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The Role of Email Marketing in an Omnichannel Strategy

If you'd like to to learn about the role email marketing plays in an ominichannel strategy, this article is for you. In it, we discuss how to effectively use email marketing in ominichannel strategies with example brands that are doing it right.

The post The Role of Email Marketing in an Omnichannel Strategy appeared first on mailfloss.

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The Role of Email Marketing in an Omnichannel Strategy

Marketers must understand the importance of creating a seamless experience across all platforms. In a study done by Target Marketing, they found that 26% of people believe that an omnichannel experience is an integral part of their business.

Every step of the way, your customer needs to have access to you and your marketing. Each part of the customer journey needs to be an omnichannel experience because it creates a cohesive bond between your marketing strategy and their experience as they move through the funnel.

Utilizing email marketing allows you to further improve the process by adding another avenue of communication to create that bond. Here’s how you can do it and why you should.

What Defines an Omnichannel Experience?

Omnichannel is another way to describe “multi” channel, but they are not the same. This means that you approach your marketing across all platforms. It also means that everything the customer needs or wants is available no matter what platform they choose. In a perfect world, the customer would have a choice of how they’d contact you, do business with you, seek more information, and so on.

The most important thing to understand is the difference between a multi-channel experience and an omnichannel one. Multi-channel means having different points of contact across many platforms.

Omnichannel creates a unique and integrated experience for the platform the customer is using. This means that the experience someone has on mobile can be continued seamlessly on desktop.

Lastly, all of these platforms, while they are different, communicate information across borders to make everything seamless. If you interact with a brand on one platform, you could hop right over to another one and have the same quality experience.

Examples of Amazing Omnichannel Experiences

If it’s difficult to understand the application of an omnichannel experience, we think it would be helpful to show you some examples. These brands do an excellent job of implementing an omnichannel experience that includes email marketing.

What you’ll notice from all of these brands is that you never lose touch with them. No matter where you are, what you’re doing, or who you’re with, you have complete access to the brand, and you can do almost anything from wherever. That’s an authentic omnichannel experience.

Disney

Disney is a beautiful example of creating a perfect user experience. Each part of engaging with their brand is well designed, well thought out, and seamless. You can start on the website by booking your trip.

Once you’ve done that you can use the My Disney Experience tool to plan all the finer details of your trip. You can secure a Fast Pass, plan which parks you’ll hit and when, and even reserve tables for your meals. You can even use your phone as a hotel room key!

Disney can also send you emails updating you in the days leading up to your trip. This offers another way for them to communicate with you on a personal level.

Bank of America

Banking is getting easier and easier through the use of mobile integration. Bank of America allows consumers to do as much as possible on their own without requiring them to come to a bank.

We can pay bills, deposit checks, set automatic bill pay, and transfer money directly from our phones. Someday we expect to be able to apply for a loan without ever having to talk to anyone in person. We’ll see what happens.

Dominos

A great example of an omnichannel experience is getting you to spend as much time engaging with the brand as possible. The Domino's app is so much fun to use that you almost want to order the pizza just to watch the timer go down. From the second you place your order, you get a play by play on when the employee is putting cheese on the pizza to the second it goes in the oven.

From the app, you can get coupons and special deals as well to save money on your purchase right away. The experience from app to web browser is identical, and you can create an account to keep track of your purchases and earn rewards points over time.

One thing we find great about Domino’s omnichannel strategy is their use of email marketing. They use email to send more deals and coupons than anyone else. Since they don’t actually engage with customers through the app, they use email to keep the communication going.

How to Develop a Seamless Omnichannel Strategy?

Now that you’ve seen some examples of an omnichannel strategy, you should have a better understanding of what it means. At this point, it’s time to start implementing this in your marketing. We’ll be focusing on an overall omnichannel strategy and how you can use email marketing to enhance it.

Pristine mobile experience

72% of mobile users say that mobile experience is the most critical factor when shopping or conducting business online. These people want to be able to do business from everywhere and anywhere. We see over time that more and more businesses are jumping on board with this, but some are still left behind.

It’s no longer an option for businesses who market to people online without a mobile-optimized website. Unless you have a completely in-store business model, you need to have a mobile-optimized website, and you need to optimize all your marketing strategies for mobile-first.

If we take this over to email marketing, how many times have you received an email containing some form of marketing material that you couldn’t open on mobile?

This mistake happens all the time. Marketers optimize everything for mobile, but they forget about their emails. Much of the time those graphics you send through on desktop aren’t viewable on mobile, so it makes the email look unprofessional.

Make sure you don’t forget to see how your emails look on mobile just as much as everything else.

Perfect user experience

Users care more now than ever about their online shopping experience. We’re seeing more and more brands customizing the experience based on the individuals wants and needs.

Look at it this way. When we go to a store, we gain that experience. We gain the process of getting ready, getting in the car, driving there, walking through the doors, smelling the smells, and hearing the sounds. We don’t get that when we shop online, and businesses need to do as much as possible to create that experience for their customers.

You should be analyzing as much data from each visitor as possible, and email marketing is a great way to do this. Collect their email, create a customer profile, and send them surveys to collect data.

Use the data

Once you’ve collected this data, you need to have a way to organize it, manage it, and use it. Make sure you have the right systems in place to store the data and keep it for quick access. One of the biggest pain points of creating an omnichannel strategy is knowing how to implement the data you receive.

When you have everything organized, you can now take that data and use it to develop a better experience for your customers.

Engage on all channels

Every time someone engages with your brand, you are boosting your reputation and creating a deeper bond with your community. You want this to happen as much as possible so engage with your audience whenever possible.

This means posting on social media, engaging with customers, commenting on their posts, and doing this across all platforms. You can use your email marketing strategy to remarket to people who engaged with you on social media. You should be creating custom audiences based on the people you’ve engaged with. There are never too many platforms to reach your audience, and the best way to keep you fresh in their mind is by being everywhere.

Utilizing Email Marketing for an Omnichannel Experience

We talked about utilizing email marketing in some of the previous examples but let’s dive in a little more. Now let’s focus on how you can use email marketing directly in your omnichannel experience.

Effective communication

Email allows you to cut through all the red tape and get down to business. Once someone signs up for your email subscriber list, they are now your lead. They are your customer, and you can market to them however you see fit.

If you’re collecting enough data from each subscriber, you can create segmented lists so you can send personalized emails to each of those lists. Personalization is the key to success with email. When you can tailor-make every email, you’ll experience higher engagement and more conversions.

Further data gathering

It’s so important to understand the data gathering process with email marketing. Once someone subscribes to your email list, you can now market to them. You have permission to send them more information. This factor is not something you should take lightly. In most countries, it’s illegal to send correspondence without consent, so you have a unique privilege here.

Use every opportunity to collect as much data from each subscriber. Find out what they like, what they dislike, what they want from you, what they expect, and so on. By gathering this data, you are learning what your ideal customers want so you can tweak the experience to give them what they want.

Advanced targeting

You can set certain trigger points all throughout your website that will send an email to subscribers who complete a certain action on your site. For example, if someone hits your website and purchases an ebook about “Five Tips to Make Money Trading Forex,” you could send them a follow-up email a day later asking if they dove into it yet.

From there, you can send them an email in five days seeing if they checked out some of the other resources on your website. You could even sell them a coaching program or webinar you conduct from your site as well. You’re creating a cohesive experience that keeps this person coming back to your website and engaging with you across multiple platforms be it, email, website, and social.

That is the true definition of omnichannel.

Better experience

Let’s face it; emails can be dry. Many businesses and marketers don’t understand how to make email engaging and interesting. Make sure you include plenty of graphics and engaging copy in your email marketing. The goal is to create the best possible experience for your audience, and you won’t be able to do that by sending them walls of text.

Make sure you aren’t overdoing it with emails as well (that’s a quick trip to the spam folder). You shouldn’t be sending more than one email every couple of days unless the individual engages back with you.

There are many laws to follow pertaining to email marketing so ensure that you have a clearly labeled opt-out button and abide by all local restrictions.

Reward your customers

Customer loyalty programs are an incredible way to offer incentives for engaging with you. You can create a special area on your website where only members are allowed access. This type of exclusivity makes it more desirable for people who aren’t members. Allow your customers to do some of the marketing for you by pushing them to promote your business in exchange for loyalty program points.

Many brands utilize something similar by offering referral bonuses or affiliate commissions. Funnel building software ClickFunnels gives you a cut of every customer who purchases the software. It’s become so powerful that some people make an entire living from promoting ClickFunnels.

You can utilize a similar structure in your business.

Final Thoughts

By this point you should understand the following:

• What is an omnichannel experience?
• What a great omnichannel strategy looks like
• How to develop an omnichannel experience?
• How to integrate email marketing into that strategy

The bridge between digital and real is becoming blurry. As this continues to happen, users will expect more and more out of their online experience. Omnichannel is the best way to provide everything the consumer wants; everywhere they want it.

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17 of the Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Are you looking for an email marketing service? If so, check out our article on 17 of our favourites. They are all amazing in their own right but one size does not fill all when it comes to email marketing. Make sure you make the best choice for you and your business when selecting an email marketing vendor.

The post 17 of the Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses appeared first on mailfloss.

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17 of the Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Everyone is looking towards social media, influencers, chatbots, and other methods to reach their ideal customers. In the meantime, email marketing sits in the back unused by so many people.

Email brings in $38 for every dollar spent and yet, so many marketers and online business owners see it as a waste of time. A 3,800% ROI doesn’t sound like a waste of time, and we believe that email is still the most powerful tool for reaching your audience.

There are so many email marketing services available to small business owners; it can seem challenging to choose only one. We have 17 of our favourite options to choose from, so by the end of this article, choosing an email marketing provider should be a no-brainer.

1. MailChimp

MailChimp is simple, easy to use, great for beginners, and the most popular email service provider on our list . The service allows you to collect complex statistics about your audience while building a list that is sure to generate an ROI. From the dashboard, you can import lists, create campaigns, and even send surveys to your email subscribers.

Using MailChimp, you can also track who has opened emails so you can figure out open rates and tweak your email headers and copy. It allows you to make changes based on the success of your campaign. Overall, MailChimp is a simple yet powerful option, and is an excellent start for someone looking for the fundamentals.

The service is free for up to 2,000 subs or 12,000 emails. Pricing starts at $10 for a premium account.

2. Ontraport

Here is a service that offers an all in one solution for people looking to scale their business. Ontraport offers a complete CRM autoresponder, task management system, and payment processing. This service has a lot more features than many email marketing services.

Ontraport also has a high deliverability rate, so marketers don’t have to worry about their emails making it into the inbox as much. This software starts at $79 per month, and they have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

3. Constant Contact

The main thing that separates Constant Contact from some of the competitors is the amount of customization and design options you have with your emails. You can roll through hundreds of templates and an assortment of cool features like polls, surveys, and videos.

As with most other services, you can create reports, including bounce rates, email forwards, click-throughs, and shares. Constant Contact also allows you to include social sharing buttons in your emails, which can help boost traffic.

Constant Contact pricing starts at $20 per month for the basic plan, and they have a premium option at $45.

4. HubSpot

The HubSpot platform offers a ton of different tools with one of them being an email marketing service. With this software, you can generate emails, search for specific emails, look at data like bounce and delivery rate, and edit emails.

You also have the choice to create your emails or use their templates. You can schedule emails in advance and personalize emails with variable population tools.

Something we love about HubSpot is that it offers two different unsubscribe options for your list. They can choose to unsubscribe permanently, or they could take a quick break from your emails, which helps convince people to stay aboard.

HubSpot has three different pricing options. The starter pack is $50 per month, and you get lead analytics, flows, collected forms, and the CRM. The basic plan is $200, and you get everything we mentioned plus email marketing, landing pages, and an analytics page. Finally, the pro plan is $800 per month, and you get everything we discussed plus automation tools, smart content, split testing, and more.

They also have a $2,400 a month plan that offers special events, advanced reporting, and lead scoring that you may want to look into if you’re starting to get some huge ROI from your email marketing.

5. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor provides a useful tool that allows you to see what your emails will look like on popular email platforms like Gmail and Yahoo. This tool helps you ensure that emails are displaying correctly across all platforms.

You have the choice of uploading your own templates, but it doesn’t appear that they provide templates for you. You would need to have a basic understanding of HTML. Using Campaign Monitor, you can set up autoresponders and segment your subscribers, so only certain people receive specific responses.

This service has two pricing platforms. Basic starts at $9 per month, and the upgraded plan is $29.

6. AWeber

AWeber is a popular tool for digital marketers and is one of the more established email service providers out there. They have an autoresponder that allows you to engage with your subscribers. You also get access to 150+ templates that provide uniqueness and variability to your emails.

You can also integrate AWeber with other services and CRMs to help create a seamless process. AWeber is also especially popular in the e-commerce world because you can integrate it with your shopping cart. This feature allows you to add customers to your list as soon as they make a purchase.

With AWeber, you can have 500 subscribers for $19, and they have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

7. Infusionsoft

This platform is incredible, and while it’s expensive; if you have the budget, it’s well worth it. Building campaigns is simple and easy with Infusionsoft because you have a ton of customization and personalization options to make your subscribers feel like their email was made for them.

This platform really stands out when we look at its lead scoring feature. They provide more lead management tools than most other CRMs, and while they are at a higher price point, they’ll bring you an ROI.

Their most basic package starts at $199 per month, and it continues to go up from there.

8. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a crowd favourite for those who love lead management and automation options. It’s slightly lower priced compared to some other vendors with similar functionality, and it offers a lot of benefits with an easy to use dashboard.

You get everything you would ever need to manage lists, send emails, customize emails, manage auto-responses, and create sales automation. They even offer incredible training and one-on-one video chats with representatives to help you understand the platform. ActiveCampaign takes things up a notch.

They offer a variety of payment options that get as low as $7.65 if you pay for a year in advance. Their pricing plans go up as high as $149 for everything if you pay monthly.

9. ConvertKit

This service might be newer to the game, but they bring a lot to the table. ConvertKit uses a tag-based subscriber system that allows you to organize your leads based on the tags you associate with each one.

Automation with this service is also simple, and they use a system that closely resembles what ActiveCampaign does. They allow you to build your workflow using their visual builder that takes subscribers through the campaign from beginning to end.

If they opt-in, they go down a different path than they would if they opened and bounced. That’s an example, but there are many ways to push your leads through the campaign.

One of the best things about ConvertKit is that you can do all of this editing directly from the workflow dashboard. You can change emails, forms, and entire automations directly from your workflow. It’s like the Wix of email marketing services.

ConvertKit offers a ton of subscription plans ranging from $29 per month to almost $4,000.

10. Drip

We chose to review this one next because it closely resembles both ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit. Drip uses features like message personalization, e-commerce integration, and deep analytics.

With this software, you can build visual emails and create workflow automations, and it contains some seriously powerful segmentation options. One thing that Drip offers is a conversion tracking feature that is easy to use and integrate into your email marketing strategy.

Drip has a starter plan that’s free up to 100 subs, and their basic package is $41 for 2500 subs.

11. Sendlane

Sendlane makes generating email marketing campaigns simple and is one of the newer kids on the block . They provide you with detailed training and a simple interface to help prepare email lists. The service also offers complete automation at an affordable price. You can manage behaviour-based automation trees and track events because every action your subscriber takes gets recorded in the system.

You also get smart retargeting that initiates specific workflows based on the actions your subscribers take. Here are some of the features:

• Visual editors
• Journey tracker
• List management
• Third-party integrations
• Machine learning
• Real-time reporting

Sendlane offers a variety of pricing options ranging from $25 a month to over $219 per month. They also offer special pricing choices for larger companies looking for more than 25,000 profiles.

12. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is great for e-commerce because it integrates well with major platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce. For as low as $20 per month, you get advanced email marketing, auto-responders, drip campaigns, images, templates, and landing pages.

13. Sendinblue

Sendinblue does both marketing emails and transactional emails, and they offer a lot of the features you would expect from an email marketing service. They have email preview options that allow you to view your emails on mobile and different platforms. You can create lists of subscriber data, segment lists, and create profiles for each lead.

Sendinblue offers plenty of customization and personalization tools as well. They offer a free plan that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day, which is great. If you need more than that you could upgrade to their $66 per month plan that offers you 120,000 emails per month.

14. MailerLite

MailerLite has a wide assortment of free options like marketing automation and a simple to use interface. You also get an easy to operate landing page editor to allow you to host on their sponsored hosting or you can get your own domain.

They have simple reporting and an easy to understand dashboard. MailerLite is both pleasant and simple to use without all of the unnecessary bells and whistles. It’s a great service that has its purpose in the marketplace. It’s a place where you build lists, customize emails, and send emails.

They have four primary pricing options. For 2,500 subscribers you pay $15 per month, and it goes all the way up to $75 a month for 15,000 subscribers.

15. Moosend

We find the main upside of Moosend to be its user-friendliness. This platform is easy for people with little email marketing experience to jump right in. The software also offers an assortment of reporting tools, split testing, and great customer support. They are also a relative new-comer and are rapidly releasing new features.

They offer a few different pricing options. For up to 1,000 subscribers the service is completely free, and their plans run up to 1,000,000 subscribers. It appears that their plans are catered to the individual because they also have pay-as-you-go plans that use credits.

16. SendPulse

This cloud-based marketing software allows users to manage their email, texts, and push notifications using one tool. Setting up emails using a drag-and-drop system and templates makes the entire process simple and easy.

The software also offers different split testing tools, and if subscribers elect for text notifications, users can send personalized messages directly to their list in over 200 countries.

SendPulse uses predictive analytics to help their users determine the best time to reach out to clients based on a number of factors.

SendPulse has a monthly subscription-based payment plan that varies depending on how many messages you want to send. For example, its $8.85 for 10,000 messages and as much as $275 for 500,000. They also have similar plans for email.

17. GetResponse

In addition to other features you’d come to expect from a powerful email service provider, GetResponse has an assortment of tracking options that allow you to view who views your emails, who unsubscribes, and who complains. You’ll also gather data on how many of your emails didn’t reach their destination. The data is easy to interpret because you’ll receive it in pie charts and graphs.

GetResponse also provides you with plenty of training via FAQ sections, webinars, and tutorials. Their pricing starts at $15 a month, and this plan offers you 1,000 subs.

What Service Do You Use?

If you use a service we didn’t list here drop us a comment and let us know what you use and why. All 17 of these email marketing services have their pros and cons, but overall, they are all excellent choices depending on where you are at with your email marketing. Make sure you do plenty of research and make the right choice for your business! Don’t be afraid to demo various vendors, audit them, and ask them plenty of questions. Since email marketing is essential to any business that does their marketing online, choosing the right email marketing service for you can be a game-changer and really take your email marketing to the next level.