Email.

This ubiquitous service is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience. According to a February 2017 study from the Radicati Group, the number of worldwide email users, including both business and consumer users, will grow from over 3.7 billion in 2017 to over 4.1 billion by 2021. Creating and managing a list of emails from folks who want to hear from you is one of the best marketing efforts you can engage in.

Coordinating your email marketing with the rest of your marketing efforts takes something great and makes it even more powerful.

Exploring the Feature Set

There are several great services that offer email marketing features. The key feature of these services is accepting contact information from your customers and allow you to create emails that can be sent out to those contacts. One of the most important factors for a good email marketing service is how well their email sends. These companies take great pains to make sure that emails being sent from their servers are acknowledged as safe and accepted by the big email clients. Beyond that there are a lot of factors to consider when choosing your service.

Commmon Features

• Price – This is usually the first item that everyone looks at. What is the pricing model for the service? Do they charge monthly, based on the volume of email sent, or based on the number of contacts you have?
• List management – Can you segment your contact list? Can you have multiple lists?
• Tracking – One of the key features is how much tracking of your emails you have easy access to. How are your email campaigns performing? Can you make changes that will allow you to A/B test your campaigns? Can you track opens, bounces, and forwarded emails?
• Scheduling – Can you set your emails to send at a scheduled time?
• Autoresponders – Can you set up a campaign of responses to trigger at intervals that you set up?
• Triggered Responses – Can you set up emails to send when a specific trigger occurs?
• eCommerce Integrations – Does the service have any extra integrations with your eCommerce solution? Can it help with cart abandonment?
• Video Support/Training – Are there good instructional videos available for the service? Can you take online courses?
• Number of Sends – Are you limited in the number of emails you can send in a day or month?
• Social Media Integration – Does the service integrate with your social media effort?

Email Marketing Services

Among the services available for email marketing there are a few standouts that we have some familiarity with:

• MailChimp – An excellent service, MailChimp offers a free level of their service that allows for up to 12,000 emails per month from a list of up to 2,000. MailChimp is a great tool to start with.
• AWeber – Pricing models are based on the number of subscribers you have and a free trial is available to get you started.
• InfusionSoft – InfusionSoft expands from the email marketing space to encompass the CRM space as well so your marketing can seamlessly move into your sales channel. InfusionSoft’s packages start a little higher than most but, the robustness of their automation is well known.
• Active Campaign – Pricing is based on the number of subscribers but Active Campaigns has pushed into the CRM space in a very affordable way.
• Constant Contact – Also offers pricing based on your list size, Constant Contacts is one of the first companies to offer email marketing.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. Exploring one of these services is a great way to start. Your list is easily portable to another service. All of these services have WordPress integrations.

Coordinate Email with Your On-Page Ads

You may be asking yourself, “how does any of this relate to ads that I run on through AdSanity?” There are a couple of factors that tie the two efforts together. First, making sure that you have a consistent message is key. You’ve probably already created assets for your advertising efforts. An email campaign can make great use of these assets and create a consist message for anyone who engages with your brand. Also, we’ve talked about having individual landing pages for each of your advertising campaigns. Running a coordinated email campaign alongside your online advertisement makes a great secondary use of that landing page. Be sure to track the source of the acquisition if you have two ways to get to the same landing page. Finally, if you’re leveraging the power of retargeting in conjunction with these two features then you increase the number of exposures to your advertising message increasing the overall impact on your sales.