Understanding the benefits of email marketing is one thing; knowing the right email marketing platform to suit your business niche and needs is another.
Businesses in Africa and beyond have found that email marketing is a solid and efficient way to maintain communication and engage with clients.
By sending personalized emails, business owners can have a direct line of communication to reach their target audience and build lasting relationships with their active customers. This not only helps increase profit but also ensures the sustainability of the business.
However, there are many email marketing platforms, and it can be confusing for a business owner to decide which is best. Factors to consider include pricing, features, and compatibility. Knowing the right email marketing platform for your business can be the difference between failure and success.
In this blog post, I’ve highlighted eleven (11) of the best email marketing platforms for small businesses in Africa and will also explain what to consider before making a choice.
What are email marketing platforms?
Email marketing platforms are software and services designed to help you create, send, and optimize your email campaigns.
They come with features that help you segment your subscribers, create and send targeted emails, and automate your marketing processes, among other things.
Depending on your email marketing provider, your platform can offer features specific to your niche and specialized features that might not be readily available on other platforms.
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Benefits of email marketing platforms for businesses
It will surprise you to know that some business owners, while they understand the benefits of email marketing, still don’t use an email marketing platform.
If you are one of those business owners, here are some valid reasons to consider having an email marketing platform:
1. Increased efficiency
Manually creating your email marketing campaigns is time-consuming. With email marketing platforms, you can reduce the time it takes to create and send them.
Some email platforms will even help you automate some of the email creation process. You won’t have to select emails manually, but you can send specific emails to different segments of subscribers.
2. Sustainability
Manually sending emails and keeping a list of subscribers is not sustainable. It is easy to lose your email list or track subscribers, which will limit your follow-up and customer retention strategies.
However, this won’t be an issue with the right email marketing platform.
3. Increased effectiveness
Email marketing platforms can help you increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns with features like customization and A/B testing. This is because you will be sending targeted and personalized emails that will resonate more with your readers.
Also, features like analytics will give you real-time insight into subscribers, helping you create more reader-specific email content.
How to choose the right email marketing platform
The right choice of an email marketing platform for your campaign is essential for your brand’s success.
With many available platforms offering email marketing services in Africa, choosing the best one for your business can be daunting. However, in the long run, it is worthwhile to scale through by selecting the right tool.
Look out for these key features as positive pointers for a good email marketing platform:
1. Ease of use and interface
A good email marketing platform should be easy to use, and the user interface should be simple. With this type of platform, creating and managing your email campaigns will be simplified without the need for any coding skills.
2. Automation features
Automation is essential in email marketing. At the very least, your email marketing platform should offer automation features for basic processes, including creating email campaigns and segmentation.
3. Third-party integration
Your email marketing platform should offer third-party integrations, such as social media integration and CRM tools. These features are paramount for seamless communication across multiple channels.
4. Analytics and reporting features
What is the use of having an email marketing platform when you cannot track your email marketing efforts? Your platform of choice should have efficient analytics and reporting features to enable tracking the success of each campaign.
You can also analyze data such as email opens, click-through rates, number of subscribers, and other important email marketing metrics.
5. Customer support
This is another must-have feature for a good email marketing platform. Having constant and available customer support to help you with service issues is non-negotiable, especially if you are just starting email marketing. You want to ensure you can access help whenever you need it.
Additionally, depending on your business needs, you can consider other features like the number of subscribers, the number of emails per month, email templates and customization, A/B testing, email list-building features, security, and a drag-and-drop editor.
Email marketing platforms for small businesses in Africa
Here are some of the best email marketing platforms for small businesses in Africa:
1. MailDrip
MailDrip is a famous email marketing platform in Africa, and it’s the preferred choice for tech-savvy digital creators, email marketers, small businesses, and medium enterprises.
Here are several reasons why MailDrip is a recommended email marketing platform for African entrepreneurs and businesses:
- MailDrip offers a pay-as-you-go feature so that you are only asked to pay for email marketing when you use it.
- With MailDrip, you can import your existing email lists or create new contacts.
- This email marketing platform allows you to segment your email list and use it to send targeted messages to your audience.
- You enjoy responsive customer care from MailDrip’s support team at every step of your email marketing journey.
- MailDrip pricing plans are affordable and reliable, and you will enjoy 100% value for the money invested.
Pricing
| Plan | Cost | Limitations |
| Free | $0/month | 100-1,000 monthly emails, unlimited subscribers |
| Advanced | $10/month | 1,000-10,000 monthly emails, unlimited subscribers |
| Premium | $50/month | 10,000-50,000 monthly emails, unlimited subscribers |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited monthly emails, unlimited subscribers |
2. Mailchimp
This is one of the widely used email marketing platforms. One of its top advantages is that it can be used by start-ups and established enterprises. However, the more subscribers you have, the higher the plan price.
Mailchimp offers a landing page builder, email scheduling, a form builder, and over 300 integrations to help you customize your email strategies to fit your business needs.
Another interesting feature of MailDrip that may sell you off is its inbox preview, which shows how your email will appear on different email clients like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. It also offers simplified analytics with graphical representations to help you understand and visualize your data.
Pricing
*Pricing changes based on subscriber count
| Plan | Cost | Limitations |
| Free | $0/month | 500 subscribers, 1,000 monthly emails |
| Essential | $13/month | 500 subscribers, 5,000 monthly emails |
| Advanced | $20/month | 500 subscribers, 6,000 monthly emails |
| Premium | $350/month | 500 subscribers, 150,000 monthly emails |
3. MailerLite
MailerLite is one of the go-to email marketing platforms for small business owners and solopreneurs. It is an effective platform that offers many needed email marketing features in its free plan.
MailerLite is also easy to use with its drag-and-drop features and third-party integrations for ultimate customization.
However, some of MailerLite’s two best features might be its pre-made content blocks for every email section, including headings, navigation, and footer. Users can also include interactive elements in their emails, such as quizzes, countdowns, surveys, carousels, etc.
Pricing
*Pricing changes based on subscriber count
| Plan | Cost | Users | Limitations |
| Free | $0/month | 1 | Up to 1,000 subscribers, 12,000 monthly emails |
| Growing Business | $10/month | 3 | 500 subscribers, unlimited emails |
| Advanced | $20/month | Unlimited | 500 subscribers, unlimited emails |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Custom |
4. Omnisend
Omnisend is an email marketing platform focused on e-commerce, especially for small businesses. This might explain its good integrations with several e-commerce platforms, such as WooCommerce and Shopify.
Its free plan also offers many needed email marketing features, such as segmentation, templated automation workflows, SMS, web push notifications, A/B testing, performance reporting, etc.
Its templated automation workflow includes an e-commerce marketing automation workflow that helps you optimize customer journeys for increased conversion. It includes features like cross-sell emails, welcome series emails, abandoned cart emails, and so on.
Omnisend also has email and form templates for different purposes and interactive elements such as timers and fortune wheels.
Pricing
*Pricing changes based on subscriber count
| Plan | Cost | Limitations |
| Free | $0/month | 250 subscribers, 500 monthly emails |
| Standard | $16/month | 500 subscribers, 6,000 monthly emails |
| Pro | $59/month | 2,500 subscribers, unlimited monthly emails |
5. Brevo
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive marketing platform that offers tools beyond email, including SMS marketing, WhatsApp chat, and CRM. Talk about a platform that meets all your marketing and sales needs.
Despite its many features, its email marketing features are quite solid and user-friendly. Brevo offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, advanced automation capabilities, including automation workflow templates, and a wide range of integrations.
Another highly sellable feature of Brevo is its brand library, which collects brand elements like logos, color palettes, fonts, and relevant links as a built-in design style guide for your email campaigns.
Pricing
| Plan | Cost | Limitations |
| Free | $0/month | Unlimited subscribers, 300 daily emails |
| Starter | $9/month | Unlimited subscribers, 5,000 monthly emails |
| Business | $18/month | Unlimited subscribers, 5,000 monthly emails |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
6. Moosend
Moosend is the easiest email marketing and automation software. It offers a good balance of features and affordability.
Moosend has several pre-made email templates, and users can create a custom template that suits their brand identity. It also offers an advanced email automation builder in all its plans to help you create a personalized subscriber journey.
Moosend provides strong reporting and analytics features to help you track your progress and optimize your campaigns.
Pricing
*Pricing changes based on subscriber count
| Plan | Cost | Limitations |
| Free | $0/month | 500 subscribers, unlimited emails |
| Pro | $9/month | 500 subscribers, unlimited emails |
| Moosend+ | Custom | Custom |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
Conclusion
Before choosing your email marketing platform, you must consider third-party integration, user interface, customer support availability, and automation features to ensure that the email marketing platform aligns with your business needs and marketing goals.
Email marketing is a needed digital marketing strategy for businesses both in Africa and all over the world.
Take your time to analyze and compare the pros and cons of each platform; try the free plan or take a free trial to get real-time data and see if the platform will be a valuable asset for your business before you make payment.
MailDrip has a pay-as-you-go plan that gives you full access to our powerful email marketing tools without the pressure of a monthly subscription.
Send emails when you need to, and only pay for the messages you send.
Subscribe to MailDrip’s free plan, and you can send up to 1,000 monthly emails to unlimited subscribers.
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