One of the first major marketing decisions a company makes is how it will reach out to customers via email, a powerful owned marketing channel that is important to get correct.
Although there is nothing wrong with transitioning from a lighter provider to a more robust one as your business grows, switching to a new platform down the road can be time consuming and difficult. If that’s something that you are currently considering and need help with, feel free to contact us.
Let's take a look at some e-mail marketing platforms to fit your individual business's size, budget, and needs.
I’m at a small business or a startup, relying on e-commerce or lead generation, and we’re just starting to do email marketing.
Generally, the most popular choices here are MailChimp or Constant Contact.
We suggest MailChimp for its ease of use and simple integrations with other systems you may want to use (such as SalesForceIQ, Survey Monkey, Shopify, Squarespace, and more).
Additionally, while Constant Contact offers a free 60-day trial, after which rates start at $20 a month, MailChimp is free so long as you’re under 2,000 subscribers and have yet to send 12,000 emails in a given time frame. This allows you to build your initial list and e-mail strategy on your own timeframe before you start paying.
For a more in-depth breakdown of MailChimp vs. Constant Contact, head over to the Capterra Blog.
My mid-sized sales based business is growing and I rely heavily on lead generation.
A good choice is HubSpot. While pricing can be more expensive than simpler systems, the benefits are many: landing page creation, some of the most robust and easy to activate integrations with CRMs like SalesForce, powerful lead scoring tools, email nurturing, and best-in-class analytics.
If you are moving into HubSpot we highly suggest having a full-time performance marketing person on board or hiring a firm like Good & Gold to work with you, or both.
If you’re new to HubSpot or looking to add it or switch over, let us know.
My large business relies heavily on lead generation and nurturing and needs a customizable solution.
If this is you, Marketo may be a good choice. While the learning curve is much steeper than HubSpot or MailChimp, the ability to customize your workflows, nurture streams, and how you handle leads and integrations makes Marketo a great solution for larger, more complex businesses.
Be aware that having a Marketo administrator in-house or working very closely with an agency is a must for using the software given its complexity.
My company relies solely on e-commerce and I’m interested in customer segmentation and predictive marketing.
Bizzy is worth a look, due to its powerful suite of segmentation, coupon, and optimization tools, as well as its close integration with Shopify.
We have a long-standing relationship with Bernardo 1946, partnering to drive success on their digital marketing channels with excellent results and ROI. We recently revamped their email marketing channel—read on to see how we knocked it out of the park!
In less than 3 months, we increased Bernardo’s email campaign-driven revenue by 106%! The brand was looking for an email strategy to increase engagement and revenue within Klaviyo. By designing an email system that reflected their sophisticated, timeless brand and leveraged thoughtful subscriber segmentation, we built an immersive ecommerce experience that benefits both the consumer and the brand.
We developed a multi-channel paid media strategy around seasonality, allowing us to deliver a return on ad spend close to 1,000% even in historically slower months. Bernardo needed to stand out in an overwhelmingly crowded footwear market, drawing attention to the quality and craftsmanship of its heritage brand while also appealing to modern digital shoppers. The brand was also hoping to drive consistent seasonal revenue, with a focus on conversions for both iconic best-sellers and newer footwear designs.
Impressed? We are too! To browse our services, see our certifications, and learn more about how our work can help take your brand to the next level, click here.
Keeping your audience both engaged and compliant is one of the most important keys to a successful email marketing program. Doing so ensures you’re reaching people that are interested to hear (and purchase) from you. There are three main steps to maintaining a compliant and engaged audience:
Re-engagement should happen continuously, but the exact timing will depend on your audience size, email campaign cadence, and outside factors. In this article, we’ll go over best practices for these three very important steps!
When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a very strict privacy and security law passed by the European Union, was announced, marketers everywhere scrambled to ensure they were compliant. Soon after, California followed suit with the California Consumer Privacy Act (‘CCPA’), which is a similar regulation to GDPR. It’s rare, but now that we know how to refresh consent, we’re prepared for if anything similar happens in the future.
It’s recommended to regularly check-in on marketing regulations changes so you aren’t stuck flat on your feet when a change in consent regulations does happen.
Depending on the specific standards you are subject to, like the GDPR, the exact steps you need to take will vary. You may need to send a re-permission campaign (getting people to give their consent again), maintain a double opt-in standard, or store information securely. You’ll want to check the laws that are relevant to your audience, which depends on factors like your industry and where in the world your customers are making purchases from.
Taking these steps is important not only because it’s the law, but because at the end of the day, you want to ensure you’re targeting people who are interested in hearing from you and doing business with you. This is essential to using email as a relationship-strengthening tool with your audiences instead of it becoming a nuisance.
Unengaged audience members drag your KPIs down – it’s a simple fact. Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to, you guessed it, re-engage your unengaged audience members. Here are a few key guidelines we follow when running these campaigns for our clients:
Keep It Simple:
Grab Attention:
Send Only to Un-Engaged Members:
There are a few ways to go about this, and your platform is a great place to start. At Good & Gold, we use MailChimp and Klaviyo, both of which have great templates for creating an email and a relevant segment as a jumping off point.
Your final step will be to archive (or “sunset”) users that don’t engage, even after you send that super-enticing last campaign. Those who do not interact with emails for a prolonged period of time are unlikely to start engaging again and will drag down your KPIs, so it’s best to part ways on good terms! Some platforms have this worked into the automated flow, and some require a manual process – you’ll want to check with your specific platform for their recommended best practices on how to do this.
Remember, staying compliant and maintaining an engaged audience results in a happy audience that’s more likely to make purchases – and that means a happy marketing team and a growing business! It’s a win-win…win!
Over the past year, we've had the privilege of working with LOTS of wonderful clients on their email marketing programs. And though email marketing strategy is about much more than design, we love the process of developing and executing great design systems for email. For us, the challenge of creating something eye-catching and compelling within a notoriously restrictive system is hard to beat. Scroll on for a gallery of email templates we created this year.
In many cases, less is definitely more for email design. We've found that simple and consistent emails using native HTML render perfectly on all clients and convert well.
👍 Pros of simple templates:
We use highly branded emails to leverage well-established and recognizable brand systems. These often require a bit more pre-production work, as they typically require lots of custom assets to make an impact.
👍 Pros of branded templates:
This year, we've also designed some great templates that use a mix of native HTML and custom assets. In our opinion, this is a great approach, as it allows us to showcase strong brand systems without losing the flexibility afforded by HTML.
As digital marketers, we navigate technology changes all the time. For example, now that Apple has released new privacy features in iOS 15 and Mac OS Monterey like Mail Privacy Protection, we know it's essential to understand how those features will impact email marketing holistically.
Will Apple’s update make tracking harder? Sure. Will it make your emails any less great? Nope. Since we recently answered your SEM questions, let’s explore Apple Mail Privacy Protection and ways to prepare for it.
If you're unfamiliar with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection update, it's basically a privacy feature that hides your IP address to block a sender from tracking your location, what you do online, and seeing if you've opened their email. It also prevents a sender from seeing the device you use to open their emails.
While this sounds like a metrics nightmare for email marketers, privacy updates like these are generally positive in the long run, making it important to adapt.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection features only affect Apple Mail users, and those who’ve toggled the feature within the Mail app. So, for now, you can still track anyone using the Gmail app or others outside of the Apple ecosystem.
Depending on how many of your subscribers exercise their privacy, the impact may vary. This update will, however, cause metrics like open rates, clicks per unique open rate, geolocation, device usage, or anything else captured by IP address to become less reliable or inflated.
Beyond reporting, Apple’s privacy update could change how you manage segments, resends, A/B tests and automations. For example, automations or resends triggered by non-openers will be a no-go for people using Mail Privacy Protection. Similarly, A/B tests based on open rates like subject lines will become slightly skewed for these users. But remember: open rates aren’t going away. They’re just becoming a little more mysterious or inflated. Metrics like clicks—not clicks per unique visitor—continue to be reliable.
The best place to start is taking a look to see how many of your subscribers use Apple Mail. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do that, here’s how in Mailchimp, and here’s a reporting refresher for Klaviyo.
Once you have a good sense of how many subscribers are impacted, it’s time to do a little platform housekeeping to anticipate shifty metrics. At Good & Gold, we took Mailchimp’s advice to:
As daunting as this sounds (or reads), we’re approaching this as an opportunity to continue doing what we do best: create highly engaging emails that generate revenue.