Which Email Marketing Service is Right for You?
Email marketing remains a quick, inexpensive and effective way to engage your client base and nurture leads into loyal customers. An email marketing service can help streamline your email marketing efforts, with features like pre-designed templates, automation, mailing list management, monitoring, integration with other software, analytics, and more.
At Articulate Solutions, a creative services agency based in the Bay Area, California, we’ve used several different services to manage email marketing campaigns for our clients. Here are our three favorites and some general tips to help you decide which is best for your business:
1. Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a powerful personalized email marketing tool that is very customizable in design and billing plans, but still simple to use. Campaign Monitor also offers built-in analytics that make it easy to optimize your email campaigns and create segmented groups for different audiences to boost your engagement.
At Articulate Solutions, we use Campaign Monitor for many of our clients, big and small. We typically design custom HTML templates for our clients to align with their overall brand. Then their staff can use the drag-and-drop email editor interface to build out emails by themselves.
We also like the fact that Campaign Monitor offers different billing plans that work for all businesses. If you only send emails every now and then, there is a “pay as you go” plan so you only have to pay for what you need. Or, if you send emails more frequently, you may choose from several plans that allow you to send as much as you want per month for a flat fee based on the number of subscribers in your database.
2. MailChimp
MailChimp is a well-known name in the email marketing game. With millions of customers all around the world, MailChimp collects a lot of data and insights on their users that can help you as a marketer improve your campaigns and marketing strategies.
MailChimp is very flexible and can be used for large organizations to small businesses that are just getting their feet wet in the email marketing arena. MailChimp also offers over 300 integrations to tie into your analytics, CRM systems, and website.
MailChimp does offer a free program if you are just getting started. But to really utilize the features, you most likely will end up going with one of the fixed-price options. MailChimp does not offer a “pay as you go” plan.
3. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is another well-known email marketing service that has been around for many years. Like the other services, it has an easy-to-use interface so you can create your email and get it out to your users quickly.
The one downside to Constant Contact from a marketing agency perspective is the lack of fully customizable templates. However, there are over 100 pre-designed email templates that can be modified with your brand’s logo and colors.
Constant Contact also has some other nice features, such as the ability to set up emails to go out at a regular cadence (like sending an email to a client on their birthday). You can also send out specific types of campaigns, like coupon offers or donation collections.
No matter what email marketing service you choose, be sure to include your logo in the header and use colors and fonts that align with your organization’s brand. The overall style of your emails should look and feel “on brand” with your website and other marketing communications. (To learn more about the important of a strong and consistent brand, read our recent blog about branding.) And be sure to check your analytics to be sure your emails are delivering real results!
See the Articulate Solutions Featured News page for more blog articles about creative branding, marketing, communications and more.
—————
MORE RESOURCES
For nearly 30 years, the creative experts at Articulate Solutions have been helping our clients communicate and build their brands. We’ve developed email marketing campaigns for many of our clients, from Visit Gilroy and Gilroy Gardens to Bobbie LaPorte and Solis Winery. We’re happy to help you get started too—whether that means designing a custom HTML template that aligns with your brand, setting up your mailing lists, helping write and edit content to drive real results, or managing the whole project from start to finish. Contact us today to learn more!
Posted on July 7, 2020