There are literally hundreds of email marketing management systems to choose from, and once you start researching them, your head quickly begins to spin. So, before you start, do a quick brainstorm of your priorities, so that you can zero in on the features and benefits that will be most important to you. Here’s a place to start:
- Capabilities (surveys, newsletters, customization, etc.)
- Simplicity
- User interface
- Affordability
- Technology basis and support
- Data and list management, including reporting capabilities
- User FunFactor*
Once you have a clear(er) picture of your needs, let the research begin! We’ve given you a head start by breaking down four popular systems:
Constant Contact – The Relationship-Builder
Pricing: Features-based at $20-145 per month
Features: listing service, email newsletters and announcements, offers and promotions, online events and registrations, feedback and surveys
Constant Contact says: “More than 500,000 small businesses, nonprofits, and associations worldwide rely on Constant Contact to help create and grow customer relationships.”
Summary: Constant Contact is an ideal tool for small to mid-size businesses that are highly relationship based – whether it’s the relationship with Constant Contact subscribers and their customers, or Constant Contact’s direct relationships with social media, search engines, mobile apps, consumer review sites or important organizations that the company leverages to help build credibility. Structured around building and executing campaigns, Constant Contact has a large template library (400+) and a CMS that’s integrated with Google Analytics, salesforce.com and more. Run simple campaigns and purchase nice extras like the listing service as needed. Constant Contact is robust enough to produce professional, measurable results but not so advanced that a small to medium-sized business owner wastes time and money trying to understand and use tons of features. More advanced users or those with additional business needs can customize their platform based on Basic, Advanced and Ultimate subscription levels.
Positive Review Quote: “I think my most exciting part of the experience so far is the quality of the system that has been put together. It all works really smoothly thus far and I can tell that it took a long time to program the whole system by a really skilled team. It’s all quite impressive!”
Constructive Review Quote: “So far I think there is some areas that could be cleaned up and streamlined to make it easier to navigate, but other than that I haven’t had any issues. Everything of use can always have some tweaking to improve it.”
Mail Chimp – The Modern Day Fun Factor-y*
Pricing: Subscriber and email volume-based, up to 2K, up to 50K, over 50K. Sign up for free, but certain features are only available to paid accounts. Upgrade to a paid account starting at $10 a month.
Features: Subscriber profiles, personalization, automation, advanced analytics and reporting, email designer, fully responsive.
MailChimp says: “MailChimp is the best way to design, send, and share email newsletters. Email is serious business, which is why we never smile.”
Summary: Mail Chimp brings the fun factor big time for many reasons. You can actually sign up and use many of the site’s functions for free. Users get to play designer with templates and colors that are modern, attractive and professionally applied. Delivery Doctor tests email addresses before you distribute. Support is robust and topical, with contact options available (“Looking for human support?”) once you’ve entered search terms. Additionally, Mail Chimp works overtime not only as an email marketing system, but also as a sales management hub in which you can enter notes about prospects and your conversations with them. Get to know your subscribers with subscriber profiles that offer up engagement data and website activity, then send a triggered email based on that activity.
Positive Review Quote: “A lot of the tools they’ve developed, the analytics and the integration is spot on. It makes it very simple to just login and get going without a lot of fuss, and it provides comprehensive analytics on how all of your campaigns perform. From an ease of use when using their templates, it’s pretty much unparalleled.”
Constructive Review Quote: “When you want to deviate from their email templates, that’s when the trouble starts. To develop your own template, you basically need to contract with them to have a MailChimp developer do it for you. Their solution is idiot-proof from a design perspective, that it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive the customize outside of their pre-design templates.”
salesforce.com ExactTarget Marketing Cloud – Just Try and Stop Us
Pricing: upon request, highly variable and scalable.
Features: Broken down into products (email, mobile, social, ads, web, marketing automation, data & analytics) and services (Strategy and Insights, Onboard and Activate, Educate and Enable, etc.), ExactTarget defines itself (along with its Adobe peer and others) as a “marketing cloud,” versus a mere email marketing system.
ExactTarget says: “A salesforce.com company since July 2013, ExactTarget Marketing Cloud brings together ExactTarget and the leading social marketing solutions … to form the world’s most powerful 1:1 digital marketing platform.”
Summary: It’s difficult to describe this complex and innovative product (Is it a product? A company? A way of life?), but one thing is for sure – ExactTarget has within its capabilities virtually every operation, design, automation and metric you could possibly imagine. The question then becomes how much do you really need for your business, and how much do you want to spend? Personal experience some years ago while working for a Fortune 50 company granted this blogger the understanding that ExactTarget, as they say, don’t come cheap. But the support and hands-on partnership, from technical issues to writing custom code for automation, to side-by-side collaboration on special projects, was – and presumably still is since the salesforce.com acquisition – very impressive. The anecdote to ExactTarget’s complexity? The relationship manager, assigned to your account, who is available for questions, meetings, as a bridge to technical support and more. ExactTarget users need not sit on hold for customer service. They can simply email their relationship manager and expect a response within a pre-determined timeframe.
Positive Review Quote: “I like that we have all of our emails under one umbrella now. Previously I had no insight to our triggered/event driven emails (a total of 50 high-impact emails). Now I have access to make changes on the fly and can see how many we are sending and how they are performing. We really also have flexibility to do whatever we want. We run a lot of programs, segmentation and personalization within our email program and concentrate on providing a 1:1 email experience for our users. I have always figured out these on my own but know that a lot of people use their “services” team for help at an extra cost.”
Constructive Review Quote: “I know when new users come on board, ET can feel a bit intimidating – for me personally, I didn’t really know where to start. However once I dived in, it was a process of walking and not running. We’ve managed to build a massive program that comprises event/triggered emails, ftp data uploads & programs for our b2c emails and we utilize the salesforce integration for our b2b business. Also everything is also ala carte. It gets annoying to have to pay extra for something later on that you didn’t know you needed.”
dotMailer – The Happy Helper from Across the Pond
Features: data collection and segmentation, email campaign design and personalization, rule-based dynamic content, email testing and distribution, tracking and reporting, etc.
Pricing: upon request.
From dotMailer: “dotMailer is powerful email marketing made easy, with the most intuitive, easy to use email marketing platform you will find. Packed with ROI boosting features!”
Summary: dotMailer comes in as a close second to ExactTarget on complexity, yet its core benefit appears to be the systematic simplification of complex automation tasks. dotMailer strikes an impressive balance of technical aptitude, like integrations, with marketing services like managed campaigns, email marketing automation and email design/build. dotMailer has in its tool belt Skip Fidura, heading up their Strategic Services team and widely recognized as an email marketing thought leader. Imagine meeting with his team to reinvent your email marketing strategy, and then plugging into the impressive stable of campaign managers and technicians to super-charge anything from SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) on up to large enterprises.
Positive Review Quote: “The Easy editor is amazingly easy to use. Drag and drop interface is great for everyone, and being able to save complex blocks for future use is a great feature and massively time saving. Once we figured it out, uploading templates is also a cinch too. The reporting is a good set for analysis, and Segments is a good, easy way to identify ideal target audiences through their behaviours.”
Constructive Review Quote: “Their classic editor is very limited and it is not very easy to use. They seem to invest a lot of time and effort in their easy editor while classic editor could benefit from some improvements.”
No matter which email marketing system you choose, don’t be romanced by more features than you’ll ever use or need, which almost always come with a bigger price tag than your business can absorb. Remember how much goes into sending even one good email, be clear about your priorities before you engage a salesperson and opt for the least amount of spend and complexity that you think you’ll need. As your business grows and your needs change, presumably your budget power and understanding of your scope will become clearer, too. Long story short, you can always add on, but it can be difficult to scale back once you’ve signed a contract.
Contact Filament today to generate exciting content you can plug in and fire out of your new email marketing system.
*User FunFactor can be defined as the giggles, butterflies and general gratification users are likely to experience upon building and sending marketing emails. We believe that email management systems should not only be powerful, reliable and simple, but also fun to use. Since you have so many great options, why not pick the one that’s both great on paper and delivers on the User FunFactor? Many products provide a free test-drive, so take full advantage of them by clicking around and conducting your own real-world demonstrations to see how they handle, and the level of joy you find in using them.
