What is the Best Email Marketing Software for Lead Generation?

What is the best email marketing software for lead generation? We’ve narrowed down the list to the top 10 best email marketing software based on their features and capabilities so you don’t have to search far and wide. Overall, the best email marketing tools enable you to do the following:

1. Automate the processes involved in your email marketing campaign
2. Organize and segregate email lists for better targeting
3. Come up with personalized design and engaging content
4. Track emails and report on metrics and marketing results
5. Test and optimize your campaigns
6. Integrate with CRM and other business apps

You can read our analysis of email marketing features, benefits, pricing and types for a deeper understanding of this business solution. The above enumerated features and functionalities are designed to help you generate leads. Why is this important? A lead is someone, a person or another business/company, that has indicated an interest in your product or service. For a better understanding on how to attract and convert business customers, you can check out the four best practices on B2B SaaS lead generation.

Awareness and interest are the first two steps in the marketing funnel – before complete strangers become buying customers. Lead generation, therefore, takes on a critical role since it involves the process of attracting and converting those strangers or prospects into leads. This is the frontline responsibility of your marketing team.

Lead Generation Challenges for Marketers

However, the task of lead generation is not a walk in the park as marketers face numerous difficulties. The fact is that generating traffic and leads is the biggest marketing challenge for most companies. Take note that marketers also have to qualify those leads to get the right ones so that they don’t keep chasing dead ends or, in marketing lingo, cold leads. Then they have to track and nurture those leads and warm them up to your business products or services. The marketing team has to work on several stages in the conversion pipeline until a lead is transformed into a customer.

The reality is that 80% of marketers say that their lead generation efforts are only somewhat effective. The common causes of concern for marketing professionals are rooted in lack of contact data quality, poor email personalization, inefficient list segmentation, and coming up with engaging content, among others.

Despite the above issues, marketers are one in recognizing that the top benefit of email marketing software is the ability to generate more and better leads. The aforementioned issues are directly addressed by the capabilities of email marketing software including automation which is harnessed to the hilt to streamline your email marketing campaigns.

Best Email Marketing Software for Lead Generation

What is the best email marketing software for lead generation? It’s this selection of solutions equipped with tools to optimize your email marketing efforts, helping you get quality leads.

1. HubSpot Marketing
2. Wix ShoutOut
3. Exponea
4. dotmailer
5. Marketo
6. ActiveCampaign
7. iContact Pro
8. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
9. MailChimp
10. Taximail

Top 10 Email Marketing Software for Lead Generation

1. HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot Marketing is part of the overall system of inbound marketing, a proven methodology pioneered and promoted by HubSpot and used by thousands of marketers worldwide to attract prospects and let them come to you. It is designed to help your team unify and streamline marketing efforts, grow traffic, and increase conversions. The software is free to test; simply sign up for a HubSpot Marketing free trial here to get started.

USER SATISFACTION

99%

OUR SCORE

9.5

HubSpot Marketing won our Expert's Choice Award for 2018

The distinct advantage of the inbound marketing practice is that you don’t need your IT team to come up with codes and scripts to craft responsive email designs as well as engaging content and landing pages. You can follow tested steps in preparing and optimizing promotional content and it directly in front of the right audience whether in social media or other contact points and channels of engagement.

HubSpot Marketing will automate most of your vital marketing operations, let you engage audiences highly personalized and targeted messages that are adjusted to the persona and expectations of your prospect. It will give you as much control over the entire purchase journey, enabling you to organize drip campaigns and queue up a series of emails that keep your leads connected and interested until they decide to buy.

With its integration to HubSpot CRM, the marketing platform can record valuable customer information, and pull out stats and metrics you can use to report on your impact. To make the entire process even more interesting for your team, HubSpot Marketing will allow you to design your own web pages and attract targeted traffic, optimize content for search engines, and turn your sales management into a virtual hands-off operation.

How HubSpot Marketing helps in lead generation:

1. Complete control over your marketing campaigns. From designing your own workflows and preparing, formatting, and publishing content to integrating contact profiles and information to target the right audience, you get to optimize your campaigns from end to end.
2. Powerful lead evaluation. The solution can collect and import valuable contacts from a variety of sources, letting you move them to the appropriate stage. It can help you evaluate contacts based on demographics and behavior, then score and nurture them, and provide you visualized traffic data.

2. Wix ShoutOut

Wix ShoutOut is an intuitive and easy to use marketing email and newsletter builder and editor. It lets you keep track of your campaigns’ effectiveness through a statistics feature that shows views and clicks, allowing you to learn about the types of content that prospect and customers alike prefer to see. Having this knowledge, you can customize email design and craft interesting content designed to attract leads. Want to see firsthand how this app works? You can easily sign up for a Wix ShoutOut free trial here.

The software ensures your email campaigns will look good inside and out when viewed on any device as they are also mobile-ready which means the look and content are viewable to recipients the way you intended because of automatic adjustment. Wix ShoutOut also brings with it features such as contact integration, social media tools, and stats tracker based on your campaign’s open, view, and click rates.

You can share your content and creations on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest so that even customers who are not subscribed to mailing lists can still keep up-to-date with your latest products, promotions, and announcements. The solution is available for Android and iOS devices and lets businesses create, send, and share updates and promotions to their subscribers.

How Wix ShoutOut helps in lead generation:

1. Subscriber base build-up. Every email sent from Wix ShoutOut contains a sign-up form that can be customized so that businesses can ask for information that is relevant to them. This lets you build up your subscriber base to widen the reach of your campaigns.
2. Simple contacts management. Wix ShoutOut seamlessly connects with contacts management solutions to import email addresses and other data into the application’s system. It likewise supports the grouping of emails into mailing lists, enabling you to send targeted emails with ease.

3. Exponea

Exponea is a cloud-hosted marketing solution that combines analytics and engagement automation to improve customer experience. It allows you to perform cutting-edge customer analyses and make accurate predictions. Among its features are web layers and revenue analyses, automated sales funnel operations, CRM, custom funnels, and much more. The vendor offers a comprehensive free trial of the software. Simply sign up for an Exponea free trial here.

Exponea applies artificial intelligence to enrich your campaigns by making use of detailed customer information. This lets you harness the maximal capacity of your marketing efforts, personalized recommendations, and target customers on several platforms. To further enhance the execution of marketing activities, it offers tools such Vouchers and Discounts, tag management, asset management, complex roles and permissions management, new action nodes in scenarios, and Geo analysis, among others.

How Exponea helps in lead generation:

1. AI-driven campaigns. Maximize the potential of your conversion, acquisition, and customer lifetime value programs by leveraging powerful AI capabilities that lets you discover behavioral trends and automatically optimize marketing campaigns.
2. Predictive analytics and segmentations. Use marketing tools and capabilities to help you focus on prospects with the highest likelihood of conversion so you can set effective marketing, product or sourcing strategies.

4. dotmailer

dotmailer is dubbed as the marketing platform built by marketers for marketers. Hence, it is designed to meet the needs and requirements of email marketing professionals with its friendly user interface and capabilities to automate the marketing processes, letting you build, test and send emails in minutes. With its drag-and-drop template, automation tools, and campaign management capabilities, you’ll be able to manage our marketing operations effectively on the fly. The best way to assess the software is to try it yourself. You can quickly sign up for a dotmailer free trial here.

The software’s capabilities are focused on three main areas: an easy-to-use platform, optimized email marketing, and marketing automation. The first lets you use advanced marketing tools to transform complicated marketing tasks into simple and manageable processes. The second allows you to build and send beautiful, personalized, and optimized messages to multiple channels and applications. Meanwhile, automation empowers marketers to quickly build lifecycle and nurture campaigns without any coding.

How dotmailer helps in lead generation:

1. Lead nurturing tool. Its Engagement Scorer allows you complete control on how to determine cold contacts from hot leads by scoring contacts’ behavior (how they engage with your emails, surveys and landing pages) and their identity, then combine both into an overall score that lets you see how valuable they are, and where they are in the conversion funnel.
2. Personalization and targeting. You can use dotmailer to send the right content at the right times to the right people using dynamic email content and personalized landing pages, so that you deliver and drive people towards the content that gets reactions and results.

5. Marketo

Marketo is leading marketing automation solution that enables you to simplify the marketing process and streamline many marketing-related tasks. It is able to scale as you grow your business and offers real-time personalization, visual drag and drop interface, and can send emails based on actions, timing, or a series of pre-defined steps. Email testing is also included, allowing you to try out various content or if you need to dynamically change the content to make it suitable for specific situations.

You can easily create landing pages through the drag and drop functionality and the massive collection of pre-designed templates. Its data capture forms can help you effectively profile potential contacts, which can result to more lead data over time. Landing pages can also be transformed into Facebook pages, which can be tweaked and customized using Marketo’s dynamic content capabilities.

How Marketo helps in lead generation:

1. Solid lead management capability. The platform lets you gather strong leads based on pre-determined parameters and criteria such as demographics, input from sales reports, product scores, and prospect behavior.
2. Scalable campaign. You can scale your campaign execution and engage prospects anywhere in their lifecycle with automated, personalized campaigns while delivering a cohesive and compelling story across all of your channels.

6. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is all-in-one user-friendly marketing platform that offers an array of tools designed to help you acquire, retain, and engage customers. From getting new contacts to keeping tabs on your company’s post-sale processes, the solution provides capabilities to accelerate and optimize your marketing activities. It brings together messaging features, marketing automation, and built-in CRM and sales automation functionalities in one robust unified platform.

The platform helps you deliver the right message at the right time by providing market insights, and valuable customer data, allowing you to manage contacts and partners from one location. It consolidates marketing, sales, and CRM to facilitate communication and collaboration among your marketing teams. Aside from email marketing, the platform also offers site messaging, SMS, event tracking, and a fully integrated form builder. It integrates with over 150 apps and services to give you a fully extensible platform.

How Active Campaign helps in lead generation:

1. Conditional content. The feature lets you dynamically alter content on a per contact basis. You can display entirely different images or blocks of text in an email based on how a contact is tagged or what web pages they have viewed on your website.
2. Intelligence-driven automation. You get to maximize efficiency with an optimized sales process that focuses resources on your best leads, enabling you to increase your conversion rate, and shorten your sales cycle.

7. iContact Pro

iContact Pro is an email marketing solution that focuses on workflow automation, social media management, and business analytics. It is intended to help you create effective email campaigns, using modified templates or unique, custom designs. It can then test each of your campaigns to enhance your targeting strategy and segment leads in categories based on how they’re interacting with you. The solution also tracks and records other types of engagement such as social media conversations, landing pages, newsletters and releases, events, and website visits.

iContact Pro is loaded with advanced marketing automation features including high end email marketing tools, advanced segmentation, CRM functionalities, engagement tracking, landing page creation, social posting and monitoring, to name some. It is scalable to the needs of high volume senders, marketers, and businesses that are new to email marketing and offers a variety of functionalities to ensure a potent and result-oriented marketing strategy.

How iContact Pro helps in lead generation:

1. Audience segmentation. You get to boost your conversion rates by sending highly relevant and personalized content to leads, prospects and subscribers based on shared conditions like demographics, geography, social activity, and onsite behavior/
2. Performance reporting. Real time data and reporting keeps you informed of the health of your campaigns, letting you understand what works best and what doesn’t for your audience from big picture tracking to keeping an eye on an individual’s click behavior.

8. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud specializes in the creation and management of customer journeys. It is touted as a powerful marketing solution especially suited for the social landscape. With solution, you can easily create and maintain a strong presence in social media while allowing users to keep track of their brand visibility as well as publish and deliver engaging marketing content and advertising campaigns. It boasts of being able to harness the power of social media and apply it as a marketing tool to drive your sales and marketing efforts.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud let you plan, personalize, and optimize the customer journey; gain more information about your clients; map your one on one customer journeys across multiple channels, devices, and customer lifecycle stages; and generate positive experiences for your customers as you move them forward. You can also analyze and assess the results of every customer interaction to learn of the strengths and flaws in your processes and then proceed to optimize your strategies and other methods in real time.

How Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps in lead generation:

1. Lead generation optimization tools. The solution provides capabilities and tools to automate and optimize your lead generation, lead qualification, lead tracking, and lead nurturing programs throughout the prospect lifecycle.
2. Predictive marketing. This capability lets you create the right landing pages, track visitor behavior, deliver personalized web content, and trigger emails in real time to increase conversions and click-through rates.

9. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the widely known and used best email marketing platforms used by ecommerce and online sellers to introduce their business and reinforce their brand. It provides all the capabilities for you to build campaigns such as a full-featured content editor, templates library, testing tools, custom forms, segmentation and groups, and social profiles and sharing, to name a few. MailChimp lets you prepare email campaigns designed with the right look and content.

MailChimp offers many sources and materials to help users plan and succeed in their email marketing campaigns. You can publish your own newsletter or choose from choose from templates to start marketing with your own branded newsletter. You can divide and categorize your mailing list to engage different audiences and choose an RSS-to-email option to automatically send out your newsletter when you update your blog. You also get progress updates of your campaigns with analytics and detailed reports.

How MailChimp helps in lead generation:

1. Add-ons and integration. You can add opt-in boxes and connect MailChimp to engaging blog posts, allowing you to collect email addresses and leads. Likewise, when you connect your store with one of MailChimp’s hundreds of e-commerce integrations you can create targeted email or ad campaigns.
2. Lead magnets. The solution is equipped with several marketing tools that let you attract leads such as coupons and discount offers, custom and mobile signup forms, assessments and tests, resource lists, toolkits, and more.

10. Taximail

Taximail is a easy-to-use email marketing software built for simple creation, implementation, and analysis of marketing campaigns. Delivering attractive campaigns is easy thanks to its easy-to-use drag-and-drop email interface and large selection of customizable email templates. Coupled with its trigger-based email capabilities and email scheduling, you can effortlessly reach your audiences at the optimal moment. The software also comes packed with testing tools to further improve your email marketing performance and results.

Aside from its well-designed software, Taximail provides exceptional customer assistance in designing email campaigns and automation workflows. Taximail also performs all the heavy lifting in cleaning mailing lists of duplicate and invalid emails, thus, you can gauge your marketing campaign success with ease.

How Taximail helps in lead generation:

1. Effective segmentation. You can set various criteria to define your segmentation rules. With this, you can send the right marketing campaigns to the right audiences.
2. A/B Testing. Various factors can be set in determining your best email marketing campaign.

Conclusion

Email marketing software takes the burden out of your marketing team, empowering them to enhance lead generation by applying tools and capabilities to come up with engaging email content and design, attractive landing pages, automated email delivery, segmented list for efficient audience targeting, and quality contact data, among others.

It helps you optimize your email marketing campaigns to ensure that qualified leads smoothly move through the marketing or conversion phases up until they reach the purchasing stage. A successful email marketing campaign results in sales transaction. And you know what every consummated sale means – more revenues and a better bottom line for your business.