A good email platform brings you more exposure, helps you keep your followers engaged, and can even convert some of them into loyal fans or customers. One of the great things about WordPress is that it integrates with major email platforms that pro bloggers and online businesses and organizations use, including AWebber, iContact, MailChimp, Campaign Manager, and GetResponse. All of these powerful email platforms feature plugins that you can easily integrate into your WordPress blog to create email subscription forms, craft newsletters, view email marketing stats, and more.
The Value of Email
Although today we have technologies and apps that make communication between two or more people easier than email does, good old email remains indispensable for most Internet users. A whooping 92% of online adults use email, with 61% using it every day, according to this study. There are three times more email accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined. What’s more, email continues to have the best conversion rates online: email is 40 times more successful at acquiring new clients than either Facebook and Twitter according to McKinsey & Company. Even if you don’t intend to make money from your blog, you can still count on email as a reliable content distribution system that can encourage people to read more of your blog, and do it more often.
Why You Need a Mailing List
Blogs and email platforms go great together. An email platform enables you to deliver your posts as emails to subscribers, as well as to send your followers exclusive content that you don’t publish on your blog. Incorporating an email platform into your blog enables you to build a mailing list. Whether your blog is a personal blog or a marketing blog, a mailing list helps you not only enlarge your audience, but keep visitors returning, by constantly reminding them of your blog through your newsletters and by delivering to them your new posts straight into their mailbox.
In spite of the hype surrounding social media, newsletters remain a great way to grow or maintain relationships with your audience, as this study highlights. A mailing list makes it easier for people interested in what you have to say or offer to follow you. Also, should you ever want to start a new blog, you can use that mailing list to spread the word about it, so that you won’t have to start from scratch again.
Why Use an Email Platform
An email marketing platform empowers you to build a large mailing list faster, by streamlining your email distribution and valuable metrics at your fingertips. The templates these services often include help you craft appealing emails with calls to action that are more compelling. What’s more, they provide analytics with which you can keep track of the performance of your email campaign: you can see how many of your emails are actually opened, how many clicks the links in your emails get, as well as how much blog or website traffic your emails generate.
Cloud-Based Email Marketing Platforms
Gone are the days of slow and ugly email marketing software. Modern marketing platforms are available as Software as a Service and can be accessed through a web browser from any computer. The best of them work on mobile devices, too. The only things you have to install are small plugins which link your email platform to your WordPress website, but those can be quickly added to your WordPress installation.
The advantage of cloud-based email marketing platforms, apart from their mobility, is that they generally work on a subscription-based model, enabling you to choose the right subscription for your needs. This means you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on an enterprise solution which has features that go beyond your needs. Some of these cloud-based email marketing platforms are even free.
The Right Platform For Your Blog or Business
Top email marketing platforms tend to be flexible enough to fit the needs of any blogger, business, or organization. Moreover, they have the same essential features for creating emails, managing marketing campaigns, and tracking your emails to evaluate their performance. Here are the key features that all of the top email marketing platforms share:
- Rich, customizable email and sign-up templates
- Integration with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter for a more unified marketing experience
- High usability and a user-friendly interface, making them easy to understand even if you’ve never tried an online marketing platform before
- Flexible pricing and free plans for long-term cost-effective email marketing
- Proven track record
- Large user base, which means plenty of free help resources available online
- Prompt and friendly customer support
- Scalability and an assortment of advanced features
- Data tracking and analysis
- Automation features for easily sending mass emails
One aspect in which email marketing platforms differ, however, is their compatibility with WordPress, and how seamlessly they integrate with it. We’ve looked carefully at the very best email marketing platforms for WordPress in terms of both features and integration. All the solutions in the following list come with a WordPress plugin that enables you to add customizable sign-up forms on your blog in the sidebar, footer, or even posts. These leading email platforms are not presented in any particular order — in terms of quality and features, they are all high up there, but some of them may be more convenient for your needs than others. Consider their highlight features carefully to determine which of them would work best for your blog or website.
MailChimp
This ubiquitous email marketing solution is used across the Web by bloggers, small businesses, and big brands alike. User friendly and easy to set up, it makes email distribution and marketing a straightforward and convenient process, whether you have a small or a large mailing list. At the same time, it’s highly customizable and comes with Google Analytics integration.
Highlight Features
- Subscriber profiles for every individual subscriber, featuring engagement and website activity
- Automated workflows for getting started with your email marketing right away
- Time optimization for sending emails at precisely the right time
- Allows you to send an unlimited number of emails
- Comes with geolocation targeting for more effective marketing
- Supports surveys, which you can integrate into your emails
- A/B split testing feature which enables you to measure over time which subject lines and content works best for your audience, helping you fine-tune your email campaign
Pricing
MailChimp offers a Free Forever plan for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month. Business plans start at $20 a month and are based on the number of subscribers.
AWeber
One of the most established email marketing platforms, AWeber packs a wealth of features in a clean and intuitive interface. Having been around for many years, AWeber’s email marketing platform looks very solid and has polished features that make even large email campaign management easy.
Highlight Features
- Industry-leading 99% deliverability
- Autoresponders, which enable you to send automated emails to save time and keep your audience engaged
- Easy mailing list importing from another marketing platform or service
- Subscriber segmentation for boosting conversion rates
- Sign-up form split-testing feature
- Live support services
Pricing
AWeber offers a 30-day free trial. Unlike other email marketing platforms, it doesn’t have a free subscription plan. Pricing starts at $19 a month for up to 500 subscribers.
iContact
A streamlined and accessible email marketing platform, iContact makes it easy for you to craft beautiful emails and deliver them to your audience using automated features. iContact is known for its award-winning customer support team and has reliable reporting capabilities ideal for bloggers who want to use emails as part of their effort to monetize their blog.
Highlight Features
- MessageBuilder, which enables you to design visually engaging emails by dragging and dropping message elements on a template
- Advanced contact management options for maintaining a relevant mailing list
- A/B split testing for upping conversion rates
- Fast and extensive reporting capabilities
- Excellent customer support through email, phone, and chat
Pricing
Like AWeber, iContact does not have a free plan, although it does come with a 30-day free trial. On the other hand, it has an affordable pricing model that starts at $14 a month for 500 contacts.
Campaign Monitor
Another leading email marketing platform, Campaign Monitor is replete with email creation and management features and comes with one of the most engaging interfaces around. It’s a polished and optimized solution that integrates beautifully with WordPress. More than 120,000 companies from around the world use it.
Highlight Features
- Gorgeous drag and drop email builder allowing for the creation of professional-looking newsletters
- Enables you to deliver personalized content to increase engagement and responses
- Easy to understand insights and analytics with beautiful graphs that help you understand how many of your emails are opened and how many of your email links are clicked
- Smart email automation features
Pricing
Campaign Monitor’s pricing starts at $9 a month for up to 2,500 emails and 500 subscribers and includes basic email support. You can get started with a free trial.
GetResponse
Simple to use and effective, GetResponse was designed for small and medium sized businesses, but it works for bloggers as well. As its name suggests, this solution provides you with tools that help you increase engagement and maintain successful follow-up campaigns. It can be a particularly effective email marketing platform if you want to sell your blog followers an e-book or some other type of content.
Highlight features
- Professional drag and drop creator for sign-up forms, landing pages, and emails with over 500+ different templates
- Contact importing from 20+ different sources which can enlarge your mailing list
- Powerful testing and optimization features for every element of your emails, including the subject line, call to action, and form field
- Email intelligence features such as follow up comparisons and hourly fluctuations
- Inbox Previewer for ensuring that your email designs look beautiful across email clients
- Effective Spam Checker
- Full-fledged video email marketing features
Pricing
GetResponse comes with a generous trial that enables you to test all of its key features. Pricing starts at $12.30 a month (with an annual payment discount) for an unlimited number of emails and up to 1,000 subscribers.
Useful Email Marketing Plugins
In addition to the email marketing platforms mentioned above, there are several wonderful email plugins for WordPress which, although not marketing platforms in themselves, enable you to craft and send newsletters through the WordPress dashboard. Some of these integrate with the email solutions mentioned above. Check them out.
- SendPress – enables you to create responsive newsletters and has no limit on subscribers
- CircuPress – turns your latest posts into beautiful newsletters
- Newsletter – a complete newsletter system that helps you build a mailing list
- Nifty Newsletters – makes it easy for you to set up autoresponders
- NewsletterForm – helps you create newsletters forms with high conversion rates
- WP Email Template – create a beautiful HTML email template for your WP site
- Email Before Download – create an email sign-up form which users have to fill before they can download something from your site
The Bottom Line
The effectiveness of the email marketing platform you choose will be directly related to how well you plan and design your email campaign. Whether you choose to send your followers newsletters in the form of recent or popular posts, or create fresh newsletter content for them, understanding your audience and planning and scheduling your emails in advance is crucial for you to succeed. Keep in mind that almost everyone is doing email marketing these days, and merely sending emails is not enough to capture the attention of your followers and engage them. Provide valuable content through your emails and make a habit of giving your followers a lot of great content before you ask them to answer your calls to action, whether you want them to buy something you’re selling or merely follow you on social media. Email marketing is a powerful tool, but it has to be used diligently.
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