EMAIL MARKETING

Email Marketing Can Be Very Effective Marketing for Small Business

Definition:

What is email marketing? Basically the use of email to promote products and/or services. But a better email marketing definition is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing, which encompasses online marketing via websites, social media, blogs, etc. It is essentially the same as direct mail​ except that instead of sending mail through the postal service, messages are sent electronically via email.

Much of the spam email we all get proclaiming 'deals' on this and that is a good example of email marketing at its worst; the mindless email barrage.

Someone somewhere buys an email list (or several!) and sends an email along the lines of “Get ___________ (the product name) for only $_____! (the amount) to everyone on the list – sometimes repeatedly. All this does is annoy everyone and give email marketing a bad name.

At its best, email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their customers.

Email Marketing Can Be Personalized

Particular groups of customers can be targeted or even individuals. Offering individual customers special deals on merchandise and/or services on the customer's birthday, for instance, is one example of email marketing personalization. (A restaurant might send an email to customers on their birthday offering 50% off an entree,) Email marketing helps a business develop and maintain a relationship with a customer over time that hopefully results in increased sales and increased customer loyalty.

Email marketing best practices include developing your own email list rather than buying an email list(s), and making participation in your email list opt-in rather than opt-out (using permission-based email marketing). Email should also be optimized for mobile usage as according to statistics over half of emails are opened on mobile devices.

The Advantages of Email Marketing

The two big advantages of email marketing are price and ease. Emailing is an inexpensive way to advertise your company and its products and/or services compared to many other types of marketing. It's also extremely easy to set up and track an email marketing campaign, making it a very accessible type of marketing for small businesses.

Newsletters can be sent to the email list you've built from the people who provided the necessary information on your website, for instance, providing these potential customers with news updates about your company, upcoming events and/or special offers – and, of course, reminding them that your business exists and that maybe it's time for another visit.

Email Marketing Is Still Relevant

In an age of increasing usage of social media for advertising, email marketing still rules the roost, according to a study conducted by HostPapa:

• 94% of Internet users use email, while only 61% use social media

• 75% of adult online users say that email marketing is their preferred marketing method

• the "opt-in" feature of email allows marketing by consent

• email marketing allows targeting by demographics (age, income, etc.)

• email messages have a much wider range of formatting possibilities than social media messages

• email offers more reporting and analytics capability, such as click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, and conversions

The huge advantage of email over social media is that prospects and customers are more likely to see an email than social media. Just posting something doesn't mean that everyone you want to see your message will see it. Your post might not even show up in your targets' social media streams. However, ​an email will sit in the inbox until it's read (or deleted). 

Ideally, email marketing should go hand-in-hand with social media. Adding social media "Like" or "Share" buttons to your marketing emails gives an additional way for customers to connect with your brand. Snippets of positive reviews from social media fans can be included in emails, and conversely social media postings can be used to encourage fans to subscribe to your email newsletters.

Email marketing can substantially increase your income if you do it correctly. (See the tips below.) It's a great way to get people to visit and/or revisit your website or blog and more traffic usually equates to more income.

7 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business

1. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.

You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, and more.

Each account gives you access to easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, an image library and 1GB of storage for your own files.

Constant Contact offers unmatched support with live chat, email, community support, and a vast library of resources.

They also offer online training as well as live seminars in your neighborhood. This allows small business to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it like a pro.

For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses.

Constant Contact has a 60 day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.

2. Drip

Drip is a powerful email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and marketers. They offer a wide range of tools with their smart email marketing platform.

It is also one of the most beginner friendly email marketing service. They have integration addons available for all popular website builders including WooCommerce and WordPress. This allows you to easily add sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.

What sets Drip apart from the competition is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, list groups, and tons of cool features that allow you to reach specific audiences in your email list.

Support options at Drip include live chat support, Webinars, automation training, detailed course, free guides and excellent documentation.

They offer a free trial account for up to 100 subscribers. After that their plans start from $41 / month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.

ConvertKit allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails.

With ConvertKit, you can easily segment contacts into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This is great for marketing automation.

ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material.

Pricing for ConvertKit plans start from $29/month with a 30-day refund policy.

4. AWeber

AWeber is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.

Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seemlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.

You get access to ready to use email templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.

Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.

AWeber offers a 30 day free trial. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month.

5. GetResponse

GetResponse is a hugely popular email marketing solution. It is extremely easy to use and simplifies email marketing for small businesses and absolute beginners.

It comes with some amazing marketing automation tools which allow you to create smart automated campaigns. With a drag and drop builder, you can create campaigns, segment contacts, and send content designed for specific groups. These tools help you create effective campaigns to boost your profits.

GetResponse comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, tracking, and autoresponders. It also integrates with third party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc.

Support is provided by phone, live chat, and email. Their help section is full of free learning material including videos, webinars, how-tos, guides, etc.

GetResponse offers a 30 day free trial. Their pricing starts from $15/month.

6. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers. They offer a very easy to use interface with great tools and awesome support.

It integrates beautifully with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms. If you are using WordPress, then see our ultimate guide to using MailChimp and WordPress for detailed instructions.

MailChimp also comes with easy email creator, merge tags, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking and analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on user’s timezones and setup segmenting based on geolocation.

Support is offered by email, live chat, and a huge knowledge base with how-tos, videos, and tutorials.

MailChimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for upto 2,000 subscribers. Their paid plans start from $10/month.

Because of their free plan, we rate MailChimp the best email marketing software for nonprofits.

7. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign combines your email marketing, automation, with CRM and sales. It comes with all the tools you will need to create smarter email marketing campaigns.

ActiveCampaign comes with a beautiful email template editor and mobile friendly signup forms. It allows you to segment contacts based on their actions, location, behavior, and social data. It can also fetch additional data about your contacts using only their email address.

It integrates beautifully with many third party software including WordPress. You can also send SMS messages to your contacts for follow up on campaigns.

ActiveCampaign’s plans start from $9/month. You can also request a demo with limited features for a test run.

Although the pricing on ActiveCampaign gets quite high, it’s totally worth the money if marketing automation is what you’re looking for.

You probably receive enough emails as it is, and it's tough to know which newsletters are worth subscribing to, so we've curated a list of some of our favorite examples. Read on to discover some great email campaign examples and what makes them great -- or just skip ahead to the brands you already know and love.

1) charity: water

2) BuzzFeed

3) Uber

4) TheSkimm

5) Mom and Dad Money

6) Poncho

7) Birchbox

8) Postmates

9) Dropbox

10) InVision App

11) Warby Parker

12) Cook Smarts

13) HireVue

14) Paperless Post

15) Stitcher