A robust email marketing plan can help marketers nurture, acquire, retain customers, enhance referral and cross-marketing goals while also supporting sales initiatives. To optimize ROI from any email marketing plan, marketers need a combination of the right email marketing platform and email marketing tactics.
Before honing in on an email marketing platform, it is crucial for marketing teams to evaluate different vendors and compare their top features. Once marketers have a shortlist in place, ensuring certain factors are evaluated before making a buying decision will help companies find a best-fit platform that can help them achieve their core goals.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Have A Product Trial / Demo Assessment Stage
Most SaaS platform will offer either free plans or free product trails for specific periods of time. One of the biggest drawbacks of product trials is that most of the top end features may be locked for use but again, certain platforms/providers do offer access to all their features for a period of time during this stage.
For marketers who don’t necessarily have the time to undertake different product trials, a couple of product demo calls can help them understand more about the products they are evaluating.
Before making a decision, going through multiple demos is useful in gathering more information about the various capabilities and uses of the product. This can fuel a better buying decision.
How Well Will It Interact With Other Existing Martech?
One of the fundamentals to consider when adopting a new martech or in this case, email marketing platform, is how easily the platform will interact or integrate with existing martech systems.
Email platforms that can easily integrate with existing CDPs,CRMs and other data systems will allow marketers to build seamless processes to fuel more data-driven email marketing activities. One of the common problems faced by B2B marketers today revolve around having siloed data and information. Ensuring that marketers across a business know what platforms are in use for what marketing activity while having a process that allows for reports or data from one single source of truth is key to keeping internal processes healthy.
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Does This Email Marketing Platform Offer Other Marketing Features?
Consolidation in martech allows users to have access to leaner martech systems, they may not need to have too many different platforms to pursue multiple marketing objectives.
When considering a change in one platform, for instance, just your email marketing tool, it still makes sense to evaluate what else in your martech could do with a change or replacement based on the above. Building martech stacks that are lean and those that can integrate well with each other allow marketers to build more seamless internal processes and external customer journeys.
Features That Support Change In Modern Communication
There’s been a constant shift in content consumption habits over the years. While blogs might play a base role for any content marketing effort, today’s B2B marketers also know of the importance of having robust content marketing channels like podcasts, webinars, online/hybrid events and more.
If one part of the content marketing team is building all this content, the email marketing plan has to allow for swift and easy distribution of this content. Email marketing platforms that can easily offer design elements or suggestions/features that support the marketing of new age audio/video/text content can help marketers build more impactful messaging.
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Data And Reports
Lean marketing teams might not be able to have dedicated resources that do a deep dive of the data to understand how email campaigns are offering. This is where easy reports and analytics dashboards can come handy. Email marketing platforms that can offer different types of analytics and reports based on each marketing members need can help boost future email marketing initiatives.
Onboarding And Support
End users of any product or service should have easy access to their provider’s team when needed. Assessing a provider based on their overall after-sales reputation and customer success/onboarding model will enable internal team’s better optimization of the tool while also helping you in enhancing your own experience of your product for your end users.
Typically, 24/7 support is a standard to go by, providers with easy to reach customer care channels like email/call/chat are some others.
Email marketing still play a key role in B2B today. With creative tactics and a well-structured email list and email marketing plan, marketers can contribute to overall marketing ROI through this channel effectively. The right platform suited to your organization’s current goals and near-term objectives plays a vital part in this.
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