Email marketing is still a handy outreach method for businesses. It allows for a direct, personal touch in how you can interact with your clientele. The big problem many companies have with email marketing is how much time it takes up from its staff. But does email marketing have to be that time-consuming?
Over the years, businesses have realized that anything that used to take time can now be more efficient. Email marketing is no exception. Where research once meant digging through tons of questionnaires and noting results, today you can simply access an automatically compiled list of customer preferences, sorted by an algorithm. These lists enable you to develop targeted, personalized emails that resonate with your chosen audience. These tools are only the tip of the iceberg, however.
As more and more companies develop personalized marketing techniques, the process needs to speed up more than ever before. Specialized tools and software exist to help businesses realize results more quickly. However, many companies are still unsure of how to streamline their email marketing to take up less time.
We asked 17 thought leaders from YEC for their recommendations on the best tools and strategies to make email marketing a more efficient process. Here are the solutions they suggested.
1. ActiveCampaign
"At Hubstaff, we love using ActiveCampaign for all our email automation. We have it integrated with Segment so that all our event tracking is going into ActiveCampaign. This can be a bit of a setup in the beginning, but once you're up and running, it's an amazing tool to set up personal, targeted emails to your users.” ‒ Jared Brown, Hubstaff Talent
2. Canva
"Canva is great for predefined marketing layouts and messages. Pop in your idea, test out different messages and images, and output the design over to your email marketing template." ‒ Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design
3. ConvertKit
"The majority of email marketing tools do the exact same thing. The real results come from the strategies you use, and one of the most powerful is deeper segmentation of your audiences. My favorite tool for this is ConvertKit. We segment our email list into hyper-specific groups (freelancers, agencies, employees, etc.) and then send them highly targeted campaigns instead of mass email blasts." ‒ Travis Jamison, Smash.vc
4. Grammarly
"Are you editing and proofreading every single email to ensure it's professional and clearly conveys your message? Grammarly catches your spelling errors and other mistakes that dumb down your writing and don't get your point across." ‒ Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
5. HubSpot
"We utilize HubSpot for our marketing automation and sales CRM and tracking. Having everything in one place ensures that the sales team can see what marketing emails a lead has received and interacted with before getting on the phone with them, which leads to better initial conversations.” ‒ Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.
6. Pardot
"We are a Pardot shop, and we found that Pardot makes it incredibly simple to keep CRM and email tool data in sync without much hassle at all. This has allowed us to create, adapt and execute on email journeys within days (at times even hours) from ideation." ‒ John Lie-Nielsen, One Park Financial
7. Klaviyo
"Klaviyo makes email marketing a breeze. Their segmentation and data science is unmatched by anything else in the industry today." ‒ Josh Weiss, Reggie
8. Leadpages
"I use Leadpages as the main tool to build our email lists and deploy lead magnets. All landing pages, email trigger links, alert bars, pop-ups and lead magnets are managed under one roof. This software makes it easy to manage all email marketing efforts in one spot for a reasonable price." ‒ Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media LLC
9. Mailshake
"I prefer deep engagement and targeting rather than sending out a shotgun email, but it really depends on what kind of business you are. To that end, I think an outreach tool like Mailshake is invaluable. It can combine sequences, accept meeting reservations, assign callbacks, and track email-to-website visits and activity.” ‒ Richard Fong, Ready Green
10. Alfred
"The success rate of any email campaign depends on many factors, like deep research and understanding the nature of a company and the industry it belongs to. And the best tool, in my view, is Alfred. It's not an email tool entirely. Rather, it's a tool that helps you get input from LinkedIn and automates the process from start to finish of building connections and sending emails." ‒ Vikas Agrawal, Infobrandz
11. OptinMonster
"We use OptinMonster. And trust me, this service does a lot more than manage opt-ins. It comes with form-building tools, landing page help and lead management assistance. Plus, it's affordably priced." ‒ Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
12. ReSci
"ReSci is a great tool for anyone in the e-commerce and software-as-a-service space. It allows you to develop email campaigns for every stage of the customer lifestyle, and then its AI engine will reach out to them based on their interaction with your brand. This saves you a tremendous amount of time and yields great results." ‒ Rishi Sharma, Mallama
13. Sendinblue
"Sendinblue is an email marketing service that helps you create engaging emails. It's great because it's beginner-friendly, so you don't need to worry about coding or other areas of expertise. You can personalize campaigns so they speak to your audience and you can improve your conversions." ‒ Jared Atchison, WPForms
14. Content batching
"Batching content is a great way to simplify and speed up the process of email marketing. Rather than rushing to constantly create new content the same day or week, set aside time to write everything you need in one sitting. This also allows you to plan ahead and schedule a time during the day to write when you are at your highest creative peak." ‒ Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker
15. Customer personas
"Put in the time to understand your audience and develop personas. When you know who you're talking to, what's important to them and what keeps them up at night, you can effectively and efficiently message them. Use your learnings to develop automated email campaigns through which you can deliver timely content that addresses the thoughts and questions at the forefront of your audience's minds." ‒ Traci Beach, Craft Impact
16. Email automation tools
"Email automation is essential. There are many email automation tools out there (just Google it). These systems track your email subscribers' actions on your website and then email them targeting campaigns. This can be used for both business-to-business and consumer businesses. It's important to monitor your automation campaigns and to optimize them, but having them set up will save you a lot of time." ‒ David Boehl, GoLastMinute
17. Email polls
"A quick poll inside your email can help you send more valuable information to people who want it. Give them a choice of content to receive, so they'll be more likely to open and click on the emails in the future. Most email marketing software will let you do this, but you can even just put in a hyperlink with UTMs or other analytic tracking codes in there so you can track the clicks manually too." ‒ Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
[Looking for help with your business's email marketing campaigns? Check out our picks for the best email marketing software.]