How to Choose a Great Email Marketing Platform (March 2023)

When it comes to email marketing, choosing a good email marketing platform can make all the difference in the success of your campaigns.

A great email marketing platform should be user-friendly, offer a range of customization options, and provide robust analytics to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

It should also integrate with other marketing tools, such as social media and customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Additionally, it should offer advanced features like automation and personalization to help you engage with your audience in a meaningful way.

Lastly, consider the pricing structure and scalability of the platform, ensuring that it fits your budget and can grow with your business.

However, that is a very high-level view of what a good email marketing platform should be. In order to get a clearer answer to that question, some very important fundamentals need to be laid out, starting below.

What is email marketing, and why is it important?

Email marketing is a short term describing email communication between a business and its customers, which includes marketing emails (promotions, newsletters, related content, etc.) and transactional emails (order confirmation and status reports).

Marketing emails are usually templatized and sent in bulk to reach as many people as possible, as where transactional emails are only sent based on a customer’s action and are likely automated to make the sales fulfillment process easier.

What is an email marketing platform?

An email marketing platform/service allows users to create, send, and manage emails sent to their existing subscriber lists.

These core features are the base of every email marketing platform, but most platforms come with other features as well such as advanced analytics tracking, email campaign automation, in-platform landing page builders, and much more.

Some more features are listed below:

• Drag-and-drop email creators
• Landing page builders
• Email automation
• Audience segmentation
• A/B Testing
• Lead forms/pop-ups

Sometimes, like in the case of CRM (customer relationship management) software, an email marketing platform will be integrated into the CRM’s system by default.

Email marketing platforms can also be integrated with social media platforms or external landing page builders, to help streamline your workflow.

How much does an email marketing platform cost?

Luckily for you, most email marketing platforms have either a free trial or a free-forever plan available, which lets consumers get a feel for each platform before making a decision.

The difference between a platform’s free trial and free-forever plans mainly comes from features; when a company offers a free trial of its email marketing platform, it’s likely that the trial will include many (if not all) of its premium features for that period, for anywhere from 7 to 30 days.

As for the free plans, they’re just limited enough by subscriber count or monthly emails that someone new to the email marketing space will quickly outgrow those limitations and opt for a paid plan instead. 

These paid plans tend to drastically increase the number of subscribers you can have and emails you can send, plus some extra features like email scheduling and automation or more personalized campaign support.

For the most part, email marketing platforms scale the cost of their plans based on how many subscribers you want to import into their software.

However, some platforms may opt for a “pay-as-you-go” plan, where you only pay for what you use; this can be very useful for smaller outfits or individuals just getting into the email marketing space.

Why do you need an email marketing platform?

An email marketing platform is an essential tool for individuals or businesses looking to build relationships with their customers and increase sales.

The main reasons of why you might need an email marketing platform are below:

• Reaching your audience: with an email marketing platform, you can reach your audience directly via their inbox, making sure your message is seen.
• Building customer relationships: by sending regular, targeted emails, you can build rapport with your customers, keeping them engaged and informed about your business.
• Driving sales: email marketing is a powerful tool for driving sales, whether through promotional campaigns, product updates, or customer onboarding.
• Automating your marketing: email marketing platforms offer tools to create automated email workflows, saving you time and effort while ensuring your messages are sent at the right time.
• Tracking your results: email marketing platforms provide detailed analytics on your campaign performance, allowing you to track open rates, click-through rates, and other important metrics.

These are many of the benefits of using an email marketing platform, but there are also drawbacks to not using one.

For example, what you may see as “sending bulk email to your growing email list through Gmail” could be seen by Google as “spam”, and might result in your Gmail account being suspended.

Additionally, its also possible that your “@gmail.com” email address could be instantly blocked, reducing the number of inboxes your marketing ends up in.

An email marketing platform can help with that by providing a custom email address that will be blocked much less often, if at all.

What are the best email marketing platforms?

Below are a few of the “best” email marketing platforms, and their ideal use cases:

• Getresponse – best all-in-one platform
• MailerLite – best for e-commerce
• EmailOctopus: best for small businesses

Of course, there are many other options, and their ideal use cases can vary from beginner-friendly tools to more specific niches. To summarize, what you should keep in mind when choosing an email marketing platform are the following points:

• Email send volume
• Subscriber volume
• Integrations
• Design & ease of use
• Automation
• Customization

With all that said, I hope this article has been helpful in making your decision of email marketing platform.