An effective email marketing campaign has the potential to represent one of your business’s most valuable assets. They represent a significant opportunity for ROI, clicks, ensuring new and existing customers remain engaged with your brand, and, of course, driving traffic to your site.
Why Your Campaign Needs Email Marketing Software
Email marketing can quickly become an indispensable string to your proverbial bow, but without the right platform from which to launch your campaign, it risks remaining painfully underutilised.
The role any reliable email marketing service provider seeks to fulfil is incredibly multifaceted. There are plenty on the market – many of which offer a comprehensive toolset with which to simplify, streamline, and automate many of the most time-consuming aspects of email marketing.
Email is frequently touted by marketing experts as one of the most lucrative mediums with which to access your growing customer base, both in terms of cost and time. Without the right software to take on the majority of the work on your behalf, however, the efficiency and strong payoff of email marketing is liable to be lost – and the campaign, underutilised.
With that in mind, here are five of the most important features to look for, learn, and use in your email marketing software.
Automation
Not only will automating many of the existing steps in your email marketing campaign enable you to free up hours each week, the ability to do so will also help you to grow your efforts, without needing to invest much more time into its execution.
From social media and CRM integrations to ensuring that emails are issued according to time zone, automation ensures that you spend as little time as possible on the more tedious aspects of your campaign.
Responsive Designs
The vast majority of us open emails on both our smartphones, and our computers. Unless your software is capable of managing device adaptability, email templates that are suited only to one platform risk being virtually unreadable on others.
Let’s say you send out an email formatted only for PC browsers; considering the fact that so many of us regularly open our emails on our cell phones, your efforts will prove largely futile.
Software that features templates with responsive designs will ensure that your emails are capable of arriving on any device, without any issues arising in the translation from PC to mobile to tablet.
Issue Surveys and Questionnaires, and Segment Data
Your customer base is considerably diverse, both in terms of their interests and preferences, and, in a much broader sense, their age, gender, and location. Of course, the more you know about them, the better, and choosing a software provider with the ability to issue effective surveys – and, more importantly, organize and put the results to use – will enable you to create a more targeted campaign.
Detailed Reporting
Rather than allowing your emails to slip off into the void, utilizing a provider capable of issuing regular engagement reports will much it much easier – and quicker – to understand how your customers are responding to your outreach.
Look for a software that offers a real-time breakdown of your readership’s activities, such as opens, clicks, flagging, and those who have unsubscribed.
Support
If you have been managing your campaign manually until now, or using a more limited software, then getting to grips with the new features may well come as a challenge at first. To avoid setbacks or frustration, choose a provider that actively caters to first-time users; up to date guides and responsive customer service will prove invaluable if you encounter any stumbling blocks.
Final Thoughts
There are many more features a good email marketing software provider should bring to the table. Affordability, security, and spam testing, for instance, are all integral to your ability to optimize your campaign and ensure that you are getting the highest ROI possible.
When it comes to marketing, streamlining every element that goes into your email campaign is one of the best ways of improving small business productivity, and facilitating further growth, development, and customer retention as you move forward.