At BuzzShift, we always want to recommend the smartest and most effective way for our clients to spend their hard-earned marketing dollars. That’s why we believe email marketing is an extremely valuable tool when it comes to digital marketing. Relative to other digital marketing platforms, email marketing is a fairly inexpensive channel that can produce great returns on investment.
Brands of all sizes can use email marketing software to send relevant communications to their customers whether that be product and brand updates, transactional updates such as order confirmations or shipping updates, promotions and sales, or educational and lifestyle content.
There are several different platforms that help streamline email automation and email marketing efforts. Most of them have similar features when it comes to email design and templates, email list growth tools, audience segmentation, and analytics but some are stronger than others in various aspects. When we develop our clients’ digital tech stack, we help assess and prioritize their needs and pain points to help them find the best solution for their email marketing. In this blog, we’ll break down a few of our favorite email marketing platforms and highlight their features, some pros and cons, as well as pricing.
Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that we often recommend to our clients. It truly makes email marketing for eCommerce brands a breeze as they offer 200+ integrations with other platforms and apps that brands may already be using. Whether you sell your products on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or Adobe Commerce (previously Magento), you can seamlessly integrate your email marketing with your online store.
The email design functions are extremely easy to use, and they offer many aesthetically pleasing templates that can have your email marketing up and running in no time. Their audience segmentation capabilities allow you to get extremely granular in building out audience segments based on specific behaviors and properties. For instance, you can create a segment of customers who have viewed a certain product X amount of times but have not made a purchase in the last 6 months.
Klaviyo also allows you to build sign-up forms and pop-ups that provide a simple way to build your subscriber list. Klaviyo offers SMS messaging as well so that you can manage your email and text messages all in one platform. Klaviyo requires a higher investment level than some of the other eCommerce-friendly email marketing platforms out there, so we tend to recommend it more so for more established brands as opposed to those closer to the startup phase. However, as a starting point, they do offer a free plan that includes up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends.
MailChimp is an all-around great email marketing tool that offers the basic functions you need to run a decent email strategy. Like Klaviyo, MailChimp integrates with plenty of e-commerce platforms and apps. MailChimp does not integrate with as many loyalty programs as Klaviyo; however, you can set up Zapier to connect MailChimp to just about any app you may be using.
One of the pros that make MailChimp appealing to smaller e-commerce businesses is that they offer a free plan that offers a built-in CRM. However, Klayvio offers more in-depth analytics. Their segmentation pales in comparison to the granularity that Klaviyo offers; however, for brands just needing the basics, it will get the job done! As for pricing, they are not as expensive as Klaviyo but they are not one of the cheapest options in the email marketing game.
Privy could be considered a “dark horse” in the email marketing software space. It’s one that we regularly recommend to our clients – especially when they may not need all of the functionality that a tool like Klaviyo offers or they do not want to invest as much in an email marketing platform. We frequently recommend Privy because it’s easy to use and offers many tools that help brands convert users at each stage of the customer journey.
Compared to other email marketing platforms, they prove superior when it comes to building high-converting and highly interactive forms and popups. If you’ve ever seen a “spin to win your discount” wheel on a brand’s website, there’s a strong chance that it’s built with Privy. You can also integrate cart-saver campaigns which are an insanely effective strategy when it comes to recovering abandoned carts and also collecting emails from potential customers whose emails you have not previously had on your list.
They do not offer the in-depth audience segmentation that Klaviyo offers but like MailChimp, they offer the necessities. Their onboarding and customer support are also top-notch. As for pricing, Privy’s Growth plan starts at $45 per month, which is a great value. It includes unlimited pop-ups, up to 3,000 email contacts, and 500 SMS contacts.
We’ve touched on just three of the many email marketing platforms out there, and as you can see, each platform has its benefits and its limitations. Whichever email marketing platform you decide to use to grow your business, implementing an email strategy that nurtures your customers at each stage of the customer journey goes a long way in the success of your brand. At BuzzShift, we love helping our clients build the tech stack that works best for their brand and their unique needs. We focus on lifecycle marketing and offer email automation, ongoing email marketing strategy, and even smart AI-powered newsletters. Shoot us an email today to chat about how we can build a successful email strategy for your brand!
About BuzzShift
BuzzShift is a digital growth strategy agency with a focus on mid-market, scaling, purpose-driven DTC Brands. By combining the ideologies of branding, performance marketing, and retention agency, we are able to create memorable experiences with measurable results, and build long-term success for our clients with scalable, sustainable growth. Learn more about BuzzShift.
