Marketing trends and channels keep evolving over time. While many trends have come and gone quickly, one of the channels that has managed to remain relevant even today is email. Today, email continues to be one of the top preferred channels for digital marketing for different businesses. However, organizations still face several challenges in their email marketing efforts. One of these include spending enormous amounts of time on a single email marketing campaign. Without quick and effective tools, marketers may end up sending out emails that may not be appealing and this may hinder productivity and drag down the email marketing ROI. This blog highlights the best online tools to automate your email marketing campaign.
Email automation is one of the most frequently used tools in marketing. It encompasses a set of emails that can be sent out to your current customers for describing your product/ service and asking them to give it a try. However, managing it in a manual manner can sometimes become tedious and cumbersome. Thus, we present to you email marketing automation tools that will help you create effective email marketing campaigns.
1. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing automation tools being used today as it allows you to send drip emails to your subscribers based on what they have opted for. This helps in avoiding spamming and sending out only relevant information, thus, giving out a good impression.
- Application: Mailchimp can provide you with effective and insightful materials to help you optimize your email marketing techniques and alter content as per audience demographics and preferences. Being one of the best email marketing automation tools available, it even has a content manager folder to help you store and manage all your files and images to make them more accessible.
- Ease of Use: Mailchimp allows you to send welcome emails to new subscribers, birthday emails with promotional content (like offers, discounts, etc.), follow up emails for purchases, contacts for first-time customers, reward and promotional emails for frequent buyers etc.
- Key Feature: Ready made email templates with specific theme based triggers are provided by Mailchimp for specific themes
- Pricing: Being one of the top email marketing automation tools for business, it has a free plan available while its paid plans start at 9.99/month
Read a comparison between email marketing and SMS marketing, in our blog: EMAIL MARKETING VS SMS MARKETING: WHICH IS BETTER FOR YOUR ORGANISATION.
2. Contactually
Contactually is one of the neatest tools among email marketing automation tools available. It’s a CRM platform that works on gathering contacts from your email inbox, website and social media profiles and uses them to guide you to find potential subscribers and leads for sending out mails. Contactually serves as the best email marketing tool for real estate professionals.
- Application: Contactually works by collecting data from your inbox, social media pages, website, customers’ posts, shares, likes, etc. It then helps you to develop tailor made content which is specific to the people with specific preferences.
- Ease of Use: By providing excellent suggestions, Contactually helps businesses to drive personalized communication with their clients. By identifying new relationships, new referrals and new leads, it helps businesses grow immensely. This is done by targeting different sets of audiences differently, while putting out the brand’s message in an effective manner.
- Key Feature: As one of the best email marketing automation tools, it offers features like regular monitoring of campaign performance, engagement with customers, etc.
- Pricing: The pricing starts at $69/month for the Professional plan while the costs for the the Accelerator plan start at $119/month.
3. Sendpulse
SendPulse is a multichannel marketing automation platform catering to small and mid-sized businesses. Apart from usual email campaigns, SendPulse offers a dedicated SMTP server for transactional emails. With a native email verifier, it’s easy to check for abandoned or invalid email addresses which in turn can drastically increase the deliverability of your promotional emails. When it comes to email automation features, SendPulse allows you to add emails, SMS and messenger marketing to your marketing mix and create a cohesive promotional campaign.
- Application: SendPulse is a great option for marketers looking to expand from email marketing to other channels like SMS, web push notifications, or even chatbots for Facebook, Telegram, or freshly-released WhatsApp chatbot.
- Ease of Use: Intuitive interface of email template builder lets you create beautiful emails in no time. The same goes for user-friendly landing page builder.
- Key Feature: Apart from main marketing channels, the platform provides its users with free CRM software which is really helpful for lead management.
- Pricing: Most features on the platform are available for free with certain limitations in functionality. Email marketing plans are quite flexible and start at around $7 per month.
4. Hubspot
Hubspot has been consistently ranked as one of the top email marketing automation tools across several domains due to its use of automated workflows. Besides being free, it is also very useful and is specifically targeted towards small and medium businesses.
- Application: HubSpot has a free email marketing tool to support small business’ transactional email needs.
- Ease of Use: From sending kickback emails from lead offers to after-purchase thank you emails, HubSpot’s free version of email marketing features a handy visual editor to help you make the best use of its freely available email templates and kickstart your email marketing campaign the right way.
- Key Feature: Once you make an account on their portal, you get unlimited access to tools that will help you organize your databases and maintain information about your campaign performance.
- Pricing: One of the best email marketing automation tools available, the basic Hubspot CRM version is completely free while the starter premium version costs $50/month, the professional version costs around $400–$800 and the enterprise version is for around $1200– $3200. The pricing keeps changing on a regular basis.
Read about the bulk SMS and email marketing strategy, in our blog: BULK SMS AND EMAIL MARKETING: A COST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY.
5. ReachMail
ReachMail is one of the email marketing automation tools that offer excellent customer support and visually appealing mail campaigns in a matter of seconds. Not only does it help you to clean up and organize your existing lists, but it also helps to easily send out mails to your intended recipients.
- Application: Being one of the best email marketing automation tools available, ReachMail helps you connect with more than 1,00,000 contacts per month. It also gives you the option to use your own template or let the platform make one for you. Thus, you connect with as many interested and prospective customers as possible and grow your business with ease. With ReachMail you have the option to use your own template or you can have them make one for you.
- Ease of Use: One of the features that make ReachMail really popular is that it lets users compare subject lines, images, content, etc. of upto 5 campaigns at a time to help them boost their campaign performance. This not only helps users to reach out to their target audiences effectively, but also helps them to create beautiful and visually appealing emails even without much prior knowledge about photo editing and graphics.
- Key Feature: Being one of the top email marketing automation tools for business, it has a message testing feature wherein you can compare up to five campaigns and incorporate the best working subject lines and content in your campaigns to improve their performance.
- Pricing: It has a free plan available and also offers a paid plan starting at $10/month.
Read about the top 7 social media marketing benefits for your business, in our blog: TOP 7 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING BENEFITS FOR YOUR BUSINESS.
6. Zoho Campaigns
Zoho CRM helps you manage everything, right from sending out customer altered email campaigns to launching webinars or survey campaigns. Apart from being one of the best email marketing automation tools available to create and track campaigns, it also helps you measure the success of your campaigns.
- Application: Zoho Campaigns is one of the most popular options for email automation and newsletters. By using its cloud software suite, it offers pre-designed templates to help you choose templates for altering them as per the specifications of the audience.
- Ease of Use: Zoho Campaigns is an advanced option in terms of its competitors as it offers options like organizing mailing lists as per the needs of the customers, setting up follow up mails and comparing different campaigns to help you improve them for better results.
- Key Feature: Zoho CRM works extensively with Google AdWords to help you figure out which keywords or campaigns are boosting your sales the best. It builds every website or landing page visitor into a lead and helps you manage them with customized content.
- Pricing: Being one of the top email marketing automation tools for business, the free plan allows you to identify and maintain a database of at least 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, whereas, their paid plan starts at just $3 per month.
Most of these email marketing automation tools for business come with advanced and user friendly free features even without the need to upgrade to a paid plan. Small businesses and marketers should thus utilize them efficiently to save time and money. Even while offering paid plans, a lot of email marketing tools are cost efficient and budget friendly. So, effectively utilize the power of these email marketing automation tools and give a right kickstart to your email marketing campaigns.
