10 Best Email Marketing Tools for Small Business
Small businesses have a lot to focus on – without the budget and resources of a midsize or enterprise company. The decisions they make around tech tools and software suites are often more important than a bigger company, because they need tools that inherently make it easier to run a quality business with less.
There are no shortage of email marketing tools for small businesses, which is totally logical: Email marketing remains a really powerful tool for small businesses, in part because they have more flexibility with their brand and image.
10 Best Email Marketing Tools for Small Business
And it’s valuable in no small part because while it may be hot to have a cool Instagram page right now, IG is still driven by an algorithm; emails go right into a prospect’s inbox, which means a formula isn’t deciding who sees your best stuff.
Email marketing is a tremendous relationship-building channel. But with so many possible options to choose from, what is the best email marketing tool for your small business?
What Features Should I Look for in an Email Marketing Tool?
Today’s email marketing platforms do more than just send email to your list. There are many features and capabilities you’ll want to consider and evaluate before choosing the best email marketing tool for your small business.
Drag & Drop Builder
Creating eye-catching HTML emails is essential for small businesses for getting newsletters and promos read in the inbox. These emails include elements outside of simple plain text, including images, colors, different font-styles and more.
The tricky part is that email clients (inboxes like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, iPhone mobile, and the multitude of others) don’t follow the same rules when it comes to displaying HTML emails.
A drag & drop email builder is essential for small businesses that want to send well-designed emails that look great in any email client. Drag & drop email builders do double duty for small businesses.
They make it super simple to create email layouts, add text and pull in images – without the need to know any HTML code. And, they are designed to render your HTML email flawlessly in most ever email client.
While you are doing a trial of an email tool, spend a little bit of time in their drag and drop builder to evaluate ease-of-use. You may also want to try a few test sends to the email clients you send to the most and make sure you get the results you expect.
Admin Tools
Even small businesses can be organized in complex ways, and your email marketing tool should help you work efficiently.
You may need the ability to create sub-accounts if you want to treat communication channels differently in different departments. Small businesses that have clients, such as business coaches, consultants and marketing agencies, may require a way to share email templates across client accounts.
As your email marketing efforts grow, so do your lists of contacts. As everyone knows, there’s money in your lists – and you don’t want a rogue client or employee to take off with your proprietary data. If security is a concert for your small business, you’ll want to evaluate your options for protecting your lists.
Deliverability Tools
The cold hard truth of email marketing today is that not every email will make it to the inbox. However, there are steps you can take to protect your sender reputation and ensure you’re delivering as many emails as possible.
As you compare platforms, take note of deliverability help they provide. Email verification, spam checkers, whitelabel IP, and DKIM authentication can all give your business a boost in the battle for the inbox.
List Building
Small businesses can have a giant reach as they grow their email list. List building tools, like online forms, surveys and polls can help you capture a wider audience. As you test out new email marketing platforms, take a look at their list building tools.
Do they have forms? Will they embed seamlessly with your website? Understand if you’ll need a technical resource or not to take advantage of any list building tools an email marketing platform offers.
List Segmentation
As an email marketing best practice, you want to send the most relevant message to everyone on your list. That’s where segmentation comes in. Your customer’s inbox is a competitive place to reach, and sending a generic message to your whole list is rarely a recipe for getting noticed.
Pulling a list of contacts who opened a certain email or clicked a specific link can help small businesses refine their message and improve engagement with their contacts.
As you compare email tools, make sure you have an easy way to slice and dice your contact data and get the right message into the right hands with every send.
Automation
Speaking of sending the right message at the right time, automation is helping small businesses scale their email marketing efforts. Email automation can help you send one-to-one emails to a large list of contacts.
An email automation is a series of triggers and actions that fire automatically. Triggers can be signals such as a contact getting added to a list, opening an email,
or clicking a link. Meanwhile, actions can be steps like sending a specific email or removing a contact from a list. Even just a few triggers and actions put together can create powerful workflows for small businesses.
For instance, an automation can send a special offer to a contact who fills out an offer form. More complex automations can including sending a reminder email to a contact who has put an item in their shopping cart, but has not bought it yet.
Automations can vary from platform to platform, so get a handle on the scope of automation actions and triggers before you make your final decision.
A/B Testing
Digital buying behavior is changing all of the time. A subject line that may have gotten noticed a year ago may feel stale today. Testing subject lines and email copy can set your email marketing efforts apart from the pack.
A/B testing features can be simple or complex. It’s definitely a feature that can help you improve engagement – as long as it’s easy to use for your business.
Reporting
Measuring the success of email marketing is simple with good reporting tools. If there are metrics you want to track that go beyond the basics of open and click-through rates, make sure you can get to the data you need with your email marketing tool.
