The worst thing you can do for your business is waste time with tools that simply don’t work the way you need them to.
That’s why so many email marketing platforms have grown more feature-rich over the last few years—giving small businesses more insight into optimization, performance, and customer relationship building.
Here are the tools you should look for when it comes to email marketing services.
Built-In Email Validation
Email validation is a technology that verifies the existence of email addresses and deletes duplicate ones.
Why is this important? The more emails that bounce after you send a campaign, the more likely you are to ruin your reputation with your email service provider.
That can pretty much ensure your emails start going to spam or just don’t get delivered. Email service providers can also decide to shut down your account if they suspect you have poor list quality. Having built-in validation can safeguard your business reputation.
Message Automation
If you have a product that requires a triggered response, message automation is a must-have. You can set-up custom triggers that tell your platform when to send a specific message.
It’s great for things like cart abandonment or responding to actions your customers might take.
For example, let’s say a customer buys a product off of your website. An automation tool can send follow up emails asking customers to review the product, to learn about other products, to purchase a subscription and more.
Built-In CAN-SPAM Compliance
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act has rules about what businesses can do with their customers’ emails. It outlines things like subscription management and how you can work with the contacts you have.
Needless to say, violating one of these rules can get you in big trouble, as they were put in place by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Having built-in protection to ensure you don’t violate these rules is a huge help.
Simplified Integration
From eCommerce to social media, integrating your email platform with outside services is a major plus. This is one of the features that will allow you to fully align your marketing messages and branding outside of just your emails.
It can also help you to track your performance or enable you to integrate your contacts and data into a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). Having everything right where you need it saves you time, which ends up saving you money.
Troubleshooting Deliverability
The worst thing that can happen in email marketing is that no one sees your message. It’s even more frustrating when you don’t know why that’s happening.
Several email marketing tools include assistance with deliverability. They should have a tool that shows you where and why a problem might have occurred, which will allow you to research and troubleshoot them.
These are just a few of the best email marketing tools that many platforms have to offer. The ones that are most important to you will depend on your goals.