When you have a food blog, you want to interact with your customer base as much as possible. As you make more posts over time, you will want to ensure your customers never miss a thing and constantly interact with your content. But beyond your blog, what’s the best way to reach your readers? Simply through email marketing. And, this interesting guide presents the best email marketing software for food blogs, among the numerous marking software on the market.
Like fine wine and a good cheese, email marketing pairs well with any blog – these communications help you expand your blog’s reach and share your content with more of your contacts more often.
With email marketing, you can remind your readers about posts they’ve missed, send recaps of popular blog pieces, and even share varied types of content through your emails you wouldn’t normally share on your blog. Personal, specific content matters to consumers – 74% of marketers say targeted email personalization increases user engagement. This allows you to engage on a closer level with your readers and establish more brand loyalty to your blog overall.
Beyond diversifying your content, email marketing software can help you learn a lot more about your consumers and strengthen your individual relationships with them.
By sending out more individualized content, you will create meaningful connections with your consumers and ensure they are consistently keeping up with your posts and content. This can lead to higher sales and profit down the road as more and more consumers become plugged into all your blog has to offer.
However, there are a wide variety of email marketing software tools you can choose from when launching email marketing alongside your food blog. They each offer different capabilities that can help you market your blog to its full capacity.
Here are some of the best email marketing software options for food blogs:
5 Top Email Marketing Software for Food Blogs
- MailChimp – best for brand recognition
- MailerLite – best for email automation
- AWeber – best for a great user experience
- SendGrid – best for email deliverability
- Moosend – best for high traffic blogs
» MORE: How Effective Is Email Marketing?
1. MailChimp – best for brand recognition
MailChimp allows ultimate creativity when it comes to your email marketing campaigns. Through MailChimp, you can build attention-getting templates easily with no coding knowledge necessary. The software also allows you to sync all your photos and graphics in one place – particularly helpful for high-quality food photos.
Using the template builder, you can create brand-specific communications that reflect the look and feel of your existing blog. This will make your email communications unmistakably yours and yours alone – the unique layout will reflect what consumers expect when they visit your blog.
Through these capabilities, MailChimp also helps you establish elite brand recognition and increases the possibility of higher open rates for your communications. This is great to establish your food blog as a professional blog, setting yourself apart from the competition.
What’s more?
The email marketing software also holds all your content, giving you space to reuse your marketing assets across channels and different communications for brand consistency. So, you can customize your communications to align with your overall blog to manage your user experience from every outlet.
MailChimp launched a new smart feature, ‘The Creative Assistant.’ It’s a new AI experience that learns about your business and generates quick designs to capture your customers’ attention. The Creative Assistant will help your tailor your emails to your consumers and maintain the most important elements of your food blog. These quick yet effective designs help you save time on your communications without sacrificing overall quality.
Pricing
MailChimp offers four tiered packages ranging from the Free program for $0 a month to their Premium program for $299. You are able to access their Creative Assistant across all packages. To learn more about Mailchimp, visit their website here.
» MORE: Best Cheap Email Marketing Software
2. MailerLite – best for email automation
MailerLite is an ideal email marketing software for those who are new to email marketing. The overall use of the software is simple and incredibly easy to get the hang of in a short amount of time. MailerLite offers a ton of templates to choose from that are made specifically with user engagement in mind.
Furthermore, they are optimized for both mobile and desktop views, ensuring your consumers can read your communications without issue, regardless of where they are. If someone reads your food blog on the way to work, at the store, or on the couch at home, you can be confident they will see the most optimized version for their viewing platform.
Having an easy-to-use platform means you can start your email marketing campaigns as soon as possible without any major issues. However, MailerLite offers elite capabilities that take your marketing communications to the next level for even a seasoned professional.
What’s more?
Using MailerLite, you can enable specific automation activities like pop-ups to engage your audience further and ensure your blog has the largest reach possible. Checking in with consumers to take advantage of different blog posts or points to gather more information can help you find out more about your readers and create more targeted content over time.
You can also specify different blocks of content for different audiences using MailerLite. For example, you may be looking to share different blog pieces for men and women, or maybe a piece about cooking with children instead of just cooking with adults.
Based on your customer segmentation lists, you can send out individualized emails that appeal to these established groups. This way, you send out content from your food blog that directly applies to their daily lives, giving your food blog a lot more value to your average consumer.
Pricing
MailerLite offers two plans: Free and Premium. The Free plan comes with many of MailerLite’s typical capabilities. However, if you have more than 1,000 subscribers, you will have to use a Premium plan, which varies in price depending on the size of your audience. To find out more about MailerLite’s packages and capabilities, visit their website here.
» MORE: Best Email Marketing Software for 10,000 Contacts
3. AWeber – best for a great user experience
AWeber has been around for a long time – over 20 years to date. Even though it’s not as new as some of these other options, there’s a good reason AWeber has withstood the test of time. Easy to use, AWeber immediately begins your subscription by showing you a video of its capabilities to ensure you are using all the available tools to their maximum capacity. Once you’ve gotten acquainted with all the different things AWeber has to offer, you can begin taking advantage of the email marketing software.
Through AWeber, you can establish a “Welcome Series” for your new customers – a series of different email communications to welcome your new customers. These welcome messages differ based on how your customer relationship was established, where they registered for your email list, and other preferences you gather to ensure a customized and meaningful start to your relationship.
Welcome emails are particularly important to customers – welcome emails receive 86% higher open rates on average than typical promotional email communications.
What’s more?
AWeber also provides plenty of options when it comes to building out your marketing communications. You can choose between different templates or create your own, depending on what you’re comfortable with.
When it comes to managing your subscribers, AWeber makes it easy. For example, you can segment your customers into lists to further customize the communications you distribute to them.
As a result, you can learn more about the consumers that read your food blog and get to know their specific interests, tailoring your blog content and communications more in the future. This will keep your consumers interested and reading your food blog for longer periods of time.
Pricing
AWeber offers two plans, the Free plan, and the Pro plan. Many more intuitive email marketing tools are offered on the Pro plan for $16.15 a month. To learn more about AWeber and why it’s been such a popular choice for so long, visit their website here.
» MORE: How Much Does Marketing Cost?
4. SendGrid – best for email deliverability
SendGrid offers a few unique email marketing functionalities that make it a strong player in the email marketing software field. Beyond your average capabilities, SendGrid offers tools that help you evaluate your current position in your field and learn how to be more successful through your email marketing campaigns.
SendGrid helps you optimize your communications to ensure they are consistently delivering to your consumers every time. Understanding people get many emails every day, many of these communications tend to sort into junk and spam folders, never to be seen again. This is especially true for promotions and blog materials. Therefore, you want to ensure your food blog communications stand out amongst the rest of what is being sent to your consumers daily.
To combat this common issue, SendGrid focuses closely on your email deliverability. They help you improve parts of your communication that may cause your communications to go unread and detect any errors in your send list to ensure maximum delivery.
What’s more?
Once your emails have been sent, SendGrid does a great job reviewing performance and offering a ton of analytics data regarding your communications’ success. Beyond evaluating delivery, open, and bounce rates, SendGrid allows you to see your campaign performance broken down by different segments based on location, email provider, and type of campaign.
As a result, you can track performance across promotional campaigns, newsletters, and more specific types of communication to compare their specific results and success.
Pricing
SendGrid offers four tiered plans that range by the number of contacts you plan to distribute emails to. The Free plan allows you to send 100 emails a day. Beyond this, you can expect to pay increasingly higher prices based on the different packages and what capabilities you are looking for to maximize your blog’s reach. Read more about Sendgrid here.
» MORE: How can email marketing fuel your overall inbound strategy?
5. Moosend – best for high traffic blogs
Moosend is a great email marketing software for all blogs, but especially ones with large consumer bases. The software is easy to use and adapt to and comes with a library of templates to build out your specific communications. In addition, you can send your communications far ahead of time to ensure you are distributing when you want to.
Moosend also has great automation capabilities, allowing you to establish certain consumer activities that trigger emails. For example, if someone clicks to learn more about a certain part of your communication, you can set up an automation to send a follow-up email. For example, if someone is interested in a specific email about a certain type of recipe, you can establish automation to share more similar content and capture their attention for longer periods of time.
What’s more?
The platform also comes with A/B testing that allows you to test different versions of your communications to different segments to analyze how they perform. Using A/B testing, you will be able to decipher which types of communications resonate with your consumer base most and gain you the highest readership.
For example, you might want to test out sharing a cooking video in your email communication and compare the results to a simple recipe tutorial. Using A/B testing, you can share both with different segments and track performance to determine which content appeals most to your consumers. This helps you create more consistently successful campaigns understanding exactly what your customers are looking for and delivering on this expectation.
Additionally, Moosend offers fantastic customer service for their clients. Each client has a specific account manager dedicated to troubleshooting any issues and offering advice regarding their unique email marketing campaigns. These account managers can share best practices to ensure your custom campaigns meet the specific needs of your audience. This will help you create more effective communications that ensure high viewership consistently.
Pricing
Moosend offers 3 package plans, including a Free plan with unlimited emails, forms, and campaign analytics. Beyond this, Moosend offers a Pro plan for $8 a month, and a custom plan for larger needs. To learn more about what Moosend has to offer, visit their website here.
» MORE: Email Marketing Coordinator
Final Thoughts
When it comes to email marketing software for your food blog, there are many different options available. Each of these choices allows you to customize your marketing communications to reflect your individual blog’s personality and capture the attention of your viewers.
Decide which platform is best for you depending on your unique food blog’s personality and how you are looking to continue to share more content with your customers. Using any of these email marketing software options, you will be able to extend your reach and make your blog as popular as it can be!
Sources:
http://www.experian.com/blogs/marketing-forward/2015/04/08/welcome-welcome-back-life-cycle-marketing/
https://econsultancy.com/reports/the-realities-of-online-personalisation-report