As a company that just sent 4B emails on behalf of our customers over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we know how busy you’ve been over the last couple of months.
Probably busy enough that, even if you’re in the market for a new email marketing platform, you haven’t had time to take it on. We get it. There is a sea of email marketing providers to choose from, so how do you narrow the options?
One method is to trust third party reports, like MarTech Advisor’s “Top 10 Best Email Marketing Services Software Platforms for 2020” which does a lot of the work and research for you.
To whittle the field in a strategic way, MarTech Advisor prioritizes 8 must-have features of an email marketing platform. We’ll review each of these with you, offering a quick double-click on how Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns (a top 10 recommendation, we’re proud to say!) hits the mark. Consider this a personal tour of what makes us proud to serve marketers who need to send anywhere from hundreds to millions of marketing emails each month.
1. User Interface
MarTech Advisor says that “A tool with great features but a bad user experience can increase full adoption time by an entire quarter.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: A common refrain when users first log into Marketing Campaigns is that it’s refreshingly modern. There’s whitespace that gives you room to breathe, and each workflow minimizes the number of clicks necessary to get the job done, saving you time.
2. Audience Segmentation
MarTech Advisor says: “Audience segmentation radically increases the performance of email campaigns.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: Create dynamic segments of your recipients using contact data you provide as custom fields as well as engagement data that Marketing Campaigns provides based on opens and clicks. With strategic segments in-hand, you’re able to craft relevant, targeted campaigns.
Segmentation best practice tip: Segment your audience based on how engaged they are as part of your deliverability strategy. Send more to frequent openers, and consider not sending to those who haven’t opened in the past 90-180 days.
3. Email Automation
MarTech Advisor says: “Choose an email marketing service that provides email automation to save time and marketing resources.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: Getting started with email automation can be intimidating, particularly when triggers are complex and workflows are cumbersome. Marketing Campaigns makes it simple. Trigger when a contact joins a list you designate, then create a time-based drip series from one streamlined view.
4. Merge Tags
MarTech Advisor says: “This feature helps in personalizing your emails based on your audience, and facilitates segmented campaigns.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: Import data to be used with merge tags via simple CSV upload, signup forms, or with a programmatic, real-time integration with our API. Once imported, insert the data with intuitive tags to personalize subject lines and email content for each recipient.
5. Ready-made Templates and Non-technical Editor
MarTech Advisor says: “Design your own emails with an easy-to-use editor with simple drag-and-drop capabilities…[also look for] editing at the code level for detailed changes in email templates.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: With two flexible editing paths, you can choose to design visually with drag and drop editing (plus per-module HTML access) or using pure HTML with efficiency-driving features like side-by-side preview panes and live scroll synching. Bonus: We offer a gallery of free email marketing templates you can use today!
6. A/B testing
MarTech Advisor says: “A/B testing is a time-tested technique to analyze the performance of your content and make data-backed improvements.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: Create up to 6 variations of either your subject line or content, set a sample size, and tell Marketing Campaigns whether to choose the winner based on open rates or click-through rates before rolling out the winning version automatically. Magic!
A/B testing tip: When setting up your experiment, think about what metric you’re trying to influence, open rate, or click rate. Subject line tests are best for open rate improvements, and content tests are ideal for discovering how to drive more clicks.
7. Reports and Analytics Dashboards
MarTech Advisor says: “Email reports and analytics dashboards help marketers make data-oriented decisions to improve email campaign performance.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: Statistics for both one-time sends and recurring automations are at your fingertips so you can make informed optimizations. Further, data for troubleshooting delivery and understanding recipient insights like geography, device types, and more is available across your marketing and transactional email for a complete view of your recipients.
8. Low Bounce and High Delivery
MarTech Advisor says: “The last thing that your marketing team needs is for their hard-worked email designs to find their grave in recipient SPAM boxes.”
Marketing Campaigns double-click: Deliverability is core to who we are at Twilio SendGrid, so we’re glad to have saved the best feature for last. With Marketing Campaigns, you have access to dedicated IPs and custom domain sending to own your reputation, but you also benefit from our expertise (nearly 100 years of combined experience!), proven throughput, and proactive Inbox Service Provider monitoring and outreach.
That’s our quick tour of how Marketing Campaigns delivers on 8 of the most important features to consider in a new email marketing platform. Now, create a free account to experience each feature for yourself—and enjoy up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails/month.