email marketing – Mike Khorev – SEO Consultant

Best Effective Mailchimp Alternatives to Look At

Mike Khorev — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:43:46 +0000

A Brief Overview on Mailchimp

In this guide, obviously Mailchimp will be the benchmark for the other tools, and here we will start by discussing its key highlights. Mailchimp is still the industry leader in email marketing tools, and not without its reasons. First, Mailchimp has the benefit of being one of the first players in creating a user-friendly email scheduler, with its drag-and-drop approach and various templates to choose from. Ease of use is indeed the key highlight of Mailchimp as an email marketing tool, while also providing a well-rounded set of features. However, many other Mailchimp alternatives – as you’ll learn further below – offers more advanced features in one area or the other. For example, Mailchimp’s automation features are relatively basic, and there’s no drag-and-drop composer for automation. Mailchimp, as one of the oldest email marketing tools available, is still leading the industry amidst the saturated competition. One of the biggest reasons, is the fact that it’s a well-rounded tool that is very easy to use with its rich set of features. However, Mailchimp is certainly not the perfect tool for all situations, there are other Mailchimp alternatives that offer different features, more advanced functionalities, and different price ranges. Below, we will discuss 6 of the best of these Mailchimp alternatives. However, let us begin with a brief discussion of Mailchimp itself, and why it’s so popular.

Key Features:

Easy to use composer with a drag and drop approach
Automated email scheduler and workflow
Personalization features
Segmentation features for better audience targeting
A/B testing
Lead capture features to capture email addresses via signup forms, pop-ups, and landing pages

We can consider MailChimp as a well-rounded tool designed for beginners or those who are only looking for simplicity and ease of use. Power-users and advanced marketers, however, might benefit from other Mailchimp alternatives with more specific advanced features.

Pricing: The limited free version is sufficient for most basic marketers, the cheapest “Essentials” plan is $9.99/month, and the Premium plan is $299/month.

Top 8 Best Mailchimp Alternatives

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is much more than an email marketing tool compared to Mailchimp. Omnisend allows you to connect several marketing channels into the same seamless automated workflow. While email marketing sits at the core of Omnisend, you can do use a lot of by improving your email marketing: email automation workflows, drag-and-drop visual composer, pre-built templates, email capture and lead generation forms, and more. Omnisend offers advanced segmentation to target your customers based on their profile data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior.

Pros of Omnisend:

Advanced segmentation for precise targeting
Email capture using popups, static sign up forms, landing pages, and gamified forms
Live website tracking for behavioral data and A/B testing
24/7 customer service

Cons of Omnisend:

Relatively expensive with its email subscriber-based pricing
Not too many email templates included

Pricing:

For starters, you can try out Omnisend’s 14 days trial package to see whether it fulfills your specifications or not. For basic email marketing, Omnisend offers a free plan that lets you send up to 15,000 emails per month. After that, their paid plans start off at only $16 per month.

2. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor also offers ease of use and user-friendliness in its email builder, making it the direct competitor to Mailchimp in the visual builder department. Campaign Monitor is also strong in its email automation features, offering a better automated email workflow than mailchimp that is more user-friendly with more advanced features. A few minor downsides about Campaign Monitor is in the lead capturing aspect. For example, you can’t configure pop-ups. Also, it’s not dedicated to ecommerce so it doesn’t has as many integrations with ecommerce platforms compared to other tools (it does offer integrations with Shopify and Magento, among others).

Pros of Campaign Monitor:

Slightly more affordable than MailChimp across all plans
Easy to use, very visual email buildier and automated campaign builder. Various templates available
In-depth analytics and reporting tools, useful in developing your strategy and evaluating your progress

Cons of Campaign Monitor:

No free plan, and the $9/month plan is relatively basic
Although easy to use initially, has a pretty steep learning curve for the advanced features

Pricing: starts at $9/month, the most expensive plan is $149/month. There’s also the option for custom, advanced plan called Emma HQ, and the option to pay per campaign.

3. TargetBay

TargetBay is more than an email marketing tool. It has three products under its wing – BayEngage, BayReviews, and BayRewards. BayEngage is an email marketing tool that supports SMS marketing as well. It has all email marketing features at affordable pricing, which makes it a direct competitor to Mailchimp. The email marketing tool BayEngage, TargetBay’s product, is an easy-to-use and user-friendly tool that offers pre-built email templates with a drag-and-drop builder along with advanced segmentation, reports, and analytics with UTM tracking, making it perfect for campaign tracking. BayEngage has a powerful email automation feature, making it easy and better automation workflow along with SMS and more advanced features.

Pros of BayEngage

Advanced segmentation features
A/B testing
24/7 dedicated account manager, be it on any plan
In-depth analytics and reporting
Create your own pop-up to capture emails or showcase your offers for website visitors

Cos of BayEngage

Relatively fewer email templates
The pricing plan for the 50000 email subscribers is not displayed on the pricing page, but you should contact the sales team.

Pricing: TargetBay offers a 14-day free trial and pricing starts at $169/month for 100K emails. Pricing scales with eCommerce needs. Although this can look costly, it is not. The catch is here since the eCommerce needs to scale up the tool has come up with direct pricing for 100K emails per month. (Note: If the emails sent per month are relatively less, then pricing also drops off).

4. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is not only an email marketing tool, but also an all-round digital marketing and sales automation tool offering various advanced automation and scheduling features. The Lite plan, however, is focused only on email marketing and email automation, with some excellent features like the ability to create segmented lists for targeting purposes, autoresponder set-ups, and analytics, among other features. As a digital marketing automation tool, however, ActiveCampaign is among the best available. So, if you are also looking for a solution for your overall digital marketing campaign, ActiveCampaign can be a great option.

Pros of ActiveCampaign:

Great customization and personalization options
As a well-rounded digital marketing and sales automation tool, very cost-effective
The lite plan (dedicated for email marketing), is also very cost-effective where you get unlimited sending with just $9/month

Cons of ActiveCampaign:

The user interface is relatively outdated, and not as easy to use as MailChimp
Customer service is sometimes not very responsive

Pricing: Free trial available, the Lite version is $9/month, and the Enterprise (full) plan is $229/month

5. Mailjet

Like Mailchimp, Mailjet is a cloud-based email marketing tool focusing on simplicity and ease of use, characterized with the visual, drag-and-drop style email builder. Mailjet also offers basic email automation features, which can be useful for those looking to implement drip campaign. There are two main factors why Mailjet might be an interesting Mailchimp alternative: there is a relatively useful basic plan that is totally free, which can be useful for those looking for a free tool to assist their email marketing campaign, and it’s very easy to setup SMTP server with Mailjet. SMTP can significantly improve the speed of email delivery, so this can be useful for time-sensitive campaigns (i.e. limited-time offer, flash sale, etc.).

Pros of MailJet:

Easy SMTP server setup
The basic version (that is totally free) is fairly useful and might be sufficient for most basic email marketing needs
The most affordable option in this list where the paid plan starts from $8.69/month
Easy to use with user-friendly interface
Can easily implement sign-up forms within the email

Cons of Mailjet:

Fairly basic features compared to others on this list so far, basic segmentation,targeting, and automation features.
Customer service not as good as MailChimp

Pricing: free version available, basic plan is $8.69/month and the premium plan is only $18.86/month. Customized enterprise version available.

6. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a Mailchimp alternative focused for ecommerce companies’ email marketing needs. So, there are several useful features for ecommerce needs like the ability to design opt-in forms, landing page builder, recipient analytics, and so on.

Features-wise, ConvertKit is probably the best on this list with various unique features designed for—as the name suggests— conversion.

Pros of ConvertKit:

Rich set of conversion-focused features, the best choice for ecommerce businesses
Great marketing automation features
Great user interface, easy to use campaign builder, website design, and marketing automation builder, among other features

Cons:

Relatively expensive with its email subscriber-based pricing
Not too many email templates included
Steep learning curve due to its deep set of features

Pricing: Free trial available, $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers, $79/month for up to 5k subscribers, customizable plan available

7. Aweber

Unlike some of the tools in this list that offer well-rounded digital marketing automation features, Aweber is totally focused on email marketing. In fact, Aweber is one of the oldest email marketing tools around that is still widely used today not only for its popularity, but also functionality. For instance, Aweber offers more email templates than any other tools in this list, where each template is completely customizable. Aweber also offers one of—if not the best—visual email builder around. Also, Aweber has very intuitive email capture features, where you can easily create popups and forms. There is, however, a major downside in Aweber’s segmentation features. This can be a problem if you are aiming for more targeted personalizations in your email campaign.

Pros of Aweber:

Easy to use email creation features, among the best in its class.
Great analytics features including intuitive A/B testing tool
Responsive and fast customer service
A lot of customizable email templates

Cons of Aweber:

Lack of targeting and user segmentation features
The basic plan is limited for 500 email subscribers, so might not be cost-efficient if you have a big contact database
Relatively basic email automation features

Pricing: Free trial available, plans start from $19/month for up to 500 subscribers.

8. HubSpot

HubSpot blends AI-powered functionalities with a straightforward email builder to create a highly capable, yet easy-to-use email marketing tool. HubSpot includes a drag-and-drop email builder that further streamlines the campaign creation process through numerous goal-based templates. You can also set up rule-based workflows that pull in data from your contact lists to easily send and deploy personalized emails. As for analytics, HubSpot provides insights into your campaign’s click and open rates and also reveals how many users either glanced, skimmed, or read through your emails in their entirety.

Pros of HubSpot:

AI writing assistant that generates personalized emails based on your input.
An intuitive drag-and-drop email builder with numerous templates.
Email health reporting tools to monitor and boost sending reputation.
A/B testing with in-depth analytics.
Free version available.

Cons of HubSpot:

Steep pricing differences between paid plans can cause issues in terms of scalability.
Design elements within the email builder can only snap into place, which can limit customization options.

Pricing: You can access basic email marketing features completely for free. Paid plans are available in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, which starts at $15 per user per month.

End Words

As you can see, each of the 7 Mailchimp alternatives we have shared above has their own advantages and disadvantages. There are mainly two reasons for choosing an email marketing tool that is not Mailchimp: either you are looking for something cheaper, or you are looking for more advanced features not offered by Mailchimp. It’s important to figure out your needs carefully with the help of digital marketing consultant before making your choice, and choose the one according to your email marketing goals.

The post Best Effective Mailchimp Alternatives to Look At appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools

Mike Khorev — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:39:14 +0000

There’s no secret that the digital marketing world is now a very complex one involving all the different platforms, different marketing methods, and virtually endless possibilities. Thankfully, with the rise of complexity and saturation, also comes more digital marketing tools that can help ease the burden.

However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

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Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms

Mike Khorev — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 04:20:44 +0000

Nowadays, there are various email marketing software available with various price ranges—a lot of them are free—. However, not all of them can make the cut as “enterprise-grade” to cater to the needs of enterprise email marketing.

In this guide, we will help you determine the best enterprise-grade email marketing solutions that can fit your organization’s current needs—and available budgets.

First, however, let us discuss one of the most frequently asked questions:

What Qualifies An Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions From Ordinary Ones?

Before we begin our discussion for the best enterprise email marketing solution available in the market, here are some important criteria we used to differentiate between enterprise email marketing tools and mid-sized ones:

Contact Database Capacity: Obviously, bigger enterprises engage to a lot more leads and prospects, that can often reach hundreds of thousands if not millions. We mainly look for email marketing solutions that are offering huge contact database/lead storage capacity and are reliable enough (in terms of processing power, bandwidth, and overall stability) to handle the size of the data.
Deliverability: A very important aspect to consider for any email marketing software. There’s nothing worse than realizing that only half of the people in your email list are actually receiving the email. Different email marketing solutions might offer different approaches to maximizing the deliverability. For instance, some might automatically blacklist addresses that trigger a bounce, and some might be able to automatically sort the contacts based on open rate.
Advanced Audience Segmentation: The large quantity of leads/prospects that are engaged by the enterprise will have different “readiness” level. One prospect, —or group of prospects— might be more ready to make a purchase than others, depending on many different factors from demographics data to different urgency. Thus, proper segmentation solutions to differentiate between these readiness levels are necessary, so the enterprise can properly implement hyper-targeted email campaigns for each.
Analytics, Testing, and Reporting Tools: Enterprises rely on data, not gut feeling, and various analytics tools from A/B testing to heat mapping to the analytics of various engagement metrics are necessary for an enterprise environment. The email marketing solution must be able to deliver reliable and intuitive reporting so executives and managers in the enterprise can readily use and analyze the reported data.
Flexible and Advanced Email Builder: Content and how we present it are still the main cores of email marketing. An email builder capable of dynamic content is required so we can better cater to the needs of different user segments (as discussed above), so it can dynamically adjust content depending on different segments (age, previously triggered actions, etc.) The more flexible the email builder is, with more advanced features, the better. However, ease of use is still an important factor to consider.
Lead Scoring: With the quantity of generated leads, a lead scoring solution—or even better, automated lead scoring solution— is required so the enterprise can properly allocate time and resources only on prospects with the highest likelihood of converting. The email marketing solution should provide the ability to establish different scoring criteria according to the business’s preferences, needs, and goals.
Integration: In an enterprise environment, it’s more common to have many different
Customer Support:Reliability is a very important factor to consider, but no software will be 100% free of technical and non-technical issues. Reliable customer support—or even better, dedicated customer support—, is an important factor to consider when choosing between different enterprise-grade email marketing solutions.

Email Marketing Best Practices and FAQ

Email marketing is, on the one hand, a very effective marketing channel with the highest ROI. Yet, on the other hand, executing effective email marketing can be quite difficult with all the saturation and competition.

It’s important to actually have an email marketing plan, and execute the strategy flawlessly so that your email(s) won’t end up in the dreaded spam folder.

Below, we will discuss some important things when planning and executing your email marketing strategy.

Elements of a Successful Marketing/Promotional Email

Content body: often called “copy”. The body of your email, the core of your message. Should focus on only one topic, and should be consistent with your brand message and identity.

CTA: since this is a marketing email with the intention to convert in one way or another, call-to-action (CTA) is very important. It should be well-placed and should be designed to stand out. The offer tied to the CTA must be relevant to the email’s content.

Images/photos/infographics/video/gifs: you can use any kind of media in an email nowadays. The main principles are that it should load properly and quickly on all devices, engaging (immediately eye-catching), and relevant.

Timing: it’s about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. It will vary depending on your audience, so you must conduct proper research to find the best possible timing for your ideal audience.

Personalization: as mentioned, it’s about sending the right message to specific people. Email personalization today is more than using the receiver’s first name in the subject line. With various AI tools and platforms available today, we have more ways to hyper personalize our emails.

Mobile-friendliness/responsiveness: more than half of all business emails today are opened on mobile devices. Your email should be optimized for any devices, and the best way to achieve this is to adopt a mobile-responsive design (or use an email builder that supports responsive templates).

Email Personalization Basics

The key to successful email personalization is to really understand your (ideal) audience: their behaviors, their needs, and their pain points.

Why is personalization important?

Simply put, our email inboxes are getting saturated with each and every year. Studies suggested that an average office employee receives more than 120 emails each day. How many of them are actually opened? How many went straight to the spam folder?

According to campaign monitor, emails with personalized subject lines have a 26% higher open rate, while personalized message (body) can improve click-through rate from a mere 0.4% to 2.1%, 5 times higher.

As briefly mentioned above, various tools and solutions have now allowed us to bring more hyper-personalizations to our emails beyond simply using the email receiver’s first name in the subject line and in email greetings.

Here are some personalizations you can implement:

Include location-specific or time-specific information when appropriate, i.e. unique holidays in some countries/regions
Send content according to the prospect’s current stage in the marketing funnel, for example, by sending a specific email to people who recently abandoned a shopping cart or have consumed a specific content
Including relevant and personal events in the email (i.e. a trending movie or tv series, etc.)
End your emails with a personal signature with a human’s name. Very simple and very important, yet often overlooked.
Relevant call-to-action that is interesting and valuable for the specific reader

What Is Email Segmentation

Segmentation, in a nutshell, is dividing your (large) email list or database into smaller “segments”.

We can use many different approaches to segment our email list, for example, based on demographics data (unique interests or characteristics), based on their stage in the marketing/sales funnel, and so on.

Email segmentation is closely tied to personalization (discussed above), and the main idea behind it is that different email receivers will have a different level of “readiness” to convert into actual customers—which should be your end goal.

For example, a free trial or discount offer might be effective for the audience who already recognize their own problems/pain points and started to recognize that your brand is a possible solution. However, it might not be as effective for customers who don’t even know what their actual problem is.

So, we put them into different segments and send different personalized emails to each segment accordingly.

The better we can target—and segment— our ideal customers, the better we can build trust and credibility with each segment, and thus the higher the chance to convert them.

How Can We Segment our Email List

The most efficient approach in segmenting our email list is to create several different opt-in (sign-up) forms with different lead magnets, specifically tailored according to each stage of the buyer’s journey or marketing funnel.

Also, various email marketing solutions (including the ones we’ve reviewed above) offer the feature to segment your email database based on demographic data and/or behavioral data such as:

Stage in the marketing funnel (might be called differently with different platforms. Hubspot, for example, used the term “lifecycle stage”.
Geographical location—might dictate different holidays, regional events, etc. that we can use in personalizations.
Industry/niche they work in, especially for B2B businesses.
Previous engagements with your brand—i.e. If they have bought your product in the past during the holiday season, so you can target them with a personalized message this next holiday season.
Specific job title/role in a company. Again, particularly useful in B2B email marketing.
Preferred language.

There are, however, no set rules on how we should segment our email list, and you can certainly as many different categories and segments as you want. There is only one rule: each segment must be as exclusive as possible so you cant hit them with a more targeted personalization.

Implementing Marketing Automation

Automation is how we can use both segmentation and personalization to good use, in order to maximize the results of our email marketing campaign.

Remember that the main idea of email marketing comprises of three things:

Sending email to the right people (segmentation)
With the right message (personalization)
At the best possible time (automation)

Nowadays, various email marketing software or platform can help us in implementing automation—including the ones we’ve reviewed in this guide—, but in practice, there are several different approaches to implement email automation:

Email Autoresponders/Drip Campaign

As the name suggests, the autoresponder works by sending “response” to a specific audience who has triggered a specific action and then sends follow-up messages on a regular interval until another action is triggered.

For example, when someone downloads your ebook lead magnet, the autoresponder will send a custom-tailored, personalized “response” automatically.

The autoresponder approaches require us to prepare a set of different emails according to these different “triggers”, these emails are often referred to as drip emails, and thus autoresponder campaign is often called “drip campaign” or “drip marketing”. We can then decide on a schedule to define how far apart these emails are going to be sent—- every few days, every week, etc. —

The main benefit of an autoresponder campaign is that when you’ve set it up properly, you can basically forget it and let the campaign work automatically, just as intended. You only need to update the drip campaign periodically when you need to add or change the triggers—or the responding messages.

Automation Workflows

We can think of email workflows as an “enhanced” autoresponder. While autoresponder can only send messages at a regular interval until the receiver took a certain action (or unsubscribe from your list), workflows can execute different actions based on different yes/no criteria.

There are two key elements of email automation workflow:

The goal(s), that is, the desired action of the user after a specific step on the workflow
Criteria: the action that would qualify a user for a specific workflow (yes), or another workflow then the action is not taken (no).

So, workflows—as opposed to autoresponders—-, can change the course of action depending on the actions taken by the user. For example, the workflow can send a different email for a user who’ve abandoned the cart the 2nd time than another user who’ve just abandoned the cart for the very first time.

Remember that the more accurate and personalized your sent email is, the higher the chance of conversions.

Email marketing solutions that offer workflow functionalities tend to be more expensive, but generally will provide justified, additional value compared to those offering traditional autoresponders.

End Words: Our Final Choice(s)

The six enterprise email marketing solutions we have tested above are very different from each other, and each of them offers their own unique set of features and selling points.

With that being said, choosing just one between them as our ultimate recommendation is going to be very difficult.

However, for the sake of this guide, here are our final recommendations:

Best For Automation: Drip

With automation and personalization being very important in today’s very saturated email marketing environment, Drip offers the best features in those aspects with advanced and unique automation builders and advanced event-based segmentation.

Best All-In-One: HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot is still the best choice if you already possess an existing ecosystem of marketing/sales tools with its huge library of third-party integration (and integration with HubSpot’s other products). If you are looking for seamless integration, overall ease of use, and great set of features, HubSpot is your best bet.

Best Affordable Choice: SendinBlue

We covered several affordable options in this list, but SendinBlue offers more flexibility in its prices because you are not charged a higher price based on yo ur contact size. A decent set of features, and quite reliable.

The post Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Content Marketing Strategy for Technology, Software and Startup Companies to Grow Traffic and Revenue

Mike Khorev — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:13:27 +0000

Content marketing for technology, startup and software companies is a very challenging thing, especially because B2B audiences simply demand more value and information from you. On the other hand, communication is the core aspect of B2B marketing, and so content marketing is arguably even more important in a B2B setting compared to B2C.

So, in this guide, we will cover all aspects of the content marketing strategy for technology, startup and software companies: from figuring out your audience to planning your topics to creating conversion devices for your content pieces. Yet, let us first discuss the main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing tactics.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Content marketing, in a nutshell, is how you use content to attract new audience, converting the audience into prospects, and ultimately, into paying customers.

With a proper content marketing, you can establish credibility, a very expensive asset in this saturated digital age. Why? Because simply, people only buy from brands they can trust. If you publish valuable, relevant content regularly, you can establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your industry, which is the principle of inbound marketing.

The main difference between B2C and B2B content marketing planning, obviously, is the audience. With B2C content marketing, you are dealing with personal customers, while with B2B content, you are dealing with businesses, or professionals within the businesses. This main difference will further gives fruit into several important differences, namely:

B2C audiences are mainly influenced by emotion, while B2B audiences are mainly influenced by logical information, although this is not absolute
The purchase process of B2B businesses tend to be longer than B2C consumers, meaning, generally you will need more content pieces to nurture a B2B audience
There can be several different decision-makers in your target companies, and each of them can have different roles with different needs. Your content pieces should address each of these roles, and so B2B content marketing must be more diversified.
B2C content marketing is more effective for brand awareness purposes, while B2B content marketing plan is more focused towards results (conversion)

Obviously, there are other differences, but these four we have discussed above are the most crucial ones. So, based on those differences, B2B content pieces are required to be more engaging, valuable, relevant, and developed with professional-quality.

Planning and Executing Content Marketing Strategy for Your Technology, Software and Startup Company

Now that we’ve understood the main principles of B2B content marketing, and the differences to B2C content marketing, let us further discuss how to develop a content marketing strategy for technology and software companies.

1. Finding and Understanding Your Audience

It’s impossible to please everyone: our time is limited, our resources are limited, and our manpower is limited. This is why it’s very important to focus on an ideal audience.

Here are some key considerations before we delve further into this subject:

Your core value proposition

Remember that people aren’t essentially buying your product or software, but rather the benefits tied to it. Identify the single, most important value about your product or service. If you can define the extra features and benefits, that’s fine, but don’t let these extra features dilute your judgment about the most important benefit.

Who would benefit most from that value?

Now that you’ve defined your core value, you will need to find out who, or at least, which companies will benefit the most from this value. For example, if your product is aimed at improving productivity, you might want to target startups with fast-paced growth.

Your unique value

What makes your business unique compared to your competitors? What should be the reason your audience will purchase from you and not from your competition? This can be a lower price tag, but remember that your competitor can always lower their price as well. Identify your unique value, and build your business (and content marketing) around it.

Based on those three considerations, here are some targeting approaches you can implement:

Start by defining your target companies

If you are a B2B technology, startup and software company, your customers will be companies and organizations. List all possible target companies and pick 3 or 5 biggest/most relevant ones. Research these companies thoroughly, especially their key decision-makers.

Each company can have more than one decision-maker, and by studying these key companies, you can have a clearer picture of ideal roles you should target. If possible, segment this audience according to the various stages of the marketing funnel.

Using analytics and available data

If your brand (and especially site) is not totally new, you should be able to use analytics data to analyze your current visitors. You can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics to do this.

Then, you can take notes of the important metrics. You might want to check out this guide by Tech Funnel listing all the important metrics in tracking qualified audiences.

With this data, you can learn a lot about your site visitors, from basic demographics like gender and age, and more in-depth behavior and interest data from the topics they are interested in, what time they are active on your site, what device are they using (mobile/desktop/tablet), and so on.

Understanding this data will be useful not only for your startup content marketing strategy, but for your overall marketing and business strategies you can apply for your tech or software business. Here are some key metrics to observe:

Demographics: fairly obvious, for example, if your main target audience is millennial women working in California between the age of 25-34, you can figure out how to develop content for this group.

Behavior: there have been arguments that behavioral targeting is now more important than demographics targeting. The better you can understand your audience’s behavior, the better you can tailor your content. Check out this guide by Google on how to use Analytics to analyze behavior.

Keywords: analyzing keywords that bring these visitors to your blog/site will be extremely beneficial for your startup digital marketing planning. You can plan out topics to target keywords that have brought results.

Interest: you can use Google Analytics data to track the social channels that bring visitors to your site. Then you can use the analytics feature on each social media channel to find their interests. You might want to check this guide to learn more about this aspect.

In short, with this approach, we analyze various data of our current visitors and readers to develop better content. Obviously we can’t use this approach if your site is brand new, but you can analyze your closest competitors’ data for a similar effect.

Developing reader persona

Reader persona, similar to buyer persona, is a fictional model of your ideal reader. So, as opposed to the previous approach where you use the available data to understand your current audience, here you analyze possibilities to create your most ideal future audience.

One way to do this is by analyzing your business and marketing goals, and finding the audience with the highest possibilities in helping you to achieve those goals.

Another approach is to analyze various data, similar to the previous discussion, and use this data to shape your ideal reader. Developing a reader persona can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on developing a data-driven reader persona.

2. Planning Your Topics

One of the biggest challenges in developing a content marketing strategy for tech and startup businesses is consistency. A proper content marketing is not about just one or two high-quality content pages, but you will need to publish a lot of content blogs, articles and pages in various forms, while maintaining consistency in quality.

The best way to tackle this issue is to plan your topics ahead, or better, develop a 6 to 12 months editorial calendar. At the very least, you should aim for two to three content pieces per month. The more the merrier, as long as you can maintain quality.

Here are key steps to consider when planning your topics:

Keyword research

In this saturated digital marketing world, thousands of content pieces are being published every single day. No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any value from it unless it’s visible to your audience.

One of the best ways to achieve content visibility for software companies is through SEO, and this is why targeting the right keywords is important. In general, you should target keywords that are:

Valuable for your business and relevant to what you are offering.
Have enough search volume (people are actually searching these keywords).
Ranking for these keywords is possible (manageable competition/keyword difficulty).

Then, you can develop topics to target these keywords. You might want to check out our previous guide on keyword research here.

Social Monitoring

Another indicator you can use in planning your topics is to see the current trends in social media channels: what topics are currently talked about, what’s being shared the most, what’s the popular hashtags, and so on.

There are various marketing tools that can do this, but the most popular one is BuzzSumo. With BuzzSumo, for example, you can collect real-time data from all major social networks according to your industry/niche, and you will be given a list of popular topics with the most traction in your niche.

Using this data, you can either aim to make better content on the topic or use a different approach to cover the topic. Obviously, since you are measuring trends, this approach will be limited to a time frame.

To tackle this, you can first develop a content calendar using the keyword research approach, and use social monitoring to fine-tune it. For example, if you see a topic that was planned for December is trending today in June, you can move it forward. You can also stick to your initial content calendar while developing another content to cover the trend.

User Intent Prediction

Every activity on the internet from searching to browsing to making a transaction has an intention behind it. This is the concept of user intent, and there are three basic user intent types:

Navigational: when you are aiming to get to a specific website
Informational: when you are searching for information
Transactional: when you are looking to make a purchase

In a B2B sales cycle, it is important to understand that user intent can move progressively according to their position in the sales cycle or marketing funnel. Let’s use an example to illustrate this:

Let’s say you are a marketing manager in a company, and you are currently searching for information on improving your team’s productivity. Your intent here is informational but you are not yet looking for a specific product. Here, a marketing automation tool company can target you with content like “how marketing automation tools can improve productivity”, covering the benefits and main features of marketing automation tools.

Then, after reading the content, you are now interested in buying a marketing automation tool and decided to research your options. Notice your intent has shifted here, and in this stage, content like “best marketing automation tools comparison” can appeal to you.

As you can see, the better you understand the various user intent, the better you can plan your topics. Here are several principles to consider when using this approach:

The more expensive your product is, the longer your sales cycle will be, and thus generally more people will be involved in the purchase decision
Understand your sales process, how a typical user usually stumble upon your product and their key considerations until they finally make a the purchase
Understand the unique values of your product compared to your competitors
Develop content pieces according to the possible user intents.

3. Validating Your Content

Now that you’ve planned your topics and probably developed a content calendar, it’s time to validate your topics. We all know creating content can be a painful, arduous process. So, we have to make sure our efforts, time, and resources are going to the right ones.

Thankfully, with social media as well as other channels, we can validate our content by using simple social experiments. For example:

You can create a simple infographic covering a topic, and post in on social media to see number of shares, etc.
Develop simple, short, but valuable content and post in on social media or over email marketing.
Use A/B testing to test various aspects of your content from headlines to forms to images and videos.
Surveys and one-on-one interviews are always effective.

The idea is, don’t blindly produce any content and let your precious time and/or money go to waste. Make sure to focus on topics that actually matter.

4. Planning Content Promotion

Planning and actually developing the content is actually only half the job done. As we have mentioned, excellent content won’t bring value unless people (and ideally, a lot of people) are consuming it.

This is why it is very important to plan how you are going to distribute and promote the content.

As we have discussed briefly above, optimizing your content for B2B SEO with the aim of increasing your organic reach is very effective. However, that’s not the only effective way to promote your content, and here are some tactics you might want to consider:

Social media marketing

Social media is how many people finding out news, new products, new places, and especially, contents. So, it’s fairly obvious that social media will be a very effective channel for your content promotion.

Take notes, however, that organic social media reach has been in decline for some time now, and you will most likely need to invest on paid social advertising.

Influencer marketing

The key here is finding the right influencers of the B2B industry you are in, that will align well with your content. Influencer marketing on the B2B environment is still less common than the B2C counterpart, but it can still be very effective when done right.

Email marketing

You can use email marketing to promote your content, while on the other hand a valuable content can help improve the performance of your email marketing.

The idea here is to deliver the right content, to the right people, at exactly the right time, and we can do it by implementing drip marketing.

5. Planning Conversion Device

Now that your audience is consuming your content, what then? Obviously, for your content pieces to be effective, they must be able to convert your readers, either from readers to prospects or from prospects into actual, paying customers.

There are several different approaches to do this, and here are some of the most effective ones:

Offering free but valuable, in-depth content in exchange of the user’s contact information (mainly email address), a pretty common but effective tactic
Offering free-trial of your product, free sample, or discount within the content, using a sense of urgency.
Using a comprehensive, in-depth content about your product and its unique values to encourage them to purchase. This can be effective, but you will need to find the right balance between being informative and hard-selling.
Use social proof like testimonies, user reviews, etc. within your content. A common approach is to develop a video highlighting these social proofs.

End Words

The most important aspect of any B2B content marketing plan is finding and understanding your ideal audience: always aim to provide value by offering solutions to their problems or presenting new information to improve their businesses. If you are looking for professional content marketing and SEO check my SEO services for startups.

Remember that the key here is consistency: regularly publish your content pieces, yet maintain the quality. Monitor your progress, evaluate your results, and use the data to develop even better content in the future.

The post Content Marketing Strategy for Technology, Software and Startup Companies to Grow Traffic and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Top 5 Email Marketing Tools For Your Business Growth

Mike Khorev — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 14:12:14 +0000

Even with all the new marketing channels, technologies, and tactics, email marketing remains the most effective marketing channel with the highest ROI.

However, email marketing is also a highly competitive field. The average person can receive hundreds of emails in a single day, so a proper execution is necessary to capture your audience’s attention.

Fortunately, there are various email marketing tools that can help you in planning, executing, and automating your email marketing, where you’ll need all the advantages you can get.

Yet, with all the different options available, it can be confusing to choose the right email marketing tool with the right price and the features you actually need.

With that being said, here are our recommendations for 5 of the best email marketing tools, a brief overview about the, and their pros and cons.

Top 5 Email Marketing Tools

1. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the oldest email marketing tools ever invented, and is still the industry leader even with the arrival of newer competitors with new technologies.

One of the key reasons for that, is the fact that Mailchimp was one of the very first user-friendly email scheduler, offering various templates and a visual builder to build your email with a drag and drop approach.

So, the key highlight of MailChimp is its ease of use. However, Mailchimp also offers a fairly well-rounded set of features to cover all your email marketing needs.

Also, MailChimp offers great integration with hundreds of software and applications, from popular ones like WordPress, WordPress alternatives and niche CMSs. It’s very easy to integrate MailChimp with your existing environment.

Pros:

Very easy to use template editor
Generous free plan allowing 10,000 emails and 2,000 subscribers
Great third-party integration with hundreds of platforms
Great reporting functions
Great lead capture features
A/B testing

Cons:

Hard to program automation compared to its competitors
Strict policy prohibiting affiliate marketing

Pricing: A free version, enough for basic email marketing needs. The cheapest Essentials plan is $9.99/month, and the Premium plan is $299 per month

You can also check Mailchimp alternatives.

2. ActiveCampaign Lite

ActiveCampaign is a full-fledged digital marketing tools suite, offering various sales and marketing automation tools.

ActiveCampaign Lite, however, is solely focused on email marketing, with various features like setting up autoresponder, analytics report, great user segmentation features, and many more.

A key advantage of the ActiveCampaign Lite, however, is the ability to send unlimited number of emails with a very competitive price, at just $9/month, you even get quite advanced automation features in its basic plan.

You might also want to consider subscribing for ActiveCampaign’s full Enterprise plan, which offers some of the best digital marketing tools available today.

Pros:

Cost-effective as a well-rounded sales and marketing automation tools suite
The Lite plan, focused on email marketing only, is also very affordable where you get unlimited number of emails sent for just $9/month
Great, easy to use personalization features

Cons:

Fairly obsolete user interface compared to newer competitors
Slow customer service

Pricing: Lite version for email marketing is $9/month (unlimited emails), Enterprise plan is $229/month. No free plan available.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is quite similar to MailChimp in many different ways, but mainly because it also offers an easy to use visual builder with a drag and drop approach.

However, Campaign Monitor offers better email automation features, with a more user-friendly email automation workflow and more advanced automation features.

On the other hand, Campaign Monitor is slightly lacking in its lead capturing features. Again, especially when compared to MailChimp.

Pros:

Cost-effective, slightly more affordable than MailChimp with all of the offered plans
Easy to use, user-friendly visual builder
Great and easy to use automated campaign builder
Great reporting and analytics tools, you can easily evaluate your campaign and develop your strategy

Cons:

No free plan offered, the $9/month plan is comparable to MailChimp’s free plan with slightly more features
Pretty steep learning curve for the advanced functions, although initially easy to use

Pricing: The most affordable plan is $9/month, and the most expensive plan is $149/month. You also have the option to pay per campaign or a custom plan based on your needs.

4. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing tool focused on ecommerce, offering several unique features that are useful for ecommerce-specific needs. For example, the feature to do recipient analytics, opt-in forms designers, and landing page builder, among others.

ConvertKit probably offers the richest feature set among the other tools in this list, especially focused on conversion (hence the name ConvertKit). A well-rounded tool for any email marketing needs, even when you are not planning to do ecommerce.

However, it’s quite expensive with its subscriber-based pricing model. If you do have the budget, ConvertKit is a very good choice especially if you want to boost your conversion.

Pros:

Great set of features, especially for conversion-focused features designed for ecommerce needs
Easy to use marketing automation features
Intuitive user interface with great visual builder
Advanced marketing automation features
Website builder as an extra feature

Cons:

The cheapest plan is relatively expensive, and limited to 1,000 subscribers
Steep learning curve with a very deep, advanced features
Not many templates

Pricing: Starts from $29/month (1,000 subscribers), the most expensive plan is $79/month (5,000 subscribers), custom plan available, no free plan.

5. Mailjet

Similar to MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, Mailjet is an email marketing software that especially focuses on simplicity and intuitiveness with its drag-and-drop email builder.

Mailjet does offer relatively basic email automation but is sufficient for most email marketers. However, there are two interesting selling points that might make Mailjet the best choice for you: just like MailChimp, the free plan is fairly useful. Second, it’s very easy to integrate an SMTP server with Mailjet.

SMTP can be useful if you want to improve the speed of email delivery, so it’s a valuable feature to have if you are going to implement time-sensitive email campaigns (i.e. limited offer).

Pros:

Easy, reliable SMTP server
Very easy to use, intuitive builder
Free basic version, sufficient for basic email marketing
The paid plan is also affordable at just $8.69/month
Can integrate sign-up forms within the email

Cons:

Customer service not very responsive
Basic overall features compared to others in this list

Pricing: free version available, the most affordable plan is $8.69 per month, and the premium plan is $18.6/month.

5. Respona

Respona is a powerful email marketing and outreach tool designed to streamline your communications and improve your overall marketing strategy.

Originally built for link builders, Respona has evolved into an all-in-one email marketing platform that combines user-friendly features with advanced automation and data-driven insights.

Respona stands out due to its integration of data credits, which allow you to enrich your email campaigns with up-to-date contact information and AI personalization.

With a robust set of features that cover email marketing, lead generation, and automated workflows, Respona is a versatile tool for businesses of all sizes, from in-house teams to large enterprises.

Pros:

Comprehensive set of email marketing and outreach features
Data credit system for finding and verifying contact information
Unlimited email sends, campaigns, and users for unrestrained marketing efforts
Priority support and strategic sessions in higher plans
Enhanced security and dedicated success manager for enterprise needs
Easy-to-use interface with advanced automation capabilities

Cons:

Higher price point compared to some competitors
Significant learning curve for teams new to advanced email marketing tools
Lacks a free tier beyond the 14-day free trial for more extensive hands-on experience

Pricing:

Pro: $399/month. Includes 5 email accounts, 300,000 data credits/year, unlimited emails sent, unlimited campaigns, unlimited users, and 50k active contacts.
Unlimited: $799/month. Offers everything in Pro, plus unlimited email accounts, 600,000 data credits/year, white-glove onboarding, three strategy sessions, priority support, and 100k active contacts.
Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes everything in Unlimited, plus enhanced security, a dedicated success manager, advanced permissions, and a service level agreement (SLA).

Conclusion

Each of the 5 email marketing tools we have discussed above offers their own unique selling points, and each has their disadvantages.

It’s important to first figure out your email marketing goals, and choose the right tool that can help you in achieving that goal(s), according to your needs and budget.

The post Top 5 Email Marketing Tools For Your Business Growth appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

10 Tips to Boost Email Marketing Engagement

Rhonda Martinez — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 20:55:14 +0000

Email marketing is one of the most effective methods of digital marketing. It can help you promote your products and generate sales. According to statistics, as much as 60% of digital marketers note that email marketing outperforms social media, and the main reason is that it is highly engaging. Email marketing can drive more traffic to your website and generate more conversions.

People who opt-in to receive your emails are interested in your brand. You can turn them into loyal customers and increase their lifetime value, and the only thing you should do is to keep them engaged. Keeping your subscribers engaged is the biggest challenge of email marketing because, if you fail to do it, you will not only lose subscribers but also damage your credibility. You can analyze your click-through and open rates to learn more about your subscribers and to determine what content is the most interesting for them. However, if you see that your open rates decline and people start to unsubscribe, it means that your emails are not engaging enough. Here are some tips that will help you boost your email engagement.

Tips to Increase Engagement

1. Let them know what they’re signing up for

First, it’s important to set expectations before people decide to subscribe to your emails. No matter if it’s seasonal offers, monthly newsletters, or helpful tips, you should clearly indicate what types of emails they’re going to receive. This way, you will attract the right audience, and your subscribers won’t be disappointed by any unpleasant surprises. Besides, if the content of your emails doesn’t meet your subscribers’ expectations, these emails may end up in the spam folder. Thus, we recommend that you always describe the type of emails in the signup form.

2. Send engaging welcome emails

A good welcome email can be a reason why your subscribers will continue to engage with your brand. Welcome messages have higher open rates, and you should use them to your advantage. A simple thank you email will help you establish good relationships with your subscribers. We also recommend that you include a list of things that they will receive in the future (e.g. newsletters, promotions, etc.) so that they can know what to expect from you. To ensure your welcome emails reach subscribers’ inboxes, it’s essential to use an SPF record checker to maintain your sender reputation and guarantee effective communication with your audience.

3. Communicate frequently

If you don’t send emails for a long time and then try to re-engage with your audience, your unsubscribe rate may explode. We suggest that you send your subscribers regular emails and relevant offers to keep them engaged all the time. However, don’t send too many emails. One or two emails per week will be fine. Besides, make sure that your content is actually valuable.

4. Use personalization

Personalization allows you to add value to your emails, tailoring them to the preferences and interests of your subscribers. According to statistics, 90% of marketers note a significant impact of personalization on profitability. To create personalized email marketing campaigns, you can segment your lead lists. Determine what types of products your subscribers have purchased in the past and create valuable content that will reflect their interests. A good example of valuable content is emails that educate and teach your subscribers something new. You can also personalize your promotions.

5. Put more effort into your subject lines

Even if your email is great in terms of content, nobody will read it if its subject line is ineffective and weak. Your subject lines must grab attention and motivate the readers to open your emails. “People get dozens of emails every day, quickly skimming through their inboxes, so your subject lines must stand out. Ask a question, mention a special offer, or create a sense of urgency. I also recommend that you address your subscribers by name,” adds Kimberly Thomas, editor and email marketing specialist at LegitWritingServices.

6. Use automation

Automation can make a big difference because it helps marketers combine strategy and software, enabling them to create personalized and relevant email campaigns. Automation allows for creating dynamic content and A/B testing, which are just two of the many benefits of automation that can help you boost email engagement. It will also save you a lot of time and help you communicate with the subscribers at the right moment.

7. Add social links

If you enable your subscribers to share your emails on social media, you will increase subscriber engagement significantly. Emails with social links demonstrate 158% higher click-through rates. We recommend that you add highly visible social media buttons to make sharing your content as simple as possible.

8. Use different types of emails

Provide different types of content to make your emails more engaging. We’ve already mentioned welcome emails, which should be simple and personalized. In addition, send weekly and monthly newsletters with targeted content. Share relevant offers and don’t forget to send thank you emails when your subscribers use your offers.

9. Include a strong call-to-action

The purpose of a marketing email is to not only give your audience something to read but also to motivate them to take action. For instance, emails may ask them to purchase a product, sign up for a webinar, or to follow you on social media. Make sure that your CTAs stand out visually and are easy to follow. Besides, the design of your emails shouldn’t distract your subscribers from the CTAs.

10. Make your emails mobile-friendly

According to research, 55% of emails are opened on smartphones and tablets. If you don’t optimize your emails for mobile devices, they will look terrible on small screens so you will get fewer clicks and engagement will drop. Fortunately, you can use mobile-friendly templates when working with MailChimp, Mailchimp alternatives, AWeber, and many other service providers.

Conclusion

If you see that your emails are not as effective as they used to be and people don’t respond to them as often, these simple tips will help you increase engagement so that your email marketing campaign will bring you better results. We recommend that you clearly indicate what kind of content your subscribers will receive from you and send them personalized thank you emails to build positive relationships. Segment your audience and use automation to communicate with your subscribers at the right time. Include strong CTAs, optimize your emails for mobile devices, write engaging subject lines, and you will boost your email marketing engagement in no time.

The post 10 Tips to Boost Email Marketing Engagement appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

How To Build A Great Content Marketing Campaign

Mike Khorev — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 19:46:23 +0000

Content marketing is an important part of your marketing mix. You need it to get noticed, to build awareness and to drive your audience to conversion. However, creating a good content marketing campaign is not so easy. There are many aspects to consider and many different ways to handle it.

But, if you know the most important steps of a successful content marketing campaign, you can do it with a lot more ease.

Get to know your audience and what they need from your content

Your audience should always be your focus. Make sure that you understand your demographics and psychographics well before you start your campaign. Consider what your audience could want or need from your content. It might be guides and tips or it might be something more research-focused. It can even be purely for entertainment.

Discover this before you start content marketing.

If you have a blog, update content – if not, start one

Blog is the foundation of content marketing. That’s your base and a good place to start from. If you already have a blog, update the content already there to reflect your content marketing efforts. No blog yet? No problem – blogs are easy to build and they could mean a lot for your page because of all of the optimization that you can do.

Start building an email list and use it properly

Email list building is important because email is the perfect medium for content marketing. You can, for one, create a long-form content gift for everyone who subscribes. This is a lead magnet that will help you get many people on your email list. You can create blog post roundups and different emails for your audience aside from regular blog post updates.

Tell good stories, this makes all the difference

Storytelling is an important element of any piece of content. We love stories as we understand the world better through them. Use storytelling to help people get your message and to grab attention. You can tell your brand’s story, customer stories, and even use them in blog post content as a way to inform more effectively.

Schedule and organize your content and sharing

To avoid any delays and hiccups, you should create a content schedule that will help you stay on track. This is fairly simple and there are many tools you can use. By scheduling content, you map out your strategy and you get the most out of your time.

“Schedule social media marketing too, as it will be much harder for you to share on a regular basis that way,” says Emma Perkins, a editor at Boom Essays and Uktopwriters.

Understand what you want to achieve and create content that will get you there

Set clear goals for your content marketing campaign. What do you want to achieve? More engagement? More awareness? Better sales? Set a goal – or more goals – and work towards it. Come up with a clear plan that will get you there.

Create content for all stages of the sales funnel

Your sales funnel stages all need different content. Awareness stage means informational content like blog posts where you are not trying to sell anything yet, but just to build trust and familiarity. Middle part of the sales funnel is the stage where you would create product comparisons or more detailed content on how to use your products. And finally, last stage means that you should create direct sales emails and offers.

Use visuals to enhance your messages

“Visuals help improve your content. Images, videos, infographics, graphs and so on all serve to bring your story to life and improve it,” says Beth Carson, a content marketer at BigAssignments and Eliteassignmenthelp.

So, do you feel like you know more about content marketing? Tips are always great and useful – but to really understand something and learn how to do it well, you need to get straight into it. It may take you some time and a slightly slower approach but you will find your way. Keep these tips in mind.

The post How To Build A Great Content Marketing Campaign appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

4 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

Mike Khorev — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 18:02:38 +0000

Marketing is one of the most difficult challenges for any e-commerce businesses. Yet, overcoming it is also one of the most important aspect in achieving success, from finding new prospects, nurturing these prospects until they are ready to buy, and encouraging the conversion.

In this guide, we will discuss four of the most effective marketing tactics for the e-commerce environment. These tactics can be very effective to increase the revenue of your business, encouraging growth, and maximizing profitability.

Without further ado, let us begin.

Have an Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing—even amidst all the newer platforms and technologies today— is still one of, if not the most most effective tactics available, especially for nurturing your prospects until they are ready for the purchase.

Since in an e-commerce business, we lack of any physical engagements with our customers, your email marketing campaign will be your main, and most effective way to maintain engagement.

When implementing email marketing for e-commerce, here are some key considerations:

Proper audience segmentation and personalization are very important factors to success nowadays. You will need to understand the needs of each specific audience, and deliver the right message properly. (link drip marketing)
An engaging subject line will be the key to optimizing open rate. Make sure it’s to-the point and can communicate the benefit of opening the message. You will also need to optimize preview texts with a similar approach.
Have an optimized landing page for each email sent. This is the key to maximizing conversion rate.
The quality of your content, as well as visual design will be the most important factor in determining click-through rate (CTR).

To learn further about email marketing for e-commerce, you might want to check this guide by BigCommerce.

Implementing Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the popular term now used to describe the activity of regularly publishing relevant, valuable audience to attract prospects. This can be an active blog, podcast, or even a YouTube channel.

The main idea of inbound marketing—as the name suggests— is to pull our audience “inward”, and it is particularly effective for e-commerce because:

Your business is mainly online-based where you don’t have physical engagement. By regularly publishing content, you can maintain and optimize engagement with prospects and customers.
A proper inbound marketing will improve your site’s ranking in search results. Remember that people mainly find e-commerce sites through a Google search, and this can be a very effective strategy to improve visibility.

When implementing inbound marketing in an e-commerce setting, here are some key considerations:

Your inbound marketing efforts should not focus solely on promoting your products or services, but rather to provide relevant information about your niche.
The key is a proper understanding of your audience: their needs, problems, and behaviors in general. If you can answer a specific issue with your content that is relevant for your ideal audience, you can drive a lot of traffic.
Although we shouldn’t mainly focus on selling products, you should aim to convert readers into prospects—or even better—customers. You can include CTAs to capture your audience’s email address to follow them up with email marketing. This is mainly done by offering a downloadable content (ebook, white paper, etc.), free-trial, or even free stuffs.
Developing the content is just half the job done. No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless there’s an audience. Promote your content through various marketing tactics, and aim to get as many backlinks during the process. Working with SEO experts will also improve your SEO results.

Make an Easier Checkout Process

While there are many different factors that can determine conversion rate, it is actually a common occurrence that the cause for a low conversion rate is simply because the checkout process is not optimized.

In the specific case of the e-commerce niche, we can avoid cart abandonment with an easy, optimized checkout process:

The whole checkout process should be seamless, easy enough for anyone, and trustworthy. Include as little number of steps as possible.
Make sure the whole checkout page is mobile-responsive and optimized. More and more people are purchasing from their phones, and you shouldn’t neglect this opportunity. Make sure all your buttons are easily clickable from a mobile device.
Capture their contact information (email address) as early as you can in the checkout process. You can actually do this before showing any checkout forms. This way, if they abandon the cart, you can follow up with email marketing.
You should provide a reliable real-time support that is easy to access during the whole checkout process. You can either provide a live chat feature here, or even implement chatbots. You might also add a live chat function in your app using an in-app chat API solution for Android or iOS.
Don’t offer false promises, inform clear delivery times, stock levels, shipping costs, and other necessary information. You might also want to offer free shipping.
Offer incentives and communicate them clearly within the review page(s). This is done to avoid cart abandonment.

Optimizing your checkout page is a pretty deep subject on its own, and there are still various ways to further enhance your checkout process. You might want to check out this guide to learn further.

Leveraging Social Proofs Effectively

People are now avoiding advertising all the time, and studies have suggested that people are more likely to purchase a product or service after reading a positive review, or after a recommendation from their peers.

This is often referred to as “social proof”, a psychological phenomenon when we follow the action of others, assuming this specific action is the correct one.

There are at least six main types of social proof in the marketing environment:

From existing customers: positive reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.
From big masses: using large crowds as social proof, for example, “100,000 customers have bought our product, are you ready to join?”
From experts: reviews from experts and thought leaders of the industry, including the specific content discussing your product
From influencers: celebrities that have bought your product/used your service, influencer mentions, etc.
From colleagues: recommendation from your friends or using social media data (i.e. “100 of your friends have used our product”)
Awards/certifications: credible awards and certifications can be a huge social proof

So, how can we leverage these social proofs to improve conversion rate? Here are some key principles:

63% of customers are more likely to purchase something online when the site displays reviews and ratings.
You can use real-time stats as powerful social proofs. For example, showing how many people are currently on your site, how many people are currently making a purchase, and so on.
If you are a B2B ecommerce site, displaying client logos can be very effective. Make sure, however, that it is well designed.
Encourage existing customer to leave positive reviews and/or ratings. You can offer incentives from discounts to freebies to other special offers.

The main idea here is winning the trust of your audience, so avoid using exaggerated social proofs.

End Words

The key to marketing success for e-commerce is understanding your customer base: their behaviors, their needs, and the problems you/your product can address.

You should also talk to a digital marketing consultant and adapt marketing tactics according to the length of your sales cycle. If your sales cycle is long, for example, you should focus more on the lead nurturing process.

The post 4 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Tactics appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy

Mike Khorev — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 17:17:46 +0000

We have surely seen all the buzz surrounding inbound marketing, with many claiming it to be the most effective marketing strategy available. Yet, just because it’s effective, doesn’t mean we won’t need to execute it right, and in this guide, we will learn how.

In this guide to inbound marketing strategy, we will divide our discussion into three big parts. By the end, you can develop a sound inbound marketing strategy and start implementing it.

Let us begin with the first one.

Targeting The Right Audience

Knowing who to target and understanding their needs are very important factors for the success of your inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is ultimately about delivering valuable content to your target audience. Without knowing their needs, you simply can’t deliver value.

The market is also rapidly changing, as do the behaviors and needs of your audience. Focusing on the target audience that matters will also help you in dealing with this changes. So, how can we effectively determine the right audience? Below, we will share some of our methods:

1. Social media insights

If your business already have performing social media profiles with several hundreds followers for each, you can analyze their demographic data to figure out your existing customer base.

Most major social media platforms offer features to analyze the demographic data of your followers, especially their gender, age, and location. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, there’s the “Insights” tab on the top of the page for this purpose.

This is also why social media should be one of your main ways of publishing and promoting content.The more followers and fans you have, the more data you’ll have, and the better you can understand your audience.

2. Conducting Online Surveys

Conducting surveys can be very effective to know your target prospects, and you can easily do this if you already have a growing email database. Also, there are many different tools that can assist you in this process.

The main goal here is to find out your target audience’s needs and problems, so you can ask a question like “what is your current biggest issue related to X (your niche/industry)”. By figuring out their problems, you can then develop content pieces providing solutions to these issues.

3. Conducting Interviews

While broadcasting surveys can be an effective way to figure out the general picture of your target market, it is fairly difficult to capture an in-depth data with it. This is where phone or even in-person interviews can fill in the gap.

Select a few of your existing customers (it’s better to conduct interviews with existing customers compared to prospects, since generally they are more willing), and ask them if it’s okay to conduct short phone calls or video chats (a maximum of 10 minutes). Again, your main goal here is to find out their current problems: ask their current struggles, the solutions they’ve tried in the past, and what are they looking in a solution.

You can then use this data to develop your content.

4. Content Development

Content quality is obviously the core of any inbound marketing strategy. In fact, in theory, if your content quality is excellent, you won’t need any strategy at all.

On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content pieces. Even when a low-quality content somehow rank on the top of search engine results, it won’t bring any business, period.

The value of your content is directly tied to your audience’s needs: a good inbound marketer should always adapt their content according to the current needs of their audience. Yet, it’s not the only thing you should consider when developing your content.

Here are a few areas you should focus on:

Content types

First, understand that textual content, especially blog posts, is still the most effective content form in generating new leads.

However, more and more businesses are shifting towards podcasts and videos, and not without its reasons:you can’t consume textual content while driving or while working out in the gym. Podcasts and videos tackled that issue.

Yet, when researching for services and products, people trust textual content more, especially due to its ability to cover in-depth information.

So, a majority of your content should be textual, while podcasts, videos, and webinars can assist these textual content pieces. For example, you can create a podcast covering an outline for a topic, and offer a link to a more in-depth blog posts covering the same topic. If necessary, you can offer e-books or white papers for even more in-depth information.

Content length

This is the main principle you should understand: the longer is always the better, as long as you can maintain engagement throughout the whole content. Yet, we all know that maintaining quality will be more difficult with longer content pieces. The key is finding that balance.

For textual content pieces, the average word count to maintain this balance looks like to be 1,890 words. For videos? This research by Minimatters might help.

Optimizing titles

Titles, or headlines, if you will, are the first thing people read when they stumbled upon your content, and so they are the ones determining your click-through rate (CTR).

Optimized titles are also important for SEO purposes. You should include your target keyword in the title while making sure the title is also appealing to human readers. Putting the target keyword at the front of the title will also help. For example, if your focus keyword is “Local SEO”, you can make a title like “Local SEO: Top 10 Tactics for Higher Google Maps Results”.

You might want to check this guide by QuickSprout on optimizing headlines.

Optimizing snippet

Similar to titles, your snippet (META description) is very important not only to improve CTR, but for SEO purposes. Include your target keywords, but make sure the description is comprehensive and engaging for human readers.

You might want to check this guide by Neil Patel on how to optimize META description.

Diversify your media

Even if you should focus on primarily textual content pieces, you should utilize other media like images, infographics, audio, and even videos to enrich your content.

Remember that these additional media should support your core content, do not use them just for the sake of it. You can also optimize these images and videos for SEO benefits.

Tell a compelling story

Every human being is attracted to great story: we either spend our lives consuming exciting stories (through books, movies and so on) or writing our own (literally, or by living a successful life).

So, even if your content is technical and data-driven, doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and fun. Use storytelling techniques to enhance your content, use a conversational approach to engage your audience, and aim to create an interactive story.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value if no one consumes it. This is why content development is just half of the process, and you shouldn’t neglect content promotion as the core part of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are various ways to promote your content, and below, we will list some of the most popular (and effective) ones:

1. Social Media Marketing

Quite obvious, with so many people using social media nowadays, it is one of the most effective platforms to promote anything.

The thing is, organic reach on major social media platforms have declined rapidly in recent years. So, you will need to consider paid promotional options. Your main goal here is to have more people sharing your content, which can bring exponential benefits both for short-term and long-term basis.

2. Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting can be very effective inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because you get many different benefits with one action: you get backlinks (probably not immediately, but very possible), you get awareness and authority, and you develop relationships with influencers and high-quality sites.

There are several key principles to a proper guest posting campaign:

Consistency is key, find as many sites accepting guest posting,and approach all of them
Take notes on sites with high engagement rates, these are your priorities
Build relationships before you pitch them with your blog post: engage in their conversations, comment on their previous posts, and so on
Don’t focus on getting backlinks at first, aim to get authority

3. Influencer Marketing

Utilizing influencers not only can effectively promote your content pieces, but you will also get the benefit of getting backlinks from their authority sites.

Again, here are some key principles for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

The most important step is finding the right influencers for you. There are many tools that can assist you in this process, for example, Buzzsumo.
Gradually build a relationship with these influencers. Engage them on their social media profiles, join their conversations, and only after gaining their trust, you can propose them for a content promotion opportunity
Don’t solely focus on major influencers and celebrities, micro-influencers can also provide values

4. Host a Webinar

You can utilize webinars to promote your brand or your personality, while also indirectly promote your content. Host a free webinar session in exchange for their email address, which can be an effective lead generation device.

If you can provide value, people who attended your webinar might also be interested in future content, as you establish your position as the thought leader of your niche.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective tactic not only to promote your content, but also to encourage those who have consumed your content to convert.

Here are some important principles for a successful email marketing campaign:

Be consistent and think long-term, regularly provide excellent content through email marketing. Don’t focus on hard-selling your products, but focus on providing value
Understand the behavior and needs of your email subscribers (back to section I). You simply need to provide them with proper values, a reason to stay subscribed
Personalize your email marketing by using first names. Many email marketing tools can help with this
Use an interesting, engaging subject line.
Keep your email messages to-the-point and engaging, you can use animated gifs, images, and even videos, but make sure they have decent loading speed
Make sure all email messages are mobile-responsive

6. SEO

SEO is obviously an inseparable aspect of inbound marketing, and the primary way you can increase your content’s visibility.

To maximize your SEO results, there are four main areas to focus on:

Make sure your content is targeting a proper keyword with enough search volume. Check the top-ranking content pieces of this keyword, and aim to develop a better content
Optimize these keywords on your content, but don’t overstuff the keywords. Include keyword variants and make sure they occur naturally
Use various content promotion techniques discussed above to generate more backlinks
Work with SEO expert and consultant to streamline your traffic improvements and avoid search engine penalties

Remember, however, that SEO is a long-term game. Be consistent with your SEO optimizations, and expect at least 6 to 12 months before you see your content on the first page of search results.

Utilizing Your Content to Achieve Results

Inbound marketing won’t bring any value on its own, unless it can generate traffic (leads), educate customers (lead nurturing) or encourage conversions.

Below, we will discuss how to optimize inbound marketing in those three different areas.

1. Lead Generation

The most common practice in this aspect is to offer free but valuable content to acquire leads. You can offer well-researched reports, white papers, e-books, or even in-depth videos and webinar sessions in exchange of their email address.

The key here is obviously the value of your content: the more valuable it is, the more leads you can capture. Check out some of the best examples of this practice, as compiled by Contently.

There are other tactics you can try, for example, offering your readers to subscribe to your email newsletter within your blog post.

2. Lead Nurturing

This is the stage where most inbound marketing practices shine the brightest. Your content will be a powerful weapon to nurture your prospects until they are finally ready to purchase. There are two main goals here:

Establish trust and credibility. The thing is, people only want to purchase from brands they can trust. This is the most important purpose of inbound marketing.
Educating your audience about your product or service, especially your unique value proposition. Only when people realize your unique values, they will purchase your product and not your competitor’s.

In this stage, inbound marketing will be even more effective when combined with other lead nurturing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing among others.

The key here is to refer to the two main goals discussed above when planning and developing your content pieces.

3. Conversion

There are two different conversions to discuss here: converting visitors to prospects/leads, and converting leads into actual customers.

Inbound marketing is very effective in driving blog visitors into leads, as we have discussed on the lead generation section above. However, inbound marketing is less effective at converting leads into actual customers, although it’s not impossible.

Here are some key tactics you can implement to optimize conversions:

Optimize your site and landing pages

Make sure all your pages, including your email content is mobile-responsive and have fast loading speeds.

If you include links, make sure it is easy enough to click on mobile device.Similarly, make sure all forms are easy to fill on phone screens, and don’t use too many fields (4-5 is the maximum).

Optimize CTA placements

You can include CTA buttons within your content. Yet, make sure the placement doesn’t disrupt the user in consuming the content. You might want to check this guide by Crazy Egg (written by Neil Patel) on optimizing CTA buttons.

Monitor and Refine

Monitor the performance of your content, and aim to refine future content pieces according to this data. You can also re-optimize or even leverage existing content pieces.

End Words

As you can see, although inbound marketing seemed like a simple strategy at first, there are many different tactics and optimizations you can implement to maximize your results.

Inbound marketing is a very effective way especially to generate and nurture leads. The key here is to understand your audience, especially their needs and behaviors, and provide values and solutions according to their needs and problems.

If you work with a professional digital marketing consultant to implement inbound marketing properly, you will see sustainable growth in your business.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Email Marketing Tips and How Not to Spam Your Audience

Adeyemi Olanrewaju — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 03:56:47 +0000

Email marketing tips on how to avoid your campaigns turning out to be spam to your audience is what this short post is about. Get ready for few email marketing tips and tricks for help you deliver better and ROI-driven email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing has been pronounced dead for a long time now, but it is still driving website traffic, user engagement and direct sales. Maybe email got born again and the results we get from it are miracles of its salvation.

Is Email Marketing Dead?

I do not believe email marketing is dead. But, for those who SPAM their audience with repeated salesy cold emails, email marketing may be long dead and buried.

If your email marketing campaign adds value to audience in exchange for their attention, then it is not spamming. , If you regularly use engaging emails to ask for feedback, that is not spamming either.

Let’s say you use email marketing to solicit for clients’ input in product design or as for suggestions on how to personalize your offer to best suit users, you aint like that.

If these email marketing tips sound strange to you by now, you must have been spamming your audience. Maybe!

Benefits of these Email Marketing Tips

Email can be a very powerful marketing tool, ONLY IF you know how to make it conversational, heartfelt, personal and cost-effective. Read on for a couple of tips to help you achieve email marketing campaign of your dream.

The huge benefits of email marketing stand tall, tower high above prejudice of spamming attached to it in recent years.

Since people mostly buy from whom they can trust, you can build that trust over time with email. To achieve this feat, you should achieve approach email marketing as your go-to resource for starting, sustaining relationships which will along the line drive sales and customer satisfaction.

Email marketing is quite personal. Please take note.

Some people check their emails more often than they pray. Some wake up, visit the Internet first and their email is the next thing they check. Some folks unknowingly stay longer than normal because they are reading and replying emails.

This should tell you how closely email marketing takes you closer to your audience. Why then would you bother them with what they are not happy to read?

Instead of unjustly murdering our loyal online marketing errand-boy, let us look into what we are not doing right with it, correct those gray areas and move on to successful marketing with email.

Email Marketing Tips to Avoid Being Spammy

Share messages that intimate your audience with your brand message
Add value to readers to build loyalty
Use emails as though you are nurturing a fragile relationship
Aim at making readers promoters of your business by delighting them.
Don’t pitch for sales with every email
Let buyer personas determine message type based on stage of buyers’ journey
Separate email for creating awareness from driving conversion

4.3 billion Email accounts send 196 billion emails every day. 91% of consumers check their email daily. 77% of consumers prefer email for marketing communications. Email has a marketing ROI of 4,300%. -HubSpot,

I found these email marketing tips by HubSpot for sending the right message to the right persons at the right time. And thought of sharing with you:

HubSpot Email Marketing Tips

Send the right email at the right time: message must tally with reader’s current needs.
Segment your contacts database: email content should not be one-size-fits-all
Constantly update contact list: 25% of email database decays annually.
Be mobile-conscious with email content: 47% of all email is opened on mobile.

More Email Marketing Tips

These are ingredients for great email marketing campaign, cook them up in your next outreach:

Define a clear goal for your email: choose what in particular each email should achieve.
Focus on engagement: your message will be trashed if it asks for value instead of adding it.
Personalize where appropriate: let the reader feel you are human not some robot
Test and analyze: measure every email campaign, apply the result to subsequent campaigns.

You may want to learn how I built email list of over 7,000 contacts in a day.

The post Email Marketing Tips and How Not to Spam Your Audience appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Product	HubSpot Sales Hub	Pardot	Drip	ActiveCampaign	SendinBlue	ConstantContact
Free Plan	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Integration	5/5	4/5	4/5	4/5	5/5	3/5
Ease of Use	5/5	5/5	5/5	4/5	4/5	4/5
Features	5/5	4/5	5/5	4/5	4/5	3/5
Price	Expensive	Very Expensive	Moderate to Expensive	Affordable	Affordable	Affordable

email marketing – Mike Khorev – SEO Consultant

Best Effective Mailchimp Alternatives to Look At

A Brief Overview on Mailchimp

Key Features:

Top 8 Best Mailchimp Alternatives

1. Omnisend

Pros of Omnisend:

Cons of Omnisend:

Pricing:

2. Campaign Monitor

Pros of Campaign Monitor:

Cons of Campaign Monitor:

3. TargetBay

Pros of BayEngage

Cos of BayEngage

4. ActiveCampaign

Pros of ActiveCampaign:

Cons of ActiveCampaign:

5. Mailjet

Pros of MailJet:

Cons of Mailjet:

6. ConvertKit

Pros of ConvertKit:

Cons:

7. Aweber

Pros of Aweber:

Cons of Aweber:

8. HubSpot

Pros of HubSpot:

Cons of HubSpot:

End Words

25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools

Analytics Tools

1. Google Analytics

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

3. MixPanel

4. Sumo

5. Whatagraph

Social Media Marketing Tools

1. Hootsuite

2. Buffer

3. Tailwind

4. Socialbakers

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

1. Yoast SEO

2. Feedly

3. Google Alerts

4. BuzzSumo

5. Google Keyword Planner

6. Moz Link Explorer

7. Social Mention

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

1. Omnisend

2. SendinBlue

3. ConvertKit

4. Drip

5. MailChimp

6. Aweber

Landing Page Tools

1. Unbounce

2. GetResponse

3. HubSpot

4. Leadpages

End Words

Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms

What Qualifies An Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions From Ordinary Ones?

Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions 2025

1. HubSpot Sales Hub

2. Pardot

3. Drip

4. ActiveCampaign

5. Sendinblue

6. ConstantContact

Email Marketing Best Practices and FAQ

Elements of a Successful Marketing/Promotional Email

Email Personalization Basics

Why is personalization important?

What Is Email Segmentation

How Can We Segment our Email List