Today, the retail environment goes far beyond your brick and mortar. By now, most organizations have some of all of their retail handled online. Managing your retail store online is essential in current times, and it is expected that you have a deep online presence regardless of your market. Managing your online customer base is just as important as managing customers in person. So, it’s important to establish individual relationships to ensure your customers keep coming back.
Leveraging email marketing communications, you can communicate with your customers regularly and share updates related to your retail offerings and overall updates regarding your store. 53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact. Promotions, new items, and general business news can all be communicated through your email marketing channels.
Understanding the expectation for email marketing, it’s important to have good email marketing software. Using highly capable and thoughtful email marketing software will help you manage your individual customers and maximize your overall sales. You will be able to create an elite customer experience that maintains solid relationships with all your customers, customized to their unique shopping habits.
See below for some of the best email marketing software options for online retail:
5 Top Email Marketing Software For Retail
- Get Response – best for brand recognition
- Keap – best for knowing your customers
- Active Campaign – best for customer engagement
- MailChimp – best for visualizing customers’ experiences
- Vertical Response – best for optimizing communications
» MORE: Why Email Marketing Is Important?
1. Get Response – best for brand recognition
Get Response is a great email software that offers a range of capabilities critical to retail email marketing. Through Get Response, you can easily create beautiful and detailed email campaigns that appeal to your customer base.
The smart template builder allows you to create exactly what you are looking for – capturing the look and feel of your individual business through your communications. For example, by getting your customers’ attention via email, you will easily bring them in to start shopping on your site.
Get Response also allows you to save select areas of your email template to use in future templates and also offers custom web fonts to use throughout. This gives you the opportunity to personalize your emails to your business and make all your communications immediately recognizable as yours and yours alone. So before reading the content of your email, your customers will always know it’s your communication – strengthening your brand recognition and contributing to stronger customer loyalty too.
What’s more?
The email marketing software is also a great tool for establishing your retail brand and its unique story with your customer base. Due to the customization capabilities the software offers, your consumers will immediately recognize your emails and distinguish them from any other communications they receive from different brands. This can lead to a much higher likelihood of customers continuing to open your emails and following up with a potential purchase.
In addition to intuitive template design, Get Response offers tons of integration with different applications across CRM, eCommerce, social media, analytics, and much more. So, you can connect a range of applications to get the full scope of your store’s online presence and customer base. The wide range of integration allows you to utilize different tools in your Get Response emails to ensure more sales turnover through each email.
Pricing
Get Response starts at just $15 a month for up to 1,000 contacts and basic capabilities. They offer 4 plans total, ranging in price and capabilities depending on the size of your contact base and the varied capabilities you want to take advantage of. You can learn more about Get Response and the different packages available here.
» MORE: How Effective Is Email Marketing?
2. Keap – best for knowing your customers
Keap is one of the best email marketing software for retail that assists you to know your customers. Understanding your customers is the best way to ensure more sales over time. Using Keap, you can set up easy automation based on your customers’ preferences, previous purchases, and more to send personalized emails.
However, personalized emails will target your customers with the kinds of communications they want to receive, making it more likely for them to open your emails. All your effort building and customizing your email templates will payoff with these in-depth automation and segmentation capabilities. 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases their overall customer engagement.
Keap allows for easy customer segmentation to streamline your email communications. The email marketing software allows for tons of smaller customer segmentations. This aims to ensure you send personalized email communications to the right groups of people, sharing information that will most likely get them coming back.
What’s more?
By sending out unique communications based on these segmentations, you’re more likely to have higher open and click-through rates, resulting in more sales overall.
Additionally, Keap offers a sales pipeline feature to keep track of all your sales in one place. Through Keap, you can look into individual customers’ to track their sales and interests over time. With this in-depth look into customer history at your fingertips, you will have a better look at your overall customer interactions and be able to tailor your communications to more specific needs in the future.
Pricing
Keap starts at $56 a month for up to 500 contacts and includes plenty of capabilities. Beyond this, the software offers 2 more plans with more capabilities included. If you want to include more contacts in your customer base, you will have to take advantage of a pricier package. You can learn more about Keap’s unique capabilities and package offerings here.
» MORE: Best Looking Email Marketing Software
3. Active Campaign – best for customer engagement
Active Campaign email marketing software provides the ultimate user experience. The software has a strong list of eCommerce capabilities to maximize your online sales. For example, Active Campaign will reach out to customers if they have items in their cart they haven’t purchased by sending a reminder email automatically.
Again, it allows you to enable “win-back” campaigns – sending emails to customers who haven’t purchased something in a while to “win them back” and invite them to your store by providing discounts and promotions you activate. This elite automation connects with your customers through meaningful interactions that help you stand out as a retailer.
What’s more?
Active Campaign pays close attention to your customer base and allows you to customize how you showcase your retail store to each individual. The software shows customers items they might be interested in based on previous purchases or preferences recorded in their detailed CRM database. This intimate automation capability meets customer’s individual desires when it comes to their online shopping experience.
To ensure delivery, Active Campaign also shows you your complete order process for every individual purchase. This will help you manage your various orders and be able to handle any shipping concerns immediately. In addition, this ensures top-notch customer service and troubleshooting capabilities to consumers anywhere, establishing your brand as trustworthy and reliable.
Pricing
Active Campaign starts at $9 a month and offers 4 distinct packages serving your varied email marketing needs. The Enterprise package that costs $229 a month serves large organizations with thousands of contacts and offers multiple in-depth capabilities to meet your business’s needs. You can learn more about Active Campaign and the different packages available by visiting their website here.
» MORE: How Much Does Marketing Cost?
4. MailChimp – best for visualizing customers’ experiences
To know how to reach your customers effectively, you have to anticipate their activities and reach them where it matters most. That’s where MailChimp comes into play. MailChimp email marketing software does a great job visually showing you the customer experience through their Customer Journey Builder. This tool lays out individual customer journeys on a map with different branches to demonstrate each customer’s unique paths.
The tool begins with “starting points,” identifying multiple ways consumers enter your customer base. These starting points range from signing up for email communications on your organization’s landing page to purchasing a product at your store and entering their email at checking. There are over 20 unique starting points your customers can be sorted by.
Using the Customer Journey Builder, you can map out countless user experiences from end to end, anticipating all the potential user possibilities. This helps you to tailor your communications for any specific customer situation.
What’s more?
To organize and anticipate your customer’s journey even further, MailChimp allows you to tag your customers based on their preferences, purchases, levels of engagement, interactions, and more as a method of segmentation. Beginning with their starting point, these tags siphon your customers based on their unique experiences to plan out how you will handle your communications depending on their full customer experience.
The elite segmentation and customer journey capabilities allow you to anticipate your individual customer’s moves well ahead of time. By mapping out these distinct customer journeys, you can prepare for any type of customer and still ensure they have the best experience possible. This will help you develop strong relationships with your customers and keep them coming back to your store for more.
Pricing
Mailchimp starts at $0 a month through their free plan, which offers various capabilities and up to 2,000 contacts. They offer 4 plans total, with the Premium plan offering the highest amount of contacts (200,000+) and unique email marketing capabilities starting at $299 a month. You can learn more about Mailchimp’s various packages and individual capability offerings here.
» MORE: How Much Does an Email Marketing Campaign Cost?
5. Vertical Response – best for optimizing communications
Vertical Response email marketing software gives you deep insight into the success of your email marketing campaigns. Using the software’s advanced reporting capabilities, you will be able to evaluate where your customers click throughout your email, the devices they are using, where and when they are opening your emails, and more. This will help you send more efficient email campaigns based on your audience’s specific preferences regarding communications.
Vertical Response also offers capabilities to build and manage a professional lading page to connect your communications and website’s look and feel. This will establish a strong brand identity and create a lasting impression. As a result, your customers will immediately recognize your brand and know what to expect when it comes to your complete online presence.
What’s more?
Additionally, the email marketing software offers a “Test Kit,” ensuring your confidence when sending out any email marketing communication. The Test Kit allows you to preview your emails from an Inbox, Preview, and Subject Line view in addition to the full email communication. This way, you know exactly how your communications will look when they arrive in your customer’s inboxes.
Evaluating your communications insights and performance will help you adjust your email marketing strategies for more effective campaigns in the future. You will be able to send communications optimized to your specific customer base to ensure higher open rates and purchases directly from your emails going forward.
Pricing
Vertical Response offers a Basic and Pro package, starting at $11 and $16 a month, respectively. The packages range by the number of contacts in your customer base and the capabilities you are looking to use in your email marketing communications. You can learn more about Vertical Response and the email marketing packages available here.
» MORE: Best Email Marketing Software for 10,000 Contacts
Final Thoughts
Customers expect you to have a strong online presence and keep up constant communication, whether in-person at your store or home. Any sized business can have a successful online presence with the help of these elite email marketing software options.
To determine which email marketing software is right for you, you will want to evaluate which capabilities are most important to you and will be most effective in growing and marketing your business.
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