Email Marketing Software 2021: Complete Guide

Email marketing software started as a simple tool to create a list of email-ids and then have the ability to send out messages to folks on your list. These tools evolved to have the ability to have multiple contact lists, the ability to create high-quality HTML messages, and then have the ability to track the user interaction on your messages.

In recent years, there has been a lot more focus on the customer journey and many of these email tools have evolved to deliver personalized messages at scale based on the state the user is in his journey. This made the tools built lots more features to automate, personalize and customize the delivery of messages.

In short, for most businesses that deal with many customers, the need for having software for managing their email communication across the customer journey is no longer a debate, the real questions are:

• How do you choose a software that is best suited for you?

• Do you choose an email marketing software, a marketing automation software or a sales engagement one?

• Also, what are the features that matter to you -- how does a feature make a difference to your business need?

You can read the rest of this guide to figure out how to go about finding the right software for you or try out our AI-based advisor who will recommend the right fit based on your requirements.

Email marketing software is used along the customer journey predominantly to achieve the following business goals

Acquire more customers

Businesses obtain a list of potential customers from third party data set providers and then use emails to reach out to them to sign them up as their own customers. Typically there is a call for action in the email such as the link to a website or a phone number asking the potential lead to sign up.

Increase Revenue from Existing Customers

A related use case of email marketing is when it is used to upsell and cross-sell to existing customers. This can be quite effective as we tend to know a lot more about our existing customers and email marketing is an effective tool not only to stay in touch but also to send personalized emails to upsell or cross-sell to them.

Enhance Customer Relationship

Periodic emails, newsletters, relevant updates, new launches, best practices, etc., helps keep in touch with customers in a non-intrusive way. Email marketing tools have features to send an elegantly crafted newsletter to keep customers engaged and happy.

Good email marketing software will have some or all of the features mentioned below

Template Library

A good template library with lots of formats makes one’s job of creating an email marketing campaign easy. One can pick a template, customize it, and be ready in a matter of minutes.

Tracking and monitoring open rates

AB Testing

Auto-scheduler and Cadence

First, automated emails are not the same as transactional emails. Transactional emails are sent as per a user’s action such as buying something on the site and the email is a receipt of his action. Automated emails are emails that are to be periodically sent based on your goals and the state of your customers, say existing customers, potential customers, high-value customers, etc.

These automated emails with carefully planned cadence help the top of the mind recall of your brand and it’s offerings with the customers.

Autoresponder

Autoresponder and auto-scheduler go hand in hand for seamless automation of your email campaigns. Autoresponders are based on a user’s action whereas the auto-scheduler is used to send periodic stay in touch messages based on the state of the user. Autoresponders are used to send a welcome note for a person who fills a contact form, to someone who just added something to a shopping cart and forgets to check it out, etc.

Personalization

A big weakness of mass-mailing email campaigns is that they lose the human touch and soon can feel robotic. The newer breed of software has built-in cool personalization features that can send 1:1 messages at scale.

An email message feels personalized if the system knows something about the user, his last transaction, his last complaint, etc and the message is tailor-made to address the specific user in mind. For example, it could be as simple as knowing the name of the user to more complex things like knowing his hobby, movie interests, etc.

Role of AI

AI is literally gaining into everything we do, including email marketing. In recent years, AI has played an active role in creating personalized content to decide when best to send an email to understand the interest of the users.

AI also has played an active role in AB testing and choosing the campaigns that have best worked for you in the past and optimize your results based on past campaign results.

You can either follow this beginner’s guide or use our AI advisor to find the right recommendation for you.

Where do your contacts lie?

In case you are buying your contact data to acquire new customers, then it’s a green field, and most of the software allows you to upload and manage your contact list.

In case you want to tie back the response of your customer to your CRM, in order to have all your customer information in a single place, then also you should consider tools that have both way integrations with your CRM.

Horizontal vs Specialized Solutions

Most of the new breed horizontal solutions such as CRMs and sales tools have built-in ability to send out emails, just check once their capabilities before you go ahead and invest in a new tool. In general, most email marketing tools are best suited to acquire new customers and you should see if existing customers can be managed through your legacy horizontal solutions. The one drawback of this approach is that you would need to set up and manage two systems. But, specialized email marketing tools give you lots of flexibility to set up new templates and try our various messages using AB testing, which makes it really appealing to acquire new customers.

Capabilities

Decide whether you are interested in acquiring new customers or engaging with existing customers. In the former case, you would need software with pre built templates, the ability to AB test and track/monitor clicks and open rates. In the latter case, you would need software that you can auto-schedule with auto-responder and ability to personalize the response for each user.

Ability to deal with spam filters

One of the biggest risks of email marketing tools that you will buy is its ability to navigate the spam filter of most email tools. Ensure that the tool doesn’t deliver to the spam folder and has the ability to change and personalize content so that it doesn’t look like bulk messages.

Ability to handle rich content natively

With multimedia and video becoming a major part of our marketing collateral, ensure the tool can embed rich media and track users’ actions on these rich media seamlessly.

Analytics and Reports

An email marketing tool with poor analytics and reporting ability is useless. A major part of your effort in marketing should be spent on AB testing your open rates and user interactions, which are impossible to tune without fine-grained custom reporting.

Whether you are starting your journey on digital marketing transformation with email marketing or a small business owner, it is always desirable to try out a free email marketing tool. Many of the email marketing software vendors have a free plan that comes with robust features. However, most of the free plans are limited by the number of subscribers or contacts or the number of emails that you can send per month. If your business needs are met within those limitations, often there is very little need to upgrade to a paid plan. Here are some of the popular free email marketing software that you may find useful.