How to choose the best email marketing service for 2021?
By: Bolloju Durgaprasad
Tags: Email Marketing, Email Marketing Services, Digital Marketing, Email Productivity, Email Marketing Tips

Choose the Best Email Marketing Service for 2021

While the popularity of email marketing is increasing and there is also a tremendous increase in the email marketing service providers (ESPs). How to choose the best email marketing service for 2021 is a question that begs to be answered.

To save your time we are here to provide you with some vital information and some guidance on the common ESP features and the benefits that your business can get from them.

Learn the free stuff on Email marketing online from blogs and YouTube.

We talk about the main criteria on how choose the best email marketing service provider that you can use in your business.

Why do we need the best email marketing Service for 2021?

Stable revenue is the major benefit of email marketing that many entrepreneurs and CEOs never stop claiming.

Why people of small or big business entities are relying on email marketing rather than social media channels is because email marketing is always stable enough.

However, Social media channels worked as the main advertisement platforms for a long time, but due to their constantly changing algorithms they are not stable enough.

Click below to get FREE e-book

Click here to download your FREE e-book one Email Marketing Essentials with free Email Marketing Tools inside

Well, before choosing an email service provider, you should clearly understand your goals in your business.

Did you know, many brands switched over to email marketing and invested time and money, which in return, increased their revenue several hundred times without any hassles.

Understanding your goals

Every company has its own goals, because the business process is unique for each business organisation.

Some businesses may be satisfied with a couple of emails per month with a mailing list of 500 subscribers.

The others require email automation, triggered messages, deep analytics of user activity and demographics and budget-friendly plans for a million users list.

Small and mini business organisations depend on free email marketing tools to meet their requirements.

On the other hand, some branded organisations constantly launch email campaigns with a team of designers, marketers, managers and copywriters. But in small companies these responsibilities are limited to one person.

No matter the size of business you are running, before choosing the right email service provider, you need to know the main features of email service providers. How to choose the best email marketing service provider?

The important criteria to choose the best email marketing service provider for 2021?

When choosing an ESP, look for the following features: We will give you the purpose of each feature:

Subscription Forms

Free email templates

Preview mode

Email builders

Scheduler

Personalization

Segmentation

Triggered emails

Integrations

Open API

Analytics and reports

SPF and DKIM

Option to resend unopened emails

24/7 Customer support

Multiple Access Permissions

Price and Plans

Subscription Forms:

Purpose: To build a strong and high quality mailing list.

Firstly, you have to collect email addresses, before sending emails. One of the easiest ways to get email addresses is to attach a subscription form on your website. Almost all email marketing platforms have this functionality.

However, while choosing an email service provider, make sure that the subscription forms that ESPs provide are customizable and provide space to text, images and call to action buttons.

It must be editable to make changes in size, colors, shape, transparency, horizontal or vertical.

Find out some ESPs offers different types of subscription forms like:

Subscription Form Template

Floating forms: These forms are useful to attach on any part of the page and will be visible when visitors scroll on the page.

Pop-up windows: These will appear on the top of the content after a predefined time spent on your website.

Embedded forms: These are useful to place anywhere on a website like header, footer, or a sidebar of a website.

In some services we find ready-made form templates, you can change the copy and publish at first on your website and test it.

Free email templates

Purpose: A ready-made template which can be sent in an instant.

In fact, free email templates are very useful for small businesses. If you want to create an email based on a template, you have to upload images, add text blocks, links, call-to-action buttons and other elements as per your requirement.

A free email template makes your job easy with all the current needs.

Preview mode

Purpose: Compatibility of email on different devices.

Most emails are viewed on small screens and for this reason you have to see the adaptability of ESP to adjust to different screen sizes.

If your email copy looks both good on mobile and desktop in the preview mode, it is good to go.

Easy Email builder Forms

Purpose: To create an attractive-looking email

Remember, this feature is a valuable advantage to those who are non-coders who do not know the rules of using HTML tags for email layouts.

Some ESPs provide online email builder forms wherein you can create elements in drag and drop way. The elements like text blocks, videos, social media icons, images, payment buttons etc.

You have to check the design options, compatibility to different devices before making a purchase decision.

Scheduler

Purpose: Planning email campaigns for a given date and time.

This feature is very useful when you create multiple campaigns to be sent out at different times and dates. It is based on the date and time which you set up manually.

Personalization

Purpose: Using subscriber’s data in emails to make it personalize

Using personal information of the user such as name, gender, age and other demographics in emails is called personalization.

According to statistics, 61% of customers would switch to another brand if they received non-personalized emails.

Placing customer names in the body is the most common way of making an email personalize.

Get Your Free Email Marketing

Segmentation

Purpose: Dividing your audience into segments according to their needs, purposes and sending them the relevant content.

Another important thing is, segmenting your audience is very essential. We can send relevant content to our audience which enhances the click-through and open rate.

Segmentation targets a particular audience based on gender, age and location. This will be a useful feature for small businesses

But, tracking irrelevant users would amount to the fall of CTA and CTR. Check out the segmentation variables in ESP before choosing.

The more the segmentation options, the more relevancy you can adopt in sending mails.

Triggering emails

Purpose: Sending order confirmation emails, birthday emails and abandoned cart emails and others.

Email automation is the process of sending emails triggered by users’ actions, like making purchases, abandoned carts, sign ups and others.

Mostly, automated emails help improve customer experience by supporting them at every step of their actions.

This would improve 2X to 4X of your campaign goals. Not only you can set up triggered emails with the auto-responder feature of your ESP but also enhance the open rate.

When an event is triggered, the subscriber receives an email as per his action.

Test the features of your service providers before making a purchase decision.

Integrations

Purpose: To send emails from your CMS or CRM contact list.

Moreover, the more integrations your ESP provides, the better the success of your email campaigns.

Email Integrations are useful for:

To automate data flow from ESP to your CMS or CRM

To let users’ pay right from emails

Data transfer from sign up form to your mailing list

Creating contact list in your online store

Obviously, you need to check for the detailed information or instructions that the ESP provides you and also check the features for adaptability to your type of business.

API (Application Programming Interface) for multiple goals

Purpose: To integrate ESO tools with your projects

Further important factor is API lets you reach multiple goals: This will work with mailing lists, senders campaigns, templates and receive all the information about your emails.

To check how useful the API can be for you, look at the ESPs documents wherein detailed explanations about integration requirements will be given.

Analytics and Reports

Purpose: To track email marketing metrics and campaign progress.

An ESP will provide you with detailed metrics on each email campaign.

The following are the basic metrics that most ESPs provide

Open rate : how many emails were opened in a campaign

Click-through rate : how many clicks were tracked

Bounce rate : how many emails didn’t reach subscriber’s inbox

Spam complaint rate : how many subscribers marked the mail as spam

Unsubscribe rate : how many users unsubscribed

Further your ESP should provide the maps, demographics, device statistics and graphs and pie charts to display analytics.

Your ESP should also integrate with Google Analytics to track your website traffic and conversions from campaigns.

SPF and DKIM (Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys Identified Mail)

Purpose: To avoid an email going to the spam folder

Make sure your ESP has email authentication through SPF and DKIM is available. If there are no such features, chances are more that an email will land in the spam folder than in inbox.

What is an SPF Record and Why do we need it for email campaigns?

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication technique. It is used to prevent spammers from sending messages from your domain. This policy is used to publish authorised mail services from a registered domain.

SPF and DMARC (Domain based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) will give the receiver the email he received from an authorised domain and the information is trustworthy.

Both prevent the spammers from sending duplicate or spoof emails on behalf of your domain.

What is DKIM and Why do we need it for email campaigns?

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email security standard to make sure that the mails aren’t altered while going from sender’s server to recipient server.

We need DKIM to our ESP because our mails appear more legitimate to your recipients and are prevented from going to junk or spam folders. DKIM makes it harder for spammers to spoof your emails.

Option to resend an unopened email

Purpose: To increase open rates

Sometimes your subject line or timing of your email might be wrong. It may not appeal to the subscriber. You may find such mails weren’t opened by some subscribers.

Make sure your ESP has an option to resend such emails with a different subject line or timing. This would increase the open rate.Get your free Email Marketing service

Revolution in Email Marketing

24/7 Customer Support

Purpose: To solve issues with email delivery and to know about service features

Make sure that the support team is available 24/7 via email, phone, messengers, social media or direct chat.

Make sure that there should be a FAQ section which you can use as a ready reference to at least some of your doubts.

Find all the information you need and learn more details about the ESP before choosing even a trial version.

Find the knowledge base properly structured and have a search field to learn more in case you need to know which you couldn’t find in the knowledge base.

Limited Multiple Access Permissions

Purpose: To avoid information leakage

Suppose you are working campaigns with a team involving a designer for beautiful email designs, copywriter for catchy lines, marketer to launch A/B tests and final start.

Your ESP should set limits for the roles for each member of the team and block all functions that they don’t need so that the information leakage can be prevented.

Price and Plans

Purpose: To make smart investments and purchase decisions

Last but not the least, The comfortable price is the one of the most significant factors, in case you have plans for regular emails. Test out free plans before you purchase a paid plan.

If a free plan meets your business requirements, you are good to go.

Final Thoughts

Finally, choosing an email service provider is a crucial decision as both your sales and reputation of your brand will depend on it. So, investigate the main and additional features the service offers and make detailed comparative study of Email marketing Services of different ESPs with regards to subscription forms, email builder, segmentation, triggered emails, personalization, interface, free email templates and so on.

I always suggest my clients GetResponse Email Marketing and Aweber Email Marketing Services as they have free trial for 14 days and offer within the budget suitable to small and large businesses as well.