How to choose email marketing software with recommended products
Recommended Products is an important feature primarily used by eCommerce marketers to boost their sales.
But not all email marketing tools offer recommended products.
Having analysed 678 different tools across 113k data points, weāve found 6 tools that offer recommended products and should meet your needs. In this interactive guide, weāll help you whittle this down to a small handful of tools to consider.
šŖ This guide is personalised to you based on your contacts, budget and business type. If you havenāt already entered these, we recommend doing so to improve this guide.
1. Whatās your budget?
How much you spend on email marketing software is going to depend on the size of your contact list, the features you need and what your organisation can afford to invest in an email marketing platform.
Based on 30000 contacts, the average monthly cost of an email marketing tool with recommended products is $781/month. As your maximum budget is currently set to 350 you may want to consider increasing this a little.
While itās true that you get what you pay for with email marketing software, this doesnāt necessarily mean that the cheaper platforms are worse.
Firstly, effective email marketing is about communicating the right message to the right person at the right time ā at scale. The more leads you have (and the higher value they are) the higher the potential ROI of your email marketing activity.
As a eCommerce business with 30000 contacts, you'll most likely get a better ROI with a mid-level/premium platform that offers functionality beyond basic newsletters.
Secondly, the price you pay today is unlikely to be the price you pay one year from now. As such, itās prudent to consider how much you might pay if your mailing list doubled or tripled. Donāt worry, weāve done the maths for you for the top three tools!
While Omnisend may be the most affordable platform today out of these three options, ActiveCampaign would be a more affordable long-term option if youāre expecting list growth.
Lastly, while itās helpful to have a clear budget in mind itās also worth noting that the features (and therefore the results you can produce) with different tools are different. At 30000 contacts, you'll have plenty of scope to improve your results with features like A/B testing and automation sequences, so it makes sense to consider these in your evaluation process.
Which brings us neatly onto our next question.
2. What features do you need?
Besides needing Recommended Products, itās worth considering what other critical features you might need from your email marketing software.
Most basic features like templates, an easy-to-use visual editor, and segmentation are table stakes and found in virtually all tools. You may, however, want to consider some of the more unique email marketing requirements that your team needs.
As an
you might want to consider ruling out any tools that donāt offer advanced marketing automation, as this is essential for creating user journeys that reduce cart abandonment and increase your checkout conversion rates.
If there are any specific features that you need, you can enter them here to automatically filter out any of the 6 tools that donāt have them.
3. Does it integrate with your tech stack?
At a minimum, your email marketing software should communicate with whichever platform you use to collect and store customer or user data. This not only helps you hit your marketing objectives by having up-to-date segment information, but it also makes personalising your emails (and therefore increasing engagement) much easier.
As a eCommerce business youāll also want to consider whether or not itās important for your email marketing software to integrate with:
- Your eCommerce software/CMS
- Any software you use for incentivising reviews
- Any software you use for discount codes/offers
- Any reporting tools or dashboards you use
- Any marketing channels you heavily use (e.g. Google Ads, Instagram Ads)
- Any internal communication or project management tools you use as a team
While itās ideal to find an email marketing platform with the native integrations that are critical to your business, most tools rely on integrating with a service like Zapier, Make or Automate.io that enables you to connect almost any imaginable combination of tools.
Feel free to enter any integrations you need in the box below to further whittle down your list of 6 email marketing tools.
4. What do other companies like you think?
The email marketing software recommendations on StackUp are made algorithmically ā and most influenced by Satisfaction Score.
This score is based on 100,000ās of ratings weāve collected from real users of these tools. The reason we use this metric is that it highlights the platforms that deliver a good overall experience.
This matters because, letās face it, every email marketing tool says the same thing ā easy to use, a wide range of templates and lots of features.
Yet, much of what separates the wheat from the chaff is revealed through actual usage. From email deliverability rates, to support quality, security and platform stability, these are all things that can make or break an email marketing tool.
Satisfaction Score is a good proxy for this, as the tools with low scores are typically plagued by these issues, whereas those with high scores tend to get these things right.
Based on this, our algorithm has recommended
ActiveCampaign as the best-fit for your business with the highest user satisfaction score.
5. Can you try it for free?
All email marketing providers worth considering will offer a free trial. If not, that should probably trigger some alarm bells.
The top three recommendations above all offer free trials, and weād recommend signing up for a trial with at least two of them so you can make a good comparison.
We hope this data-led approach has helped narrow your search and find the right email marketing service for you.
- HubSpot
(here's the link to start a 14 day free trial- no credit card required)
- ActiveCampaign (hereās the link to start a 14 day free trial - no credit card required)
- Omnisend (hereās the link to start a 30-day free trial - credit card required)