[clear]What you need to consider and the criteria you should use for choosing an email marketing service for your small business.
Over the last few months I've been trying out a range of Email Marketing Services on behalf of my small business clients. In the course of doing it became clear to me just how important it is to match the service to the characteristics of each business.
Each email marketing service has a range of features that can fit more or less well with your business, so it becomes important to select the right service. For example, some services such as MailerLite excel at providing you with elegant templates which you can easily apply to your email newsletter to produce a professional looking result with little effort.
However, if you're looking to apply a more conversational style of communicating with your target audience these services that market themselves around beautiful newsletter templates, can often be difficult to use. Other services, such as ConvertKit, focus primarily on allowing you to easily build conversational sequences of emails that provide a more personal one-to-one feel to the communication.
Of course, there are other, more general features of each email marketing service which are important to consider as well. For example, when you're starting out, how easy is it find your way around, work out what to do first, and get started? Initial Ease of Use is extremely important, and the best services can get you started quickly and easily and without having to delve into the documentation.
User Interface Design is one aspect that contributes to ease of use when you're starting out, but also decides how easy it is for users to configure the service once you're up and running, have gained some familiarity with the service, and know what you want to do. The best systems are intuitive to use, and don't require you to consult the documentation very often.
A List of Review Criteria for Email Marketing Services
Here are some of the other factors that need to be considered.
- Deliverability.
- Configuring your domain dns
- Newsletters templates
- Auto sequences
- Overall view – the dashboard
- Tagging
- List building
- Plans and Prices
- Free trials
- Documentation
- Training Videos
- Support responsiveness and usefulness
For example for each business it became important to consider:
- What are the business goals?
- What are the business products and services?
- What are the characteristics of the target audience?
- Are there multiple audiences?
- What are the goals of the email marketing?
Over the next few weeks I'm going to review a number of different Email Marketing Services and highlight how each service matches a particular kind of business.
To begin with I'm going to focus on 3 services that are not the biggest and most widely known services, but which I think fit specific business niches better than the big services do.
I'm going to start with:
