How to Find the Right Email Marketing Service Provider

Wordpress Experts - Melbourne Wordpress Developers  

Before we review the three most popular email marketing platforms, let’s establish our criteria for choosing the best option for you:

  1. Find a small business email marketing solution
  2. Easy to create emails
  3. Simple to manage and segment contacts
  4. Detailed reporting & tracking
  5. Price

Best Email Marketing Service Providers

In this article we will be reviewing who we think are the most well known business email software in 2018.  You might find there are many more options, however, for today, we are reviewing the 3 that we have had experience with.

  • Constant Contact
  • Mailchimp
  • Campaign Monitor
  • Omnisend

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an easy-to-use email marketing software.

This simple platform is tailored for small businesses and has features that allow you to easily manage email lists & templates, as well as offering built-in social media sharing tools.

Their bonus features include automatic emails, such as “Welcome” emails and birthday emails.

You can also conduct surveys & polls, gather online donations (for non-profit companies), as well as utilise the built-in coupon system or event system (which is an extra charge).

Pricing starts at $20 per month for 500 subscribers, up to $95 per month for 10,000 subscribers.  

If you want the automation, event marketing, donations, surveys & coupon features then you’re going to have to fork out another $25 per month – so for up to 500 subscribers you’re looking at $45 per month.

Other benefits of Constant Contact are the seminars & training, Live Expert support and user community forums.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email systems online. Their interface is pretty sophisticated and they over a stack of intuitive tools.

MailChimp have developed custom plugins that integrate nicely with WordPress, Magento & Shopify.

You can either upload your own email from scratch or use one of their visually-appealing templates within the email builder… However, sometimes we’ve found the email builder to be a little clunky overall, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very good.

With MailChimp you are able to create custom lists, custom fields within a list and also segments, which can be very powerful.  Furthermore, they have a great email automation system, where you can build your own or use one of their pre-defined templates.

Other features include Facebook & Instagram ad campaign managers, A/B Testing, various reporting tools, as well as a bunch of additional e-Commerce features, such as “Abandonment Cart” emails.

Overall the MailChimp system is effective & jammed packed with features, but at times can be a little overwhelming.

The best part about MailChimp is they offer a “Forever Free” plan which allows you to send up to 12,000 emails among 2,000 subscribers per month.

They also have a “Pay As You Go” option and monthly plans starting from $10 per month.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is another popular platform that gives you everything you need to run successful campaigns, plus much more. The company is based in Australia too, so they get our support.

Their new “Drag & Drop” email builder allows you to professionally create email templates or upload your own HTML.  

When creating a campaign they have a built-in segmenting tool, which makes it really easy to create targeted campaigns based on behaviour & actions.  

Every email message can be personalised with merge tags as well, making your emails more personal than ever before.

Campaign Monitor also comes with A/B testing, tracking & social sharing tools.

If you set up an account, head  to the Insights tab and you’ll find a full suite of analytics that will give you a better understanding of your audience – including the overall performance of campaigns, geography (even in real time!) and of course, your overall engagement rates.

They have plenty of apps that integrate with popular websites platforms, CRMs and analytics programs.

Campaign Monitor pricing can get a little difficult to follow, but their basic package starts from $9 per month for 500 subscribers and up to 2,500 email sends per month. Their premier package, with all the bells and whistles, starts at $199 per month for 500 subscribers.

This package is tailored to medium-size business.

Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing software that takes it to the next level. Email marketing automation lies at the core of what Omnisend has to offer, but it’s far from everything this versatile tool can do.

Offering a simple drag and drop visual composer, Omnisend allows you to easily create emails, forms, landing pages, and anything else you need to build and communicate with your customer base.

What’s more, Omnisend offers robust automation workflows that allow you to build relationships with your customers via email, SMS, web push notifications, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Viber, all from one automation workflow. You won’t have to bounce back and forth between platforms anymore, Omnisend centralizes everything you need into one easy to use platform.

Omnisend offers a free plan for basic email marketing that allows you to send up to 15,000 emails per month. Pricing for their Standard plan which includes automation, segmentation, and more of the features Omnisend is famous for, starts at just $16 per month.

Summary

All three options listed here are great tools & have the ability to scale as your database grows.

For us & our clients however, we tend to recommend using Campaign Monitor. They have great apps that integrate with WordPress, Facebook and other CRMs, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.

Still, the best thing about any of these systems is that you’ll never be locked into a contract.  You can always export your data and import into another system – so it’s best to try them all and see which is right for you.

If you’re restricted by budget then I recommend starting with MailChimp. It’s worth noting you won’t be able to upload a HTML template, but you will be able to use their email builder.

If you have the budget then I would recommend starting with Campaign Monitor.

Once you’ve selected an email platform, getting started is easy. Simply follow these steps:

  • Upload your subscriber list
  • Create your email template
  • Test your email (including spell-check and links)
  • Send!
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