By Ryan Kh
Wouldn’t it be great if writing stellar content was all that it took to become an exceptional blogger? The unfortunate reality is that you need to invest as much in engaging your followers as creating great content. Email marketing is one of the top ways to engage with your followers, scale conversions and expand your brand image.
Why is email marketing so important to blogging? It offers numerous benefits, including:
- You can encourage people to return to your website to read recent blog posts. This is important for creating repeat visitors, because over 60% of first-time visitors never return.
- You will build reader loyalty, which is key to boosting engagement. You will have more comments and social shares if you establish a connection with readers through email marketing.
- Email makes it easier to monetize your blog. Many blogs depend on promoting affiliate offers, revenue sharing opportunities and their own informational products and services for monetization. Emil marketing makes it easier to convert users with all of these offers.
Unfortunately, most bloggers are on more limited budgets than larger brands. They need to get their money’s worth when they choose an email marketing solution.
Choosing the Right Email Marketing Platform to Boost Blog Engagement
Email marketing may offer a very high ROI, but it also requires a strong upfront investment. The good news is that there are ways to minimize the capital needed to launch and scale your email marketing campaigns.
If you have a limited budget, you should try using an email marketing platform that offers free packages to low-volume users. You should choose a reliable platform that lets you reach as many free subscribers as possible. This will give you plenty of opportunities to test and scale your campaigns before you need to upgrade.
Here are the email marketing platforms that offer the most free subscribers.
GetResponse
GetResponse has been a leading email automation platform for over a decade. Here are some of the most appealing features:
- Highly nuanced customer segmentation options. You can customize your lists according to customer engagement actions, subscription date, traffic source and much more.
- Tailor your email delivery time to each subscriber. GetResponse knows when each subscriber is most active and will deliver emails accordingly.
- Create highly personalized content for every email subscriber. Most marketing automation platforms only allow you to use dynamic tokens to personalize your emails. However, the dynamic content that GetResponse provides is far more sophisticated and engaging.
PC Magazine has consistently praised GetResponse for its exceptional level of service.
“Since email marketing pricing varies wildly, we calculated how much it would cost a small business with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database to sign up for each service we reviewed. GetResponse’s price tag is $25 per month, one of the lower prices we’ve seen in the space. This becomes an even better deal when you consider that GetResponse doesn’t impose any email sending limits, which is becoming a common practice among email marketing services,” writes PC Magazine’s Molly K. McLaughlin.
HubSpot
HubSpot offers some of the most sophisticated email marketing solutions of any email marketing automation platform. HubSpot generally charges more for their services than their competitors, but their free marketing package is incredibly generous. I heard that they allowed customers to reach up to 1 million customers, which seemed too good to be true. So, I contacted their customer service team to confirm.
“With our free platforms you get access to up to 1 million contacts,” one of their customer service representatives confirmed after I spoke with them. This is much higher than the subscriber limit than the free packages of any other email marketing platform I have come across.
MailChimp
MailChimp doesn’t offer the same range of features as HubSpot or Campaign Monitor. However, it is still a very dependable email marketing platform for many applications. Over 16 million small businesses prefer MailChimp for its cost effectiveness.
MailChimp users can engage with up to 2000 subscribers every month. If you choose to upgrade to a new plan, your services will be cheaper than most other email marketing platforms. PC Magazine has awarded the PC Choice Award to MailChimp for its free and low-cost features.
MailGet Bolt
MailGet Bolt is one of the most intuitive email marketing automation platforms for new users. It may not be among the most robust, but it offers a very easy to use interface.
MailGet Bolt also offers a very generous free trial. This trail allows you to send up to 9000 emails a month. You can send emails to up to 100,000 subscribers.
However, there is a catch with free MailGet Bolt. Your account must be attached to a website that is at least two years old with a valid information on WhoIS.
Ryan Kh is an experienced blogger, digital content & social marketer. Founder of Catalyst For Business and contributor to search giants like Yahoo Finance, MSN. He is passionate about covering topics like big data, business intelligence, startups & entrepreneurship. Follow him on twitter: @ryankhgb.
