What is Email Marketing?

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from email marketing, but what exactly is it? Several email marketing campaigns likely flooded your inbox in the last 24 hours. Emails that remind customers about abandoned carts, for instance, are typically automated and offer a slight nudge to those who might have been interested in your products online. Email promotions may also have been sent to your inbox showing off the latest product from your favorite brand with an enticing discount. Regardless of the various campaign types that you may find in your Gmail or AOL account, many online platforms exist to help build and monitor an email campaign for your own business.

What are the best Email Marketing Platforms?

While there are many email marketing websites at your disposal, we’ve created a shortlist of some of the most popular platforms available. Your experiences may vary from site to site, but we hope these brief outlines will help provide a starting point for you and your business.

Sendinblue

One of the most attractive aspects of the Sendinblue, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit platforms is the ability to create a FREE account. The free tiers aren’t expected to satisfy even the most budding start-ups, but they are enough to get you started with the added benefit of testing each platform.

Sendinblue is one of our favored platforms but just like the other recommendations, Sendinblue has advantages and disadvantages. During our initial experience with the platform, everything flowed nicely. Most tools “just worked” and they likely won’t leave you scratching your head while wondering how they might work. However, Sendinblue may give cause for concern when it comes to Google Chrome extensions or another browser’s equivalent. Some extensions may cause the program to break or freeze certain navigation bars. This may provide a reason for us all to clean up those ancient add-ons we haven’t used in years, right? Right??

Like many of Sendinblue’s competitors, internal tools offered by the platform include inserting images, social icons, styling, custom HTML/CSS, header & footer layouts, and of course, call-to-action buttons. We did notice a severe lack of e-commerce options, but they are currently working on a new feature called Payment Link.

Pricing Tip: Most email platform pricing tiers contain some sort of limitation, and Sendinblue is no different. Each plan below has a limit of 20,000 emails per month. There is a slider for the plan of your choice for those who require more. If you aren’t sure how many emails you’ll need, then simply purchase at the standard price and upgrade at a later date.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is another popular email marketing service that is known for its ease of use. Surprisingly, Constant Contact doesn’t offer a genuinely free option but instead shows off a free trial for up to 60 days or 100 emails. If you’d like to check it out yourself, simply click on “Start Trial” in the upper right-hand corner and follow the instructions.

After creating an account, you’ll be greeted with a series of introductory questions to suit your needs better and highlight their services. Offer your website name, intended use, e-commerce suggestions, and more.

Pricing Tip: While looking at Constant Contact’s pricing tables, please keep in mind that pricing is based on your contact list size. See the images below to see their proper pricing chart for each tier.

Active Campaign

Active Campaign integrates with Facebook, WordPress, Google Sheets, and Stripe. Considering WordPress powers over 40% of the internet, that is a pretty nice feature to have. Active Campaign showers its users with many necessary and “fluffy” features so that you are armed to the teeth when marketing your products and services.

Active Campaign is in the process of building a new email editor that is currently experiencing some growing pains. At times, their code may stick out on a button or two, but we’ve never had any issues actually using the platform. If you have too much trouble, you can always opt-out and use their traditional editor or code it yourself.

The navigational menu in Active Campaign offers “structures” that allow you to place 4 blocks in a horizontal line. This is a great advantage compared to Mailchimp, which only allows two images to be laid horizontally on the page without using HTML/CSS.

Pricing Tip: Much like Mailchimp below, the prices above are based on a sliding scale referencing your contact list. The above prices are set at the default of 500 contacts.

Mailchimp

Out of all the email marketing platforms, Mailchimp is probably the closest to becoming a household name. This likely has a lot to do with being in business since 2001. That is significant when you consider the state of the internet 20+ years ago. Mailchimp offers most of the features presented above, but MC sometimes gets stuck in its old ways with dated limitations. One of the more notable issues with the platform’s editor is limited structuring. You’ll quickly notice that you cannot add more than two blocks horizontally. This causes concern for anyone attempting to promote multiple products without requiring their customers to scroll down for multiple seconds. Users are notoriously impatient when browsing online, so every second and click counts!

That being said, Mailchimp is a prized platform for being so powerful. Depending on the plan you purchase, you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t with A/B testing and various tools to analyze your audience or contact list.

Pricing Tip: The pricing above may seem out of this world, but please note that prices are based on your limited contact list. The default number of contacts is 500. Interestingly, the free plan has a higher default but cannot be changed. The highest amount of contacts you can easily order is 200,000 for $1300 per month. If your company requires more, then you would need to contact Mailchimp directly.

Email Marketing in Myrtle Beach

Element Marketing Company offers multiple services to promote your company. We create custom emails or work with templates to maintain affordability. Email marketing is just one option, so we would love to go over what we have to offer including web design & development, corporate photography, videography, social media management, and digital marketing. Tell us about your company by clicking the link below.