How To Choose An Email Marketing Software For Your Business
Your website marketing plan is already in place and you are starting to reap the fruits of your labor. You are steadily getting sales of your products and services and have amassed an increasing list of customers who are eager to know more about your future offers.
If you do not have an email marketing plan for your website yet, this is probably a good time to start one. You should leverage email marketing in order to attract new customers as well as offer value to your existing ones.
To achieve success in email marketing, it is highly recommended that you have a professional email software or an autoresponder solution to automate the process. So what do you exactly look for in email software assuming you don’t already have one in place?
Here are a few tips you can use when looking for that email software for your business.
Import Multi-Email-Addresses Function
It can be tiring, cumbersome and unproductive for you to manually add your long list of email contacts into a database. Your time is best spent on marketing and adding value to your customers and potential clients.
The perfect solution is an email software that allows you to import your email contact list data directly in formats you can use such as txt files, doc files, xls files, csv files, etc. This would simplify the process of adding your long list of customer emails and data to start off your email marketing campaign.
Bad Email Filters
When you are building your list of email contacts, there are bound to be wrongly entered emails, duplicate emails, emails that are obsolete and so forth. The ideal email software should be able to filter out outdated emails so you don’t get bounced emails for your email newsletter campaigns and allow your emails to filter through to valid inboxes.
Support For Text And HTML
This is an important feature to look out for when choosing an email marketing software as there are email applications which do not accept HTML messages filled with graphics or the users themselves chose not to accept such emails.
Thus, having the flexibility of adding a text-only format when sending out your emails is bound to increase your email open rate and spread your message. There are email software such as Aweber which can send your emails in both formats depending on the options set by the email applications or recipients.
Capability To Send Test Messages
Imagine sending an email to hundreds or thousands of your subscribers only to have it wrong. For example having embarrassing typo errors in the email or the wrong formatting.
A good email software should have a preview and test function whereby you can do a ‘test send message’ prior to launching your email campaigns. This way, you can send test messages to your own accounts across several email applications to see the way your emails will shape up when they reach your recipients.
Email Scheduling Utility
A useful tool to have in an email software is the ability to schedule emails. This means that you do not have to be around all the time when launching your email campaigns a.k.a having your emails sent out on complete autopilot.
You simply setup the emails in advance, configure the dates you want them sent out in the scheduling option and let it run it’s course. An awesome productivity function!
Tracking, Analytics And Reports
Once your email messages have been sent, you need to know how successful the current campaign has been. To achieve this you need tracking, data analysis and reporting. You do not want a blind email campaign.
Email marketing software with such capabilities will allow you to analyze data from each email you send out such as how many of those emails were opened, how many emails were bounced, how many of those opened emails gets recipients to click through on links within and much more.
Conclusion
It does not matter if you used a self-hosted email software or a hosted email software solution from an email marketing provider. Ensure you do your due diligence when selecting one as the right usage of each software can certainly add value to your business.
We do recommend hosted solutions such as Aweber as they offer a great user-friendly experience overall.
