Ulistic’s Question of the Week: Which Email Platform Has the Best Open Rates?
When it comes to email marketing, which platform has the best open rate? Before we can answer this question, what’s more important: Open or deliverability rate?
Hello! We’re back with another Ulistic Question of the Week!
Keith from Baltimore asked this week’s question, which pertains to email marketing. Keith asked:
Which email platform has the best open rates?
This is an excellent question, and it’s one that seems to come up a lot from our clients.
What’s important here, however, is actually another question:
What’s more important: Open rates or deliverability rates?
In other words, should you be looking for an email platform that has great open rates or great deliverability rates?
At Ulistic, we’re partial to deliverability rates. Before we get too far in, however, let’s define a few terms for those new to this aspect of marketing.
Email Marketing
In the world of email marketing, there are several terms that are used often to help marketers benchmark the success rate of their campaigns. The two most common benchmarks are the email open rate and the email deliverability rate.
What is a marketing email open rate?
The open rate of an email marketing campaign is the percentage of email recipients (subscribers) who actually opened the emails they received from a campaign.
What is a marketing email deliverability rate?
The deliverability rate of an email marketing campaign is the percentage of email recipients (subscribers) who received the emails from an email campaign in their inbox as opposed to their spam folder. The deliverability rate is also referred to as the acceptance rate.
Open Rate Vs. Deliverability Rate: What’s More Important?
We’ve established that the deliverability rate of your email marketing campaign is actually more important than the open rate. But why?
The answer is pretty simple: If the recipient of the email marketing campaign never even receives the email (in their inbox), they never have a chance of opening it at all. Therefore, it stands to reason that the deliverability of an email is inevitably going to always be more important than the open rate of the same email.
Ulistic Takes Deliverability Seriously
Ulistic focuses on deliverability when it comes to email marketing campaigns. We’re looking at what email platform will have the best chance of ending up in each prospect’s inbox because we know this is the benchmark that’s going to give you the best results.
Of course, after we know we can get those emails into inboxes, we’ll put the focus on open rates. In the end, we want as many emails to be opened from inboxes as possible, and ideally, we of course want conversions from the emails as well.
What Are the Best Strategies for Getting Emails Delivered?
Now that you know how important it is to get your emails delivered into inboxes, how do you go about that?
#1 – Choose the best email platform.
This is where we finally answer Keith from Baltimore’s question.
Many people think that the best email platform for deliverability is HubSpot; however, remember that there’s a hefty price tag that comes with using this service. It works, but it’s expensive.
If you don’t want to pay quite so much for your email platform service, the next best thing for many others is MailChimp. This is the budget option, but remember that you always get what you pay for, so the service here isn’t amazing.
If you really want the best of both worlds (effectiveness and affordability), you want SharpSpring. Creating emails with SharpSpring is extremely effective and easy. According to their website: "You don’t need programming skills or graphic design training to create amazing emails. Point and click to add or remove elements, edit styles and move content around on the page."
#2 – Avoid HTML emails at all costs.
If you want to keep your emails out of spam (and out of the trash), avoid using HTML emails because they are prime targets for spam filters. Instead, use text-based, Outlook-like emails.
#3 – Eliminate links.
Contrary to popular belief, you actually don’t want links in your emails. It may seem counterintuitive, but you should simply be asking your email recipients to reply if you want them to take action (even if they reply with nothing).
By taking these three actions, you’ll have the best possible chance of success when it comes to your email marketing campaign.
Looking for more tips and tricks to boost your MSP company’s marketing strategy? Talk to Ulistic! We can offer you a complimentary, 60-minute, no-obligation MSP website review with our team. Call us at {phone} to learn more.
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