Email Marketing is an integral part of consistently communicating with new and existing customers. Remaining in communication with clients is a great way to build credibility and trust for your business. With all the benefits of email marketing platforms, there are numerous platforms company’s can use to blast out these emails to said customers. Below, we analyze the pros and cons of the four most popular email marketing platforms!
MailChimp
Link: https://mailchimp.com/
Pros:
- Mail Chimp is one of the most reputable and deliverable email marketing services available. They do an incredible job of ensuring your emails will not end up in your customer’s SPAM boxes, as well as give you an easy to use interface and dashboard. Compared to other services, MailChimp is one of the easiest to use.
- On top of Mail Chimp’s simple usability, this email marketing platform is known for their simple yet appealing template and design capabilities. Additionally, Mail Chimp is known for their reasonable pricing, as well as their wide array of integrations. When building email marketing campaigns, the ability to integrate with other apps is key in order to customize your campaign to your business.
Cons:
- A major negative that Mail Chimp has is that they are constantly improving their product, which in turn leads to frequent updates. The constant improving can lead to some confusion due to the fact the dashboard can operate a certain way one day, and look entirely different the next.
- MailChimp can be great for beginner’s in regards to setup and data pulling. However, if you wanted to go in and change or customize this, you’ll find it can be rather difficult. Changing all of the defaults and data requires you to find them on second screens and specific workflows. For the everyday user, you will never need to worry about this, yet if you’re looking to get extremely specific you might run into problems.
Constant Contact
Link: https://www.constantcontact.com
Pros:
- Constant Contact is a great tool for novice level email marketers, due to its customization flexibility coupled with their great template library. Additionally, they offer a very generous free trial period (60 days) which gives the user plenty of time to decide if their platform works best for their business.
- On top of Constant Contact’s easy to use interface, it also provides top notch security which in turn leads to a zero-tolerance approach to spammers. Constant Contact puts a lot of time and effort into making sure their platform is never compromised by spammers or individuals who are buying mass email lists (to spam others).
Cons
- A huge negative when it comes to Constant Contact is that it can be considered quite overpriced for the service it actually provides to you. Not only is Constant Contact pricey, but it is somewhat challenging to cancel. They hook you in with the extended trial period but do effectively make it hard end your account with them.
- Another downside of Constant Contact is their customer service. Unfortunately, there are quite the amount of complaints concerning the email marketing platform’s customer service (or lack thereof).
Active Campaign
Link: https://www.activecampaign.com
Pros:
- Active Campaign is a great tool for novice email marketers due to its great user interface and intuitive design. Essentially, you do not need any experience or training of email marketing automation platforms to be able to effectively utilize Active Campaign.
- On top of their simple interface, Active Campaign is very reasonably priced. For such a simple yet effective email marketing tool, Active Campaign is one of the most logical choices for most small business’ looking to improve their marketing efforts.
- Not only is Active Campaign an email building tool, one of its key differentiators is the fact it is also a useful CRM and sales tool!
Cons:
- Despite being extremely easy to use, Active Campaign definitely lacks top notch CRM and email building. The email builder itself is almost too primitive and feels slightly outdated for 2017. Additionally, the CRM is very confusing to navigate and fully optimize.
- Another big down side of Active Campaign is that they a very limited in regards to native integrations. The platform does not have any integrations with third party tools and while they do have over 300 apps and extensions, most of them have additional and ongoing costs attached with them.
Emma
Link: https://myemma.com/
Pros:
- Emma is a relatively new platform with some great and effective features. Firstly, Emma has some beautifully design mobile friendly templates which are universally appealing. On top of this, Emma has some very useful and intricate advanced automation features which really help customize your business’ experience.
- Another great upside of Emma is very easy to import lists, as well as incorporating a great customer support system. Emma really helps you cut time out of the whole setup process that revolves around email marketing.
Cons:
- Emma does appear to be quite lacking in the entire realm of tracking and following email analytics, which assist you in getting a better feel for effectiveness. The lack of in depth analytics can be a turn off for some businesses.
- In addition to not having advanced analytics features, Emma is also a costlier option compared to a few of the aforementioned email marketing systems.
