Experienced digital marketing practitioners all have their own favourite ways to market a business. Some require a lot of investment in terms of both time and money, others require great skill which tends to come at a price, but one thing that most marketers, digital or not, tend to agree on is that email marketing, when done properly, is a very effective way to nurture prospects and customers and maximise their potential in terms of spend.
Notice that I qualified the above statement by adding “when done properly.” A badly run email marketing campaign will just annoy people and could possibly alienate them from your business – forever. This is one activity that you have to get right but if you do – the rewards are substantial. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and services available to help you to achieve your objectives with Email Marketing.
Email Marketing Success – It All Depends On The List
The key element to any email campaign is your email list. This should ideally include the contact details of your customers and prospective customers together with a reasonable amount of supporting data. A typical email list would include the name of the contact, the organisation for which they work and the position or role they have, their email address and , possibly, their telephone number and some commercial information about the organisation such as product or service category, geographical trading areas, number of employees and, possibly, turnover.
Obtaining such a list is not so easy, however. It used to be, but now it isn’t. this is because data-protection legislation in the UK, across the EU and in many other parts of the world prevent you from simply buying a list and sending unsolicited emails. Nowadays it is polite to ask people first of all if they would like to receive information from you and to give them the option of easily removing themselves from your list, should they wish to do so.
It is possible to purchase email lists where those listed have opted in but they tend to be expensive and often the opting in procedure is tenuous with the intended recipient of future emails not realising quite what they had let themselves in for. This results in a high “churn,” i.e. lots of people on your nice new list asking to be removed from it as soon as you start to mail them.
In most cases, the only way to get your hands on a really good emailing list is to build it yourself and there are many tools and products out there to help you to do this. In The Digital Marketing Directory we have listed all the best email packages and services and have reviewed many of them for your convenience. We also have a useful “How To” guide for building email lists and creating an effective email marketing campaign.
Hunter – Email Lead Generation, Cold Outreach & Prospecting Tool
Find the email addresses behind any website with Hunter. Hunter is a set of platform offering a set of email tools that helps you to find, verify and utilise, or reach out to, email addresses and contacts in any organisation that has a current website. Cold outreach...
Clearout – Email Reputation Management
Improve & Protect Your E-Mail Sender Reputation with ClearoutClearout is an email cleaning and maintenance platform, with a Catch-all email verification facility, that enables you to instantly ID catch-all domains to avoid sending to those emails and hurting your...
TextAnywhere – SMS Marketing Solutions
Email marketing is a well established and highly effective marketing method but SMS (Text Message) marketing is still in its infancy - TextAnywhere looks set to become one of the major players in this channel. In a world where most people carry a mobile device around...
Kissmetrics – Website Performance Analytics
Kissmetrics describes itself as “The Customer Engagement Automation Platform” and that may be true but, in my opinion, it does little to explain what their product is really all about. So, it would be reasonable to ask, what is Kissmetrics all about? Well, there are...
ConvertKit – Email Marketing For Bloggers
ConvertKit is an email marketing platform that has built its reputation as being the go-to email provider for professional bloggers. One of the claims made by ConvertKit on their website is that their product has "The power of Infusionsoft, but easier to use than...
Kahuna Marketing Automation Platform
Kahuna targets medium and larger corporate organisations with sophisticated cross-channel marketing automation facilitating 1to1 personalisation across marketing channels including email, web, mobile devices, Facebook retargeting, and text messaging. A look at their...
Sendloop Email & Digital Marketing Platform
Now the concept of automated marketing funnels is widely accepted as an important marketing tool for businesses, the need for affordable software to run such a funnel has become more widespread - Sendloop could be a fit for that requirement. Email Marketing with...
Autopilot – Marketing Automation & Funnels
Autopilot is an Australian company offering a comprehensive marketing automation tools platform at an affordable price. Autopilot's very attractive and easy-to-use visual customer journey (funnel) builder Competition is hotting up in the marketing automation space...
Sendlane – Email Marketing & Marketing Automation
Sendlane is an email marketing and marketing automation platform offering a great set of digital marketing tools at a very affordable price. I came across Sendlane because, due to the nature of my work, I am on the mailing list of a great many marketers and others in...
Speak2Leads – Turn Emails Into Inbound Sales Calls
Unbounce is a landing page building system for small businesses but it is equally of interest to agencies and web developers. I don't want to be unfair to them but I think it would be reasonable to say that Unbounce is probably still in the shadow of LeadPages and...
Act-On – Marketing Automation, Email & SEO Tools
Act-On is an Oregon-based provider of a nice looking suite of Digital Marketing Automation tools. Act-On has placed itself firmly in the Digital Marketing automation space. Marketing Funnels and sophisticated automated email campaigns are becoming the life blood of...
Drip – Email Marketing by LeadPages
Bringing marketing automation to the masses - that's one of the stated aims of Drip and with their impeccable pedigree as an off-shoot of LeadPages, I believe they are equipped to make that happen. If email marketing is part of your digital marketing strategy then...
EMMA – Sophisticated Email Marketing Tool
Emma is a USA based email marketing platform with some nice, up-to-date features that give email marketing an air of sophistication without making the process too complex. If you were thinking of launching a new Saas, (software as a service), package today you might...
Pardot – Marketing Automation By Salesforce
Pardot is a marketing automation platform from Salesforce that works in conjunction with their market-leading Salesforce CRM. I've been reviewing quite a few marketing automation platforms recently and, as a Salesforce user for several years, (although not at...
FunnelMaker – Marketing Automation & CRM
FunnelMaker is a name that, you might be forgiven for thinking, describes a platform that offers a complete marketing funnel automation system. It does not. FunnelMaker is a very good, very comprehensive, CRM with limited email marketing capability but it is not a...