Email Marketing Services For Small Businesses: 5 Fantastic Solutions

August 6, 2015

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is not dead.

In fact, according to a post published by Outboundengine.com, “marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.”

Over the years, I’ll admit… that I didn’t fully understand the importance of email marketing. But now, I totally get it.

With email marketing, you will have the ability to do some of the following:

• Get more personable with your newsletter subscribers and connect with them on a deeper level.
• Communicate with your subscribers on a regular basis.
• You can use email marketing services to collect a list of targeted leads and get them into your sales funnels.

Still not convinced yet? Consider these additional mind blowing statistics about email marketing:

1. Companies using email to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at 33% lower cost. And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads. (Hubspot)

2. 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an e-mail marketing message. Over 70% of mobile purchasing decisions are influenced by promotional e-mails. (Mark the Marketer)

3. 70% of people say they always open emails from their favorite companies. (ExactTarget)

4. 40% of B2B marketers rated the leads generated by email marketing as high quality. (Mark the Marketer) …Great stuff right!

Email Marketing Services For Small Businesses

Today, I’ve put together a post rounding up a list of 5 of the best email marketing services available for small businesses.

1. Aweber

AWeber – (the email marketing service provider that I am currently using) was first started in 1998 and is considered a leader in the email marketing arena.

Their email marketing service plan starts at just 19.99 per month and allows you to send unlimited emails (anywhere and anytime) to up to 500 subscribers.

AWeber’s Features include:

• Blog Newsletters (publish blog posts to your email newsletter)
• Ability to add Web Sign Up Forms to your blog/website
• Autoresponder capabilities
• Subscriber Management
• Analytics and Tracking
• Excellent Customer Service
• Social Media Sharing capabilities
• Integration with a ton of applications
• Great email deliverability rates
• Access to a large number of user guides and documentation
• Scheduling capabilities

Cons:

• Their email marketing templates need to be updated (especially the Blog to Email Newsletter templates). They are a bit antiquated for my taste.

AWebers Email Marketing Service Plans are as follows:

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp – I’ve used Mailchimp in the past and they are an awesome email marketing service provider as well. Mailchimp has a very easy to use interface that allows you to create, send and track emails in a jiffy.

Mailchimp currently has a free plan that allows you to send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers.

Mailchimp’s Features include:

• Access to a large collection of predesigned email marketing templates
• Easy drag and drop email campaign capabilities
• Ability to add Web Sign Up Forms to your blog/website
• RSS to Email (publish blog posts to your email newsletter)
• Autoresponder and automation capabilities
• Social sharing
• Email marketing analytics and tracking (to see how your email campaigns are doing)
• Access to a large database of user guides
• High deliverability rates
• Email campaign scheduling capabilities

Cons:

Some of the features will take a little time to understand and could be a tad more user friendly;

Aside from that, Mailchimp is an awesome email marketing solution.

Mailchimp’s Current Pricing Structure:

3. Get Response

Get Response – Is actually voted #1 in Email Marketing service provider.

Like AWeber and Mailchimp, Get Response has an interface that is super easy to use to create email newsletters and send them to your email list.

Features of Get Response include:

• The ability to publish landing pages
• Autoresponder and automation capabilities
• You can easily create responsive email marketing campaigns (this means that your emails will show up great on all types of devices)
• The ability to create Web Sign up Forms
• Access to drag and drop email features
• RSS to Email (publish blog posts to your email newsletter)
• Social media integration
• Email campaign scheduling capabilities
• Advanced email segmentation (important for split testing)

Cons:

• From what I’ve seen on the web, their support specialists are a little slow to respond to requests.

As far as pricing is concerned, their offerings are below:

4. iContact

iContact – a super duper popular email marketing service provider that has scored some seriously high marks online (specifically from TopTenReviews.com) iContact scored high praises online with users stating that the software makes it easy to send effective email marketing campaigns.

Features of iContact include:

• Easy to use dashboard
• Access to Mobile responsive email marketing templates (meaning they work on various types of mobile devices)
• Social media integration
• RSS to email (publish blog posts to your email newsletter)
• Autoresponder and automation capabilities
• Email campaign scheduling capabilities

Cons:

• Their pricing can get tad bit expensive as your email list grows…

5. Constant Contact

Constant Contact – Last (but definitely not least) is Constant Contact. My good friend over at Diversity Solutions Marketing (Steph) who is a small business marketing & business consultant currently uses this email marketing service provider and has nothing but great things to say about them.

Constant contact (according to online reports) has a very large selection (400 to be exact) of email marketing templates that you can use to make your email campaigns stand out.

Features of Constant Contact:

• As mentioned previously, access to more than 400 drag and drop email templates
• Automation capabilities
• Social media sharing
• The ability to allow your customers to register for events that you may be hosting
• Event tracking and payment acceptance
• The ability to add Web Sign up Forms to your website/blog
• High deliverability rates
• Email campaign scheduling capabilities
• Tracking and reporting capabilities

Cons:

• The one critical component that constant contact does not have is the RSS to email feature (that lets you syndicate content published from your blog to your email newsletter).

Constant Contact’s Current Pricing Structure:

Essential Features to Look for in an Email Marketing Service Provider

1. High email deliverability rates – there’s no since in spending money to use an email marketing service that doesn’t do a good job of making sure that your emails get delivered to your subscribers.

2. Autoresponder and automation capabilities – to set some of your email marketing activities on autopilot. This is a very critical component especially if you want to be able to do things like: send freebies to new subscribers when they opt in to your newsletter, automate your blog posts, and etc. This is one of the main features that I love about using AWeber.

3. Support – This is super important. It’s nice to be able to have someone available when you run into an issue. From the looks of it, most of the email marketing service providers mentioned in this post have a substantial amount of information available on their websites (such as end user guides and training videos) to get users up to speed on how to use their services.

All right..now over to you. What email marketing service providers are you using and why? I’d love to hear back from you. Thanks!

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