Having the right email marketing tool for your business’s specific requirements is critical. 

Use the wrong tool for your needs and you could find yourself spending way too much money on a tool that’s difficult to use and isn’t getting you the results you need.

Use the right tool on the other hand, and you can easily send great email campaigns that get stellar results and drive in major revenue.

But how do you know which tool is the right one for your business?

Keep reading to discover why choosing the right email marketing software is crucial for your brand’s success as well as the questions you should ask to ensure you have the right solution for your needs.

Not sure what an email service provider does? Read this to understand the tech behind ESPs and how they work.

 

Why it’s important to choose the right email marketing software for your business

There are a number of reasons why it’s important to choose the right email marketing solution for your brand:

Return on investment

Research shows email marketing has the highest ROI of any channel. But if it takes a week to create a campaign and has to be done by a dedicated email specialist, it’s probably not going to be as cost effective as if you dragged and dropped some images and text, selected a list, and clicked send.

Choosing the right tool will give you much better results for the amount of effort you put in.

Reliability and support

There are tools that allow you to create and send email campaigns for free, but many aren’t reliable and very few offer customer support. This is fine for scout groups and hobbyists, but if you are a marketer who relies on email to drive sales and revenue, you need to be able to rely on your chosen software and get help when you need it.

Choosing the wrong tool can leave you stranded when you need to get a campaign out the door and in front of your subscribers.

Cost

Just like there are free tools, there are also tools that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and have a lot of advanced functionality. While these may seem great in theory, if you don’t actually use these fancy features, you’re just throwing good money away.

Choosing the right tool will keep your costs low and the return on your efforts high.

Still trying to decide how email plays into your digital marketing strategy in the first place? No worries. This guide will walk you through how to develop a successful email marketing plan.

 

How to choose the right email marketing software for your business

If you’re like many people we talk with, you’re using your current email software for one of two reasons:

  • It was already in place at your organization and it seemed easiest to continue using it
  • You’d heard of that brand before and didn’t have the time to research other available solutions

While it’s completely understandable, this isn’t necessarily the right approach to choosing an email marketing platform and can often result in paying a lot of money for the wrong tool.

To help you assess whether your current tool is right for your business, consider these 3 factors:

1. Is my email marketing tool easy to use?

One of the most critical factors in determining the right tool for your business is matching your resources (both time and expertise) to the complexity of the tool.

There are a number of email marketing solutions at the high-end of the market that have a lot of advanced functionality, but with that increased functionality comes increased complexity, and they often require dedicated experts to implement and manage them.

If you have the time and budget to do this, then these tools may well be a good fit for your business’ specific requirements.

However, if you’re like most SMB marketers who have a thousand things to do and not enough time to do them, you probably need a solution that lets you create and send a campaign yourself in less than 10 minutes.

In that case, mid-market tools are going to be more appropriate for your brand. You can get started on these tools straight away, and creating and sending campaigns can be done in just minutes using drag-and-drop email builders.

The key here is to identify which segment your business falls into, and then choose the appropriate tool from there. If you’ve got the resources and budget to hire dedicated experts then high-end tools might be the right choice for your business. But if you’re a busy SMB marketer who just needs to get stuff done then the mid-market tools are going to be the best choice.

2. Do my emails look great on all devices?

The design and compatibility of your email campaigns will determine the results you get from your email marketing program.

Your emails also need to work across the various devices people use to consume email. Our own research shows 41% of email campaigns are opened on mobile devices while 22% are opened on desktop clients and 28% are opened in Webmail clients.

So unless your email campaigns are specifically optimized to work across all of those devices and clients, you could be missing conversions and revenue.

Many dedicated email marketing tools, which focus solely on helping customers create and send great email campaigns, come with drag-and-drop email builders that enable anyone to create responsive email campaigns right out of the box.

Marketing Automation platforms, on the other hand, are built to perform a wide range of marketing functions—building landing pages, scoring leads, integrating with CRM systems, etc—and don’t always have the same level of simplicity and functionality in their email builders. They might not have a simple drag-and-drop interface that anyone can use to build emails, or the templates they offer out of the box might not be optimized for mobile and tablet devices.

So the key is to assess whether or not you are happy with the compatibility and design of the email campaigns coming from your current system.

Are they truly representative of your brand? Would you happily display them on your website for all potential customers to see? And do they work on all devices?

If you cannot answer yes to all those questions then it could be time to switch to a tool that ensures your emails look great on all devices.

3. Do I get great support and help when I need?

While most of the time your email marketing will work fine, there will always be the occasional moment when you’ll need help.

And when that time comes, it’ll be incredibly important to have access to amazing support to help you sort out any issues and get your campaign out on time.

The thing is, while a lot of the free tools might seem appealing at first, few of them have support to help you during these times. It’s just not feasible for them to pay customer service experts to support thousands of customers who aren’t paying them.

If you’re a scout group or hobbyist, that’s probably ok and these tools are perfect for your needs.

However, if you’re a professional marketer at a small to medium sized business then you have goals and KPIs to achieve, and you need to know that if something goes wrong you can get help from someone quickly.

In that case, you might be better off using a mid-market email tool that offers live support to help you out in tricky situations.

The key here again is thinking about your budget and how you use email. If you’ve got very little budget to spend and only use email to communicate with friends, teammates, and family then the free tools will likely be your best bet.

If you’re a professional marketer though, going with a tool that offers support and business-level deliverability and reliability will help ensure you get the results you need from email marketing.

We also offer feature by feature comparisons so you can see how some of the biggest names in ESPs stack up with Campaign Monitor. 

 

Wrap up

Choosing the right email marketing software for your business’ specific requirements is critical to your email marketing success.

If you can confidently answer ‘Yes’ to these questions, then it’s likely you have chosen the right tool for your business.

However, if your email marketing tool isn’t easy to use, doesn’t produce beautiful, responsive emails, or doesn’t have great support, then it might be time to reassess your choice.

Switching email marketing tools doesn’t have to be a challenge either. Most solutions will allow you to export your lists and upload them into your new tool, making it easy to send your next campaign on your new platform.

So take a moment to assess whether you have the right tool for your business, as doing so could both save you money and increase the results you get from your email campaigns.

Get the right email marketing software for your business

Campaign Monitor is a dedicated email marketing tool designed for small to medium businesses who need to get results.