In the digital communication landscape, email is one of the most traditional channels.
Nonetheless, in recent years, an increasing number of people have questioned whether email is still so necessary – or could be potentially replaced with less time-consuming marketing tactics.
Indeed, several new forms of communication have emerged over the years, mostly in the social media landscape, where the automation tools appear to be more user-friendly and simple-to-use than designing a lead generation and email marketing strategy from scratch.
Despite this, email marketing continues to grow in popularity and is a sure bet for ROI success.
Consider this: for every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect an average ROI of $40 (source: Omnisend)!
However, approaching an email marketing campaign – particularly a group email one – without relying on a powerful mailing list tool can force you to deal with security, GDPR, and management issues that can seriously undermine your efforts and results.
This is why today we’ll look at:
What email marketing really entails in today’s business landscape;
The key advantages of an effective email marketing strategy – such as the possibility to segment your target audience and personalize your message;
How a user-friendly and powerful email marketing tool, such as Simplelists, can make the difference.
Let’s investigate further!
What is email marketing?
Email marketing, in a nutshell, is a digital marketing strategy that entails sending emails to a specific group of people to promote a newsletter, event, offer, product, or service.
Consider that by 2025, the number of email users worldwide is expected to reach 4.6 billion (source: Statista) – accounting for more than half of the world population, – with over 375 billion emails expected to be sent and received each day.
That’s why, to make the most of it, businesses typically create a list of email addresses collected via ad hoc lead generation forms, in order to:
Efficiently track and analyze their efforts, including using the right automation tools;
Better understand their target audience;
Focus on consent, segmentation, and personalization, abandoning the outdated outbound approach.
Nevertheless, email marketing can’t be a stand-alone tactic, but rather a component of a larger marketing strategy that includes other channels – such as pay-per-click, SEO, and social media.
So, let’s quickly compare a few different channels:
Social Media Marketing: Social media allows businesses to interact and build relationships with their potential customers, but the competition is fierce. Their ROI varies depending on the platforms’ algorithm, but it is typically $2.80.
Search Engine Optimization: With a ROI of $22.24, SEO is an essential tool for any business, because ranking higher on search engines means being more easily found by the potential customers.
Pay-per-click Advertising: PPC ads have an average ROI of about $17 and they help businesses leverage their search engine visibility. However, this is not a one-to-one channel, but rather an advertising tactic. Indeed, 64% of people believe that basic ads are frequently intrusive and annoying (Source: Optinmonster).
Email Marketing: With a stunning ROI of $40, email offers a better conversion rate than any social media channel, as well as a higher degree of personalization and audience segmentation. In the long run, in fact, an email strategy helps building a community of loyal customers and is the most profitable and cost-effective direct marketing channel for moving customers through the purchasing cycle.
As you can see, email is still the most effective digital marketing channel, and a combination of SEO, social, PPC, and email marketing can really help you easily build the most powerful digital marketing strategy – where email can enhance all the other channels, allowing you to retain and communicate with your customers individually.
Let’s take a closer look at the key email marketing benefits!
4 Major Email Marketing Benefits
Personalized Targeting
Have you ever felt frustrated and overwhelmed while attempting to segment your target audience and personalize their message?
A non-personalized approach – whether through ads, messages, or posts – can have a negative impact on your marketing strategy and result in:
Lower engagement and conversion rates, as you won’t be able to address your potential leads’ specific needs, making it difficult to pique their interest and convert them into customers.
Higher costs, because a one-size-fits-all approach would necessitate more resources to reach a broader audience;
Inefficient customer loyalty, as personalization and segmentation are the foundations for building a relationship with customers.
So, why can a proper email marketing strategy – with the help of an efficient email marketing software – help you avoid such risks?
The answer is simple: The key is personalization, which is at the heart of mail marketing.
People, in fact, appreciate it when brands add personal touches to their messages – and email marketing, by definition, allows you to segment your target audience into specific lists that are based on different demographic or psychographic criteria, as well as easily get direct feedback.
A personalized email strategy, in fact, can drive more conversions than any other digital channel – with 66% of online consumers making a purchase as a result of an email marketing message (source: Monetate) – and it is much more efficient if it’s based on a well segmented opted-in list.
You might think it’s easier said than done at this point...
Please, hold on! If you want to segment and personalize your email lists based on various criteria, you should use an efficient email marketing platform.
We at Simplelists understand exactly how such a tool can make a difference for businesses of all sizes. That’s why our group email software includes features dedicated to email customization and segmentation, ranging from multiple lists management to styling.
All of these features would provide you with a full hosting service and management that eliminates the need for you to worry about technical details!
Sales and Lead Generation
As above-mentioned, email marketing clearly has enormous potential for enhancing sales and driving lead generation.
Indeed, if you rely solely on social media or search ads to increase sales, you should be aware that while these channels can help you attract new visitors – and reach a larger number of people at once, – they cannot always help you retain customers or nurture relationships with them.
On the other hand, email would give your company a direct channel to reach out to potential customers and nurture the relationship throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey.
To name a few, email marketing can help you leverage sales in the following ways:
Generating new leads through the creation of a well-structured landing page and opt-in form, allowing you to collect email addresses from both website, social, or ads, to then build a targeted email list that can really make a difference during new product launches;
Lead nurturing and helping leads move through the sales funnel by sending them highly targeted and personalized messages based on their interests and purchase habits, such as special birthday offers, welcome discounts, or abandoned cart emails, in order to create a one-to-one relationship and stimulate the brand loyalty;
Promoting new products, services, or business events through the right email campaign, including powerful calls to action and multimedia content.
As you can see, there are numerous approaches to driving sales through email marketing.
However, all of them would benefit greatly from using an email list management tool like Simplelists.
As a matter of fact, there are several technical details that can make you waste time and effort when segmenting and personalizing your email strategy, going from the design of landing pages to email footers, and email moderation.
What our clients appreciate most about our simple tool is that it allows them to quickly address all of these issues in no time by allowing them to easily customize their emails, subscription forms, footers, and even posting restrictions.
Whatever the size of your company, this can save you a lot of time and resources to devote to your sales or business strategy!
Would you like to learn more about how Simplelists can help you save time, money, and resources? Check out our YouTube channel!
Fidelization and Remarketing
Another significant advantage of email marketing is that it allows businesses to retain and engage existing customers, encouraging repeat business and driving visitors back to websites.
This is because the use of targeted and personalized offers allows for a one-to-one relationship, which gives birth to a proper customer retention and remarketing strategy that can engage customers who have previously:
Purchased your products or services;
Visited your website, blog, or landing pages;
Abandoned their online cart.
Indeed, did you know that sending three abandoned cart emails generates 69% more orders? (source: Omnisend).
However, fidelizing a customer means being present and providing a timely newsletter in order to be perceived as also an expert in your industry. In fact, retaining a customer entails more than selling products or notifying abandoned carts, but also sharing educational content.
With the right strategy, email drives customer loyalty and becomes a necessary channel to use in conjunction with:
A sales CRM system to streamline communication;
An email list management tool to speed up the email delivery process.
Timely Campaigns
Have you ever struggled to find the right channels and times to effectively reach your target audience?
This happens to almost every business.
Selecting the most appropriate channels for a specific campaign in a constantly evolving tech market can be extremely difficult and may depend on a variety of factors.
In fact, while a B2B company may find their target on LinkedIn, a B2C retailer may prefer Instagram or TikTok. However, there is one thing that all business types have in common: email marketing.
Email is unquestionably one of the digital channels that allows anyone to create a truly timely campaign to support the:
Promotion of events, including workshops and webinars;
Seasonal campaigns and product launches;
Time-limited offers, such as discounts or free shipping, which create a sense of urgency and encourages impulsive buying;
Trend-based campaigns which are based on popular topics.
Having said that, it’s clear that email campaigns can help you reach the right people at the right time, providing far more value to the target audience.
Why use Simplelists for your Email Marketing Strategy?
Last but not least, we’d like to show you how Simplelists, our user-friendly email list tool, can truly help you reap the benefits of email marketing by allowing you to:
Let’s take a closer look at why you should use Simplelists for email marketing!
It’s user-friendly
Simplelists, as the name implies, is a truly simple tool that doesn’t require you to be techie to understand and use its interface.
You can simply write an email and send it to everyone on your list with a few clicks, saving you a lot of time and money, and freeing up time for other business tasks!
Keeps your emails out of spam
Spam filters are one of the most difficult aspects of building an email list.
To emphasize the significance of selecting the right tool, we can tell you that segmented and effective email marketing campaigns can result in a 760% increase in overall revenue (source: DMA).
So, to ensure that you get the best results possible, our tool includes a dedicated email delivery feature that gives you access to:
Email delivery reports, which include full receipt information on successful and unsuccessful email deliveries;
Email delivery failures, which help you track all bounces and drawbacks.
No adverts!
Would you like to get rid of advertising?
This is one of the major disadvantages of using free email marketing tools or providers that typically place advertisements in your emails.
It is not only annoying, but it may cause your emails to:
Go directly to your subscribers’ spam folders;
Be perceived as spammy;
Shift the focus from your content to the ads.
That is why Simplelists emails are free of advertisements and allow you to send the most professional and effective messages!
Lets you send HTML emails
Finally, another way you could use Simplelists to improve your email marketing campaigns is by designing and sending eye-catching HTML emails.
Our tool, in fact, will not limit you to the use of preset templates, but will allow you to easily customize and create your emails the way you want, so that you can:
Reflect your branding;
Gain more design control;
Send more engaging, safe, and trackable emails.
Conclusions
As we’ve seen today, developing a valuable marketing strategy can be difficult and time-consuming.
Emails provide numerous benefits, ranging from lead generation to remarketing and branding, but only through the use of a valuable email list tool you can make a difference for your company and achieve the desired results.
That’s a lot of emails! And with so many being sent and received every day, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the process of managing them all — especially if you’re responsible for sending them out too.
Group email services can make it easier to manage your email communications and can also help you manage your business more efficiently.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the benefits of using a group email service and what they can do for you.
What is a group email?
Imagine a world where you can send an email to clients, customers, colleagues, members, family and even friends in a single click!
With group email, you can do just that. But what is a group email and how can it be useful?
Your group email list can be created when multiple users are subscribed to the same email list.
This email distribution list can then be used to promote your company’s product or service and share your latest newsletter or content all in one go.
Benefits of using a group email
Managing large groups of contacts
Managing multiple workflows
Scheduling emails
Group emails are an extremely effective way to communicate with your network and build relationships. Keeping people up-to-date on what’s happening in your business, and helping you stay in touch with your community.
Common uses for group email
Inform customers about new products and promotions
Send out newsletters with company news and updates
Communicate with colleagues in other departments
Notify employees about upcoming meetings
There’s no denying that It’s a great way to get your message out there, but it’s also important that you choose the right audience for your group email.
If your message isn’t relevant or interesting enough for the people on your list, they won’t open it and may delete it without reading it.
Want to know how to avoid this?
Many businesses now use group email services as part of their email marketing tools but finding the right service can be hard. In our next sections, we’ll show you how to get the best out of a group email list and top group email marketing tools.
5 reasons why you should opt for a group email list
As a successful business, you know that communication is key and building relationships with customers is essential.
The easiest way to do this is opting for a group email list that will allow you to:
Build a rapport
Generate leads
Create brand awareness
Send/receive feedback
Whether you have a business or a cause, odds are you have a group email list at your disposal.
So you’re all set and you’ve created the perfect email marketing campaign geared toward the right audience, and you’re ready to blast it out to your subscribers.
But have you ensured that your subscribers are going to receive your emails?
If not, they will bounce and end up in the trash/spam folder, which will hurt your chances of a decent ROI.
Here is some important advice and available features of Simplelists email management software to ensure your emails are delivered, rather than thrown away.
If you’re short on time and would prefer to watch it, have a look at our short video explaining Simplelists group email features.
1. Automated and free email list management
List management is a crucial and challenging aspect of email marketing. It can be as simple as having a few email addresses, or as complex as managing a database of thousands of subscribers.
For many businesses, managing your own group email list is not only cost-effective but also gives you complete control over the data. However, it’s not always easy to set up and maintain an efficient mailing list management system.
A useful feature to have is automated bounce processing and removal from your database.
This means if someone unsubscribes from your newsletter or sends back an undeliverable message (bounce), you are notified and this is then handled automatically by the service. So you don’t have to worry about manually removing them from your list anymore, keeping delivery rates high!
The advantage of an email list manager is that it allows you to have a clear overview of your subscribers and manage your lists more efficiently. Keeping track of your contacts, filtering them according to their actions and interests, and managing your list to send out the right messages to the right people at the right time.
You should also be able to automatically forward your emails to other people or groups. For example, if someone clicks on a link in one of your emails, they can be automatically added to another list (e.g. if they want to receive offers about a specific product).
There are many reasons why you might be looking for automated email list management software. Whether it be to reduce manual work and focus on more important things or handle the influx of new subscribers.
2. Customisable group email list
A customisable group email list is an important feature to have in any business.
Email Marketing is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to build brand awareness and increase sales. However, you need to make sure that your email is personalised, consistent and relevant to each recipient.
In order to address these challenges, you will want to use an email list management tool that allows you to create customised email lists.
The biggest benefit of this feature is that you can have a customisable group email list. This means that you can add your own personalised footer or footer text, members’ names, HTML for full customisation and so forth.
You can also choose to archive old emails which can be accessed in the archives section of your account. This is useful if you need to delete old emails or if you want to keep them as backups.
3. Full manage spam reporting
Spam is very common nowadays, so it is important to have a group email service that can handle your spam issues.
Not only is it annoying to have your inbox flooded with messages you don’t want to read, but it also wastes time and money.
In addition to providing tools for sending emails and tracking their results, your group email list services should provide tools for managing your email lists in real time with automatic spam management.
This means that when your email is marked as spam by a contact in your list (whether deliberately or accidentally!), those addresses of people who have reported this are automatically removed.
They then will receive no further emails from the list and prevent them from repeatedly marking it as spam. Keeping your ‘marked as spam rate’ low, delivery rates high and your email list up to date on who wants to see and receive your valuable information.
Keeping your messaging consistent with clear brand design, tone and information will help to keep you out of the spam box or mass unsubscribing.
4. Subscribe and unsubscribe options
Email subscribers are a valuable asset. They’re customers who have opted in to receive your marketing messages, giving you a direct line to them.
But if you don’t have the right permission settings in place, you could be breaking data protection laws and putting your business at risk.
You want to make sure your subscribers know how they can manage their own subscriptions and communication preferences.
You need to give them the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list at any time. In the past, customers had to follow complicated processes to unsubscribe from an email list.
Today, this can be done by setting subscribe and unsubscribe settings, plus the ease of adding a customisable subscribe form to your website.
With these simple adjustments, you’ll be in line with GDPR to give consumers more control over their data.
5. Private group email list
In business privacy is paramount, so having the function to create a private group email list is a must-have.
If you’re sending out information about a new product launch, for example, it’s important that only those who need to know about it get the information.
This feature allows you to create a private group where only you can see the members of your list. This is particularly useful if you want to send out information about a product pre-launch, private event or meeting.
With a private group email list, only you see their emails with no way for anyone outside of your organisation to see who else is on your list or what they are receiving from you in their inboxes.
This means that no one else will get access to your database and you can also remove members from the group email list whenever you want.
The best group email marketing tools
The email marketing landscape is constantly changing, nowadays, business is not just about selling products. Customers expect brands to provide value by sending them educational content or useful tips too.
You realise you need a group email marketing tool, and there are many tools out there to help you reach your audience. However, not all of them are created equal.
Some of them may seem too complex for your needs or too expensive for your budget. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to help you choose the right tool for your business.
What makes one group email marketing tool better than another?
The answer is simple: features and usability. Here are some features we consider when reviewing them:
Easy to use
Integration
Limitations
Automation
Customisation
Data
Support
Price
This list will help you find the best email marketing software for your business needs:
Simplelists
Simplelists is easy to use and has an intuitive interface that makes creating lists and sending emails a snap.
Simplelists is a user-friendly email marketing tool that allows you to quickly create lists and send emails to your subscribers. It also has a responsive design, so it works well on mobile devices — especially important in today’s world where mobile internet usage continues to rise year after year.
Intended to be both affordable and powerful, you can create a list in minutes and send an email campaign, promotion, newsletter or discussion group in a matter of seconds.
Our features are so simple, anyone can use them. No technical knowledge is required!
With all Simplelists subscriptions, you can easily:
Manage members / list import
Set restrictions
Customise emails
Control subscriptions
Message scheduling
Integrate with your website
Archive emails
Automated list management
Spam & bounce management & feedback loops
Keep emails and contacts secure (ISO27001 certification)
View data and analytics
Whether you want to send a single list or multiple, Simplelists plans range from $8 pcm for a single list to $686 for enterprise-level and plenty of affordable packages in between.
They have a super-friendly and responsive support team that can help you with anything from getting started to managing your account.
Listserv
Listserv is an email list management solution, offered as an in-house software or cloud service.
Listserv allows users to manage email communications such as alerts, newsletters and discussion groups from a central interface.
Providing flexible licensing to meet current and future business needs, Listserv have technical support to help you get your group email list running smoothly.
With Listserve you have:
Manage members
Set restrictions
Customise emails (not with the basic plan)
Control subscriptions
Message scheduling (not with the basic plan)
Integrate with your website
Archive emails (restricted with the basic plan)
Automated list management
Spam & bounce management (restricted with the basic plan)
View data and analytics (not with the basic plan)
Listserv offers perpetual and annual licenses with three plans available, Lite (perpetual only), Classic and HPO. Starting from $1,095 - $4,485 for annual licenses or $2,875 - $28,060 for perpetual.
GroupMail
GroupMail is a free email list and mass email newsletter software.
An easy-to-use group email messaging system that’s great for newsletters, event planning, personal announcements, and more.
You can download their free software to begin sending in seconds. With varied, one-time paid software subscriptions you’re able to:
Manage members/ list import
Set restrictions
Customise emails (marketing plan only)
Control subscriptions
Message scheduling (not with the basic plan)
Archive emails
Automated list management (not with the basic plan)
Spam & bounce management (not with the basic plan)
View data and analytics (marketing plan only)
GroupMail also has the possibility to be installed in English, Spanish, French, German or Polish and the added ability to create autoresponders. They have three packages ranging from $149.95 to $699.95 excl VAT.
Conclusion
After reading and exploring features, requirements and price plans of group email marketing tools, you’ll notice that when it comes to effective marketing, sometimes the best option is the simplest one.
In short, there are a lot of reasons why you should (and probably will) use a group email list. Not only are they easy to set up and maintain, but they’ll also help get your content in front of a larger audience than ever before.
Whether you run an online store, a work-related business or a creative hub, using an email list can help you really make the most out of it.
Having a form on your website that allows people to sign up to an email list is a great way to grow your email list and increase the potential for your messages to be shared beyond your list members. In this short post, we explain what a subscribe form is, how it can work for growing your list, and how to use Simplelists to create a form for your site.
What is a subscribe form?
A subscribe form (sign-up form, email opt-in form) is an embedded/hosted web form that you can put on your website, blog or social media pages so that people can enter their details into the form to sign up to your list/email group. Normally, the form is very straightforward and only has a few fields to get the information needed. Name and email address are most important.
Importantly, this is a way to collect email addresses with permission. The person completing the form is actively agreeing that you can send him or her emails sent to your list. This is good news in terms of abiding by rules related to spam, as well as hopefully resulting in more visits to your website and/or participation in group discussions via clicks from your emails.
Creating a form using Simplelists
First, you need to copy the code from Simplelists. Sign into Simplelists and navigate to 'general settings’ and then the 'subscriptions’ tab. Scroll down to 'web subscriptions’, select the code and copy it. Next, you need to paste the code into your website. Open your website editor and paste the code where you want to the form to appear. This should be somewhere between the <body> and </body> tags. In this short video, you can see the code pasted into a div created for this purpose.
Styling your form
Finally, you can style your form by using CSS to change how your form looks. This means that you can make it match perfectly with the design of your website. You can also edit the HTML to adjust your form. For example, you could add a title above the form or remove some of the form options, to simplify it. You might like to remove the daily digest summary option, the unsubscribe option and/or the notes box. If you remove these three lines of code, you would be left with a form that allows users to leave just their name and email address.
It is a good idea to put your form in a visible place on your site where you receive the most visitors. Examples include: the top side bar of your website/blog, the top navigation bar, the footer, on your 'About’ page, etc.
That’s all there is to adding a subscribe form to your website - simple.
