What is Email Marketing Software? Analysis of Features, Pricing, Types, and Benefits

Email marketing has been a staple for many businesses, especially e-commerce. It helps educate new subscribers, boost CRM efforts, and establish brand awareness while moving forward with the sales funnel. However, like every other marketing strategy, it goes without saying that email marketing has several bumps and hiccups along the way.

It can be challenging to retain email subscribers, boost email click-through rates, increase email open rates, earn new subscribers, and achieve a measurable ROI, to name a few. Fortunately, email marketing software can help you conquer these challenges with its various features.

Email marketing tools and software can amplify your email marketing campaigns and drive impressive results without breaking the bank or burning late-night candles doing everything yourself. Email marketing software allows you to compose, send, and track emails sent to your subscribers. It also gives you the freedom to choose from multiple templates and access key metrics, among others. 

Benefits of Email Marketing

You may have heard marketers gabbing about the death of email marketing. While they think it’s the truth, I’m here to tell you that email marketing, unlike chivalry, is not dead. We say email marketing is alive and kicking because many companies and businesses are reaping the fruits of the strategy. According to HubSpot, 40% of B2B marketers claim email newsletters are critical to content marketing success, and 73% of millennials prefer business communications via email.

Email marketing allows you to create and send targeted content, communicate with your audience, collect feedback and surveys, generate site traffic, improve sales, send timely campaigns, produce cost-effective campaigns, increase leads and brand awareness, and save time, among many others. Using quality email marketing software is crucial if you want to be on top of your game.

What Does Email Marketing Software Do?

Over time, technology underwent extensive innovations to make everyone’s lives better, including marketers. Hence, the rise of multiple technologies, tools, and software like email marketing software. 

This software offers many help and benefits, such as assessing how your emails look before sending them. It also allows you to segregate your mailing lists into targeted groups according to your metrics.

By using email marketing software, you can better manage your campaigns through its A/B Testing tool, where you can send multiple email sets to smaller groups to better measure feedback on the design, copy, and subject line, among others. Another strength of email marketing software is its ability to merge tags, provide relevant analytics and reports, and send targeted content.

Can you use a CRM for email marketing? What is email marketing CRM? Most, if not all, email marketing systems integrate with CRM solutions, aligning sales and marketing activities.

Best of all, email marketing software has a social media integration option to integrate your social media pages with the software to expand your reach. You can maximize this feature to invite your mailing list to follow, subscribe, and engage with your top social media channels.

Features of Email Marketing Software

The use and features of email marketing software cater to the different needs of an email marketer. Here are the features of complete email marketing software:

• Visual Editor. Even when sending emails, you must remember that first impression counts, especially as your contacts read your email’s content. Hence, a great email marketing tool has a drag-and-drop functionality, predesigned templates, a built-in photo editor, responsive design, and a function to incorporate your CSS or HTML form. These features get rid of the need to redesign your newsletters all the time.
• Analytics and Reports. Every marketer aims to stand out amidst a clutter of unread emails, and one great way to devise an outstanding email marketing campaign is by placing data at the center. Therefore, your email marketing tool must provide a detailed overview of your campaign’s performance, emphasizing metrics that deliver impressive results.
• CRM Integration. The best email marketing software can be integrated with a CRM or customer relationship management system. CRM integration aligns your sales and marketing efforts, resulting in more effective campaigns and a higher ROI. It also lets you update data in real-time, ensuring updated records for future campaigns.
• Autoresponder. Since most businesses don’t have the time to do everything individually, automation is one of the primary reasons they invest in email marketing solutions. So, if you want to put your money into a marketing tool, look for one with an autoresponder feature, as these tools help you cut costs and save time by automating particular tasks.
• Send Time Optimization. This feature allows you to optimize messages by sending emails or when your customers are most engaged. Regardless of what time of the day it is, you can schedule your sending your emails at the time your customers are most likely to open them.
• Contact Segmentation. Email marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy. Hence, you must divide your contacts into separate segments. Advanced email marketing software allows you to create groups based on various factors, such as autoresponder engagement, purchase behavior, subscription message data, geolocation, click-through, and browsers.
• No-Fail Email Deliverability. Operational emails contain significant information for your subscribers and are more informative than marketing. Operational emails include password resets, confirmations, shipping status, and download links. Your email marketing tool should be able to deliver these emails perfectly.

Why Use Email Marketing Software?

All the features of an email marketing tool are undoubtedly innovative, but does your business need to use it? Any business or brand wanting to invest in email marketing cannot do away with email marketing software. Email marketing has proven successful over the years, and one of the backbones of success-generating email marketing is email marketing tools.

There are multiple reasons why it pays to invest in a top-notch email marketing tool, including the following:

• Facilitates Personalization. Sending personalized emails is crucial in keeping your loyal subscribers, and what better way to do this than by using email marketing software? Email marketing tools allow you to send personalized emails, so you don’t have to greet your customers with the typical “hello.”
• Saves Time. Using an email marketing tool allows you to save time and focus on other relevant tasks for your brand or business. You don’t have to send your emails manually; you can send everything to everyone in a click or two.
• Organizes Email Marketing Campaigns. You can organize your email marketing campaign within your team through an email marketing tool with CRM integration. It helps you and the entire team keep track of your tasks and progress. 

How Much Does Email Marketing Software Cost?

The cost of email marketing software varies based on the developer and features. Some have a starting price of $3 to $39 monthly. The higher the cost, the more features you can enjoy. So, if you have enough budget to spend on a tool to help your campaigns in more ways, don’t hesitate to try them.

What Are Examples of Email Marketing Software?

With digital marketing at its all-time high, there are tons of different marketing software. So, what softwares are used for email marketing? Which is best for email marketing? To help you address these concerns, we have gathered the top five email marketing software examples.

• Mailchimp. Mailchimp is Forbes Advisor’s best email marketing software of 2023 and the most popular email marketing tool to date. The tool gives you access to various marketing channels, email templates, segmentations, customer surveys, and Divi Forms integration, to name a few. Mailchimp is also an email marketing software free to use.
• MailerLite. MailerLite is one of the best email marketing software on the market. Some of its key features include hundreds of integrations, websites, landing pages, visual automation builder, drag-and-drop email builder with templates, and free stock photos. Check out the software on our MailerLite review.
• HubSpot. HubSpot is an integrated email marketing service and the best in what it does. It connects with other HubSpot tools, including live chat, CMS, and CRM. It allows you to create targeted email campaigns, segment your email list, and other tasks. If you are interested, head to our HubSpot review.
• Constant Contact. Constant Contact is best for small businesses. It does not cover all the features of a marketing tool, but it has everything you need for your email marketing campaigns, plus several other nice-to-haves.
• Convert Kit. This email marketing software is best for content creators as it offers tools to manage content experiences, such as shoppable landing pages. It also has link pages creators can use on their social media pages, and they can use the tool to create paid newsletters, virtual tip jars, and content subscription plans.

Potential Issues With Email Marketing Software

While using email marketing tools brings multiple benefits, you can also face several issues. Here are potential issues that you can go over to help you decide whether or not an email marketing tool is a bang for your buck.

• Mixed Engagement Metrics. Email marketing campaigns come in different types — newsletters, one-off announcements, and welcome and win-back campaigns. In most cases, email marketing tools tend to lump all the metrics of the said campaigns, making it difficult for you to assess the progress of your efforts. Ideally, you would want to track the metrics of each campaign separately, but setting it up in an email marketing software can be difficult or, sometimes, impossible.
• Lack of Sales Attribution. To increase your progress and maximize your efforts, you ought to know which one of your campaigns is generating revenue. With that, you must identify which of your new customers are converted through your email marketing campaigns, what type of emails are effective, and what your campaign’s impact is regarding sales and renewals. Unfortunately, email marketing tools can’t tell you what your efforts are doing to the bottom line.
• Confusing Terms and Categorization. Email marketing tools often use confusing terms and categorization methods. It can be confusing to differentiate a “tag” from a “segment” or “contacts,” “prospects,” and “customers.”

What Are the Latest Trends in Email Marketing Software?

Email marketing is continuously evolving and improving. Interactive emails have become more popular, so we expect email marketing tools to develop features to create better interactive emails containing dynamic elements that allow for a website-like experience in the inbox.

In addition to interactive emails, the rise of artificial intelligence is something to look out for in email marketing. AI, such as Jasper AI, can help write content, analyze data points, shorten campaign creation time, identify trends and create tailored content, analyze customer behavior, restructure campaigns, and clean email lists, on top of other tasks.

Email marketing tools are bound to get better as technology innovates, and we can hardly wait to find out what the future has in store for email marketing. 

Read and learn more about email marketing in our “Email Marketing: Types, How to Do It, and Tools” article.