Guest Post

Email marketing is more than important today. So many tools for email marketing are available on the market; how will you choose the best one?

We give you full insight into the most powerful tools that bring some great innovations and allow you to have completely customer-oriented email marketing campaign. You have certainly heard about Mailchimp. You might use it as well. However, it may not be the best tool for your small business.

Here are the most effective alternatives to Mailchimp that give you more options and help you grow your business.

1. Omnisend

Omnisend represents all-in-one email and marketing tool for online sellers who want to create campaigns in minutes, engage with audience with some great solutions and create automation flows that target subscribers with ultimate segmentation.

Omnisend is the only tool on this list that actually offers very dynamic elements for keeping your customers engaged. From discount giftboxes and scratch cards in email messages, to Wheel of Fortune email capture, your customers will stay interested in what you have to offer.

With Omnisend, you can build sophisticated omnichannel marketing automation workflows that incorporate a variety of channels into the mix to create a unique omnichannel experience for each customer. Easy scaling means that Omnisend grows with your brand, enabling you to do more for your customers sooner.

Omnisend Pricing

This tool offers plans that are based on the amount of subscribers, including a free plan that allows you to send up to 15,000 emails per month. You can get a Standard plan for only $16 per month and has add-on modules so you can build your own customized plan.

2. Drip

Drip puts the focus on effective workflows that allow simple automation of email campaigns. Clear channels of communication give you options to compose messages, headers, footers and other details for effective visual workflows.

Drip is made to provide best options for people who are just starting out with email automation and marketing. If you’re in a rapid development phase in your business, it might be better to choose a tool that scales better.

Drip Pricing

Plans within Drip are completely based on the number of subscribers. Up to 2500 subscribers are covered with the Basic plan at the price of $49. The Pro plan is perfect for 5000 subscribers and you can get it for $99.

3. SmartrMail

Simplicity is the main thing about SmartrMail. Automated email sequences and very simple email capture popups are perfect for creating you own segments dedicated to the specific audience. Segment your audience according to shopping behavior, profile data and special preferences.

SmartrMail has a very visual platform which makes it easier to understand for beginners. However, this tool lacks a lot of the more advanced features that other tools on this list have as a standard.

For those who need just basic email automation functionalities, SmartrMail might be a good choice.

SmartrMail Pricing

With this tool, you can use any plan for 15 days for free. After that initial period, you are able to get the Basic plan for $29 per month, or the Advanced plan for $99, or the Enterprise plan for $1999 per month. The options are numerous and they depend on your business size.

4. SendinBlue

As one of the better visual builders on this list, SendinBlue allows you to create automated email campaigns including SMS in the mix. This tool is great for those who need simplicity and don’t want fancier features.

Their email builder it a bit limited, however it’s one of the best email builders I’ve seen yet. Automated funnels are there to give you answers about user behavior every time you want to create automated campaigns.

SendinBlue Pricing

With SendinBlue, it is not all about subscribers. It is all about number of emails. You can have unlimited number of subscribers and you can still have a free plan. It is limited to 300 email per day. A more advanced Lite plan is available for $25 per month and you can send up to 40,000 emails. Other plans are tailored for a larger number of emails where daily limits are lifted.

5. Klaviyo

With more than effective features, Klaviyo is there to offer some great email automation possibilities. Users are able to create email capture popups, automated workflows and segmentation.

Klaviyo offers the whole package, much like Omnisend. However, the one thing that tends to make many small business owners turn away from Klaviyo is their pricing.

Klaviyo Pricing

As the most expensive tool on the list, Klaviyo is both good and bad.

You have to invest more money, but the options you get are quite effective. The free plan is made for 250 contacts and up to 500 emails per month. After that, the prices jump significantly. For 1001 subscribers, the price is $75 per month. If you have a larger list of subscribers, and another plan covers 2001 and more subscribers for $125/month.

Wrap up

When searching for a new email marketing tool, it’s important to do your research and test each tool that interests you. While all of these tools are great, they may not be great for your individual business. Depending on what you need, different tools will be better for you.

For example, Klaviyo and Omnisend are the most advanced and feature-rich tools on this list. Omnisend and SendinBlue have the most user-friendly interfaces. For price point, it depends on how many subscribers you have because some tools scale disproportionately with the amount of contacts you add.

You just need to look into them and choose what’s ultimately best for you. Hopefully, this article has proved as a great launching pad to get started.

About the Author

Whitney Blankenship is a Content Marketing Manager for Omnisend. When not writing awesome content, Whitney is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, ecommerce, and social media trends. Obsessed with pop culture, art, and metal. Powered by coffee. Fastest Googler in the West. Follow on Twitter.

Marketing automation for most people probably regards e-mail marketing. But the newsletter is not the only way to use automatic actions for better timing and personalization. Among them, we can list web push notifications – messages that show up when an Internet user visits browser (not necessarily a particular page). Only one click leads a consumer to a subscription of web push notification, which can be extremely successful compared to other forms. On the market, you’ll find a wide range of tools, and in the following article, we’d like to present one of them – PushPushGo.

PushPushGo lets you send mass and target campaigns as well as create scenarios. Therefore you’ll get the holistic approach on web push notifications and be able to send any kind of campaign. Moreover, you can track and analyze user’s behaviors on your site, thanks to this platform. The details are crucial when it comes to online tools so more on that you can read below.

PushPushGo: offers every kind of web push notification you might need

Web push notifications, which you can create in an online tool PushPushGo, can be used in many ways for marketing purposes. For e-commerce, you can use it as a notification about special discounts or abandoned carts. Every company can see its potential when it comes to content distribution, as it’s an excellent alternative for e-mail marketing – let’s face it, people are already overwhelmed with tons of e-mails. Web push notifications can be your brand’s chance to get noticed by its audience. The most advantageous is that the system gathers data regarding website visitors for better targeting. Therefore, you can create campaigns with relevant content and send them to the right group of your customers.

Some of the main features of PushPushGo include:

• Mass Web Push Campaigns
• Interest-based Segmentation
• Behavioral Data-based Segmentation
• ABX Campaigns
• Domain Notifications
• Marketing Automation
• Advanced Integrations
• Export Subscribers
• CSV Exports
• Time Zones

How does it work?

1. Sign up and start a PushPushGo account.
2. Paste script on your site (you’ll find the code and the instruction on the PushPushGo platform).
3. Configure a sign-up form (choose creatives and an appealing text to attract your website’s visitors).
4. Create an automation scenario based on your customer’s needs and behaviors.
5. Build a subscriber database.
6. Send mass or targeted campaigns (compose content and select images, plan campaign and choose your target audience).

Pros & Cons

Pros

• intuitive creator with a preview of the notification and the option to send it to yourself,
• easy installation on the website,
• 6 layouts for sign-up form,
• customer service at the highest level. Support 24h/7 and a dedicated account manager,
• integrated with: MailChimp, GetResponse, Freshmail, Mailer Lite, Mad Mini, Splio,
• the possibility of custom integration after contacting PushPushGo team,
• GDPR ready.

Cons

• only three languages versions: English, Spanish and Polish,
• doesn’t have a mobile app, although there’s a responsive web design for mobile browsers,
• PushPushGo doesn’t provide a plugin to Shopify (it’s integrated with Shoplo though).

• Send mass and target push campaigns, create scenarios, track and analyze user behaviors with @PushPushGo pushpushgo.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

PushPushGo provides few types of campaigns, so you can use one tool for all web push notifications you want to send. Moreover, it’s essential that it’s GDPR ready so no worries about protecting your customers’ data. You can try it for 14-days free.

What use is a skill if you cannot show it to people? How can a business grow without reaching the right customers? The point we’re coming at, is that an organization’s or a professional’s success rate has a lot to do with the way they advertise themselves. Without the right tools and the right words, even Google wouldn’t have the iconic status it has today.

When it comes to advertising, in addition to monitoring what to say and how, another aspect where keen attention should be paid is – where. You wouldn’t expect to find a toilet-soap advertisement displayed in a restaurant! In other words, knowing where to advertise is also crucial. And nothing has better reach in the modern world than social media. Now what is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of social media? You guessed it right – Facebook!

So add all that we said above and what do you get – advertising on Facebook. Want to know how you can ace it?

Catvertiser – Smarter Facebook advertising!

Noticed the attractive little boxes lined up in Facebook sidebars? Or the occasional post that promotes a new brand of shoes? Well, Facebook has become quite a huge platform for advertising; and rightfully so, more than half of the world’s population stays glued to it for the larger part of their day. Getting people’s attention on Facebook is probably the quickest way to reach out to them. But that isn’t a secret anymore is it! With so many people trying to market so much stuff on the one platform, aren’t things bound to become a little too repetitive and boring? Well, not if you have Catvertiser by your side.

Catvertiser is an online tool that lets you automate the creation, management, and reporting of your ad campaigns on Facebook. It lets you automatically boost your hottest content based on specified requirements. Along with that, you get to analyze in-depth statistics and track goal conversions of your ads, thanks to Catvertiser’s integration with Google Analytics. The best feature of the tool is its simple and user-friendly ad creator which lets you upload commercials from an Excel file in bulk. This in turn saves your time and effort and lets you generate multiple ads faster.

Some other great features of Catvertiser include:

• Lets you display up to 5 products in one advertisement
• Based on the CPA model so you pay only for the real effects of your campaigns
• Drives better results by letting you define your advertising strategy by boosting only selected type of posts
• Allows you to perform A/B tests and find out which ads are performing more effectively

In short, Catvertiser lets you do in 5 minutes what you earlier did in about 45 minutes. It lets you post hundreds of ads, automatically detects which ones are performing the best, eliminates the one performing the least, and gives you a PDF report at the end of the day. Crisp and cute!

Did you know that Catvertiser is developed by the makers of NapoleonCat? We reviewed that tool a little while ago. Check it out here.

This is how the tool works

Sign up for a free trial through the button that says “Start your free trial now!” on the homepage. You will then be prompted to connect your Facebook account with the tool to enable advertising through it. You’ll be able to control who sees your posts (you should probably select to post privately for the moment and change the setting once you figure out how everything works). Thereafter the tool will ask you for a few permissions. Now here’s a catch. We tried to grant it just one permission out of the three asked for and it didn’t let us proceed. Then we tried with granting 2 permissions (reluctantly, since we wanted to just check the tool out initially and not starting posting immediately), and it still wouldn’t budge. Finally we gave in and reached the dashboard (why ask people for permissions if they wouldn’t be allowed to proceed without saying “yes” anyways?)

Thereafter you should land at your dashboard and the tool will give you a quick tour of how things work. Take it! A good thing at this point is that with the trial account you get to spend $100 on creating your initial advertising campaigns. Once this limit expires, you’ll need to upgrade your account to get more.

There no learning curve involved with the tool as such so if you’re an online marketer who creates Facebook ad campaigns regularly, you’ll easy get a hang of Catvertiser.

Pros VS Cons

The pros are many and can be figured out by taking a look at the features section. The tool also includes freebie utilities like ‘catjuster’, ‘catoramic’, and ‘gridcat’ which can help you beautify your Facebook ads. To access these utilities click on the “Free Tools” label in the menu on the top right corner of the homepage.

We could spot a few tiny cons too:

• As mentioned above, the permissions section doesn’t make sense. It would be better to term it as notification and not ask users to select what they wish to allow.
• Once you go to any functionality from the left hand panel, coming back to your Dashboard isn’t straightforward. Clicking on “Dashboard” won’t do. Instead you’ll have to click on the Catvertiser icon on the top left corner of the tool interface. We think this is a bug. Maybe the creators can clarify.

• Create, Manage, Analyze your Facebook ad campaigns better with @CatvertiserCom catvertiser.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

Overall, Catvertiser is a good tool for online marketers. People who’ve never created ads on Facebook before might find it a little daunting though. None-the-less, with the right improvements, Catvertiser might prove to be better at Facebook advertising than Facebook’s in-built advertising module itself.

The act of supporting executives and managers in making strategies and decisions based upon defining, gathering, analyzing and distributing intelligence assessment, forecasts of behavior or recommended course of action regarding a product, competitor, customers or some aspect of the environment is called competitive intelligence.

Learning about what’s happening in the business outer world so that you can compete better and beat your competitors. Competitive intelligence is one of the most ethical and legal practice where the focus is on the environment external to the business. The process of getting information and transform it into intelligence and using it in decision making.

When it comes to online ad campaigns discovering insights and trends can be a difficult task if done manually. And this task can be handled more efficiently by machines, saving time and human efforts. Utilizing competitive intelligence for developing an ad campaign can be of great profits. The various details like the kind of campaign and what’s working where can help one to ensure success of the strategy you would be using for your advertisement campaigns.

One of the most used web application utilizing competitive intelligence is Whatrunswhere.com, using this application you probably would discover several new sources to route traffic to your website or application so as to more efficiently monetize your advertising campaigns and to know what strategies are being used by competitors .

How to Use Whatrunswhere.com?

Whatrunswhere.com has wonderful and simple user interface and also has tracking capabilities across MSN Content Network, AdBlade, Quigo or Adsonar, Pulse360, Google Adwords Content Network and many others totaling to 18 display networks and 6 text ad networks. What runs where allows you to search for banners as well as the text ads. All you have to do is select the networks from the given list, the timeline for which you want the search to be performed and the keyword to be included.

Large Amount of Data and Ad research

Whatrunswhere.com offers a wide and extensive variety of data which is current and it keeps recording almost each and every aspect of the market to show what is in trend currently. Covering 15 countries on text, display and mobile advertisement trends and around 90 ad networks they manage to maintain the quality of their service very well. Using Whatrunswhere.com one can be sure to know what exactly the trend is in a specific country or a location and accordingly plan their advertising strategies.

New and Existing Traffic Sources

There is a huge list of sources which are used to generate the data by Whatrunswhere.com these include Tribal Fusion, BuySellAds, Rubicon, Google/Doubleclick , ValueClick, 47 Media, AdBrite and many more. WhatRunsWhere even keeps a check on the latest new sources of traffic as currently Facebook is the largest source from where people can drive in traffic to their websites, blogs or apps but who knows the trend may change any day and just to be safe and keep tracking the traffic source and the change in the trends.

Text and Banner Advertisements

Text Advertisements and Banner Advertisements both can be looked for as I said earlier you can select whether you want to look for text ads or banner ads for your keyword and press the button accordingly. You can select a banner size like 300*250, 250*250 or 728*90 and so on. You can also select from many networks like Google Image Ads, Adsdaq, Zedo, Tribal Fusion, Burst Media and more. Selecting the timeline within which you want the banner ad. Press the search button and you’ll get flooded with relevant results.

Domain Profiling

Checking out the traffic sources, Ad Servers Relationships, Text Ads used and Banner Ads used for the last thirty days on your competitor’s website is one of the coolest feature I came across on this website and it’ll be helpful to you in cutting down the competition and monetize your website properly. The Text and Banner Advertisement details can be exported and you can work on them even when you are offline.

Getting the Most out of WhatRunsWhere

You’ll be amazed to know that they offer a trial for 1$ for 7 days. Now to make the most in your trial period I would advise you to have a list of at least the top competitors and the products which are being promoted in your marketplace. You’ll be able to find a lot of data about the traffic sourse, landing pages and advertisements and you may have an advertisement ready within these seven days based on this data and who knows it may turn out to be profitable and you would like to keep the membership.

Plans and Pricing

Priced at 249$ for a month, WhatRunswhere is an amazing service which would help you learn and chalkout your advertising strategies. You can also go for monitoring and report changes feature for $229 a month.

Customer Support

They Offer customer support via chat and email. The response from the customer support team is quick usually though being a basic or trial customer you’ll have to wait for some time for your queries to be answered. On the other hand if you are a premium customer you’ll get an answer soon through a dedicated service line specially for a premium user.

• Create Amazing Campaigns and Strategies Using The Competitive Intelligence Tool @whatrunswhere WhatRunsWhere.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Drawbacks

As nothing in this world is perfect! WhatRunsWhere has some drawbacks too. It comes up with a lot of data and you’ll have to figure out yourself what is going to work for you and it may be puzzling at times. Secondly, it may appear heavily priced to some.

WhatRunsWhere is a tool which is designed well to give you the desired result. You can be sure that while you’re using this service you’ll come up with a wonderful advertisement strategy for your product the next time you design one. It’ll be profitable and would allow you to make a well informed decision based on the data generated by this application. So now if you want to kill out your servers with heavy traffic and more profits all you need to do is try out Whatrunswhere and I am sure you’ll love the results.