The challenge that growing businesses constantly face is usually that they quickly become victims of their own success. Customer Relationship Management systems like Salesforce and Microsoft D365 are therefore meant to help with this challenge by providing tools that help businesses scale up seamlessly.
In this article we explore one of those, email marketing automation software. We take a look at some of the best CRM software for email marketing available today, including enterprise level email marketing software, as well as solutions for small businesses.
What is an email marketing automation software
In general, CRMs provide tools for automation for many different department operations, helping companies eliminate human error, improve efficiency, and generate data that can be used in other operations as well. CRMs also produce reports that are crucial for decision-making because they are timely, accurate and well formatted.
Email automation software fulfills precisely the same purpose for sales and marketing teams. It is specifically targeted to help companies manage their email campaigns, meaning the software provides a set of features that enhance operations and add value to email marketing. Email marketing automation software may come as part of a CRM offering, or as a standalone solution.
What makes a good email automation platform
The definition of a top email automation platform is not set in stone. There are some features though, that every solution, from enterprise email marketing platforms to those made for small to medium size businesses, should offer.
One of the first things is automation. This can be implemented to varying levels of complexity depending on the solution you are working with. However, you want to be able to design and deploy workflows that enable you to send personalized emails without the input of your marketing or sales staff.
Beyond that, you want to be able to perform certain tasks, like segregate your audience into segments, check the quality of the emails you are sending by previewing how images, links, and layouts appear on different devices, web browsers, and platforms. And good analytics to help you keep your finger on the pulse and to facilitate continuous optimization of the campaigns you send out.
5 best enterprise email marketing platforms
Salesforce Pardot
Salesforce is one of the best known CRMs on the market today. It offers a whole range of modules that support different business operations – solutions for sales, warehouse management, inventory, and so on.
Pardot is the solution that is meant to support sales and marketing teams with automated tools that enable them to generate, nurture and qualify leads, increase sales, and track performance and ROI.
How It Works
For email marketing in particular, Pardot offers the following features:
Engagement Studio
This is meant to help you nurture leads. You automate a logical path with a set of actions, triggers, and rules. You can send emails to contacts (action), and depending on their interaction with them, or lack thereof, program a set of subsequent steps to take. For example, if a contact doesn’t open an email after a predetermined period (trigger), you can program the email to be resent with a few changes, for example, a different subject line. An example of a rule would be sending the second email only if the contact is part of a certain list.
Drip programs
Drip programs are legacy versions of Engagement Studio. They are slowly being phased out as new versions of Pardot are released. They essentially do the same tasks but instead of using a canvas in the UI for creating email campaigns, they use wizards to guide you through the steps.
One-to-one emails
This does exactly what it says on the tin. It is meant for communicating to individual recipients. There may be cases where a rep needs to communicate with a particular contact. Pardot offers the option to do this.
List emails
Like the one-to-one email feature, list emails are provided for the purpose of sending emails to a list manually. This could be for some one-time event, a press release for instance, or some special offer.
Auto-responders
These can be set to send emails as a response to certain triggers, like a prospect completing a form and signing up for a brochure, or newsletter.
Testing
Pardot also has features that let you test your email campaigns. You can use Litmus to preview how your emails are displayed on different devices, see how they work on different browsers, and also see whether or not your emails go to spam. You can also use Pardot’s testing features to see if all your links and tags work as intended.
Pros
- Feature rich
- Advanced options for automation with no limit on branching
- Excellent support
- Convenient integration with Salesforce apps like Einstein
Cons
- Price might be prohibitive for smaller companies
- No mobile app for the software
Pricing
- Pardot Growth – $1,250/month
- Pardot Plus – $2,500/month
- Pardot Advanced – $4,000/month
- Pardot Premium – $15,000/month
Link To Official Website
Hubspot
HubSpot’s offers an email marketing solution within its Marketing Hub software – a solution that is meant to help marketing teams create content for landing pages, email, and other platforms, implement marketing automation, and track ROI.
How It Works
Using a drag-and-drop editor, you can design your own emails with different layouts, your own branding, and add calls to action. Alternatively, you can choose from a whole catalog of templates from the Hubspot marketplace.
Marketing Hub also offers the ability to adapt your correspondence depending on which stage of the lifecycle your recipient is at. Drawing from data in the wider Hubspot CRM, the email functionality uses the data you have on your contacts to automatically tailor subject lines, calls to actions, links, and other assets, to be more relevant to the subscriber, making your email campaigns more effective.
Marketing Hub also offers A/B testing capabilities for email campaigns. It serves up reports that enable you to determine which subscribers are connecting, which content is most effective, at what times, and other relevant metrics that help you improve your conversion rates.
Pros
- Integrates easily with the Hubspot CRM
- Free version available
- Affordable pricing
Cons
- As the number of contacts increases, pricing becomes expensive
- Lower tiers are limited in functionality
Pricing
- Starter: from $45/month
- Professional: from $800/month
- Enterprise: from $3,600/month
Link To Official Website
https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is another platform for automating marketing best known for its dedicated email marketing features. It started as an email marketing service and is now expanding its core focus to cover more marketing functionality.
How It Works
Mailchimp has tools for creating personalized journeys for clients. You can set up messages that are delivered based on who the subscriber is, and what interactions they have had with your brand.
Mailchimp offers additional data-driven functionality to enable businesses to optimize the times emails are sent out, and improve open and click-through rates. You can also set up emails to go out once purchases are made, or some account activity takes place.
There are triggers, scheduling tools, automations, visual journeys, and other pre-built tools to help you along. A Content Optimizer helps you enhance your email content – copy, pictures, layout, and more – based on the data taken from top performing campaigns.
Also, there are segmentation features that help you group your audiences based on different parameters to ensure your emails are relevant. You can also get data-driven recommendations on which segments to target based on behaviors, activity, and characteristics.
Pros
- Free version available
- Reasonably capable free version
- Affordable pricing
Cons
- Removing the limits placed on numbers of contacts and email sends may significantly increase the cost
- Tracking your campaigns is not straightforward and has less features than competitor solutions
Pricing
- Essentials: from $11/month
- Standard: from $17/month
- Premium: from $299/month
Link To Official Website
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is another product whose core focus is marketing automation. It has a raft of features to support omnichannel marketing. You can track how your subscribers engage with your campaigns using tags, you can create custom fields, there are rich analytics, and very helpful reports.
How It Works
ActiveCampaign offers options to send emails to lists or have emails go out based on triggers. For example, a subscriber visiting your website or engaging with your content. The platform also offers options to send emails to lists, or have emails go out based on triggers. Triggers could be actions like a subscriber visiting your website or engaging with your content.
Activecampaign also gives you the option to divide your audience into segments based on different parameters so that you can send more targeted content. Use the platform’s email autoresponders to, for example, automatically send welcome email or respond to triggers and deliver a more cohesive experience.
Pros
- Unlimited sending for all plans
Cons
- 14-day free trial. No free version
- Unlimited sending is actually limited to 250,000 contacts
- Predictive content only available for Professional and Enterprise
Pricing
- Lite: from $29/month
- Plus: from $49/month
- Professional: from $149/month
- Enterprise: On request
Link To Official Website
https://www.activecampaign.com/
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a dedicated email marketing platform that is focused on being user friendly. It’s a great fit for smaller businesses and those who don’t have advanced needs, or skills, in email marketing.
How It Works
The platform provides drag-and-drop capabilities for designing emails. If you want to, you can instead use one of the pre-designed email templates, or simply add a link to your website and campaign monitor will import your brand colors, your logo, and use the concept to style your email campaigns.
Campaign Monitor also offers segmentation features which enable you to use the contact data you have to create specialized categories and send them emails that are relevant and more likely to be effective.
Use the platform’s link review tool to ensure that any links that you include in your emails are working properly and are not broken or out of date. You can also create journeys for your clients that will help ensure that each subscriber remains engaged and that the system is communicating relevant information that will spur them on to the next step in the journey you have envisioned for them.
Additionally, the platform also provides smart analytics that help you improve how well your email campaigns do by using metrics like geography, acquisition statistics, and the amount of engagement that each campaign garners. Additionally, the platform also provides smart analytics that help you improve and enhance how well your email campaigns do using metrics like geography acquisition and the amount of engagement that each campaign garners.
Pros
- User-friendly
- Feature-rich
- Affordably priced for smaller businesses
Cons
- No extensive customer support
- Lack of SMS features
Pricing
- Basic: from $9/month
- Unlimited: from $29/month
- Premier: from $149/month
Link To Official Website
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/
Conclusion
A digital marketing strategy is never complete without an effective email marketing plan. Email has endured as a platform and proved beyond doubt that it is here to stay. With the list of email marketing services that we have provided here, you should be able to sort through the many options that are out there right now and take steps towards finding the right solution for your business.