Categories
Getting Started

How Do I Delete GetResponse Account?

If you’re wondering how to cancel  and delete GetResponse, you’re in luck. This simple guide will walk you through the process of how to cancel GetResponse no matter what type of account you have.

Delete GetResponse Trial Account

If you have a free trial of GetResponse, you’ll need to contact customer support directly via the live chat on GetResponse’s website or send them an email. You can also simply wait for the free trial to end, since no credit card information is necessary to sign up, so they have nothing to bill after your trial expires.

Delete GetResponse Paid Account

If you want to cancel GetResponse and you have a paid account, you’ll need to login first and then click on Billing. From there, choose “Cancel Subscription”.

GetResponse gives you one last overview on that page — a summary of the newsletters you’ve sent, any drafts you still have in progress, and any autoresponders that are currently running. You’ll lose these when you delete GetResponse. If you’re sure you want to continue, simply click on the button marked Cancel the Account.

GetResponse Refunds

Unfortunately, GetResponse does not offer refunds. Because it’s billed as a pay-as-you-go service, when you’re charged for a month, you pay for that entire month even if you cancel your account right after your credit card is charged.

This also applies if you pre-paid for the entire year. If you change your mind and cancel right after being charged, you’re still billed for the whole year and cannot be refunded any pro-rated amount or anything like that.

How to Delete GetResponse Social Ads Creator account?

If you have GetResponse’s Social Ads Creator app, the process to cancel your account is a little different than the typical way to cancel the email marketing service.

First, sign in to the app, then click on Settings and tap the Delete Account option. You’ll be asked to confirm that you want to delete your account, so simply click on the next screen to confirm it.

You’ll also be asked why you’re deleting the account, so choose a reason, and then confirm. That’s it!

Keep in mind that deleting your GetResponse Social Ads Creator account means that all of your integrations and drafts made with the service will also be deleted. Once you delete your account, you’ll no longer be able to share social posts this way.

However, the posts you’ve already shared will continue to remain on your profile(s). If you want to delete those, you’ll need to manually login to your social media profile(s) and delete them directly from there.

Why Delete GetResponse?

GetResponse is amazingly powerful in terms of both its email marketing and webinar marketing options. It’s built-in CRM (customer relationship management) is quite robust and nicely integrated with other services. In addition, they offer a solid variety of features like split testing, landing pages and automations that other email marketing services don’t offer at all (or charge exhorbitant amounts for).

With GetResponse, they’re all integrated with each other, so as your business grows, your marketing can scale with it.

With this in mind, though, GetResponse may be a bit much for some users. While it’s true that it doesn’t have the hand-holding and beginner-friendly guides that other services like AWeber have, it does make up for this in terms of offering a suite of marketing functions rather than strictly sticking to just email marketing.

If you don’t need all of that extra stuff — you’re not marketing via webinar, you’re not using landing pages and you don’t have enough traffic to bother with split testing yet, you might want to downsize a bit with your email marketing. That’s understandable.

Your next question then, is probably which email marketing service to switch to once you’ve canceled GetResponse.  Here are our top picks depending on your specific needs:

  • If you want something more beginner-friendly that walks you through the process of building your first email newsletter or autoresponder, choose AWeber.
  • If you want email marketing that offers you a great selection of tools and options to properly follow-up with and improve the customer experience, choose ConvertKit
  • If you just want to create beautiful email newsletters quickly without the need for any other features, choose Benchmark.
  • If you want to concentrate on automating the sending of cold email outreach to prospects, choose Woodpecker.co
  • If you want “less is more” with your email marketing, in a simple, clean and streamlined interface that adds on landing page functionality and similar basic email marketing features, choose MailerLite.

Hopefully if you decide to cancel your GetResponse account, you’ll find these GetResponse alternatives to be exactly what you’ve been looking for! Best of success!

Categories
Getting Started

How Do You Create an Effective Email Marketing Campaign?

When it comes to creating an effective email marketing campaign, it’s important to remember that before you even start writing your first message, you’ll want to have a strategy and a goal in place. That can cause many people to freeze up and feel overwhelmed by “analysis paralysis” as they try to perfect every step and end up getting stuck in the details of the email and missing the big picture of the overall campaign.

Fortunately, by asking yourself the following questions as you create each message, you can create an effective email marketing campaign that gets results and helps you get conversions.

What is the End Goal?

Now, before you say “more sales!” take a step back and think about how you want to reach that goal. Distill your goals down into smaller individual “sub-goals” such as “increase sales by x%. This will allow you to think about the steps involved to reach that goal and it also gives you a more concrete result to aim for.

Again, it’s easy to break down your email marketing goals into smaller tidbits to the point where you get overwhelmed. Just remember: small, concrete and manageable gets you to the end goal.

Who are You?

One of the little-known “campaign killers” is simply subscribers not really knowing who you are, or more importantly, why they should care.  Companies make this problem worse by sending their emails from “Company Name” rather than a person’s name, and an email address of “no-reply@example.com”.

Although it’s understandable that you don’t want to add to your support workload, this kind of approach inherently tells the subscriber “you’re not important to us”. It also prevents you from building up a meaningful business relationship with them and them with you.

A more relationship-friendly approach is to incorporate an email-to-support-ticket system to allow your support team to be proactive about answering questions and directing users to the answers they need while still maintaining a professional, polished and approachable front.

Switch Up Your Subject Line Process

Do you typically write your subject line first before your email? Or is it the last thing you do before you prepare the email to be sent?  Either way, switch up the process and freshen up the process. Your subject line has to be compelling but short.

Remember that your users may be reading your email on their phones, their computer or their tablet, and it’s possible that the subject line gets cut off. Think of ways that you can add urgency or pique curiosity quickly with short-but-sweet terms or even emojis if it’s relevant to your business.

Leverage Personalization to the Fullest

Oftentimes, many email marketers will start to create an effective email marketing campaign just using basic personalization such as the subscriber’s first name. Many of the best email marketing services offer much deeper personalization features than that.

For example, GetResponse lets you use geo-targeted fields as well as assign your own fields for whatever you want. So if you’re selling rain boots in Seattle, you might have a custom field for the user’s shoe size and the colors they prefer. This would let you create an email message full of personalized features like:

Hey Jane! The weather’s getting brisk in Seattle these days. Look chic in any season with gorgeous new rain boots that are cute and comfortable! We’ve got them in size 7 and in red just for you! 

How much more likely would you be to click an email message that was personalized like that as opposed to a more generic ‘Boot Sale Going On Now”.

Do You Have a Call to Action?

Oftentimes when creating compelling email marketing campaigns, we tend to forget to ask for the sale! We pour so much of our time and focus into getting the design just right, and making sure the subject line and personalization are perfect that adding a call-to-action slips our mind.

So consider this your reminder. Include a call-to-action in your emails — preferably a link as those who have images turned off might not see that fancy button you added. Your call-to-action should have an action word in it — like Browse our Selection, View the Latest Styles or even Check Out the Hottest Deals.  The goal is to get users excited and enticed enough by the content of your message to click.

Have You Planned the Rest of the Campaign?

This is where most well-thought-out email campaigns end — but it doesn’t have to be! Based on whether or not the user clicked the link in your message, you can then follow up and segment your messages accordingly based on who viewed those pages, what products they looked at, and so on.

Keep in mind that much of this customizability and segmentation will depend on how deeply personalized your messages can be based on your email marketing service provider. If you want to go deep into personalized, segmented emails, we recommend GetResponse as they have the most thorough customization options through a simple “click-to-add” style of interface.

Categories
Getting Started

Is Email Marketing Still Effective in 2020?

Social media…Instagram…video streaming. There’s always some new and exciting marketing channel to explore. Which is why many people look at something as simple as email marketing and wonder, “does it still work?”

It’s easy to think that the oldest form of online marketing is practically extinct, and it does look pretty simple in comparison with the deep personalization of things like retargeting and the algorithms of search engines and social media alike, but you’d be surprised at how effective email marketing is — even as it nears its 50th birthday.

The fact is that what email has in its corner is something that other technologies haven’t been able to duplicate just yet — one-on-one access to the consumer.

Social media, video, text messaging, retargeting — all of those have some other form of distractions around them. But email is your one chance (and sometimes your only chance)< to connect with the user for just a few seconds.

And those few seconds will make or break how effective your email marketing is.

Targeting Your Email Marketing

Although it may not be as deeply targeted as social media advertising, email marketing nevertheless benefits from proper segmentation options. Based on what you know about your prospects, you can segment them (or better yet, allow them to segment themselves) based on the information they want to receive.

For example, not everyone wants to receive sales notifications, they just want to see what the upcoming trends are. Still others only want to know when the products they love go on sale. Allowing users to segment what they want out of your email marketing initiatives and even choose how often they receive communication from you can be crucial to your email marketing effectiveness.

Measuring Your Email Marketing Success

In order to know whether or not your email marketing is effective, you need to be able to measure it. Email marketing is most commonly measured via the number of emails opened (the open rate) as well as the number of links clicked (the click-through rate).

If your email gets a lot of opens, but not very many clicks, it’s likely that people were intrigued by the subject line, but found that the content (or whatever you linked to) wasn’t that interesting.

If your email got a lot of opens and clicks, but few orders ultimately, your audience may need a bit more preparation before they’re ready to buy — consider following up with emails that talk about the benefits of what you want them to buy, why now’s the time to own it, and so on.

If your email didn’t get a lot of opens, it’s possible that it went into the user’s spam or somehow got filtered into another area. For example, Gmail has a tab that it filters emails into called “Promotions”, skipping the inbox completely. Of course, you can ask that our users “whitelist” your email, but few actually will go through that process.

Instead, something has happened to make Google feel that your message belongs in promotion. It could be the subject line you used, the content of the email itself, or any other number of factors. If it looks lke a promotion, and it sounds like a promotion, Google will label it as such.

Email Marketing Effectiveness Doesn’t Mean Just Concentrating on Email

It can be easy to read this article and think that you should be a proponent of email marketing to the exclusion of other marketing channels, and that’s simply not the case.

In fact, email marketing actually goes amazingly well with social media if you plan your strategy right.  Matt Jabs, who runs DIYNatural.com, combines his passion for creating natural alternatives to typically chemical-laden goods (think candles, detergent or even things like fruit juice).

Whenever he publishes a new blog post, he uses AWeber to send out an announcement to his email list, and he also publishes the post on social media at the same time. This vastly increases the audience he reaches by targeting both email and social media users with a steady supply of relevant information that they want to know about.

Effective Email Marketing Begins with an Effective Email Provider

Your email marketing effectiveness depends partly on what you have to share. The other part depends on the quality of your email marketing service provider. Companies like AWeber and GetResponse are the most popular for good reason — they enable you to not only gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns, but also connect them to social media, webinars and more. This, in turn, greatly broadens your reach and potentially your sales.

And for that, you can thank our old friend email. It’s nowhere near dead, even though it’s often eclipsed by other, shinier marketing channels. Don’t count email out — it may be much more effective than you realize.

Categories
Getting Started

What is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is an email service provider that offers a complete suite of marketing and promotion tools designed to help increase email conversion rates. Unlike other email marketing services (like MailChimp or AWeber), ConvertKit has been built from the ground up to focus specifically on helping bloggers, YouTubers and other online content creators connect with their audiences. 

To that end, it doesn’t include a lot of extra (and often unnecessary) features in its bid to try to be all things to all users. 

At its core, ConvertKit is broken down into five sections: 

  • Subscribers – the users that have subscribed to your mailing list
  • Landing Pages – Specialized pages that are designed with mobile-responsive templates to help you gain more subdscribers.
  • Sequences – Emails that are sent at pre-determined intervals. Also called an autoresponder.
  • Automations – The ability to send specific emails to specific segments of users based on previous actions they’ve taken. 
  • Broadcasts – One-off emails sent to your subscribers that aren’t part of a sequence. 

What Makes ConvertKit Different than Other Email Marketing Services? 

In asking “what is ConvertKit?”, you may be wondering how ConvertKit differs from other email service providers. There are a few areas where ConvertKit stands out from its competition.

Subscriber Counts

The first is the way in which ConvertKit counts subscribers. Other services, like MailChimp, look at your total number of subscribers. So if one user subscribes to two of your mailing lists, they count as two subscribers even though it’s really only one user. 

If you have a lot of mailing lists, this can make your subscriber count blow up considerably. That’s why it often costs more, over time, to use a low-cost email service provider like MailChimp vs. ConvertKit. 

On the other hand, ConvertKit bases your subscriber count on the number of users. So if one user subscribes to two mailing lists, it only counts as one user. This creates a more accurate representation of your actual subscriber count (and is a fairer way of calculating pricing). 

Understanding Segments and Tags

You can’t ask  “What is ConvertKit?” without getting into Segments and Tags, which are two of the ways that ConvertKit helps you manage your subscribers. Think of Tags like a label that you give subscribers:  people click a certain link, sign up for a certain freebie, participate in a certain mailing list campaign, etc.  You can tag them accordingly. 

From there, you can then separate these groups of users into segments. This makes it much easier to send out emails only to certain people in your subscriber list. For example, if you sent out an email announcing your latest YouTube video, you could tag those users who clicked the link to view the video. From there, you could segment it into “People who watched my video” and send them a follow-up email asking how they liked it. 

Superior Personalization

Most email marketing services would have you believe that personalization is simply adding “!firstname” to an email message and calling it a day. But ConvertKit allows you to go much deeper than that, if you want. 

Going back to our YouTube video example. Let’s say you have a segment of users who regularly watch your YouTube videos or read your blog posts. You have tagged those who click those links as “regulars”. From here, you could create an email that not only goes out to that segment of users, but references the fact that they participate often. 

In short, you can, simply by clicking and dragging chunks of pre-programmed text, send emails that are personalized and tailored to very specific user groups within your subscriber list. 

What is ConvertKit? More than Just an Email Marketing Service

As you can see, ConvertKit is more than your average email marketing service. With excellent personalization options, fair pricing and great segmentation and organization options, its focus isn’t just on helping you build a list — but a list of users that will convert more effectively into paying customers. 

ConvertKit offers a “Freemium” account that lets you create an unlimited number of landing pages and opt-in forms. This lets you get started at absolutely no cost while you build up your content.

Categories
Getting Started

How Much is GetResponse?

GetResponse pricing varies depending on list size and starts at $15 for up to 1,000 subscribers. With each tier in GetResponse pricing, you have a greater number of marketing tools like sales funnels, webinar funnels, and automations. See pricing details below: 

Is There a GetResponse Coupon Code? 

GetResponse offers several options to help you save money on their plans. If you pre-pay for a year, you can save up to 18% off. Pre-paying for two years knocks up to 30% off the price. Non-profit organizations can receive a whopping 50% discount by filling out the application here

Which GetResponse Package is Right for You?

Simply knowing “how much is GetResponse” doesn’t give you much direction on choosing a package, and GetResponse’s own comparison list can seem overwhelming. Fortunately, we at MailFocus have made it easy for you to choose a package based on how you plan to use email marketing in your business. Let’s take a closer look: 

 Just the Basics

If you want to save money and just use GetResponse for your email marketing and landing page needs, the Basic plan, at $15/month for up to 1,000 subscribers should suit your needs perfectly. It includes the ability to set up autoresponders, newsletters, blog digests (RSS to email), split testing and much more. 

The Basics Plus Some Extras! 

The Plus plan is the most popular of all GetResponse pricing plans. If you’re asking “how much is GetResponse” and want a plan that includes most everything you’ll need to really automate your marketing, the Plus plan,starting at $49/month is a good all-around plan to start with. 

In addition to everything that Basic offers, it also includes, most notably, the automation builder, and abandoned order recovery (the system will follow-up with users that don’t complete an order, yet you have their email address). 

The Plus plan also includes some basic webinar functionality but you’re limited to only doing free webinars with up to 100 attendees, and you have a maximum recording storage time of 3 hours. 

Going Professional

Quite a big jump up from the Plus plan is Professional. Starting at $99 for 1,000 subscribers, it removes all the limits and restrictions, so that you can build an unlimited number of automations, sales funnels, webinars (paid and free plus on-demand webinars) of up to 300 attendees and more. 

This option is by far the best choice if you simply want to market without having to worry about being restricted in terms of the number of funnels or automations you create. Once you start leveraging these tools to build your business, you’ll see how a service like GetResponse can act as less of an email tool and more of an online marketing hub for everything from email to landing pages, to automation and funnel building. 

Understanding Which Plan to Buy

Now that you have a better idea of what each plan offers, the question you really should be asking isn’t “how much is GetResponse?” but rather how much more your internet marketing efforts could grow with the right GetResponse plan powering your needs. 

All GetResponse plans come with a 30 day free trial with no credit card required, so it’s a good idea to try the one you think would fit your requirements to see how it aligns with your overall email marketing and business goals. 

Categories
Getting Started

Is GetResponse a CRM? 

GetResponse has moved from being strictly an email marketing service, to a complete suite of marketing tools. These days, it combines email marketing, landing pages, a CRM, webinars and more into one platform, making it a great all-in-one hub to manage and monitor your marketing efforts. 

For those who’d like to use GetResponse as a CRM, let’s take a closer look at how that specific functionality works, not only for your users but also to help you better manage your follow-up through the entire customer journey. 

The 3 Parts of the GetResposne CRM

The GetResponse CRM is divided into three parts: 

  1. Pipelines
  2. Stages and
  3. Deals

Working with GetResponse Pipelines

Pipelines are like a visual overview of your sales process. It’s essentially the path your users will take from the very beginning of the sales process until a sale is completed. You can divide your pipeline down even further into individual stages. 

Working with GetResponse Stages

Stages are the building blocks of a pipeline.. When you create a stage for your pipeline, you should name it according to what it is that you want to have happen at that point in the pipeline.

Stages are further broken down into two parts: open and closed. These have to do with the status of that stage. For example, open stages can have names like “presentation”, “proposal” or “negotiation” while closed stages are simply “won” (you got a sale) or “lost) (you did not get a sale). There’s also a third type called “frozen” for those sales efforts that seems to be in limbo.

You’ll want to add open stages to create a new stage (they always appear at the front of the pipeline, but you can drag and drop to arrange it the way you want). Add a closed stage to signify the end of the pipeline. These can’t be rearranged. 

Working with GetResponse Deals

 Deals are the contacts that you add to a pipeline. These are not the same as the subscribers in your email list, but rather your potential customers that may complete a purchase. Because it’s not like email where you need their permission to email them more information, there’s no double opt-in process required. These people have already expressed an interest in hearing from you — you’re just using GetResponse’s CRM to connect and follow-up with them. 

You can select specific customers, and then click and drag to move them across different stages, so that you’ll always have a visual overview of which customers are at which stage of the buying process.

Automatically Adding Deals to the Pipeline

You can also automatically add new deals to a pipeline. When you add new deals to your pipeline, you can enable a function that converts all current and future contacts to deals and adds them at a certain stage in the pipeline.  Even if you happened to copy the same contacts to different lists, if there are duplicates, they’ll be removed so that you have only one contact or deal. 

What Else Can I Do with a GetResponse CRM?

The CRM function in GetResponse is rather simple, but it fits the bill if you just want to be able to have a visual overview of where prospects are in your pipeline, and how to follow-up with them accordingly. The best thing about the GetResponse CRM is that it connects and works seamlessly with other functions of GetResponse services. 

For example, if you have certain customers who always open your email messages, click on your links and join your webinars, you can save these customers as a specific kind of deal and move them to a stage in your pipeline that you’ve called ‘Highly Likely to Purchase”. You can then see how your mailings or other follow-ups affect their propensity to complete a purchase. 

In short, the GetResponse CRM allows you to see which of your subscribers are most likely to become customers, and what stage they’re in of the overall customer journey (or pipeline). But email isn’t the only type of follow-up you can do with the users in your CRM. GetResponse CRM also includes a calendar function, so that you can schedule phone calls, meetings and more to help further push these engaged users along the pipeline. 

Try the GetResponse CRM for Free

As you can see, GetResponse does have a basic CRM feature that’s well-integrated into the rest of its services. It’s definitely worth trying if you’re just looking for a simple CRM without all the bells and whistles of more involved systems or platforms. You can try GetResponse CRM and the full suite of marketing tools they offer free for 30 days by clicking the link below. 

 

Categories
Getting Started

Is AWeber Free? How to Start Email Marketing for Free with AWeber

In order to better compete with free autoresponders like MailChimp and MailerLite, AWeber free is now available to let you try the popular service at no cost. If you’ve always wanted to try AWeber’s features for yourself but didn’t have the email marketing know-how to justify paying a monthly fee, here’s your chance to go beyond the 30 day free trial, and set up an AWeber free account.

When you search for “AWeber free account” or something similar, chances are you’ll end up on the official page which looks like this: 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you anything about what’s actually included in your free AWeber account. In this article, we’re going to reveal what AWeber’s free account gives you access to, and compare it to other free autoresponders so that you can decide for yourself. Let’s get started: 

AWeber Free Account: What’s Included?

At a basic level, the AWeber free account lets you have up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails per month with a single mailing list. You can also do basic segmentation and get a general overview of your email campaign performance through a basic analytics report. 

If you’ve been thinking of trying AWeber, this is a great way to get your feet wet with email marketing.  However, if you’re looking to maximize what you get from a free email marketing account, there are options out there that let you send to more subscribers, or send more emails. Take a look at the options below: 

Subscribers

Email sending limit

Email lists

Create and send newsletters

Autoresponders

Blog Digest (RSS to Email)

Drag-and-drop email builder

Email templates

Custom HTML allowed

Email split testing

Customer support

Branded with company logo

Create sign-up forms

Wordpress plugin available

AWeber 
Free Account
$0
Up to 500
3,000/month
1
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
no
phone, email, live chat
yes
yes
yes
 Sign Up 
MAILCHIMP
PRO Account
$0
Up to 2,000* 
10,000/month
1
yes
yes
yes
yes
Basic
no
no
30 days of email support
yes
yes
yes
 Sign Up 
MaILERLITE
Sub Heading
$0
Up to 1,000
12,000/month
unknown
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
no
no
24/7 email support
yes
yes
yes
 Sign Up 

A Warning about MailChimp

Keep in mind, although Mailchimp looks like the clear winner here with a high number of subscribers you can send to, keep in mind that they label them as “Contacts” and that includes everyone who has ever subscribed to your list — including those who have unsubscribed or bounced. All of those count toward your total number, so it’s not nearly as generous as it might seem! 

MailerLite: The Best of Both Worlds

 

MailerLite, although not as well known as AWeber, is a solid choice if you want to have a free email marketing account with less restrictions. You can send to double the number of subscribers (1,000 vs. 500) and can send up to 12,000 emails per month as opposed to AWeber’s 3,000. And although MailerLite doesn’t have the sheer number of templates that AWeber has, it nevertheless has some excellent, mobile-responsive templates that you can make your own and customize with their drag-and-drop email editor.

Still, if this is your first time marketing with email and you want a simple, straightforward, guided hand to help walk you through it, it’s hard to beat the simplicity and ease of use that AWeber brings. Since all of these options cost you nothing to try, we recommend trying all three to see which interface you like best and then ultimately settling on the one that you feel most comfortable with. 

 

Categories
Getting Started

How to Create a Template Email

You don’t have to be involved in email marketing for long to know how much of a time-saver template emails can be. If you’re wondering how to create a template email, you’re in luck. Below, we’ll walk you through the process of creating and saving a template email in some of the best email marketing services

How to Create a Template Email in AWeber

AWeber has a simple “Save as Template” option when you’re in the message builder writing or designing your email 

From there, you simply give it a name and the next time you’re writing another email or newsletter, you can select it from among the different templates. You can create as many template emails as you want. 

How to Create a Template Email in GetResponse

Unlike in AWeber, where you have to create a message to be able to save it as a template, with GetResponse, you don’t have to do this. You can get started creating a template email by simply going to: 

Menu > Email Marketing > Marketing Templates

From here, you simply click the Create Template button and choose a predefined template or start to create your own. When you have it the way you want, click Save and Exit

And then Save as My Template from the dropdown menu that appears. 

How to Create a Template Email in MailChimp

If you’re using MailChimp, you can easily create template emails by going to Campaigns and then choosing Email Templates. From there, choose Create Template.

Depending on your MailChimp plan, you may not have access to all of the templates. Higher-tiered plans give you access to more options.

Once you choose to use one of their templates as a basis (or code your own), you can then drag and drop different “content blocks” into place, and click the Save and Exit button. You’ll then be prompted to give your template a name.

How to Create a Template Email in ConvertKit

ConvertKit just released a visual email template builder (you can still work with code if you prefer). To access it, login to your account and click on Email Templates.

From there, you can choose the visual template or the previous HTML editor. By choosing the visual template builder, you won’t have access to HTML functionality, but you can still style your template with CSS if you want. 

From here you can then edit the styles for:

  • Paragraphs
  • Buttons
  • Headings and
  • General styles (like the colors of the areas where your content will be). 

You can also add different content areas above or below your actual email content. 

Create a Template Email, Save Time and Increase Productivity

As you can see, creating a template email for all of your most-used designs, newsletters, updates and more will not only save you time with your email marketing campaigns, but also ensure that your emails consistently look good and are welcomed by your subscribers. 

Different plans may limit your access to certain features, so it’s a good idea to check the pricing of each email marketing service before you sign up to make sure that you get access to the templates you want! 

Categories
Getting Started

Which Marketing Platform has the Best Free Email Template Builder? 

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use free email template builder, you’re in luck. There are a variety of ways to click and drag your way to building a beautiful email template you’ll be proud to send. No programming or design experience needed! 

Why You Shouldn’t Use a Standalone Free Email Template Builder

Now, there are a lot of email template builders out there but that’s all they do. They don’t let you preview how your emails look on different devices and they don’t let you actually send emails. 

It’s very likely that you’ll design a beautiful email, get it ready to send, and then realize it looks terrible in every device you preview it on. 

With most of these free email template builders, you’ll spend more time agonizing over the placement of things just to make your emails look good, that you’ll waste a lot of time in an effort to save money. 

How All-in-One Marketing Platforms are Different 

A better way to design email templates is to do so with an all-in-one marketing platform that lets you: 

  1. Click and drag to build great-looking, responsive free email templates
  2. Preview your email designs to make sure they work on different devices, platforms and email programs.
  3. Schedule and send your emails with the confidence that they’ll look great no matter what. 

With that being said, we’ve narrowed down the field to the top three email marketing platforms that offer free email templates as part of their packages. 

Each of these programs has a monthly (or yearly) fee, but the actual email template builder part of the system doesn’t cost anything extra, and it’s free to design as many email templates as you want. This is great in cases where you may want to send out a regular newsletter, but from time to time, also send out sales or other announcements. 

Some of them even let you add free stock photos, as well as your own logos, colors and images at no extra charge. Let’s take a look at which platforms offer you the greatest creative freedom while looking great across a variety of devices and operating systems. 

The Top 3 Best Email Template Builders

Postcards

Postcards lets you drag and drop different “modules” to create the base of your template. Then, you simply fill it in with images, text and links. There’s nothing to download, and it works right in your browser. 

Plus, with over 100 templates to use as your base, you can create virtually any type of layout you want. Rather than sending an email design back and forth to your design team, you can use Postcards to lay it out and get input from everyone on your team, while being sure that the end result is responsive.

Emails designed in Postcards with with all major email software programs, including Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and many more. You can also export the HTML from your Postcards design and import it into nearly any email marketing platform: With just one click, your email design can be exported and ready for use in a variety of popular email marketing services: 

The free version of Postcards gives you 10 modules to work from and you can freely create and save your projects. However, if you want to export them for use in an email marketing platform (like AWeber or GetResponse), you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts at $15/month (or $179 per year – saving you $37). 

GetResponse

GetResponse features 500 different email templates that you can use and customize to create your own unique email template design. Plus, with GetResponse’s built-in email marketing, landing page designer and advanced marketing automation, it’s easy to consider them much more than just a email marketing service, and more of an all-in-one marketing hub. 

Plus, you don’t need to worry about which email platforms and programs GetResponse works with, because it is designed to work with all of them. An email marketing platform at its core, GetResponse has evolved to 

Although GetResponse’s lowest-priced option is $15/month (you can try it free for 30 days without needing a credit card), it offers features that are far more extensive than just an email template builder. Pre-paying for a year with the basic plan will knock the price down to just $12.30 per month. 

ConvertKit 

When it comes to email design, ConvertKit helps you keep it simple. With emails designed for optimal conversions, you can easily create your own personal library of images you use the most. In addition, ConvertKit has partnered with free stock photo site Unsplash to give you a larger variety of images to choose from to easily create beautiful emails.

ConvertKit, like GetResponse, includes landing page designs, marketing automations and email template designs. Their basic account is free for up to 1,000 subscribers, so it’s a great option if you’re looking to quickly create, launch and test your email marketing messages without having to spend hours of time getting every section pixel-perfect. 

Get Started With a Free Email Template Builder

If you’re looking for a fast, easy way to get started creating emails that look good, load fast and can be viewed easily on any device, these three choices will give you the best value for your money and the easiest way to send emails that get noticed and acted upon. Since all of them have at least a free trial, you can see which one you like best before deciding to pay. 

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Getting Started

4 of the Best AWeber Alternatives for Email Marketing and Autoresponders

If you’re looking for alternatives to AWeber, you’re in luck. Although AWeber is one of the most popular email marketing platforms (also known as autoresponders), it is by no means the only one out there. If you’re looking to cancel AWeber and switch to another email marketing service, you shouldn’t do it without having another option in mind.

Here are four of the best Aweber alternatives worth trying: 

AWeber Alternative #1: GetResponse

The closest alternative to AWeber in terms of pricing and features, GetResponse actually builds upon AWeber’s basic autoresponders, email marketing campaigns and marketing automation and makes the process much more intuitive and user-friendly. 

Although it doesn’t hold your hand through the process as much as AWeber does, and it doesn’t have nearly the amount of HTML newsletter templates as AWeber, it nevertheless offers an excellent selection of email templates that you can use as inspiration to customize your own designs without any programming experience. 

Where GetResponse excels is in its marketing automation and landing page designer. Click and drag to build simple or complex automations based on specific triggers, and build landing pages that do all the heavy lifting to help you convert more users into customers.

Also like AWeber, GetResponse has a free 30 day trial so that you can try out all of the features for yourself and see how everything works together: 

 

AWeber Alternative #2: ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an excellent AWeber alternative if you’re looking to split test your emails. This alone can boost your engagement rate considerably and give you a better idea of the types of emails that your subscribers prefer (over sending them the same sorts of things and just hoping those emails convert). 

Although ConvertKit may not have the extensive design template collection that AWeber has, it does offer a great deal of versatility when it comes to testing and seeing which offer and email converts best. For example, ConvertKit is the only alternative to AWeber that lets you test out the incentives you offer to your users to see which one best converts them into subscribers. 

Most email marketing services will let you split test emails, but not the actual incentives that draw in subscribers.

Plus, ConvertKit has a completely and totally free account (not just a free trial) for up to 1,000 subscribers. This account comes with unlimited landing pages, forms, calls-to-action, traffic and much more, making it among one of the best AWeber alternatives on the market. 

 

AWeber Alternative #3: Benchmark

Benchmark is a little-known AWeber alternative that is built for speed. Much like AWeber and GetResponse, they also offer email marketing, autoresponders, landing pages and marketing automation, along with a full suite of tools to help you see how your messages and pages are performing. 

Where Benchmark truly stands apart is in its RSS to email feature. AWeber and GetResponse also offer this functionality, but AWeber’s templates look somewhat dated. Benchmark offers beautiful templates that you can either drag and drop to build yourself, or if you’re an HTML pro, code directly to create the look you want. 

One of the best features that Benchmark offers that the others don’t, is the “Inbox Checker” which uses third-party technology to let you preview how your email will look in different popular email programs. The first test (with Gmail) is free, but after that, it costs $14 per 100 tests. This is not a recurring fee).

This feature alone will save you tons of time and you never have to worry that your emails won’t look anything other than outstanding no matter who’s viewing it and on what device or program. 

Plus, it costs you nothing to get started. Benchmark has a free “lite” account that doesn’t even require a credit card. Even the Pro account, which is packed with Enterprise-grade features, is cheaper than both AWeber and GetResponse.

Benchmark may not be as well-known as the other AWeber alternatives, but it’s nevertheless a powerful email marketing platform that you should definitely check out if you want a clean, design-focused option that’s made for speed. 

 

AWeber Alternative #4: Woodpecker.co

Woodpecker.co is another lesser known alternative to AWeber that’s focused on cold email outreach and follow-up. Since this is where they concentrate their efforts, its natural that all of their engagement tools, analytics and reporting would be based around nurturing those cold leads and turning them into warm prospects. 

Although it costs twice as much as AWeber, it’s a fantastic option if you want an automated email system that integrates with Outlook or GMail (among others) and lets you contact unlimited users each month while still giving you all the features that you’d expect from an email marketing platform, such as beautiful designs, advanced personalization and detailed reporting.

Woodpecker’s free trial is also shorter than both AWeber’s and GetResponses (only 14 days), but by then, you should get a good handle on how the system is designed to work and how to use it to the fullest. If you have questions, Woodpecker offers great and prompt support as well as a thorough knowledge-base. 

Which AWeber Alternative is Right for You? 

If you’re looking for an email marketing service like AWeber but with: 

  • Better HTML newsletter templates and designs – choose GetResponse
  • Better split-testing and conversion optimization capabilities – choose ConvertKit
  • Better blog-to-email (RSS) functionality that’s made for speed – choose Benchmark
  • Better follow-up that integrates well with Outlook or Gmail – choose Woodpecker

Each of these alternatives to AWebers shines in its own distinctive way, and will give you access to advanced email marketing features at around or slightly more than what you’re paying for AWeber. 

Categories
Getting Started

How Do You Send Marketing Emails?

Long gone are the days when marketers had a simple, straightforward path to a prospect’s inbox. With today’s filtering, sorting and anti-spam technology, it’s harder than ever to send marketing emails, much less hope that they get read.

But if you approach it the right way, you won’t even have to ask “how do you send marketing emails?” because it’s not how you send them, but what you say in them.

In short, you should stop looking at it less as “how to get into my customers’ inboxes” and more “how to write emails they’ll look forward to reading.”

It’s a tall order to fill, but one that, with the right approach, you can tackle easily. Not only will this make sure that more of your marketing emails are read, but it also helps increase the likelihood that a reader will click a link, place an order, sign up for more information or any other action you want them to take.

How to Send Marketing Emails

The first step before you even send out a single message, is to choose an email marketing service. Two of the biggest are AWeber and GetResponse, but there are also several other email marketing platforms worth a look depending on what your marketing needs are.

Step 1: Segment Your List

The very first step in sending marketing emails is to consider your audience. Obviously you want the shortest route between them and a sale. To that end, you’ll want to start off by segmenting your list. All email marketing services let you do this, although to different degrees of depth. If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea not to go too deep into it until you’re more familiar with the process and working with your email marketing program of choice.

The simplest segmentation is simply who bought from you versus who did not. But that’s not the only way to segment your list! You can also divide it between people that have bought recently, versus those who bought some time ago, people who are repeat customers versus one-off purchases, or even those who spend a lot when they buy, versus those who spend less.

The important thing is that you don’t send the same message to everyone. That’s a sure-fire way to make sure you get marked as spam and never heard from again, even if the user originally opted in to your mailing list.

Step 2: Automate Your Emails

Some email marketing can be automated, saving you time and effort. How much you can automate, on the other hand, varies from service to service. If you only want the basics, such as sending a thank you message when a user signs up, an email marketing service like AWeber will handle that easily.

If you want something with deeper automation, along the lines of “if customer buys product A, send an email recommending product B and if they buy product B, subscribe them to email list B to show them how to use it”, that’s more involved and a more thorough email marketing software like GetResponse will let you do just that.

Step 3: Have Something to Say, Not Just Something to Sell

A core part of how to send marketing emails is having something to say, in addition to something to sell. Your emails should have a goal for you, but should also provide value for your readers. In other words, send the kinds of emails that you’d want to receive!

Step 4: Don’t Stress Too Much about the Design

This isn’t to say that the design of your marketing emails isn’t important. Of course you want to present a unified brand, style and voice. But at the same time, it’s worth realizing that packing an email full of images is also a surefire way annoy customers. Design-heavy emails can be slow to download or eat away at mobile data. Plus, it’s possible that different email programs will display the design differently (and some may not display images at all), so in most cases, to be safe, simpler is better when it comes to email design.

Now, keep in mind that as part of good email marketing, you’ll often be directing users to a landing page, and you’ll have a lot more freedom to design that landing page in a particular way to suit your end goal. So save flexing those design muscles for the page itself. When it comes to email marketing templates: simpler is better.

Step 5: Check Your Analytics

All of the best email marketing companies offer you analytics so that you can see relevant information about how many people opened your message, clicked on the links inside and much more. If your emails are being delivered but aren’t being opened, then there’s a disconnect between your message and your audience — they don’t deem your emails important enough to bother reading, so it’s worth investigating why.

With these points in mind, you’ll be able to not only start sending marketing emails with confidence, but do so knowing that your subscribers are actively looking forward to hearing from you, and what business could ask for more than that from their marketing efforts?

Categories
Getting Started

Free Autoresponders: Should You Use Them for Email Marketing? 

When you’re just starting out with online marketing, you’re understandably looking to save as much money as possible. With a website, hosting and advertising costs among others, you may be looking at free autoresponders as a way to cut back on costs – at least until your marketing efforts pay off and you start making some money back. 

Before you jump in and sign up with the first free autoresponder you find, it’s important to consider what you’re actually getting. There are four key components to look at when you’re deciding between free autoresponders:

How Many Subscribers Can You Have?

You’ll want to look for a free autoresponder which lets you have a decent number of subscribers, otherwise there’s no point in building your mailing list. Among the best free autoresponders (listed below), you can have up to 2,000 subscribers which is a solid number and a good starting pint to consider a paid autoresponder service. 

How Many Emails Can You Send? 

Free email autoresponder providers don’t want to become a haven for spammers, so many of them limit the number of email messages you can send in a day. If it’s very important to you to send out as many emails as possible at the exact same time, then you’ll want to look for a free autoresponder that allows you a higher number of emails to be sent per day. 

Some have no limit, but to prevent them from being abused by spammers, they also limit other features. For example, they may only let you trigger autoresponder emails under certain conditions (such as a welcome email, but no ability to follow-up beyond that), or other restrictions. 

What Else is Included with a Free Autoresponder?

Some free autoresponders include additional features, like landing page builders or a certain number of SMS messages. You’ll want to carefully consider what additional features (if any) they’re offering and how these features fit into your overall email marketing plan. More features aren’t necessariliy better if there are other restrictions in place on how you use them! 

Can You Upgrade from the Free Autoresponder Plan? 

Once you get your feet wet with the free autoresponder, you may be looking to grow your subscriber list, take advantage of mobile responsive email templates and other features that may not be offered with the free plan. If that’s the case, does the free plan make it easy for you to upgrade to a paid version, and, perhaps more importantly: 

Does the paid version give you access to the features you need in order to grow your business and email marketing initiatives? 

Oftentimes, for the money you’re paying for a slightly upgraded version of the free autoresponder, you could get many more features with other email marketing solutions. Just because you started out with a free autoresponder doesn’t mean you have to stick with them. Get your money’s worth by shopping around!

That being said, you’re here to see the free autoresponders, so here’s our list of the best: 

The Best Free Autoresponders 

MailerLite

MailerLite is one of the most robust free autoresponders in terms of features that you get. It lets you send welcome emails as well as emails based on a specific date. You can also send emails when a user clicks the link in an email. So if you wanted to send a discount to your email subscribers, but only those who clicked the product page, you can do that with MailerLite. 

MailerLite lets you send up to 12,000 emails per month (no restrictions on how many you can send at a time), but you’re limited to 1,000 subscribers. 

Benchmark

Benchmark is another great option and lets you send the largest number of emails out in a month on their free plan. It features basic autoresponders including the ability to send welcome emails, date-based reminders and birthday emails. More advanced options are available through their paid plans. 

Benchmark lets you send up to 14,000 emails per month (no daily restrictions) for up to 2,000 subscribers. Overall, if you just need a free autoresponder to send out an occasional set of emails every month and you don’t need all the bells and whistles of paid programs, Benchmark is a solid and reliable choice.  

MailChimp

As one of the most popular free autoresponders on the market, Mailchimp comes with a host of advanced options. You can send welcome emails, emails based on a specific date, as well as emails that are like a digest of your latest blog posts. 

MailChimp lets you send up to 10,000 emails per month with a restriction of 2,000 per day for up to 2,000 subscribers. 

SendInBlue

SendInBlue lets you send welcome emails, date-based emails, and emails based on certain actions on your page (such as whether or not a user bought a product or they abandoned their cart. You also have the ability to send some basic transactional emails (like order receipts). SMS is also available for an extra cost. 

SendInBlue lets you send up to 9,000 emails per month (with a daily restriction of 300) and you can have an unlimited number of subscribers. However, you’re limited to 2,000 subscribers in automated campaigns at any time (to prevent spam abuse). 

Free Autoresponder Comparison

MailChimp
FREE
 Get Started! 
10,000 Emails/month
2,000 Emails/day
2,000 Subscriber Limit
Send automatic welcome email
Send date-based emails
Send blog post digest by email
MailerLite
FREE
 Get Started! 
12,000 Emails/month
Unlimited emails/day
1,000 Subscriber Limit
Send automatic welcome email
Send date-based emails
Send emails based on links clicked
SendInBlue
FREE
 Get Started! 
9,000 Emails/month
300 emails/day
Unlimited (but restricted to 2,000/campaign)
Send automatic welcome email
Send date-based emails
Send emails based on page actions (product viewed, etc.)
Benchmark
FREE
 Get Started! 
14,000 Emails/month
Unlimited emails/day
2,000 Subscriber Limit
Send automatic welcome email
Send date-based emails