Best Email Marketing Platforms for eCommerce Stores
The eCommerce sector is extremely lucrative but it is this very feat that has given rise to intense competition. In order to stand out, businesses are continuously seeking to employ complex tactics that strengthen the relationship with their consumers, fostering trust and long-term engagement. Email marketing has been around the block for quite some time, but with the recent developments in AI, now being able to explore shoppers behavior, merchants can create highly personalized messages, making this strategy one of the most powerful tools to address customers in a way that is unique and engaging. So, let’s dig into some of the best email marketing platforms available in 2023.
As experts in e-Commerce development services, we’re here to help you choose the right solution for your business.
Personalized emails stand out because they resonate with individual preferences, behaviors, and purchasing history of each recipient. In a world where consumers crave authentic and relevant interactions, being able to send messages crafted to each client with ease, is a potent tool for e-commerce stores to differentiate themselves, drive revenue, and cultivate lasting customer relationships. With the right message and a sprinkle of personal touch, emails can be your secret handshake with your customers, turning them from casual browsers into die-hard fans.
If your company is new and the list of clients is not that big, maybe you can get away with sending that ‘Amazing offer’ email individually, from a free email client like Gmail. What if your business draws hundreds or thousands of customers? It simply becomes impossible without employing an army of people. Manually emailing customers individually is also not the best use of your time when you have other store responsibilities to take care of. The need for marketing automation becomes critical.
Every major ecommerce platform has some sort of automatic mechanism to send emails. For some, like Magento and Shopware, the native capabilities can also be enhanced with complex extensions that help them market to customers and generate more revenue.
But if you want to take it a step further, the more feasible alternative is to use dedicated email marketing platforms. Highly performant and many benefitting from being powered by Artificial Intelligence, they can easily be integrated with your eCommerce system. Tasks like creating engaging email forms for building a list of potential clients, stunning newsletters to announce forthcoming sales, email automation for abandoned carts, sending ‘thank you’ emails, these are just some benefits you can look forward to in some of the best email marketing platforms for ecommerce.
Add in the convenience of having reports that tell you exactly how much revenue your emails are bringing in every day, and you can easily see why integrating your online store with such complex platforms becomes key in modern retail.
What to look for when considering your email marketing platform
Integration with your online store
A seamless store integration will sync the list of products as well as customer data with the email marketing platform. This is essential if you want to showcase products in your emails, or if you want to send personalized messages such as offers, product recommendations, reminders for abandoned carts, based on customers’ order history and behavior.
Fortunately, the top marketing platforms offer direct integrations with platforms like Magento, Shopware or Shopify.
If your online shop sells locally only, and you might feel that there is a marketing service that focuses exclusively on your area, fitting your business better, the chances to get seamless integration are also high if your shop runs on a well-known platform. However, if your e-commerce platform is not yet supported, they will provide general documentation to help you get started.
A good bunch of creative tools
Having a wide selection of attractive email templates will help you customize your messages and speed up your work. Make sure that these templates are also mobile-friendly in case your customers are reading your emails from their phone. At the same time, it is important that the platform offers an email editor which is user-friendly and provides various design options. You will use these functions a lot for crafting messages that align to your brand identity and the more versatile they are, the better the outcome will be.
Personalization
This is a hot topic right now and we wrote many articles on it. Addressing your clients personally in your emails is pretty much a standard practice, so make sure you don’t fall behind. Check that your chosen marketing platform is able to recommend products based on your customers’ interests, or displaying the exact items they have left behind in their cart. These are complex features and all modern platforms powered by AI offer them.
Contact segmentation and email automation
Segmenting your customers into various parameters like geography and age group is nothing out of ordinary with the majority of marketing platforms, but the advantages appear when the platform is able to split them into groups based on previous purchases, interests and behavior.
Your chosen email marketing service should be able to automate common ecommerce marketing scenarios, such as post-purchase follow-ups or cart abandonment messages. The best platforms will let you build your own automations by providing a range of triggers and actions. This way, you will be able to adapt it to your own processes, making it an integral part of your eCommerce ecosystem. Also, check reviews about email deliverability rates for your chosen platform. Some platforms have a good rate for delivering emails to their intended inboxes, and some don’t, so select an email platform with good deliverability scores.
Sales reporting
While your eCommerce platform most likely does a pretty good job in showing you the latest transactions and your earnings, this is where its capabilities will probably stop. It will not show you the orders attributed to your email marketing campaigns. This is where a good email platform comes in to help. And the more detailed the sales reports, the better. Some of the top platforms use AI and machine learning to attribute visits or sales to certain campaigns, to show various business performance benchmarks, or even more, to use predictive analytics to guess future shoppers’ behaviors, so that marketers can do smarter, more efficient targeting.
Top email marketing platforms in 2023
A simple search will reveal a great variety of offers to choose from. However, not all platforms are created equal.
eCommerce stores, with their unique set of challenges and opportunities, demand specialized features that many generic email marketing tools might overlook. On the flip side, simple websites might not need the extensive toolkit geared towards eCommerce functionalities. Thus, it’s crucial for businesses, especially those in the eCommerce sector, to discern which tools align best with their goals and objectives.
If we talk strictly about platforms that focus mainly on eCommerce shops, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign and Omnisend have fantastic reviews, with a good range of eCommerce email marketing features, such as abandoned cart reminders and email personalization. These platforms also offer SMS marketing if you want to engage your customers using both email and SMS.
Klaviyo mainly caters to online shops. Powered by AI, it offers the capability to personalize emails with product recommendation. Klaviyo tracks website interactions and events and merchants can use the findings for emails, automations and segmentation. All customer data goes into individual profiles of a CRM. Klaviyo also offers advanced reporting capabilities. In addition to a dashboard showing the regular metrics, it also provides customized benchmarks for your business.
ActiveCampaign is also one of the top email platforms that have great reviews from eCommerce customers. Powered by AI, the software makes it easy to personalize emails using clients’ contact data. Users can also split to test up to five different email versions in order to work out what content performs best. Plus, there’s also a built-in spam tester to check if emails are likely to go to junk.
The option to segment audiences is standard. Two features that make it stand out are website tracking features for collecting data on contacts’ page visits and other onsite actions, plus an extensive selection of pre-made automation workflows. Users can create custom automations from scratch using a range of triggers, including website activity.
Omnisend was specifically built for eCommerce stores. It has one-click integration with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and more, meaning that not only is it easy to get started but also to sync data with the platform seamlessly. Magento shops can integrate Omnisend by adding a front-end snippet, followed by integration via their API.
The platform covers the entire on-site marketing funnel: from collecting subscribers with pop ups on landing pages, to engaging them through email, SMS and push notifications. Users can also take advantage of automated workflows for abandoned cart or welcome messages to get more sales.
Brevo is a complete CRM suite, with a sales and marketing toolkit that work together to build an effective strategy. The platform features a drag-and-drop email editor, a selection of fully responsive and customizable email templates, a complex feature for audience segmentation, an AI assistant to help with personalization of email content, plus the ability to perform A/B testing. The real bonus with Brevo is the capability to create detailed email metrics such as click heatmaps.
Multiple channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, and push notifications are all accessible within Brevo’s interface.
HubSpot is another contender that features a powerful CRM. The platform comprises a Marketing Hub and Sales Hub (CRM). The Marketing Hub has all the tools needed for growing traffic covering emails, social media ads, live chat, video, SEO, and content.
The Sales Hub adds email tracking and scheduling, meeting scheduling, CRM, predictive lead scoring, sales automation, email sequences, and reporting. Their Service Hub offers ticketing and support features.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular platforms. Retailers usually start with it because of the simple user interface and then move away to more suitable alternatives. Mailchimp features a drag-and-drop email builder and professional templates that will help create beautiful campaigns in minutes. Popup signup forms can be added to the website to grow your audience.
MailerLite is another strong contender and its advantage is that it combines simplicity with AI-powered features to create one of the most user-friendly platforms available on the market. It features many pre-designed templates or, if you want to create highly personalized emails, the drag-and-drop editor makes it all a breeze.
The platform’s automation features allow for personalized email sequences and targeted campaigns. There are also comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities to help merchants track campaign performance and optimize marketing strategies.
And because choosing an email marketing platform developed locally brings a multitude of benefits – like better understanding the nuances, preferences, and regulatory environment of the market, ensuring that campaigns are tailored and compliant with local standards – we decided to write a few lines about theMarketer, a platform that has started to makes some big waves in the Romanian eCommerce world, and not only.
First of all, the platform can be easily integrated with all major eCommerce platforms and offers all the commodities that complex email marketing platforms offer: built-in templates, an intuitive drag and drop builder, customer segmentation and automated flows for automation. Customers can receive your messages through all the key channels: email, SMS, or Push Notification campaigns. Engaging pop-up forms can be created and the platform prides itself with one of the best-in-class deliverability rates for emails.
theMarketer features a comprehensive and precise suite of reporting and analytics which lets users perform A/B testings, Get price suggestions to maximize sales, discover most or least popular items and see how their customers engage with each type of product.
But one of its assets is the capability to create irresistible content with AI-based personalized recommendations, based on your clients’ shopping behavior.
All in all, a great product, and its AI-powered features make theMarketer a strong contender for the top eCommerce-focused email marketing platforms.
If you want to know more about our list of services at Clever++, please visit our website.