Selecting an Email Campaign Platform

Which one should I use? Luckily, the tools that we need to start paving our way to email marketing success are largely free or low-cost to use. Your first order of items is selecting an email campaign platform. There are many to pick from. Here are a few that may make sense for you.

• Marketing Automation - Sell More Stuff | MailChimp

  MailChimp is likely your best solution. It's perfectly free and will remain free for many users until you cross the threshold of a couple thousand subscribers. Thereafter, it's still affordable, starting at just $10/month. MailChimp integrates beautifully with Shopify, Squarespace, Wordpress, and many more with integrations such as analytics and CRM. Their support is top notch. There's a reason I'm listing them as number one.

• Constant Contact

  You've likely heard of Constant Contact. This platform is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing platforms in the world; used by many organizations. It also offers intuitive, easy set up with access to training videos and world-class support. They might even do seminars in your neighborhood through networking groups. Free, however, they are not. Constant Contact will start your journey at $20/month up to 500 subscribers. It gets higher from there.

• AWeber

  AWeber is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the entire world. They offer a toolbox of features for small and medium-sized businesses to manage their email marketing. AWeber connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress with ready-to-use email templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights. At the same price point as Constant Contact, AWeber offers a trial period with a $19/month commitment up to 500 subscribers with increased costs as your list grows.

• GetResponse

  GetResponse is a very popular email marketing solution that often comes up in online marketing demonstrations. This system also caters to the beginner, with easy setup. GetResponse comes with some amazing marketing automation tools which allow you to create smart automated campaigns. It also comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, tracking, and autoresponders, like the other solutions. Their pricing starts at $15/month up to 1,000 subscribers, and onward from there. So a bit less expensive than our 2nd and 3rd solution, but still higher than my first pick, MailChimp.

• ActiveCampaign

  ActiveCampaign started their platform as an email marketing automation system and eventually added CRM and sales. It comes with all the tools you will need to be a savvy email marketing pro. ActiveCampaign comes with a beautiful email template editor and mobile friendly signup forms. It allows you to segment contacts based on their actions, location, behavior, and social data. It can also fetch additional data about your contacts using only their email address. Like the others, it integrates effortlessly with many third party platforms including WordPress. Pricing is just a little bit different. ActiveCampaign starts their offerings at $17/month at 1000 subscribers, however the next price point of $49 will get you custom domains, custom branding, 25 users for sales tracking and BONUS ** you can also send SMS messages to your contacts for follow up on campaigns.

• Emma

  For comparison's sake, we can take a look at Emma. Emma is a beautiful and powerful email marketing system that boasts big brands as their clients, such as the city of Philadelphia, the University of South Carolina, and the YMCA. Their pricing, however, starts at $89 per month and targets more established brands with university editions, franchise editions, and even non-profit editions.

Choosing Your Niche

The key to email marketing is defining the area you want to become an absolute authority on. It can be anything; you might be selling information on how to do something, or you might be providing information that leads people to purchase your products. Either way, the key to success is realizing that you are not in the business of selling "stuff," you're in the business of growing distribution channels. Example: you might think that Apple is in the business of selling electronics. While that's a true statement, they are actually in the business of real estate and expanding their digital distribution channels. Their value is in their loyal customer base that is willing to explore everything they send to them. So if you haven't got a niche already, then explore some ideas on how to find the perfect niche to harvest leads.

• Trending Product Niches in 2019

  If you're not sure where to start, then take some advice. Trending e-commerce niches can give some insight into what the hot buttons are in online commerce and email campaign open rates. Check out this list on Ecomdash for their top 7 categories to peak subscriber interest.

• Some Tips From Shopify on How to Use Niche Marketing to Grow Your Business

  My advice to any new business owner is to shoot for the donut hole and not the donut. What that means, is specialize in something and don't exhaust yourself in multiple product niches. Identify what you do really well and dominate it. Shopify gives us some great advice here in that exact same vein. Once you’ve discovered your niche and built your target audience or tribe, you’ll be able to redirect your efforts towards reaching wider audiences and growing your business.

• 9 Niche Marketing Examples

  There are many businesses that understand their niche and dominate their space. This is a business concept that is foreign to most business owners because they are creative minds that drift from idea to idea like a wide open body of water. However, when surrounded by the right team and the right idea, creative minds can be focused and niche marketing evolves into powerful brand messaging that can build a loyal audience in a very short time.

Setting Up a Landing Page

Though a full blown website that has claimed its space and is indexed by the 3 major web browsers is a better asset to own, you might not be there yet. Landing pages can start this process for you and serve as a lead funnel for email leads. Take a look at my top 5 recommendations for building a landing page. Two of my recommendations are CMS platforms for full-blown websites. I work in both of these environments and think they're worthy of your consideration.

• Leadpages Landing Page Creator & Lead Gen Software

  Here is my number one recommendation IF you are wanting a landing page only with robust integrations and tools. Lead Pages is one of the fastest growing companies in the digital world and they are in my backyard, right here in Minneapolis. Also a great option for building out trackable PPC landing pages. There are many solutions here and the support by Lead Pages is world-class.

• Squarespace

  My number two recommendation is Squarespace, largely because I'm a Squarespace designer and live in this system every day. This is technically a full-blown CMS for the production of small to large websites, but they offer a host of various templates, landing page solutions and e-commerce options. With feature-rich integrations and the ability to customize completely, Squarespace is the next logical step if you're wanting to host something permanent beyond just a landing page.

• Landing Page: Create, Publish and Optimize for Free - Lander

  Lander is my third choice. They offer free trials like the others and robust integrations and features. Why would you choose Lander over Lead Pages or Squarespace? The answer lies mostly in personal preference and your comfort level in design and customization. Lander is designed to get you up and rolling in just minutes with very few options to lead you down rabbit holes. They know the landing pages game well and their focus is to deliver conversions to simple, informative design. Their small business plan (if paying annually) is extremely affordable. Take a look...

• Unbounce

  I have clients that have been using this system for some time and they really like it. They compete in the Lead Pages and Lander space with a simplistic design focused on conversion to form fills - exactly what you're looking for in email marketing. The reason Unbounce is 4th on my list is due to their pricing strategy. Their primary market is not individuals starting on a shoe-string budget, rather companies looking for solutions to immediately bring returns on their paid campaigns.

• Webflow

  Lastly, though certainly not least, is Webflow. This is another CMS platform that I also develop on. It's beautiful and powerful and if you're familiar with Adobe InDesign, it's like designing in the browser to deploy responsive code immediately. Is it great for landing pages? If you're looking for customization and full website features, then this tool may be a hands-down winner. You'll have to use Zapier to manage most integrations, but you can put your creative foot forward if you're brave enough, with Webflow.

Build Your List of Brand Champions

Now for the real important stuff: building your base of loyal fans. There's no single correct method to doing this but the good news is that there are plenty of vehicles for it. Some are more effective than others. Lists can build quickly with a defined marketing budget, but not everybody has that, especially when starting from the ground up. Here are some great ideas on where to start your tribe with little investment.

• Self-Liquidating Offers

  Self-liquidating offers are my number one recommendation for answering the question "how do I build an email list?" In a nutshell, this type of marketing will utilize the components we've addressed already: your niche and your landing page. From there, you'll want to identify a white paper or digital asset that offers some value to people that may be landing on your page via social media marketing (for example). If you were to spend $50 per day on a lead gen ad on Facebook that converted just 10 out of 1,000 clicks to purchase a $9.99 informational document, you would have doubled your money and just gained 10 subscribers to your email list that care about your topic. Perfect this process and increase your budget to $500 - you'll see 100 new subscribers $999 in revenue. Catch my drift. You can now call these people your tribe or brand ambassadors!

• List Building Hacks That Follow Your Self-Liquidating Offer

  If you've read the first article on self-liquidating offers, then you may be left with some unanswered questions. You've built your landing page, you've selected your niche, you've placed your ad and have some value-added assets to provide to subscribers. Now what? Read through these tips for the most important steps.

• 14 More List Building Recommendations to Deepen the Plot

  Of course, there are many ways to enhance your list growth and automation. Here's an article that lays out 14 recommendations that all have their place inside your strategy.

Automating Your Email Marketing

You've probably heard of trite old phrases like "it's all a game of numbers." This holds true in almost everything we do, and it's the single most important thing to understand when we talk about digital marketing. If you subscribe to search engine marketing of any kind for your business, you're faced with paying per click, per thousand impressions, or some other measurable metric. Email marketing is regarded as one of the most profitable marketing platforms because of its ability to land directly in front of a willing audience. But it's all about customer exhaustion and in some cases, just good timing. So let the system do the marketing for you.

• How to Use Marketing Automation and Why

  There's a lot of data that will tell us that marketing automation has the lowest cost per customer in digital marketing, but many companies haven't yet figured it out. Start your understanding of automation and its importance to your business in this quick read from Smart Insights. Any business whose owners or operators place value on their time should be looking into automation.

• Some Good Advice on Email Automation Workflows to Consider

  You may have heard of Hubspot, one of the fastest growing companies in automating various things in digital marketing land - most specifically for other businesses. Take a read through triggers and workflows, how to nurture and re-engage them. You might just find every solution you need with Hubspot.

• More Good Advice with Automation Tips for Small Businesses

  Soffront Marketing reiterates the importance of some key marketing automation tips including split-testing, personalization, and online contests.

Using Your List of Brand Ambassadors

So you've built your landing page, you have your niche or idea, you've employed some list building techniques and have automated responses. Now what? Well ideally you've managed to grow a list of responsive listeners that at least have an interest in your topics, so now you need to offer them opportunities to engage with your further.

• Using Your List to Find Customer Interests

  Constant Contact, a leader in email marketing solutions, provides some hard data on what people actually read. You can use this data to figure out what they like, what they share and if they'll keep buying.

• Why and How To Re-Engage Your Email Leads

  After you've grown your list and automated your offers to exhaustion, you'll be faced with one single question - "How do I re-engage my list?" Benchmark email shares some valuable insight on this exact topic.

• A Few More Suggestions on Staying Engaged...

  Honestly, email subscriber engagement is like going out on a date. You need to bring something new to the table, you need to drive personality, and you need to make personal connections to keep your list alive. Once in a while, you may even need to remind your date how you got here.

The Bottom Line in Email Marketing and Automation

If you've followed the advice given in this roll and taken some steps to choose platforms and topics, then you are in an elite class. Even today, in our digital word, email marketing and automation of our efforts is still a mystery to many companies and marketing managers. But truth be told, the statistics don't lie. Your most valuable customers are those that want to see what you're up to and who are willing to purchase and share your content for you while you sleep.

• Why So Few Companies Commit to Email Marketing Automation

  According to Forbes, less than 10% of companies in 2015 effectively figured these strategies out. Mostly because of the lack of time and implementation or in some people's opinions, lacking technology. You can get a glimpse of this by reading through this article but the main takeaway is that there's a whole universe just waiting to be explored.

• 6 Reasons Your Email Marketing Efforts Are Not Effective

  Entrepreneur Magazine has some ideas on why email marketing campaigns fail. After all we've been through together, I think you'll find that the common theme across the board is to identify your goals, your niche, your tools, and your process to building your list. From there, you MUST provide value-added content to keep your tribe engaged.

• An Overview of Where We Are Today, and Where You Can Be

  Lastly, but certainly not least, the data changes as quickly as your favorite jeans wear out. In 2016, marketing automation grew substantially with companies realizing ROI not seen before. With so much information to fall back on, your ability to build a business based on email marketing should be a solid one. Read these last thoughts and statistics and make the leap.

Meet The Author

• Sammy J. Koza

  Sammy is a website designer, local search Guru, and SEO specialist. As the owner and operator of Raging Bull Digital, his strengths have largely been focused on helping small to medium-sized businesses gain search-ability in their digital space. He is also the co-founder and chief marketing officer for WarPaint International Beauty Agency. Having worked with national liquor brands, service companies, retail companies, authors, jewelers, artists and more, Sammy has a solid grasp of how many business owners are being found and how their content strategy affects their bottom line.

• Raging Bull Digital

  Raging Bull Digital is a boutique website design company. We offer website designs starting from $2500 for small to medium-sized businesses. We also specialize in social media advertising, SEO, local search, blog creation, and writing.

• Raging Bull Digital - Facebook

  Raging Bull Digital, Minneapolis, Minnesota on Facebook.

• SammyJ Koza (@SammyJKoza) - Twitter

  The latest Tweets from SammyJ Koza (@SammyJKoza). Digital Marketer. SEO Specialist | Website Design. Co-Founder WarPaint International Beauty Agency. Minneapolis

• Warpaint International Beauty Agency

  As Co-Founder of WarPaint International Beauty Agency, I'm constantly looking for new marketing techniques in the beauty sector. Email marketing and social media are a large part of how we operate our business. The website is largely designed as a series of call-to-action driven landing pages.

• Bublup

  I made this roll with a new app called Bublup. If you like the way it looks and want to make one too, you can check them out here.