If you’re a business owner who just got into email marketing, it is essential that you make the most out of your investment by ensuring that your customers always receive, open, and click the links in your emails. To accomplish this, you need the right tool for the job.
That means using an email marketing platform with the necessary features to boost deliverability, engagement, and purchase rates. Read on to discover the features your marketing tool should have and why they matter.
1. Email list segmentation
To make your campaigns yield high engagement and deliverability rates, they must be sent to the right customers. But to do so you must first free your mailing list of bad emails by following good email hygiene and assigning your engaged customers to different list segmentations based on their attributes. Using smart email management platform can also help you stay ahead in the game.
Sending highly relevant campaigns to customer groups manually will take a lot of time because you need to look at each individual customer data and figure out which list they should belong to. Whereas an email marketing platform with an email list segmentation feature will automatically filter out users based on their data.
For example, if your campaign’s target audience are females, you can use the segmentation feature to filter the women in your list for campaign delivery.
2. Split testing
A/B testing or split testing is a strategy email marketers should use when deciding which campaign format works best among customers. This is done by sending two different versions of a campaign to two groups of customers and seeing which performs better.
If this is done manually, the data you receive will be inaccurate because you won’t get the exact number of engagements your two campaigns received.
With the split testing feature, you’ll receive accurate results of your test and choose the best campaign format because the campaigns send back the engagement data to your marketing platform in real-time.
3. Campaign management tools
There’s no such thing as a perfect campaign no matter how many revisions you do to improve it. Changes have to be made during the promotion process, especially if the initial results aren’t as good as expected.
To do this, you need to use campaign management tools in your marketing platform to edit your campaigns before they’re sent to your next wave of customers. Make sure that when you’re choosing an email marketing platform, it has this feature provided.
4. Deliverability
The two things that negatively affect deliverability rates and cause campaigns to be sent to the spam box are the spamminess of the campaign’s content and subject line. A lot of email marketers make such mistakes yet wonder why their engagement rates are so low.
You can keep your emails out of spam by choosing an email marketing platform with a spam-checker tool. Remember to check your desired marketing tool if it has this feature as it will save you time from trying to regain a damaged email sender’s reputation.
5. Performance metrics
Of course, you’ll want to see how your campaigns perform in real-time to know if they need further editing. That’s why your email marketing platform should have the feature of delivering reports regarding your deliverability rates such as the number of campaigns that have been bounced, rejected, ignored, blocked, or sent to the spam box.
It should also have the function of sending real-time data regarding the open and click-through rates of your campaigns. These features are a huge help in making sure that every campaign you send saves time, effort, and money.
6. 3rd party integration
An email marketing platform with all the necessary features like an SMTP relay, marketing automation, or campaign template editor can be expensive. This puts marketers who are on a budget at a disadvantage. However, they have found a way around this problem – use an affordable email marketing platform and integrate more affordable 3rd party tools.
7. Reading and viewing options
Nowadays, we mostly read our emails through our phones, unlike before when we only got to open our mailboxes through a computer or laptop. The problem with this change in digital behavior is that a lot of marketers don’t put into consideration that their campaign could appear differently from device to device.
An email marketing platform should have a feature where you as a marketer can view how your message appears on different devices. This ensures that your customers are able to read your entire message because they won’t be frustrated by tilting their device or zooming in and out which leads to your message being deleted.
Final Thoughts
Use this article as a checklist of the features you should look for in your next marketing tool. Note down what your first marketing platform lacks and find another marketing tool with the features designed to fill your needs.
For example, if you’re not sure how well your campaigns fare after being sent, find a marketing platform that delivers reports of engagement and delivery rates in real-time so that you’ll know what needs to be fixed about your campaigns.
Keep on finding more marketing platform features that you’ll need in your future campaigns until you’re able to choose one platform that best suits your needs. Or you can find another tool that can easily be integrated with 3rd party service providers.