Marketers love email. According to a recent survey, it was voted to be the top ROI driver of all marketing channels (59 percent to 21 percent for social media, the nearest competitor). It also continues to be a great way to communicate with customers and prospects, and build brand awareness.
But email marketing isn’t what it was even 10 years ago. Today, sophisticated small businesses do a lot more than just send a newsletter or occasional product offer out to subscribers. Technology allows for these businesses to track incoming leads, automate marketing “journeys” to them, and collect data on site behavior that can trigger other emails. You may occasionally hear the term “marketing automation,” which refers to the ability to automate a lot of marketing processes rather than doing every step manually. An example might be the following scenario in which someone downloads a whitepaper from your website and you send them a series of automated emails below:
- 1st Email: Thanks for downloading our whitepaper/learn more about our services
- 2nd Email: You might be interested in this blog on this topic.
- 3rd Email: If you need help in this topic area, we have services to assist you.
- 4th Email: Let us know if you need our services, here is our contact information.
In other words, in the ideal world, you wouldn’t want to manually send these emails to everyone who downloads a whitepaper. You would want to automate those processes upfront.[1] This is one reason why choosing an email / marketing automation system that fits your goals is critical. After all, if your MAS can’t do some of the things you need it to do (or see your competitors doing), you might be missing a big opportunity to engage or convert your customers. And, as you consider your needs, it’s important to first think about your overall strategy.
[1] Email is only one aspect of marketing automation, but a major part.
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6 Considerations for Small Businesses Choosing an Email Platform
Before you choose an email / marketing automation provider, you should consider your strategy first. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as a small business, as you think about email.
1. What role does email play in your overall digital marketing strategy? Again, what’s the goal of your emails? Content engagement? Website traffic? Conversions? What part of the funnel?
In most cases, you’ve already acquired the individual subscriber to your list already using a valid method (purchase, registration, download etc.)[1]. At this point, most customers probably know you, so many small businesses use email to engage or convert their customers (mid-to-lower funnel approach). So, as you think about buying a platform, it’s key to understand what you’re trying achieve from the email itself. More sophisticated tools allow for better automation and targeting to those demonstrate some intent to purchase. However, if your goal is to achieve ongoing engagement, you may not need a more expensive automation tool.
2. What do the staffing resources look like? Do you have someone to manage this area?
Like everything other channel, email requires someone to manage this on an ongoing basis. After all, even if you decide to automate emails, you still need someone to do that and monitor the success of the campaigns. Plus, you’ll certainly want to develop manual email sends as well. And like other channels, you might want to think about design resources for images or other visuals you might need within the email as well. This is true for B2B or B2C emails. Staffing itself isn’t a big aspect of your platform choice as systems generally charge for the number of subscribers versus system users. But if you do have multiple staff using a platform from different teams (example sales) and doing more complex campaign workflows, you likely will want to opt for a more sophisticated platform.
3. Do you have a sales team and/or need Integration with your sales CRM?
If you have a separate sales team, you may want to consider which emails are sent from marketing and which are sent from sales. How do you want them automated from each? Or, at least coordinate your messaging so that great sales prospects can be put into, say, an automated sales email journey, and not be bothered with broader marketing emails. Alternatively, the other question to ask is how you want to connect your marketing automation platform to your CRM, or do you want more of an all-in-one solution (see the hybrid options below). If you want to manage more complex campaigns, with more sophisticated workflows and triggers, a simple email platform may not be for you.
4. What can you realistically see doing in email this year? Are you using the capabilities of your current email platform or any email platform?
Many small businesses don’t even set up some basic segmentation and automation so we’d certainly recommend tackling that first before embarking on any advanced data collection. But if you’ve already set that up, a good next step is that think about what data is available for you to collect and then whether you have the capabilities to store that data within your current email / marketing automation platform. If you don’t, it may be time to upgrade.
5. Segmentation and targeting: Who will receive the emails and how will you define the segments?
Similar to the point above, if you haven’t segmented audiences by acquisition type or topic interest, we certainly would encourage you to do so. The days of sending email blasts (the same email to everyone on your list) is probably fading because, to the extent you can, you’ll want to personalize these to improve engagement. Segments are great way to do this. What segments can you create? Here are a few examples:
- By demographics
- By geography
- By purchase history
- By open rates
- By clicks
- By type of purchase
- By web site activity
- By job title
- By organizational function
- By social engagement
- By acquisition type
The more advanced lists or combinations of those lists that you need will mean you’ll want a more sophisticated platform.
6. How will you acquire new people to your list? What kind of data do you want to store?
The goal of your email program isn’t just to convert those who are currently on your list to a purchase of some kind. It’s also to acquire new people to your list so you can continue to expose them to regular promotions and content from your brand. Many small businesses acquire new potential customers to their lists through newsletter registration, webinars, e-books/whitepaper downloads, and other events (offline and online.) To the extent you can, we would make sure the acquisition method is stored within your marketing automation platform/CRM so you know how you acquired them. That way, you can personalize an email journey or a set of manually sent emails based on the acquisition source. As far as a platform goes, most basic email providers and hybrid email/CRM solutions provide forms and even landing pages you can use. Or they can connect to the forms and landing pages that you use on your website. The big difference between the two is the data that can be acquired on different users and stored. The more sophisticated systems allow for more advanced, automated data collection on areas outside email, which can be key if you need it to see a more robust, customer picture.
Choosing a Platform Based on Your Unique Needs
Once you understand your strategy, then we believe you can dive into selecting the right email / marketing automation platform for your needs. A lot of small businesses, for example, might choose a provider such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact when they start out because: a) They’re inexpensive and; b) The goal isn’t to do much beyond sending a newsletter or an occasional product offer to customers. And they’re great platforms. You can also automate some email processes if you take full advantage of the functionality. But if you want to do more than that, you might need a different system. Here are three levels of email platforms we see. For most small businesses, the first two areas will likely work just fine, but you have to select the one that fits your overall goals.
In the follow section, we’ll provide a look at a basic email platform (Mailchimp) versus a mid-tier/hybrid email/CRM (ActiveCampaign).
Basic. (e.g. Mailchimp)
Many choose an email platform such as Mailchimp when they’re just starting out as a small business. Again, consider your strategy above as you walk through the pros and cons that we list below.
Pros
- Starting at $51 per month for 2,500 subscribers, it’s pretty inexpensive and stays comparatively that way the more subscribers you have.
- Easy to design and use. Not a complicated interface and design and most small business owners can do this on their own.
- Landing page builder. You can design landing pages with forms relatively easily in Mailchimp or use a tool such as Zapier to connect website forms in, say, WordPress to Mailchimp.
- Basic automation. You can automate some processes in Mailchimp such as abandoned carts or an email journey to someone who downloads a whitepaper etc.
Cons
- Lack of a CRM. While Mailchimp does say it has “CRM” capabilities (it can store user data and provides access to ecommerce and other reports), it doesn’t have full capabilities for linking other marketing activities to sales, managing deal pipelines or doing anything more complex. It can connect to Salesforce if need be.
- List management. In Mailchimp, lists are mutually exclusive. – In other words, you can’t include contacts on different lists in the same campaign. That’s fine if all your lists are individual, distinct business opportunities but it gets unnecessarily complicated if that’s not the case.
Mid-Tier/Hybrid. (e.g., ActiveCampaign, KEAP)
Systems such as ActiveCampaign, for example, double as a quasi-CRM, which means they can collect site visitor data or other activity (say in social) for better targeting of emails. (Note: Both can connect to larger CRMs such as a Salesforce if need be, too.), let’s look at ActiveCampaign here.
Pros
- More advanced automation. Compared to a Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign can do much more sophisticated email workflows that you can automate. For example, you can create triggers based on lead scoring functionality or website activity. You can also do more with segmentation, tagging and storing data.
- More advanced list management. Unlike Mailchimp, the same campaigns can be sent to users on multiple lists. You can segment subscribers via tags or custom lists – processes you can also automate. Furthermore, ActiveCampaign offers lead scoring, which can be a powerful tool for helping small businesses decide to send the right email to the best prospects.
Cons
- More expensive. At $129 for the professional package with 2,500 subscribers, it’s a higher monthly charge than a Mailchimp. And this is usually where it becomes a barrier for some small businesses to migrate to.
- If you don’t need all the advanced automation, it may not be as cost-effective. While we’d always recommend businesses take advantage of as much data as possible and automate as much as they can, the truth is, some businesses may not need a fancier setup. And they may just need basic email capabilities, which Mailchimp can certainly do and more.
Sophisticated. (e.g., Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud)
By definition, these email platforms are intended for enterprises and usually aren’t used by smaller businesses. They tend to be more expensive marketing automation platforms, designed for organizations that have many subscribers (hundreds of thousands to millions). And for companies that have teams that work in the platform. Many of these can also be somewhat complex for the end users, and harder to configure. As such, for small businesses, we’re not going to recommend any in this area, though Hubspot might be the one exception, given its relative ease of use and comparative pricing for certain types of small businesses.
Conclusion
As a small business, certainly you’ll want to consider options in the basic or the mid-tier systems. For many, we know that it will come down to budget. Which is perfectly reasonable. It may be that you have to start with a Mailchimp or Constant Contact due to costs. That’s fine. What you can do is to begin to automate some of the emails with those platforms. And as you grow, consider moving up to other platforms, which will allow you to track data in a more efficient way. But whichever one you do choose, we do recommend that you think with an eye toward connecting different digital aspects of the users experience and eventually storing that critical data and automating more of the processes.
We’ve been working with a number of small business clients in email marketing and marketing automation. And while each business is different, one common consensus is that the platform you choose and the strategy (and the type of emails you want to send) have to match. For that reason, it helps to do a little research upfront.
At Marketing Nice Guys, our mission is to help you excel in digital marketing. Let us know if you need help with this critical area, as we can support you in the decision-making process, the setup of a new platform and any automations, and the ongoing email management. Contact us for a free consultation.
[1] – We don’t recommend buying new lists these days if you can avoid it, as it can amount to spamming potential customers, something that can get you in trouble with both your email provider and privacy regulations. If you do buy lists, we can recommend other options for you.