Wondering whether you need an email marketing vendor?
Today we are going to discuss the five ways an email marketing vendor can transform your business and explain what you should look for when choosing one.
We will also make the case for why you should go with our software, ClickFunnels! 😉
- What is Email Marketing?
- What is an Email Marketing Vendor?
- How Can an Email Marketing Vendor Transform Your Business?
- How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Vendor for Your Business?
- ClickFunnels: an All-in-One Marketing Platform That has Everything You Need to Grow Your Business
- Try ClickFunnels Risk-Free!
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of marketing where you pitch your products and services via email to people who have subscribed to your email list.
This can be done manually with one-off, time-sensitive broadcast emails.
Or it can be done automatically with automated email sequences where you write a series of emails, load them up into the email marketing software and then set them to be sent when a particular condition is met.
These conditions can be either temporal where the sequence is triggered at a specific time or behavioral where the sequence is triggered by a specific action.
It’s probably safe to say that the most popular automated email sequence is the welcome sequence which is triggered when someone subscribes to that email list.
Automated email sequences can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want.
Email sequences that branch out based on behavioral triggers are called email workflows and can get really complex.
The benefit of using email workflows is that they enable you to automatically tailor your email content to each individual subscriber based on that subscriber’s behavior.
Here’s a sample email workflow screenshot from our software:
Ultimately, email marketing is about building a list of leads, gaining their trust and then capitalizing on that trust to sell them your products and services!
What’s the Difference Between Email Marketing and Cold Email?
Email marketing is about sending mass emails either to your entire email list or to a specific segment of it.
Meanwhile, cold email is about sending customized unsolicited emails to sales prospects one at a time.
Of course, some people use cold email software to send out 100+ cold emails per day, but that may be crossing over into spam territory…
What’s the Difference Between Email Marketing and Spam?
Email marketing is about sending mass emails to people who have consented to receiving those emails by subscribing to your email list and can revoke that consent at any time by unsubscribing from it.
Spam is about sending mass emails to people who did not consent to receiving those emails and cannot opt out from getting them except by marking them as spam.
Everyone hates spam so Internet service providers, email service providers like Gmail and email marketing vendors might shut down your access to their services if they have a reason to believe that you are a spammer.
Moreover, while email marketing is perfectly legal in most jurisdictions, spam can get you in trouble with the law.
For example, if your business is based in the United States, you should familiarize yourself with the CAN-SPAM Act.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, each separate email in violation of this act is subject to penalties of up to $51,744! 😱
That’s why reputable email marketing vendors have a 2-step opt-in process.
Typically, in order to subscribe to an email list, the person has to not only provide their email address but then click on the link in the confirmation email to confirm their subscription.
This protects people from getting signed up to random email lists without their consent!
What is an Email Marketing Vendor?
An email marketing vendor is a company that sells email marketing software.
Typically, email marketing vendors follow the SaaS business model where you pay a monthly or an annual subscription fee in order to get access to the software.
There are two types of email marketing vendors:
- Specialized email marketing apps
- All-in-one marketing platforms that include email marketing functionality
Both of these options have their pros and cons:
Specialized Email Marketing Apps
Specialized email marketing apps are solely focused on email marketing.
Consequently, these apps tend to have better email marketing functionality than all-in-one marketing platforms.
However, this sole focus on email marketing also means that the functionality of these apps is limited to just that.
This means that you will need to pay separately for other software solutions to get the rest of the features that you need to run your business.
All-in-One Marketing Platforms
All-in-one marketing platforms offer not just the email marketing functionality but also various other features.
Due to this broader scope, these platforms tend to have a worse email marketing functionality than the specialized email marketing apps.
However, this broader scope also means that you may be able to get everything you need in one place.
Something to consider here is that the more separate apps you add to your business workflow, the more fragile the system becomes. Why?
Because if something goes wrong with one of these apps, it might disrupt the entire workflow. More apps mean more points of failure.
That’s why all-in-one marketing platforms tend to be more stable: it’s just one app created and maintained by one company.
Since there’s just one point of failure in the workflow, you are less likely to experience serious disruptions!
Should You Go With a Specialized Email Marketing App or an All-in-One Marketing Platform?
The technical resources at your disposal are an important factor to consider here. What do we mean by that?
If you are a non-technical person who doesn’t have access to in-house developers and can’t afford to hire a freelance developer, then trying to patch a bunch of different apps together to create a business workflow might prove to be a headache.
In that case, you might want to go with an all-in-one platform that already has all the features that you need to run your business.
Meanwhile, if you are a technical person yourself, have access to in-house developers or can afford to hire a freelance developer, then going with a specialized email marketing solution might be worth considering.
After all, with those technical resources, you should be able to integrate various apps to create a streamlined business workflow that is custom-tailored to the needs of your company.
We will talk more about how to choose an email marketing vendor later in this article but here’s the TL; DR version of it:
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. It all depends on what makes the most sense for your business!
How Can an Email Marketing Vendor Transform Your Business?
An email marketing vendor can help you:
#1: Take Back Control by Building a Lead List That You Own
There’s no denying that building a social media following on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube can help you grow your business.
But here’s the problem: you don’t own that following. If any of these platforms decide to ban you for whatever reason, you won’t be able to take the following you built somewhere else.
It may be tempting to think that this would never happen to you because you abide by the terms of service, behave in a civilized manner and stay away from controversial topics.
However, these are massive platforms that have billions of users, so the companies managing them are bound to make mistakes that lead to people who haven’t done anything wrong getting banned.
In fact, this happens all the time, we just don’t hear about it when the victims of these unfair bans are regular people who don’t have massive audiences. Are you sure you want to bet your livelihood on the hope that it won’t happen to you?
This is where email marketing comes in. You see, unlike a social media following, an email list is an asset that you own and can take elsewhere.
Sure, any given email marketing vendor can refuse you service for whatever reason, but if that happens you can simply export your email list in a spreadsheet format and take it with you to another vendor.
That’s why building an email list should be your top priority. It’s the best way to take back control from the social media giants, protect yourself from unfair bans and become “uncancellable”!
#2: Earn the Trust of Your Dream Customers
Email marketing allows you to gradually build trust with your dream customers over an extended period of time that you can then capitalize on to sell your products and services.
We believe that the best way to go about it is to create a Value Ladder sales funnel for your business.
This sales funnel has four stages:
- The Bait stage where you offer the potential customer a freebie in exchange for their email address.
This freebie is also known as a lead magnet. It serves as bait that you use to attract your dream customers. - The Frontend stage where you use email marketing to pitch your least expensive and least valuable offer.
- The Middle stage where you use email marketing to pitch a more valuable and more expensive offer.
- The Backend stage where you use email marketing to pitch your most valuable and most expensive offer.
At each stage of the funnel, you build trust by providing value, then capitalize on that trust in the next stage. And the more trust you build, the more expensive products and services you can sell!
#3: Increase Your Marketing Spend ROI
There are two problems with using your marketing budget to drive traffic directly to your sales pages:
Problem #1: People Tend to Buy From Brands That They Already Know and Trust
Sure, everyone makes random impulse purchases here and there, but that’s not the dominant pattern of consumer behavior.
This means that even if you manage to get someone who has never heard of you before to click on your ad, they probably won’t be ready to buy yet.
So you paid for that click but didn’t make the sale!
Problem #2: People are Busy and Distracted
Moreover, if someone who has never heard of you before clicks on your ad, checks out your product and decides that they aren’t ready to buy yet, they are probably not coming back. Why?
Because in all likelihood, they will completely forget your product five minutes later when a funny cat video catches their eye or they start arguing with some random stranger about politics.
Again, you paid for that click, but didn’t make the sale!
Why Email Marketing is the Solution to Both of These Problems
As you can see, just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean that driving traffic directly to your sales pages is a good idea. It’s actually a waste of money!
It makes much more sense to drive traffic to your sales funnel by promoting your lead magnet.
As we just discussed, someone who has never heard of you before is unlikely to buy your product or service there and then…
But they might be willing to give you their email address if you offer them an appealing freebie in exchange for it!
Then, even if they get distracted and forget all about it five minutes later, the next time they open their inbox they will see an email from you asking them to confirm their subscription.
Then, after confirming their subscription, they will get their freebie. If your lead magnet is genuinely valuable, they will start trusting you more once they check it out.
And now that you have their email address, you can continue building that trust by providing free value in your email content and pitching them increasingly more expensive paid offers.
This approach can help you increase your customer lifetime value (CLV) and get a much better return on your marketing spend!
#4: Gain a Competitive Edge
Our co-founder Russell Brunson loves to quote Dan Kennedy:
“Whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”
In one of our events, he had an opportunity to sit down with Kennedy himself and discuss this idea:
Basically, the higher your customer lifetime value (CLV), the higher customer acquisition cost (CAC) you can afford and the more aggressive you can be about acquiring customers.
And if you can outspend your competitors on customer acquisition, you may be able to grow your business faster than them and become the dominant player in your niche.
If your rivals are either not using email marketing at all or are underutilizing it, you can probably gain a competitive edge simply by building a Value Ladder sales funnel and driving traffic to it!
#5: Increase the Value of Your Business
Business valuations can vary wildly.
However, one digital asset that is pretty much guaranteed to drastically increase the valuation of your business is an email list.
This is especially true if you have a weekly email newsletter with high open and click-through rates.
In fact, newsletters are so valuable that there’s an entire market for buying and selling them, with acquisitions ranging anywhere from a few hundred bucks to eight figures (yup!).
You can check out Duuce to learn more about newsletter valuations. If you want to see the going prices, browse the newsletters that are currently for sale.
Meanwhile, They Got Acquired has published a Newsletter Deals Report that covers 13 newsletter acquisitions, including some of the biggest ones to date!
How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Vendor for Your Business?
Here are the three key factors that you should consider when choosing an email marketing vendor:
Features
All email marketing vendors provide the core email marketing functionality.
This core functionality enables you to collect email addresses, send one-off broadcast emails to your subscribers and set up automated email sequences.
You want to get clear on what other features you need beyond that, both for running your business in general and for email marketing in particular.
We recommend documenting your entire business process and listing the features that you need at each step.
If you don’t have a business yet but want to start one, write down what you expect your business process to look like and list the features that you believe you will need.
Integrations
Does your current workflow include specialized apps?
If you want to continue using these apps, see which email marketing vendors offer native integrations with them.
Also, if you have access to technical resources, you may want to check which email marketing vendors provide APIs. You can use APIs to develop custom integrations!
Pricing
Your budget is probably going to be the main limiting factor when choosing an email marketing vendor.
But making the right decision isn’t as simple as comparing the price tags of various options. Why?
Because you need to look at how the features that each vendor offers would fit into the big picture of your overall business workflow.
For example, our Startup plan costs $97/month, while there are specialized email marketing apps that only cost a fraction of that.
However, ClickFunnels is an all-in-one platform that can replace a wide variety of specialized apps, not just the aforementioned email marketing ones.
So when you are evaluating our software, it makes sense to do so in the context of all the functionality that you need to run your business.
You might discover that although each specialized app that provides something that you need costs just a fraction of what we charge, when you put them all together it adds up to way more than $97/month!
Moreover, the time, energy, and money required to get a bunch of different apps to play nicely with each other is a hidden cost that you need to consider as well.
On top of that, fixing various technical issues that are pretty much guaranteed to be a regular occurrence with this setup will also require resources.
Finally, as we already discussed, the more apps you add to your business workflow, the more fragile the system becomes. This means that you risk losing revenue if it goes down and people can’t buy your products and services until it’s back up again!
ClickFunnels: an All-in-One Marketing Platform That has Everything You Need to Grow Your Business
ClickFunnels has an exceptional email marketing functionality.
That being said, it’s not just an email marketing app, it’s a complete all-in-one marketing platform that has everything you need to start, manage and grow an online business!
ClickFunnels’ Features
Websites
ClickFunnels has a website builder functionality that enables you to create a business website that you can then host on our platform.
This website builder is easy to use and doesn’t require any coding knowledge whatsoever.
All you need to do is pick a website template and then use our drag-and-drop page editor to customize it!
This functionality can replace website builders such as Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc.
Online Stores
ClickFunnels has an ecommerce functionality that enables you to build an online store.
It includes:
- Store templates that have been optimized for conversions.
- One-click upsells designed to help you increase your average order value (AOV) and your customer lifetime value (CLV).
- A lightning-fast checkout.
…and more!
This functionality can replace ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc.
Membership Sites
ClickFunnels has a membership site builder functionality that allows you to build a community around exclusive content that only paying members can access.
It also includes various features designed to help you reduce your churn rate and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
This functionality can replace membership site builder and online course builder apps such as Skool, Kajabi, Thinkific, etc.
Online Courses
ClickFunnels has a course builder functionality that enables you to create online courses.
It includes:
- Course templates that can help you build your courses faster.
- A drip feature that you can use to gradually make your course content accessible over time instead of making it all available immediately.
- Various advanced course management features that allow you to manage user enrollment directly inside your courses.
…and more!
This functionality can replace membership site builder and online course builder apps such as Skool, Kajabi, Thinkific, etc.
Sales Funnels
ClickFunnels has a funnel builder functionality that enables you to build sales funnels that convert.
It includes:
- Sales funnel templates that have been optimized for conversions.
- Page templates for all the pages that you might need to build your funnel, from squeeze pages to thank you pages.
- A visual funnel editor that you can use to customize funnel templates or build sales funnels from scratch.
…and more!
Email Marketing
ClickFunnels has an email marketing functionality that you can use to build your email list.
It includes:
- An email editor that enables you to design beautiful emails.
- A broadcast feature that enables you to send one-off, time-sensitive emails to your list.
- A scheduling feature that enables you to compose your email and then schedule it to be sent to your list at a specific date and time.
- An automation feature that enables you to set up automated email sequences that get triggered at a particular time or by a certain behavior.
- A workflow feature that enables you to create complex email sequences with multiple branches.
- A segmentation feature that allows you to segment your list based on criteria relevant to your business and then target specific subscriber segments with your email campaigns.
…and more!
This functionality can replace email marketing apps such as Convertkit, Mailchimp, GetResponse, etc.
CRM
ClickFunnels has a customer relationship management (CRM) functionality that you can use to keep track of everything that’s happening in your sales pipeline.
It includes:
- A centralized database for all the information that you have on each contact.
- A note-taking feature that enables you to add notes to each contact’s profile that you can then use to personalize communication, build rapport and keep them accountable for what’s been agreed on.
- An overview of each contact’s customer’s journey where you can see everything from their enrollments to their purchase history to their billing details in one place.
- An overview of your entire sales pipeline.
…and more!
This functionality can replace CRM apps such as Keap, Freshsales, Hubspot, etc.
A/B Testing
ClickFunnels has an A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your entire sales funnel for conversions.
It allows you to test everything, from your landing pages to your email content to your offers.
You can even test multiple versions of the same variable simultaneously, which can speed up the optimization process!
Analytics
ClickFunnels has an analytics functionality that you can use to track all of the most important business metrics, including:
- Total pageviews
- Total opt-ins
- Total orders
- Revenue
- Conversion rates
…and more!
Our analytics functionality allows you to track both the immediate results and the long-term results of each campaign as well as compare the performance of various campaigns.
Moreover, there’s also a sales projection feature that enables you to use historical data to model the future performance of your business.
It can help you see whether you are on track to reaching your sales targets and course-correct if necessary!
ClickFunnels’ Integrations
ClickFunnels offers a wide variety of native integrations with various specialized web apps.
This means that you don’t need to give up your favorite apps in order to use our platform. You can simply integrate them with our software!
Moreover, if you can’t find a native integration, you can always use Zapier which enables you to connect ClickFunnels with thousands of popular web apps!
ClickFunnels’ API and Webhooks
We also offer API access and webhooks that you can use to create custom integrations and streamline your business workflow.
ClickFunnels’ Pricing
ClickFunnels has two pricing plans:
- The Startup plan which costs $97/month and allows you to have 3 workspaces and 3 team members. It includes unlimited funnels, courses, members, contacts, pages and domains. You can save $194/year if you choose to pay annually.
- The Pro plan which costs $297/month and allows you to have 10 workspaces and 10 team members. It includes unlimited funnels, courses, members, contacts, pages and domains. You can save $594/year if you choose to pay annually.
Both plans have a free 14-day trial!
ClickFunnels’ Official Facebook Group
We also have an official Facebook group with 297.6k members at the time of writing.
This community is a great place to talk shop with fellow entrepreneurs, get answers to your questions and make new business connections.
It’s also really active: members have created 28 new posts just today. Meanwhile, last month we had 709 new posts in total!
Try ClickFunnels Risk-Free!
Let’s be real:
We are biased in favor of our software.
So we understand if you take what we say about it with a grain of salt.
Fortunately, we have a free 14-day trial, so you don’t have to take our word for it.
You can go and see ClickFunnels for yourself without any risk!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐
P.S. Here’s What Our Customers Say About ClickFunnels…
