The word “startup” is used as an all-encompassing for growing companies. But, depending on size and industry, growing brands aren’t always just “startups.” For instance, people frequently confuse early-stage startups with growth-stage or medium companies, but the two are very different.
In the early stages of a startup, you’re still discussing what the company you want to be. This means looking for funding, developing a viable product, and building your own place in the industry. These businesses take more risk because they’re unproven in the market and still require years to mature. Early stage startups focus on development, setting up a customer base and establishing a strong cash flux.
They’re also called the seed stage of a startup because while early stage companies are setting down the foundation for success, they also face a unique set of challenges including:
- Rough competitors: It can be arduous building a company and competing with existing companies in your industry. You’ll have to strategize to find ways to obtain competitive advantages.
- Finding the right workers: You will want to employ people who are action-oriented, dedicated to their work, enjoy teamwork and know how to treat clients adequately. You also want employees who share your trademark’s view/eyesight
- Gathering clients: To build a strong base of customers, you’ll need to make sure your products line up with their expectancy and needs. You’ll also want to sell your products successfully and offer quality customer support.
In order to facilitate early-stage startups success, email marketing is remarkably important at every stage of the sales funnel whether you’re building awareness, nurturing leads, welcoming new users, or taking care of customers. Using the right email marketing software can feed your funnel and grow your startup.
Here are 5 different email marketing tools for Early-stage Startups
This is one of the best free email marketing software that comes with content ready, responsive Free email templates that look great in all major email clients. With the free email marketing plan, this software lets you send up to 20,000 emails per month with Postr branding. Paid plans start at $25 per month.
It’s also a web-based application that works in most web browsers, which means the client doesn’t need to download or install any software on their computer.
The drag-and-drop email builder is perfect for beginners with limited email marketing experience. Sendinblue includes email automation tools so you can create workflows for follow up emails, segment users, and send transactional emails. Using the AI-driven algorithms, you can find the best time to send bulk emails to get the best deliverability.
This is a simple email marketing platform used by several companies. It allows you to create, send, share, and track email newsletters online. This marketing tool is for people who want email marketing to be simple.
Every day, over 40 million emails are sent, shared, and tracked using their powerful service. It was initially conceived as a tool for musicians to create online press kits but the idea pivoted to an email marketing platform featuring a simple design experience.
Mad Mimi has a free trial (with no credit card required) followed by a Basic Plan of 500 subscribers for $10. Pro is $42 for up to 10,000 subscribers, and Silver is priced at $199.00 for up to 50,000.
AWeber has a wide variety of features like the autoresponder that sends a string of automatically delivered messages. AWeber also provides segmentation of customers, which is based on their actions.
You can send newsletters that have a professional look using AWeber. This email marketing tool has built 3 mobile applications to provide more ease in the email marketing world.
What you will like best about Aweber is that you can segment your content to different lists with different interests within your marketplace.
You will be able to set up autoresponders for each of your client programs as well as freemium offers.
3. Mail Chimp
Mailchimp is one of the popular apps for email marketing developed by The Rocket Science Group LLC.
The main features include predesigned and user defined email templates, drag and drop editor for designing templates,email beamer, integration with around 100 other apps and services like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Google, WordPress etc, multi user accounts with different levels of access, designing custom signup forms, classify different segmentation and groups,autoresponders,delivery by time zone,spam filter diagnostics,API for syncing with existing customer databases etc.
MailChimp has also spent the last year evolving its platform into a complete marketing solution by adding branding via targeted ad placement, website hosting, and domain hosting services.
The main features include creating and sending emails using drag and drop campaign editor,also putting dynamic content to the campaign, optimizing templates for mobile, personalizing the content of the email, integrating online surveys with campaigns, adding traceable buttons for social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, landing page builder, editing HTML code in the templates and customizing it, tracking the email campaigns and creating reports based on them etc.
Pricing structures are available for small as well as early-stage/ medium businesses.
5. ConvertKit
This email marketing tool enables you to schedule your email sending process in which you can select particular days for delivering your emails.
Not only you can schedule the emails, but also check the sequence of drip emailing using ConvertKit.
You can add patterns to your page design using the wide variety of textures offered by ConvertKit. It’s very easy to set up and use. ConvertKit really shines with their Sequences automated email campaigns that can be used for welcome and indoctrination series and sales funnels.
They are laid out chronologically via email, so you can see the entire sequence and the email content for each. You will also love that ConvertKit includes landing pages and forms that are easily customizable.
Also published on Medium.