A Step-by-Step Guide To Picking the Right Email Marketing Tool

So, you’ve decided that email marketing is a must-have in your marketing toolkit. 

You’re not alone. According to the 2023 Email Workflows Report by Litmus, 87% of businesses say email marketing is critical to their success.

Arriving at the conclusion that you need email marketing is one half of the journey. The other half is choosing an email marketing platform to get started.

But here’s the thing. It’s 2024 and there are a bunch of email marketing platforms out there. Sifting through them all to find the right fit for your business can feel overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what to look out for. 

We’re here to help you with exactly that. We’ll walk you through a step-by-step process to assess your email marketing needs and highlight key features to meet those needs. We’ll also recommend some of the best email marketing platforms to consider and guide you on how to make a final decision. 

By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of what to look for in an email marketing platform, and more importantly, you'll feel confident in choosing the right one to power your email strategy, boost email ROI, and help your business thrive.

Why Trust Me?

Kawusara Salley has three years of experience with email marketing, working on side projects and volunteering to help businesses with their email projects. She’s also a passionate software reviewer who has tested 15 top email marketing platforms and loves sharing her unique insights in plain, simple language.

Table of Contents

• Assess Your Email Marketing Needs and Goals

  • 1. Evaluate your business size

  • 2. Identify the type of emails you want to send

  • 3. Define your email marketing goals

  • 4. Consider industry-specific requirements

  • 5. Take note of your budget

• Key Features to Look for in Email Marketing Tools

• Comparing Email Marketing Companies and Services

• Making the Decision: Selecting the Best Email Marketing Software

• Leveraging beehiiv for Your Email Marketing Success

Assess Your Email Marketing Needs and Goals

When you understand your email marketing needs and goals, you’ll be better prepared to choose a platform that is right for your business. To get started, here are five key factors to consider:

1. Evaluate your business size

The size of your business plays a big role in choosing the right email marketing platform. If you're a small business, you'll likely want a budget-friendly tool with an intuitive newsletter editor and basic audience segmentation and automation tools. 

However, if you’re part of a larger company with more complex needs and a big budget, it’s better to choose a platform with advanced automation, segmentation, and analytics tools. While this comes with a steep learning curve in the beginning, investing in training your marketing team will pay off in the long run.

2. Identify the type of emails you want to send

There are two broad categories of emails you can send to your email subscribers and customers: marketing emails and transactional emails. 

Marketing emails—like newsletters, promotions, and product updates—let you engage with your audience, stay top of mind, and boost product sales. Most email marketing platforms support this, but not all of them offer transactional emails. 

Transactional emails are automated messages sent to customers to take a specific action on your website or app. This includes creating a new account, resetting a password, abandoning their shopping cart, or purchasing an item. 

3. Define your email marketing goals

Different businesses have different email marketing goals. Understanding your main goal—lead generation, product sales, effective multi-channel campaigns, or email monetization—helps to identify platforms with unique features that’ll support your goal. 

For example, if email marketing is a channel to generate leads for your B2B business, you might want to look out for platforms with a built-in CRM and lead scoring tools. 

Meanwhile, if your main goal is to boost product sales, you’ll want to check if an email marketing platform offers robust segmentation, automation, and A/B testing tools to make it happen. 

And if you want to run effective multi-channel campaigns that boost brand awareness and eventually lead to more sales, look out for platforms with social media scheduling and ads management features. 

How about if you’re looking to make money directly from your newsletter? Then your tool of choice should have built-in monetization tools like ads management and paid subscriptions. 

4. Consider industry-specific requirements

Depending on your business’s industry, certain email marketing tools will be better suited for you. 

For instance, if you’re in the creator or media industry, you’ll benefit most from an email marketing platform with built-in growth and monetization tools. This way, you can grow your email list faster and generate an additional passive income stream.

In contrast, if you run an e-commerce business, you'll need a platform that integrates with your online store, allows you to showcase products in emails, tracks revenue from campaigns, and segments customers based on purchasing behavior for more targeted, sales-driven campaigns.

5. Take note of your budget

After assessing multiple email platforms and narrowing it down to a few options with the features you require, compare their pricing plans with your budget to help you make a final decision.

Many platforms charge based on your subscriber count and email volume. So, if you plan on sending frequent campaigns or have a growing contact list, make sure the platform’s pricing scales with your long-term needs. 

Key Features to Look for in Email Marketing Tools

The previous section hinted at certain key features to look out for in an email marketing platform. But this time, we’ve rounded all the key features in a list, so it’s easier to decide which ones you do and don’t need.

1. Ease of use: Check how intuitive the platform’s interface and newsletter editor are. It’ll save you lots of time and effort, so you can focus on what matters—publishing emails! And if you plan to design graphic emails, having access to a template library makes it easier to get started.

2. Audience management: Your chosen email marketing platform should have sign-up forms and a landing page builder (or website builder) for collecting new subscribers. It should also have a segmentation feature to group these subscribers for running personalized, targeted campaigns.  

If you have more complex needs, the platform should also be able to automatically segment users based on their behavior. For example, it should let you group subscribers based on the actions they take in an automation sequence or the specific links they click in your emails. 

3. A/B testing: Platforms with this feature let you test different versions of an email to see which one performs best. Some platforms let you test two variations of an email’s content, while others let you test up to five versions. Besides email content, there are platforms that let you optimize other areas like subject line, sender name, and send time.

4. Automation: If you’re planning to launch multiple automated email sequences that welcome new subscribers, promote an upcoming event or product launch, or educate your customers on product features, then having an automation tool in your email platform is a must. Ensure the automation tool covers the core triggers and actions you need for running your email sequences. 

And here’s a pro tip: check out a platform’s automation template library to gauge its capabilities and see if it can support the use cases you have in mind.

5. Integrations: Your email marketing platform should seamlessly integrate into your existing tech stack. So, check if it has native integrations that connect with your CRM tool, e-commerce shop, social media, or ad platforms. And if you’re looking to connect with custom apps or ones that aren’t natively supported, check if they have a Zapier integration or allow access to their API.

6. Analytics: Most platforms provide basic email marketing metrics like open, click-through, and bounce rates. However, some platforms go further by offering industry-specific insights. 

For instance, platforms tailored to e-commerce businesses show revenue generated from your emails, while platforms built for creators and media companies let you visualize your most effective audience growth channels. 

7. Monetization tools: Email marketing platforms can help promote your business’s products, but if your goal is to generate income directly from your newsletter content, you'll need to choose tools with built-in monetization features. These tools allow you to run ads and offer paid subscriptions to turn your content into a revenue stream. 

8. Email deliverability: This shows the percentage of your emails that will land in your recipient's inbox (instead of the dreaded spam folder). So the higher your deliverability, the better.

One big factor that affects this is your email platform’s sender reputation. To get a sense of what this is, check Email Tooltester’s deliverability reports, scan review sites to see if the platform’s users are complaining about it, or conduct your own deliverability test.

That said, sender reputation is only one piece of the puzzle. Regardless of the email platform you choose, you need to ensure you’re following best email deliverability practices to boost your deliverability. 

9. Customer support: A good email marketing platform should have an extensive resource library with help center articles, video tutorials, webinars, or community forums. You should also check if they’ve got responsive customer support via your preferred channel—email, live chat, or phone.

10. Pricing: If you're on a tight budget, look for free plans that let you use basic features and run simple email campaigns for a smaller audience. As your list and email volume grows, be sure to check how these impact the pricing in different email marketing platforms to see which fits with your budget.

Comparing Email Marketing Companies and Services

Now that you know the key features you need in an email marketing platform, here are some of the top email marketing services that might be a fit for your business.

To explore more options, check out our list of the best email marketing services. 

And for a smoother email marketing experience, consider pairing your chosen email platform with some of our top software picks for email marketers. These tools will help you with content research, designing custom graphics, and managing your email projects.

Making the Decision: Selecting the Best Email Marketing Software

You made it here! And it’s now time to make a decision on which platform is right for you. Use this simple three-step process to guide you:

1. Shortlist the tools to use: Start by narrowing down the email marketing platforms to those that offer the key features you need most. If your list is still too long, eliminate tools with features you'll never use but would end up paying extra for.

2. Take a test drive: Sign up for the free plans or trials of the platforms on your shortlist. If you have a team, involve the people who will use the tool regularly. Pay attention to how each tool executes the feature that matters most to you (like ease of use, segmentation, automation, A/B testing, and analytics) and the responsiveness of their support team when you have questions or issues. 

3. Evaluate and make a decision: After testing, gather feedback from your team. Discuss how each platform performed and which one ticked the most boxes. The platform that meets most of your needs and gets the majority vote from your testing team is likely your best choice.

Leveraging beehiiv for Your Email Marketing Success

Choosing the right email marketing platform is easy when you know what you need and what to look for. Many platforms, like beehiiv, offer free plans and trials, so you can test them before making your choice.

beehiiv is a perfect fit if you’re a content creator or digital solopreneur looking to grow your personal brand or monetize your newsletter content. 

Its unique set of analytics, growth, and monetization tools has helped over 150,000 creators (and counting) to grow into recognizable brands and build profitable businesses.

Growth tools

Most email marketing platforms leave you to grow your newsletter on your own…but not beehiiv. 

Join beehiiv’s recommendation network to cross-promote newsletters with other creators on the platform. So when someone subscribes to another creator’s newsletter, beehiiv will recommend yours. If they’re interested, they’ll subscribe. 

You can also turn your existing audience into brand ambassadors. beehiiv’s referral program makes it easy to reward your subscribers for bringing in new signups. This system helped The Brink’s newsletter grow to 14,000 subscribers in just one month.  

“Delivering the [reward] to people whenever they've made a referral—It's a digital product, but you guys just do that in a really easy way. I don't have to set up any automations or anything. It's just kind of just done. I like that a lot. That's definitely saved me a lot of time” — Marcus Ramsey, Founder of The Brink

Monetization tools

beehiiv’s ad network is the easiest way to start monetizing your newsletter content—it’s like Google Ads but for newsletters. 

You get to promote top brands and earn some extra cash on a cost-per-click basis. Jennifer Chou leveraged this feature to boost her newsletter revenue:

“The ad network... It works on autopilot. One time a lot of people clicked on a B2B ad that paid two dollars per click. So I made $600 from that one email, and that was from the beehiiv ad network.” — Jennifer Chou, Founder of Vegan Tech Nomad

You can also run a premium subscription, where your audience pays a monthly fee to receive premium newsletter content. Jennifer also uses this feature to make an extra $627 in MRR. 

Analytics

Besides covering basic analytics, beehiiv provides insights for optimizing your subscriber growth and income. 

For example, the Subscribers by Acquisition graph shows which marketing channels are bringing in the most subscribers, so you can double down on your most effective marketing channels. 

“To be able to see where the traffic source is coming from has been really crucial for us to figure out what our strategy is to gain and increase followers.” — Cody Hock, Co-founder of Enjoy Basketball

beehiiv also compiles a list of your top-performing posts across specific periods, making it easier to adjust your content strategy. For example, if you notice posts about a certain topic or product getting more clicks or conversions, it’s a sign to create more content around that subject.

These features are super cool, right?

You can test them by signing up for a free beehiiv account.

Get started with beehiiv today!