Email marketing tools: a sales enablement success story

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With an estimated 4 billion users globally, email remains an effective communication channel for companies looking to connect with their customers. But in 2023, it takes more than just clicking send to maximize sales opportunities and generate business revenue from an email campaign. And that’s where email marketing tools fit in. Sharing many of the plus points of business email optimization, such as built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, email marketing tools have become another sales enablement success story.

Key providers of email marketing tools include:

• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• Hubspot
• Campaign Monitor
• Mailer Lite
• Mailjet
• SharpSpring
• Act-On
• Mailgun
• EmailOctopus
• Turtl
• Keap
• Adobe Marketo Engage

And running through the list, highlighting the essential sales enablement features on offer, shows exactly why digital tools have become so valuable in helping companies to pitch products and services to potential customers.

Analytical insight up for grabs

Mailchimp’s tagline of ‘Guess less, sell more’ neatly spells out the importance of analytics in powering a successful email marketing campaign. Analytics play a crucial role in helping companies measure the success of their email messaging, spot trends, and stay ahead. “There are two key purposes of marketing analytics – 1) to determine how well your marketing efforts are performing and 2) to determine what you can do differently,” writes Mailchimp on its website.

Being able to quantify the impact of their actions enables sales and marketing managers to make the right decisions and capitalize on audience engagement. A great example is A-B testing, a core feature of successful email marketing tools. And you can soon see why.

For example, Adobe’s Marketo Engage team is quick to point out the importance of having a crystal clear subject line. Selecting the right subject line is make or break for the success of an email marketing campaign – insight that comes directly from A-B testing. Given the choice of a creatively curious subject line or plain text that spells out succinctly what’s what and sets expectations, recipients overwhelmingly prefer the latter. Analytics report higher open rates for emails sent with concise and clearly composed subject lines.

Data science add-on

Numbers can reveal other important attributes too, such as the optimum time to launch a campaign. Sales enablement software puts companies in the digital driving seat and that includes email marketing tools. Machine learning algorithms can shine a light on when customers are most likely to make their next purchase and calculate the potential future spend – attributes of Klaviyo’s platform.

AI can also scan through campaign designs ahead of launch and provide an indication of how well the text might land with recipients. Mailchimp has a content optimizer that, according to the firm, benchmarks email content against millions of top-performing campaigns. Algorithms offer another perspective and can give early warning that content could miss the target. And that includes images and layout as well as text.

‘One size doesn’t fit all’ is an important lesson to be learned sooner rather than later. And there are multiple examples of where sales and marketing teams have used personalization options to drive revenue by boosting repeat purchase rates. Platforms such as Hubspot make it straightforward for users to tap into contact insights. Plus, many email marketing tools have integrations that can pull in data from other enterprise software.

UX

Drag-and-drop composition tools simplify the editing process. And email marketing tools will provide templates that speed up and focus campaign creation. Not everyone will want to spend time editing HTML, but some users will. Well-designed email editors will accommodate a wide range of user preferences and even allow custom coding. Products such as Mailer Lite, give users a live view to monitor changes to HTML and CSS code. And email marketing tools will also render previews to show how the final email message will appear to recipients in their inbox. There are device considerations too.

Mailjet points out that more than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. And the firm, headquartered in Paris, France, provides a gallery of responsive templates to make sure that messages look as good on a smartphone as they do on a desktop. What’s more, the platform allows colleagues to collaborate digitally on a campaign, which includes making edits and leaving comments.

Segmentation paves the way for creating emails that are more relevant. “Decide who you want to deliver your message to. And tailor your emails to speak directly to those contacts within your mailing list,” recommends the EmailOctopus team. Smart email segmentation tools allow users to adjust their message based on how frequently clients shop, how much they spend, and a whole host of other customer data.

Delivery and compliance

Other factors to pay attention to when working with email marketing tools include deliverability and having an IP address that’s viewed as trustworthy. Having a beautifully designed, crystal clear, personalized email counts for little if that message bounces or gets stuck in spam. It’s important that platforms are configured to make sure that emails arrive in customer inboxes. And there’s also compliance to consider. Email marketing tools will assist with GDPR and other privacy regulations – for example, by recording that customers entered on the mailing list have given consent. Platforms will also support unsubscribe functionality.

Email proves that age is just a number. It may not be the newest kid on the block, but powered with a suite of analytics and creative tools, email campaigns can radically improve company profits. Email marketing tools are another sales enablement success story.