For anyone serious about using the internet to grow a business, email marketing is a fundamental aspect of an online business.
There are a number of email marketing platforms available on the market. Some of them have features that make them a perfect fit for e-commerce, others not so much, but they all have very interesting characteristics.
In the text below we’re going to show you the best email marketing platforms for e-commerce, some of which also offer the possibility of other options for communicating with customers (CRM). Even so, almost all of them are paid services; some are cheaper than others, and still others have versions that are free but come with certain limitations.
Here are 5 of the best email marketing platforms for e-commerce:
Mailchimp
This is one of the most popular ones, used by close to 2 million people worldwide.
Mailchimp is easy to use and offers a comprehensive email design tool that you can use to make very professional, personalized emails for every situation.
It’s a powerful platform that allows you to take control over every aspect of email creation and delivery. And it also integrates perfectly with database and email address capture services, amongst others.
Another thing that’s very useful for e-commerce entrepreneurs is that in addition to allowing you to create email lists, you can use it to segment emails manually, assigning a name to each sub-list or segment. That way you can separate prospective customers according to any number of characteristics, which will be useful further down the road when you want to design customized emails for each segment.
You can also differentiate users who use their cell phones to read their emails and design an email especially for them that will look good on mobile devices, to name just one of many possibilities.
Another great feature that Mailchimp offers e-commerce business owners is a comprehensive statistics report. It’s possible to know when an email has been opened, if a user clicked on any of the links inside it, and if they’ve opened it more than once. Furthermore, it’s possible to access information about your subscribers’ Twitter activity. When integrated with Google Analytics it’s possible to access a whole host of other statistical reports. You can see exactly how an email marketing campaign affects your web traffic.
It’s a free platform that lets you send up to 12,000 emails per month and lets you have a list of up to 2,000 subscribers. Beyond those limits, the current rate is €30 per month.
MDirector
This email marketing platform has some features that are very interesting to e-commerce entrepreneurs. It allows text messages (SMS) if you provide the phone numbers.
Another very useful option for getting a high rate of email openings is a feature that they’ve christened “the pressure filter,” which determines the relationship between received emails and opened emails in order to avoid sending emails to contacts that aren’t very receptive or who have already received a certain number of communications.
Effective email marketing campaigns are indispensable in e-commerce, and having the right segmentation for the emails is key. MDirector allows contact segmentation, and it does it on two levels: in lists and segment groups. This is very useful when you have a database with a lot of email addresses and you need a deep, complex segmentation.
Its A/B test system is ideal for refining an email campaign prior to actually launching it. You can send a small number of tests and based on the results measured in terms of emails opened or the number of clicks received, it’s possible to know which option is better, which one got better results, so you can stick with that one. You can repeat this process indefinitely and thus keep improving the email each time.
Of course, MDirector also allows you to analyze metrics, such as email openings, link clicks, and more. It also allows you to know the geographical location of recipients who open the emails.
MDirector is a free platform with a limitation of 5,000 emails per month and up to 5,000 contacts. It offers a lot for free.
MailCast
This platform is aimed at companies that want to create email marketing newsletters and campaigns, customer segmentation, and customized email design. It’s an exclusive service for companies that operate solely in the market in Spain.
And because it’s a Spanish company, it has the advantage of being perfectly adapted to complying with the complex Information Protection Law (IPL) that regulates the entire country. It’s all about confidence and security.
In addition to the advantage of being local, it offers better communication to users requesting support for technical needs or any other purpose that requires communication between MailCast and their customers.
Some of the features that MailCast offers include: having the option of publishing newsletters automatically, being able to create and set up email marketing campaigns, or doing surveys or sales forecasts.
MailCast also allows you to personalize your relationship with your customers, which makes the relationship more long-lasting and profitable. You can submit content to your customers’ websites via RSS channels, and you can help to distribute tasks among various offices by adjusting permissions and responsibilities for each employee.
It’s a paid service designed exclusively for Spanish companies, although it does offer the option of trying it completely free of charge, with no limitations, for one month.
Mailrelay
This is a comprehensive email marketing platform with a lot of features and options, including:
Programmed deliveries and auto-responders. With these two elements you can make an email marketing campaign almost completely automated. Auto-responder is ideal for new subscribers because it sends a chain of emails specifically geared towards e-commerce. In addition, you can set the auto-responder to send a special email on a user’s birthday, for example, or any other specific date, which is ideal for launching a promotion or getting new customers by taking advantage of an important date.
Mailrelay offers a wide variety of preconfigured templates for free that you can use in email marketing campaigns. The templates can be theme-based, general, basic, or specially designed for any occasion. It also offers a simple html editor to design templates from scratch.
Another very useful automatic tool that Mailrelay offers is sending content from an RSS feed. This is ideal for sending emails with new content that’s published on a website or blog, whether it belongs to the account holder or a third party. It includes the option to select the frequency with which emails are sent, which is to say the period of time between sending one email and the next. This can be independent of the frequency with which the blog or website is updated.
In addition to allowing you to segment subscribers based on opening and click rates, Mailrelay automatically deals with rejected emails and nonexistent or unsubscribed email accounts. It automatically keeps your database clean by eliminating addresses that no longer exist.
Like all email marketing platforms designed for e-commerce, statistics play an important role. Mailrelay offers a comprehensive statistical report. It allows you to see email opening rates and click rates for each segmentation, what links they followed, geolocalization, what internet navigator they use, what operating system they use, and other statistical information that’s indispensable for optimizing an email marketing campaign.
Mailrelay is free for up to 30,000 subscribers or 15,000 emails per month. In addition, all the tools and features are available for free accounts. And best of all, the emails do not include any kind of ads. This is something to keep in mind because very few platforms are ad-free for free accounts.
MailerLite
Simple and easy to use, it’s ideal for those who are new to email marketing but who still want an email marketing platform that’s efficient and useful for e-commerce.
MailerLite has a lot of tools and features that are similar to their more professional competitors. In any case, it’s still a good platform for doing email marketing.
It offers an email editor that’s very simple yet versatile that allows you to create and customize your email design. The resulting emails are categorized on lists that you can see on any email service or client.
Database management is rather comprehensive; you can import lists from any file, and the program will detect duplicate or nonexistent email addresses. You can work with multiple lists segmented according to a variety of characteristics.
One of the features of MailerLite that really stands out is its efficient delivery of emails. This is due to distribution to a variety of IPs, high integrate-ability, constant testing of email black lists, and 100% guaranteed email delivery.
Furthermore, its delivery speed is superior to that of its competitors: it’s capable of sending 1000 emails per minute, which saves time and resources, making it into one of the most efficient email delivery systems on the market.
Its statistics report is very complete and includes open rates, click indices, email rejection indices (including the reason for rejection), reports about subscribers who have unsubscribed, and other statistics. The metrics can be viewed in real time in graphical format.
MailerLite allows you to sign up and use the whole system without limitations for up to 1,000 subscribers with no email delivery limit. Beyond 1,000 subscribers the rates are very reasonable, running from €8 to €80 per month for lists of more than 50,000 subscribers.
Author Edward Azorbo
Rebeldesmarketingonline.com