When You’re Setting Up a Business, Did You Know You Need to Pay Attention to Your Company Email and Website?
Setting up a business means attending to what seems like a million little details. Your corporate email and website are two of those details. Don’t drop the ball on them!
But let’s start with business credit.
Business Credit
This is credit in a corporation’s name. It is not tied to the owner’s creditworthiness. Instead, biz credit scores depend on how well a company can pay its bills. Hence consumer and corporation credit scores can vary dramatically.
The Benefits
There are no demands for a personal guarantee. You can quickly get business credit regardless of personal credit quality. And there is no personal credit reporting of company accounts. Biz credit utilization won’t affect your consumer FICO score. Plus the owner isn’t personally liable for the debt the corporation incurs.
The Details
Getting corporate credit is not automatic. Building it requires some work. Some of the steps are intuitive, and some of them are not.
Fundability
Fundability is the current ability of a firm to get funding. Some factors are within your control. Others (like your time in business) aren’t. Your online presence and data are one area which is at or close to 100% with your control.
Business Credit, Fundability, and Business Funding Applications
The better your business credit and fundability are, the more likely you will get approval for financing. Today, let’s concentrate on your online presence, that is, your email address and your website.
Lenders Use Data to Decide on Your Application
They check information from a variety of sources, and they don’t tell you about any of them. Knowing what these secret sources measure can only help you. Understanding what matters the most makes getting a loan A LOT easier, because you know what to improve first. This information is the difference between getting an approval and getting a denial.
Lenders Use LexisNexis Information
LexisNexis is one source where many of the lenders reviewing loan applications get their information from. They offer information regarding likelihood to pay, or not. Lenders compare LexisNexis information to what you put on your loan application. If the application and LexisNexis don’t match, then, the loan providers will deny you a loan. They will see the inconsistency as fraud.
LexisNexis connects all of the data that pertains to you, both positive and negative. They have access to
criminal records
every email address you’ve ever used (these are your professional and personal email addresses)
Lenders Use Online Information Including Your Business Email and Website
One place where lenders and vendors will be looking for your company is online. Even if they’re not specifically checking out your online presence, they may still need to know how to order your product or service, or where to send praise or complaints. Your online presence is where they will find that information, or not.
Your Business Email and Website: Your Website
What happens if your family member or a friend built your website? Maybe that person is talented, but corporate websites differ from personal ones. A business website needs to be easy to navigate. It needs to answer customers’ questions.
Styles differ. Wedding photographers and construction companies differ. They have dissimilar sites and design sensibilities, but they both have Contact and About pages, and information about what they do.
Make sure you own your domain, and not just your domain at Wix or WordPress or the like. You can do this by buying hosting. This is through hosting companies like GoDaddy or HostGator.
Your Business Email and Website: Your Email Address
Given that so much more of lending decisions is going on online these days, then your email address is an opportunity for your firm to puts its best foot forward. Don’t squander this easy and free opportunity! General email addresses like admin@yoursite.com tend to be best.
With a general email address, if someone leaves your employ, another employee can seamlessly take over that email address. A username like admin, webmaster, or even hello is far, far better than cutiepie or the like, even if you’re in a playful industry that caters to kids. After all, your bank and banker aren’t.
Your Business Email and Website: Records Congruency
Keep your records consistent! This includes your online records. LexisNexis and the SBFE (Small Business Financial Exchange) are looking at everything, so it had better match.
Inconsistent records will lead to a denial due to fraud because that’s how lenders interpret inconsistencies. This is a cause of denials which is in the owner’s hands. You have the ability to change and correct this.
This means your corporate name, address, phone number – everything! – must look the same in these places and more:
Every place you have an online presence (your website, Yelp, SoTellUs, etc.)
Build Fundability on Business Credit Applications to Avoid Denials
Keep your firm looking fundable (legit) with:
A professional website and email address
A toll-free phone number
List your phone number with 411
A business address (not a PO box or a UPS box)
Get all necessary licenses
Your Business Email and Website: Online Fundability
There are some aspects of fundability where you should pay particular attention to what’s going on online. They include:
Firm owners listed and listed ownership uniformity
Company name and address uniformity
Industry aligned
Company domain
Information uniform on all records
Online Fundability: Business Ownership Listings
Records consistency matters here, too. Your website should show who owns your company. And that information needs to be consistent. So if the owner is named Susan Johnson on your website’s About page, then she can’t be listed as Sue Johnson on your Contact page. If your ownership changes, you need to show that here.
Business Name and Address Uniformity
Abbreviations can be your downfall here, as can punctuation like hyphens, commas, and colons. If your Contact page says your main office is on Main Street, then your About page can’t say it’s on Main St.
If you move, or you add subsidiaries and other locations, then you need to update that information everywhere. This even means whether you use your 5-digit ZIP code, or a ZIP plus 4 code (9 digits).
Fundability: Industry Alignment
If your industry is over the road trucking, then it needs to be listed that way. Pro tip: when your industry can be called several different names, like long distance trucking, mention those other phrases on your website.
Your Business Email and Website: Company Domain
When your company domain matches your company name, it helps with fundability. Pro tip: try to match what people will be searching for online, so if (for example) the word ‘brothers’ is in your company name, then determine if ‘brothers’ or ‘bros’ will be used by people searching for your company and its goods and services online.
Good websites can help you get funding and convert prospects to customers. While websites differ, there are some things they all need. Such as:
Easy to use navigation – hiding important information won’t help
Speed – if visitors have to hang around and wait for pages to load, they’ll go elsewhere
Intuitive organization – keep your address and phone numbers on your About and Contact pages because people expect that data to be there
Your website also needs:
Branding – if your company is known for the color green, but it’s nowhere to be found on your website, you’re losing an opportunity for connection
Visual design – ugly websites, and those which haven’t had a design update in a decade are not conducive to enhancing your reputation or making sales
SEO – search engine optimization means making your site easier to find. Stuffing in keywords doesn’t help with this, but writing honestly about your biz and using the kinds of terms people search for? That does
One of the more vital items your website needs is content. This can mean blogging, and it certainly means creating pages which explain what you do and what sets your biz apart from its competition. It also means a page devoted to each product you sell or service you provide. Again, you’re making it easier for your prospects to find you.
Setting Up a Business Email and Website: Takeaways
More fundable companies can get more money, and they tend to get more prospects who decide to become customers. One area of fundability you have total or near total control over is your corporate online presence. Keep it professional, uniform. and appealing, and easy to use. We can help you with even more aspects of fundability.
Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Email beats all other marketing channels and can generate $37 for every $1 you invest.
Even though email marketing can generate a ton of revenue, it’s still not easy.
You need to know which email tools are best, how to use them so you don’t end up in spam folders, and how to create emails that convert.
Even for fully-staffed marketing teams, it can be overwhelming.
Email marketing agencies are perfect for overcoming these challenges.
They know how to use the tools and run fully-scaled email campaigns. They can also distill your brand and offer into great campaigns that generate revenue.
Today, I’ll walk you through how to choose an email marketing agency that’ll help you unlock all the business value email holds.
Good?
Well, let’s start from the basics.
Know Your Goals and Desired Outcomes
Before you jump straight to the top email marketing companies and pick one to work with, it’s a good idea to pause first.
Why?
You’ll get much better results.
Famous email agencies, like the ones I’ll recommend, usually have a track record of overseeing successful email marketing strategies and campaigns.
However, it’s never a one-size-fits-all situation.
Some agencies only excel when working on specific projects or campaigns. Others drive better results when working with specific kinds of businesses.
Knowing your goals and desired outcomes with email marketing gives you the right lens to evaluate different agencies and know which one is best for your needs.
Not to mention, it’ll help your agency get started a lot faster. The clearer the goal, the better the outcome.
Let’s take a look at some examples.
Example #1: Build and grow your email list
Without an email list, you can’t do email marketing.
And if you have a small list of, say, 33 email addresses, you’ll never get the full benefits of email marketing either.
The first step is to build your email list.
You’ll achieve this by choosing an agency with experience executing list-building campaigns to get your first 100, 1,000, or 10,000 email subscribers.
Take yourself, for example.
You won’t give a company your email address for nothing, right?
Absolutely not! We all get enough spam as it is.
Similarly, most people would only subscribe to your email list in exchange for something valuable.
In the digital marketing world, this could be an ebook, a checklist, or other forms of relevant content promoted to the audience whose emails you’re targeting. Consider choosing an email marketing agency with experience creating and promoting amazing content. The better the content, the faster your list will grow.
Example #2: Increase your email open and click-through rates
Low open and click-through rates will destroy your list.
If your open and click-through rates are low, you’ll run into a cascading series of problems:
Your audience isn’t seeing your offers. That’s less revenue.
Email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo will notice your low performance. Then they’ll flag you as spam or stop delivering your email altogether.
Now your open and click rates get even worse.
Even if you improve your campaigns later, they won’t deliver nearly the same results.
Improving your email reputation is REALLY hard.
Instead of risking this email cycle of doom, it’s a good idea to partner with an agency that knows what they’re doing.
They can look for early signs that something’s wrong, course-correct early, and keep your email reputation safe.
In this case, look for an email marketing agency that is exceptional at developing strategies and tactics to help increase your open and click-through rates.
The two examples above were to show that your goals and desired outcome with email marketing go a long way in determining what agency to choose.
They were also to demonstrate that no agency is a one-size-fits-all for all email marketing problems.
Set your goals first, then look for an agency that specializes in those goals.
6 Characteristics That Make a Great Email Marketing Agency
There are hundreds of email agencies out there. Maybe thousands.
And if you visit the websites of these agencies, every single one claims to be the best.
But what characteristics make an email marketing company great? And how can you vet and choose an agency to work with?
1. Great Content Creation
Think of all the emails you receive from other companies.
Do you know why you can’t wait to open and engage with some, but would ignore, delete, or unsubscribe from others right off the bat?
In most cases, it’s because you don’t value the content of those emails.
Amazing content keeps people opening and reading. Then when you send an offer, they’re willing to consider it.
Great content is the core of any serious email strategy.
Check to see if they focus on a process for crafting engaging email content. The best ones always do.
2. An Impressive Client Portfolio
Excellent email marketing agencies didn’t achieve that status overnight.
They worked with dozens or hundreds of brands to execute successful email campaigns.
Because of this, they should have plenty of top-tier brands in their portfolio. And case studies that show you exactly what was done.
Not all of this can be shared publicly. But when you’re exploring options with agencies, ask for examples during your initial calls. The agency should have plenty of examples to point to. If they struggle to come up with some, look elsewhere.
It’s a great way to quickly vet agencies of all types.
3. Thought Leadership
Exceptional email marketing agencies are always on top of email trends. It’s constantly evolving and you don’t want to work with someone that’s using tactics from 5 years ago.
An easy way to check for this is the agency’s blog, YouTube channel, or their own email list. Within 20-30 minutes of consuming their content, you should learn a ton. And it should all be cutting edge.
That’s a good sign they’ll be able to apply those same tactics to your email campaigns.
4. Deep Expertise with Email Tools
Great agencies will have used them all.
If you ask them which tools are best, you’ll quickly learn:
Which are most popular
Strengths and weaknesses of each
The handful of tools to avoid
But don’t worry about which tool they recommend. Pay attention to their depth of knowledge when speaking with them. They’ll probably start by recommending a single tool. Then as soon as you ask any follow up questions, they should have plenty of qualifications, nuance, and detail to their answers.
You should get the feeling that the agency knows this stuff cold. If not, find someone that does.
5. Has Specific Rules to Avoid Spam
If you’ve been hit hard by spam flags, you might need an agency that specializes exclusively on reviving domains with negative email reputations.
Most of us don’t need to go that far.
But you absolutely want to work with an agency that knows how to stay out of the spam box.
Also ask new agencies about how they stay out of spam, their processes to keep things clean, and early warnings that they like to look for.
You should be blown away with the thoroughness of their answers.
If not, keep looking.
6. A Great Company Culture
By choosing an email marketing agency to work with, you’re entering a business relationship with another business entity.
So, before you proceed, check that their company culture fits with yours.
Without a good fit on culture, you’re going to get email campaigns that don’t jive with your brand. You could anger your audience and turn them away. Or play things too safe and leave money on the table.
There’s no right answer on culture, just make sure their culture and yours fit well.
Ask for samples of recent campaigns that they’ve done. They’re likely to do similar work for you.
How to Work With an Email Marketing Agency
Working with an exceptional email marketing agency isn’t like dashing into a grocery store, filling your cart, and dashing out in a few minutes.
There are steps you’ll need to take that ensure your partnership with one leads to business growth via email marketing.
1. Align your in-house team
Most email marketing agencies won’t work in isolation but as an extension of your in-house digital marketing team.
Hence, to ensure a smooth partnership between you and them, you should:
Have meetings with stakeholders in your company to align relevant teams on the need to work with an email agency.
Communicate how the agency’s work would impact your business and why it is necessary.
As needed, appoint employees to work directly with the email marketing agency.
Doing this ensures team alignment between the agency and your company. Also, it keeps the agency in sync with your values, company culture, and the goals for choosing to work with them.
2. Discovery session
As you first go out to contact an email marketing agency, they won’t jump straight into sending you a proposal or contract.
The best email marketing agencies act like doctors who only prescribe after they diagnose.
And to start diagnosing your challenges and goals with email marketing, expect to fill an inquiry form, followed by a discovery session.
3. Research & strategic recommendations
Before making a specific proposal, any good email marketing agency will do an extensive round of research on your current campaigns. This will include things like:
Signing up for your lists and looking at your current campaigns
Mapping out your signup flows
Checking landing pages and signup offers
Looking through social profiles and email funnels from other channels
Once they have a complete picture of where you are today, they’ll be able to put a proposal together.
4. A working contract with project deliverables
A typical work duration with an email marketing agency spans several months.
To take on that kind of scope,agencies usually prefer to send a formal proposal and contract for you to sign.
Take your time and this stage and go through the proposal in detail. You should feel great about every piece. If you have any concerns, work through them now. It’s really easy to change scope, budget, or goals now.
Once you fee good about it, get the contract signed.
5. Onboarding
Expect an onboarding process customized for your team after you sign the contract.
During this step, the agency will usually ask for all your internal document and tool access. Expert to send them invites for your Google Analytics and email tools. Also put together every piece of internal documentation that you have on your email campaigns. The more info they have, the better.
From here, the agency will get started on the work and should have regular check-in calls along the way.
How to Find The Right Email Marketing Agency For You
To choose an email marketing agency that’s right for your needs, the steps I recommend are:
Be sure about your business goals and desired outcomes from email marketing.
Consider agencies with the characteristics above.
Choose an agency with expertise in the area you need help with. And where possible, also prioritize those that have worked with reputable brands.
Finally, know that email is part of your digital, and by extension, content marketing strategy. Hence, it’s best to choose a company with bandwidth for those.
To help, we reviewed hundreds of agencies and found these to be the best.
The 5 Top Email Marketing Agencies
#1 Neil Patel Digital – Best For Email Content
Every time you send an email, people unsubscribe.
That hurts the long-term prospects of your email list.
Since every email has a real cost and makes your list smaller, it’s best to make them count.
The best way to do this is with great content. Your unsubscribes will be lower, your list will be more engaged, and you’ll generate more revenue in the long-run.
Content, including email content, is one of the core areas of expertise at my agency, Neil Patel Digital.
#2. InboxArmy – Best for Full-service Email Management
InboxArmy comes highly recommended, as a full-service email marketing and management company.
This agency’s services include email strategy development, template design, email automation, and other.
InboxArmyserves companies such as Airbnb, LandCentral, and Jockey. If you’re looking for serious email pros for your B2C company, I’d reach out to them.
#3 Fix My Churn – Best for SaaS Onboarding Emails and churn
User onboarding emails are a very unique skill set. The content, CTAs, sending logic and tools are completely different. If you want to improve your SaaS emails, you really need experts in this area.
Fix My Churn applies top-level SaaS copywriting skills to create email onboarding and churn-eliminating sequences to turn free and trial users into happy, long-term customers.
Led by its Founder and SaaS email expert, Val Geisler, Fix My Churn has earned a reputation as an email marketing agency for SaaS companies like Buffer, Aweber, Podia, InVision, and others.
I’d also consider them if your have any type of subscription offer.
#4 Action Rocket – Best for Enterprise Email
Action Rocket needs no introduction as an email marketing agency for enterprise companies.
This agency even works with leading email software companies like Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Litmus, and others to shape the email marketing space.
Using its vast years of experience, Action Rocket strategizes and develops custom email and CRM programs for enterprise companies, including Marks & Spencer, the BBC, and others.
If you want serious muscle behind your email strategy, reach out to them.
#5 SmartMail – Best for Ecommerce Email
SmarMail is our recommended email marketing agency for ecommerce businesses.
Every business model has its own unique challenges with email and ecommerce is no exception.
You need cart abandonment emails, promotional emails, lifescycle emails for repurchases, and receipts with guaranteed email deliverability.
This agency excels at helping online stores acquire, convert, and retain customers by strategizing and launching email marketing campaigns based on automated triggers across buyers’ lifetime cycle:
SmartMail has an excellent track record, helping ecommerce companies generate about $187 million in revenues. Their clients include French Connection, Skechers, and others.
Get Email Right to Drive Growth
Email marketing isn’t going anytime soon. It is here to stay.
And it generates a ton of cash. Choosing the right agency will get you that growth a lot sooner.
Set your goals, then start looking for the right agency for you.
Even if you plan on doing email inhouse, the right agency can get everything set up correctly from the beginning. That will save your team a ton of time and prevent disastrous mistakes like getting all your emails stuck in the spam folder.
The people you’re trying to reach or retain already have active email addresses. Heck, most of them used or would use one to sign-up for your service or product.
If you can get into (and stay) in people’s inbox, you can make a ton of money. Data shows companies can generate $38 for every $1 email investment.
Unfortunately, getting into an inbox is not a stroll in the park.
Now that’s where the best email marketing companies come in.
These companies will help you to strategize, collect relevant email addresses, create, and manage email marketing campaigns that drive business growth.
How do I know this?
Our team at Neil Patel Digital vetted hundreds of email marketing companies based on their brand reputation, client portfolio, ratings, and their areas of expertise.
The result?
The very top email agencies you can trust. Not only would they get you into the inbox of your ideal customers, but these companies can keep you in there till you turn prospects into brand advocates.
I’m confident the best email marketing companies listed above and reviewed below are reliable because of their proven track records.
Hire any of them, according to your needs, and they’ll help you to turn email marketing into a growth channel for your business.
Without further ado, let’s explore each of these companies and see for yourself why we consider them the very best.
#1 Neil Patel Digital – Best For Email Content
Email marketing is effective, no doubt. But it has its downside too.
According to two different studies, between 0.19% and 0.52% of your email subscribers would unsubscribe per email you send.
Now, guess what was one of the top three reasons found Jilt, an email marketing software, responsible for why people unsubscribe from emails?
Bad content!
In other words, irrespective of how excellent your email marketing strategy is, writing killer emails that resonate with your prospects and keeps you in their inbox requires excellent content.
And that’s where we, Neil Patel Digital, come in. It is also why clients, from startups to enterprise brands, love working with us.
Email is also an excellent channel for content distribution.
However, he quality of content has to be amazing. If not, your unsubscribes will tank the ROI of your email campaigns.
Again, this is one area we stand out from the crowd.
At Neil Patel Digital, our email content service starts by producing engaging content your customers and prospects will love.
Then, we use email marketing as one of the channels to promote it:
You can check out Neil Patel Digital’s content services here.
#2 InboxArmy – best for full-service email management
For in-house teams looking for rapid email marketing turn around, InboxArmy comes highly recommended.
As a full-service email management company, InboxArmy offers a spectrum of services, including email templates’ design, custom coding, and 360-degree email marketing management:
This agency offers volume-based pricing for companies and white label services for fellow digital marketing agencies, which goes to prove their experience.
And they serve clients from government agencies like Texas Health Resources, to companies such as LandCentral, Airbnb, Jockey, and several others.
#3 Fix My Churn – best for SaaS onboarding email and churn
When it comes to email marketing, Software as a Service (SaaS) brands have special needs.
First, when new trial users sign-up, they need excellent email onboarding sequences to convert them into happy, paying customers.
And if an existing customer stops using your product or wants to churn, you can retain them with relevant churn email.
Fix My Churn collaborates with tech companies with a monthly subscription business model.
The company applies top-notch SaaS copywriting skills to craft relationship-based email sequences to keep customers happy.
#4 Action Rocket – best for custom HTML & CSS enterprise email
Action Rocket needs no introduction in the enterprise email marketing sector.
This company even partners with the top email marketing software brands like MailChimp, Litmus, and Campaign Monitor to drive innovation in the email space.
Action Rocket has years of experience strategizing and executing custom HTML and CSS email and CRM development programs for enterprise companies:
Founded in 2011, the company works with a knit-team of experienced developers who are excellent at strategy, design, and coding of complex and customized email programs.
And their clientele speaks for themselves, including the BBC, Marks & Spencer, Global Radio, and many others.
#5 SmartMail – Best for eCommerce email marketing
SmartMail is the Done For You (DFY) email marketing company that comes highly recommended by ecommerce businesses.
This company handles everything ecommerce email marketing for online stores. And excel most at launching campaigns based on automated triggers.
Across the customer lifetime cycle, SmartMail is exceptional at strategizing and executing optimized email marketing campaigns for ecommerce businesses.
And they have a track record and excellent results to show.
SmartMail has generated over $187 million in revenues for ecommerce brands via email, sent billions of emails, and serve over 87 businesses, including Skechers, French Connection, Cotton:On, and others.
5 Characteristics That Make a Great Email Marketing Company
What characteristics make an email marketing company great?
They are as follows.
1. Well-versed in content creation
Most companies get buried in strategizing and outlining plans for email marketing.
The quality of your email’s content goes a long way in determining how effective your email marketing campaigns would be.
A fundamental characteristic of the top email marketing company is to focus on creating engaging content to power your email campaigns.
And a world-class email company will help you blent top-tier content with amazing promotions to also get the conversions that you need. Great companies blend the two seamlessly.
2. An Impressive Portfolio
An email marketing company that claims to be among the best must have something to back that claim up.
One of such things is their client portfolio.
Who have they implemented a series of email marketing campaigns for? Were those campaigns successful?
Anyway, you don’t even need to ask a top email marketing company those questions, as you’ll find the answers in their clients’ portfolio.
And looking out for this portfolio-displaying characteristic in top email marketing also does you good.
It helps you to see who they have helped and to decide if they’ll be a good fit for your company.
In its 40 years of existence, email marketing has evolved tremendously.
What worked yesterday may not work today. And even if it does work, it may require a different approach.
Due to the always-evolving nature of trends and modern strategies applicable to email marketing, top companies must keep pace with these changes to deliver the best work.
Thought-leadership is how the top email marketing brands keep such needed pace with the industry.
And they do this by sharing new learnings, experiments, emerging strategies, and tactics publicly to retain brand reputation among other professionals.
So, you should do some research and look out for this characteristic, as it is an excellent way to spot a top email marketing company.
4. Real Life Testimonials
Anyone can claim to be the best, but it is what others say about them shows their competence most.
In the business setting, you’ll find how past and existing clients feel and say of a company’s work in the testimonials they leave behind.
The truth is executing a successful email campaign that drives growth for a company is hard.
A lot of thought goes into a successful email marketing campaign.
From strategy to the acquisition of email addresses, selection of email marketing software, email copywriting, and campaign management, they all require some different kind of expertise.
Established email marketing brands are never a one-person show. It is usually a team of experts, collaborating to drive results.
And that’s one characteristic of top email marketing companies: Displaying the entire team that works to plan, execute, manage, and optimize email campaigns:
What to Expect from a Great Email Marketing Company
Ultimately, an exceptional email marketing company to help you turn email into a real business growth channel that:
Nurture prospects into customers
Facilitates customer relationship management
Turns email marketing into a reliable content medium.
But to get to these benefits, there are steps to expect before you start working with one. Some of the most notable ones are what follows.
1. A discovery session
As you saw in the review and categorization of the best email marketing companies based on their areas of expertise above, not all can serve all clients across all industries.
To determine if they can solve your specific problems, excellent email marketing companies start by getting to fill an inquiry form.
Filling this inquiry form allows you to share your challenges and business goals related to email marketing.
After filling this form, expect a discovery session where an expert would talk one-on-one with you to understand your needs better.
2. Research & strategy recommendations
A discovery call allows the company to gain more clarity and context about your business needs relevant to email. But, don’t expect them to propose a solution right off the bat.
Top email marketing brands would typically use what you shared with them to delve into research.
From there, they can make sense of how to tackle your challenges and identify the best possible strategies they can deploy to work with you.
Expect to receive a summary of their research and recommendations via email or another call, which usually ends with deciding if you’re fit to work together.
3. A contract with project deliverables
If everything goes well up to this point, and you like their recommendations, expect a contract that outlines what a top email marketing company would do, and what it’ll cost to work with you.
This contract also outlines project timelines and deliverables, legal requirements to work together, and your expected investment.
4. Client onboarding
If the contract, project scope, deliverables, pricing, and others look good, exceptional email marketing companies would have a custom onboarding process to initiate the process of working with your company.
This onboarding process will help you and the company to establish an understanding of how to manage your product, and any other thing necessary for a smooth working relationship.
Start Email Marketing from Day One
Don’t make the mistake of starting email marketing later on.
Most businesses recognize the need for social media, SEO, content marketing, and others early on, but they leave emails to the backseat because it is not trending.
Well, you shouldn’t.
A few reasons to take start email marketing from day one are:
Marketers who used email marketing to segment their audience said they saw a 760% increase in revenue.
That’s unreal.
Whether you do email yourself and get help from one of the top email companies, get started today.
For those who aren’t afraid to take a few extra steps, email images will spice up your campaign and help your email campaign stand out.
I’m going to show you how to leverage images in email the right way.
Email Images: Yes or No?
You can use email images, but should you?
I want to start by asking a few questions, because these will help you determine if using email images helps or hurts you. Read these and answer yes or no:
Do my images support my brand?
Have I optimized the image size?
Am I using the right number of images?
Am I properly using image alt tags?
Are my emails easily accessible?
Chances are you may not even know the answer to all these questions.
If that’s the case, then you’re not getting all you can from your email images, and this guide will help you.
But it’s not quite that simple. Having email images can boost your email’s aesthetics, but how do you increase email click-through rates with images?
What Is a Good Email Click-Through Rate?
Your click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on an image, link, or video in your email to continue through to your content. The average click-through rate is around 2.5% across all industries.
This number might sound a little low, but keep in mind, we’re talking about click-through and not open rates, which is the number of people who read your email.
Including images in your campaigns is a great way to increase engagement and improve your chances of driving traffic or even sales.
Images in Email Marketing: The Magic Ratio
Many marketers will tell you there’s a specific magic ratio of image to text, but it’s not always true. What is true is image-only emails will almost always cost you a trip to the spam folder.
Do that too much, and you’ll find your whole domain blacklisted.
That’s no good.
The ideal ratio is around 30-40% image to text. Any higher, you run the risk of triggering spam filters. Any less will make your email difficult to read.
The only way to find out what works for your audience is to test it! Use A/B testing to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Keep Your Email Images Consistent
How many times have you searched for something on Google, found what you wanted, and clicked through to the website only to realize the link didn’t lead where you expected — at all?
It’s frustrating.
The truth is, you might be doing this to people right now without even realizing it.
Your email image needs to align with your brand and remain consistent throughout your marketing campaign.
Make sure when someone decides to open your email, it remains true to your company message, and all the emails look relatively similar.
If you’re using blue headers with a specific font in your campaign, it should match the landing page your visitor ends on.
Because there’s more impersonal spammy communication out there than ever before. Personalization changes the way your email appears based on the person you’re targeting.
Just think about it. How often have you received an email that seems like it was made for you?
Not often, right?
This is where you can get ahead of your competition by doing the things no one else is willing to do.
No product or service has “universal appeal,” so you need to narrow down your email images to a targeted audience.
Find products people need to purchase regularly and appeal to people who bought in the past. Amazon uses this strategy, resulting in 60% conversions from their on-site recommendations.
Here’s an example from Wayfair that was based on browsing history:
Recommend New Products
Recommend products to customers based on their previous buying history. Go the extra mile and even call it “Selections for [insert name].” That strategy helps create an “in-store experience” for your subscribers.
It’s as if you went to the clothing rack and specifically picked out items you thought would look great on them!
Ask Questions
If you’re selling a service or a digital subscription, you can ask your subscribers why they haven’t made a purchase yet. Give them a chance to sound off on what’s holding them back.
Doing this not only helps the email feel more personal and intimate, but it allows you to get feedback on what you could do better.
The ALT Tag Is More Important than You Think
We all know the importance of ALT tags for website images, but what about images in email marketing?
Are you currently using ALT tags properly in your email campaigns?
When the email client doesn’t download images correctly, your ALT tag becomes your lifeline for a few big reasons:
When the email client doesn’t download the image, the ALT text displays to the email recipient.
ALT text provides context if images aren’t loading.
ALT tags make it easier for those who use screen readers and other accessible technology to understand the image.
When all else fails, the ALT tag might be the thing getting the email recipient to open.
How to Create ALT Tags for Emails?
On the back end, an ALT tag looks like this:
<img src=”youremailimage.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”How to Use Email Images in Email Marketing” width=”482px” height=”205″ />
Where it says “alt=” is where your ALT text goes. So, if an email image doesn’t load properly, that’s what will display across the email text area instead of the image.
You have three primary formatting options for your email image. PNGs, JPEGs, and GIFs are the most common choices. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each.
PNG
Portable Network Graphics offer a large color palette, which means compressing the file size doesn’t impact the image’s resolution.
Another benefit is that you can add transparent layers, making it easy to embed the image on top of other content. This lets you blend the background image into an email with live text.
The only downside to PNGs is the file size is much larger compared to JPEGs and GIFs because of the image quality.
JPEG
JPEGs offer large image compression, but doing so impacts the quality of your image. When you reduce a JPEG image, it groups each section into larger blocks, which causes the image to become blurry — which isn’t a good look.
While these are the most common image types, I wouldn’t recommend using them for email images.
GIF
You get less color vibrance with GIFs because they use an 8-bit color palette compared to a 24-bit palette with PNGs and JPEGs.
The obvious difference is the animation effect. Using GIFs in your emails increases interactivity and can allow you to show more than one product with the same image.
How to Find the Best Email Images
Finding the right images to get your email message across is crucial. There’s a variety of different types of images you can use, and each has its own purpose. Let’s look at a few.
Charts and Graphs
Providing statistics and data is almost useless without a graphic to back it up. When you provide charts in your email to prove a point, it makes it much easier for the recipient to grasp your message.
Inside’s business newsletter has a Series A funding tracker where you can see what startups recently got funding above $5m:
This easily shows at a glance who got the largest amount of funding, by size and color.
Piktochart is an infographic tool that makes it easy to create free charts (with a watermark). Just enter the data and select the type of chart you want.
Stock Photos
Stock images are the easiest way to add images to your email marketing campaign. There’s a large assortment of sites to choose from like Shutterstock, Depositphotos, and Pixabay.
When sourcing the best image, choose something relatable to your audience. If you’re targeting middle-age moms of toddlers, find images that appeal to your demographic.
Don’t just add images to add images — make sure they have a purpose.
Screenshots
Instead of using a numbered list to explain how something works, turn the process into beautiful imagery with screenshots.
Awesome Screenshot is a browser extension on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that makes it easy to capture screenshots directly from the browser. You can capture a whole page or a part and download it to your computer.
Personal Photos
Keeping it real and making things personal is never a bad choice. Email marketing is all about pulling back the curtain and showing people what you’re all about.
You don’t need professional photos to make sales, and the realistic and pure nature of personal photos can be what you need.
Illustrated Content
Illustrations are a nice way to expand your possibilities. While you might be able to do a certain amount of things with a product, an illustration can display limitless options while staying true to your brand.
Here’s an example from comedian Nate Bargatze announcing a drive-in tour. After this image, his email contained a text call-to-action with more information.
Consider hiring an illustrator on Fiverr or Upwork to get affordable illustrations.
UGC helps create trust, and it offers authority from a relatable audience. For example, imagine how an image of someone using your product in their home would outperform a stock photo or a cartoon using it.
Offer rewards to happy customers by having them upload images to social media using specific hashtags and use those images in your email marketing campaigns.
Never Send Image-Only Emails
While images are important – you should never send an image-only email.
Here’s why:
Image Blocking Is Real
If you work in the corporate world, you understand this point. Many companies block images by default, and in fact, 43% of email users have their images turned off.
So, if you don’t have your ALT text game up to par, your campaign won’t load properly.
Email Image File Size
Email image sizes can cause subscribers with slow connections to lag and become unresponsive. If your email takes too long to load, your subscribers are going to click out or even unsubscribe because they can’t get your emails to open correctly.
Email Accessibility Is Changing
More people are using voice assistants to read emails, and these do not recognize ALT text or HTML yet. So, if the user is trying to read your image-only email, you’re out of luck.
So, what’s the ideal email image format?
Background Images with Live Text
Remember earlier, when we talked about the pros of using PNG files for your email images? Here’s where this all comes together.
Background images applied as an element to the email allow you to put live text over it, providing the most accessibility. Even if the subscriber has images disabled, they’ll see the text, which ensures all your subscribers will get something from the email.
Bulletproof Buttons
Including your CTA in your image is a fatal error. If the image is blocked or doesn’t load properly, the button or CTA you have is hidden and completely missed by the recipient.
Using bulletproof buttons allows you to build the button with code, rather than images. So if everything fails and your image doesn’t load, the subscriber will still receive your text and CTA.
Conclusion
Email images are an effective strategy to increase your email campaigns’ success, but you can’t take shortcuts.
Using the right image size, format, and design is critical to ensuring your emails get delivered and get results.
Follow all of the best and worst practices outlined in this guide, and you’ll be well on your way to a higher click-through rate and a repeatable email process that will drive traffic for years to come.
Need some help perfecting your email image strategy? Drop a comment below.
In the globe of domain name, points like domain name enrollment, domain name transfer, or domain name revival are simply so regular. The domain name sector additionally produce a significant bang in the globe today, as well as that is with the intro of domain name e-mail forwarding, which is the primary issue of this write-up.
Given that a number of you are still not conscious regarding the nature of the domain e-mail forwarding and also its features in the area of domain, below are a couple of realities concerning the domain e-mail forwarding for you to be mindful that such point exists on the planet of digital fact.
What is truly domain name e-mail forwarding?
Possibly you have actually listened to that the domain system contributes in e-mails. It is frequently kept in mind that the domain system not just connects to domain yet it yet along with to assist e-mails in discovering the best computer system that it is expected to get to. Because of such duty played by the domain system, the principle for domain e-mail forwarding for that reason arised.
Domain e-mail forwarding is really a sort of domain solution which will immediately reroute the e-mail for your domain name to your existing e-mail address. In many concrete words, the domain e-mail forwarding considerably gives you to ahead any type of e-mail that is entering into your domain name to any kind of e-mail address on the planet. It is usually specified by the majority of sources worrying domain e-mail forwarding that with the feature of the domain e-mail forwarding, also if you do not have a website yet you can use your domain name as your e-mail address.
Other than that, with the domain e-mail forwarding, all the e-mail that were sent out to your domain will certainly be instantly sent to your e-mail mail box that makes your solution or service far more specialized. With the domain name e-mail forwarding, you can most definitely onward mail to your ISP e-mail account, your Yahoo account, your Hotmail account, or any type of various other e-mail account that you have. It is likewise every intriguing to recognize that in addition to the domain e-mail forwarding, the majority of the firms today also accompany it with the DNS-Plus solution which permits you to establish for approximately 100 pen names and also ahead to as much as 100 e-mail address.
With the introduction of the domain e-mail forwarding, lots of people were really devoting themselves in such solution thinking that the domain e-mail forwarding will certainly provide a specific degree of satisfaction as well as exhilaration. Well, tolerable in any way for the domain e-mail forwarding will certainly enable you to have an e-mail address that had much more indicating to you, either directly or properly. One of the fantastic information regarding the domain name e-mail forwarding is that after you have actually established up your e-mail addresses, your e-mail will certainly after that start to be sent for within twenty 4 hrs, as well as some domain name e-mail forwarding solutions are currently provided definitely complimentary.
In the globe of domain name, points like domain name enrollment, domain name transfer, or domain name revival are simply so common. Domain name e-mail forwarding is in fact a kind of domain name solution which will instantly reroute the e-mail for your domain name to your existing e-mail address. It is frequently mentioned by the majority of sources worrying domain name e-mail forwarding that with the feature of the domain name e-mail forwarding, also if you do not have an internet website yet you can use your domain name as your e-mail address.
One of the excellent information concerning the domain name e-mail forwarding is that after you have actually established up your e-mail addresses, your e-mail will certainly after that start to be sent for within twenty 4 hrs, as well as some domain name e-mail forwarding solutions are currently provided definitely cost-free.
In the globe of domain name, points like domain name enrollment, domain name transfer, or domain name revival are simply so regular. The domain name sector additionally produce a significant bang in the globe today, as well as that is with the intro of domain name e-mail forwarding, which is the primary issue of this write-up.
Given that a number of you are still not conscious regarding the nature of the domain e-mail forwarding and also its features in the area of domain, below are a couple of realities concerning the domain e-mail forwarding for you to be mindful that such point exists on the planet of digital fact.
What is truly domain name e-mail forwarding?
Possibly you have actually listened to that the domain system contributes in e-mails. It is frequently kept in mind that the domain system not just connects to domain yet it yet along with to assist e-mails in discovering the best computer system that it is expected to get to. Because of such duty played by the domain system, the principle for domain e-mail forwarding for that reason arised.
Domain e-mail forwarding is really a sort of domain solution which will immediately reroute the e-mail for your domain name to your existing e-mail address. In many concrete words, the domain e-mail forwarding considerably gives you to ahead any type of e-mail that is entering into your domain name to any kind of e-mail address on the planet. It is usually specified by the majority of sources worrying domain e-mail forwarding that with the feature of the domain e-mail forwarding, also if you do not have a website yet you can use your domain name as your e-mail address.
Other than that, with the domain e-mail forwarding, all the e-mail that were sent out to your domain will certainly be instantly sent to your e-mail mail box that makes your solution or service far more specialized. With the domain name e-mail forwarding, you can most definitely onward mail to your ISP e-mail account, your Yahoo account, your Hotmail account, or any type of various other e-mail account that you have. It is likewise every intriguing to recognize that in addition to the domain e-mail forwarding, the majority of the firms today also accompany it with the DNS-Plus solution which permits you to establish for approximately 100 pen names and also ahead to as much as 100 e-mail address.
With the introduction of the domain e-mail forwarding, lots of people were really devoting themselves in such solution thinking that the domain e-mail forwarding will certainly provide a specific degree of satisfaction as well as exhilaration. Well, tolerable in any way for the domain e-mail forwarding will certainly enable you to have an e-mail address that had much more indicating to you, either directly or properly. One of the fantastic information regarding the domain name e-mail forwarding is that after you have actually established up your e-mail addresses, your e-mail will certainly after that start to be sent for within twenty 4 hrs, as well as some domain name e-mail forwarding solutions are currently provided definitely complimentary.
In the globe of domain name, points like domain name enrollment, domain name transfer, or domain name revival are simply so common. Domain name e-mail forwarding is in fact a kind of domain name solution which will instantly reroute the e-mail for your domain name to your existing e-mail address. It is frequently mentioned by the majority of sources worrying domain name e-mail forwarding that with the feature of the domain name e-mail forwarding, also if you do not have an internet website yet you can use your domain name as your e-mail address.
One of the excellent information concerning the domain name e-mail forwarding is that after you have actually established up your e-mail addresses, your e-mail will certainly after that start to be sent for within twenty 4 hrs, as well as some domain name e-mail forwarding solutions are currently provided definitely cost-free.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
