Successful email marketing is like carving wood for art and selling it for profit. You need a toolkit to excel at your craft and produce the best product. But some tools in the kit aren’t needed, and buying an entire set will make you waste money.
Paying for a kit that lacks a few tools will also make crafting hard. This is why you should find the right email marketing platform for use that best suits your business needs at the moment, such as affordability, flexibility, and function.
With that in mind, here is a checklist of features that you should consider before choosing a platform.
1. List segmentation
It is essential that your email marketing platform should have a list segmentation feature. This is to separate the different users in your mailing list and put them in their different groups. One of the group could be based on location. For example, usa email list. That way, you’ll be able to send the right email campaign you’ve created for each list segment easily.
2. A/B testing
Not every new campaign strategy works. You need to test it among the users in your mailing list to see which format is more effective at bringing sales. The A/B testing feature allows you to test campaign strategies by letting you send two campaigns with different formats to all users in your mailing list.
After that, the feature will show you statistics of which among the two campaigns garnered more engagement. You can pick the best campaign style from your creations that will drive your business forward because of this function.
3. Detailed analytics
Engagement and email deliverability rates determine the success of your email campaigns. You’ll want to know what needs improving to make your campaigns land in your customers’ inboxes, get opened, and generate clicks.
The detailed analytics feature will also tell you which users reported, bounced, rejected, ignored, quarantined, or sent your campaigns to the spam box. It’s a very useful feature to identify who needs to be re-engaged or removed from your mailing list to protect your sender’s reputation.
The more campaign analytics the email marketing platform offers, the better.
4. 24/7 customer support
A lot of technical problems could happen as you do email marketing, and it’s normal. Sometimes, your email marketing platform’s SMTP relay servers are down, making the sending of your campaigns impossible.
You’ll also need assistance with the settings of your email marketing platform. Always pick a platform with 24/7 customer support. This is to ensure that your campaign delivery is on time and your marketing experience is smooth because someone is ready to help you at any time.
Seasoned email marketers use multiple email delivery services to have backups if their marketing platform’s main service is down. They do this so that they become less reliant on one service and save money.
5. SMTP relays
Speaking of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol relay, you’ll need an email marketing platform that uses one. Why? As your mailing list grows, so does the number of campaigns you’ll need to send daily. Using a standard mailing service will no longer be enough due to sending limits.
An email marketing platform with SMTP relays will help you reach more customers while staying in touch with your current ones. This is because SMTP relays have a significantly higher sending limit than standard mailing services. Some are even unlimited.
6. Detailed reports
As a follow-up to detailed analytics, detailed reports are about the accuracy, diversity, and timeliness of the delivered reports. Accuracy is about measurement, such as the percentage of opens out of the total campaigns sent.
Diversity is about the number of details being reported. A good example would be sending you a report that an internet service provider rejected your campaigns because of the use of spammy words.
Timeliness is about whether the reports are sent to you in real-time as your platform sends your campaigns or at a certain period after all your campaigns are sent. Most email marketers prefer the former.
You might want to follow suit because it helps you quickly make changes to your email marketing tactics. As a result, you’ll increase deliverability and engagement rather than wait for your sender’s reputation to be tarnished.
7. Plans that meet your needs
Some email marketing platforms offer premium features but are expensive. Others are affordable but don’t provide all the necessary tools you need for successful email marketing. You’ll want something that’s right in between.
Simply speaking, you’ll need a platform that has flexible plans. A good email marketing platform should have a different price range depending on the features you want to use. For example, you’ll need a platform that has a high email sending limit but allows you to use only the features you need.
Or you can go for a platform that lets you use a lot of features but has a low sending limit but can be increased later. Whichever you choose, the price should vary. This can help you save money and use the cash you save for other critical email marketing needs.
Final Thoughts
For successful email marketing, consider your business model, niche, and customer base first. Then think about which tools you need to make your experience better.
For example, if you’re marketing to customers with different characteristics, then you need list segmentation. If you need a tool to make your campaign avoid the spam folder, look for an email marketing platform that provides detailed analytics.
Once you have found the right marketing platform, ask the platform’s customer servicer if the plans can be modified so you can save a lot of money. Remember, only pay for the tools you need and see to it that help is ready whenever you need it.