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.

A key area of operation for any company is Marketing; so much so that in most organizations, you’ll find a dedicated department devoted to it. While it may seem to be just another operation that a company performs, it can be safely said that without effective marketing, a company can never think of progressing. And with the right kind of marketing, even the most impossible situations can be turned into a victory.

When it comes to a nicely planned and executed marketing strategy, a lot of platforms and campaigns are involved over and through which a company’s brand is sold to customers. Different techniques are implemented and a number of experts are consulted to make sure no stone is left unturned. Managing all personnel and processes involved can be challenging. But if you have the help of a little genie called SalesManago, you can ace the marketing game like a pro!

SalesManago – the best marketing solution for your company!

SalesManago is an online platform that combines the potential of a number of marketing tools into one application. Email marketing, Dynamic web content, Personalized web content, Social media marketing, Online advertising, Mobile marketing, you name it and they have an easy to implement, next generation solution for it that will help you achieve outstanding sales results. SalesManago offers a complete range of automated and personalized marketing products for Ecommerce, B2C and B2B companies of all sizes in a multichannel environment, with an aim to redefine the way traditional marketing tools are used.

All marketing tools implemented by SalesManago are powered by real-time flow of customer behavioral and transactional data so that users of the application can implement any kind of marketing process they desire. With over 6000 customers in 40 countries, SalesManago is one of the best and the most innovative marketing automation platforms across the globe.

Here are a few areas in which SalesManago can be of service:

• Identification of website visitors, identification of hardware/software used to reach your website, Geolocation information, etc
• Behavioral monitoring of identified website visitors
• Automating simple actions such as alerts regarding prospect buyers’ activity sent directly to sales team
• Ability to run fully automated, complex and advanced marketing campaigns with Workflows
• Email marketing including an in-depth knowledge of what customers visiting your website are looking for
• Mobile marketing automation by monitoring in-app behavior of particular users
• Social media marketing including sourcing new contacts as well as tracking social events on your media pages
• Customer Relationship Management and 360 degree customer view
• Web Push notification solutions to reach maximum number of users

These features are merely the tip of the iceberg. SalesManago bundles many other extremely useful tools that can help you create a solid marketing strategy and emerge as a true winner.

How to use SalesManago

The best way to get a hands-on experience of the tool without paying anything or signing up for a trial is through its Demo. All you need to do is punch in some basic information and enter the demo. If you do not want to leave your real credentials here, type in dummy details and it will still work (could be counted as negative but if they had a check here it would take away the purpose of a demo).

Once you enter the demonstration, you’ll see a lot of information on the screen that is refreshed almost every second to show you the latest inputs. You’ll get to see the total number of contacts your website database has, how many of them are monitored, how many messages have been left in the past 30 days, how many contacts are active, a real-time analysis of the page views generated by clients, prospects and partners, and individual customer / company behavior profiles.

Additionally you’ll be offered a number of wizards and creators to perform various marketing related activities such as personalized banners, workflows, dynamic content tests, email creators, etc. Also a host of marketing tools will be listed in the left hand panel to let you take charge of your mobile marketing, social media marketing, Ad remarketing, campaigns, automation processes, and more. In order to understand how you can actually use the tool, the following basic steps will come handy:

1. Add monitoring code to your website
2. Import your email contacts
3. Send email or newsletter to your database
4. Set up an alert if a contact from your database visits your webpage
5. Set up automatic contact’s segmentation based on what on your website interests them
6. Set up scoring for your contacts and get alerts about the hottest leads
7. Implement contact forms to automatically monitor each new contact from your database
8. Expand your client communication with personalized content on your page
9. Set up lead nurturing program to automatically educate new contacts in your database
10. Set up automatic marketing process or marketing campaign

To comprehend each of these steps in detail, click on the Get Started button on the top right corner of the screen and access the video tutorial associated with each step. If you like what you see and what the tool does for you, logout and sign up for a 30-day trial, this time with your actual credentials.

• Rule the marketing automation circle with @SALESmanago salesmanago.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Evaluation and Final Verdict

SalesManago is an affordable and useful tool, but it is undergoing a lot of improvements. Moreover, some of its features might not work as smoothly as you expect them to. Also, you might have to pay a little extra to get your hands on features like dynamic emails. However, if you are a little patient and probably a tad forgiving, the tool can be customized to suit your needs perfectly. Plus, it has a lot of integrations.

Thus, final verdict, it’s worth at least a demo run.

With this post we’re starting a new series – short interviews with popular Web Designers, Web Developers and e-Marketers. We ask them to share their Top Web Applications they use in their every day work.

Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, and consultant (also a musician!). He worked for large brands like TechCrunch, MasterCard, Verizon, Nike and many more.
From his headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA he’s tweeting and blogging, mostly about the web.
He’s also a frequent speaker at many events, including TEDx.

Here are some tools and resources for Web Designers Brad helped to create: This Is Responsive, Styleguides.io, Mobile Web Best Practices.

Brad’s Top Web Apps

Here are the web tools Brad Frost uses on a daily basis:

• Google Apps – “for Gmail, calendar, and documents”
• Workflowy – “I’ve tried just about every to-do app, and Workflowy is the only one simple enough for me to manage and maintain”
• Harvest – “to track my time, send my invoices, and keep track of expenses”
• Rdio – “to listen to music while I’m working”
• Github – “to host my code and communicate with the community”
• Dploy.io – “to deploy my code”
• Basecamp – “to manage client communications”
• MailChimp – “to send email campaigns” read our review
• Fitbit – “to keep track of my health, eating, exercise”

• .@brad_frost Top Web Apps: @Google Apps, @WorkFlowy, @harvest, @Rdio, @github, @dployio, Basecamp by @37signals, @MailChimp and @fitbit

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Web Apps Brad is involved in

“I help with the direction of a tool called Pattern Lab, which helps web designers/developers create interface design systems.”

How does Brad find his apps?

“I follow a few accounts like Lifehacker, The Next Web, and The Verge that post about new services.”

• .@brad_frost: “I follow a few accounts like @lifehacker, @thenextweb, and the @verge that post about new services.” via @supermonitoring

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Stay tuned for the next “My Web Toolkit” post!

Hubspot is a company which develops and markets a software for inbound marketing. Founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the basic idea behind Hubspot was to implement inbound marketing instead of interruption marketing to gain customers. Inbound marketing is the method in which the customers come looking for you through social media, search engines and other resources. On the other hand interruption marketing is to advertise in Magazines, Radio, TV and through Billboards to gain customers.

User Interface

Hubspot has a very well planned and guided user interface which guides you through the whole process and helps you getting started. A summary of key metrics would come up which includes the leads, landing page activities and traffic. But to get started you’ll have to copy and paste the tracking code to your website. Hubspot in itself is a management system that will keep a track of the keywords, social media sharing and other impressions.

Call To Action Tool

Hubspot contains many tools for search engine optimization and one unique feature of this system is the call to action tool. This tool allows you to customize the graphic or menu prompts and you can change the design according to the reports generated by this tool and check on which buttons or links people click on.

Email Manager

A perfect, built in email manager which allows you to send emails to all the people on your list and you can even create segments among the list to send emails to.It allows you to manage subsciptions and also track unsubscriptions.You can also monitor the click through rates but google analytics is better on that part.

Keyword Research Tool

Keyword research tool allows you to research keywords based on your website and shows suggestions based on which you can spin your content. You also have an option for manually entering the keywords.The keyword results are much similar to what you’ll get using Google Keyword Tool. Choosing the right keywords for the content on your website can be of great importance and you can leave the generation and optimization of keywords on Hubspot.

Page Grading Tool

Based on the keywords on the page, visits to the page and inbound link leading to the page Hubspot’s page grading tool rates the pages on your website and gives you an idea about the best or the most valuable page while it also reflects the improvements you should make to the pages on your website to get more visitors.

Link Grading Tool

Link Grading tool grades the inbound links to your website . They use the page rank or Moz rank to grade the inbound link to your website.

Marketing Automation

Using Hubspot you can build an automated workflow from scratch and around the interests of your buyers and goals by defining your segments, setting goals, adding steps and actions, branching logic and measure the performance of your campaign.

Social Media Tools

Social media tools monitor the conversations taking place on the internet about your brand.You can also add social media follow buttons to lead people to your website to follow your brand on the social media websites.
Social media tools allow you to publish posts directly to social networking websites, reply to tweets and messages or comments on facebook through the hubspot interface itself. You can also schedule your messages and posts.

Link Building Using Hubspot

The ability of hubspot’s tools to identify a link opportunity is of utmost importance as it’ll increase the number of inbound links to your webpage and will also help in increasing the ranking of your web page on search engines.It is one of the best method to increase the awareness about your brand.

Analytics

Hubspot focuses on people to generate analytics related to your website and is not just about pageviews. It gives you details in context with the contacts you have, individual profile and complete database reporting.It allows you to see all the channels of maketing and keep a check on their performances. It generates revenue reports related to the activities which lead to revenue for your company.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot CRM allows you to sell without any complications and confusions by storing every detail about your contacts, deals and companies. It allows you to connect with your leads quite easily and quickly. Hubspot CRM works well with the Sidekick chrome extension. It allows you to connect with your contacts in many ways from a single backend. You can send tracked emails to your contacts and it notifies instantly when you click or open the mail.Place calls directly from your CRM and it records your calls and takes notes of your discussion automatically.

Appstore and Marketplace

Hubspot has an integrated app store where you can find apps to install on your Hubspot site. Though there are not many apps listed but you can get a list of providers who can help you with various features on Hubspot or inbound marketing.

Plans And Pricing

Hubspot is quite highly priced. They charge a minimum 200$ a month for 500 visitors and 100 contacts. This is the cost you’ll pay for your convenience as Hubspot merely is a platform which consists of various different services integrated into one single interface. One should try the demo first and decide if Hubspot would work for them. You can always use the 3-4 different applications you get for marketing if you wont like to spend that much money. You’ll have to work hard for getting the results through Hubspot as well. Hubspot has nothing exclusive to itself you’ll easily find these services available on other applications.

• Try @Hubspot – Inbound marketing platform with multiple services offered hubspot.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Hubspot is one of the best tools available for inbound marketing if you have what it may take to give you the results, the skills, money and expertise. I would suggest if you have the budget you should go for it but if your budget is low you should look for other alternatives. Try using Hubspot and do let us know your experience in comments.

In Email Marketing, testing and correcting the coding of the email you design is one of the most important steps. It helps the marketing team to ensure better conversion and click through rates. Testing is highly recommended especially if you have coded the mail yourself. This step is often skipped by many email marketers and they end up sending emails full of errors and mails which may qualify as spam and land up into the receiver’s spam folder. Email Testing allows you to know how your mail would appear to the people using different email clients like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and more….

Litmus.com is a website which offers email testing and tracking services. Litmus can be said to be a versatile tool which allows you to ensure that your mail looks beautiful everywhere including mobile browsers and devices. And in today’s competitive world I don’t think you would like to lose your business to rivals. Thus, you must make sure that your emails appear, will your email qualify as “not a spam” and land up into the customer’s inbox, all the links point to the proper web pages and the overall performance of the mail to ensure high conversion rates. In short, Litmus is a tool to confirm that the emails you create are supported by most or all of the devices having different sizes and equipped with different browsers and settings.

How Does It Work?

The basic idea behind Litmus is that you need to send the email you created to an email address provided by litmus or just upload it to the website. After this litmus would come up with screenshots for different email clients and shows how your email would look on these clients so that you can check for errors and correct them easily.

The User Interface

Litmus.com has a simple, very instinctive and easy to use interface and this allows users to easily access the application to test their emails.  Once you sign up you can get started with testing your email by selecting the environments you want your email to test for like Outlook, Lotus, Apple Mail, Gmail, and even various mobile clients like Symbian, Windows mobile, iPhone, iPad and more. All the major options are covered in this list of more than 30 clients including the main web clients Gmail, Yahoo! And Hotmail which can be viewed in IE and Firefox environments too.

Not Just Emails! Websites too…

Litmus doesn’t only test html emails for their design but also tests websites and you can check your website on 8 different browsers for design errors. It provides easier and is best for testing static pages. It takes a screenshot of your website when you provide the link and the design and appearance of the website can be modified in accordance with these screenshots. These screenshots can be shared easily with your clients and team by making them publicly visible.

The Screenshot Options

You can select how you want the screenshot to appear there are various modes available such a Preview Pane only with images on or off, Full email with images on or off. Though these options are not available with every email client many of them do offer an option to block images. One must keep a check on the status boxes on Litmus to keep a check on delays and the unavailability of certain features. The screenshots are of amazing quality and the errors in the design can be easily detected.

The Test for Spam Filter

A spam also known as Junk email or unsolicited bulk mail is an identical email sent to many recipients. These mails often lead to phishing sites or websites which host malwares. Email filtering is the process of organizing the incoming mails according to a predefined criteria. These filtering processes are automatic and the email you design may qualify as a spam during this automatic process. To ensure that your email is not treated as a spam by the email client Litmus offers a Spam Filter Test. It checks your email with many popular email filtering services such as SpamAssassin, Postini etc. and gives a list of email clients/Spam Filtering services which support or do not support your mail.

Email Analytics

Do you want to know who read your email? Who deleted it? What Browser and Device was used to do the same? And did anyone forward your mail to friends and family or even if they took a print?

Litmus.com provides perfect analysis of the email like it would give you the percentage of people Glanced, Skimmed, Actually read and what percent of recipients were engaged. It also tells us about the percentage of recipients using a particular email client for example 23% use Apple Mail, 25% Use Gmail and more. It even tracks whether the recipient clicked the print, forward, delete button for your mail so that you can keep a track of people who share your content and even you can check how many discount coupons got printed. Using Litmus you can keep a track of your users worldwide and lets you identify which region of the world your subscribers belong to and which time zones are important especially when you plan to launch a multilingual website or an email in different languages.

The Litmus Community

The litmus community has answers to almost every query regarding email designs and coding and even has a wonderful tutorial library and you can even learn from fellow designers around the globe.

• Test your newsletter in different email clients and webmails, check it against spam filters with @litmusapp litmus.com via @supermonitoring

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Pricing

There are 3 plans available at Litmus:

1. Basic: This costs 79$ per month and includes unlimited Email testing, Interactive testing and Community access but does not include Spam Filter test and email analytics. This can be accessed by one user and one colleague.
2. Plus: This costs 149$ per month and includes unlimited Email testing, Interactive testing and Community access and also include Spam Filter test and email analytics. This can be accessed by one user and one colleague.
3. Premium: This costs 399$ per month and includes unlimited Email testing, Interactive testing and Community access and also include Spam Filter test and email analytics. This can be accessed by ten users.

These plans may appear to be heavily priced for individual marketers and small agencies thus this application is used more by large companies and wouldn’t prove to be economical for an individual.