You can create a store, process payments, and move it along with dedicated marketing and sales tools when you combine them. These email marketing services generally offer several different but compatible services. You'll find this in several of our contenders, including Editors' Choice winner Mailchimp.
There is also a rising trend towards third-party e-commerce integration. Other email marketing systems will be able to plug directly into your existing CRM.
It makes sense, because both types of software deal with managing and communicating with customers. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. That leads us to another modern trend in email marketing tools, which is integration with other systems, most notably CRM. Some tools may force you to create custom reports to see this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool. You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Even better, the designer should also automatically render your email in a responsive format, meaning the HTML will correctly size images and other elements depending on the device used to view them.
The designer should provide at least a preview of how your email will look on a typical mobile device, and better yet, on several screens of varying sizes. The increasing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop allowing customers to go from marketing to purchase in a single session. Thanks to Apple Pay and Google Pay services, smartphones have also evolved as mobile payment solutions. Mobile users access emails throughout the day from any location. However, one important change for email marketing has been the increase in engagement on mobile devices, rather than PCs. Even so, market research firm Statista's forecast projects email marketing spend to grow to almost $18 billion by 2027. Social media, mobile and text marketing (see below), and even video campaigns compete for marketers' budget dollars. Marketers have many more channel tools available to them these days than they did even just a few years ago.
And you'll probably want to integrate with other back-end systems, such as the accounting system, the customer relationship management (CRM) system, and the inventory management system. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographic slices and engagement levels. Others might want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, so they can provide special offers and deals to recipients.Įach approach requires different tools for creating the source email and sending it to recipients. For example, some businesses might decide their most effective marketing tactic is a value-add newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Many of the solutions in this roundup have affordable starter plans, and some even offer onboarding services for new customers.Įmail marketing can take several forms. The good news is that it doesn't cost much to get started, nor is it an arduous undertaking. Options range from text-based template solutions that marketers can quickly make their own to more complex HTML or JavaScript templates.