Emails have been a staple of marketing since their creation, and they’ve only gotten more relevant in the past two years as the pandemic pushed more people online.
The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on online advertising changed how both businesses and consumers responded, with many businesses changing their strategies in both advertising and marketing.
While it is vital to stay on top of the latest email marketing trends, one of the most effective ways to grab attention is to utilize email marketing tools and email marketing platforms, such as Ongage, to boost your campaigns and reach more inboxes.
What You Want To Get Out Of Email Marketing Tools
Before you choose which tools to utilize, you should assess what you want to accomplish with your marketing strategy. Other things to think about are the size of your campaign, the amount of data you have, and the other tools you’ll be employing that they can interact with.
Generally a good email marketing tool platform will let you:
Keep an eye on your campaign with a single-user interface.
Split your audience and tailor your content.
Schedule emails and launches across multiple campaigns.
Synchronize your data with your CRM, CDP and other data applications.
Analyze data in order to make decisions about future campaigns
Type Of Tools To Use In Email Marketing
Let’s answer the main question that might be on your mind: what are the various types of email marketing solutions available? They can be classified into several types, which are given below, along with some helpful tips for working with them.
1. Email Sending Tools
The intricacies of what occurs when you send emails are sometimes overlooked if you use a platform that handles it for you, but if you want more control, you may utilize tools to govern how your emails are sent.
There are a lot of acronyms you may see floating around such as Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocols (SMTPs), all of which represent different types of connections between email addresses that information flows down. A few good possibilities for modifying these include, PowerMTA, AmazonSES, and Pathwire
2. List Building Tools
Building email lists is simple, but doing so in accordance with data protection standards is not. Active consent technologies, such as double opt-in, automated sign-up forms, can be used to ensure that people joining your lists truly want to be included, and you should double-check with data protection rules in your location just in case.
There are also outreach tools that allow you to expand your reach and add new names to your data lists. These include video and survey creation tools like Poptin, advertisement add-ons like Optinmonster, and referral platforms like GoViral that allow others to reach out for you.
3. List Hygiene Tools
Even though your list is complete and ready to go, it doesn’t mean you can overlook it once the emails are being sent. If your emails are bouncing, being filtered as spam, or being sent to invalid email addresses, you may be violating ISP spam or malware filters. List hygiene tools can be useful in this situation.
Email validation software checks whether an email account is still active and receiving emails to reduce the likelihood of being reported as a spammer. There are also unsubscribe programs that allow users to unsubscribe from your lists with the click of a button.
4. Data Management Tools
The more information you have, the more customized you can make your content to each individual on your list. Unfortunately, this will make it more difficult to manage all of that data.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and Customer Data Platforms are examples of common tools (CDPs). The former is useful when experimenting with personalization and audience segmentation, which you can integrate into your email sending software to create content tailored to the reader. The latter employs analytics tools for sales teams and obtains more robust data directly from them rather than simply scraping it from communication channels.
5. Data Enrichment Tools
Data enrichment tools include a huge range of uses, and what you get depends a lot on which package you opt to use.
There are options for associating email addresses with postal addresses in order to obtain additional insight into your list members, as well as ones for preventing data decay (becoming outdated) by automatically updating your information and filling in data gaps where possible. There are also tools that employ marketing tech advancements, such as artificial intelligence, to examine publicly available information about individuals to determine which marketing strategies they could respond to best. All of this is done with what is legally public and available, meaning what your subscribers have disclosed about themselves online.
5. Content Scaling Tools
You may be inclined to establish as large an email list as possible, then send as many emails as possible to each address on that list in the hope of increasing your audience. While it is true that the more emails you send, the more likely they are to be opened in this round, doing so can result in you being marked as spam, which will harm your reputation.
Content scaling tools, such as customized templates, the ability to build mobile-responsive content, and even interactive aspects in your emails, allow you to produce emails that remain relevant to the recipient.
6. Email Testing Tools
Emails must make it to the inbox in order to be read. There is an old hack for checking the quality of your postal service by mailing yourself a letter, and you can do the same thing online with email testing tools.
SendForensics, GlockApps, and HTML Email Check are just a few of the toolkits available for receiving and grading your own email content. With these tools, you can ensure that your material passes popular spam filters, that it formats properly, and that it is compatible with different email providers, as they all use different code bases.
Wrapping Up
With many great top email marketing tools available, it’s difficult to decide which will be the most beneficial for your business. Each tool has associated costs, which should be measured against the benefits they give. Overall, all of the tools will be valuable in some way, but some will be more so than others depending on your goals.
Another important thing to note is that while all of these tools provide you with data, that is all they are. What you do with it is all up to you. If you are unclear which path to take, try another avenue. In most cases, there is no single right way to run a successful email marketing campaign.
