With hundreds of email marketing platforms available for marketers and business owners, making the right choice becomes a difficult task. To help you make informed choice, I have done in-depth email marketing platform comparison.
I compared the features, such as mobile optimization, customer service, marketing automation, and spam filter.
You need to run your email marketing campaign on the right platform because it enhances performance. Also, the chances of making good return on investment from email marketing depends on the platform you use.
Let’s look at the general features of good email platforms before going into the comparison.
What are the Best Email Platforms?
After gathering responses from over 50 professional email marketers and agencies, in addition to my experience, the top 5 best email platforms are:
I arranged them in order of ranking, which means Aweber tops the list of best email marketing platforms comparison, followed by others.
One common question I posed to these marketers was how did they choose email marketing platform? In order words, what informed their decision of the platform they are using?
There answers bring us to how to choose email marketing platform?
How to Choose an Email Marketing Platform
The first step of making a choice is by reading other users reviews. Yes, a simple search online on any product review will give you insight on what other users experiences are with it.
And that is the reason you are here today.
Things to watch out when reading users review online concerning email marketing platforms are the ease of use, deliverability, built-templates, mobile optimization, marketing automation, and customer service.
Let’s throw light on these features before going into individual email marketing platforms listed above.
Ease of use
The ease at which you navigate your ways inside the platform is a factor to pay attention to. Complexity leads to procrastination and frustrations.
An ease of use of email marketing platform allows users to easily create, format, send, and track performance.
Deliverability
This is a term used to measure the rate at which sent email is delivered in the recipients’ inbox. This is the most vital email marketing metrics because without it you can’t measure other metrics.
So, as a business owner that is considering going for email marketing, you have to pay unusual attention to what others are saying about the deliverability of a platform.
If you don’t pay attention to deliverability your emails may end up in the spam folders of your target audience.
Built-templates
Built- in templates are tools inside the platform that helps users build captivating emails. Platforms with many tools helps users reduce the stress of creating and formatting email contents.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization is the measure of the ease at which an email from a platform can be read on a mobile device. It entails that the emails must be clearly visible in any screen, and easy to read.
Marketing Automation
There are several steps to a successful email marketing campaign. The ease to automate every step is a function to look out for in a platform. 100% automation is possible with some of the platforms listed above.
Customer Service
A robust customer service is like having an expert standing over you with the right directions. So, speed of response from the customer service build confidence on a user.
Email Marketing Platform Comparison-Deliverability
There is a fierce competition on the deliverability rates of the best email marketing platforms listed above. If you should go by their figures, every one of them will produce a great result if you do the right thing.
Awaber and getresponse have 99% rate of deliverability. Mailchimp has 97% rate of deliverability, while salesforce has 95% deliverability rate.
Benchmark Email marketing software came last with 95% deliverability.
As a rule of thumb, an email marketing platform should have a minimum of 95% deliverability rate. That means you can’t go wrong by using any of the platform listed above.
Ease of Use
When I conducted email marketing platform comparison on ease of use, mailchimp took the lead. The interface is so friendly that a first timer could go a long way with first try.
The next on the list of ease of use is Aweber, and followed by salesforce, benchmark and getresponse.
The aweber interface is very similar to mailchimp. The difference is in the formatting section.
The take home here is that the five platforms have high rate of ease of use. The fastest way to get use to the platforms interface is by studying the tutorial videos on the platforms.
The videos are very clear and explanatory on how to use the platforms at ease.
Built – Templates
I could not declare a winner on this feature. The reason is that the entire platforms have almost the same tools in common for users.
On all the platforms you can easily create newsletters, forms, landing page, autoresponder and import contacts.
I still place Aweber ahead here because it has more number of templates than others. That means you have more choice to make on the templates you need.
Email Marketing Platform Comparison-Mobile Optimization
When it comes to mobile optimization, Benchmark and Aweber took the lead. Though, the rest also proved high score of mobile optimization.
Customer Support
Get response has it all. There customer support is second to none. All their staffs are well knowledgeable in all areas of email marketing. All my stay with them, I have never been told to wait to be transferred to another agent.
That is where Aweber took last among all the features measured. Their customer support is very fast. But most time you need to wait to be connected to the right person.
Mailchimp, salesforce and benchmark’s customer support are equally great in helping out.
Marketing Automation
Comparing the marketing automation features of the five top email marketing platforms revealed that salesforce and Aweber has 100% tools for automation.
Email Marketing Platform Comparison-Price
I did not boarder to say anything about pricing because good email marketing platform cost much. However, if you have a good marketing plan, pricing becomes immaterial because you make huge ROI per $1 spent.
Email Marketing Platform Comparison-Conclusion
The fact remains that there is no single email marketing software that meets all marketers demand. So, you make a choice based on your priority and marketing goals.
Yes, Aweber has upper hand over the rest. But all of them have high score of the basic features needed in an email marketing platform.
So, go ahead with your plans of email marketing because it is a rewarding venture