Finding the Best Email Autoresponder

by | May 3, 2022 | Blog

Finding the best email autoresponder software for your business can transform your email marketing and, ultimately, your eCommerce business. Email autoresponders help your team productivity while maintaining your personalized connections with leads and customers.

However, some email automation software is better than others, and some of those metrics would be decided on your marketing strategy. Some autoresponders are better at sending basic welcome and follow-up emails. At the same time, other programs can be configured to deal with complex triggers and workflows, such as segmentation, landing page triggers, follow-up emails, and auto-send anniversary emails. Each step of the journey requires a different response according to your overall strategy. You need to select the right automated response software for your strategy.

Automation Capabilities

Depending on the needs of your eCommerce and your industry, there are many automation capability options. Better quality SaaS will have integration options that access your customer databases or CRM and let you define triggers based on a range of highly-personalized criteria.

Some common automation capabilities include:

  • Abandoned cart: Contact a customer with the opportunity to buy items left in their cart
  • Welcoming/Onboarding: Greet new users, customers, or employees
  • Reminders: Send time-sensitive emails about deals or webinarsA/B testing: Experiment with different versions of the same email to analyze performance and evolve your strategy
  • Web Trigger: Make contact when someone clicks on a link, fills out a form, updates a field, makes a purchase, or joins a group
  • Follow up: Reach out after purchase or interaction
  • Celebrations: Send discounts for birthdays and anniversaries
  • VIP: Trigger discounts and promotions for loyal customers
  • Branch flows: Create workflows that split customers based on conditional or logical triggers to direct them down the most appropriate path

Good autoresponder software lets you build out workflows using a visual editor, making it easy to understand your process and giving those without technical skills the ability to configure settings easily. This is an important feature for small businesses that might not have an IT team as it reduces costs and stress.

Email Editor

Your email content still needs to be exceptional. You cannot rely simply on the automation of email responses to reach leads. The content must do the hard work. The subject line, the CTA, and the landing page must be optimized for web and mobile.

Good email autoresponders often provide templates with easy-to-use visual builders. You can add buttons, embed content, and preview your email, all in a short amount of time. Using these templates and adjusting them for each type of response means that you can create consistency with branding. It also makes it faster for your team to send emails.

Email Segmentation 

Sending a blast without careful segmentation is not good practice. Businesses are expected to reach people on their journey at specific points, not just at random intervals or with irrelevant information.

Email segmentation means leveraging customer data to target your contact list in relevant groups based on:

  • Age
  • Average spend
  • Cart contents
  • Gender
  • Geolocation
  • Past purchases
  • Website behavior

Have you ever noticed that when you search for a product online, ads related to that query follow you? It’s the same when segmenting. You need to be sure that you send relevant emails to your customers. For example, if your eCommerce sells books, you might send customers a reminder of what they have on their wishlist at 6-month intervals to encourage sales.

Email Personalization

Personalization is about more than using the customer’s name. You can automate product recommendations in the body of your email based on a contact’s location, past purchases, anniversary information, etc. Some autoresponders use machine learning to suggest products to shoppers based on what people with the same or similar purchase history have also purchased.

The best tools send personalized greetings to new subscribers and send birthday emails with offers. The better your email segmentation strategy, the better your leads and closing of sales will be. These emails are also important for securing relationships and developing loyalty with prospects, especially in B2B interactions.

Campaign Management

Your contact list will likely contain a diverse range of customer-journey points. A good automation system will have the tools that help you manage each aspect of the campaign.

The automation tools should also provide important reports about click-through rates, open rates, and conversions. This information helps your marketing team know which adjustments need to be made to make the most of your emailing capabilities.

Email and Subscriber Limitations

Depending on the SaaS you choose, email autoresponder pricing is usually based on the number of subscribers you have and the number of emails you send each month. You need to consider the flexibility of the plan you choose if it is easy to upgrade your package, the options offered for various pricing tiers, and how they answer your campaign needs.

The List

The following is only a list of some of the most popular email automation options. These are not recommendations, and you should consider if any of these options are right for your business. Many other options are available, and our consulting team can help you find the best solutions for your business needs.

Moosend 

Moosend is an affordable and easy-to-use email automation tool. It has been on the market for a long time, making it reliable and offered with good content ideas, additional features, and support for technical issues.

Moosend has lots of triggers and actions, all managed in a drag-and-drop interface. Workflows can be shared among team members, and notes can be shared with the team using the integrated SaaS.

The interface comes with templates that make A/B testing fast and easy, and it also offers ideas for how to create designs that are appealing to your audience. You can use AI to hyper-personalized your emails based on similar consumer preferences and other behavioral analytics.

The SaaS is aimed at marketers who do not write code. There is a focus on easy use, clever integration with your CMS, and actionable reporting to improve your campaign.

  • GDPR compliance
  • Click heatmaps
  • Rich tracking, reporting, and analytics
  • Cart abandonment
  • Five types of subscription forms
  • Mobile responsiveness
  • Direct SMTP service
  • Native integrations with WooCommerce, Salesforce, WordPress, and dozens more top products
  • Embed product blocks in newsletters for shoppable emails

Moosend offers a free forever plan. The plan is capped at 1,000 subscribers but does offer many of its core features. For added features and increased subscriber numbers, they have scalable plans for your business needs.

Constant Contact 

Constant Contact is suited to marketers who want unlimited email automation capabilities and fine-tuned customization options. The program gives users options, from simple click-and-tick to more nuanced sequencing with precise timing and personalization.

Constant Contact’s form builder is easily embeddable on websites and landing pages. The forms allow you to create custom fields to get the information you need. You can also set unique triggers using the forms to target specific segments in creative ways.

For instance, you can set up one welcome sequence track for salespeople and another for C-suite executives. This means you can tailor your messaging and content as well as harvest more actionable data.

This automation capability can also be set up for nuanced drip campaigns to maintain engagement without overwhelming customers. The long-term strategy capability of the SaaS, as well as its high-tailored approach, makes it suitable for B2B operators who have a long customer journey and who need teams to be making regular and consistent contact to build and maintain relationships.

Sendinblue 

Sendinblue has a free-forever option that is limited but still offers unlimited contact storage. Storage is usually capped, so this offer is unique compared with others. You can auto send up to 300 emails per day, which for most businesses is adequate to breathe new life into a campaign or launch a new one.

Sendinblue has templates and pre-prepared setting responses for common situations. It is fast and easy to configure and can take as little as a few minutes to launch if the team is ready. Sendinblue’s automation builder gives complete control over trigger actions (like an abandoned cart, among many others), timing, conditions, and qualifiers.

The drag-and-drop email builder is so simple to use it is a good starting point for new businesses and those with little experience or coding skills.

Klaviyo 

Klaviyo integrates with your CRM or eCommerce platform, making it easy to launch email marketing campaigns. It works well with software like Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommmerce. It can collect your customers’ shopping data and repurpose that information for you to use in email and marketing campaigns while creating unique customer journeys.

The native integration with customer data sources also means that your segmentation can be highly structured.

The SaaS interface is also straightforward to learn and use, so your team will be refining and sending emails to the right audience targets in no time.

Klaviyo’s toolkit includes:

  • A/B split testing
  • Drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG email editor
  • Shoppable product recommendations in email
  • A rich selection of behavior-based triggers
  • Prebuilt autoresponders
  • Comprehensive segmentation options
  • Email personalization for first-time buyers, regulars, VIPs, and more
  • Responsive templates optimized for web and mobile

The free plan is small, with only 250 contacts and 500 emails, with the tiered payment plan giving you access to more extensive contact lists after that.

GetResponse 

GetResponse is well-liked by sales teams. It is one of the simplest, most effective email autoresponders and has been operating for more than 20 years. The additions of features and continually improving UI mean that it remains popular with businesses that have evolved with the brand.

The built-in sales tracking feature is one of the most popular features of the SaaS. Even the Basic plan comes with a sales funnel, unlimited lead funnels, and unlimited landing pages. The tools emphasize email marketing integration with your pipeline, and for this reason, too remain a constant for many businesses.

GetResponse has several other features, such as:

  • A/B testing
  • Unlimited email sends
  • RSS-email templates
  • Transactional and time-sensitive emails
  • Drag-and-drop email editor with mobile and inbox preview
  • Add content blocks, videos, buttons, and social media icons to the email
  • List and calendar views for email scheduling

MailerLite 

MailerLite is used by more than 1 million companies, startups, and freelancers. It relies on its intuitive design, budget-friendly options, and good reputation. The free version lets you send 12 emails per month to 1,000 subscribers, which for smaller businesses can be all you need. The SaaS has good A/B testing functionality as well as segmentation parameters.

Some other features include:

  • Segment subscribers based on a varied criteria
  • Track email campaign activity with detailed reports
  • Automate RSS to email
  • Time-zone based email delivery
  • Rich email personalization
  • Auto resend unopened emails with alternative subjects or personal messages
  • Target specific interest groups by tagging subscribers or inviting them to self-select
  • Click maps to analyze subscriber interaction with your emails

MailerLite also comes with features for your website, like pop-ups and embedded forms and useful drag and drop editor to create professional-looking newsletter layouts.

Mailchimp 

Mailchimp first hit the market in 2001 and remains a popular first choice for new business owners. It functions as an integrated marketing platform and has far more features today than its start as an email marketing tool.

It is simple to use, has many basic designs, and offers those new to the business lots of helpful tips, like how to write a subject line that will get attention and what features you should add to your email to solicit a certain response.

Other features include:

  • Drag-and-drop email editor
  • Send Time Optimization
  • Lookalike audience finder
  • Segmentation capabilities to target messaging and automate product recommendations
  • RSS to email
  • Multi-branch customer journeys
  • Behavior-based automation
  • Transactional Emails with Mailchimp API or SMTP

Mailchimp offers a free forever version limited to 2,000 contacts and has marketing features that include CRM and landing page development, which is uncommon on free versions.

Conclusion

The tools listed above are more than just email autoresponders. All have additional features that will benefit your customer journey creation, integrate well with most off-the-shelf eCommerce platforms, and many free versions are a good starting point for new businesses.

All of these tools can help your business to grow. The simplicity of an email marketing campaign can be achieved quickly. However, all also allow you to become more nuanced in your campaign with segmentation, auto-reply, personalization, and reporting. Selecting the best tool for your business will come down to understanding your goals and how to achieve them.