sent out on certain occasions, such as when someone signs up for your e-newsletter or clicks on the links in your emails.
2. Social Media Integration
You can now connect with your existing customers and subscribers and gain even more leads by including social ‘share’ buttons in your newsletters. You may either share/tweet your content on Facebook and Twitter the manual way, or schedule for automatic updates to be posted on these sites. You should also look for the ability to include a web form on your Facebook page.
3. Custom Templates
You want plenty of eye-catching, professionally designed templates you can customize and use as you see fit. If you have a marketing team or designer on board, that’s great, but if you’re handling everything yourself and don’t have the luxury of a staff member, your email service provider should offer a range of well-designed options for you to choose from.
4. Split Testing
You want an accurate split testing platform that enables you to craft multiple emails, each with different subject lines (or other differing content), in order to see which one performs best. The system will then test them for you and let you know which email is likely to pull in the best conversion rate.
5. Advanced Segmentation
As the name indicates, this particular feature allows you to divide (segment) your list according to a subscriber’s interests, location, activity level, spending ability, etc. You can then create custom emails to send to that segment.
6. Stats
Any email service provider worth their 1s and 0s should provide you with an extensive array of stats as well as an in-depth analysis of your email campaigns. You should be able to track the number of opened emails, percentage of clicks within an email, the number of sign-ups per day and much more. You should also able to analyze data in real time and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
Finally, you want great customer support for all of it. Getting started can sometimes be overwhelming, but if you have solid support team members working with you it can make all the difference.
Calvert Creative sets up and manages email marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses. We can set up your account, create your forms, write your content, schedule your newsletters, and much more.
Contact us toll-free at 877-495-6851 and see how awesome it feels to have a virtual marketing staff working to build your business revenue!
