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Work smarter, not harder.
That’s the goal of just about every eCommerce marketer out there. And there’s no better way to do that than to use marketing automation.
eCommerce marketing automation is how we get more done in less time, but which tool is the best one? It seems like a heavy question since there are a lot of options out there.
In this post, we’re going to review some of the best options out there for eCommerce to help you narrow down your choices.
1. Sendlane
For any eCommerce brand, the hub for generating revenue comes down to your email marketing. If your website and your email are connected and running smoothly, then you’re in business.
With email being the main sales driver, it makes sense to have your email marketing platform at the center of your marketing automation. Sendlane’s high deliverability, ease of use, SMS capabilities, and deep data collection makes it a go-to ESP for eCommerce stores.
What It Does
- Gives real-time analytics at a glance. If you run an eCommerce store on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or Miva then the deep-data integrations are going to really shine with all the analytics you’ll receive.
- Unified SMS and email automation. No need to look for a third-party SMS tool. Sendlane’s built-in SMS capabilities make automation a breeze. Plus gives you a full picture of your CX.
- Cross-channel marketing thanks to multiple stores under one account. Got a lot of stores to run? Want to market one store audience to another one? You can do that with us inside one account and all under one roof.
- Drag-and-drop funnel builder and template library. Get your emails out the door even faster with our email template library and an easy-to-use email and SMS funnel builder.
- Built on MJLM framework. This is a fully responsive framework that helps eliminate the dreaded curse of Gmail Clipping (oh yeah, that’s a thing.) This helps improve your deliverability and gives you better analytics all the way around.
Who It’s Best For
Sendlane is great for any eCommerce brand of any size. Whether you sell digital products or physical ones, the automation features for both email and SMS and the intuitive design is ready to help you shine. The deep data integrations we have pull more data points and show you them in an easy-to-understand way.
Pricing
Our Growth plans start at $83/month for 5000 contacts. The Pro plans start at $640/month for up to 50,000 contacts.
You can add an SMS subscription to that as well, but all plans get you access to the eCommerce marketing automation features built into Sendlane. Another benefit to the Pro plan is that you get custom onboarding help, monthly reviews, and free access to our online eCommerce courses.
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Pros and Cons of This Marketing Automation Tool
- PRO: Intuitive interface and a responsive framework make this platform easy to use with a low learning curve while also doing a lot of the work to make sure email land in the inbox and don't get cut off.
- CON: If you're a brand-new startup and bootstrapping things, then the price aspect could put a hamper on things until you're able to allocate funds to eCommerce automation tools. However, the sooner you can do that, the better it will be for you since these tools help do a lot of work that drives more sales.
- PRO: The customer support at Sendlane is a big plus. Response times are under 30 seconds you can reach us 24/7/365 and talk to a real US-based person. Even at 2 am? Yes, even at 2 am (*wink*).
2. Klaviyo
Another popular choice for your eCommerce marketing automation platforms is Klaviyo. It has many desirable features for an online brand to utilize, so let's review some of them to see if it's the right fit for you.
Who It’s Best For
Klaviyo is a great fit for small to medium-sized eCommerce stores. If you're new and hoping for a free option to get started, this could be a good place to start.
What It Does:
- Create automated workflows for email and SMS. Just like you'd hope to have, this tool does both automated email campaigns and SMS flows you can blend together.
- Build emails with drag-and-drop design. Most ESPs have this these days, but even a popular tool like this gives you the tool you need to create no-code emails quickly.
- Access pre-built templates. eCommerce companies can struggle to get customer emails out the door. With pre-designed templates, you can tweak them as needed and get them sent sooner rather than later
Pricing
If you're on a budget for email marketing tools, Klaviyo does have a free version of the platform for up to 250 contacts. But if you want full access to all the features, you will have to switch to a paid version.
Price all depends on the number of contacts you have and whether or not you want to do SMS marketing too.
For 5000 contacts and email and SMS features, you can expect to pay $115 per month. As your contacts or SMS sends increase, the price will follow suit.
Pros and cons of this marketing automation tool
PRO: A lot of people say how much they enjoy certain digital marketing automation features like segmentation and predictive behavior analysis, which help you decide the best route to go with your audience.
CON: Customer support is a common complaint among many users who need more hands-on help to solve issues.
CON: The dashboard reporting tends to feel a bit clunky and it can be hard to find certain data without a custom report or digging around a bit deeper.
3. Constant Contact
This tool has been around for quite a while. It’s evolved into another one of the many eCommerce marketing automation tools on the market.
Who It’s Best For
This tool could be of good use to those who do a lot of events for their brand or don't need advanced automation software. The cost isn't terrible and it has some features that could be good for your eCommerce business.
What It Does
- List management is a breeze. Tags, segmentation, contact details, and eCommerce activity are all present in your contact's info. You can easily create segments based on tags, add tags to emails, or sunset inactive subscribers.
- 200+ templates are at your command. That's quite a lot of templates but that just means you have a lot of options for creating unique and branded email campaigns to fit your marketing strategy.
- Send vital emails using marketing automation. Abandoned carts and post-purchase emails and even some SMS are possible with Constant Contact.
Pricing
The price for the tool starts at $9.99 for up to 500 contacts and then goes up from there.
That price is for the most basic features, so you'll need to pay more if you want the eCommerce automation software side or if you need SMS messaging added.
The cost stacks up and tends to end up rather high for what they offer and compared to what other tools offer too.
Pros and Cons of This Marketing Automation Tool
PRO: This tool has shown to have some high deliverability rates which are hard to come by these days and not something to shirk when trying to pick a good automation software for email and SMS.
CON: The advanced automation software is a bit lackluster and really only works with Shopify. Many customers say you can set up basic automations like abandoned cart workflows, but if you need a lot of conditional splits or more technical automation software, this tool may not be a good fit.
PRO: Many users have reported enjoying customer support, including the knowledge base being in 4 different languages, making it more accessible to more people.
CON: Speaking of customer support, been reported that it can be hard to cancel your account, which is frustrating for anyone.
4. Omnisend
eCommerce marketers are always looking for ways to better their email marketing. This comes down to finding an email marketing tool that checks a lot of the boxes. And for some, Omnisend has stepped up to be that tool
Who It’s Best For
Omnisend works well for many eCommerce brands and has integrations with a lot of eCommerce platforms including Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, Drupal Commerce, and Volusion. If you're on a less common eCommerce platform but still want to gather data that can be used for your automation and email marketing campaigns, this is a great option.
What It Does
- Combines email, SMS, and web push notifications for a cohesive experience. Omnisend pulls together three channels to help your eCommerce businesses capitalize on all the screens your customers are spending time on. This means getting your message in front of more people and driving them back to your site.
- Run a health check to see how you're doing compared to the competition. Once you have 30 days of sending emails under your belt, you can take a look at your benchmarks and measure them against your competition to see where you stack up. This can be helpful as you gain a better pulse on what's working for your audience and how to improve.
- Access advanced email marketing automation features. There are pre-designed automation templates that you can use to help jumpstart your marketing efforts. You can a/b test things or create automated conditional splits. Even blocks within emails can be conditional and change based on the audience it's being sent to.
Pricing
You can give this automation platform a try for free when you have under 250 contacts. Their Standard plan will get you access to the majority of the platform and up to 60 SMS messages in a month. That plan starts at $16 for up to 500 contacts and goes up from there with the increase of contacts.
If you want more features and/or more SMS sends, then the Pro plan is better if you want to capitalize on SMS marketing. The Pro plan starts at $59 per month for up to 500 contacts; the price goes up from there.
Pros and Cons of This Marketing Automation Tool
PRO: It's very eCommerce centric and delivers a lot of features you'd hope to have for an eCommerce marketing automation platform. Creating efficient email marketing campaigns with automated workflows and SMS marketing is available and it’s designed to track sales from these as well.
CON: According to Email Tool Tester, the platform didn't do too well with the deliverability tests they ran, so there's that to contend with, which isn't a good thing in terms of your email marketing efforts.
5. MailChimp
Marketing professionals often turn to Mailchimp for email marketing. It has some good features that make it a good fit for certain brands.
Who It’s Best For
If you sell services online or have a smaller budget, Mailchimp could be good for you thanks to its free tier and other features like the appointment booking feature.
It supports some major eCommerce platforms, which is another thing you want to keep an eye out for with choosing the best eCommerce marketing automation software for your brand.
What It Does
- Intuitive email building for faster email production. The classic builder and the AI email builder make it straightforward to start designing and sending emails. Like anything, it takes some learning, but it's much easier than some other eCommerce marketing automation platforms make it.
- You have access to some in-depth marketing automation software. You can build email workflows with conditions, A/B test your campaigns, and get a bit more technical with the Customer Journey feature. It can get a bit hairy to get things running smoothly, but it's still an option and can do well if you don't have many conditional splits happening.
- AI can help you out quite a bit. Some new updates offer AI to help you design or correct some errors in your email marketing. These come in the form of suggestions around sentence length and scannability which is nice to get that little extra help to make the most of your email campaigns.
Pricing
While Mailchimp has a free tier you can start with, getting access to all the premium features can mean a pretty penny. It's currently $350 for full access for up to 10K contacts.
There are some middle tiers, too, which will drop that money price point, but it all depends on what you need and how many contacts you have. As far as pricing goes, Mailchimp has also been on a trend of raising their rates little by little, so there's also that to consider.
Pros and Cons of This Marketing Automation Tool for eCommerce
PRO: It's a well-known tool that many consider a great jumping-off point as a growth marketing platform. The basics of what some smaller eCommerce companies would need are there and it's easy enough to learn that you can get the ball rolling faster.
CON: List management can get very messy, so you'll have to be organized to ensure that you don't lose track of how you're putting lists together since there's not much the platform does to help you manage that.
CON: You're either going to love it or you're going to hate it. A lot of people come to Sendlane because even though the tool was doing okay, they knew they could do better with their marketing automation if they switched to something that offered more of what they needed.
CON: The reporting dashboard is really hard to love. It's not easy to get the data you need and hard to fully understand that data the way they have it laid out in front of you.
Marketing Is Always Better With Automation
Marketing automation can drive more sales, customer engagement, and loyalty. It’s one of those things that’s not worth putting on the back burner.
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At Sendlane, we’re eCommerce folk just like you. We built our tool after trying all the available options and finding they all fell short of what we needed to run our online stores.
Our marketing automation solved those pain points and it can help you solve yours too. Take a risk-free spin on Sendlane for 60 days! No cc require
