What to Look Out For in a Good Email Marketing Platform.

If you are a digital marketer or a small business owner who has applied digital marketing to your business, then I don’t think I need to tell you how important email marketing is for your business. But in case you need some convincing, let’s look at these statistics. 

• The average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. 
• Email is nearly 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

The statistics indicated above show that you should definitely get with the program if you haven’t considered email marketing. 

Now, to properly automate your email marketing process, you need a good email marketing platform. And I say, ‘good’ because I’m sure you wouldn’t want to do email marketing with a less-than-good email platform that wouldn’t serve the purpose you are doing email marketing in the first place. This is because the platform you choose will affect the effectiveness of your email marketing one way or the other. The platform is not only responsible for helping you automate the process, but it also offers other marketing features that affect your deliverability, open and click-through rates. So, you would want to use a platform that doesn’t hinder the success of your email marketing campaign.

How do you do that? How do you identify the right platform for you? That’s what this article will discuss; what to look out for in a good email marketing platform. 

 

Deliverability

Imagine going through the stress of compiling your email list, inputting it into the marketing platform, crafting a creative and effective copy, and automating your email only for most of your email to end up in SPAM. All that hard work gone down the drain because you chose the wrong platform. Honestly, it is a no-brainer; nobody wants to use a platform that cannot ensure your emails doesn’t end up in SPAM. so, when you want to choose a platform to use, make sure that it is one that has an excellent deliverability rate. 

 

Marketing Automation

When considering what to look out for in a good email marketing platform, the marketing automation of the platform is essential. Now, the primary function of email marketing software is to help you automate your emails to your audience. I mean, imagine the difficulty and even the impossibility of trying to send an email to a large number of subscribers manually. That’s a lot of work that is better imagined than experienced. However, these tools also offer different automation features that make the automation process easier and ensure more effective marketing. There are a lot but it is particularly important that your marketing tool eases personalisation, segmentation and tracking. There are several reasons why this is important;

• Personalisation: Personalisation, alongside segmentation, are some of the most effective email marketing strategies. This probably has to do with people feeling more comfortable with an email that is addressed to them as opposed to one that seems like a broadcast message to all and sundry. Now, of course, you have sent that email to others but personalising it makes them feel seen and acknowledged by your company. So, as it relates to a marketing platform, you need a tool that makes personalisation possible and easy.
• Segmentation: I already mentioned how effective segmentation is above. Segmenting your contacts basically entails putting your subscribers into categories or groups. For instance, if you have customers across different regions; you could segment your contact list based on the different regions because what region A might relate to might be strange to customers in region B. So, if you send them all the same email, it might give off the impression that you don’t care to do your homework. This goes to say that if an email marketing tool doesn’t support effective segmentation, you should probably not subscribe to it. 
• Tracking: If you don’t insight have into what you are doing, how do you know to know what to stop doing, what to improve on and what to definitely do? Your platform should help you track your performance, so you can properly improve your email marketing if you need to. 

 

User Interface

An email marketing tool doesn’t have to be so difficult that only a certain IQ can handle it. The interface should be clear to understand and easy to use. It should also offer aesthetically pleasing templates and an option to customise. 

 

ROI

At the end of the day, every company wants to record a high ROI (Return-on-Investment). I mean, otherwise what’s the point? If you are putting funds into the platform, it is only natural to expect a return on your investment. But if you are constantly incurring losses, it is time to ask yourself some hard questions. Is the loss your fault or is it because of the email marketing software you are using? If you are sure you have done all that needs to be done on your end, then it might be your platform. And the ROI will be largely dependent on all the points listed above. You need to check that your marketing tool is great in all the areas mentioned above. 

Now that you know what to look out for in a good email marketing platform, let me conclude by saying although many platforms have free versions, you might not have access to all the features if you don’t pay. And you might not get more exclusive deals that will help your brand if you don’t use more premium tools. You can read our article on some of the top email marketing platforms if you are considering a more premium tool.