Email marketing is far from dead. In fact, it’s seen increased success in recent years. Both prospects and marketers find it to be one of the most flexible, useful channels for staying in contact.
Sending emails won’t help you succeed unless you use the right tools. If you want to increase your sales with email marketing, you must create great content and measure results. The Internet offers tools that let you do this. We can help you find the right tools—Here are some of our favorites.
Cortana Scheduling Abilities
If you use both Cortana and Microsoft Outlook, you should try Cortana’s more advanced scheduling abilities. When Cortana scans your emails, she can recognize language that refers to an upcoming meeting or phone call. And she can add this information to the right client contact info, as well as your calendar. This is particularly helpful when you’re managing multiple leads, and you don’t have the time to input every meeting or scheduled call into your calendar. Cortana also works with Outlook and Office 365 to pull information from the web and emails so your contact information is always up to date. This can save you a lot of time.
Google Smart Reply
If you’ve been using Gmail on your mobile device, you may have noticed an important change — When you reply to a client or lead, Google will suggest pre-made emails for you to use. Gmail notes your previous responses to clients and auto-creates a similar one. However, this won’t work for complex emails—Only for brief emails arranging a meeting time, etc. This service provides several options, so you can pick the one that makes the most sense and sounds like it came from you.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a handy email management tool that lets you use automation, advanced A/B testing, analytics, and much more. A/B testing is useful when you aren’t sure what email subject line to use. Plus, you can chart your email success rate, and how to improve it. MailChimp is most famous for creating surveys and polls that you can send to gauge interest in almost anything. For companies that want to use a specific approach, this is a great service to try. Don’t use it too often, or you may annoy your recipients.
Microsoft Office 365 Group Emails
Office 365 Groups helps you create teams based on your relationship to projects and other employees. You can add and update team lists as you choose to. One of the best advantages to this flexible setup is the ability to share data. Group provides a shared inbox and calendar in Outlook so you can carry on conversations and send emails to the entire Group automatically. It’s a great way to coordinate team marketing activities, and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Mad Mimi for Newsletters
Mad Mimi is a popular email marketing tool to create, send and track newsletters. If you regularly send newsletters, then it’s important to use a system to ensure quality, and track results. Mad Mimi is a great place to go for these capabilities.
Hiver for Brand Emails
If you don’t use Office 365 but still want to coordinate a marketing team, Hiver turns Gmail into a shared email service. You can coordinate tasks and assign client emails to various team members. It also offers tracking software so you can see conversations and responses over time and locate any weak spots.
Constant Contact for Templates
Today, the appearance of your emails is more important than ever before. An email needs to stand out, but not be too flashy. It should draw attention, but not look like an advertisement. And if you don’t have the coding skills, then building an email from scratch can be a big challenge. Constant Contact provides pre-made email templates for a variety of different messages to ensure that your emails look great on desktop and mobile devices – It’s a great tool if you don’t have email templates of your own.
Hemingway for Sending Concise Emails
People don’t have a lot of time to read emails, especially from brands they aren’t familiar with. This means you must use words effectively. We’ve covered design, but for help using the right text, you may want to try Hemingway. This simple web app scans your text and provides edits for easier consumption.
Raven URL for Analytics
If you want to track your email ROI, it’s time for analytics. Raven is a good choice because it works with Google Analytics URL Builder to show where visitors come from, when they visit your website, and when they open your email messages. See what impact your emails make when it comes to CTAs (calls to action) and conversion rates.
Let us know if any of these tools worked for you. And, if you have questions about email marketing, reach out to us. Alliance Technology Partners provides a variety of IT solutions to businesses in Chesterfield. Contact us at (314) 391-9888 or info@alliancetechpartners.com to learn more.
