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24 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked)

A robust email marketing strategy is a great way to reach your target audience directly.

But your email marketing campaign success rests on whether you used the best email marketing services.

No two email marketing services are equal. So you must choose carefully. We created this guide and ranked the 12 best email marketing services for you.

How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Services

Although we ranked these best email marketing services in this list from number one to eleven, we also understand that everyone’s need is unique. So we identified where each email marketing tool performs best.

Here’s what to keep in mind to find a good email marketing service:

Your business goals
Growth stage of the business
The audience your business targets

Please read on for the best email marketing services in the market today.

1. ActiveCampaign: Best Advanced Email Automation

If your goal is to deliver timely, personalized, and unique email experiences to your customers, try ActiveCampaign. As the best email marketing service for putting your marketing on autopilot, this tool offers a built-in email automation system, a campaign tracker, and a CRM.

Unique Feature: Customer experience automation (CXA)
Target Users: eCommerce, B2B, B2C, SMEs, bloggers, and influencers
Pricing: $29 per month.

Features

ActiveCampaign offers users loads of beginner-friendly advanced automation features. Here are a few:

1. Automated Marketing

You can focus on other important business pursuits and let ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation send welcome emails, track contact tags, monitor sales analytics, and fetch performance reports.

This feature empowers users to launch automatic email marketing campaigns or follow up on customers who abandoned their carts or disengaged from their content.

2. Site and Event Tracking

ActiveCampaign records your site visitors’ consumer behavior and demographic information in real-time. So you can segment your email list better and target your audience with messages that resonate with them.

Gathering visitor data can help you engage with them emotionally or during memorable events like anniversaries, birthdays, and other milestones.

3. Free Migration

ActiveCampaign offers a seamless move from your previous automated marketing service provider.

Best part? Migrating to ActiveCampaign comes at no cost to you.

Simply request for migration by filling out a quick form. And you’re on your way to a better email marketing experience.

4. Segmentation

Image Credit: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign groups your email contacts into different categories to enable you to make sense of the data.

You can segment a contact list by name, date, location, subscription status, tags, and other metadata.

Segmented data helps you target the most conversion-ready audience for the particular campaign.

5. Third-Party Integrations

You’re free to link your favorite apps with ActiveCampaign if it enhances your business growth.

So you can integrate your account with third-party apps like

Facebook to pull ad or public user data
Shopify to pull sales and shop data
Google Sheets for spreadsheet operations
WooCommerce for eCommerce performance data

You don’t need to move contacts across email marketing platforms to access or manage your data. ActiveCampaign lets you keep your data on the platform you wish to use and then use integrations to extract the benefits of having those contacts.

6. Performance Reporting

Get real-time reports on your deals and sales activities using ActiveCampaign. The reports feature lets you know your campaign’s performance across these indicators:

Subscriptions
Subscriber engagement
Automation reports
Sales rep deal pipelines
Revenue generation
Customer attribution reports

ActiveCampaign lets you track your competitors by providing reports of users who switched to competitors.

You also get a funnel report to see how well your email marketing effort converts engaged audiences to buyers.

7. One-on-one Messaging

ActiveCampaign lets you start and manage conversations with current and prospective customers across multiple channels.

Send and receive instant direct messages, which you can also automate in full.

Customers will quickly reach you with questions and orders without losing their messages in your email pile.

More Features

Automation templates
Email Templates
Email drag-and-drop builder
Branded Forms
Tags
Split Automations

Pros

ActiveCampaign is feature rich. You can fully integrate other applications on the platform without losing vital leads and data.

This email marketing software positions itself (and rightly so) as a leading email marketing solution that encompasses other parts of marketing and your CRM needs.

You can enjoy its free email marketing service offering for 14 days.

Cons

Although ActiveCampaign promises many features, most of them are exclusive to users who subscribe to paid plans. Sadly, this email marketing tool doesn’t offer a free plan.

Also, the workflows and features are sophisticated. So this email service provider will demand a learning curve.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign offers four paid plans—Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise. The enterprise plan is customizable to meet the peculiar needs of big businesses.

Each plan is billed monthly at:

Lite: $29 per month

Plus: $49 per month

Professional: $149 per month

Enterprise: Customized rate

2. Sendinblue: Best Free Plan and Instant Messaging

Sendinblue provides users with instant messaging features, sales enablement software, and email marketing tools to grow their businesses.

If you’re looking to engage users more instantly through SMS and chats along with your email campaigns, then Sendinblue is the solution. As the best email marketing software for instant messaging, Sendinblue has personalization features to help you engage better with your target audience.

Unique Feature: Email and SMS marketing
Target Users: Retailers and CPG, SaaS, media, publishing, public sector, NGOs, and hospitality industry
Pricing: Starts at $25 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

Sendinblue offers over 40 responsive and professional pre-made email templates from which to choose.

If those are not enough, you can create bespoke email templates. Again, you’ll find the platform intuitive. In addition, you can use templates on multiple devices for the best results.

2. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Modify emails to your taste by simply dragging and dropping items on the campaign template.

Sendinblue is one of the most advanced email marketing services today. For example, it takes personalization seriously. So you can craft the content of your emails to appeal to your target audience better.

3. Email Tracking

If you wish to measure campaign performance rate or monitor engagement on certain emails, Sendinblue provides the option of turning on your Google Analytics tracker.

Google Analytics generates insights by drawing your customer information from all over the internet, including their behavior on social media.

4. Live Chat

Sendinblue lets you initiate instant communication with your site visitors through chat. Live chat is a handy email for engaging your leads at critical moments.

You can install this feature in seconds, assign conversations to your team, and customize the chat feature for your brand.

5. Contact Segmentation

Every contact is different and often has unique preferences.

Target the right audience with the most suitable message by exploring Sendinblue’s segmentation; this categorizes contacts and helps you determine, create and push a tailor-made campaign to a ready market.

6. SMS and Whatsapp Marketing

Sendinblue allows you to send your desired SMS volume to any chosen destination for a token.

You can also reach numerous contacts on your Whatsapp with customized messages about your business.

A recent report says that 69% of internet users use Whatsapp. So, you want to get your message to this audience.

7. Shared Inbox

Does managing all your conversations from a single place appeal to you?

With Sendinblue inbox, you can navigate smoothly between chats from your linked Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook accounts.

Keep your team and customers updated simultaneously with a simple inbox setup.

This Shared Inbox feature enhances organization.

More Features

Schedule send
CRM automation
Editable signup form
Push notifications

Pros

Sendinblue’s free email marketing software offers advanced features for startups and supports unlimited contacts. Except you need to do more, you can function solely on the free plan.

As the best email marketing software for initiating instant communication with leads, this email marketing tool promises a simple user interface and instant account setup.

Also, Sendinblue is relatively cheaper compared to similar email marketing providers.

Cons

You can only send 300 emails daily on the free version of Sendinblue. A paid subscription is required to remove the Sendinblue logo from your emails.

Pricing

Apart from the free plan, Sendinblue offers three other monthly plans—Starter Plan at $25, Business Plan at $65 per month, and Enterprise Plan at $1000 per month.

3. Drip: Best for Pre-Built Email Workflows

Drip is a personalized email, SMS, and automation service provider trusted by thousands of brands globally. It provides a seamless email workflow for businesses of all sizes.

- Unique Feature: pre-built email and SMS workflows

Target Users: eCommerce industry
Pricing: starts at $39 per month

Features

1. Pre-built Playbooks

Handling every marketing operation by yourself is overwhelming.

Save precious business time by using any pre-designed Drip templates.

The playbooks with heart-melting welcome series and abandoned cart reminders are ideal for growing your revenue.

Choose a suitable visual workflow and automate it fully.

2. Email Builder

If you like your emails deeply personalized and right on target, you’ll find Drip’s HTML builder useful.

Create 100 percent original content from scratch.

Personalized emails prove to your customers that you go the extra length and they’re special to you.

3. Drag and Drop Editor

Customize emails to capture your brand image using its ultra-easy drag-and-drop email editor.

People and businesses exchange over 306 billion email messages daily. Your audience is already getting tons of messages. Stand out with branded emails.

The visual interface is vibrant and can help boost your creativity.

4. Pop-up Notifications

Get access to form templates that your on and off-site visitors can easily fill out on Drip.

You can redirect, engage, sponsor specific actions, offer discounts to customers and grow your audience with targeted pop-up notifications and forms.

Pop-ups and signup forms convert about 3.09% of site visitors.

5. Real-Time Business Insights

Gain insights on your growth, audience, revenue, and overall campaign performance with Drip analytics and benchmark.

That’s not all.

Drip supports users with personalized guides to help them make informed decisions using these data that lead to business growth.

6. Marketing Automation

Your emails and SMS can run on autopilot without taking on the stress of maintaining correspondence with new and existing customers.

Simply set up revenue-targeted workflows and relax.

Since Drip comes with pre-built workflows, you don’t have to start your automation process from scratch.

7. Single Click Integration

Are you a new or an existing business owner? Drip supports your business on multiple channels.

Fully merge or connect your online store like Shopify, Magento, and other eCommerce tools to your Drip account with just one click. Easy breezy.

You can start conversations on your e-store and finish in your inbox.

More Features

Segmentation
Email support
A/B testing

Pros

Apart from unlimited email sends, Drip lets you access its advanced features and all the tools on its platform during your 14 days free trial.

Users get tailored assistance and live support when they need them. In addition, Drip simplifies the scaling process for businesses.

Cons

Although you get unlimited emails, this plan doesn’t support unlimited contacts and doesn’t offer a free plan. However, you have unlimited features access. But Drip limits usage by the number of contacts.

Pricing

More than ten paid plans starting at $39 up to more than $1,899 and billed monthly. Email contacts vary by plan, but you can send unlimited emails and email support for all paid plans.

4. Constant Contact: Best for Educators, Small Businesses, and Event Organizers

Constant Contact simplifies email marketing for event marketers and small businesses as one of the best email marketing providers. This email marketing solution helps users benefit from their email marketing effort without the typical steep learning curve of complicated email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Event management tools
Target Users: Small businesses and event organizers
Pricing: Starts at $9.99 per month

Features

1. Marketing Automation

Constant Contact empowers small businesses to put their email marketing on autopilot. You can segment your lists automatically and initiate campaigns without manual effort. You can also set drip campaigns and automation to trigger based on your audience behavior, data, or events.

You can resend messages under different subject lines to contacts who didn’t open them the first time.

2. List Building and Management tools

You can access a range of list-building tools on Constant Contact to help you attract and keep leads. In addition, you can access a landing page builder, form builder, text message signup FTW, and a contact management system.

3. Event Management

One of this email marketing service’s biggest selling points is its event management tools. Users can create signup forms for their events, build unlimited landing pages, create email follow-ups, and collect payments using tools available on Constant Contact.

4. Email Templates

Users can find more than 100 mobile-friendly, drag-and-drop email templates on Constant Contact that match different business types and brands. So you will find the appropriate template for the occasion regardless of industry, market, design preference, holiday, event, or other needs.

5. Surveys and Feedback Tools

Constant Contact understands that customer feedback and extra data can improve your marketing performance. You can consider Constant Contact the best email marketing service for getting feedback through surveys and polls.

You can customize these surveys with your branding and logo on your Constant Contact dashboard.

6. Responsive Email Editor

Constant Contact makes email editing a breeze for users with smart columns, undo-redo, an image library, color customizations, fonts, backgrounds, and more. In addition, its preview function lets you see what your email would look like across devices, so you can adjust your design or message to your heart’s content before sending it out.

7. Marketing Calendar

Unlike most email service providers, Constant Contact offers marketing calendars. The feature helps plan your marketing. Marketers can create their messages, schedule them, send, and track them with the help of a marketing planner.

More Features

Error Checker
A/B testing
Landing page builder
Reporting
Agency tools
Signup Forms

Pros

Constant Contact’s focus on small businesses means they’ve designed this email marketing platform with simplicity in mind. And they haven’t limited users’ who need more advanced email marketing automation features.

Its error checker is a good feature to catch bad links and fix issues that might lower conversion. Constant Contact is a great email marketing software for educators, event organizers, and small businesses.

Cons

Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan. Although it has simple pricing, this email marketing tool overcompensates higher-paying Plus users and leaves its Core plan users with limited functionalities.

Pricing

Constant Contact offers two paid plans to accommodate two audiences:

Getting started — $9.99 per month
Advanced features— $45 per month

However, for more advanced automation features, you’ll need the $449 per month marketing automation offer.

These paid plans come with 30-day money-back guarantees so that any small business can test-drive the tool without commitments.

5. MailChimp: Best Email Design and Marketing AI

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing software available online. It integrates email marketing automation features and creative tools to deliver result-oriented email marketing.

Unique Feature: Email marketing automation features
Target Users: Freelancers, agencies, and developers
Pricing: Starts at $11 per month

Features

1. AI-Powered Design

Mailchimp is an artificial intelligence-enabled creative assistant to automate and personalize your email and newsletter design for your businesses.

The creative assistant uses AI to study your brand and create beautiful, professional designs tailored to your needs.

These AI-powered designs are useful across multiple channels.

2. Subject Line Assistant

Your email subject lines are crucial to your campaign’s success. Barilliance reported that 64% of email recipients open messages based on the subject line.

Thinking and drafting the perfect email subject line to drive customer engagement is often difficult. But not anymore.

Mailchimp’s subject line helper provides real-time feedback and suggestions to guide you.

3. Audience Segmentation

Is your email marketing effort not yielding the desired results? You might be targeting the right audience with the wrong campaign.

Mailchimp helps to categorize your email list according to shared characteristics.

This ensures you send the right message to the right audience for better results.

4. Pre-built Templates

Create professional-looking emails and landing pages in minutes using any of over 100 template designs on Mailchimp.

Campaign templates incorporate content blocks and exciting design elements for your exploration.

5. Smart Predictions

Save yourself the cost of hiring a data analyst using available insight predictions on Mailchimp to analyze data.

Get demographic information about your past, present and prospective customers at your fingertips. These predictions help you make better decisions that affect your brand.

6. Marketing Automation Features

Automate your brand marketing workflows and drip campaigns to get the work done in just a few clicks. Set up the processes new email subscribers will go through before conversion.

Send automated welcome notes, product notifications, abandoned cart reminders, and other vital information about your brand.

7. Image and File Editor

Alter, sync, and save your images or files with Mailchimp’s robust content studio.

8. Website Builder

Create a unique search-engine optimized website with Mailchimp’s free website builder.

No special coding or website design experience is needed. Instead, get right into it with your domain name and a clear idea of what you hope to achieve.

More Features

Pop-up form
Marketing CRM
A/B testing
Analytics
Integrations
Appointment scheduler

Pros

Mailchimp is easy to use, and its creative assistant takes away the mental hassle of creating original content regularly. Apart from its free plan, this email marketing service offers unlimited contacts on its Premium plan.

Cons

The free version only allows 500 contacts, and Mailchimp’s monthly email sends are limited across all paid plans.

Pricing

Apart from MailChimp’s free plan, paid plans start from $11 per month, and the Premium plan starts is $299 per month.

6. Klaviyo: Best eCommerce Marketing Automation

Klaviyo is an eCommerce-centered email marketing platform that pools data to create workflows and enhance business growth.

Klaviyo promises users an experience, a unified database, and a learning platform guaranteed to launch their businesses to new heights.

Unique Feature: Personalized benchmarks
Target Users: eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $45 per month

Features

1. Email Marketing

Develop, personalize and automate your emails to portray your brand essence with Klaviyo.

This email marketing platform promises to help users maximize revenue, improve repeat sales, and increase customer retention using well-timed personalized email messages.

Klaviyo uses customer behaviors like these to target your messages better:

Abandoning carts
Items they ordered
Recently viewed products

And also incorporates group behaviors like these:

Bestsellers
Newest products
Most viewed products

So, whether customers appreciate group behavior or tend to repeat a behavior, Klaviyo picks up on that signal to improve your sales.

2. Precise Segmentation

Klaviyo automatically syncs customers’ data from their first interaction with your brand. Segmentation is swift, specific, and happens in real-time.

Categorize customers in similar demographics or those with shared traits together. This will ensure they get appropriate email messages guaranteed to trigger recipients.

3. In-built Signup Forms

Get to know your customers better and build your email subscriber list with pre-built forms. Klaviyo forms can be embedded in the content or pop up when visitors land on your page.

4. Professional Templates

Klaviyo provides over 100 SMS marketing and email templates to suit your brand. You don’t have to rack your brain trying to come up with authentic messages all the time. Pick expertly crafted

5. Integrations

Klaviyo lets you move data across apps without a hitch.

This email marketing solution supports over 220 platforms that cater to eCommerce functions like payments and order management.

6. Benchmarks

The eCommerce sector is highly competitive. So stay ahead of your peers. Catch market, industry, and emerging trends on time. And compare your growth with businesses selling similar products.

Benchmark helps you know where you stand in the grand scheme and what others are doing differently to achieve better results in your field.

7. SMS Chats

Scale your business with direct SMS messages to old and prospective customers.

SMS makes communication easier, faster, and less formal. So you can talk to customers around the globe on the go.

8. Broadcast Newsletter

Create the perfect newsletters about your brand and distribute them to your audience through their most preferred channel (email or SMS).

Broadcasts are one-off messages you can easily design without professional help. Klaviyo makes the process faster with send time automation.

More Features

Drag and drop email editor
A/B Testing
Multichannel attribution
Custom reporting

Pros

Klaviyo targets eCommerce brands squarely. This targeting helps users of this email marketing platform optimize for result-driven marketing automation. Users can get a free plan on this email software.

Klaviyo is feature packed and specializes in increasing revenues for businesses.

Cons

The free version has limitations. And Klaviyo allows only a few integrations compared to other email marketing service providers. So, this email marketing solution is only good if you won’t be heavy on integrations.

Pricing

Klaviyo offers a free plan for starters. After that, the email plan starts at $45 per month, and you pay $60 per month to access all the tools in the email and SMS marketing plans.

7. Campaign Monitor: Best for Transactional Emails and Autoresponders

Campaign Monitor prioritizes ease and efficiency in delivering email marketing services to businesses.

The platform assures users of helping them to create memorable emails that convert and drive engagement.

Unique Feature: Expert email marketing
Target Users: Tech brands, media agencies, marketers, and charities
Pricing: starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Email Templates

As a business owner who is always on the go, creating an email from scratch is time-consuming. This email platform offers free brandable email templates.

Freely choose from the stash of professional templates and save yourself the stress and time it takes to design.

2. Custom Emails

This email platform harnesses customers’ data from your website, apps, and eCommerce tools to enable you to craft and deliver personalized emails to them.

A Campaign Monitor report shows marketers record a 20% sales increase and 26% more open rates when they send personalized campaigns.

As the best email marketing software for transactional messages and autoresponder, this tool lets you deliver personalized experiences to your customers for as low as $9.

3. Transactional Emails

Sending messages that trigger specific actions from recipients has never been easier.

This email software allows you to create, modify and enhance your communication with customers using bespoke transactional emails.

4. Actionable Analytics

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this popular email marketing service offers actionable email analytics you can access in just a few clicks. So you can rest assured of practical insights into your business performance.

Popular email marketing services like this email software gives you access to an interactive dashboard to measure results across metrics like these:

Email campaigns
Automated journeys
Transactional emails

And others.

As one of the best email marketing platforms, this email software provides actionable insights from your top-performing campaigns that you can deploy across other campaigns.

5. Email Experts

Enjoy round-the-clock professional support services from one of the best email service providers.

If you run into technical problems, you can count on Campaign Monitor’s expert team at any time. From funnel to deliverability experts, you can get all the helps you need for your email marketing campaign with this feature.

6. Email broken link review

As one of the best email marketing providers, this tool helps you find and fix broken links that might hurt your campaign efforts. The Link Review tools work in this capacity.

This tool scans your messages, flags any missing or broken links, and validates them.

Image Credit: Campaign Monitor

7. Customizable Signup Forms

A signup form is a helpful tool that persuades customers to take the extra step into your business.

Direct the ideal audience to the right section of your business with editable signup forms.

You can also add a subscribe icon on your website’s landing pages.

More Features

SMS marketing
Segmentation tools
A/B testing
Image Gallery
Campaign tags
Email broken link review
Integrations

Pros

Campaign Monitor is easy to use and offers affordable feature-loaded paid plans for all business sizes.

Cons

The SMS feature on Campaign Monitor is only available to contracted customers sending texts to the USA, and it doesn’t offer a free plan.

Pricing

Three paid plans are billed monthly with prices starting as follows:

Basic: $9 per month
Unlimited: $29 per month
Premier: $149 per month

This email service provider’s prices changes per plan as your list grows, but you can send unlimited emails on the Unlimited and Premier plans.

8. Moosend: Best Value for Unlimited Emails

If you’re looking for pocket-friendly email marketing services that deliver results, try Moosend.

Moosend is designed for small and big businesses seeking impressive emails that resonate with their audience.

You can send a limitless amount of emails to suit your business needs.

Unique Feature: Weather-based personalization and evergreen campaigns
Target Users: Saas, publishers, eCommerce, non-profit, travel, and agencies
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Whatever inspiration you have when recreating an email campaign, simply drag and drop it with Moosend’s powerful email builder.

You can also design your email campaigns with HTLM—you have full control over how MooSend works for you.

2. CRM Automation Features

Build lasting and rewarding relationships with customers by automating basic CRM functions.

Handling every customer’s need is tedious and time-consuming. But you must make each customer feel special to ensure continuous patronage.

Automate basic CRM operations and focus on bigger tasks.

3. Landing Pages

Your website landing pages help you convert visitors better—MooSend lets you create responsive and catchy landing pages to increase your site’s conversions.

4. Ready-to-use Templates

MooSend lets you save time with pre-built subscription forms, landing pages, and newsletter templates.

Simply flip, personalize and use your most preferred template from this email marketing service provider.

5. AI-Powered eCommerce

Moosend provides eCommerce email marketing solutions to users, from abandoned cart reminders to product recommendations.

Like other best email marketing services on this list, MooSend uses artificial intelligence to help your business make more sales with email.

6. Forms

Design lead-generating subscription forms for onsite visitors.

When your landing pages receive visitors, they receive your pop-up or embedded forms immediately. Information from these forms goes to segment, retarget, and drive customer engagements.

7. Integrations

You don’t have to let go of your best CRM, CMS, and eCommerce tools when moving to MooSend.

Bring your marketing tools or apps and integrate them into your MooSend account. This email service provider lets you connect your integrations without a developer’s help.

More Features

Custom reports
Site tracking
Segmentation
Product recommendation
Transactional emails

Pros

Moosend affords you access to powerful email marketing tools at a relatively cheaper rate.

Cons

The basic paid plan excludes account managers who provide expert support to users. Moosend also limits the number of email subscribers by payment plan.

Transactional emails are available to pro and enterprise subscribers, and no free plan exists.

Pricing

MooSend offers a 30-day free trial. But its pricing starts from $9 per month.

9. Omnisend: Best Email Marketing Service for Shopify

Omnisend is the best email marketing tool with eCommerce optimizations and pre-designed workflows.

This email marketing service reduces the work involved in running a thriving eCommerce business by relying on automation.

Unique Feature: eCommerce email and SMS automation
Target Users: eCommerce, startups, and SMEs
Pricing: Starts at $16 per month

Features

1. Drag and Drop Editor for Content Creation

Your emails and campaigns must be consistent with your brand identity and message. The drag-and-drop email content editor lets you modify in-built templates to suit you.

2. Automated Push Notifications

Attract, retarget and convert web visitors with personalized push notifications. Set automated reminders for cart or browse abandonment and transactional emails beyond just offering a basic email marketing service.

3. Audience Synchronization

Integrate contacts into your Facebook and Google for better and on-target ads. Omnisend harmonizes your contact every 5-15 minutes, keeping you up-to-date. It also supports cookie-less advertising, which is good for when Google deactivates cookies on Chrome.

4. SMS Marketing

You want to handle all your SMS and emails on a single email marketing service to keep you abreast of customer conversations.

Also, you can automate SMS by including it in your marketing workflow, so customers get timely and thoughtful messages.

Onmisend boasts a 47.7% higher conversion rate in users who combine SMS and email marketing.

5. Migration

Omnisend makes the switch to their email marketing service easy and seamless for users, specifically eCommerce brands.

As a popular email marketing service, Omnisend integrates with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

6. Hyper Segmentation

Omnisend’s intuitive segmentation helps you understand your audience better to serve them better.

Increase your sales and campaign by targeting an audience based on purchase behavior and their unique journeys on your website.

Also, monitor customer lifecycle phases to develop and execute a better retention strategy.

7. Multichannel eCommerce Marketing

Omnisend engages your eCommerce customers from different channels in one place. All your marketing activities, email campaigns, ads, and sales happen on the Omnisend platform.

You can finally keep an eye on all your important data and audience.

More Features

Live support
Forms
Campaign builder
Sales report
MMS

Pros

Omnisend is purpose-built for eCommerce businesses and integrated with 100+ eCommerce stores like Shopify and wooCommerce. So, you only need one click to start your eCommerce journey.

Plus, you can start exploring this email marketing software on a free plan.

Cons

Omnisend targets eCommerce users and offers limited features for other industries. But you can use the free plan to test drive it.

Pricing

The free plan is available for 250 contacts, but you can upgrade to paid plan starting at $16 per month to enjoy premium offerings.

10. Mailerlite: Best for Email Campaign Tracking

Mailerlite is an affordable email marketing service that offers growth-focused email solutions to customers.

It integrates your e-store with most email marketing tools to increase conversion. Mailerlite also incorporates ultra-tracking technology to deliver the most accurate insights on your marketing campaigns.

Unique Feature: Auto resend campaign
Target Users: Marketers, writers, publishers, eCommerce
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Newsletter Editor

Newsletters are a great way to keep customers informed and updated about your product and services. Create outstanding newsletters from scratch or touch up existing beautiful designs.

2. Website Designer

Every business needs a responsive and attractive website where prospective customers can interact with their brands—most email signups happen on your website anyway.

Utilize Mailerlite’s drag-and-drop website builder to design your business’s lively and engaging website layout.

3. Email Automation Features

Image Credit: Mailerlite

Monitor email clicks, customer behavior, and response to your emails to enable you to strategize. Automated emails handle follow-ups, email resends, and action prompts based on analyzed data.

4. Email Verifier

Mailerlite performs routine checks and deep cleaning on your email list to weed out inactive subscribers, dormant accounts, and spammy contacts.

Enjoy a fully optimized email list 24/7.

5. Blog Creator

Use its drag-and-drop builder to craft attention-grabbing blog posts to build your audience and share your unique ideas with your community.

Blogs are an important marketing strategy to adopt for your business. According to statistics, 77% of internet users read blogs.

Leverage the power of blogs and increase your site clicks.

6. Landing Page Gallery

Your prospective customers need an online location to interact with your business. This could be a landing page.

Choose from a range of templates for a mobile-friendly landing page. So you have one less thing to worry about in building your email marketing campaign.

7. Digital Products Marketing

Mailerlite offers an avenue for users to sell virtual products like ebooks, online courses, or other digital services.

Set up websites and include a payment gateway for easy patronage.

You can equally promote your digital products on Mailerlite.

More Features

Signup forms
Email automation
Newsletter subscription
Analytics and tracking
Facebook integrations

Pros

Mailerlite is simplified for even beginners to understand. Also, the email marketing service integrates with Shopify.

Pricing is fair, and you can enjoy up to 30 days free trial period for all paid plans to decide if you want to continue or not.

Cons

The free version is only open to one user and has limited functions and features.

Pricing

Free for up to 1000 subscribers. Monthly billing based on their annual plan:

Growing Business: $9 per month
Advanced: $19 per month
Enterprise: Custom pricing

11. ConvertKit: Best for Creators

ConvertKit targets creators and builds its features around their needs to attract, engage and monetize their audience. As a result, users can build, manage, and earn a living from your audience on a single platform.

Unique Feature: Creator pro
Target Users: Creators (authors, musicians, coaches)
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Features

1. Automated Email Marketing

ConvertKit lets you breeze through the email writing process by automating every stage. For example, schedule email sends, deliver welcome messages, and group subscribers automatically.

2. Advanced Creator

ConvertKit’s creator pro takes the creator business a notch higher. This feature allows subscriber scoring, newsletter referrals, timely support, and teamwork and provides deliverability reports.

This is the best email marketing tool for mainstream creators.

3. Email Design

Create, edit, and optimize your emails to convert faster. ConvertKit makes email designing easy and more fun.

You can choose from previous templates and flawlessly modify the font, color, or body of your emails.

4. Email Opt-In Forms

Whether you want to choose from numerous form templates or create a customized form yourself, ConvertKit got you covered.

Access free signup forms to retarget your audience.

5. Commerce

Turn your passion into a source of income with ConvertKit’s eCommerce channel, which enables you to sell or buy digital products easily.

Package and monetize your knowledge as ebooks, online courses, newsletters, music, or presets and sell to a willing audience.

6. Third-party Integrations

Integrate your ConvertKit to your most preferred third-party apps. You can access eCommerce, lead capture, ads, CRM, and many other third-party integrations.

7. Paid Newsletter

If you have rich content and a list of loyal readers who enjoy them, ConvertKit can help you earn from newsletters.

Create customized newsletters targeted at the right audience and put a price on your knowledge.

Mailerlite provides free newsletter templates.

More Features

Audience tag
Advanced Reporting
Community support
Broadcasts
Automation builder

Pros

ConvertKit promotes the creator business and is positioned to help creatives sell their products.

The free plan supports 300 subscribers with unlimited emails, forms, landing pages, and other email marketing features.

What’s more?

You get two months of free email marketing services when you opt for annual billing.

Cons

Features on ConvertKit are purpose-built specifically for creatives making the email marketing service a poor choice for other industries.

Migration to ConvertKit from any other email marketing tool is unavailable on the free version. Also, the creator plan only allows for a single team member addition.

Pricing

Free for up to 300 subscribers. Monthly billing begins at $9 per month for Creator and $25 per month for Creator Pro.

12. Sendy: Best Low Budget and Self-Hosted Solution

Sendy uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to deliver the best email marketing software for users who would like a solution that’s 100x cheaper than competitors.

Sendy is one of the most affordable email marketing services in the market.

Users don’t need to pay monthly subscriptions as this self-hosted email marketing service bills only the number of emails sent. However, you’ll need to buy, install, and update the Sendy email marketing software.

Unique Feature: Low-budget email sends
Target Users: eCommerce, SMEs
Pricing: Pay as you use

Features

1. Cheap Email Sends

Sendy offers the lowest low-price email send rate in the market. For example, you pay only $1 for every 10,000 email messages.

The affordability doesn’t affect deliverability and speed as it uses the widely trusted Amazon SES. So, you can achieve your email marketing goals on a low budget.

2. Email Campaign Reports

Get timely reports on your campaign performance and other marketing activities on the platform.

Reports give updated insights on your site activities to help you focus your energy on marketing efforts that produce the most results.

Reports are organized into beautiful visual representations like charts to simplify data.

3. Autoresponders

You can’t determine when customers will visit your site or indicate interest in your product.

But with auto response in place, you can rest assured that you’ll miss nothing.

Follow up on email subscribers without being present around the clock. Set marketing automation to answer inquiries, provide feedback, and engage customers while you’re away.

4. Email Clean Up

Sendy’s Housekeeping ensures your email list stays clean and relevant so you can channel your marketing efforts to the right audience.

Prune out redundant contacts, uninterested subscribers, and wrong email addresses, clogging your sales progress wheel.

5. Integrations and Zapier

Image Credit: Sendy

Explore many third-party apps like WordPress and thousands of marketing tools on Zapier by integrating Sendy with them.

The integration process is easy, but if you need expert support, the Sendy community is there to assist you at no cost. However, Sendy may charge a fee if you need them to help you install their email marketing software on your hosting server

6. Personalized Domains and Brands

Create your branded domain to increase brand awareness and customer trust. Let your URL capture your brand.

7. Personalized Fields

Save information about your subscribers on your created custom field. Stored data ranges from names to emails and demography.

Information from Sendy’s custom fields is useful in segmentation and audience tags when designing newsletters.

More Features

Subscription forms
Subscriber segmentation
Webhooks
Google Analytics integration
Personalized tags

Pros

Sendy is feature-rich for a low-budget email marketing platform.

Users only pay for emails sent. And the one-time fee required to use Sendy is refundable if you don’t get desired results—but this is case-by-case.

You can install Sendy on one domain but host emails for multiple domain names.

Cons

Sendy runs on your web server and requires a license to set up. Requires updating to newer versions from time to time. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t support a free plan.

Pricing

No monthly payment plan.

One-off $69 is to buy this email marketing software
Pay $1 for every 10,000 emails sent.

FAQs

What is the best email marketing software to choose?

Choosing an email marketing platform is tough. But you can make it slightly easier with a checklist.

Use this checklist to make your decision easier:

Understand the nature and purpose of the emails you intend to send.
Decide on the most important features your ideal email marketing software must possess.
Prepare your testing team
Develop a shortlist of productive apps.
Carefully assess each shortlisted app with your team.
Start exploring any free email marketing service you can access.

What are the categories of marketing emails?

Email Newsletters: they’re newsletters that contain vital brand information.
Transactional Emails: facilitates or updates commercial transactions, e.g., order confirmation email.
Behavioral Emails: on-target messages based on user behavior to previous messages on your site or third-party tracking sources.

What is B2B email marketing service?

B2B email marketing involves sending messages and email campaigns to businesses rather than individuals.

In a B2B marketing scenario, the communication link is between your business and another business.

Your targeting, product, and marketing activities are channeled toward converting other businesses to loyal customers.

How often should you send out marketing emails?

Frequent emails can turn customers off and make them unsubscribe from your list quickly. Ideally, you should drastically increase emails from twice monthly to once weekly.

Research shows that 33.3% of businesses send out emails weekly.

Whatever you decide, ensure to analyze progress reports and use insight to determine whether to increase or reduce the number of emails sent.

What is the importance of email marketing?

Email marketing helps businesses gather, manage and engage new site visitors. You can also keep existing customers updated on your latest offerings.

It costs 500% more to gain new customers than to retain an existing one. So, use email marketing to keep your loyal customers engaged.

What is the average ROI for email marketing?

Email marketing gives a significantly higher return than other types of marketing, like digital or traditional marketing.

You gain $42 per $1 invested in email marketing campaigns. This makes email marketing the most preferred digital marketing strategy for businesses.

Does email marketing increase sales?

Email marketing is an efficient and cost-effective approach to marketing across different industries.

Consumers who receive email offers are 138% more likely to patronize a business because of email marketing campaigns than those who don’t.

Hence, email marketing increases sales, lead generation, and overall brand engagement.

Summary

The email marketing space is rife with email marketing services built to meet different user needs.

So, choosing the right email marketing service from the pool of options can be tasking.

But we’ve highlighted the top email marketing services and features you should consider when migrating your email service to a different platform. Of course, Active Campaign would be the best email marketing service on this list if we must choose one.

Explore any of the best email marketing software mentioned above, and let us know if you need help.

Featured image by storyset on Freepik

The post 12 Best Email Marketing Services for 2022 (Ranked) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

12 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

Using Redis on Cloud? Here Are Ten Things You Should Know

It’s hard to operate stateful distributed systems at scale and Redis is no exception. Managed databases make life easier by taking on much of the heavy lifting. But you still need a sound architecture and apply best practices both on the server (Redis) as well as the client (application).

This blog covers a range of Redis-related best practices, tips and tricks including cluster scalability, client-side configuration, integration, metrics etc. Although I will be citing Amazon MemoryDB and ElastiCache for Redis from time to time, most (if not all) will be applicable to Redis clusters in general.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

7 octobre 2022/par Service comm.

Why Mutability Is Essential for Real-Time Data Analytics

Successful data-driven companies like Uber, Facebook, and Amazon rely on real-time analytics. Personalizing customer experiences for e-commerce, managing fleets and supply chains, and automating internal operations require instant insights into the freshest data.

To deliver real-time analytics, companies need a modern technology infrastructure that includes three things:

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

15 septembre 2022/par Service comm.

Introduction to AWS Config: Simplified Cloud Auditing

Modern cloud environments are ever-changing, and so is the nature of cloud computing. The growing cloud assets accompany the attack surface expansion problem for organizations, which unveils the need for visibility of cloud resources. AWS Config addresses that exact demand. It can be challenging to understand resources within your infrastructure like:

Seeing what resources you have
Understanding your current configurations
Knowledge of configuration changes and change histories
Assessing if your resources are compliant with specific governances controls
Having accurate and up-to-date audit information

Depending on the size of your AWS resources or deployment, overcoming these challenges and obtaining this information can become time-consuming and budget-intensive unless you use resource visibility and auditing tool like AWS Config.

25 juillet 2022/par Service comm.

Quiz: The Super-Difficult Website Speed Quiz

Users expect websites to load quickly. As a result, companies like Amazon and Target spend millions of dollars optimizing their sites to make them load as fast as possible because there is a direct correlation between site speed and conversions.

Websites typically don’t have load bars, so a user waiting for a site to load cannot know that it will be one more second or even that the site will load at all.

The best load time for a website is 0 seconds, an instantaneous load. However, that’s not possible with current technology. So how fast is fast enough? What will users really accept? Take our website speed quiz and see if you know…

Featured image via Unsplash.

The post Quiz: The Super-Difficult Website Speed Quiz first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

8 juillet 2022/par Service comm.

Design Patterns: How to Create Simple Interfaces

There are long-standing patterns in design that help us understand what the user wants and which solution will work best. These are referred to as design patterns. This article will explain how patterns help us appropriately construct an interface. We’ll dissect features like buttons, navigation, accordions, and date selection with examples.

This article will be helpful to both new and experienced designers who want to learn more about how to use interactive features and when to use them. If you’ve been in the industry for more than a year, you’ll know that nothing is black and white and that multiple ways can address the same problem depending on the situation.

Buttons

First, consider the following question: which of the buttons depicted in the graphic is better?

The first button will appear to be the obvious choice for many people. Indeed, it is a well-known pattern that most people will recognize; it is the perfect solution for many projects. However, if customers understand the context, they are less concerned with the shape; therefore, there is no need for the designer to think in stereotypical terms. The context or states of a button can demonstrate that it is a button. When we place the cursor at an interactive feature on one website, it turns into a circle. “View” will be written inside the circle. The interface will be less cluttered as a result, and you will be able to clearly show the user that they are dealing with an interactive interface.

Next, which of these two Skip and Sign Up buttons, each with a distinct design accent, is better?

Many people would most likely vote for the first couple. That was something I used to do as well. However, put yourself in the shoes of a user and observe what this interface expects of you. They also want us to collect data at registration, which they emphasize. You can, however, skip this step. Is it up to par? Yes, because many users are hesitant to register on the site and provide personal information. We decide for the user which action is a priority when we show this hierarchy of buttons. But why not let them make their own decision? This is becoming a more prevalent strategy nowadays. For example, we see two identically filled buttons at Nike: Register and Learn more.

Apple uses the Learn More and Buy buttons the same way. The latter isn’t a large red button that screams, “Buy now! Buy now!” The user also can decide what is more important right now.

And here’s another question: if you had to choose between Cancel and Save, which would you put first?

It’s difficult to say whether Cancel should be displayed first or Save. Assume I issue a command. Which is more important: having a button in the interface for the desired action or seeing all of the answer alternatives and then deciding? Designers frequently choose the second choice, but it is unimportant.

According to Nielsen Norman Group research, both the first and second patterns are understandable for customers. Android and iOS are two examples of this, as they use both methods. They all have their own set of benefits.

I enjoy how Apple handles this in macOS. The emphasis is on canceling the action if you are assigned an irreversible task (such as deleting data from the recycle bin). The user must fully comprehend that they cannot retrievd anything they delete.

So, when working with buttons, do the following:

Determine your task, i.e., what action the constructed buttons should prompt the user to take.
See if you can demonstrate that the button is a button by looking at its uses in the interface or its states.
Check to see if the text on the buttons is legible.

Navigation

I’ll also begin the navigation section with an example question. Consider a site’s navigational block and a logo (a circle on the slide). Is it better to put the logo in the middle of the navigation or on the left side?

Both options appear to be equivalent. However, according to various research, the upper left corner is still preferable. There are numerous explanations for this. Because we read from left to right, the logo is the first thing we see. It’s also a marker that tells the user where they came from.

The NNG research center conducted an interesting experiment on this topic. Users were tasked with purchasing a specific item from an online store. At the same time, the list did not include any well-known stores, only local businesses. Some sites’ logos were on the left side of the navigation, while others were in the middle. Commodities were purchased, but the users had no idea what was being tested in the trial. After a while, they were asked for the company’s name from which they purchased the merchandise on the internet. People remembered both the brand and the company name better when the logo was on the left. As a result, having the logo on the left is likely to be significantly better—especially for well-known organizations. Of course, this doesn’t stop a lot of websites from putting their logo in the middle of the navigation box.

Consider a site that displays page links in a burger-style menu. Is it better to hide all navigation in the burger or remove part of the elements and display them to the user?

According to research, it is preferable to highlight a part of the navigation. If you know what sections users visit first, you might be able to show them those sections immediately. However, the user must click on the icon and search through a comprehensive database for specific information. Therefore, it makes sense to expedite this process and immediately provide them with what they require.

This is true not only for mobile interfaces but also for desktop interfaces. In the example below, a directory must be opened independently to be viewed. When the focus of a user’s attention shifts, it irritates them. If a drop-down list displays when you open a menu, users are not always comfortable. After that, it must proceed from left to right, and so on. Therefore, it’s preferable to display the complete menu if possible.

When it comes to navigation, the issue of the menu’s number of items cannot be overlooked. The fewer options a user has, the easier it is for them to decide. It is suggested that 7-9 things are ideal on the internet. However, when there are a lot of sections, subcategories, and sub-subcategories (as in a marketplace), fitting everything into a minimal number of items isn’t always feasible.

There are various options in this instance. There are multiple tiers of menus that can be created. The website of the New York Times is an example. There is horizontal navigation and another burger on the upper left of the home page. A wide menu appears when you click it, with more sections at the bottom and more sections at the top. The fact that the New York Times is a vast resource justifies this. That is why the website’s designers placed the essential items on the horizontal while also indicating that there are other components. The menu is accessed using a button in the upper left corner. If the user is dissatisfied with the primary navigation, this placement enhances the likelihood that they will see the menu and click.

According to the three-click rule, the user must reach the needed information in three clicks. There is, however, no data to back this up. Users today are willing to spend significantly more time looking for information. For example, if we’re looking for a product at an online store, we browse to the appropriate department and then dig further into many subcategories until we find it. Then there’s more filtering, sorting, adding to comparisons, adding to cart, checkout, shipping, etc. This does not appear to fit within three clicks. As a result, don’t limit yourself to this guideline. It’s preferable to keep the navigation simple and obvious so that the user may rapidly reach his objectives.

Perhaps you could divide the interface so that the user chooses from 7-9 categories first, then another 7-9, then another 7-9, and so on till they reach the end. Although you shouldn’t make it too complicated by creating a hierarchy with ten to twenty levels—this is scarcely practical. Five catalog segments, in my opinion, are quite acceptable.

But what if there are a lot of subcategories, and you can’t sensibly divide them into 7-9 items? Here are two basic strategies to assist you: The first is a list of names in alphabetical order. The second point to consider is terminology. This may be seen with Amazon. Take a look at their home decor area, which is organized alphabetically by subcategories. This makes finding things much easier for the user. The essential requirement is that the name be correct and recognizable to the user. You should not use jargon, slang, or professional vocabulary.

In some places, I genuinely admire Amazon’s approach. The creators placed a couple of the most popular subcategories at the top of the list, then let the rest of them go in alphabetical order. This is an excellent solution to the problem because it allows you to display the most popular things first.

Avic follows suit. Apple products account for the majority of the company’s revenue. As a result, breaking up or hiding such products makes no sense; instead, they are removed from the catalog and relocated to the top, increasing the number of categories on the main page. Again, it appears that the user will have difficulty making a decision. However, if Apple is the primary source of revenue, it seems logical to feature this section right away.

The examples considered are based on simple navigation. However, not every task is like this in practice. You might want to do something entirely out of the ordinary in some circumstances. For example, you may have seen a developer’s website in France where you have to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to drive a car that rides between menu items to traverse between sections. This is a rare occurrence, and even though it appears to me to tackle a slightly different problem, it succeeds—and in the process, it generates an environment around the project.

Here’s another example of an impressive menu from the Warsaw Puppet Theater’s website. All navigation is done using symbolic images that appear to be on strings and move as you point at them, much like puppets. As a result, the user becomes more engaged in the navigation game. In the tradition of puppet theater, this approach produces a delightful ambiance.

Go over the following items before beginning to work with navigation:

Is there anything you don’t want to be seen on the site? If the service is huge, consider how you might make the user’s life easier: alphabetical order, putting critical stuff first, constructing sophisticated breadcrumbs, etc.
Find a way to display to the user where they are now and where they can go. This is critical because you should always design states for all interactive elements: normal, on hover, active, unavailable, and in the process of loading.
Determine whether the menu will be anchored at the top and what it will contain. A language switcher, for example, will most likely be located in the top right corner of a bilingual site. Should you, however, remove the option to change the language if the visitor has already begun scrolling down the page?

Accordion

Let’s get to the accordion now. First, let’s look at two different versions of this interface element: one with the chevron pointing down and one with the plus symbol. Which version of the icon do you think is better? Then there’s the question of whether the icon should be placed to the right or left of the text, independent of its type.

According to studies, users recognize accordions and are more likely to click on the text. They click on the icon 25% of the time when it’s on the right and 75% of the time the text it’s on the left. Does this mean there’s no need for the icon to be on the right? No, it’s pretty acceptable to put it there. In truth, it doesn’t matter where we put it; the important thing is that we put it somewhere and make it big enough to click on.

The only difference is that the procedure takes a little longer when you click on the icon. This is because individuals aim and try to click on the icon accurately. As a result, it is vital to create such an element large enough to work with comfortably. I would even propose enlarging the clickable area rather than the icon itself. The project “Dia,” in which the icons are as large as the accordion itself, appeals to me. This site is, I believe, simple and convenient for all users. Each cell is clickable and takes up the entire screen width in this example.

When it comes to the arrow’s direction, you shouldn’t always aim it right. Many users have learned that pointing the arrow to the right indicates heading to another page. Only the tiny area, text, and icon in the example below are clickable, and there is a button at the bottom with an arrow that points in the same direction as the accordion’s equivalent. However, the acts are distinct. When you click the accordion, it will open block down, and when you click the button, you will be redirected to another page. People may be perplexed by this.

Giving the user an accordion with no identifying signs is likewise not good. A person must know which aspect of the interface they are interacting with. You must either use an icon or demonstrate that the element is clickable. The only thing that indicates clickability in the example above is the changing appearance of the cursor when hovering over the text. However, it is not visible; it must be larger, or a term such as “Read” should be used. Without that, the user won’t be able to tell the accordion apart from the bold text selection.

As I previously stated, you must think out all interactive features in terms of states. If there was a positive, for example, it should change—or at least become a minus. As a result, the user will realize that the drop-down box can be hidden.

It’s inconvenient when the icon vanishes after you click on it. The user anticipates being able to close the block at the exact location where they first opened it. After all, they may not like the response that appears and may want to delete it right away. He’ll have to re-aim now that the button has been repositioned. Here’s an unusual example of an accordion plus that isn’t clickable. This is only true for mobile navigation. If the user has previously dealt with the desktop version, they may not recognize what’s wrong and believe it’s a bug when switching to the mobile version.

Imagine you’re charged with deciding whether to keep the open items or conceal them when the user opens others. On the one hand, if the items don’t shut, the symbol will not move because no items are transferring. On the other hand, if there is too much text, the user may have trouble navigating to the following question. As a result, it may be preferable to close superfluous blocks automatically. However, consider the number of responses in a specific accordion.

The accordion is a multipurpose element. Not only may it be utilized for the FAQ area, but also the checkout page. According to Baymard, more than 30% of online retailers worldwide accept payments through accordion-style checkouts, with the percentage in the United States being considerably higher at 56%.

This solution has several benefits. The user can first view the following steps to complete (say, which payment systems are accepted). You don’t even have to click “Next” or navigate to another website to accomplish this. Second, the accordion makes it simple to navigate from block to block to check data without having to reload the page and risk losing it. After all, if the user made a mistake in the first area and discovered it in the second, it’s simple to correct it here. You’d have to return to the previous page in a typical checkout and risk losing the information you’d filled out but hadn’t sent to the server.

You can also use an accordion to create menus. However, you must exercise caution in this situation. The parent accordion category in the example below has no content. As a result, if you repeatedly click on the items to collapse the accordion, the entire content area remains empty. In this situation, it’s also a good idea to include some information in this page section.

The fantastic, beautiful accordion on hover is another example. It is quite adaptable. Although there is no accordion in the mobile version, it is essentially just banners that translate to other links.

Another more extreme example created by evident admirers of such a solution is an accordion within an accordion. The entire site can be navigated using these blocks. It’s amazing.

In mobile interfaces, accordions are also essential for website design. They make it simple to conceal information. All navigation on The Guardian’s website is done through these blocks. The only thing that bothers me is that the parent categories aren’t clickable. A user does not have the choice of seeing all of the sports news. Only the subcategories “Football,” “Cricket,” “Rugby,” and so on are available. On the other hand, The Guardian has moved the parent categories on the front page, which is a reasonable answer to such an issue.

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, took a very different approach. They didn’t post the categories on the main page and instead crammed everything into a single block. When a user visits a category, however, there is the Main section. This allows you to navigate to the main parent section or a specific subcategory.

Let’s summarize the accordion:

Always ask yourself from the start if you really need an accordion. After all, the user’s “fee” is the click. You can sometimes get away without it and supply all the information at once.
Consider which icon to use. It can be anything, but the most important thing is that it is simple to use.
Where should the symbol be placed? It is highly dependent on how everything adapts. For example, if you have a long line, it is preferable to set the symbol on the left. Then, you won’t have to worry about the icon vanishing when you collapse the accordion into a small block and shift the text to the following line.
Choose whether all blocks are closed by default or the initial block is left open. This is dependent on your task and the aims of the user.

Date

The choice of date is the next crucial factor to consider when discussing design patterns. I’ll begin with a comparison, as is customary. Users of iOS 14 who have set the alarm clock time will be familiar with this scenario. What is the better option?

I like the first choice since it is more attractive and does not distort the font as much as the second. However, the first variant has a potential issue: it is difficult to modify and twist. After all, the space is limited, and the user must fit precisely into the spot. It’s worth noting that Apple decided to leave both alternatives open.

Consider what you’ll use the Date Picker for a while you’re creating it: a date range for booking hotels or planning excursions, a date to set a birthday or reminder, a date to indicate the time for a movie session, or for ordering a cab. This will impact the rest of the process of envisioning and designing this feature.

It’s critical, in my opinion, to describe the many ways in which the user obtains information right now. The four options are a calendar, a drum (more of a mobile solution), a conventional input area, and a drop-down list. Let’s look at a few distinct solutions that all deal with airline tickets. Wizz Air, for example, utilizes a calendar, but it’s a double one so that the customer can see two months at once.

But, if so, which start date should be specified? It seems it should be the next day, and the website shows this. However, studies have shown that users are not always happy when a date has already been set. People rarely purchase next-day plane tickets. Therefore this “default” setting will almost certainly need to be modified.

Qatar Airlines went even further by announcing a start and end date. Today is the first day of the program. Is that choice required if the user logs in at 23:58? The second issue is that there is no differentiation between the start and end dates and all days in between. Everything is painted in the same hue. Users want to see anchors for dates if they plan a long trip that begins in one location and concludes in another. People are used to being told that we begin and end at specific places. As a result, the user can be certain that the dates are correct.

Today, UIA puts both the departure and return dates on the calendar. We’ve already established that this isn’t ideal. It’s also challenging to select a destination because you have to first click on the list, then go to the dropdown, search for the country, etc. It’s a long and winding road. But, it appears to me that the main blunder is something else. The search results output is blank. If I select two destinations and dates, I may be informed that that destination has no available flights. If I go on to the following date on the calendar, there are no flights available. Overbooking is the only method to find out when they will arrive. I’m likely to use a third-party aggregator that gathers data from numerous airlines straightforwardly and conveniently.

SkyUp’s calendar is one of my favorites. It includes large fields that open up a large calendar, and it’s simple to set the trip’s start and end dates. It indicates days when there are no flights for a specific location, and you can view the price for each ticket right away. This is quite useful because it allows you to choose a day and a flight even before you click confirm.

Let us now turn our attention to the drum. You can enter nearly any information into such an element, including time, date, and other lists. Users may easily navigate this tool and jump between values.

The input field follows. We must consider the format if we allow the user to enter a date using the keyboard. For example, in different regions of the world, “12.10.2021” may be interpreted differently: for some, it may be October 12, while for others, it may be December 10. This is especially significant in the case of the following example site for renting a car in another country. The user must be aware of the format they are dealing with. In this circumstance, several experts advise that the user writes in text. However, there is the issue of localization: would the system recognize that the language is not global English but rather a more non-standard language? After all, the user can use abbreviations when writing. You must either instruct the user on how to do it or use other solutions, such as placing a calendar icon next to it. In this method, the user controls how the data is entered.

If the drop-down list is modest, such as months, there is nothing wrong with it. However, you may accumulate an excessively long list over time. Consider the website Ukrzaliznytsia. The time limit is one hour, and there are 24 items on the list. Perhaps a mixed approach is best here, where the user enters a few digits and then selects from a list.

This is precisely the approach used in Google Calendar. If you start writing 16 in the input box, the sub-options appear at 16:00, 16:15, 16:30, and 16:45 (according to the system’s set step of 15 minutes).

Let’s summarize calendars:

When creating a calendar, remember to figure out what format the date will be in, as well as localization, language, and how to define where the day and month will be.
It’s worth noting that the start of the week varies by region and personal preference—in some cases, it’s Sunday rather than Monday.
Figure out whether the fields should have some default value if they are going to make sense to users or leave everything blank at the start.
Decide if unavailable days should and can be shown. In some cases, there may be technical limitations here. I’ll refer you to the examples mentioned above. SkyUp may not have many flights, and Qatar Airlines has an order of magnitude more. Because of this, it is not always possible to pull flight information to the calendar before the user sends a request to the server.
Determine whether the next entry step should be opened automatically. For example, for Wizz Air, after filling in the departure date, the field for the end date will open automatically, while for UIA, you need to click the field again for the second date.
What to give the user first: the date or the time? Let’s say you want to sign up for an English course. You have certain working hours, and you want to get to classes before or after them, any day suits you. What is the primary goal: to allow a person to enter the time and then show the available days for a given schedule, or do otherwise? That brings up another question: how do you show selected and unavailable days or other labels? For example, in Google calendar, everything is well separated by color tags: events, public holidays, invitations to events, etc. But in this scenario, you need to think about the possibility of creating a legend that describes all the tags you’ve created.

Remember: Design Patterns Must Solve the User’s Problems

If you summarize everything above, the main recommendation is simple: before applying any design patterns, make sure you know what tasks the user should complete and how to solve them. Based on this, you can build an interface with gorgeous and, more significantly, human-friendly buttons, navigation, accordions, dates, and other features.

The post Design Patterns: How to Create Simple Interfaces first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

4 mai 2022/par Service comm.

Using AWS Lambda Function URL To Build a Serverless Backend for Slack

A combination of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway is a widely-used architecture for serverless microservices and API-based solutions. They enable developers to focus on their applications, instead of spending time provisioning and managing servers.

API Gateway is a feature-rich offering that includes support for different API types (HTTP, REST, WebSocket), multiple authentication schemes, API versioning, canary deployments, and much more! However, if your requirements are simpler and all you need is an HTTP(S) endpoint for your Lambda function (for example, to serve as a webhook), you can use Lambda Function URLs! When you create a function URL, Lambda automatically generates a unique HTTP(S) endpoint that is dedicated to your Lambda function.

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

30 avril 2022/par Service comm.

10 AWS Services That Use SQL

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest cloud platform in the world, with over 200 features. In this article, we break down 10 AWS services that support at least some SQL syntax, talk about their use cases, and give examples of how to write queries.

Service	Description	SQL Support	Use Case
RDS	Postgres, MySQL, etc.	Full	Small-medium web apps
Aurora	Serverless databases	Full	Serverless apps
Redshift	Data warehouse	Full	OLAP, Petabytes of data, analytics
DynamoDB	NoSQL database	Some – PartiSQL	Ecommerce, building fast
Keyspaces	Managed Cassandra (key value)	Some – CQL	Messaging
Neptune	Graph database	Some – openCypher	Social networks
Timestream	Time series database	Partial	IOT, Logging
Quantum Ledger	Cryptographically verified transactions	Some – PartiSQL	Finance
Athena	Ad-hoc queries on S3	Some – CTAS	Historical data
Babelfish	MSFT SQL Server on Aurora	Full	.NET

The table above shows how SQL support varies between the services. A graph database cannot be queried in the same way as a classic relational database, and various subsets of SQL, like PartiQL, have emerged to fit these models. In fact, even within standard SQL, there are many SQL dialects for different companies like Oracle and Microsoft.

8 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2022

We’re going to have some fun this month. There are so many new tools and resources out there for designers that make life easier, and others are simply enjoyable.

Here’s what is new for designers this month …

Polka Dot Generator

Polka Dot Generator is exactly what you think. Adjust colors, dot size, shadow, and fuzziness, and then export the CSS for use in your projects. This could make for fun effects or backgrounds.

Design Memes

Design Memes is just a lot of fun. It’s a collection of memes based on design culture updated daily. It’s a little silly and a little reflective. Yes, it’s completely ok to laugh at yourself.

Pppointed

Pppointed is an SVG arrow-making tool that helps you create cool pointers without a lot of effort. Just pick a color, shape, and style, and you are ready to go. Save your custom arrows as SVG files or copy the code and use them on the web whenever you want to point at things visually.

Open Source Color System

Open Source Color System is a set of palettes that include carefully picked colors to help you overcome interface challenges. For example, it is one of the only color tools out there that includes palettes for light and dark modes. It’s also designed with accessibility in mind to help you create a complete and usable system.

Cowsay

Cowsay is a nifty little web interface of the same name made with Svelte and HTML Canvas. Play with it and then copy your art as ASCII or an image.

Minze

Minze is a simple JavaScript framework for native web components. It’s tiny and fast, modern, shareable, framework agnostic, and uses TypeScript to scale your component library. Plus, you can get started with it right away.

Tally

Tally is a simple – and free – online form builder. You can use it without coding, and it works like a document file, so there’s no learning curve. You can create unlimited forms, integrate with other tools, set logic, collect payments, and more. There’s a pro version as well if you need even more features.

Hue.Tools

Hue.Tools is another color tool to help you maximize effort when creating palettes. Generate a color you like, see specs and values in all the different color spaces, inspiration from design sites, and colors that work with it. It’s fun and functional.

Sturdy

Sturdy is a low overhead code collaboration platform for fast-moving teams. With Sturdy, you work in the open with your team. Discover and interact with draft code as it is written. Those team drafts are like live pull requests (Figma or Google Docs) but using your local editor.

Mage

Mage is a tool that transforms your data into predictions. Build, train, and deploy predictive models in minutes with no AI experience required. This is a premium tool, but you can try it for free.

Huemint

Huemint is a machine-learning-based color scheme generator for websites, graphics, and branding. There are many options to play with, and you can generate some pretty interesting combinations that ordinarily you might not think of.

CSSUI

CSSUI is another tool you’ll love because it includes pure CSS interactive components without any JavaScript. It’s easy to customize, uses standard HTML, is easy for all levels to use, is tiny and fast, and supports pretty much all modern browsers. It’s an open-source tool that you can download and use immediately.

UI Icons Line – Free

UI Icons Line – Free is a set of 1,000 free vectors for use in your projects. Who doesn’t need a robust set of icons?

Skill Icons

Skill Icons is a set of icons to help you showcase your design and development skills on your resume or GitHub. They all look great and match.

Ambient Design

Ambient Design is a mobile app design market where you can get mobile UI kits for Figma. Purchase kits separately, or buy quarterly or yearly plans to access all current and future UI kits.

TextFrame

TextFrame lets you create animated tutorials for your users to get the help they need. It integrates directly with WordPress or any other website with just a couple of lines of code and includes plenty of customizable options to make it easy for you to help others understand how to use the website. The tool is free for one site and just a few bucks per month for additional sites.

Booqsi

Booqsi is a fun new social media network for book lovers. The platform is still in beta and lets you save and share books, create shelves for reading, and doesn’t force a connection to Amazon. It’s just all about the books. And there’s a bonus: every link from the site goes back to bookshop.org to help you find and support local bookstores.

Stylo

Stylo is an open-source WYSIWYG interactive editor for JavaScript. It is made to bring great user experience and interactivity to the web, for everyone, with no dependencies. It has an interactive design, is customizable, and is future-proof.

Tutorial: How to Favicon in 2022

How to Favicon in 2022 is an excellent lesson on the five icon files every website needs (plus one JSON file). If you are creating more than that, this is a must-read.

Tutorial: Creating Generative SVG Grids

Creating Generative SVG Grids is an in-depth, step-by-step tutorial for anyone who wants to create a more artistic SVG. It uses a handful of tools, including SVG.js, Generative Utils, TinyColor, and GSAP.

Fromage

Fromage is a new and beautiful premium typeface family from Adam Ladd. It includes 14 styles with an interesting serif and alternative sans option. The high-contrast design is great for a variety of projects.

HD Colton

HD Colton is a premium super sans serif typeface with a whopping 91 styles and family package options. It would make a bold statement as a display option.

The post Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.