Email Marketing Software Key Features

Common Email Marketing Software Features
Businesses of all types and sizes are deploying robust, feature-rich email marketing software to automate core processes, increase staff efficiency, reduce campaign-related costs, and improve results.

There are many email marketing software packages on the market today, and most provide a wide range of functions and capabilities to help companies achieve those goals, such as:

Automated List Management
Email marketing software eliminates manual data entry activities, making it easy for users to add new lists to the system, modify information about existing contacts, export lists to be incorporated into other applications, and segment contacts into groups based on unique characteristics. This not only saves time and reduces errors, it allows for more targeted and effective marketing programs.

Flexible Email Formatting Options
With email marketing software, marketing professionals can create email communications in a variety of different formats, including text, HTML, multi-part MIME messages, and messages with attachments. Design templates can also be created and stored for an unlimited amount of time, for use in future campaigns.

Campaign Personalization
The range of personalization capabilities will vary greatly from one email marketing software package to another. While most offer some basically personalization functionality, such as customized “To” and “From” fields, there are some more advanced solutions that can actually plug in custom messaging and content, such as images, body copy, and subject lines, based on specific contact traits, such as title, geography, or area of interest.

Response Tracking
Email marketing software provides comprehensive tracking of key campaign performance metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates (i.e. which recipients took advantage of a specific “call to action”, such as downloading a white paper or registering for a Web cast).

Additionally, many applications can provide advanced intelligence that will tell marketing users not only who hit the “landing page”, but which other pages they browsed while they were on the Web site, and how much time they spent looking at each.

Bounce-Back, Subscription, and Opt-Out Logging
Many email marketing software solutions automatically note bounce backs and errors within in the contact database, so marketing teams can be alerted to changes or mistakes in email addresses, and keep their database accurate and up-to-date at all times.

Additionally, email marketing software facilitates compliance with spam laws by dynamically logging those contacts who voluntarily subscribe to or opt-out of email communications.

Reporting and Analysis
From standard, pre-defined reports to custom, ad hoc analysis, email marketing software gives marketing professionals at all levels the insight they need to assess the success of their email marketing initiatives.

Users can assess ROI across a single campaign or a group of programs, track trends and patterns in response rates, easily identify the most and least successful initiatives, and much, much more.

Integration with CRM Systems.
With many email marketing applications, campaign and contact data can be dynamically synchronized with CRM solutions and customer service automation systems, so customer-facing staff in other departments can have access to vital campaign-related information.