Everyone has an email address, and when you’re new to email marketing, using your free Gmail account might seem like a good idea. It’s familiar, after all. Before you decide to do that, it’s important to know why experienced email marketers advise against it.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for driving traffic, increasing conversions, and generating leads. To make the most of it, you need the right environment. Using a platform like Gmail, while tempting, can actually harm your ability to get into your subscribers inbox and you might not even realize, because you won’t have the statistics to check how well your emails perform.
In this blog, we’ll compare iContact and Gmail to help you understand why iContact, an email marketing platform might be the better choice for your needs.
The Number Of Emails You Can Send
Sending emails to a large number of recipients simultaneously is often more cost-effective and time saving. With a dedicated email marketing platform like iContact, you can easily import all your contacts on the platform. You can send personalized bulk emails to tens of thousands of subscribers simultaneously, with no daily limits on the number of emails you can send.
On the other hand, when it comes to sending mass emails using Gmail, it’s a time-consuming process, involving repeatedly copying and pasting the contact list from Word to Gmail, which can take hours. What’s more, the send limit for Gmail is 500 emails per 24 hours. This limit is fine for personal use. But if you run a business, it will be very easy to exhaust this limit as your audience grows.
Drag & Drop Design, Email Templates & Stock Images
A successful email campaign combines great content with eye-catching design.
iContact simplifies your designing process by offering a variety of pre-built templates to choose from in our Template Library, you can build eye-catching emails in 5 minutes. Simply select your template and edit the content and images as needed.
Want to build your emails from scratch? Our Drag & Drop Email Builder makes it super easy for you to quickly build an email from start to finish in one sitting. Plus, with iContact, you have the option to customize your emails with pictures, you can choose from hundreds of images from our Image Library to make your emails pop.
In contrast, Gmail’s email composer primarily focuses on text formatting and lacks basic design features, only allowing you to make changes to your fonts. Gmail falls short, leaving you to rely on external tools and extensions to turn your visions into vibrant email realities.
Contact List Building
iContact’s powerful but straightforward drag and drop editor gives you the freedom to build landing pages and sign up forms within minutes. It’s a very useful tool that helps you collect email addresses, grow your audience ,and acquire new customers, as well as ensuring the forms and pages work on all types of devices.
Gmail on the other hand, does not offer any additional built-in tools for advanced contact list building or management. You’ll need to manually collect and manage your email addresses on a spreadsheet, making it time-consuming and prone to errors.
Reporting & Analytics
With iContact’s comprehensive tracking features, each time you login to your account, you’ll get an overview of how many people opened your emails, clicked on it, engaged with it and so much more, this can help you quickly identify what is working and what isn’t.
In contrast, Gmail falls short in providing the in-depth analytics offered by specialized email marketing services like iContact, leaving you without access to valuable insights and opportunities for improvement. It can result in less effective campaigns, reduced engagement, and missed opportunities as you would not know if your emails are performing well.
Content Assistance
iContact’s AI-powered Content Assistant makes writing content super fast and easy. You just pick the tone and purpose, write a quick short prompt of what message you need, and it instantly creates the text you want for your emails and landing pages. This can save you time, boost your creativity, and help with writer’s block, making your email marketing campaigns more efficient and effective.
While you can enjoy Google Workspace’s AI content assistant within Gmail, it is not a straightforward process. Typically, you’d require a full G Suite subscription and will need to enroll in Google Workspace Labs. Getting accepted into Workspace Labs might take a while, making the process time-consuming and complex. This can be a significant drawback for regular Gmail users who don’t have a G Suite subscription and want to get access to the content assistant feature.
2024 Gmail Changes
Starting February 1, 2024, Gmail will be incorporating some changes that will impact businesses and their email marketing efforts, especially those using free email addresses like @gmail.com. If businesses use these free addresses, their emails may be rejected or marked as spam. This change is taking place mainly because Gmail wants people to use these free addresses for personal use, not business correspondence. To combat spam and fraud, businesses now need to send marketing emails from their own domains, meeting specific technical requirements like proper authentication.
Obtaining a domain and performing the required technical tasks can be done in about 30 minutes. However, if you are an iContact user, we can help you make sure that your emails are authenticated by providing you with the information you need to set it up.
The recommendation is to act sooner rather than later, as meeting these requirements improves email delivery.
Support, Guides, and Other Resources
iContact offers dedicated customer support, including live chat, email, and phone assistance. Additionally, it provides a wealth of resources, including guides, webinars, and educational content, to help you maximize your email marketing efforts. Gmail, being a general email service, does not offer the same level of support and resources tailored to email marketing campaigns.
In conclusion, while Gmail is an excellent choice for personal email communication, when it comes to effective and results-driven email marketing, iContact shines as the superior option. Its specialized features, list management capabilities, email templates, deliverability, and resources make it the go-to platform for businesses looking to make the most of their email marketing efforts. If you’re serious about achieving email marketing success, iContact is the platform that can take your campaigns to the next level.
The post iContact vs. Gmail: Why Is iContact Better For Your Email Marketing Needs appeared first on iContact Blog.