The Best Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms and Best Practices to Know For 2021

Having the right tool in place can take your email marketing strategy to the next level — find the one that fits your business needs.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers, and that’s not changing anytime soon. While the way people use email may be changing with the shift towards mobile usage, customers still want to hear from the brands they love via email.

That means choosing to invest in your email marketing efforts is still well worth your time and money.

In this article, we’ll help you wade through the sea of email marketing platforms and provide you with ten platforms that you should consider when looking to improve your current strategy. You’ll also leave with a few best practices to implement to improve your email marketing even further.

Here for the best practices? Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll cover in the second half of this article.

• Using welcome emails to engage new audiences.
• Create emails with your customers in mind.
• Get your subject lines right.
• Keep your list clean and up-to-date.

The Best Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms

When selecting the right email marketing platform, you need to consider what tools you need to create successful campaigns. Needing a tool that provides advanced capabilities such as predictive analytics and machine learning is much different than just something to schedule and send emails for you.

In this section, we’ll take a look at ten different email marketing platforms that can help you manage and elevate your email campaigns. While there are similarities between each platform, they all provide their own unique experience and help you achieve your email goals.

Listrak

With the Listrak platform, you’ll have the ability to manage all of your digital marketing needs in one central location — from email to SMS, push notifications, and more. Listrak will help you take your email marketing to the next level with tools like predictive analytics, advanced segmentation, dynamic content, and more.

Listrak allows you to create customized user journeys that predict and interact with your audiences when they need it the most. Creating automated workflows will save you time and keep your audiences engaged without the need for manual intervention.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Build emails with a responsive email designer designer that save time and easily integrate personalized customer data into each message.
• Create customer journeys that allow you to engage with your customers in the right way, at the right time based on real-time behaviors.
• Send abandonment emails to bring users back to your site after they left without completing a purchase.
• Tap into their predictive marketing technology to send relevant content, product recommendations, and use predictive segmentation.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “Our previous digital marketing provider could not deliver the results, product depth, and support that Listrak does. We could tell from the minute we began onboarding with Listrak, there was no comparison. They truly care about our business’ success and help us daily to maximize our growth” – Listrak Customer Testimonial.

Leadsquared

Leadsquared is a platform that can help enterprise businesses manage everything from email marketing to CRM integration and field force automation. The marketing automation platform will provide you with everything you need to advance your emails to the next level.

Easily engage with your audiences based on their real-time interactions by creating trigger emails. These can be set to send at a specific time based on a particular action that your subscriber made.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Improve personalization through segmentation capabilities and integrate triggered messages into your marketing strategy.
• Create visually appealing emails without the need to pull in a designer or code expert with an easy-to-use drag and drop editor.
• Send relevant content to your audiences based on their data and insights to encourage them to interact and engage with your brand.
• Use pre-built user behavior and engagement flows to move audiences through the motions toward completing a purchase.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “As someone who has used HubSpot, Marketo, Act-On, and more, LeadSquared has all of the necessary functionalities at a fraction of the cost. We have a 10% reduction in bounce rate for emails now, and our drip campaigns have resulted in 50% quicker movement of sales prospects through the funnel!” – Leadsquared Customer Testimonial.

Pardot

Pardot is a subset of Salesforce and provides businesses with a marketing automation platform that integrates with their existing CRM platform. With the help of the Pardot platform, you can manage, send, and optimize emails, all while leveraging the customer insights you already have.

Create automated workflows to help move your customers through their journey and send them down the path you want them to take. With detailed workflows, you can send relevant follow-up messages to your audiences that keep them engaged and your brand top of mind. Image courtesy of Pardot.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Quickly build responsive emails with out-of-to-box templates that capture the attention of your subscribers with their intuitive email builder.
• Automate message sending to ensure you’re sending the right message at the right time based on the needs of your customers.
• Improve personalization through automatic segmentation and dynamic content that changes with customer engagement.
• Optimize the emails you send through A/B testing, SPAM filter check-ups and industry-leading deliverability.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “The move seemed daunting and risky at the outset, but that couldn’t have been further from reality. We felt in excellent hands with Pardot, and the performance we see daily proves it was worth it.” – Pardot Customer Testimonial.

MailChimp

MailChimp has morphed from an email-only marketing automation platform to a tool that can help you manage various channels, including social media, digital ads, and website management. But when used for what it’s known for the most, email marketing, you can easily elevate your current efforts.

The more you know about how your email marketing campaigns are working, the better emails you can create in the future. By tracking, analyzing, and optimizing based on real-time data, you can continuously improve the success of your campaigns.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Quickly and easily create professional-looking emails with the drag and drop email editor that provides you with pre-designed templates for ease of use.
• Integrate automation into your email marketing efforts to automatically send emails and build customer journeys to move your audiences down the pipeline.
• Send transactional emails that keep your customers up-to-date and in the know about the status of their orders.
• Use real-time analytics to understand better how your campaigns are performing and what your audiences engage with most.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “The main benefit is that we can make our emails look a lot better than the technical expertise that we have.” – Mailchimp Customer Testimonial.

SendGrid

SendGrid is an automation platform designed for businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. It provides you with everything you need to simplify, manage, and improve your email marketing campaigns.

If your emails aren’t making it into your subscribers’ inbox, then your messages won’t be seen. Investing in a marketing automation platform like SendGrid allows you to leverage their high deliverability rates to ensure your message is seen every time.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Automate recurring emails to save yourself time and keep your customers engaged with your brand.
• Increase deliverability with their 96% average inboxing rate to ensure that each email makes it to your subscribers.
• Track and measure campaign success, then use that insight to implement continuous improvement capabilities.
• Create and send time-based drip series to send relevant emails based on real-time interactions and needs.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “This is far and away the best email provider I have used. It’s really easy to use, we haven’t had any problems, and it frees up our engineers’ time to focus on our product.” – SendGrid Customer Testimonial.

Marketo

Marketo is a marketing automation platform designed for enterprise businesses to manage various digital marketing needs from one central location. This platform will allow you to do everything from creating and sending emails to track and analyze campaign performance when it comes to email.

Give your audiences the experience they’re looking for and integrate personalization elements into your emails for higher performance. Your personalization efforts can be as simple as using their name and location or as complex as using previous shopping behaviors to share relevant products.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Create responsive emails with pre-made templates and an easy to use email editor tool called Marketo Engage.
• Leverage real-time data to ensure your customer segmentation is up-to-date and accurate.
• Add personalization to your emails by dynamically sending messages to hit their inboxes at the right moment.
• Track and analyze campaign performance anywhere, anytime with the Marketo Moments app.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “In the first month, email-driven leads were up 25%, we’re now generating a lot more marketing-qualified leads, and conversions are up.” – Marketo Customer Testimonial.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an automation platform that allows you to manage your digital marketing channels and elevate your customer experience. With email capabilities including segmentation, dynamic content, slip testing, and more — you’ll be able to do more with what you have.

Find out what email elements resonate most with your audiences through A/B testing capabilities. This will help you identify the details that you should incorporate into your future campaigns for higher-performing emails.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Easily create and send broadcast emails to all of your customers to get the word out about new and exciting products or new.
• Or create more targeted emails that send more customized message to specific customers and segments.
• Create automated email funnels to move subscribers down the funnel towards converting and making a purchase.
• Send autoresponders that engage with audiences right away, such as welcome campaigns or request follow-ups.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “My primary use of AC is to set up email automations to be sent to subscribers. I am able to save a lot of time, create beautifully functional emails with the templates provided and easily organize my contact list.” – ActiveCampaign Customer Testimonial.

SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a marketing automation platform that is dedicated to helping businesses continue to grow. Its email marketing capabilities will provide you with everything you need to wow your customers and take your current strategy to the next level.

Creating emails doesn’t have to be a chore. With the right platform, you’ll have all the tools you need to make your emails stand out and get your message to the audience. With a simple drag-and-drop editor, this can all be done in no time at all.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Quickly create professional-looking emails with the drag-and-drop email editor that allows you to integrate your branding and make the message your own.
• Integrate personalization into your content with dynamic text and tap into advanced email personalization options to take it even further.
• Continue growing your subscriber list, and with unlimited lists and contacts, you’ll never run out of ways to segment your list.
• Ensure messages are sent to each user at the right moment with machine learning-powered send time optimization.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “I love creating campaigns with the drag & drop builder! I just choose a template, then customize the design how I want.” – Sendinblue Customer Testimonial.

GetResponse

GetResponse can provide you with a platform to manage various digital marketing needs, including email, landing pages, paid ads, and more. But when it comes to email marketing, this tool has everything you’ll need, from automation capabilities to ensure your message is sent at the most opportune moment.

Don’t have a designer on the team? No worries! With this platform, you can easily tap into free email templates or use their drag-and-drop email creator to make beautiful emails every time.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• Send your customers newsletters to keep them up-to-date and share special offers that they might be interested in.
• Utilize automation to create campaigns that reach out to audiences at the right moment with trigger emails.
• Make sure your emails are sent at the most opportune time with their Perfect Timing and Time Travel delivery tools.
• Tap into their library of email templates to make the email creation process even more accessible and start getting messages out in less time.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “It’s the best of the email marketing tools I’ve used. I do a much better job with my emails now.” – GetResponse Customer Testimonial.

Hubspot

Hubspot is a marketing automation and CRM platform that allows businesses to manage all of their customer data and interactions in one central location. If you’re just looking for an email marketing tool, then you’ll want to check out their Marketing Hub capabilities to find the plan that’s right for you.

Personalization is made easy. With the help of Hubspot, you can easily integrate personalization into your messages via smart rules. These rules will then send the correct messages to the right audiences without you having to shift through the data.

Email Marketing Capabilities

• A drag-and-drop email editing tool that makes it easy to edit all of the elements of your messages and make sure they’re branded and eye-catching.
• Create personalized emails by pulling in real-time customer insights to ensure you’re sending the most relevant content.
• Develop customized workflows to keep your audiences engaged and moving through the sales funnel.
• Optimize emails through A/B testing and learn precisely what works and what doesn’t for your audiences.

Here’s what their customers are saying: “Marketing Hub Enterprise enables seamless cross-functional collaboration from one easy-to-use platform, allowing us to launch global campaigns quickly, run sophisticated workflows, and continually optimize performance. It’s powerful. It’s easy to use.” – Hubspot Customer Testimonial.

Email Best Practices to Elevate Your 2021 Email Marketing

Email marketing isn’t a new idea for most businesses, and most companies already have some type of email campaign developed. Whether it’s a monthly newsletter or something more advanced like triggered emails, it all impacts how your customers engage with your business.

If you’re finding that your current email marketing campaigns just aren’t performing to the standards you had hoped for, then it might be time to look at a few elements and make sure you’re following a few email best practices.

In this section, we’ll take a look at five different email marketing best practices that can help elevate your current emails and increase customer engagement. Each of these best practices can easily be implemented and enable you to move the needle towards the goals you’re hoping to achieve.

Use Welcome Emails to Engage New Audiences

Congratulations, you’ve landed a new subscriber!

Now it’s time to turn them into a purchasing customer and hopefully a loyal brand evangelist, eventually. But it all starts with that customer’s initial decision to subscribe to your content, and you need to make it worth their while.

One of the best ways to start engaging with your new audiences is by creating welcome campaigns to introduce them to your brand and keep your name top of mind.

You might be wondering how important and influential are welcome campaigns? When you consider that welcome emails produce three times the transactions and revenue than regular promotional messages, you can easily see that they’re pretty important.

Adding welcome campaigns to your email marketing strategy can help you create more transactions and bring in more revenue. This means that welcome campaigns should be a top priority and not something you want to simply ignore.

So what do you need to do to create a welcome campaign? It’s pretty simple and doesn’t have to be an extravagant campaign. By simply acknowledging your new subscribers and sharing relevant content to their needs will significantly impact their view of your brand.

These campaigns allow you to keep your new audiences engaged and nurture them through their customer journey. Along the way, you’ll continue to learn more about each individual and find ways to keep them interested from that initial decision to subscribe through completing their first purchase and visiting your site in the future.

Create Emails With Your Customers in Mind

Another essential thing to consider when developing your email messages is that you need to create content with your customers in mind.

This can be done in a few different ways, such as.

1. Understanding what the wants and needs of your customers are.
2. Integrating personalization into each interaction.
3. Creating customized segments to target your audiences better.
4. Know where your audiences are in their purchasing journey.

Each of these tactics will help you increase personalization, which will increase both sales and revenue.

However you choose to do it, you need to create your email marketing messages with your customers in mind. Simply segmenting your audiences and integrating personalization touches into each email can significantly impact the success of your emails.

Understanding who your customers are, what they want, and what they need will help you know what content you need to develop. Not only will it provide you guidance on what content to create, but it will also keep your messages relevant — which will result in higher metrics.

Once you start to collect more data and better understand who your customers are, you can then begin to segment them into similar groups and integrate personalization into your email tactics.

Here are a few email personalization strategies to help get you started.

• Leverage your customer data to drive audience segmentation.
• Understand previous browsing behaviors and use that data to share relevant messages.
• Create triggered emails that are sent to users based on their real-time engagement.
• Celebrate birthdays and anniversaries to let users know you remembered.
• Integrate dynamic content that changes based on each customer profile for a more personalized experience.

No matter what you do, you need to make sure that you’re creating every single email with your customers in mind. If you’re not listening to the data and taking the time to learn more about what your customers need, then your messages will quickly be deleted or reported as spam content.

Get Your Subject Lines Right

Your email subject line is one of the most critical elements of your message. 47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone.

That means you need to get the subject line right to encourage your subscribers to click through and read your message. There are various things to consider in your email subject lines, from the words you use to the length of it — you need to consider it all.

Email subject lines are the first thing a subscriber sees, and it’s often the moment when they decide to click-through or delete it. Knowing what words attract users and scream spam is crucial to consider when sitting down to draft up your next subject line.

So at this point, you’re probably wondering how you go about writing a killer subject line that attracts attention and gets opened. Well, here are a few tips to help get you started on the right foot.

• Put the most important information front and center.
• Integrate personal touches to the email to grab the reader’s attention.
• Add a sense of urgency to drive people to take action.
• Write something catchy and standouts from the rest of the messages in their inbox.
• Keep it short, ensuring your message doesn’t get cut off on mobile devices.

There are tons of different ways to capture the attention of your audiences through your email subject line.

Using A/B testing is a great way to understand better what types of subjects result in higher engagement. With this information, you can work to adjust and improve future subject lines and increase campaign success.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the subject line shouldn’t be ignored. Don’t miss an excellent opportunity to stand out and bring your audiences in for more.

Keep Your List Clean and Up-to-Date

Having a huge subscriber list is something all marketing teams all dream of — right?

But what happens when you finally reach your goal of 10,000 subscribers and are seeing lower than ideal campaign metrics? You thought that finally reaching that subscriber count would result in higher performing campaigns and loads of revenue flowing it.

Well, if you’re not actively cleaning up your subscriber list, it can quickly become outdated. There may be users on your list who became inactive months or even years ago that have just been deleting every email you send.

Over time some of your subscribers will inevitably become inactive and no longer engaged with your content. Once these audiences have hit a certain point, it’s time to clean your list and eliminate the dead weight. Creating an automated process to remove these users will help save you time and improve your campaign metrics.

These subscribers are now just taking up space and bringing down the success of your email campaigns. Having a smaller, more engaged audience pool will result in much higher click-through rates and more conversions.

Managing your subscriber list might seem like an overwhelming task initially, but it’s time well spent. You can also utilize tools within your marketing platform to automate the process and identify when customers should be removed from your list based on engagement.

Here are a few tips to help keep your contact list up-to-date.

• Ask contacts if they’re still interested in receiving your emails.
• Eliminate any inactive accounts and emails that no longer exist.
• Send a second opt-in email to have subscribers double opt-in to your messages.
• Make unsubscribing easy so people can take themselves off your list.

Keeping your list clean and up-to-date is a very important step to sending successful emails. Once you’ve defined how you plan to pinpoint inactive users and remove them, it will simply become part of your daily process.

Track, Analyze, and Optimize

Last but not least, you want to continuously track, analyze, and optimize your email marketing campaigns.

There is so much you can learn from the data that you’re collecting with every email sent. From what subject lines attract more clicks to which customer segments drive the most increase in revenue — you just have to do a little digging to find it.

Here are a few key metrics you’ll want to track and analyze when it comes to your email marketing efforts.

• Clickthrough rates.
• Conversion rates.
• Bounce rates.
• List growth rates.
• Email sharing rates.
• Overall ROI.
• Open rates.
• Unsubscribe rates.

By understanding how your audiences interact with your content, you can start to learn and pinpoint what elements make for the most successful emails. You can then begin to optimize your emails moving forward to incorporate these elements.

Another way to improve upon your current efforts is to add testing to this step. A/B testing is an excellent tool for email marketing because you can quickly test various elements such as subject line, call to action, images, and even the copy within the email.

A/B testing in email marketing provides you with so many opportunities to learn. Whether you’re trying to understand what subject lines catch your subscribers’ attention or how your design plays into their interactions — A/B testing can help you continue to improve.

Addinging testing to your strategy will provide you with even more detailed insights that can take your campaigns from producing mediocre results to high-performing messages. This is something you’ll want to incorporate into your email marketing strategy.

Take Your Email Marketing to the Next Level in 2021

Even in 2021, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers. With the right tools and best practices in place, you can easily set yourself up for successful campaigns that drive higher ROI and revenue.

So what are you waiting for? Find the email marketing platform that best fits the needs of your business and get started improving your current email efforts one best practice at a time! You won’t regret deciding to invest in improving your email marketing campaigns.