Email Marketing is owned marketing at its best, which is all about taking ownership of your company’s growth by taking back control of the entire customer decision journey.
Email Marketing is perhaps one of the only channels a business can have complete control over. It helps establish a direct line of communication with your customers. Besides email marketing is a low cost marketing channel. It helps generate $36 for every $1 spent.
The choice of email marketing software can indirectly impact open rates and CTRs by influencing several factors that can affect the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. While the software itself does not directly determine CTRs, it does play a pivotal role in providing features and functionalities that helps optimize customer journeys and contribute to higher CTRs and engagement. Here are some email marketing features that can impact CTR:
-Email design and templates
-Personalization and segmentation
-A/B testing
-Tracking, advanced reporting, and analytics
Learn more on 14 best takeaways for 2023 for ecommerce stores here.
Some of these ESPs are as below:
Klaviyo:
is one of the most popular and powerful customer data platforms, which serves as a powerful ESP as well.
Audience – it is most popularly used by the world’s best global DTC brands, SMBs and large DTC enterprises.
Some of the key features are as below:
– Email Marketing
– SMS Marketing
– Reviews Management
–Mobile Push Notifications
–On-Site Sign-Up Forms
–Micro Targeted Campaigns
–Collecting and Unifying customer data (UGC, loyalty, referrals, order shipping notifications)
–Paid targeting via lookalike and retargeting through Google, facebook, Instagram and Criteo
–Real time behavior tracking, reporting and modeling
–GDPR and CCPA compliant platform data storage
–Customizable templates – built in email templates and email automation based on real time customer actions.
Advanced AB testing feature sets
Ease of Use – with no developer requirements ability to integrate over 300+ pre-built integrations
Why you might not choose Klaviyo:
-You rely on old school email marketing, more than list segmentation and personalization.
-You need an advanced marketing provider that has the capability of lead scoring.
Learn more on email marketing strategy examples here.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
Target audience: large to enterprise businesses
Why you might want to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Every feature and use case is possible, as long as you’re willing to pay for it—both financially but also in terms of marketer, developer, and system integrator lift. Other Salesforce softwares, such as Salesforce Einstein AI, are already a crucial part of your tech stack
-Professional in-house services available for an additional cost
-Global enterprise features
-Multi-language and multi-currency functionality
-Template translation
-Advanced HTML tools
-Advanced AI capabilities
-AI-recommended next best action for each customer
-AI insights from data
-AI segmentation
Why you might not want to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
-High cost for implementation and maintenance
-Requires heavy developmental support to:
-Maintain integrations.
-Create segments (must have knowledge of SQL)
-Build common ecommerce flows, such as abandoned carts or back-in-stock.
-Limited data model
-Need to define every event in advance and configure every attribute of the event in the user interface
-Data is not unified but rather stored in separate data extensions.
-Requires separate Salesforce products, CDP and Genie, in order to use real-time data for triggered messages.
-Limited integrations, even with other Salesforce products
-Salesforce owns software for every use case, but all are built separately and must be integrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
-If you’re interested in learning more about how to get the most out of Salesforce for your next campaign, read more about the 4 Salesforce email marketing plug-ins.
Omnisend:
Target audience: ecommerce marketers
Why you might want to use Omnisend?
-Multi-account email support
Your digital marketing strategy requires:
-Global SMS
-Web push notifications
-Wheel of fortune-style forms
-Low pricing
-Built-in, guided prompts throughout the platform
Why you might not want to use Omnisend?
-Minimal onboarding and customer support
-Limited data access
-No access to nested event data, beyond variant details like brand and color
-Limited pre-built ecommerce data integrations (around 70)
-No storage for data older than 18 months
-Limited segmentation functionality
-Segmentation is limited to 3 categories.
-No predictive capabilities
-A/B testing is limited to subject line and sender name.
Listrak
-Target audience: large retailers
Why you might want to use Listrak?
-GXP identity graph: identity resolution for anonymous traffic and cross-device tracking (note that due to data privacy changes from Apple, Google, and government regulations, the long-term viability of this product is unclear)
-Professional in-house services available for an additional cost
-Listrak claims their proprietary MTA infrastructure translates to higher email deliverability rates
-Sophisticated predictive analytics
-Discount affinity
-Product affinity
Why you might not want to use Listrak?
You need a unified platform for email, SMS, and mobile app push notifications
-Limited ecommerce functionality
-Integrations with ecommerce platforms lack depth
-Limited pre-built ecommerce data integrations (around 60)
-Real-time data is lacking
-Restrictive data model
-Data is not unified between email and SMS products
-Pre-defined, inflexible order schema requires data mapping
-Requires list identification before gathering event data from customers
APIs only give limited access to product’s surface area
Many of the following need to be built from scratch:
–Integrations
–Templates
–Automations
-Reporting
Listrak’s team sets up every new automation—and they charge for each one
Learn more about Smarte Digital email marketing services here.
Mailchimp
Target audience: entrepreneurs, beginners, and new brands
Why you might want to use Mailchimp?
-User-friendly
-Intuitive user interface
-Free plan available
-Low pricing on paid plans
Why you might not want to use Mailchimp?
-Limited ecommerce functionality
-Revenue reporting only contains surface-level data like sends, opens, and clicks
-Back-in-stock communications and coupons are handled through third parties
-Limited data model
-Limits on data retention, including the ability to store no more than 80 custom properties
-No real-time behavior tracking, and limited nested event tracking (only offers surface-level data like product/order info and price vs. nested event data like categories, coupons, variants, email tags, etc.)
-Limited segmentation and personalization functionality
-Segments are limited to 5 total predefined metrics, rather than making all customer data available for segmentation.
-Segmentation is list-based rather than profile-based, meaning Mailchimp counts the number of subscribers that appear on multiple contact lists as two separate contacts.
-Product feeds are basic and can’t pull specific categories or collections.
-Minimal predictive analytics for future purchases and lifetime value
-A/B testing is limited to 3 email variations.
Email marketing software can play a role in customer relationship management (CRM) by helping business owners manage and nurture customer relationships through targeted and personalized email campaigns. Hence it is prudent to choose your email service provider wisely by evaluating both short term and long term business goals and taking care the rest of your martech tools are able to seamlessly feed data into the platform – to serve as a powerful personalization channel powered by email.
Smarte Digital Inc. is an ecommerce retention marketing partner for modern DTC brands. We offer exclusive pricing offers for our ecommerce strategy consulting services and our lifecycle marketing services such as email marketing, SMS marketing services for Q1 2024.
We are also offering a free martech stack audit for Q1 2024. To identify gaps in your tech stack and optimize your martech stack, lets chat. Strengthen your foundational retention strategy now for growth, book a free 30 min discovery call with us at https://smartedigital/contact-us.
