By Kimberly Maceda
In the ever-evolving digital world where the competition is getting tougher and tougher by the day, compromising is never on the list of options, unless you want your competitors to soon catch up on you. For instance, email service providers have grown to be remarkable game-changers in the marketing industry. There are already countless of them in the online space, each having different enticing offerings.
While your choice of an email marketing platform highly depends on the demands and goals of your business, some important features shouldn’t be left out when you’re in the process of choosing for the best “all-in-one” platform. Whether you are a large company or a newbie in the email marketing automation universe, here are four crucial email marketing platform features you should take note of.
1. Creates Smart and Elaborate Workflows
Managing an large amount of data and deliverables, especially for large companies, is definitely not a walk in the park for marketers. Not to mention the time it would take to meet target schedules and clients’ demands.
An excellent email marketing platform should effectively deliver marketing actions through marketing automation. By automating, you can easily perform even complex business processes such as sales/marketing collaboration, project management, resource tracking, and analytics. This doesn’t just save time but also increase sales in the long run.
2. Integrates with Other Cloud-Based Services
Cloud-based technology is now being utilized to lead quantifiable enhancements in businesses, such as increasing capacity, accessing pre-built services and boosting functionality – to name a few.
This feature within an email marketing platform helps organizations send emails and keep in contact with their customers in the most reliable and cost-efficient way without having to maintain its own in-house email infrastructure. This also helps move workloads to or from the cloud, or to a different cloud, or just keep them running as desired within a shared storage. The main goal is to achieve coherence within the organization staff through an easy access to a variety of system resources.
3. Uses Simple Segmentation and Personalization Tools
No matter what platform a business makes use of, at the end of the day, its main goal is to increase sales. An outstanding email marketing platform plays an active part in its success as it helps develop the engagement with prospects and consistent buyers. It allows you to leverage data to craft personalized, targeted and exceedingly engaging content which has been proven effective in increasing the relevance of your emails. Effective segmentation and personalization will help you do this.
- Segmentation. Determining your client’s preferences, demographic, gender, transaction record or buying behavior based on your rich database could be a good reference to create highly targeted, engagement-based segments, just like secret deals and discounts.
- Personalization. This may be as simple as sending a birthday card or updating them of their fitness achievements. This is the way to go if you want to boost your client’s affinity towards your brand as you make them feel important and worth remembering.
4. Has Dynamic Features
Since a lot of people are already using smartphones to have access to various applications, it’s a must for an email service provider to be mobile-friendly. In connection with this, another valuable feature must be the ability to provide email templates that are pre-built and very much customizable. This spares your time and exempts you from crafting a newsletter from scratch, which I believe you don’t want to do regularly especially when you have a deadline to beat.
But when a challenging scenario occurs, an easy-to-access and extensive guide list could be of great help as well. That’s why it’s important that the email platform you choose is able to deliver support right on time, whether via phone, email or how-to articles.
Conclusion
Choosing the best email marketing platform might be in itself a challenging task. However, as long as you’ve got all the important requirements mentioned, you are on the right track that will eventually lead to your indomitable business success.
