June 2, 2016 , 64 Comments
Email marketing is the cornerstone of many online businesses. And the tools you use to manage your email marketing can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
It's no wonder, then, that "which autoresponder do you recommend?" is a question I receive quite often.
In today's post, we'll take a look at the two major cateogries of email marketing solutions and I'll tell you which specific service I recommend (and why).
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There is a more recent blog post on this topic, with an in-depth comparison between the best email marketing tools. I recommend the new post over this one. Click here to go to the new post!
Broadly, all email marketing solutions fall into one of two categories that we can bluntly name "smart" and "dumb".
A "smart" solution will allow you to tag your contacts in multiple ways so that, for example, you can keep track of who purchased which product, who opted in for which offer, who clicked on which link etc. Crucially, the smart system will then allow you to act on these insights and send highly targeted messages to segments of your list.
A "dumb" system will simply dump all contacts into different buckets and treat those different buckets as entirely separate lists. Because of that, intelligent follow-up isn't possible in the same way that a smart system allows it.
Personally, I'm currently using ActiveCampaign which is a smart (or even very smart) email marketing and marketing automation system.
I use it and recommend it not only because it allows for all the intelligent segmentation and follow-up that I want to do, but also because it's fairly easy to use.
To be clear: email marketing is complex and no solution for it will be smart while also being super easy to use. There's definitely a bit of a learning curve. But I think that ActiveCampaign is intuitive enough so that even beginners can get to grips with it.
There are, of course, other smart solutions. In fact, the "smart" way of doing things has become a lot more popular and ubiquitous lately. Some of these solutions include:
Of these, I recommend against using Infusionsoft and Ontraport. Both of these I have used in the past and was disappointed with for various reasons.
As mentioned above, ActiveCampaign is my #1 recommendation and especially if you are switching over from an old-school "dumb" system, using this can make a massive difference to your business.
Now I'd like to hear from you: what other questions do you have about email marketing? What tools have you tried and which are your favorite ones? Let me know by leaving a comment below!
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