- Know your priorities
Knowing that email marketing boasts the highest return on investment, it is a no-brainer that many businesses have decided to take full advantage of this digital marketing trend.
The environment has become more complex now and marketing tools that are intended the assisting email marketing have become abundant.
But then, not all of them are the same, so you surely don’t want to land on paying for a tool or software that’s too expensive for you. On the flip side, you don’t want to be paying for something affordable that doesn’t meet your expectations.
To balance this discrepancy, first, you need to know what your mailing priorities look like. What are the main emails that you know you will be sending often?
In accordance with the study documented by Zapier, the choice of an appropriate email marketing application for your business hinges on the specific kind of email you intend to dispatch. Which among these email categories do you anticipate utilizing? To address this variation effectively, it’s imperative to understand the nature of your mailing objectives from the outset.
If you are just newsletter-based, then choose a simple tool that caters to that. But if you’re going to send out a variety of emails, a more complex tool is also required.
- Identify your key needs
And as such, once you get clear about the main types of emails that you are going to send out to your readers, it’s time to identify your key needs.
So, for instance, if you are sending out mainly newsletters, then you already know that your key needs include design templates that are easy to manage and tweak. Do you also need a variety of templates or can you handle the design yourself?
If you’re going to send out promotional emails, then you know you need a feature for A/B testing; you may also want to consider automated segmentation.
If you’re going to send out drip emails, then automation on a variety of segmentations is a crucial part of your software.
You should also identify any needs that involve customer support for an app if you have one that’s dedicated to your business. It’s small but often overlooked.
- Shortlist a variety of apps
When you have identified your most important key needs, you can shortlist a few tools that you know have the basic functions that work for your grand plan.
To really make this work though, if you have the resources, try to build a testing team that will be handling this task of shortlisting apps for your email marketing.
Your testing team should identify all the key features from a tool or software that meet the expectations of what your emails should look like and how they should work, including what metrics you would want to measure.
Then, identify further the weaknesses and strengths of each software until you find that perfect balance between cost and benefits. After all, no single software will be perfectly suitable for all your needs, right?
Referring to the insights from the Digital Ocean study, as you pinpoint your critical requirements, it becomes essential to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of each software option. This evaluation process should continue until you attain a level of contentment with the features that meet your needs. However, it’s important to acknowledge that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and no single software will flawlessly cater to all your needs.
So, being strategic and intentional with your choice will boast the best results whilst maintaining a reasonable cost.
- Do basic testing with shortlisted apps
Now that you’ve got a pretty insight into your shortlisted apps, it’s time to do some basic testing on each one of them. First of all, you just gather your team and let everyone know that you’re about to launch testing.
Drawing from the study highlighted by Notify Visitor, the process of identifying suitable software for your requirements entails crucial steps. These include exploring the range of available choices and delving into user feedback. Subsequently, initiating preliminary tests for each software solution becomes imperative. To commence this process, assemble your team and communicate your intent to initiate testing procedures.
Then, create an email list that consists of all of your team members and send out the test emails to everyone. As for the content of the test emails?
Oh, lorem ipsum and all that basic things will do. Using a dummy email is better because then it’s clear to everyone receiving it that it is a test email. Key things to look out for include how the test email looks on desktop and mobile.
As members of your team engage or do not engage with your test email, check how the software displays data for all the categories that you care about and want to see.
- Always try out a free plan first
So, as you can see, it is important to do the actual email sending when you are testing. Most tools for email marketing will have this feature and it will be a free plan.
But then, you may think to yourself that you have only tested the software of your liking for such a short time and you still don’t know if you want to commit to it for the long haul.
That’s totally fine and a lot of people struggle with the same doubts. If that is the case, it is perfectly alright to stick to a free plan for a while until you finally feel that you can commit to the software.
Of course, during the time you’re using a free plan, your experiences are going to be limited, but if you need time to make a decision, it’s not wrong at all to do so.
