Get the Best LLC Credit Card

Need an LLC credit card? You’ve come to the right place. And they are still available, despite the COVID-19 situation.

The Very Best LLC Credit Card

We researched just about every LLC credit card for you. So, here are our top picks.

Per the SBA, company credit card limits are a whopping 10 – 100 times that of personal credit cards!

This shows you can get a lot more cash with business credit. And it also means you can have personal credit cards at retail stores. So, you would now have an additional card at the same retailers for your small business.

And you will not need collateral, cash flow, or financials to get company credit.

LLC Credit Card Benefits

Perks vary. So, make certain to choose the perk you would prefer from this selection of options.

Get a Secure LLC Credit Card for Fair Credit Scores

Capital One® Spark® Classic for Business

Check out the Capital One® Spark® Classic for Business. It has no annual fee. There is no introductory APR offer. The regular APR is a variable 24.49%. You can earn unlimited 1% cash back on every purchase for your company, without any minimum to redeem.

While this card is within reach if you have average credit scores, beware of the APR. Yet if you can pay promptly, and in full, then it’s a bargain.

Find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-classic/

Get a Trustworthy LLC Credit Card for Fair to Poor Credit, Not Calling for a Personal Guarantee

Brex Card for Startups

Take a look at the Brex Card for Startups. It has no annual fee.

You will not need to provide your Social Security number to apply. And you will not need to provide a personal guarantee. They will take your EIN.

However, they do not accept every industry.

Also, there are some industries they will not work with, and others where they want added documentation. For a list, go here: https://brex.com/legal/prohibited_activities/.

To determine creditworthiness, Brex checks a business’s cash balance, spending patterns, and investors.

You can get 7x points on rideshare. Get 4x on Brex Travel. Also, get triple points on restaurants. And get double points on recurring software payments. Get 1x points on everything else.

So you can have bad credit (even a 300 FICO) to qualify.

Find it here: https://brex.com/lp/startups-higher-limits/

Establish business credit fast with our research-backed guide to 12 business credit cards and lines.

Get an LLC Credit Card with No Annual Fee

No Annual Fee/Flat Rate Cash Back

Ink Business Unlimited℠ Credit Card

Take a look at the Ink Business Unlimited℠ Credit Card. Beyond no annual fee, get an introductory 0% APR for the first year. Afterwards, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%.

You can earn unlimited 1.5% Cash Back rewards on every purchase made for your business. And get $500 bonus cash back after spending $3,000 in the first three months from account opening. You can redeem your rewards for cash back, gift cards, travel and more using Chase Ultimate Rewards®. But you will need excellent credit scores to receive this card.

Find it here: https://creditcards.chase.com/business-credit-cards/ink/unlimited

Get an LLC Credit Card for Luxurious Travel Points

Flat-rate Travel Rewards

Capital One® Spark® Miles for Business

Take a look at the Capital One® Spark® Miles for Business. It has an introductory yearly fee of $0 for the first year, which then rises to $95. The regular APR is 18.49%, variable due to the prime rate. There is no introductory annual percentage rate. Pay no transfer fees. So late fees go up to $39.

This card is terrific for travel if your expenses do not fall into typical bonus categories. You can get unlimited double miles on all purchases, without any limits. Get 5x miles on rental cars and hotels if you book through Capital One Travel.

Get an initial bonus of 50,000 miles. That’s the same as $500 in travel. However you just get it if you spend $4,500 in the initial 3 months from account opening. There is no foreign transaction fee. But you will need a good to superb FICO score to qualify.

Find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-miles/

Bonus Travel Categories with a Sign-Up Offer

Ink Business Preferred℠ Credit Card

For a wonderful sign-up offer and bonus categories, check out the Ink Business Preferred℠ Credit Card.

Pay an annual fee of $95. Regular APR is 17.49 – 22.49%, variable. There is no introductory APR offer.

Get 100,000 bonus points after spending $15,000 in the initial 3 months after account opening. This works out to $1,250 towards travel rewards if you redeem via Chase Ultimate Rewards.

Get three points per dollar of the first $150,000 you spend with this card. So this is for purchases on travel, shipping, internet, cable, and phone services. Plus it includes advertising purchases made with social media sites and search engines each account anniversary year.

You can get 25% more in travel redemption when you redeem for travel with Chase Ultimate Rewards. But you will need a good to superb FICO score to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcards.chase.com/business-credit-cards/ink/business-preferred

No Yearly Fee

Bank of America® Business Advantage Travel Rewards World MasterCard® credit card

For no yearly fee while still getting travel rewards, have a look at this card from Bank of America. It has no annual fee and a 0% introductory APR for purchases during the first nine billing cycles. After that, its regular APR is 13.74 – 23.74% variable.

You can get 30,000 bonus points when you make a minimum of $3,000 in net purchases. So this is within 90 days of your account opening. You can redeem these points for a $300 statement credit towards travel purchases.

Earn unlimited 1.5 points for every $1 you spend on all purchases, everywhere, every time. And this is despite how much you spend.

Also earn 3 points per every dollar spent when you schedule your travel (car, hotel, airline) through the Bank of America® Travel Center. There is no limit to the number of points you can get and points don’t expire.

But note you will need superb credit to get this one (as in, 700s or better).

Find it here: https://www.bankofamerica.com/smallbusiness/credit-cards/products/travel-rewards-business-credit-card/

Hotel Credit Card

Marriott Bonvoy Business™ American Express® Card

Check out the Marriott Bonvoy Business™ Card from American Express. It has an annual fee of $125. There is no introductory APR offer. The regular APR is a variable 17.24 – 26.24%. But you will need good to exceptional credit scores to get this card.

Points

You can get 75,000 Marriott Bonvoy points after using your card to make purchases of $3,000 in the initial three months. Get 6x the points for qualified purchases at participating Marriott Bonvoy hotels. You can get 4x the points at US restaurants and gasoline stations. And you can get 4x the points on wireless telephone services bought straight from American service providers and on US purchases for shipping.

Get double points on all other eligible purchases.

Rewards

Also, you get a free night every year after your card anniversary. And you can earn one more free night after you spend $60,000 on your card in a calendar year.

You get free Marriott Bonvoy Silver Elite status with your Card. Also, spend $35,000 on qualified purchases in a calendar year and get an upgrade to Marriott Bonvoy Gold Elite status through the end of the next calendar year.

Plus, each calendar year you can get credit for 15 nights towards the next level of Marriott Bonvoy Elite status.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/bonvoy-business/

Business Credit Cards with a 0% Introductory APR – Pay Zero!

Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express

Take a look at the Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express. It has no annual fee. There is a 0% introductory APR for the first 12 months. Afterwards, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%.

Get double Membership Rewards® points on everyday business purchases like office supplies or client dinners for the initial $50,000 spent per year. Get 1 point per dollar afterwards.

But you will need great to outstanding credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/bluebusinessplus-credit-card/

American Express® Blue Business Cash Card

Also take a look at the American Express® Blue Business Cash Card. Note: the American Express® Blue Business Cash Card is identical to the Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express. But its rewards are in cash as opposed to points.

Get 2% cash back on all eligible purchases on up to $50,000 per calendar year. Then get 1%.

So it has no yearly fee. There is a 0% introductory APR for the initial year. After that, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%.

But you will need great to excellent credit scores to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/business-bluecash-credit-card/

Establish business credit fast with our research-backed guide to 12 business credit cards and lines.

Get a Flexible Financing LLC Credit Card – Have A Look at Your Options!

The Plum Card® from American Express

Have a look at the Plum Card® from American Express. It has an introductory annual fee of $0 for the first year. After that, pay $250 per year.

Get a 1.5% early pay discount cash back bonus when you pay within 10 days. You can take up to 60 days to pay without interest when you pay the minimum due by the payment due date.

However, you will need great to excellent credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/the-plum-card-business-charge-card/

Get an LLC Credit Card for Cash Back

Flat-Rate Rewards

Capital One ® Spark® Cash for Business

Take a look at the Capital One® Spark® Cash for Business. It has an introductory $0 annual fee for the first year. After that, this card costs $95 per year. There is no introductory APR offer. The regular APR is a variable 18.49%.

You can get a $500 one-time cash bonus after spending $4,000 in the initial three months from account opening. So you can get unlimited 2% cash back. Redeem at any time without any minimums.

But you will need great to exceptional credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-cash/

Flat-Rate Rewards and No Annual Fee

Discover it® Business Card

Check out the Discover it® Business Card. It has no yearly fee. There is an introductory APR of 0% on purchases for one year. After that the regular APR is a variable 14.49 – 22.49%.

Get unlimited 1.5% cash back on all purchases, with no category restrictions or bonuses. So they double the 1.5% Cashback Match™ at the end of the first year. There is no minimum spend requirement.

You can download transactions quickly to Quicken, QuickBooks, and Excel. But note: you will need good to outstanding credit to qualify for this card.

So you can get it here: https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/business/

Bonus Categories

Ink Business Cash℠ Credit Card

Take a look at the Ink Business Cash℠ Credit Card. It has no yearly fee. There is a 0% introductory APR for the initial year. After that, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%. You can get a $500 one-time cash bonus after spending $3,000 in the first three months from account opening.

You can get 5% cash back on the initial $25,000 spent in combined purchases at office supply stores and on net, cable and phone services each account anniversary year.

Get 2% cash back on the initial $25,000 spent in combined purchases at gas stations and restaurants each account anniversary year. Earn 1% cash back on all other purchases. There is no restriction to the amount you can earn.

But you will need outstanding credit scores to receive this card.

Find it here: https://creditcards.chase.com/business-credit-cards/ink/cash?iCELL=61GF

Boosted Cash Back Categories

Bank of America® Business Advantage Cash Rewards MasterCard® credit card

Take a look at the Bank of America® Business Advantage Cash Rewards MasterCard® credit card. Get an 0% introductory APR for the initial 9 billing cycles of the account. Afterwards, the APR is 13.74% – 23.74% variable. There is no yearly fee. You can get a $300 statement credit offer.

Get 3% cash back in the category of your choice. So these are filling stations (default), office supply stores, travel, TV/telecom & wireless, computer services or business consulting services. Get 2% cash back on dining. So this is for the first $50,000 in combined choice category/dining purchases each calendar year. Then earn 1% after, with no limits.

But you will need exceptional credit to qualify.

And then you can find it here: https://promo.bankofamerica.com/smallbusinesscards2/

The Best LLC Credit Card for You

Get an Irresistible LLC Credit Card for Jackpot Rewards That Never Expire

Capital One® Spark® Cash Select for Business

Check out the Capital One® Spark® Cash Select for Business. It has no annual fee. You can get 1.5% cash back on every purchase. There is no limit on the cash back you can earn. Also get a one-time $200 cash bonus when you spend $3,000 on purchases in the initial three months. Rewards never expire.

So pay a 0% introductory APR for 9 months. Then pay 14.49% – 22.49% variable APR afterwards.

But you will need great to superb credit scores to qualify.

And then you can find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-cash-select/

The Best LLC Credit Card for You

Your outright best company credit cards hinge on your credit history and scores.

Only you can select which features you want and need. So, make sure to do your homework. Because what is excellent for you could be disastrous for somebody else.

And, as always, be sure to build credit in the recommended order for the best, speediest benefits. The COVID-19 situation cannot last forever.

The post Get the Best LLC Credit Card appeared first on Credit Suite.

Best Cloud Web Hosting

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You need a website that’s reliable, flexible, and adapts to your needs. You need to spend your time focusing on your business rather than worrying about your website.

Cloud web hosting could be the right choice for you. This is a relatively new kind of hosting that has emerged as an impressive solution for websites that need a stable and efficient, yet adaptable and agile hosting solution.

Unlike traditional web hosting, where you purchase a set amount of resources like bandwidth and RAM on a single server, cloud hosting spreads your website’s needs across a massive virtual server that lives on hardware in data centers all over the world.

With cloud hosting, it’s incredibly easy to add more resources or cut back as needed, and cloud hosting is much less vulnerable to equipment failure issues as there are many servers to pick up the slack.

If you’re looking for a cost-effective hosting solution to grow with your business, cloud hosting could be the way to go. Keep reading – we’ll break down 7 of the best cloud web hosting options and how to know which is the best one for your business needs.

The Top 7 Options for Cloud Web Hosting:

A2 Hosting — Best For Speed & Flexibility
Cloudways — Best User-Friendly Power Hosting
Hostgator — Best For Affordability
InMotion — Best Customer Support
Bluehost — Best User Experience
DreamHost — Best if You Know How to Code
Nexcess — Best for Ecommerce

How to Choose the Best Cloud Web Hosting For You

With so many hosting options available, it can be overwhelming to figure out precisely what you need. With this in mind, here are a few specific factors to consider when choosing which cloud hosting service is the best option for you and your business.

Scalability

Perhaps the greatest advantage of cloud web hosting is its capability to grow with your business, whatever that looks like for you. For example, you might be launching an entirely new venture but have detailed plans to grow quickly and need a website that can easily scale with you. An alternate scenario would be a business with dramatic peaks and dips in traffic volume, like an online shop selling seasonal merchandise.

In both of these scenarios, you won’t want to be constrained to a set amount of resources on one single server, like you would in a conventional web hosting package. With cloud hosting, you’re sharing space with hundreds of thousands of other websites on many servers all over the world, so it’s quick and easy for your cloud hosting provider to add more resources to your plan as needed. Many of the providers we’ve included here make scaling up as easy as the click of a button.

Cloud hosting is the obvious choice if you’re planning for your business to expand quickly or if it often fluctuates significantly. But even in other cases, it might still be the right choice for you—keep reading to find out why.

Reliability and Security

One major plus to having your site hosted in so many different locations is security. Because your website’s integrity isn’t connected to a physical object (a specific, designated server), that object doesn’t need to be protected from harm. Public cloud hosting is formed by many data centers full of servers worldwide, and they’re generally highly secure and often in remote locations.

Furthermore, physical equipment fails and experiences issues. But because the servers that form the cloud can dip in and out of hosting your website, physical problems with a server you’re hosted on won’t impact your site’s performance.

Together, these two factors mean that many cloud hosting providers guarantee a really good amount of uptime, the time your site is online and working normally. Usually, they’ll guarantee between 99.95% and 99.99% uptime – but it’s often more.

So, if a website that functions extremely reliably and is secure from external threats is important to you, you’ll definitely want to go for cloud-based web hosting.

Cost Efficiency

Because cloud hosting means you’re taking up a tiny part of a tremendous amount of server space with many other tenant sites, the amount of resources you consume is extremely flexible. As we mentioned, your provider can easily scale up the amount of resources you’re using, but if you use fewer resources, you often only need to pay for what you consume.

In conventional web hosting plans, you’ll often end up paying for more resources than you use because you’re allotted a specific amount of server space, but with cloud hosting, that’s not a concern.

If this type of cost-efficiency is important to you, be sure to choose a provider from the list below who charges on a per-hour basis, rather than a flat fee.

The Different Types of Cloud Web Hosting

Whereas web hosting refers to hosting your site’s files on a single server somewhere, cloud hosting does not restrict you to a physical server. Your site is stored on multiple servers and offers far more flexibility, meaning that your site simply switches to another server if one is malfunctioning. Let’s take a look at the main types of cloud hosting.

Public vs. Private Cloud Web Hosting

The public cloud is one large cloud hosting service offered to thousands of different clients, or ‘tenants,’ by your cloud hosting provider. As you probably know, a public cloud is run from many servers all over the world. If you choose this option, even though you’re sharing the resources in the cloud with so many other websites, you aren’t sharing anything else like private data. Your provider will use security measures to ensure your data is kept confidential and separated from other tenants. It’s highly likely that public cloud hosting is the right option for you if you’re reading this article.

By contrast, a private cloud is hosted on specific hardware dedicated only to its one tenant. It’s more expensive and less efficient but may be the right option for businesses that need cloud hosting and deal with sensitive data where privacy is a huge concern. A private cloud can be created internally by the entity that needs it or offered by an external private cloud hosting provider.

A more recent innovation is the virtual private cloud, which combines many advantages of both options. Without getting too technical, virtual private cloud hosting embeds completely separate clouds, each hosting a different tenant, within a broader public cloud environment, or ‘intercloud.’

Managed vs. Unmanaged Cloud Web Hosting

When you opt for unmanaged cloud hosting, you’re basically just paying for the bandwidth and other resources your sites consume on their own, as a utility. You’ll be charged based on your consumption, whether that’s hourly, monthly, or another metric. Your chosen host is just providing the public cloud – almost always a public cloud – where your website is hosted, along with millions of others.

If you choose this option, it means you have the capability to handle the technical side of things in-house, whether your business is large enough to have an IT team or you’re a computer whiz who can manage it yourself.

On the other hand, managed cloud hosting brings in an element of customer service. The managed cloud hosting provider is doing some of the work of keeping your business online—work that, if you went the unmanaged route, you or your IT department would be taking care of.

In the past, managed cloud hosting was always private, making it more expensive and less scalable. Today, managed cloud hosting uses a virtual private cloud. This allows managed cloud hosting to bring the main benefits of cloud hosting in general—scalability and affordable pricing—to a managed model that’s a better fit for individuals and smaller organizations.

It’s essential to understand this distinction because all the choices on this list offer managed hosting options. Unless you’re a large-scale enterprise with a robust IT department or a technical genius, it’s unlikely unmanaged cloud hosting is the choice for you. So, keep that in mind when you’re shopping around.

#1 – A2 Hosting — Best For Speed & Flexibility

A2 Hosting tops out this list for several reasons. First of all, they’re known in the industry for super-fast web hosting, and their cloud hosting plans have proven to be just as fast and reliable.

What stands out about A2 is how adaptable they are. No matter what you want out of your cloud hosting provider, they are a good, solid option to get you where you need to go. 24/7 customer support is one feature that will be especially valuable if you’re slightly less tech-savvy. There’s also a variety of price points, with their cheapest plan, Runway 1, just $4.99 per month, and the most expensive plan, Supersonic 8, starting at $29.99 per month.

A2 Hosting also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee—something you won’t get from any other provider, so it really sets them apart from the competition.

Another notable thing about A2 is that you can host as many websites as you want, as long as you stay within the bandwidth you paid for.

#2 – Cloudways — Best User-Friendly Power Hosting

If you’ve got a large, complex website that needs powerful hosting, but enterprise-class solutions are out of reach, Cloudways could be a perfect middle ground.

Their cloud hosting comes from big providers that would usually only be accessible to big corporations but put it into an accessible format. Their simple dashboard makes using the service easy, and prices are on par with other entry-level cloud hosting options.

Cloudways also has servers in over 25 cities worldwide, and they let you choose which one yours is located in. That means you can select servers as close to your physical location as possible, which is good for your website’s speed.

When it comes to plans and pricing, even their least expensive plan, at $10 per month, comes with a lot of features, like 24/7 customer support, free SSL, free migration, dedicated firewalls, 24/7 real-time monitoring, auto-healing, and more.

#3 – Hostgator — Best For Affordability

If you’re looking for budget-friendly cloud hosting that’s still reliable, Hostgator is the way to go. Because it offers unmetered storage and bills on an hourly basis, it can also handle a site with a lot of pages or significant variations in traffic without sacrificing their great 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Their introductory discounts really set them apart, especially for their biggest plan. For your first year of hosting with Hostgator, you can get discounts of up to 70% depending on their deals. The Hatchling plan is currently $4.95 per month, with the Baby plan starting at $6.57 per month and the Business plan at only $10 a month after the discount. All plans come with a 36-month commitment.

Unless you choose Hostgator’s Business plan, you won’t get any perks like free backups or SEO tools, but that plan’s prices are still a great affordable option with the discounts. It’s also simple to use, including the ability to scale up your cloud resources as your business grows with just one click.

#4 – InMotion — Best Customer Support

InMotion is a fantastic option for small business owners who need a website, especially if they’re new to the digital world.

InMotion makes it easy to scale your resources as you need to, and the fact that their plans include a free SSL certificate and cPanel makes them a good one-stop-shop option.

But their customer service is what really sets them apart. InMotion offers 24/7 support via both live chat and phone, along with help tickets and a knowledge database with tons of resources to refer back to. If you’re a busy entrepreneur who’s not that comfortable yet online, this kind of high-support, all-in-one option is likely to be exactly what you need.

InMotion is a more expensive option with the lowest-priced plan for small businesses typically $59.99 per month. But at the time of this writing, they are running a sale, and this plan is $17.99 per month and still includes free SSLs.

#5 – Bluehost — Best User Experience

Bluehost is a very well-known name in the web hosting space. While most people know them for their non-cloud shared hosting plans, they actually offer the option to upgrade any of their plans to the cloud by choosing the CloudFlare option. This lets you bring the flexibility and scalability of cloud hosting to a simple, easy-to-use plan without making any changes yourself.

Bluehost makes building your site really easy. They offer WordPress plans, which is a platform many people are familiar with, as well as their own simple, Weebly-based website builder.

It’s a great way to bring cloud hosting advantages to a hosting and site-building experience that you might already be more familiar with.

The Basic plan starts at $3.95 per month but is only for one website. The Plus plan starts at $4.95 per month and has unlimited sites and storage. Choice Plus is their most popular plan and is $6.95 per month, while the Pro plan is $13.95 per month. All plan prices are for a 36-month agreement, and all come with 24/7 customer support, a free domain for one year, a free CDN, and a free SSL certificate.

#6 – Dreamhost — Best if You Know How to Code

Dreamhost is another great budget-friendly option, but it really shines if you already know how to code. Dreamhost is less expensive because you’ll need some technical know-how to really make your site your own.

If you’re comfortable managing and customizing your website through a command-line text interface, you’ll love Dreamhost – you’ll be able to keep playing around with the web development tools you’re already using. Even better, Dreamhost offers an unmetered hourly rate.

Dreamhost’s DIY ethos and low prices mean their customer support isn’t the most full-service, but if you’re in their target market, chances are that won’t be a deal-breaker.

Dreamhost plans start at $3.95 per month billed annually, and they have a lot of different hosting options to choose from. All plans give you a discount for annual billing over monthly payments.

#7 – Nexcess — Best for E-Commerce

Nexcess is a cloud hosting solution tailored to the needs of e-commerce businesses. They offer Magento, WordPress, and WooCommerce integration, making them a natural fit for selling products online. Paired with cloud hosting’s scalability, it’s the obvious choice for an e-commerce business with big plans to grow. They also offer a variety of plans depending on which e-commerce platform you choose, as well as 24/7 customer support—perfect for busy online shop owners.

Nexcess has many great features, including auto-scaling, PCI compliance, SEO tools, and a great deal of development tools for complete flexibility and customization.

Because Nexcess has so many integration options, it is difficult to give a specific price you can expect. However, as an example, if you choose WordPress as your platform, pricing starts at $19 per month for one site with 7 plan options. The most expensive option is the Enterprise plan at $999.00 per month and includes up to 250 sites, 800 GB of storage, 10 terabytes of bandwidth, 30-day backups, and unlimited email accounts.

WooCommerce has similar pricing to WordPress, but Magento starts at $49 per month for cloud hosting.

Conclusion

By this point, you probably have a pretty good idea of what your needs from cloud hosting are and which provider is the best choice to meet them.

It’s important to remember that while some options are better than others, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. You’ll want to be guided by your priorities, whether that’s cost, customer service, flexibility, or something else, and let that determine where you host. It’s a decision that could determine the future of your website. But with so many great options out there, the future is looking bright.

The post Best Cloud Web Hosting appeared first on Neil Patel.

Best Free Website Builders

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Do you want to build a website? Luckily for you and the tens of thousands of online businesses out there, a digital website builder makes it easy to create professional sites that function beautifully in no time.

The best part? There are many free website builder options.

Website builders make it possible to create a responsive site optimized for SEO without having to invest a ton of money or time, which is perfect for small businesses.

But you have to learn what features to look for first.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the best free website builders on the market today, as well as which one can build the best site in your niche—whether you’re selling painted rocks, are a freelance writer, or want to bootstrap a dropshipping business.

The Top 4 Options For The Best Free Website Builders:

Wix – The best for e-commerce sites
Weebly – The best for general sites
WordPress – The best for blogging and content creation
Site123– The best for quick and easy landing pages

How to Choose The Best Free Website Builder For You

What is your site’s end goal? That’s the first and most important question you want to ask yourself when choosing a site builder.

Do you want to start a blog to share your extensive knowledge and thought leadership with the world?

Do you have a graphic design portfolio you want to show off to gain more freelance clients? Are you a non-profit that needs to display annual achievements and your mission statement?

When creating your site with a free website builder, your end goal will determine what capabilities you need. Once you have your site’s end goal in mind, here are additional criteria to narrow down your choices.

Design Capabilities

If you’re a freelancer, a designer, or a photographer wanting to create an online portfolio, consider the design capabilities of each builder.

Customization: How deep do their personalization and customization features go?
Templates: Do they provide eye-catching site templates you can use, so you don’t have to start from scratch?
Media storage: Does your site builder give you a lot of image storage space? Depending on how big your site will be, this is a key question if you want to keep things free.

When thinking about how to present your portfolio or brand, this is the site builder criteria you most want to pay attention to.

Learning Curve

How fast do you need your website built? This determines how much time you’re willing to spend learning the ins and outs of your website builder.

Intuitive design: Some builders are pretty intuitive to learn, while others might have a larger learning curve.
Ease of use: Do you want a drag and drop builder to make building and configuring your site easier? Or do you prefer writing in HTML and coding the site yourself?
Tutorials and technical support: Do they have a robust support options where you can find answers or get a timely response from the company?

If you’re pressed for time and want something built fast, you might not want to pick a hefty builder with lots of capabilities to learn. A more straightforward drag-and-drop builder can get the job done faster and easier.

Long-Term Options

As your business grows, your website will inevitably need to grow with it. Your site needs are going to change over time. When choosing your site builder, it’s a good idea to look into what their paid features include and if they fit the bill in terms of what your site might need as it grows.

These can be things like:

Additional hosting capacity: Once traffic to your site hits a certain threshold, you’ll likely need to purchase additional hosting to sustain your traffic growth.
Additional plugins and design features: If there is ever a need for additional plugins and features, does the free builder provide that?
Personalized support: Once you hit a wall creating your own site, do they have sufficient support to help you take things to the next level with CSS and HTML modifications?

Type of Website

What type of website do you need to build? As mentioned, determining your site’s end goal and working backward can help you answer that.

To give you a better idea, the internet is generally made up of five kinds of websites:

Blog: Are you going to continually publish content that informs, entertains, or inspires a particular audience?
Portfolio: Are you showcasing your work to sell your services to potential clients?
E-commerce site: Are you selling products or services with an online storefront?
Small business/organization site: Are you rounding out your brand with a public mission statement or publishing general public business information for the world to access?
Online application: While this is technically a website with more complexity, it’s beyond a free builder’s scope since it would need serious developer chops to build well.

For most businesses, the type of site you need is a pretty basic question. But an important one to answer.

For example, most site builders have blogging capabilities, but this shouldn’t be the only thing you base your decision on. Once you’ve figured out which type of website you need to build, then we can move on to learning about the different kinds of site builders on the market.

The Different Types of Free Website Builders

Now, there’s a slew of free site builders out there, and they tend to fall into three general groups.

Basic Website Builders

I’ve yet to come across one good reason not to build a website for your business. Non-profit organizations, informational sites, and even public speakers with a personal brand can all benefit from creating a professional website found by anyone online.

Basic web builders tend to have multiple functionalities. They don’t cater to one specific category. For example, suppose you’re looking to set up a portfolio site that’s low maintenance and simple, with a general contact form, a home page, a portfolio page, and an about page. In that case, a general website builder can be a great option.

E-commerce Platforms

Are you currently selling products in a physical location? You’ll want to go with a website builder specifically made for e-commerce. Today, it isn’t enough to display your goods on a physical storefront. You need a digital storefront, too. Or maybe you want to open an e-commerce site without a physical storefront. E-commerce website builders make it easy to do that.

As an e-commerce business, you want capabilities that let you list products, accept multiple types of payments, categorize goods, and allow you to track backend inventory in real-time.

Blogging and Content Creation

The web isn’t much without content. And if you want your site found by your audience, you want to make sure to use a website builder made to enable that end goal.

If you’re a thought leader, want to build your online brand, be an aspiring blogger, or create a community around a service or product, then a website builder geared for content generation is your best bet.

You’ll be better off in the long-term as your business grows, and you won’t run into the problems you’d have if you choose a web builder meant for e-commerce.

#1 – Wix — The Best For E-commerce Sites

If you’re looking for a free website builder that does everything a real-life store manager would do and then some, Wix makes that a reality.

The thought of building an online store can be paralyzing. But once you create a Wix e-commerce site, you have access to perks like real-time tax calculations and adding several payment channels that you wouldn’t have with a builder geared toward content or portfolios.

As a product seller, Wix helps you create beautifully designed storefronts with a selection of over 800 pre-built themes and templates ready to personalize at the click of a mouse.

There’s no doubt e-commerce businesses are in good hands with Wix. It is a builder that goes out of its way to advertise themselves as such, instead of being a jack-of-all-trades. Still, as with every site builder, there can be some drawbacks. For example, if you ever want to move your site to another provider, you can’t do that with Wix’s builder because of how it’s configured. You’ll have to completely recreate it on a new platform.

Some of their e-commerce features designed to drive sales are:

Sales and customer behavior analytics
Displaying prices in international currencies
Easily creating subscriptions and discount coupons for customers
Integration with all social channels for greater visibility
Automated email marketing and abandoned cart recovery

To get started with Wix, visit their site and sign up.

#2 – Weebly — The Best For General Sites

Let’s face it. You might not need a free site builder with all the bells and whistles. And that’s okay. That’s why Weebly exists. It’s the best site builder for general sites that need to do their job well.

It’s perfect for information businesses, non-profits, small portfolios, mission statements, or landing pages. This is because they make it easy to bring your site together with a no-nonsense dashboard and with options like built-in image editors and professional design options that let you create video backgrounds.

As a general site, you don’t want to deal with the technical stuff like SSL certification, encryption, and often costly third-party domain shopping. Weebly integrates takes care of all that for you right on their platform.

One of their best features as a site builder is that you have the option to fully customize their HTML and CSS if you choose to do so. While it might not be something you need right away, it’s nice to know you have that capability as a future option. Weebly is built for site design with a more structured approach. If you’re looking for a builder with a bit more design flexibility and freedom, this might be a downside.

Their best site builder features include:

Easy-to-use dashboard
Drag-and-drop site builder
Additional integrations like payments and product search with upgrade
Integrated analytics that kills the need for additional plugin installation
Mobile app to manage your site from your phone

You can sign up with Weebly here.

#3 – WordPress — The Best For Blogging And Content Creation

If I had to introduce WordPress to you, I’d say that it’s the top contender for blogging and content creation.

Thankfully they provide a free site builder to get you started (in addition to paid options).

For years, bloggers and companies like Disney, Dropbox, Spotify, and NBC have leveraged WordPress.com’s powerful site-building features to build audiences, expand their brand, and drive sales worldwide.

If you’re looking to blog, share your knowledge with the world, or create loads of content around your business, you’ll want to start with their free site builder. It’s designed to be straightforward and easy to use without any confusing and unnecessary features. This way, you can get started creating and publishing your content in record time. To help you if you get stuck, they provide free webinars that walk you through creating your site step by step.

Their free site builder’s biggest downside is that you might grow out of its limited blogging toolbox. But if you want paid access to fully customize your site in the future, WordPress makes it easy to upgrade without the technical hassle.

Some of the WordPress site builder’s best content creation features include:

Optimized for search engine results
24/7 live chat and support
Free subdomain that you can upgrade later to a custom domain
Free hosting without having to use a third party
Large selection of free themes to choose from and customize designed for sharing and creating content

#4 – Site123 — The Best For Quick And Easy Landing Pages

Easy and quick are the two best words to describe Site123. With its no-brainer features, it’s the best site builder for simple sites that don’t need many internal pages.

In other words, it’s great for landing pages.

Your business might not need a blog, robust e-commerce features, or top-notch design capabilities, but it’s still in need of a place online it can call home.

Site123 helps you check that off your list by being the most no-nonsense site builder possible. You can avoid frustration and a big learning curve with Site123’s optimally designed web building process, especially if it’s your first time building a site.

Their best landing page buildeing features include:

Free speedy hosting
Built-in media gallery with free professional icons and video
Compatible with third-party plugins
Beautiful pre-made landing page templates so you don’t start from scratch
500 MB of storage

You can start creating your online presence with Site123 here.

What is your site’s end goal?

That’s the perfect question to start and end with because it’s the best way to determine which free website builder you’ll want to use.

There’s no shortage of site builders in the market. What sets them apart is what they’re designed for and how you can use that to reach your goals.

Remember that many of them are geared for where you are now, but that can change when you think about how you plan to expand in the future.

Still, a detailed overview of each builder and what they offer will point you in the right direction.

After you determine your site’s end goal, pick the right free builder to start creating your masterpiece from one of the options on this list.

The post Best Free Website Builders appeared first on Neil Patel.

Best Email Autoresponder

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You know the revenue is out there and you know an email campaign can help you get it. But how do you keep a strong handle on your campaign as it plays out over weeks and months?

Email autoresponders can save you a ton of time and deliver huge returns on campaign investment. Yet automation can be a double-edged sword.

The sad truth is that many thoughtful email campaigns become inbox wallpaper. It only takes a few mistimed or off-target emails before your audience starts to tune them out.

A good email autoresponder gives you the ability to connect with customers, at scale, without overwhelming them.

Or your team, for that matter. These products eliminate many of the tedious and repetitive tasks that are so essential to building relationships at scale.

Delight your customers with content they’re interested in. Get full visibility into your open and click-through rates and watch them climb.

Let’s walk through the best email autoresponders, what they can do for you, and how to select the right one.

The Top 5 Options for Email Autoresponders

Mailchimp – Best for beginners
MailerLite – Best free email autoresponder
Klaviyo – Best for ecommerce
GetResponse – Best for sales teams
Moosend – Best for simple marketing automation

How to Choose the Best Email Autoresponder for You

Email autoresponders can help your teams get more done in less time, without sacrificing the personal touch that drives clicks. However, not all email autoresponders are created equal.

Some will work well for a brief series of 3-5 emails that welcome a new contact and warm them to your products—good for a simple customer journey.

Others help you set up complex automated workflows that respond to customer behavior, shopping tendencies, and other triggers you define.

The end goal is setting up something that automatically sends the right message, to the right customer, at the right time.

Here are the major features of email autoresponders that are helping companies increase their chances of success:

Automation Capabilities

It’s right there in the name—the big boon of autoresponders is automating menial, manual campaign tasks.

However, the more robust tools tie into your customer databases or CRM, and let you define triggers based on a range of highly-personalized criteria.

Some of the popular automation capabilities you will see include:

Welcoming/Onboarding: Greet new users, customers, or employees
Web Trigger: Make contact when someone clicks on a link, fills out a form, updates a field, makes a purchase, or joins a group
Reminders: Send time-sensitive emails about deals or webinars
Celebrations: Send discounts for birthdays and anniversaries
VIP: Trigger discounts and promotions for loyal customers
Abandoned cart: Contact a customer with the opportunity to buy items left in their cart
Follow up: Reach out after a purchase or interaction
A/B testing: Experiment with different versions of the same email to analyze performance and evolve your strategy
Branch flows: Create workflows that split customers based on conditional or logical triggers to direct them down the most appropriate path

A really good autoresponder lets you build out workflows within a visual editor, giving you a bird’s eye view of each trigger and step of the process.

Make sure you pick something with the capabilities you need to design each customer’s entire journey.

Email Editor

Don’t forget about crafting great emails. They have to be appealing from the subject line to the CTA, and every element must be optimized for web and mobile.

Good email autoresponders make these challenges much easier. My favorite products have intuitive visual email builders that help you make content that converts.

Beyond designing beautiful emails quickly, you can add buttons, embed content, and preview exactly what your email is going to look like from a customer’s point of view.

Find an autoresponder with an email editor that your employees enjoy using that also delivers predictable results.

With it, you’ll find that your teams will be able to quickly generate on-brand emails, consistently building out the perfect message for each step of a customer’s journey.

Email Segmentation

The contacts who make up your list are different people. That should go without saying.

But, even today, many companies rely on email blasting their full list to get the word out.

Effective email campaigns are based on putting things in front of customers that they actually want.

Email segmentation allows you to leverage customer data in service of better targeting, through which you can differentiate your contact list into groups based on:

Age
Average spend
Cart contents
Gender
Geolocation
Past purchases
Weather conditions
Website behavior

Companies like Starbucks are sending weather-appropriate discounts on drinks: it’s no accident when their emails entice consumers to warm up on a rainy day or cool off when the temperature spikes.

This is a whole new way to approach customers where they are.

Every company defines their important segments differently. The richer your customer data, the easier it will be to use email segmentation to increase your conversion rate.

Email Personalization

Automated, personalized emails go well beyond using a contact’s name in the subject line.

With Klaviyo, for example, you can automate the inclusion of product recommendations in the body of your email based on a contact’s location, past purchases, current weather, and so on.

Some autoresponders leverage machine learning to suggest products that other shoppers with similar tastes have ordered.

The best tools help you nail the easy stuff—like greeting subscribers by name and remembering their birthdays—while helping you convert customer data into revenue.

Tip: the better your email segmentation strategy, the easier it will be to leverage personalization, especially at scale.

Campaign Management

As your contact list grows, it’s going to include more diverse customers at different stages of their buying journey.

You are going to want an email autoresponder that gives you the ability to manage this growing list and provides visibility into the ongoing performance of your campaign.

We all know about open rates and click-through rates. Those are important, but make sure you find something that lets you drill down into what matters at the end of the day, like sales per email, ROI per email, and total sales per email sent.

Staying effective in the long term means making adjustments. Campaign management tools help you figure out what’s working and what to change.

Email and Subscriber Limitations

Typically, email autoresponder pricing is based on the number of subscribers you have and the number of emails you send each month.

This should be a pretty straightforward consideration. But if your goal is growth, factor in how many more you’re looking to add to your list over the next month, quarter, or year.

If your email marketing strategy takes off and you need to bump up into a higher pricing tier, will that be a problem for your budget and ROI?

The Different Types of Email Autoresponders

Email autoresponders have been around for a long time. These days, virtually all of your best options are going to come as one component of a larger email marketing service.

That said, you can still find tools that will help you automate email marketing without requiring you to incorporate new services into your business processes.

The questions you need to answer are: Are you looking for basic email autoresponder features that help you automate specific workflows? Or are you looking to automate complex email workflows that dovetail into your larger marketing strategy?

If you answer yes to the first question, a dedicated email automation tool should be able to help you accomplish your goals. If you answered yes to the second question, you are going to want to skip ahead to the bundled products that will better meet your needs.

Dedicated Email Automation Tools

Exemplary products: MailerLite, Mailchimp (Free & Essentials), GetResponse (Basic), Moosend (Free)

Free email autoresponders and lower-tier plans allow you to build out simple workflows. This might be a welcome series, an automated response to a new customer or purchase, or a follow-up with someone who just reached out to customer service.

These dedicated email automation tools are great because they’re so easy to use. Virtually any member of the team can put together workflows that save time each day.

Of course, these options don’t come with as many features to segment your list, personalize emails, or manage a campaign.

Another potential problem is that it’s harder to assess your campaign performance and make adjustments without advanced tracking and reporting.

That said, dedicated email automation tools allow individuals to accomplish far more than they could ever do manually.

If you already have a suite of online marketing tools that are working well and all you need is the email automation, these products can work wonders without a significant outlay.

Automation Bundled with Email Marketing Tools

Exemplary products: Klaviyo, Mailchimp (Standard & Pro), Moosend (Pro & Custom)

To provide a more complete tool for the job, there are a range of autoresponders that offer automation bundled with email marketing tools.

These products make it easy to track customers, analyze behavior, and revise your campaign strategies accordingly.

Tools like Klaviyo, for example, integrate directly with your customer data, giving you powerful segmentation and personalization capabilities with hardly any extra work.

They also let you build complex workflows that let you tailor your automation strategy to your specific needs. Often, they will include a visual builder that makes it much easier to design and manage flows.

With email marketing services, it’s important to recognize that lower-tier plans are going to function more like simple automation tools, even if it’s the same product.

Mailchimp, for instance, lets you create multi-step journeys with their Essentials tier, but you can’t include branching points unless you get their Standard plan. If you want to take advantage of all the segmentation features—which will make your multi-step journey more effective—then you will have to get their Premium plan.

#1 – Mailchimp — Best for Beginners

Mailchimp is a powerful product that hasn’t lost its simple feel, though it has grown considerably since it first hit the market in 2001.

Today, it functions as an integrated marketing platform, taking on way more responsibility than the email automation it became famous for.

Despite its depth, I like Mailchimp as an email autoresponder for beginners because it’s constantly offering user recommendations based on intelligence from billions of email interactions.

Subject Line Helper, for instance, offers data-driven insights about how to increase open and click rates.

There are plenty of other excellent features, including:

Drag-and-drop email editor
Segmentation capabilities to target messaging and automate product recommendations
Send Time Optimization
Multi-branch customer journeys
Behavior-based automation
Lookalike audience finder
RSS to email
Transactional Emails with Mailchimp API or SMTP

Mailchimp offers a free forever version that’s limited to 2,000 contacts, but comes with features like a marketing CRM and landing pages that you won’t get with other freemium email autoresponders.

To get the Customer Journey Builder, which lets you construct workflows in a visual editor, you will need one of the paid plans:

Essentials: starting at $9.99/month for 500 contacts
Standard: starting at $14.99/month for 500 contacts
Premium: starting at $299/month for 10,000 contacts

Some of the aforementioned features, like predicted demographics or the lookalike audience finder, are only included with Standard and Premium.

Millions of companies have seen Mailchimp increase their ROI. You can get started with the free version today, knowing that they also have tools to help you grow.

#2 – MailerLite — Best Free Email Autoresponder

MailerLite is used by more than one million companies, startups, and freelancers because it is an intuitive, budget-friendly platform that delivers results.

Its free version lets you send 12 emails per month to 1,000 subscribers, which might be all some people need to get started.

For an email autoresponder that’s easy to use, MailerLite comes packed with simple, yet powerful features that help you optimize your campaign.

I like using A/B split testing to send two variations of an email and see which one performs better.

The clean MailerLite interface gives your teams the control they need to communicate effectively with your subscribers.

Some of its best features include:

Automate RSS to email
Time-zone based email delivery
Auto resend unopened emails with alternative subjects or personal messages
Segment subscribers based on a varied criteria
Rich email personalization
Target specific interest groups by tagging subscribers or inviting them to self-select
Track email campaign activity with detailed reports
Click maps to analyze subscriber interaction with your emails

MailerLite also comes with features to customize your website experience, like pop-ups and embedded forms, as well as an amazing drag-and-drop editor to craft striking newsletters.

Better still, it’s very affordable beyond the free version.

Free: Up to 1,000 subscribers, 12,000 monthly email limit
$10/month: Up to 1,000 subscribers, unlimited emails
$15/month: Up to 2,500 subscribers, unlimited emails
$30/month: Up to 5,000 subscribers, unlimited emails
$50/month: Up to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited emails

As a free email autoresponder, MailerLite is hard to beat for any small business. You get a free website with five landing pages, a drag-and-drop visual email editor, and advanced segmentation features.

It’s almost unreasonably generous.

For organizations that need the paid plans, the price is still very competitive and the premium features will pay for themselves many times over.

#3 – Klaviyo — Best for Ecommerce

Klaviyo ties into a CRM or ecommerce platform and makes it easy to deliver ultra-personalized content via email.

No more unfocused email blasts to the public. Instead, Klaviyo allows users to build out unique customer journeys for long-time fans and first-time window shoppers.

Because it has native integration with customer data sources, you can get pretty fine-grained with the segmentation.

And, with the simple user interface, anyone on your team can start maximizing the relevant content every visitor sees.

Klaviyo iworks across many channels, allowing you to expand your subscriber base via Facebook, for example.

Nurture individual leads from a 10,000-foot view by using the features in Klaviyo’s extensive toolkit:

Prebuilt autoresponders
Email personalization for first-time buyers, regulars, VIPs, and more
A/B split testing
Drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG email editor
Responsive templates optimized for web and mobile
Shoppable product recommendations in email
Rich selection of behavior-based triggers
Comprehensive segmentation options

The free plan for Klaviyo maxes out at 250 contacts and 500 emails, after which you will be asked to upgrade. Paid plans start at $20/month for up to 500 contacts and unlimited email sends, climbing higher depending on the size of your contact list.

#4 – GetResponse — Best for Sales Teams

GetResponse has provided one of the simplest, most effective email autoresponders for more than 20 years. Over that time, they’ve added features and evolved the UI to keep it one of the most useful products on the market.

Their experience shows. They know what works, why, and how to help you get set up.

For one, GetResponse offers hundreds of professionally designed templates to communicate with customers at every step of their journey.

The built-in sales features are also really nice, and really set GetResponse apart from the other easy-to-use autoresponders. Even their Basic plan comes with a sales funnel, unlimited lead funnels, and unlimited landing pages.

With other email autoresponders, you’re going to have to integrate your pipeline. With GetResponse, you can keep daily operations under one roof.

Along with a flexible email autoresponder, GetResponse has a number of other useful features to help you connect with customers:

Unlimited email sends
Transactional and time-sensitive emails
Drag-and-drop email editor with mobile and inbox preview
Add content blocks, videos, buttons, and social media icons to emails
A/B testing
List and calendar views for email scheduling
RSS-email templates

GetResponse doesn’t have a free forever plan, though they do offer a free trial. Pricing starts at $15/month for 1,000 contacts with their Basic plan, which comes with all the features listed above.

And much more. Honestly, the Basic plan is far from basic.

At the Plus and Professional pricing tiers, you have more features like webinars, as well as greater degrees of customization.

Their top tier plan, Max, comes with a dedicated IP address, SSO, and other features designed to secure and streamline enterprise email marketing and sales.

#5 – Moosend — Best for Simple Marketing Automation

Moosend is an affordable email automation tool with an almost nonexistent learning curve. Yet for how easy it is to get started, Moosend users wind up automating their email marketing in really impactful ways.

It’s sad to think, but some companies spend thousands of dollars a month on ultra-powerful marketing automation software that they don’t really need. Plus, that stuff can be really hard to use.

With Moosend, you get a lot of freedom to customize your email marketing automation. There’s a rich set of triggers and actions all managed in a drag-and-drop interface. Workflows can be shared among team members, who can leave notes.

The Moosend interface itself is great at educating users how to automate and fine-tune customer journeys. With templates, preset workflows, and rich tracking capabilities, Moosend makes it simple to find what works for your unique subscriber base.

Leverage the AI to hyper-personalize your emails based on similar consumer preferences and other behavioral analytics.

They’ve recently added “And/Or” expressions to custom fields. This allows for a lot more customization in terms of defining triggers. Custom fields don’t have to be just one thing any more!

Without writing a single line of code, you can gain quick mastery of a deep set of email automation features that include:

Rich tracking, reporting, and analytics
Click heatmaps
Five types of subscription forms
Direct SMTP service
Cart abandonment
Embed product blocks in newsletters for shoppable emails
Mobile responsiveness
GDPR compliance
Native integrations with WooCommerce, Salesforce, WordPress and dozens more top products

Moosend has a free forever plan, which is capped at 1,000 subscribers, and comes with many of the best features. For additional subscribers, you’ll need a Pro plan, which starts at $8/month.

The exact price will depend on the number of subscribers you need to accommodate. For example, 25,000 subscribers is $100/month. The Pro plan maxes out at 200,000 subscribers ($608/month), with custom plans available to reach an audience of any size.

Compared to other, more expensive options, Moosend tends to be much easier to use even with many of the same essential features.

Summary

Many people begin the search for an email autoresponder only to discover that what they actually need is an email marketing platform.

The closest option on this list to a dedicated email autoresponder is MailerLite, which still comes with way more than simple email automation capabilities. It’s a really good option (and price) for companies that already have great CRM software and really just need the email autoresponder capabilities.

Mailchimp and Moosend are more feature-rich than MailerLite, but both remain incredibly easy to use for non-specialists.

GetResponse works well for sales teams because you’ve got conversion funnels and the ability to host webinars is baked in.

Klaviyo is probably the most comprehensive tool on this list, and it works incredibly well at automating the processes necessary to run a successful email ecommerce campaign.

I like all of these email autoresponders because they help you benefit from the unavoidable trial-and-error associated with email marketing.

No campaign is ever going to be perfect, but the right tools will help you continually evolve your strategy to meet your customers where they are.

The post Best Email Autoresponder appeared first on Neil Patel.

The Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with no Annual Fee

Can you get the recession-proof best business credit cards with no annual fee? Absolutely! No matter what the economy is doing, you can get cards just like these.

You Need the Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee

Are you looking for the recession-proof best business credit cards with no annual fee?

According to the SBA, business credit card limits are 10 – 100 times those of personal cards! This means you can get a lot more cash with company credit.

And this also means you can have personal credit cards at shops, and now have an alternate card at the same retail stores for your company. And you will not have to put up collateral, cash flow, or financial information to get small business credit.

The Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee – Benefits

Features vary, so be sure to select the benefit you prefer from this array of alternatives.

The Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee

No Yearly Fee/Flat Rate Cash Back

Ink Business Unlimited℠ Credit Card

Check out the Ink Business Unlimited℠ Credit Card. Beyond no annual fee, get an introductory 0% APR for the initial one year. Afterwards, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%.

You can get unlimited 1.5% Cash Back rewards on every purchase made for your corporation. And get $500 bonus cash back after spending $3,000 in the initial three months from account opening. You can redeem your rewards for cash back, gift cards, travel and more using Chase Ultimate Rewards®. You will need excellent credit scores to get this card.

Find it here: https://creditcards.chase.com/business-credit-cards/ink/unlimited

Establish business credit fast and beat the recession with our research-backed guide to 12 business credit cards and lines.

Irresistible Cards for Jackpot Rewards That Never Expire

Capital One® Spark® Cash Select for Business

Have a look at the Capital One® Spark® Cash Select for Business. It has no yearly fee. You can get 1.5% cash back on every purchase. There is no limit on the cash back you can earn. Also get a one-time $200 cash bonus once you spend $3,000 on purchases in the first 3 months. Rewards never expire.

Pay a 0% introductory APR for 9 months. Then pay 14.49% – 22.49% variable APR afterwards.

You will need good to excellent credit scores to qualify.

Find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-cash-select/

An Alternative to the Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee: Dependable Credit Cards for Fair to Poor Credit, Not Calling for a Personal Guarantee

Brex Card for Startups

Check out the Brex Card for Startups. It has no yearly fee.

You will not need to provide your Social Security number to apply. And you will not need to provide a personal guarantee. They will take your EIN.

Nonetheless, they do not accept every industry.

Additionally, there are some industries they will not work with, as well as others where they want added documentation. For a list, go here: https://brex.com/legal/prohibited_activities/.

To determine creditworthiness, Brex checks a corporation’s cash balance, spending patterns, and investors.

You can get 7x points on rideshare. Get 4x on Brex Travel. Also, get triple points on restaurants. And get double points on recurring software payments. Get 1x points on everything else.

You can have bad credit scores (even a 300 FICO) to qualify.

Find it here: https://brex.com/lp/startups-higher-limits/

Establish business credit fast and beat the recession with our research-backed guide to 12 business credit cards and lines.

Terrific Cards for Cash Back

Flat-Rate Rewards

Capital One ® Spark® Cash for Business

Check out the Capital One® Spark® Cash for Business. It has an introductory $0 yearly fee for the first year. Afterwards, this card costs $95 each year. There is no introductory APR offer. The regular APR is a variable 18.49%.

You can get a $500 one-time cash bonus after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months from account opening. Get unlimited 2% cash back. Redeem at any time without minimums.

You will need great to outstanding credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-cash/

Flat-Rate Rewards and No Yearly Fee

Discover it® Business Card

Take a look at the Discover it® Business Card. It has no annual fee. There is an introductory APR of 0% on purchases for 12 months. After that the regular APR is a variable 14.49 – 22.49%.

Get unlimited 1.5% cash back on all purchases, with no category restrictions or bonuses. They double the 1.5% Cashback Match™ at the end of the first year. There is no minimum spend requirement.

You can download transactions| quickly to Quicken, QuickBooks, and Excel. Keep in mind: you will need great to exceptional credit scores to get approval for this card.

https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/business/

Bonus Categories

Ink Business Cash℠ Credit Card

Check out the Ink Business Cash℠ Credit Card. It has no annual fee. There is a 0% introductory APR for the first year. Afterwards, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%. You can get a $500 one-time cash bonus after spending $3,000 in the first 3 months from account opening.

You can earn 5% cash back on the initial $25,000 spent in combined purchases at office supply stores and on web, cable, and phone services each account anniversary year.

Get 2% cash back on the initial $25,000 spent in combined purchases at filling stations and restaurants each account anniversary year. Earn 1% cash back on all other purchases. There is no restriction to the amount you can get.

You will need outstanding credit to get this card.

Find it here: https://creditcards.chase.com/business-credit-cards/ink/cash?iCELL=61GF

Boosted Cash Back Categories

Bank of America® Business Advantage Cash Rewards MasterCard® credit card

Get 3% cash back in the category of your choice. So these are gas stations (default), office supply stores, travel, TV/telecom & wireless, computer services or business consulting services. Earn 2% cash back on dining. So this is for the initial $50,000 in combined choice category/dining purchases each calendar year. After that earn 1% after, with no limits.

You will need exceptional credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://promo.bankofamerica.com/smallbusinesscards2/

An Alternative to the Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee: Secure Business Credit Cards for Average Credit

Capital One® Spark® Classic for Business

Check out the Capital One® Spark® Classic for Business. It has no annual fee. There is no introductory APR offer. The regular APR is a variable 24.49%. You can get unlimited 1% cash back on every purchase for your company, without minimum to redeem.

While this card is within reach if you have average credit scores, beware of the APR. But if you can pay in a timely manner, and completely, then it’s a good deal.

Find it here: https://www.capitalone.com/small-business/credit-cards/spark-classic/

Flexible Financing Credit Cards – Have A Look at Your Options!

The Plum Card® from American Express

Take a look at the Plum Card® from American Express. It has an introductory annual fee of $0 for the first year. After that, pay $250 each year.

Get a 1.5% early pay discount cash back bonus when you pay within 10 days. You can take up to 60 days to pay without interest when you pay the minimum due by the payment due date.

You will need great to excellent credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/the-plum-card-business-charge-card/

An Alternative to the Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee: Company Credit Cards with a 0% Introductory APR – Pay Zero!

Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express

Take a look at the Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express. It has no yearly fee. There is a 0% introductory APR for the first twelve months. Afterwards, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%.

Get double Membership Rewards® points on everyday business purchases like office supplies or client dinners for the first $50,000 spent annually. Get 1 point per dollar afterwards.

You will need great to exceptional credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/bluebusinessplus-credit-card/

American Express® Blue Business Cash Card

Also check out the American Express® Blue Business Cash Card. Note: the American Express® Blue Business Cash Card is identical to the Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express. However its rewards are in cash rather than points.

Get 2% cash back on all qualified purchases on up to $50,000 per calendar year. Then get 1%.

It has no annual fee. There is a 0% introductory APR for the first one year. Afterwards, the APR is a variable 14.74 – 20.74%.

You will need good to exceptional credit to qualify.

Find it here: https://creditcard.americanexpress.com/d/business-bluecash-credit-card/

Establish business credit fast and beat the recession with our research-backed guide to 12 business credit cards and lines.

Your Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with No Annual Fee

Your recession-proof best business credit cards with no annual fee with depend on your credit history and scores. Only you can make a decision on which rewards you want and need, so make sure to do your research.

And, as always, make sure to build credit in the recommended order for the best, fastest benefits. Check out how this will help your company get the recession-proof best business credit cards with no annual fee.

As the economy continues to change, you can still get financing for your small business. Let us show you how.

The post The Recession-Proof Best Business Credit Cards with no Annual Fee appeared first on Credit Suite.

Best Online Reputation Management

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

You’re already doing so much for your business. How do you successfully manage your online reputation, too?

You can do it and do it well. But if you’re already managing a lot, your best bet is outsourcing it to an ORM, or an online reputation manager.

Your online image can determine how long you stay in business and if your profits grow year after year. The problem with that is that you can’t always control what customers say about you online, or even when a damaging business mishap gets out in the open.

To help you put your best image out there, I’ve reviewed and done extensive research on online reputation managers, so you don’t have to. Finding the best ORM for you is easy once you know exactly what you need.

The Top 4 Options For Online Reputation Management

Go Fish Digital – The best ORM for managing reviews
Reputation Rhino – The best for individuals and small businesses
Reputation Resolutions – The best ORM for crisis management
Big Leap – The best for SEO and content management

How to Choose The Best Online Reputation Management For You

Unfortunately, there isn’t a singular “best” reputation manager that fits every business like a glove. If there was, then this guide wouldn’t be necessary.

Different ORMs cater to different services. This can mean some are better than others at crisis management, online monitoring, online review management, SEO focused branded content strategy, or even supplying attorneys to advocate on your behalf.

First, are you building a new online reputation from scratch? Maybe you’re trying to improve a negative reputation? Or are you being proactive and investing in maintaining a good one?

You have to determine where you are on your reputation management journey. Then you can think about a few factors that can refine your search even more.

Business Size and Type

Your company size generally correlates with the size of your reputation. Obviously, the bigger and more varied your sales channels, the more work you’ll have managing how you look online.

Your business’s size can also dictate the amount you’ll want to invest in ORM services. Some questions to consider are: What is your estimated current business reach? What types of distribution channels do you sell through or publish content on? Are you a service-based business, an organization, or an e-commerce store?

When choosing the best ORM for you, these are some key questions to consider before moving forward. If your business isn’t a complex enterprise, you won’t need a costly ORM that specializes in litigation, video removal, or a team of expert attorneys.

Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy also determines the type of online reputation management you need.

Do you primarily sell via a content creation strategy? Do you sell on multiple e-commerce platforms? Is your business big enough that it sells through on-air advertising? Do you already have a strong social media presence that drives sales?

Outlining how you primarily reach your customers is another way to narrow down your search. If you don’t, it might affect how well your ORM can deliver results.

Long-Term Crisis Management

Think about the future of your business and its reputation. Sure, at some point you might need to put out a reputation fire that caught you by surprise ASAP. Or maybe you’re only getting started and want your name out there in the short-term in a positive light to drive more sales.

But do you have a long-term plan for managing reputation crises that will inevitably come up in the future?

This will determine which ORM can deliver on either your short-term or long-term goals. Each one is built differently to cater to your business goals, as we’ll see further in this guide.

The Different Types of Online Reputation Management

There are tons of online reputation managers out there that offer a lot of the same services. But most of them fall into three main types. Most reputation management companies will provide an initial analysis and general monitoring of your reputation’s current state.

After that, they start to get a little more specific in how they specialize.

Crisis Management

Crisis management usually takes more than a one-off approach to managing any brand’s reputation. You might need more than image takedowns, burying negative reviews with positive ones, or generating positive content.

How an ORM handles a crisis can mark the difference between a business that survives through it or one that suffers those losses and ultimately closes its doors.

ORMs that handle crisis management usually approach them from all angles, meaning deploying a long-term reputation management strategy and additional costs.

Online Review Management

Online reputation management specializing in managing negative reviews tends to be a great fit for service-based businesses and e-commerce stores.

Those terrible product reviews you read first on any product you find online? The right ORM can be effective in either removing them with their own set of tools and contacts or burying them with positive reviews over time.

Businesses with reviews on Yelp, Amazon, or their own storefronts can benefit significantly from hiring an ORM effective in negative review management.

Though, if you’re an enterprise-grade business that needs review removal as part of a broader strategy, you’ll want to go with a more varied ORM.

Content Management

ORMs can focus on content creation as a reputation management strategy, surrounding your business with tons of positive branding.

They don’t necessarily have attorneys at your beck and call ready to take down negative media propaganda. But their laser-focus on SEO strategies that put the best reviews and mentions of you out there can be worth it if it means you’ll make a great first impression.

This also improves your new and returning customer experience.

A majority of your customers are using Google to search for your products or services. Making sure search results show the best content about you online is the way to go if you’re a content-focused business.

#1 – Go Fish Digital — The Best ORM For Managing Reviews

I’ve listed Go Fish Digital as the best agency for managing reviews, and while that’s true, Go Fish Digital also wows with the option of full-service reputation management used by the likes of Geico, Ford, and Airbnb.

With Go Fish, you can gain thorough insight into your customers’ reviews and comments online.

They work closely with huge review sites like Yelp to manage negative reviews by advocating for review removal on your behalf through their agency tools. They also work to get your best Yelp reviews to the top for more visibility.

They’re exhaustive in their brand monitoring abilities and monitor all corners of the internet like Wikipedia and Reddit threads to create a plan of action in your favor.

Go Fish’s review management works by pushing positive content to higher visibility with SEO, adjusting copy in public places where you’re mentioned, cleaning up Google autocomplete, and even promoting positive information about your business wherever your target audience is.

As they create results, they keep you up to date with a relevant score you can see on their dashboard.

To be clear, Go Fish is a reputable ORM that does not post false reviews for you. Still, their Yelp review management service is one of their strong suits.

Some of their best review management features are:

Managing negative Google reviews
Negative auto-complete cleanup often generated from those reviews
A dashboard that keeps you updated on your brand’s daily search results
Crafting a strategy for your business to encourage the best reviews possible
Creating and delivering a strong case on your behalf for negative review removal to the Yelp team

For pricing, you’ll have to contact them directly to get a quote.

As with most ORMs, their prices change depending on the size of your business and the specific services you’re looking for.

Get in touch with Go Fish to get an initial quote.

#2 – Reputation Rhino — The Best For Individuals and Small businesses

If you’re wondering who exactly needs reputation management, Reputation Rhino’s answer is ‘everyone.’ That’s why it’s the best ORM for solopreneurs and small businesses.

Reputation Rhino is a leading online reputation manager based in New York with clients like Disney, Microsoft, and Nestle. They offer a number of reputation solutions for almost any scenario imaginable, including ones that cater impressively to an individual and their personal brand.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, university, hotel, or contractor, Reputation Rhino helps you with Glassdoor, Yelp, and YouTube review removals, social media management, and even an SEO strategy to put the best parts of your brand (or yourself) front and center.

Do you have terrible images that need to get removed from Google? They can do that. Do you need to fight against libel and personal defamation? Their team of public relations specialists can do that, too. These are services an individual or small business may not know how to do or not have time to take care of.

Their best ORM services for individuals include:

A personalized strategy to defend against smear campaigns
Suppressing negative online search results
Adding an extra layer of protection to your personal privacy
Eliminating news articles, forum comments, and negative content

As an individual or SMB, you might be nervous about investing money into an ORM. To help, Reputation Rhino offers a 30-day money-back guarantee that can ease your worries about whether they’ll deliver. If you need a more personal approach to reputation management, Reputation Rhino is happy to work with you individually.

Their pricing starts at $1,000. But you’ll have to contact them for a personalized package.

Get started with Reputation Rhino and request more information.

#3 – Reputation Resolutions — The Best ORM For Crisis Management

Unlike other ORMs out there, Reputation Resolutions is the go-to agency for crisis management that can start working on your behalf in 24-72 hours.

A combination of their speedy response, team of attorneys, wide array of solutions, and seasoned professional team makes them the best ORM for enterprise-level reputation and crisis management.

Maybe your business is an established corporation, but there’s been a sudden increase of negative reviews, you’re dealing with a handful of loud, angry customers online, or there is negative propaganda about you in the media. Ouch. Reputation Resolutions provides everything you need to turn a crisis around.

Here’s a quick rundown of their top-tier crisis management features:

Cyber forensic investigation
News article removal
Court record removal
Thorough and ongoing reputation monitoring
Private information removal
Unwanted image removal

If you’re an smaller or mid-sized business looking for a management agency to simply take care of negative reviews, Reputation Solutions isn’t the agency for you.

Alternatively, if you’re an established, well-known business in need of comprehensive PR management, attorneys, or copyright infringement services, then look no further than what Reputation Solutions can offer you.

To get a pricing quote, email or call them for a free consultation, and they will learn more about you and tailor their services to your specific needs.

#4 – Big Leap — The Best For SEO And Content Management

Big Leap’s ORM services are designed around one thing: content management. Their award-winning content marketing strategy centers around burying the negative and growing the positive.

This is fantastic news for you if you’re looking for an ORM that cares deeply about gaining customer trust through a long-term strategy.

If your marketing strategy is mainly through content, you’re not as concerned about a sudden PR crisis, or Yelp reviews are mostly irrelevant to your sales success, then Big Leap’s trust-building approach can help you create results.

They begin by scouring the internet for every mention of your business. They do social media and search audits, along with a competitive analysis, to give them the bigger picture of where your reputation lies.

Then they create a positive content strategy tailored specifically for you through brand-strengthening content and social media campaigns. As they execute their content strategy, Big Leap regularly reports back to you with updated results.

Some of their best ORM content management features include:

Brand name monitoring
Content strategy, creation, and promotion
Site optimization
Constant workflow updates on content strategy execution

Big Leap doesn’t list their prices publicly, but you can request a quote on their site.

Conclusion

You don’t have to suffer from a bad reputation that only seems to be out of your hands. There are plenty of agencies out there that can help lighten your reputation management load once you’ve reached out and established a relationship with them.

Online reputation management agencies can indeed offer a lot of the same services. But look closer to find what they specialize in. Hopefully, this in-depth guide helped shed light on which of the top ORMs can work for you.

Check out each agency on this list and get a quote from the one that fits you best to start managing your online reputation now.

The post Best Online Reputation Management appeared first on Neil Patel.

Best Email Marketing Services

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

What if I told you there was a single marketing channel through which companies are finding a 3,800% ROI?

That’s earning $38 for every dollar spent.

This magic marketing channel is called email. Yes, just good old email. And that insane average return on investment is one of many email marketing statistics that have held true for years now.

The biggest surprise to me is how many companies aren’t taking advantage of email marketing.

I hear it’s too much work to design newsletters, manage a growing number of contacts, personalize messages, and keep the campaign moving forward.

There’s this perception that email is a time-sink, but it doesn’t align with the statistics.

If it were really too labor intensive to run an efficient email marketing campaign, the average ROI wouldn’t even be 1/1000 of what it is, year after year.

The key is finding the right email marketing service. Don’t wait to start building better campaigns in less time.

The Top 5 Options For Email Marketing Services

Constant Contact – Best for ecommerce
Zoho Campaigns – Best for simple campaigns
Sendinblue – Best ease-of-use
Marketo Engage – Best for segmentation and personalization
Pardot – Best for B2B marketing

How to Choose The Best Email Marketing Service For You

Email marketing services are packed features to help you save time at every step of a campaign.

Every step.

My favorite products get you minutes back on every task. Professional templates, drag-and-drop email editors, list management tools—they make all the hard parts easy.

On top of that, many of the most time-consuming campaign processes can be automated with an email marketing service.

The minutes you save turn into hours quickly, especially if you’re churning campaigns on a large scale.

More effective campaigns. Less effort. That’s the goal.

Let’s walk through the core features available with email marketing services so that you understand which product is going to deliver you the best results for you.

Ease-of-use

Unless your marketing teams double as developers, it’s essential to find a tool that anyone on your team can use.

As you browse, pay attention to the templates and pre-set workflows offered by each email marketing service. Are you excited to use these or do you intend to create your own custom templates? Some email marketing services lose their reputed ease-of-use once you step outside their pre-defined pathways.

It’s a definite plus if your solution comes with visual design tools to build emails and workflows. A simple-to-learn editor can be used right away by the people who need it. They don’t need training, and aren’t stuck waiting on someone who’s comfortable with the editor.

The best email marketing services also provide support, documentation, and walkthroughs to educate users and ensure that their product is truly self-service.

If reviews indicate that customer support is sluggish, or that answers are hard to find, that’s a red flag.

Integration and Implementation

An important question to ask: How easily is your email marketing service going to mesh with your existing stack?

Solutions that integrate with products you use are going to speed deployment and encounter fewer issues moving forward. This is especially true of your existing CRM and any other customer data sources.

Some products, like Sendinblue, come with their own CRM as part of the package, which can be nice for companies that aren’t looking to purchase multiple products in service of their email campaign.

Email Deliverability

The emails you send need to reach your recipient’s inbox. End of story.

Without a high deliverability rate—I would be worried about anything below 95%—your email campaigns are dead in the water.

All good email marketing services ensure high deliverability in two ways.

On the backend, they authenticate emails with DKIM, SPF, and SenderID, while also working with internet service providers to make sure that customer IP addresses aren’t blocked.

Plus, quality platforms will provide ready-made email templates that are both visually appealing and compliant with privacy and anti-spam laws.

On the user side, email marketing services help you craft compelling subject lines and content that encourages customers to actually open your message. They also provide tools for managing subscribers so you can keep a clean list and avoid the spam folder.

Email Automation and Customer Journeys

One of the biggest defining (or limiting) features of an email marketing service is the level of sophistication your workflows can manage.

Entry-level tools can help you automate welcome series of emails for new subscribers, and other similarly straight-forward processes.

If you want to start adding conditional or logical triggers that branch the customer journey into more personalized paths, you are going to need a more substantial tool.

You are also going to need to know a lot about your audience. Products that have really good list segmentation features will pick up tons of information on your customers, which in turn makes your automation more accurately targeted.

Segmentation really drives your ability to automate personalized emails, for example. You can set workflow triggers that respond to customer engagement, shopping habits, and other tendencies to ensure that customers are only receiving messages they’re likely to care about.

Subscriber Management

Quality email marketing services come with a lot of tools to manage the subscribers on their list. They will help you:

Import lists: Seamlessly integrate contact lists from CRMs and other databases.
Keep a clean list: Identify and remote inactive subscribers and spam traps that reduce deliverability
Generate leads: Create new contacts with pop-ups, landing pages, and other multi-channel tools that start an ongoing conversation.
Segment your list: Automatically group subscribers based on many criteria, including everything from what time zone they live in to how they signed up, and everything in between.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Email marketing strategies must be agile.

Every service reviewed in this article comes with the ability to track traditional KPIs like:

Bounce rate
Click through rate
Conversion rate
Deliverability
Forward/share rate
List growth rate
Open rates
Unsubscribe rate

By keeping tabs on these metrics, companies can tweak their campaigns accordingly.

Many email marketing services offer A/B testing, which allows you to test different versions of emails or subject lines to see what performs better.

Look for that, because it’s super helpful for adjusting campaigns in the right direction over time.

More advanced email marketing services will help you tie traditional metrics to revenue, letting you see ROI per email sent and other business-critical metrics.They’ll also let you see how content is performing with features like click heatmaps, which show where your customers are spending the most time.

You’ll probably have to spend more for those features, but they can provide crucial information that pays for itself.

Marketing automation software, like Pardot, provides multi-touch attribution models that let you visualize each touchpoint in the entire customer lifecycle. Marketing attribution drives business growth and informs your future campaigns by spotlighting the key elements of each customer relationship.

The Different Types of Email Marketing Services

Most products in this category want to provide email marketing services for companies of all sizes, so they offer a range of plans from a budget-friendly package to enterprise-grade service tiers.

Email Autoresponders

Exemplary products: Zoho Campaigns, Sendinblue (Free & Lite)

On the lightweight side of the spectrum, you’ll find services that augment your email marketing campaigns with easy-to-use tools for automation, email editing, and subscriber management.

You’ll see these products billed as email autoresponders or email automation.

They don’t change what you do so much as they help you do it better, faster, and at scale.

Because they are so simple, the best email autoresponders are incredibly intuitive, inexpensive, and can start delivering results almost immediately.

Email Marketing Platforms

Exemplary products: Constant Contact, Sendinblue (Premium & Enterprise)

Email marketing platforms are a one-stop shop meant to help you build, track, manage, and optimize campaigns.

They are going to capture, store, and segment your customer data much better than a standalone email autoresponder. And with the richer picture of your audience, you can build much more complex email workflows.

You can get really granular when it comes to personalized customer journeys, for example. In Constant Contact, you can automate emails with shoppable product recommendations based on a person’s buying habits.

Doesn’t that sound great?

What’s really nice is that these products are very easy to use and deploy. Campaign performance tracking features are built right in and provide a ton of visibility and control instantly. Some will integrate with tools like Google Analytics to get actionable data.

You can see what’s working, what’s not, and make changes on the fly.

Marketing Automation Software

Exemplary products: Salesforce Pardot, Marketo Engage

Marketing automation software includes email marketing services as part of a broader suite that accounts for every channel of communication.

Organizations can expand their reach across email, SMS, social, SEO, websites, webinars, and paid media. Information from across all these channels is centralized in intuitive dashboards that drive real-time, evidence-based campaign decisions.

With marketing automation software, you can build out multi-branch email campaigns and customer journeys, tracking progress across every stage.

These products tend to be quite a bit more expensive, and understandably so. If you are looking to run simple to moderately complex email campaigns, you’re fine with an email marketing platform.

On the other hand, if you start to run into problems at scale or email workflows can’t handle your needs, it may be time to consolidate your processes with a marketing automation solution.

#1 – Constant Contact — Best for Ecommerce

Constant Contact offers some of the best email marketing services alongside top-notch solutions for ecommerce, event hosting, website building, and multi-channel marketing.

They average a 97% deliverability rate. This is only possible because the mature platform blends powerful behind-the-scenes functionality—like blocklists, proactive monitoring, and multiple forms of authentication—with an intuitive UI that helps teams craft effective messages that don’t bounce.

You can get Constant Contact up and running very quickly, and it will eliminate much of the legwork associated with email marketing.

Automate product recommendations, for example, by sending shoppable emails based on the items a customer has in their cart, the weather, or tendencies of like-minded shoppers.

Trying to accomplish this task without an email marketing service would be extremely time-consuming. With Constant Contact, the process can be automated by just about anyone.

Some of the other reasons millions of people use constant contact include:

Unlimited email sends
Custom and branded templates
Campaign performance tracking
Subject line A/B testing
Drag-and-drop email editor
Rich ecommerce capabilities
Subscriber management, segmentation
RSVP, survey, and poll

Constant Contact helps with lead generation, too, via landing pages, customizable pop-up forms, and free hosting for a mobile-responsive website. This includes a blog, where you can leverage your email content as posts for SEO.

There are three pricing tiers for Constant Contact email marketing services and the amount you pay is based on the number of contacts. The plans are:

Email: Starting at $20/month
Email Plus: Starting at $45/month
Pro: Starting at $195/month

Constant Contact Email and Email Plus are two of the most popular email marketing services available today.

Constant Contact Pro uses AI-driven marketing automation to provide personalized product recommendations, smart subject lines, behavioral segmentation capabilities, and more advanced workflows.

I would consider a Pro subscription if you are thinking about marketing automation, but aren’t ready to pull the trigger on a heavyweight product like Pardot or Marketo.

#2 – Zoho Campaigns — Best for Simple Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is a lightweight, cost-effective email marketing service that comes with all the must-have features.

In Zoho Campaigns, everything has been trimmed (but not watered down), so you can still accomplish 80-90% of what you can do with an email marketing service that costs three to four times as much.

The ease-of-use is on par with agile project management software like Trello. Not only can non-technical users navigate Zoho Campaigns, they can master their domain.

Intuitively control the following features:

Drag-and-drop email editor and template builder
Email autoresponders
Email automation
Merge tags
Subscriber management
A/B testing
Team collaboration
Real-time analytics

Keep in mind that Zoho Campaigns also has integrations with popular CRM, ecommerce, and contact management products.

Tying these data sources in can help you better target and personalize your email campaigns, yet Zoho Campaigns will remain fairly easy to use.

Integrating Google Analytics, for example, can enrich the amount of customer data you pick up on each interaction, providing data visualizations to help you make sense of relationships over time.

Pricing is straightforward for Zoho Campaigns:

Email-based Plan: starting at $2/month
Subscriber-based Plan: starting at $4/month
Pay-as-you-go Plan: starting at $6/month

The Subscriber-based Plan is my favorite because it includes email automation, which doesn’t come with the Email-based or Pay-as-you-go Plans. At $263/month for 100k contacts with the Subscriber-based Plan, the automation will pay for itself many times over.

You can also try the Zoho Campaigns free forever version. It’s limited to 2,000 subscribers, but you get a lot of the marketing and content management features, as well as the chance to see if you like the interface.

#3 – Sendinblue — Best Ease-of-Use

Sendinblue is a unified CRM, chat, Facebook, SMS, and email marketing platform. It’s loaded with features that are super easy to learn.

In other words, lots of tools with very little training.

Unlike other options on this list, every Sendinblue subscription (including Free and Lite) comes with a sales CRM, marketing automation, real-time reporting, advanced segmentation features, and more.

How’s that for out-of-the-box function? But wait. There’s more.

With popups, landing pages, and chatbots, you can build out your contact list with minimal effort, turning website visitors and Facebook passerbys your next lead.

And once people are on your list, Sendinblue gives you a ton of great tools to nurture leads, build out customer journeys, and communicate effectively every step of the way. The key features include:

Unlimited contacts with any plan
Mobile-friendly visual email editor
Retargeting ads
Campaign performance tracking
A/B Testing
Customizable signup forms
Transactional emails
Email API, SMTP relay, and other core API features
Advanced email automation

Sendinblue offers a free forever version, and paid plans at several pricing tiers:

Lite: Starting at $25/month
Premium: Starting at $65/month
Enterprise: Contact sales

The amount you pay is based on your tier and the number of emails you send each month. You can store as many contacts as you want without affecting the price, which is not true with most other platforms.

Notably, Sendinblue’s pay-as-you-go plan includes the same great features as whatever tier you choose, except the phone support. This is also something you won’t find in other options, like Zoho Campaigns.

There is no prior knowledge or technical skill necessary to start using Sendinblue, and their free forever plan is one of the best available.

#4 – Marketo Engage — Best for Segmentation and Personalization

Marketo Engage, from Adobe, is a full-service marketing automation solution ready to support your strategy across any channel.

Centralize and analyze customer data in an intuitive environment that allows for email campaigns with fine-grained segmentation and dynamic personalization.

You can customize intricate workflows with behavioral triggers that wouldn’t be possible on other platforms because they can’t capture as much information as Marketo does.

Every feature is full-bodied. A/B/n testing, for example, lets you pilot multiple versions of the same site or email rather than just binary A/B testing, which is where many other products stop.

There’s also Adobe Sensei, which uses AI and machine learning to personalize content. Sensei analyzes the performance of all your assets, learns which content works best for whom, and updates emails accordingly.

Other great features that come with using Marketo for email marketing include:

Drag-and-drop workflow builder
Lead and account scoring
Deep engagement and performance analytics
Attribution and ROI dashboard
Customer lifecycle management
One-click campaign cloning
Champion/Challenger testing
A/B/n testing

You’ll have to contact Marketo to get a price. It’s going to have a higher total cost of ownership than a dedicated email marketing service, but if you want superior segmentation and personalization , this can get a lot more done.

#5 – Pardot — Best For B2B Marketing Automation

Pardot is the marketing automation platform from Salesforce that’s built specifically for B2B marketing.

Do you need to hear more, or are you already sold? It’s as good and as deep as you think it is.

Pardot has 2,000+ integrations, a rich feature set, and a surprisingly intuitive UI. To be honest, the platform is a few steps ahead of its competitors in the dedicated email marketing space.

It’s going to take some time and effort to build out the backend, but once everything is set up, Pardot gives you unrivaled visibility into your campaigns.

If you feel like the sophistication of workflows is lacking with your current setup or your analytics and data visualization tools aren’t giving you the insight into campaigns that you need, Pardot is the ticket.

Some of the advanced email marketing features include:

B2B Marketing Analytics
Engagement history dashboards
Merge fields
Visual lead nurturing designer
Social profiling
ROI reporting
Multi-touch attribution models
Developer sandbox

Pardot is not a cheap option, but it is money well spent in service of a high-growth campaign.

There are four pricing tiers:

Growth: starting at $1,250/month
Plus: starting at $2,500/month
Advanced: starting at $4,000/month
Premium: starting at $15,000/month

Other marketing automation solutions, like Marketo, are going to be in this neighborhood price-wise. There are certainly email marketing platforms you can get for a fraction of the cost, but they’re not going to give you anywhere close to the oversight and customization Pardot affords.

Summary

If you are just starting out, I would try out one of the best email autoresponders to get a feel for which email marketing features are going to be most important to you.

Zoho Campaigns is another really great starting point. These tools are easy to use and many have free forever options.

For companies that need more visibility into their campaigns but don’t want to struggle with a new platform, Sendinblue will be great. It’s also not prohibitively expensive, even at the premium tier.

Constant Contact is another great option in the SMB price range, especially for ecommerce. It comes with some of the functionality you find with marketing automation software, but there’s no loss to it’s ease of use.

If you need the marketing automation and business intelligence functionality of Pardot or Marketo, budget it in. After a certain point, dedicated email marketing services aren’t going to handle the automated journeys you have in mind.

If Pardot and Marketo give you sticker shock, but you still want true marketing automation, check out Freshmarketer, or one of the other best marketing automation software solutions.

The post Best Email Marketing Services appeared first on Neil Patel.

Best Auto Dialer Software

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

You’re making a lot of calls, but leads aren’t converting and agents are losing track of conversations.

These are just two of the reasons that any business looking to grow should get auto dialer software. It automates thousands of repetitive manual tasks—not just dialing—and optimizes the experience of everyone involved.

That way, agents can focus totally on customers.

Managers get real-time KPIs at a glance.

And customers never get another 2 a.m. phone call.

What I’m saying is: everyone loves these products.

Here are the top six auto dialer software options on the market. They’re helping companies revolutionize outreach and connecting agents with a higher number of high-quality leads every hour.

Which one is right for you? Let’s find out.

The Top 6 Options For Auto Dialer Software

Phoneburner – Best for Remote Teams
VanillaSoft – Best for Outbound Sales
Voicent Cloud – Best Standalone Auto Dialer Software
Mojo – Best for SMB Sales
RingCentral – Best for Compliance
Kixie – Best for Local Presence

How to Choose the Best Auto Dialer Software for You

Auto dialers call a list of numbers from a preset contact list. As soon as a call is answered, the auto dialer plays a pre-recorded message or transfers the call to an agent.

Sounds simple.

And it is, until you start thinking about multiple agents calling 70 to 80 numbers every hour.

This is why popular auto dialers come with additional tools to help agents manage contact lists, store information, and push trackable leads through the pipeline.

Here are the main features you are going to be looking at as you assess your choices.

Auto Dialer Modes

Most vendors offer multiple dialing modes and several offer the full range.

Preview Dialers call a number as soon as an agent is ready. Information about the contact is automatically displayed on the agent’s screen.

Progressive Dialers call one number at a time in a specific order. Progressive dialers will hang up or leave a message after a predetermined period of time, automatically calling the next number on the list.

Power Dialers call more than one number at a time and keep calling based on a call-to-agent ratio. You can configure the ratio so that the dialer increases or decreases call volume based on the number of agents available.

Predictive Dialers make calls based on algorithms that minimize the chance of someone answering when no agent is available. Essentially, they throttle the call volume according to predicted agent availability.

There’s a time and a place for each mode. Progressive dialers, for instance, prevent agents from cherry-picking leads.

You’ll also see smart or intelligent progressive dialers. These always call one number at a time, but the contact list is actively prioritized based on real-time customer data.

So, for example, if a customer fills out a form online, an intelligent progressive dialer will bump their contact info to the front of the list, putting the next available agent in touch.

In-Call Features

Onboarding new agents is a lot easier with in-call supervisor features like:

Listen: managers can hear the call
Whisper: managers can speak to the agent without the customer hearing
Barge: managers can join the call

It can be hard to understand the value of these features if you’ve never used them before. That’s okay. You can still make a good decision about what’s important by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.

Warm transfer is an in-call feature that customers love. Basically, it allows an agent to stay on the line with a customer while they’re being transferred to another agent.

It’s super simple to relay information during a warm transfer because all three people are on the line and there’s no risk of a caller getting routed to nowhere.

That way, no customer has to waste time repeating information to the next person they speak to.

Workflow Automation

How much time does it take to wait four rings and leave a message? Too long, especially if this happens hundreds of times a day.

With live answer detection, agents are only connected with real people. That saves an incredible amount of time.

If there is no answer, an auto dialer with voicemail drop places a pre-recorded message in the inbox and begins dialing a new number.

That’s hundreds of hours a year, right there.

Within the agent dashboard, you can kick off pre-built workflows with the click of a button. Initiate an email welcome campaign, send a secure bill, or use voice broadcast to send a recorded message to thousands of numbers at the same time.

So many time-consuming tasks are now simple dashboard buttons that initiate highly-trackable workflows.

Click. The agent is on to the next call.

Call Recording and Reporting

Auto dialer software is going to come with its own CRM, integrations with popular CRMs, or both.

What it’s going to do is connect all recorded calls with specific customers, automating all of the traditional storage and filing tasks.

If you are already using CRM software you love, find an auto dialer that integrates easily. If not, auto dialer software that comes with a built-in CRM or lead management system is going to work much better for you out of box.

Compliance

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and other regulations have put legal limits on what telemarketers can do. In fact, robocall lawsuits can result in five-figure damages for a single call.

In order to meet all legal and privacy obligations, you want auto dialer software that works behind the scenes to ensure that you are only calling the right numbers and keeping every conversation securely stored for future reference.

The good news is that the best auto dialer software helps the companies who use it from getting in hot water.

All of the products on this list, for example, have tools to make sure you aren’t calling numbers on the national Do Not Call list (DNC).

Be conscious of compliance, but don’t stress too much. By picking auto dialer software from the top vendors, you know you are getting a product that has kept many other businesses safe.

The Different Types of Auto Dialer Software

There are two distinct service categories that include auto dialer software. These are:

Sales Engagement Platforms
Contact Center Software

Just by looking at the names of these categories, you may have a good idea of the type of auto dialer software you need.

Sales Engagement Platforms

Auto dialer software is one part of a campaign. Sales engagement platforms give you the other tools necessary to conduct effective outreach at scale. Typically, these are outbound dialing platforms, though some come with inbound functionality.

It can be surprising how many other marketing and sales tools are included, even with basic-tier subscriptions.

You may get an email autoresponder, lead generation tools, and the ability to route calls to other channels like text or chat.

Between vendors, there’s a lot of variation in dialing modes, in-call capabilities, and workflow automation. You are looking for something that’s affordable at scale and provides your agents the support they need.

The questions you should be asking are:

How does this platform fit into your company’s sales cadence?
Does it have the tools your agents need to assist customers and track them from one stage to the next?

You may find a sales engagement platform that works well for a non-sales auto dialing campaign—fundraising comes to mind, or leaving pre-recorded messages for doctor’s appointments.

Contact Center Software

Contact center software used to be called “call center software”, but modern customers make contact via phone, text, social, chat, and so on. It is set up to handle inbound, outbound, or blended contact centers that handle communication in both directions.

The auto dialer software that comes with contact center solutions is nearly identical to what you get with a sales engagement platform. The major difference is that you are going to have a lot more inbound call functionality.

If your campaign strategy relies heavily on inbound communication, contact center software may better complement your auto dialer than a sales engagement platform.

Contact center software is also much better at centralizing all company communications in a single place. This can be important in preventing information silos.

If you are not worried about inbound calls and you already have a tool that centralizes communication at your company, a sales engagement platform is all you need for auto dialer software.

If you need more than that, a contact center solution will best fit your needs.

#1 – Phoneburner — Best For Remote Teams

Phoneburner, as a company, has been a 100% remote team since 2008. They know what life is like for a distributed workforce and they’ve designed a sales engagement platform that rises to the occasion.

New leads are automatically routed to the right agent by LeadStream, Phoneburner’s intelligent lead distribution system.

It’s easy to use and customizable, so you can configure the system to distribute leads according to your business processes.

This is a huge time-saver and a really important feature for teams where a manager isn’t just a few desks away.

One of the things I really like is how easy it is for colleagues to share content like phone scripts and email templates. They can also share button configurations, instantly setting up new agents with one-click workflows built to fit best practices.

Even though it’s enterprise-grade software, you can have Phoneburner working minutes after purchase.

The robust sales engagement platform provides everything you need, including:

Power and preview dialer
Local caller ID
Voicemail Drop
Trackable emails
Native CRM
150+ integrations
SMS support (available as an add-on)

Pricing for Phoneburner is not complicated. An annual subscription costs $1,512, which breaks down to $126 per user/month. It’s a 15% discount off their monthly price of $149 per user.

It’s a higher sticker price than some, but that’s all you pay.

It offers truly unlimited dialing and there are no extra monthly costs—no setup fees, usage fees, or per-minute charges.

Administrator accounts are free unless they use the auto dialer. They get advanced reporting features like leaderboards, real-time dashboards, and smart lead distribution via a dedicated portal.

One last thing: Phoneburner gives you as many seats as you need during your free trial. That’s not typical and says a lot about how confident they are in their service.

#2 – VanillaSoft — Best For Outbound Sales

VanillaSoft is a cloud-based sales engagement platform with business-class VoIP. Get started with nothing more than an internet connection and watch your sales team make better connections.

They have preview and progresssive dialing modes, both of which pull data automatically from your CRM and make calls based on lead-scoring and prioritization.

All the legwork is behind the scenes. Agents are always talking to the highest-quality leads.

On top of that, logical branch scripting ensures that every agent delivers consistent, on-brand information to customers. You can build out script libraries that present the agent with guidance and tips for every stage of the conversation.

I really like the foolproof calendar that lets people from any timezone schedule calls and set appointments without any accidental overlap. Never double-book a demo again.

You can use the built-in lead and sales tracking software in VanillaSoft or integrate with your CRM. Either way, the reporting and analytics are there to help you optimize performance.

Quickly identify which agents are converting leads and which need a little more help.

Some of the other aspects of VanillaSoft that attract sales teams are:

In-call supervisor features
Voicemail drop
SMS texting and email marketing
Local Caller ID
Skill-based call routing
Salesforce integration

You’ve got everything you need to get sales reps up to speed quickly. Once they’re comfortable, there are more than enough tools to help them visualize and improve their performance.

VanillaSoft pricing is broken down into their base platform and add-on products:

Sales Engagement Platform: $100/month for first user, $80 per additional user
Dialing: $30/month per user
Recording: $30/month per user
VoIP: $33/month per user

Discounts are available with an annual subscription and you can use VanillaSoft with your existing phone lines or VoIP provider.

This is one of the most recommended products on the market.

Why? All of the features are easy to use and it’s flexible enough to work for inside sales, telemarketing, fundraising, and more.

There’s no free forever version, but VanillaSoft offers a two-week free trial for up to six users and 2,000 calls.

#3 – Voicent Cloud — Best Standalone Auto Dialer Software

Voicent is auto dialer software that can be molded to fit your situation.

Here’s their offer: Get one of the best standalone auto dialers on the planet for less than $20/month per user. Then, add the specific services you need à la carte.

With Voicent, you select the exact set of tools that meet your particular needs. No more shopping around and trying to fit yourself into a prepackaged plan.

Features like marketing automation are reasonably priced add-ons in Voicent instead of being confined to an expensive premium subscription that’s bloated with tools you won’t use.

If you just need the auto dialer software, rest assured that Voicent’s base plan has you covered. You get all four dialer modes (progressive, power, predictive, and preview), as well as:

Native CRM and integrations
Campaign builder
Rich agent dashboard
Ability to play audio files while talking
Calling over SIP, IP PBX, and analog phone lines.
DNC compliance tools

All of that and more is included with the Base Plan, which starts at $19/month per user with an annual subscription.

Paying month-to-month, it’s $29 per user.

In addition to the subscription fee cost, Voicent has usage fees, which are charged per minute based on your calling plan:

4¢ Plan: no credit, pay as you go
3¢ Plan: starting at $75, with 2,500 minute credit
2¢ Plan: starting at $130 with 6,500 minute credit
1.5¢ Plan: starting at $375 with 25,000 minute credit

With a yearly Base plan rate of $228, Voicent is extremely affordable, but be sure to budget the usage fees into the total monthly cost.

Voicent Cloud only supports calls in the US and Canada, though they offer on-premise software that allows for global outreach.

Voicent is a great solution for companies that need really solid auto dialer capabilities, but don’t want a full contact center or sales engagement platform.

#4 – Mojo — Best For SMB Sales

Mojo is a sales engagement platform that operates on a copper-wire infrastructure.

Agents call into the Mojo platform from a landline or mobile and it begins dialing their list. From a browser or mobile device, they get the crisp sound of old school telephones.

Mojo makes up to 85 calls per hour with a single line power dialer, or up 300 with a triple line power dialer. Both single and multi line dialers are used by a single agent.

Give a small team titanic reach with Mojo.

The built-in lead management and marketing tools make it easy to track every call, follow up, and stay organized. Navigable dashboards provide a clear view of KPIs and prospecting lists, while preview mode provides extensive customer information before every call.

Mojo helps growing businesses make the most of every answered call. Agents can leave notes, schedule follow-ups, initiate drip campaigns, and more, all from within the platform.

Some of the other great features include:

Voicemail drop
Roving dialer (share licenses between team members)
Live answer detection
Time-zone calling guard
Leaderboard
Mobile caller ID

Monthly pricing for individual users is $99 for a single line dialer and $149 for a triple line dialer.

I like it for small businesses because there are no hidden costs, no contracts, and no per-minute fees.

For teams, Mojo pricing works as follows:

Lead Manager: $10/month, plus you must purchase one of the following dialer options
Single Line Dialer: $89/month per license
Triple Line Dialer: $139/month per license

Mojo has especially well-developed lead generation and tracking tools for realtors, who make up the majority of Mojo’s clientele.

Judging from recent reviews, however, it seems like a diverse range of businesses are taking advantage of Mojo’s outbound dialing solutions.

Agents can access the Mojo platform with VoIP, but it may not deliver the same copper-wire clarity as a phone source.

#5 – RingCentral — Best For Compliance

RingCentral can support every channel of communication, providing companies with a full-service contact center solution.

They offer one of the most feature-rich autodialers on the market, with progressive, predictive, and preview dialing modes.

They also offer TCPA Safe Dial, which allows companies to call unsubscribed cell numbers without risking legal troubles. Additionally, you can scrub campaign lists against your own DNC list or use RingCentral’s integrations with compliance solutions from DNC.com and Gryphon Networks.

The dashboard is user-friendly, letting agents quickly configure appropriate settings based on specific calls. Seamless integrations with top CRM software and compliance tools ensure that agents are only using the powerful auto dialer to reach valid customers at the right time.

Since this is complete call center software, RingCentral has a host of call routing features that outbound-only autodialers lack, such as real call back numbers, 24/7 reachability, and IVR.

Other great features that come with RingCentral include:

In-call coaching capabilities
Real time reports and analytics
Live answer detection
Voice broadcast
Intelligent call routing
Time-zone conscious technology

Despite offering omnichannel support, RingCentral Contact Center has competitively priced plans that compare with lighter auto dialers and sale engagement platforms:

Essentials: starting at $19.99/month per user
Standard: starting at $24.99/month per user
Premium: starting at $34.99/month per user
Ultimate: starting at $49.99/month per user

All plans include unlimited calling and text in the US and Canada, as well a larger number of toll-free minutes at each tier. Additional minutes are billed at 3.9¢ per minute.

RingCentral is a great choice for organizations that want powerful autodialing capabilities and the ability to centralize all of their communications within a single hub. Scale quickly without losing oversight or getting into regulatory trouble.

#6 – Kixie — Best For Local Presence

Kixie is a cloud-based sales engagement platform with phenomenal auto dialer capabilities.

Deploy Kixie in minutes and teams can begin making secure calls anywhere in the world via the Chrome extension or mobile app.

No matter where your customers are, they are going to see you calling from a local number. Several options on this list have a local caller ID, which is super helpful, but Kixie’s AI-powered local presence takes it a few steps further.

First of all, they never spoof numbers. When a customer receives a call from a local number, they can call that number back and connect to the right agent.

Kixie also automatically removes numbers that get flagged as spam, taking that time-consuming chore off your plate.

The end result is that Kixie’s intelligent local presence has delivered users upwards of a 500% increase in connection rates.

Kixie also helps you connect with leads faster with its AI auto dialer. As soon as a new lead shows interest, Kixie bumps their name to the front of the list and puts an agent in touch right away.

Agents don’t have to change the way they work to take advantage of all these automated features. Integrate directly with tools like Pipedrive to enable click-to-call from within the sales management tools you already use.

Some of the other time-saving and sales-boosting tools included with Kixie are:

In-call coaching features
Voicemail drop
IVR
Sales leaderboards
One-click integration with Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, and more
Real-time reporting

Kixie offers quarterly subscriptions or annual subscriptions at a 15% discount. Pricing is broken down into three tiers.

For annual subscriptions, you’re looking at:

Integrated: starting at $29/month per user
Enterprise: starting at $55/month per user
Custom: contact Kixie sales to create a plan

Calls minutes are billed according to the current rates and vary per country. You can add unlimited calling in the US and Canada for $30/month per user.

The additional cost of local presence will depend on how many different area codes you need and whether you want to include international numbers.

Kixie’s customer support has a consistent reputation for solving problems quickly, which has translated into a constantly improving product over the long-term.

Kixie offers a seven-day free trial for Integrated and Enterprise plans, as well as extended trials for Custom plans.

Summary

Good auto dialer software can save a sales team hours each week and potentially weeks each year.

RingCentral is going to take care of any communication problem you have, providing best-in-breed service in any channel. When it comes to auto dialer software, they offer a robust product that has multiple safeguards to prevent any problems with compliance.

VanillaSoft is going to be great for outbound sales teams. High agent turnover isn’t an issue because it’s so easy to bring people up to speed and the in-call coaching capabilities are really strong.

With Phoneburner, remote teams are completely set up. The lead distribution system routes calls to the right agents without oversight. Agents can quickly and easily transfer calls and share information within the platform, making coordination easy in the distributed workplace.

For smaller teams, Mojo can supercharge outreach with a few triple-line dialers. Combine that power with reasonable pricing and zero per-minute fees, and you have an auto dialer solution that’s perfect for SMBs.

If you are interested in really leveraging the power of local presence, Kixie is the tool you want, though it’s a really great auto dialer no matter how you cut it.

And if what you are looking for, in the end, is a standalone autodialer, Voicent is the choice for you. It’s a powerful product, and you can add other features one by one without worrying about having to jump up into a new pricing tier.

The post Best Auto Dialer Software appeared first on Neil Patel.

The Best Equity Crowdfunding Sites – and How Equity Crowdfunding Can Work for Your Business

If you are considering equity crowdfunding for your business, then you are, by definition, considering equity crowdfunding sites. We take a look at the best out there and dig into their nuances and differences. Make a smarter choice – knowledge is power!

What are the Best Equity Crowdfunding Sites All About?

When you consider equity crowdfunding sites, you will need to take a number of factors into account. Crowdfunding is a way to get funds from a lot of people, versus one or two investors.

With equity crowdfunding, you raise cash through the sale of securities such as equity, debt, revenue share and more. These security sales would be coming from a company that is not listed on stock exchanges. Equity crowdfunding has been around for less than 10 years. It is not the same as rewards-based. Rewards-based crowdfunding comes from places such as Kickstarter.

Equity Crowdfunding Sites versus Rewards-Based Crowdfunding Sites

What are the differences between equity crowdfunding and rewards-based crowdfunding? The major difference is what investors get for their investment. With reward based crowdfunding, investors generally receive some incentive for their donation. That incentive is not equity in the company. But with equity-based crowdfunding, the investor receives equity. That is, they get a share in the company.

Also, as a general rule, equity-based crowdfunding brings in larger amounts of money. This is because it draws a different type of investor. So, how come not everyone choose that? The key is some businesses are better suited for equity-based crowdfunding than others.

Details on Equity Crowdfunding versus Rewards-Based Crowdfunding

With equity crowdfunding sites, you raise capital from the crowd online. Potential investors visit a funding portal website. There, they can explore different equity crowdfunding investment opportunities. Note: there are limits on how much capital an individual can invest based on their income and net worth. Plus, investors must be 18 years old, or older.

The main purpose of equity crowdfunding is to sell securities in a business. Hence, this is also the main purpose of equity crowdfunding sites.

In contrast, with a platform such as Kickstarter, businesses make money by pre-selling their products. But on equity crowdfunding sites, companies sell securities, in the form of equity in the company. Or it can be in the form of debt, revenue share, convertible note, and more. Equity crowdfunding gives investors a stake in your business.

What is in it for Equity Crowdfunding Investors?

Equity crowdfunding investors are playing a long game. They stand to make a profit if they make a good investment, and the company they invested in grows. Here, the business can create hundreds of brand ambassadors who want to see you succeed. They are an audience the company can depend on to spread the word about their business and share the product with their own networks.

The ability to cultivate reliable brand ambassadors can be one consideration when trying to offset the cost of equity crowdfunding on a platform

What is in it for Business Owners Hoping for Equity Crowdfunding?

The business owner gets to dictate terms. The entrepreneur raising capital has total control of the offering. So this is including what to sell, how much, and, at what price. The owner can set the terms, including their valuation and how much capital they hope to raise.

Companies can set a minimum funding goal along with their desired maximum. So if they do not fully reach their funding goal, the entrepreneur can still successfully raise capital. Those who want to invest can do so even if the market interest is not enough to reach the goal.

Businesses raising money via equity crowdfunding sites are private companies. A business using equity crowdfunding does not have to issue an IPO (initial public offering). The business does not have to become a fully reporting public company. this is helpful, as being a fully reporting public company is financially burdensome for most small businesses. Investors do not have to be accredited. A business can raise funds without having to turn to venture capitalists.

For more information, see forbes.com/sites/howardmarks/2018/12/19/what-is-equity-crowdfunding.

Credit Line Hybrid Financing: Get up to $150,000 in financing so your business can thrive

A Look at all the Best Equity Crowdfunding Sites

Crowdfunder

Crowdfunder is an equity crowdfunding platform. With Crowdfunder, investors purchase equity in promising companies. They consider campaigns to be deals, and its donors are investors.

Starter listings are $299 per month. Premium listings are $499 per month. In their community, there are over 130,000 entrepreneurs and investors.

Crowdfunder does not work with every industry.

The following are prohibited industries:

Guns and Firearms
Tobacco, Cigarettes, and Cannabis
Pyramid Marketing
Adult Products and Entertainment
Gambling
Contests and Raffles, and
Illegal Substances and Drugs

For more information, see crowdfunder.com.

Fundable

Fundable is a crowdfunding for business platform. It allows companies to raise funds via equity sales. Those funds come from investors, customers, and friends. They have over $80 million in funding commitments.

Fundable will charge $179 per month to raise funds. Fees on rewards are: 3.5% + 30¢ per merchant processing transaction. They do not charge success fees.

Fundable is one of the equity crowdfunding sites (such as Crowdfunder and Fundrise, below) which seem to be more accessible to regular folks.

They do not seem to focus on just one specific industry.

For more information, see fundable.com.

Credit Line Hybrid Financing: Get up to $150,000 in financing so your business can thrive

Crowdstreet

What is so special about Crowdstreet?

The industry most likely to use equity crowdfunding is real estate. This is because real estate allows for a much larger asset to be there from the very start. For a startup company based upon an idea for a new product, there is extraordinarily little available to seize in case the investment goes south. Whereas with real estate, even if there is never any development, land has an intrinsic value no matter what.

Crowdstreet allows you to invest online in commercial realty. Investors can choose between direct investing, fund investing, or managed investing. Crowdstreet boasts over 101,000 investors and over 260 commercial real estate developers.

Direct investing has varied minimum investment amounts. The minimum for fund investing is $25,000. The minimum for managed investing is $250,000. Hence this is one of those equity crowdfunding sites that is more for professional investors.

For more information, see crowdstreet.com/marketplace/overview.

RealCrowd

Real Crowd is another real estate investing platform, via equity crowdfunding. RealCrowd charges a technology access fee to the operating partner for their services. They do not charge investors any upfront fees, ongoing asset management fees or promote/carried interest in the investments.

You can browse offerings before you sign up. The information includes minimum investment and average returns. This allows for a lot of the decision making to happen before you even log in. Real Crowd offerings are open to accredited investors.

For more information, see https://www.realcrowd.com/how-it-works.

Fundrise

Fundrise is a great starter site for those that want to break into the world of equity crowdfunding. They do not require that you be an accredited investor. The minimum investment for the starter account level is $500. Minimum investment amounts go all the way up to $100,000 for the premium account level.

Fundrise will charge 0.15% in annual advisory fees for managing your account through the online platform. They do not charge any transaction fees, sales commissions, or additional fees for enabling features on an account, such as dividend reinvestment or auto-invest.

Fundrise will also charge 0.85% in annual management fees for managing a Fundrise portfolio. They could potentially charge other fees, such as development or liquidation fees, for work on a specific project. Dividends earned are net of any fund fees.

For more information, see: https://fundrise.com.

Alternatives to Equity Crowdfunding

If you do not wish to give away any of your equity, then rest assured, you have other options. Build business credit is one option. And others include inventory financing, merchant cash advances (if you have sales coming in), and securities financing. With securities financing, you use your stocks, bonds, 401(k), or IRA as collateral for borrowing.

Try a Credit Line Hybrid Instead

Another great option is our credit line hybrid.

A hybrid credit line could be just what you need.

Credit Line Hybrid Financing: Get up to $150,000 in financing so your business can thrive

The gist of a credit line hybrid is you can leverage good personal credit in order to get business funding. Because a good personal credit score is the main thing the lender is looking for, it can be perfect for a startup venture. So, it is another option to consider. You do not necessarily have to give up business equity in order to finance your entrepreneurial venture.

Equity Crowdfunding Sites: Takeaways

Equity crowdfunding involves calling on a crowd to invest in your project. Rather than pre-selling products, you are selling pieces of your business.

The industry most likely to use equity crowdfunding is real estate. But other industries can use equity crowdfunding. Be sure to check the platform and see if there are any restrictions. Some industries will not do well at all and may even be shut out by a platform. Fees and investment minimum amounts will vary widely.

If you are interested in equity crowdfunding for your business, the best thing you can do is to shop around. Rates vary dramatically. But also check on success rates. Many equity crowdfunding platforms are expensive, or they have high minimum investment amounts, or both. Do not waste your time and money if you are not sure there is a good fit.

And, if you decide equity crowdfunding is not for you – or even if you do but want a fall back – then consider other forms of business funding. That should always include building business credit.

The post The Best Equity Crowdfunding Sites – and How Equity Crowdfunding Can Work for Your Business appeared first on Credit Suite.

Best Data Visualization Tools

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

The right image convinces a conference room instantly.

Sell that new client, get your boss’s approval, and rally the team behind you. Data visualization tools turn a whole mess of numbers into a crisp image that says it all.

With the right product, you can take command of overwhelming amounts of data to tell a clear and compelling story, while leaving your audience with a visual that resonates long after your presentation concludes.

In this post, I’ll give a complete overview of the best data visualization tools, and what to look for as you make your decision.

The Top 5 Options for Data Visualization

Tableau – Best for Enterprise
Infogram – Best For Collaboration
Plecto – Best for Sales Teams
Datawrapper – Best DIY Visualization Tool
Highcharts – Best for Interactive Visualizations

How to Choose the Best Data Visualization Tool for You

I get it. There are a million tools to help you visualize your data.

Then, when you start digging, it’s like, “Wait, do I have to know several programming languages to use this really cool product?”

Slow down. Don’t worry. You’re not going to have to go back to school to get amazing data visualizations.

Some of the high-end tools will require a little IT know-how to get off the ground, but those are really aimed at companies who can factor that into their budgets.

If that’s not what you’re looking for, no worries. There are really great data visualization tools a non-specialist can have up and running before lunch.

The key is knowing what you want your data visualization tool to do.

By understanding your local requirements, you can whittle down your options quickly by going through each of the major elements of data visualization products.

Visualization Capabilities

Are you looking for a nice tool that creates sleek reports, or a platform that lets you publish interactive dashboards?

Every vendor showcases data visualization examples on their site. Check these over and really reflect on your gut reaction.

If you are in search of the “wow” factor, don’t settle until you find something that will give your presentations that aesthetic edge.

Connectivity

This is perhaps the biggest make-it-or-break-it factor on the list: What data types and sources are supported by the data visualization tool?

No data visualization tool is good enough to justify a massive migration. You need to find something that connects with your data, wherever it lives.

Ideally, connecting data is an easy, secure, and highly-visible process.

Look for products that clearly explain how to manage and connect data sources. Official partnerships with the database products you use is a big plus.

Cruise a few reviews to see if people are finding that the connectivity is as good as advertised. Also, be sure to walk your sales team through your desired deployment to make sure it’s going to work as planned.

Skill Requirements

Not so long ago, complex data visualization required familiarity with structured query language (SQL), Python, or another language.

Today, great data visualization products like Tableau allow users to search vast databases using natural language. They provide drag-and-drop functionality that lets non-specialists drill down into the most complex questions.

That said, if you have complex data flows coming into real-time dashboards, it’s a good idea to have someone in-house who can ensure that everything is running smoothly.

Mobile Compatibility

Look for something that will appeal to your clients and customers, however they browse.

Does your data visualization tool support touch and multi-touch?

Good interactive visualizations take a lot of effort, and the last thing you want is for users on iOS or Android to be barred from the experience because of incompatibility.

Quality data visualization software delivers a final project that looks good on desktop, tablet, or smartphone. You can’t really budge on this unless you are committed to developing visual content for internal use.

Another thing to think about is collaboration. Will your remote and on-the-go employees be able to stay current with their team projects?

The Different Types of Data Visualization Tools

This product category is highly diversified, ranging from modest software that turns a spreadsheet column into a pie chart to interactive dashboards that interpret data flows from multiple sources in real time.

Although data visualization tools don’t break down into completely neat tiers, there are definitely recognizable categories.

I’ll start out with the lightweight tools and work up to the best business intelligence software, capable of handling the most complicated data analysis.

Simple Charts and Graphs

Simple chart tools have limited connectivity and few data visualization options. The draw is that they are often free and easy for anyone to use. Here’s an example from Google Charts, which is free forever:

For teams in constant communication, these lightweight data visualization solutions can come in handy.

If you are presenting to clients or company leadership, however, the reports generated by a simple chart might not cut it.

Infographics

Infographics are really great for making compelling visual statements.

I like them because you can tie multiple charts, images, and streams of information into a cohesive presentation that can be shared on a billboard or a smartphone screen.

Plus, these are great for your content. Adding original infographics increases shares and retweets because they make your posts stand out.

Infogram is a really popular infographic tool, and looking at the examples above, you can see why I chose to review it. Your teams get a whole new dimension of artistic and creative freedom to present data in an eye-catching way.

Using Publisher or Google Docs to achieve an end result that looks this good would be tedious, if possible at all.

Generally, infographic tools come with many options for visualization out of the box.

They don’t tend to have the connectivity or analytic capabilities that come with business intelligence software, though they are far more robust than a simple chart tool.

Interactive Visualizations

Want people spending time on your site?

Interactive visualizations let customers and visitors play with your data in a controlled way.

Below, in the data visualization example from Datawrapper, the chart displays information based on the county the user hovers over. The county itself is also highlighted, and the average income is adjusted on a sliding scale:

Consider these products a blend or midway point between infographics much more powerful business intelligence tools.

There is nothing complex about interactive visualizations for end-users to understand, yet they allow users some degree of control over the data, which an infographic can’t support.

Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence (BI) tools comb through massive amounts of raw data and turn it into actionable insights. As part of their reporting features, many BI tools come with data visualization tools designed to support the most complex analysis.

BI tools connect to a large number of disparate data sources, and usually require a higher-degree of technical skill to deploy and manage. Most often, however, end users like executives and sales managers can easily manipulate data within a dashboard once it is set up.

Customizable dashboards and robust reporting features allow different people within a company to pay attention to relevant KPIs in real time, picking up on trends and patterns that would otherwise be hidden.

Deploying and maintaining a BI tool represents a significant investment, whereas tools from the previous product categories tend to be a lot less work.

That said, there are BI options for small and mid-sized businesses that provide cross-organization connectivity and data visualization at an affordable price.

#1 – Tableau — Best for Enterprise

Tableau is a best-in-breed BI tool with phenomenal data visualization capabilities. It’s not the cheapest option on the market, but you get both an intuitive UI and the ability to drill down into virtually any data source.

In other words, you don’t have to make the typical sacrifices. Tableau is ultra-powerful in terms of supported visualizations, but it’s really user-friendly once you get it set up.

Many companies elect to use Tableau in order to encourage a data-driven, transparent, collaborative culture. It’s also one of the most secure products on the market, with enterprise-grade governance tools and the option for on-premises deployment.

For the most part, Tableau can do everything that any other data visualization tool can, but better. Some of the standout capabilities include:

Combine different data sources without writing code
Drag-and-drop statistical analysis, forecasts, and trendlines
Optimize dashboards for all screen sizes
Natural language queries of any published data source
AI-powered data analysis
Publish data sources as encrypted extracts on Tableau Server
Robust data management tools
Support and solutions from an active community of over 1 million users

Team pricing for Tableau is role-based, which lets large organizations economize their subscription. The roles are:

Creator: $70 user/month
Explorer: $35 user/month, 5 user minimum ($42 if fully hosted by Tableau)
Viewer: $12 user/month, 100 user minimum

Creators have full author/edit privileges, and can connect new data sources and flows. Explorers can work with most existing assets and create their own visualizations. Viewers can interact with data and collaborate with colleagues, though they cannot author or prepare data.

Tableau Public is a free forever version of the product and the company offers a free 14-day trial that lets you test drive some of the premium features.

#2 – Infogram — Best for Collaboration

Infogram is an intuitive data visualization tool that delivers stunning reports, slides, dashboards and social media visuals.

First-time users are going to love the UI. Basically all of the visualization building can be accomplished via drag-and-drop.

Infogram makes it easy for teams to share and produce consistent work with customizable branded templates, role-based permissions, and file versioning..

You can see who’s editing your projects in real-time and you can add comment threads directly to an image within the infographic.

Teams can get up and running with Infogram quickly, taking advantage of its incredibly deep design capabilities::

1 million stock images and icons, as well as animations, GIFs, and video
More than 35 interactive charts and over 550 interactive maps
Preset and customizable branded design themes
Data integration with Google Analytics, Amazon Redshift, OneDrive, MySQL, Oracle, and more
JSON feed to import live data
WordPress plugin

The streamlined features don’t stop there. Tasks like embedding projects, for example, involve no more than copy/pasting embed codes into your CMS.

Infogram can be extremely beneficial for companies of any size. In addition to a free forever version, Infogram offers several pricing tiers:

Pro: $19/month for an individual
Business: $67/month for an individual
Team: $149/month for 3 users
Enterprise: contact sales

With Team and Enterprise subscriptions, you get the ability to invite members, set flexible permissions, share projects, and collaborate in real-time. Connect your data, get the input you need, and start publishing great looking content before the end of the week.

#3 – Plecto — Best for Sales Teams

Plecto is a great tool for promoting a data-driven team culture. The idea is to involve everyone in the constant flow of data by making all relevant KPIs available in a real-time, highly-visible dashboard.

Okay, plenty of other tools can do that. Gamification is where Plecto really separates itself from the crowd.

Gamification? Yes, it’s a word, and a hot one these days. With Plecto, it’s super simple to create contests using your KPIs as benchmarks. This could be sales closed, employees hired, lists built—whatever metric you need to drive, use Plecto to enable the spirit of competition.

Plecto is built for this. It’s easy to set goals and achievements that are directly tied to the numbers you care about. Increase transparency and motivation at the same time.

The platform’s capabilities work exceptionally well for sales teams, yet other departments across the organization can benefit from the unique mix of features and functionality, which include:

Unlimited dashboards and data sources
Custom KPIs
Display multiple dashboards on the same screen
Integrations with Microsoft SQL, Oracle SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
Notifications based on thresholds and other milestones
One-click integration with more than 60 leading cloud services
Create and track individual performance agreements in private employee-manager dashboards

There are three plan options for Plecto:

Medium: $100/month for 5 licenses, $20/month per additional license
Large: $350/month for 10 licenses, $20/month per additional license
Enterprise: Contact sales, minimum 100 licenses

Some of the important data visualization tools (like SQL integration) are not included with the Medium plan. You only need to buy licenses for users who send their data to Plecto (view-only users are free).

#4 – Datawrapper — Best DIY Data Visualization Tool

Datawrapper has a simple chart tool feel, yet it’s got the ability to deliver interactive and responsive charts, maps, and tables.

It’s not designed for BI so much as mass producing next-level data visualizations to capture attention on feeds and pages.

Lots of companies, like The New York Times, for example make use of Datawrapper every day to improve their content. Using striking visuals, the Times can convey complex ideas to consumers about voting data, consumer preferences, and so on.

Datawrapper has a clean, intuitive interface that makes it easy to engage with the cloud-based product’s full range of functions, which include:

Copy data from Excel, Sheets, or the web into Datawrapper
Create live-updating charts by uploading CSV/XLS files or linking to a URL
Embed different types of interactive and responsive charts, maps, and tables
Export as PNG, PDF, or SVG
Colorblind check for all images
Live-updating graphics for maps
Collaborative tools and shared team folders
On-premise creation to comply with regulatory requirements

You have to purchase premium plans to create custom charts and white-label projects. Custom, the first tier above free, starts at $599/month and really allows companies to reach their audience with on-brand, original visuals.

Datawrapper’s free version is excellent for internal or team use, but less attractive for public-facing visualizations.

#5 – Highcharts — Best for Interactive Visualizations

Highcharts is a wonderful tool aimed at helping developers add interactive charts to web and mobile projects. It’s a clean, SVG-based, multi-platform, JavaScript charting library.

Upload multiple types of data and use official wrappers to work in:

Microsoft .Net
Python
PHP
R
iOS & Android

This product requires some technical skills to use effectively, but the tradeoff is that it’s relatively inexpensive and works with any database or stack.

And the results are phenomenal.

Highcharts is extensible, scalable, and meant to work anywhere on every device. Some of the key features include:

Multiple map types (heatmap, mapline, tilemap, etc)
Dedicated Highcharts Gannt product
Export JPG, PDF, PNG, or SVG
Add tooltip text information when users hover over labeled data points
Pure JavaScript requires no client-side plugins
Intuitive configuration and chart editing
Mobile and touch-optimized for truly interactive user experience
Download, inspect, and edit Highcharts source code.

For personal, non-commercial, or non-profit organizations, all of Highcharts’ products are available for free. This includes Highchart Stock, Gantt, Maps, Editor, and Mobile.

They also have deals for startups and ways for other businesses to customize the various Highcharts products to their needs. Contact sales to start putting together a pricing plan.

Summary

Tableau is the best tool for enterprise because it gives teams an edge in every aspect of data visualization.

It’s a considerable investment, though, and not every company is looking for a full-bore business intelligence solution.

If what you need is a data visualization tool to build and share memorable images, Infogram will help your teams take their game to the next level with zero graphic design or programming skills.

For companies that want to embed interactive visualizations in their online content, look no further than Datawrapper. Highcharts is another great option for embedding interactive content into your sites, though it’s not as easy for non-specialists as Datawrapper.

Coming back to Tableau for a second—yes, it’s heavy, but you can try the free version today without having to navigate a multi-step enterprise sign-up process. There aren’t any hoops to jump through, just the chance to take your data visualizations to the next level.

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