Today, I’ll show you how to detect whether an HTTP request was submitted via HTML form or with JavaScript to the server.
The examples in this post are based on Nuxt.js and include references to a few global functions (defineEventHandler, getRequestHeaders, sendRedirect). It’s not important that you know how they work. Just focus on the concept. I’ll explicitly highlight the important bits
Database sharding is the process of dividing data into smaller pieces called « shards. » Sharding is typically introduced when there’s a need to scale writes. During the lifespan of a successful application, the database server will hit the maximum number of writes it can perform either at the processing or capacity level. Slicing the data into multiple shards—each one on its own database server—reduces the stress on each individual node, effectively increasing the write capacity of the overall database. This is what database sharding is.
Distributed SQL is the new way to scale relational databases with a sharding-like strategy that’s fully automated and transparent to applications. Distributed SQL databases are designed from the ground up to scale almost linearly. In this article, you’ll learn the basics of distributed SQL and how to get started.
About 15-20 years ago, web application developers had the knowledge and the technical skills necessary to create an application: HTML, CSS, JS, PHP/Python/ASP, Web Server Management, MySQL/Postgres (both data and service management), etc.
With time the web applications became more complex with bigger requirements. New technologies, frameworks, and paradigms bounce into the development and pushed developers to specialize in some areas arising new roles from this specialization.
Finding a good web design agency is challenging, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. With so many options, it’s challenging to determine which best meets your needs.
The obvious place to start looking for a web design agency is by asking friends, family, and colleagues for personal recommendations, but bear in mind that they may not be qualified to judge your options objectively, and you’ll need to carry out due diligence on any web design agency recommended to you.
The process of researching and evaluating different design agencies can be time-consuming and complex. To make it easier, you must start with a clear understanding of your goals and expectations.
Begin by making a long list of web design agencies and freelance designers that might fit the bill. Then whittle it down to a shortlist by discounting anyone whose portfolio you don’t like — while design is about more than just subjective opinions, it’s also vital that you end up with a website you like and are proud to show off as part of your brand identity.
Now you have your shortlist, there are several key questions to pose to each potential candidate to ensure that they are the right fit for you. Here are the ten questions you should be asking to put you on track to finding your perfect website design partnership.
The first thing to realize is that there are many different kinds of websites, and as such, there are also many different kinds of website design services.
The types of website design services offered by web design agencies range from basic site creation to complex ecommerce solutions.
Basic web design services usually include developing and implementing a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress, Joomla, or Craft. Agencies may also provide more advanced services such as custom website design, SEO optimization, and web hosting.
Different agencies and freelancers specialize in various types of sites, so you must compare their solutions with your requirements.
Experience matters when choosing a web design agency. Ask potential candidates about the years they have been in business and the types of projects they’ve worked on. New doesn’t necessarily mean low quality — plenty of great agencies are founded by experienced designers whose portfolios are owned by their previous employers.
However, it is easier to ensure a web design agency is a good fit for your project if you can review case studies of previous jobs. Case studies will provide valuable insights into their approach and techniques and how successful their clients have been.
When it comes to web design agencies, there are pros and cons to hiring a local or remote team. On the one hand, working with a local agency can provide many advantages, such as in-person interaction and access to their resources. On the other hand, working with a remote team may offer greater flexibility, cost savings, and access to a global talent pool.
It’s essential to ask about an agency’s location to understand their services’ advantages and disadvantages.
Effective team communication is essential for any project, so you should check the working hours of any agency you select — you don’t want to wait overnight for answers to urgent queries.
Web design agencies may specialize in various industries and platforms, depending on the specific needs of their clients. For example, some might specialize in ecommerce solutions such as Shopify or WooCommerce, while others might focus on frameworks such as Vue or React.
Additionally, web design agencies may specialize in creating custom websites for specific industries, such as healthcare or finance.
Suppose you can locate a web design agency with previous experience developing websites for clients similar to you. In that case, they will be better placed to anticipate challenges specific to your project.
Before hiring a web design agency, it’s essential to understand their approach to website design. For example, some agencies may take a more traditional “design and build” approach where they create the entire site from start to finish, while others may prefer to work with an existing template and make customizations.
Some design agencies use a traditional waterfall approach, while others adopt an agile methodology. Waterfall is a sequential process in which each step happens in isolation, whereas agile is an interactive approach with frequent testing and feedback.
Knowing how an agency prefers to work will help you establish realistic expectations about how they will integrate into your company culture.
Website design agencies may offer a range of additional services, depending on the needs of their clients. Beyond website design and development, many agencies also provide SEO (search engine optimization) and web hosting services.
All reputable web design agencies will ensure that your website meets the minimum standard for technical SEO. But some agencies will also adapt your content to incorporate keywords and phrases related to your industry to help you increase website traffic once the site is launched.
When it comes to web hosting, your web design agency will help you choose the best type of hosting for your needs, but some agencies also provide hosting and will set up and manage a server for you.
When it comes to website design projects, timeline management is critical to ensure that your new website is delivered on time and within budget. Managing a website project requires careful planning and execution to keep everything on track.
You should also ask how the project will be managed throughout its lifecycle so that you can schedule your in-house timetables.
Launching your new website begins a long-term relationship with your web design agency. It’s essential to ask about their post-launch support process to ensure you have all the help and guidance you need. The agency should be able to provide comprehensive maintenance services such as bug fixing, content updates, and security checks.
Additionally, you should understand the process for making changes and requests after the website launch. Find out how quickly they can respond to your inquiries and the cost of any needed updates. This will help you plan your budget accordingly and avoid any unexpected fees.
Speaking of costs, it’s vitally important to establish ballpark figures before you shortlist an agency. Like any industry, there is a wide range of different price points, dependent not just on the project but the marketability of the web design agency.
Make sure you ask for a comprehensive quote that outlines all the costs involved. Ask for a payment schedule so you know how much you’re expected to pay upfront. Check on any additional fees, such as maintenance or hosting.
Never adjust your project to secure a web design agency outside your budget. If you can’t afford a particular provider, strike them off your shortlist and move on to the next candidate.
As a client, there are several steps you need to take to ensure that your website design project runs smoothly. You will need to supply a detailed brief if nothing else.
You should be prepared to schedule regular feedback sessions so your agency can stay on track. You’ll probably need to supply brand materials such as logos, style guides, and any text, images, and videos you want to be included. The agency may want you to sign a contract, agree on a payment schedule, and pay an initial deposit.
Hiring a web design agency is challenging, especially if you don’t have the technical knowledge to assess an agency’s past work objectively.
By asking the questions above, you’ll get a solid sense of what the company is like to work for, how well they fit your corporate culture, and whether their proposed solution is within your budget.
The more questions you ask, the better informed you’ll be, and the more likely your website design project will succeed. Good luck!
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 10 Questions You Must Ask Before Hiring a Web Design Agency first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
In this article, we will discuss the automation of application deployment on a web server using Jenkins Pipeline. We will use Jenkins Pipeline as a script. Jenkins Pipeline as script can be of two types: declarative type and scripted type. Here, we will use declarative Jenkins Pipeline script.
If you are new to Jenkins Pipeline script, then we would recommend you to go through this article first.
Cloud migration methodology is a high-level plan that is constructed in order to transfer data and applications from an existing on-premise server to the cloud server. Since data is what makes a company valuable these days, it is important that we have a good migration plan to move the data.
In this article, we will be taking a look at the different challenges risks, and approaches of migration in cloud migration.
You don’t need an online shop to sell on Pinterest, but owning one can give you the upper hand.
The only problem is that managing an eCommerce store is expensive.
On the other hand, selling on Pinterest has a low entry barrier. So it’s an excellent place to start even if you can’t afford a website.
Plus, Pinterest has many engaged users who are happy to buy your product, craft or offer. This is the only social media network where the most significant users hold the most disposable income in America.
This guide shows you how to sell to these top spenders on Pinterest, whether you own a website or not.
Pinterest is not just a visual discovery engine. The social network brings more to the table.
With 433 million monthly active users and over one billion web visits in August 2022, the platform offers businesses new opportunities to reach highly engaged audiences.
Data Source: SimilarWeb
Also, data shows that about 38% of pinners have a college education, whereas Snapchat is 20%, Twitter is 32%, and Reddit stands at 15%, offering you access to a sophisticated market.
The social network enables about two billion monthly searches.
The company’s data revealed that 97% of the searches are unbranded, providing a level playing ground for all competing brands. However, for context, 42% of Google search queries are with branded keywords, meaning many searchers already have a brand in mind before searching.
Also, 80% of pinners said they discovered new products or brands on Pinterest, and 85% buy things they’ve seen from brands. Additionally, pinners are 55% more likely to buy a product after seeing a visual on Pinterest compared to other platforms.
The platform is not all talk and no action.
For instance, nearly nine in ten weekly pinners make buying decisions on Pinterest, and 50% of users have bought after seeing a Promoted Pin.
Pinterest might not be as popular and imposing as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, but the user engagement shows the platform can hold its ground against some perennial favorites.
Its numbers are impressive, making Pinterest too good to pass up.
You can sell on Pinterest without a website.
It’s an excellent option for affiliate marketers. A Pinterest business account will work best since it lets you monitor analytics and run ads. You might also need a Facebook page and a Medium account to further your marketing.
When you’re ready, here’s how to start selling on Pinterest without a website.
Pinterest Board is a collection of pins.
It lets you stay organized. You can create different boards to categorize your products. For example, having boards for televisions, sound systems, video players, and other products in your catalog will make sense if you deal in electronics. You can further classify the boards into sections, like LG, Samsung, and Sony.
Boards make it easy for shoppers to find your products.
To create one, log in to your profile and click the Saved tab.
Click the + icon to reveal a drop-down menu, then select Board from the options.
Enter the product category in the name field to create the Board.
Open the newly created Board, click the ellipsis icon (the three horizontal dots), then the Edit board option to type a befitting description for the Board.
Use the Organize option to create and organize the pins into sections.
Create visually engaging pins to display your products.
One exciting thing about Pinterest is that you can create unlimited pins for the same product using different visuals, titles, and descriptions. And the more pins you create, the greater your chances of increasing your visibility and CTR.
The mistake most brands make is creating a single pin for a product and leaving the rest to fate.
But it doesn’t work that way.
As a visual discovery engine, you’ll need to create a lot of pins to stand out and hold your ground on Pinterest. It also lets you cover most of the keywords pinners use to discover products on the platform, stretching your visibility further.
To create pins, head to your profile and select Create Pin from the Create drop-down to begin.
On the next page, select the Board you wish to have the Pin on from the drop-down, then enter the Pin’s title. Of course. Use the keywords people are likely to search for to target Pinterest searchers.
You can see in this Pin that Cicinia, an online retailer of bridal dresses and accessories, uses searchable keywords in the title. But the Pin doesn’t have a description. Don’t make the same mistake.
Write a compelling description to entice users to click your link.
You can search your keywords on Google to see what other brands have as their descriptions if you don’t know what to write. Then, add a discount code to the description if you have any. It supports up to 500 characters, so make the most of it.
Finally, upload your visuals, add your alt text describing the visual you uploaded, then include the destination link, in this case, your affiliate link, and publish the Pin.
Repeat this step for the rest of your products.
Pinterest comes with a built-in ad manager.
With this tool, you can promote your pins to the perfect audience. It lets you target people based on demographics like age, gender, and location. You may also run campaigns based on their interests or search terms.
Additionally, Pinterest allows advertisers to upload their customer lists for custom targeting. However, it works best for sellers that own a website.
Running ads means you don’t have to compete with the over 240 billion pins for attention. Instead, promoted pins put you on the spot and in front of the right people.
Dimniko, an online advertising agency, helped a client sell over 22,500 products with Pinterest ad campaigns, generating up to 11-times ROAS.
The brand pivoted to Pinterest after experiencing slow sales from other channels. According to them, the client spent around $15,000 daily on Facebook ads, generating $3 million monthly in Shopify; that’s $6 for every $1 spent on ads.
But with Pinterest, they generated $1.29 million with $116,000—$11.12 per $1.
Dimniko advised Pinterest advertisers to kill assets that didn’t meet the KPI in the first seven days and scale the budget of the top performers by 20% every two to three days.
They admitted that half of their sales were due to their retargeting strategy and suggested that new advertisers should start with their existing buyers and ‘actalikes.’
Several opportunities exist for you outside Pinterest.
Depending solely on the channel to reach prospects is a considerable risk. The platform only controls about 450 million of the estimated 4.7 billion global social media users, so there are always more people to reach.
You can do this organically by publicly sharing your pins or boards using trending and relevant Twitter and TikTok hashtags. Also, brands like Bergdorf Goodman use Facebook to promote their pins.
Like them, you can post your pins’ links as updates on your Facebook page.
Promote the post to reach more people.
Nearly 43% of global internet-enabled persons use ad blockers, meaning there’s little future for intrusive marketing.
So, content marketing is a no-brainer.
It lets you reach prospects through organic search when they are most likely to purchase. Also, creating consistent, valuable, and engaging content helps you answer customers’ questions, build trust, and influence buying decisions.
Studies found that content marketing generates three times more leads than traditional marketing channels. Also, brands that create content have a six times higher conversion rate than non-adopters.
Thankfully, you don’t need a website for content marketing with Medium. It’s a free and intuitive online publishing platform that lets anyone create, share and discover content.
Sign up on the platform. Research keywords and create quality content with them. You can repurpose the article into a video with tools like Lumen5.com and share it on YouTube.
A website puts your Pinterest marketing on steroids.
At least you won’t have to upload your products manually. Instead, the platform can automatically pull your products from your online store to Pinterest and update your catalog regularly. It also lets you retarget non-converters and upsell existing buyers, improving conversion and customer lifetime value.
Follow these steps to connect your website to Pinterest and sell on the platform.
Create an online store if you don’t have one yet.
Pinterest currently supports Shopify and WooCommerce stores and online shops that can integrate with the following:
Next, add the website to your Pinterest business account to claim ownership. Verifying your site allows you to access analytics for the pins you publish from your website and pins other users created from your site and get a verified merchant tag.
You can claim your website by adding a DNS TXT record to your domain host, uploading an HTML file to your website’s web server, or adding an HTML tag to your website code.
Upload your catalogs to start selling on the platform.
Catalogs are a feed ingestion tool that lets you connect your eCommerce shop to your Pinterest store. The file lists all your available products and their corresponding attributes, creating a data source for the Pinterest store.
Pinterest ingests the data source every 24 hours to create your product Pins and process up to 20 million products per account. You’ll need to contact Pinterest support if you have more than that number of products.
You can add up to 20 data sources to promote your products across different markets, languages, and currencies. However, uploading your data sources to Pinterest is only available in selected countries. If you’re eligible, the steps here can get you started.
Alternatively, you may use third-party integrations like Shopify’s Pinterest app and Pinterest for WooCommerce plugin to get your products on Pinterest. Tools like Lengow, ChannelAdvisor, GoDataFeed, Feedonomics, and Productsup can also streamline your Pinterest data ingestion.
Rich Pin is a step up for Pinterest pins.
They have extra information like price, product availability, description, and product link, providing pinners with rich shopping experiences. Rich pins encourage higher click-through rates, enabling you to sell more. They also make better ads.
With rich Pins, you don’t need to update your product Pins manually whenever the need arises. Instead, they update automatically each time you change your product titles, description, price, or availability.
Another fantastic thing is that rich Pins require only a one-time, easy setup. Pinterest will convert all your product Pins to rich Pins if you enable the feature for your account, and new Pins will appear as rich Pins.
Shopify natively supports Pinterest product-rich Pins, so it doesn’t require manual setup. Open any product page, copy the link and append .oembed to the URL, then validate with the Pinterest Rich Pins Validator.
If your store runs on WooCommerce, install the Yoast SEO plugin and enable Open Graph in the plugin setting. Next, copy any of your product URLs and validate. It’s that easy.
However, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves for custom sites.
It requires you to manually add rich metadata to the header of all your product pages. Pinterest supports Schema.org properties. Use any product schema generator like Merkel Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD code for each product page.
Next, use Google Tag Manager to add the code to the page’s HTML.
To begin, log in to your account and select Add a new tag under the “New Tag” section.
Choose a name for your tag, then select Custom HTML as the tag type.
Scroll down to Triggering to choose a trigger, then click the + icon.
Name your trigger and select Page View as the trigger type. Next, choose Some Page Views under the “This trigger fires on” section.
Specify your trigger condition, save and then publish your tag.
Repeat the steps for all your product pages, then validate any URLs to apply for rich Pins.
Product groups help you manage your inventory.
It also lets you promote a product category instead of individual Pins. You can create a product group manually or leave that for Pinterest to handle if you use Shopify. The app can automatically sync your Shopify collections to create relevant Pinterest product groups.
The auto-created product groups include All Products, Top Sellers, Back In Stock, Best Deals, New Arrivals, and Most Popular.
You can add others manually if you need different product groups like brand, custom label, product type, category, or gender. First, ensure the fields exist in your data source and name the products based on your chosen filters.
Follow these steps to create a product group:
A website lets you take your Pinterest ad campaigns to a new level.
For instance, you can retarget non-converting shoppers to recover lost sales or upsell active buyers to improve their lifetime value. You may also create an act alike (equivalent to Facebook’s lookalike) audience to reach your ideal prospects, eliminating guesses from your targeting.
However, the first is to install the Pinterest tracking tag.
It’s a code snippet that lets Pinterest track your store visitors and their actions while on your site. The code helps you measure your campaign performance, optimize your conversion, build a targeting audience and become a verified merchant.
To install the tag, log in to your Pinterest ads account, click the Ads tab on the top menu, select conversion from the drop-down, and follow the rest of the instructions to complete the process.
Create your audience and run shopping and personalized collections ads to promote your products. Also, launch dynamic retargeting campaigns to upsell buyers and retarget shoppers that abandoned their carts. Run these campaigns concurrently for the best results. This resource can guide you in setting up high-converting Pinterest ads.
Also, don’t forget to promote your store outside Pinterest for maximum reach.
So you don’t need to own a website to sell on Pinterest.
With just an affiliate link, you can get started on the platform. That might even change soon. The social network is piloting a feature that lets shoppers checkout and pay for items on Pinterest so that they don’t have to leave the app to complete their purchases.
The in-app checkout will probably redefine social commerce in the coming years, and getting onboard Pinterest and setting up your stores now means you’ll always be ready for the mad rush.
Thankfully, the tips in this article can get you started.
Featured image by rawpixel.com on Freepik
The post How to Sell on Pinterest Without a Website first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
This article will demonstrate the heterogeneous systems integration and building of the BI system and mainly talk about the DELTA load issues and how to overcome them. How can we compare the source table and target table when we cannot find a proper way to identify the changes in the source table using the SSIS ETL Tool?
Let us first talk about the business requirements. We have more than 20 different Point-of-Sale (POS) data from other online retailers like Target, Walmart, Amazon, Macy’s, Kohl’s, JC Penney, etc. Apart from this, the primary business transactions will happen in SAP S/4HANA, and business users will require the BI reports for analysis purposes.
Podcasts are on the rise. In 2020 consumption of podcasts reached 332.2 million internet users, and this number grew to 383.7 in 2021. And it is increasing steadily – with the number of listeners slated to reach about 509.4 in 2024.
Podcasts have moved from a niche market of discussants in their parent’s basements to being spread across the globe into everyone’s earsets.
However, it’s more complex than just creating a decent show and uploading it. First, your website needs to be able to handle the traffic, lest you want your listeners attempting to sign up for your newsletter on a frisbee. But where does one start?
And that’s where podcast hosting sites come into the picture!
You need a podcast hosting service to publish your podcast episodes online and make them available to your audience. Podcasts are called interactive audio content for a reason. Your podcast listeners can get in touch with you through the comments section, emailing you their feedback, sharing your episodes on social media, and more.
It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to become a mega-star or want to solidify your brand; knowing which podcast hosting platform to use is essential to the podcasting process.
In today’s article, we have covered the 15 best podcasting sites. So whether you are looking for free or paid podcast hosting sites, we have covered everything in detail.
Podbean is a podcast hosting and monetizing platform that lets you publish your podcasts in minutes. Just set up some basic information about your podcast – and you are set to publish your first episode on Podbean. With Podbean’s intuitive user interface, getting started with the service is as easy as pie!
In the above image, you can see how Podbean will ask you to set up your podcast. Podbean makes it easy to create a professional-looking site from title and description to category and podcast logo. Once you upload your episode, you can also pick a theme for your site.
As you see in the below image, you can customize its fonts and colors and test the audio and appearance before it launches.
Podcasts can also be listened to on Apple, Google, Shopify, and other podcast apps. If you want to embed your podcast on your website or blogs, Podbeans Embeddable Players will make that easy for you. The Embeddable player is also customizable and lets you add branded elements, making the design professional.
You can even connect your social media handle with your Podbean account to directly share podcasts on your social pages.
It doesn’t skimp on statistics, either. Podbean statistics will give you all the insights you need to know about your podcast’s audience, including the top 10 episodes, how many downloads there are at a particular time, where your customers come from, and user retention data.
All in all, it’s a great option to get started with your podcasting journey. However, one downside is that the podcast website isn’t as polished as some podcasters might prefer.
It starts at $9/month for unlimited storage space, unmetered bandwidth, distribution on significant podcast apps, customizable themes, and more.
Buzzsprout is a podcasting platform that provides hosting, promotion, and analytics solutions. You can directly distribute your podcast on Google, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Alexa, Overcast, and more through Buzzsprout.
You can start with easy and free learning material provided by Buzzsprout, including podcasting guides, courses, video tutorials, industry podcasts, and community.
It’s also worth noting that Professional-sounding podcasts don’t come easy. That’s why Buzzsprout’s MagicMastering tool is available for you to use. It’s an audio filter that sweetens your podcast and optimizes it for the best industry standards.
That said, the Magic Mastering feature is only available with the pricier plans, so you’ll have to shell out more money for it.
You don’t have to worry about optimizing your episodes yourself either because Buzzsprout optimizes all episodes in terms of file type, bitrates, ID3 tags, etc.
The best part is that it has dynamic content flexibility, letting you decide whether audio should go at the beginning or end of an episode. It does everything to make your podcast search engine friendly, including transcribing each episode for people with hearing disabilities.
Buzzsprout’s users also usually have good things to say about the platform.
For example, Neil Thacker, founder of Casual Car Guide, who uses Buzzsprout himself, is a big fan of the platform.
Thacker says,
“I have been lucky enough to host a few different podcasts in various industries. Every time, my hosting platform of choice is Buzzsprout. They just get it. Buzzsprout makes it super easy to publish and syndicate your podcast episodes across various mainstream streaming platforms and directories.
If you need a website for your podcast, Buzzsprout gives you the tools to create one. Simply pick a domain and host your podcast there for the world to see. It’s quick and easy to set up and won’t cost you the earth. Go, Buzzsprout!”
Starts at $12/month for 3 hours of upload, advanced statistics, unlimited storage, and more.
Simplecast is the all-in-one solution for your podcasting needs – including podcast publishing, distribution, analytics, and sharing. Whether you’re a large or small business, it also has similar tool access for all sizes of companies.
Your podcast can be set up anywhere, including Shopify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, and other podcast directories. Simplecast gets your podcast on these directories and apps as soon as you publish any episode and then automatically sends it to your listeners.
Then it will provide you with advanced analytics to show how many listeners you have, how many downloads you get, your listeners’ locations, and more. See below for a visual representation of how this works:
It also has a website. That’s right; you’ll get your own website.
This website automatically updates as you publish new episodes and is customizable, mobile-friendly, search engine optimized, and Google Podcast optimized. You can even use your own domain names.
In addition, it allows the user to manage multiple shows in a single account. The image below will show you what the Podcast Dashboard looks like. It displays the number of episodes for each show and other information, such as role and owner.
It starts at $15/month for two seats, unlimited storage and uploads, basic analytics, a custom domain, a customizable website, and more.
Anchor is one of the – if not the best free podcast hosting services by Spotify that takes care of creation, distribution, monetization, analytics, and more.
Creating Music+talk episodes on Anchor is as easy as pie. Choose any song from Spotify’s library, place it in your episode builder, add an audio file that you wish to go with the music file, and then submit your episode for review.
Some of the best ways to make money from your podcast are by building an audience and monetizing that audience. And with Anchor, you can monetize in various ways, including by adding paid advertisements to your podcast or asking for donations from listeners.
In addition, the IAB 2.0-certified metrics from Spotify let you measure your podcast’s performance in detail. For example, you can see where listeners are abandoning you on the track and adjust accordingly by adding content that really matters to them. You can also see what type of listeners interact with your podcasts – how old they are, what gender they identify with, and more.
Luciano Colos, founder and CEO of PitchGrade, who uses Anchor for his own podcast, talks about his experience with the platform.
He believes that the end-to-end control of the whole process is what makes Anchor.fm unique.
Colos further shares,
“Even if you’re not a technical person, the interface is so simple that you’ll be able to learn it in minutes. I’ve been using it since the day I started my podcast, and I’m so glad I found it. It’s also worth mentioning that the support on the platform is great. If you ever have a question, you can contact the staff on their Discord channel and will get an answer within minutes.”
It’s a free platform.
SoundCloud is a platform for both streaming audio and hosting podcasts. Majorly, it’s a popular music-sharing platform, but it also offers a robust podcast-hosting platform used by over 75 million people worldwide.
Creating a SoundCloud profile is also as simple as pie. You can personalize your profile with your own username, profile URL, custom profile image, and header.
SoundCloud is also one of the few podcast-hosting platforms that allow you to create a community around your podcasts. This is handy if you want to grow awareness about your podcast among other users.
Users can comment on specific moments of the track, and other users can see those comments when they reach that moment on the track.
The podcast hosting platform is available for Android and iOS, and you can sign up for free. Of course, there’s an affordable fee for upgrading your account to a creator account.
In addition, SoundCloud lets you distribute your tracks on various channels, including Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and more.
Then you have the SoundCloud Analytics dashboard that gives you a quick overview of the number of streams, revenue, and top tracks — but it’s not as detailed as you can get with other podcasting sites. After all, it’s a music streaming platform primarily rather than one specifically for podcasts.
There is little to no knowledge on their website for beginners, which is another disadvantage. That said, it’s pretty easy to use, so anyone without experience in podcasting can easily use the platform.
It starts at $2.50/month for monetization, distribution, promotion, and split payment features.
Transistor’s like other podcasting platforms – you can create a podcast from scratch or import it from another platform. Just follow the instructions, and you’re good to go.
Once your podcast is recorded and ready to go, you can invite multiple members to contribute. Its analytics software provides clean visuals and robust insights into listener trends.
For instance, the below image is an overview of the podcast performance:
Now observe that the amount of data and clear visuals make this less overwhelming. As you can see, it gives you insights into average downloads per episode for the specific period, estimated subscribers, and total downloads (month-wise visual presentation).
In addition to providing one-click submissions to significant podcast platforms such as Spotify, Google, Apple Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and more, Transistor also offers one-click submissions to search engines like Listen Notes and The Podcast Index. Transistor is one of the few podcasting hosting platforms to provide a service like this.
Corey Haines, Founder of SwipeWell, shares his experience with the platform,
“I’ve been super happy with Transistor.fm for hosting all my podcasts. Instead of paying for each one individually, Transistor allows me to host all the podcasts I want for a single price. This made me feel free to experiment and start as many podcasts as I wanted. They also have great integrations, analytics, and sharing capabilities to embed on a website or newsletter.”
It starts at $19/month for unlimited podcasts, private podcasts, live customer support, a built-in podcast website, and more.
Libsyn has the tools to help you get started regardless of your level of podcasting expertise. It assists you in recording, publishing, distributing, and monetizing your podcasts.
The best part? You can host both audio and video podcasts on Libsyn.
To get started with Libsyn, you’ll have to provide a few details, including podcast title, subtitle, description, category, owner’s name & email, author, website URL, and more.
The below image shows what the Libsyn podcast settings look like:
You can also add your own artwork to your podcast. Click “Add artwork” or drag and drop the images in the upload area. Suppose you don’t have your artwork ready. In that case, you can design one on Canva – Libsyn’s integration with Canva makes creating a professional-looking podcast cover simple without any graphic design experience.
Once you are ready with everything, publish your podcast and distribute it to the platforms where your listeners could be, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
Libsyn gives you more ways to make money with your podcast, including advertising and subscriptions. For example, you can pitch to the big advertisers on Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast Marketplace or build a community of members who get exclusive access to your content.
Antreas Koutis, Administrative Manager at Financer, shares his experience with Libsyn,
“When I started podcasting on the side, I wasn’t sure which hosting platform to use. There are a lot of options out there, and it can be overwhelming to try to figure out which one is the best. After trying out a few different platforms, I found that I liked Libsyn the best.
It was easy to use and had all the features that I was looking for. I also liked the fact that they offered unlimited storage and bandwidth, which was important to me since I wanted to be able to grow my podcast without having to worry about running out of space. The only downside is that it can be a bit expensive, but overall I thought it was the best option for me.”
Starts at $5/month for 3 hours of uploading, 162MB storage, stats snapshot, basic social promotion, unlimited bandwidth, ad-free website, and more.
Podcastics is a complete suite of tools for hosting, sharing, and monetizing your podcasts. The prime reason to give Podcastics a try is its 1-month free trial – no credit card required! And you don’t even need the training to use this platform. But if you need assistance, there’s plenty of help in the help section.
It takes just a few clicks to get Podcastincs up and running. The editor is clean and self-explanatory, as shown in the image below. Just follow the steps, and your podcast will be ready in minutes.
Moreover, if you already have your podcasts on the Apple Podcasts platform, you can easily import all of them into your Podcastics account in just two clicks. Simply type your podcast name in the search box and select yours from the list that appears. This will collect and save all your data, such as titles, descriptions, episodes, etc.
Podcastics is also one of the few podcast hosting platforms that allow you to host multiple podcasts with unlimited episodes under one roof.
Once your podcast is up and ready to be distributed, you can share it with the world on major listening platforms such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and more. Podcastics makes distribution so much easier by automatically creating an RSS feed for you.
Its magic link never misses redirecting your listeners to the correct platform. You can also add QR codes to your magazines or print flyers to get user subscriptions.
Starts at $8/month for worldwide distribution, easy import, unlimited episodes, private/unlisted episodes, and more.
Spreaker comes with a bundle of tools for you to create, distribute, monetize, grow an audience, and track the progress of your podcasts. You can host and monetize your podcasts with programmatic ads from big brands, such as Green Chef, Lego, Swag.com, CareerBuilder, and more.
Spreaker’s how-to guide for podcasting will get you started in no time. Once you have your podcast’s name, length, and format ready, Spreaker Studio will help you record it, add sound effects, and crop or trim your audio. Finally, add the cover art, and you are ready to publish your first podcast on Spreaker.
Martyna Inkielman, Community Manager at PhotoAiD, shares her experience with Spreaker,
“I find Spreaker the best and most reliable platform. My favorite thing about it is that it provides most of the essential features in one place – pretty much everything related to your podcast can be done on Spreaker. It’s also very intuitive, so it’s effortless to use, even for beginner podcasters.”
Martyna mostly has good things to say about Spreaker, but one thing that bothers her – it doesn’t support video podcasting, so she can’t post on YouTube with it.
It starts at $8/month for 6-months statistics, 100-hours storage, auto-upload to Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Podomatic allows you to build your podcasting career in four easy steps: create a free account, record and publish, submit your podcast to big podcast platforms such as Spotify, and keep repeating.
To upload media, you must first add it to Podomatic’s library of supported file formats. It supports file formats including m4a, mp3, mp4, BMP, jpg, png, mp4, m4v, and more.
Podomatic will store your audio and video files in an unpublishable section if they are larger than 350MB, lack an extension, or has an unsupported extension.
To upload a podcast, you only need to determine the title, tagline, cover art, description, category, tags, and language. Then, once published, you can start monetizing it using Patreon, Popcorn, and What For Apparel ads.
You can also get stats on your podcast, including total plays, mobile plays, embeds, downloads, visits, and more. The service goes further into analytics to show your performance over a selected period of time, the performance of individual episodes, and listeners’ graphs.
Starts at $2.49/month for 100GB bandwidth, 2GB storage, and more.
Blubrry is a podcast hosting platform where you find easy podcast migration from other platforms, live customer support, and in-depth statistics. Blurry is also ready to host your single podcast or a whole slew of them.
With Blubrry, you can get more than just a podcast hosting service. You can grow your audience and connect with listeners by using Podcast Audience Surveys. These surveys give you valuable information about your audience, allowing you to develop a more robust publishing strategy.
For instance, you can see who completed your surveys and see their entire profile with information like identification, age, employment, education, demographics, audience’s listening habits, feedback, and more.
Once you’ve got all these metrics in place, you can then use them to compare and contrast with one another to come up with a more robust publishing strategy. This is something that no other podcast hosting platform does.
Blubrry also offers a free and optional managed WordPress website – designed with all the necessary modules a podcast website needs. In addition, this site automates podcast publishing on your website by using PowerPress Plugin.
And if you’re not looking to host an entire website, Blubrry offers a podcast landing page with a quick display of the show and listen and subscription module.
Want to further know where your listeners are coming from and which device they’re using? Blubrry Stats can help you analyze all of that!
However, it’s worth noting that Blubrry’s Standard plan is so basic that you can’t even use your own domain with it. It doesn’t come with advanced statistics or additional themes and plugins either – so be prepared to buy a pricier plan if you want all of those features.
It starts at $10/month for 125MB storage, standard statistics, monetization, email and phone support, unlimited downloads, a custom embedded player, and more.
Captivate takes pride in its simple, easy-to-use dashboard that covers all the necessary functions and metrics to create, distribute, monetize, and promote your podcast.
Although it does not come for free, the range of hosting features and storage and upload capacities makes the price worth it. Captivate is designed by podcasters for podcasters, so it knows about their needs.
Creating a podcast in Captivate is a 5-step process. First, you’ll need the podcast name, author name, podcast cover art, description, category, directory setting, and more. Once you have all the necessary details, you can start importing your podcast into the Captivate Dashboard.
Then copy your current RSS feed into the current feed URL box and choose the current host—and voila! You are ready to go.
As soon as you publish your first episode, your podcast can be listed on one of the directories that Captivate integrates with.
With Captivate Analytics, you can see total downloads, total listeners, unique listeners, website traffic, listener demographic, and more.
It also offers responsive podcast websites where you can select from 3 templates, add bios, sign-up forms, lead generation modules, and more.
Nina Paczka, Community Manager at Resume Now, shares her experience with Captivate.fm,
“What I like the most is their dashboard – minimalistic yet providing everything you need. If you’re experiencing some trouble, Captivate’s team is there to support you. Considering the above, there’s nothing to dislike there. The platform offers a seven-day free trial. All paid plans cover unlimited podcasts and team members, with access to analytics and marketing tools.”
Starts at $17/month for 12K downloads, unlimited podcasts, unlimited uploads & storage, podcasting 2.0 support, and more.
Sounder is another podcast platform on this list that offers tools to monetize, analyze, and promote your podcast across global directories. It follows IAB & GARM industry standards to generate accurate episode ratings, transcripts, keywords, summaries, and more within seconds.
You can create your podcast on Sounder either from scratch or by importing it from an existing platform. Once you sign-up for a free account, you can start with the podcast by entering details such as title, description, category, and artwork.
You can tinker with many more details, including your podcast’s name and description, author name, language, timezone, and more. While setting up these details, you can enable monetization by simply clicking on the relevant option. And that’s it!
Now you can create an episode by uploading an audio file and adding its title and description. Here you can set episode numbers, types, and artwork. You can also pre-schedule them.
If you’ve enabled monetization, you can select whether pre or post-rolls ads should go to your show.
Once you publish your podcast, Sounder will help you distribute it to popular listening apps such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, and more.
With Sounder Analytics Dashboard, you can get insights into streams, listeners, revenue, listeners’ demographics, keywords, referrals, and more.
Available on request.
If you’re looking for an affordable podcast hosting platform, then Fusebox is the tool for you! It’s also pretty easy to use and provides a step-by-step guide through the entire process.
To start a podcast using Fusebox, you need to choose whether you’re starting a new podcast or importing from an existing one. In the below image, you can see that the UI is straightforward and easy to follow, even for newbies to podcasting.
If you’re creating your podcast from scratch, you must be ready with the details, such as the podcast title, description, and cover artwork.
Here’s what the form will look like:
You can also import data from your existing podcast by simply entering your feed RSS URL. It will lead you to the subscription page, where you can select a free or pro plan.
If you’re a new user of Fusebox or creating a podcast for the first time, you should enable Easy Hosting from your dashboard. It comes in every paid subscription.
Here, Fusebox will find your podcast and import all the files and data into your Fusebox account – you can just sit back and relax.
Once you’ve set up podcast information, you can start customizing your podcast player. The Branding page lets you select the brand colors that match your podcast or website branding.
You can also add a call to action – a button that prompts listeners to buy your music or sign up for your mailing list.
You can further:
Starts at $7.50/month for a single track player, essential analysis, easy hosting, and more.
Rss.com is a podcasting app for people on the go. It’s like a Swiss army knife for busy podcasters, with features such as cross-platform analytics, automatic podcast distribution, and unlimited audio storage.
You can start by creating your podcast from scratch or importing it from an existing podcast platform. Both are super easy. To create from scratch, you will need to enter its title, description, language, and more.
Check out the image below to see what you will need:
As you can see, the UI is clean, easy to use, and self-explanatory. Every field is explained as you fill it out, and tips appear onscreen if you need more information. Once you create your podcast, you’re ready to upload your first episode.
The good thing about episodes is that they can be assigned season numbers, episode numbers, and types – giving you the flexibility to publish your episodes in the form of different series or trailers.
If you want to monetize your podcast, you’re in luck – RSS has in-built tools for that. The activation process is also easy and just takes one click.
Rss.com offers you three ways to monetize your podcasts: donations, bitcoin payments, and sponsor ads.
You can also distribute your podcast to listening platforms such as Google, Amazon, Spotify, Samsung, Amazon Music, and more.
It starts at $4.99/month for unlimited episodes & audio, cross-platform analysis, RSS feed, free website, custom embedded player, and more.
Podcast hosting platforms are the middleman between you and your audience. They’re a necessary part of the podcast ecosystem — they provide the basic infrastructure that makes it possible for you to create and publish your show.
There are many factors to consider when choosing a podcast hosting platform, including:
If you’re just starting out, then it might be easier for you to use a podcast hosting platform because there are so many options available. However, if you have some experience with WordPress, then you can host your own podcast to avoid paying monthly fees and have more control over your content and website design.
Podcast hosting services provide a platform to upload your audio files as well as convert them into an MP3 format. After uploading your content, it will be available on their servers so that anyone can access them online.
Most of these services also offer some basic analytics and statistics that help you track how many people have listened to your podcast and where they live.
Some even offer more advanced analytics like ranking charts, number of downloads per episode, etc., which helps you understand what people like about your show and how they listen to it (e.g., through mobile devices).
Hosting refers to storing your files on the Internet. It’s like storing your files on an external hard drive, except that they’re stored online rather than on a physical device. When you upload an episode to a podcast hosting platform, it will be saved there so that listeners can access it easily.
You need to sign up for an account with a podcast hosting platform (like Libsyn). Once you have your account set up, there is usually an upload tool that allows you to select the files from your computer and add them to your account.
Libsyn, Buzzsprout, Blubrry, and PodBean are all popular options for podcasters. It really comes down to personal preference and what type of features you’re looking for. You can also check out our post on how to choose a podcast host if you need more information on making this decision.
No, those aren’t podcast hosting platforms — they’re directories that people use to find podcasts. You’ll need to host your own MP3 files off-site so that they can be accessed by these directories (and other apps/devices).
No! Your podcast will be hosted on a website provided by the platform you choose, so you don’t need your own domain name or web hosting account. You may want to create an email address for your show so listeners can contact you directly with questions or feedback, though.
There are two main types of podcast hosting: free and paid. Free hosts do not give you full control over your episodes, while paid hosts usually offer more features and flexibility.
Hopefully, we’ve answered a few of your questions and given you the information you need to help you pick the right podcast host for your needs. Whether you’re looking for the best professional podcast host, the cheapest option for monetizing your podcasts, or something in between, there are podcast hosting sites out there that will help you meet your specific requirements.
We think the best way to choose whichever podcast hosting service is right for you is to check out how they handle certain features and what level of support they offer.
Note that free podcast hosting services are a great way to get your podcast started. The free option is perfect for a hobbyist or someone who is interested in the process of making a podcast. From there, you can upgrade to paid accounts for a more dedicated podcast hosting service with some of these platforms or go with a self-hosted option.
Whichever you choose, make sure you read the fine print, so your podcast isn’t censored for inappropriate content or hurt yourself by not having the proper legal disclaimers in place.
Featured image by Freepik.
The post 15 Best Podcast Hosting Platforms first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
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.
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:
Please read on for the best email marketing services in the market today.
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.
ActiveCampaign offers users loads of beginner-friendly advanced automation features. Here are a few:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Constant Contact offers two paid plans to accommodate two audiences:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alter, sync, and save your images or files with Mailchimp’s robust content studio.
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.
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.
The free version only allows 500 contacts, and Mailchimp’s monthly email sends are limited across all paid plans.
Apart from MailChimp’s free plan, paid plans start from $11 per month, and the Premium plan starts is $299 per month.
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.
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:
And also incorporates group behaviors like these:
So, whether customers appreciate group behavior or tend to repeat a behavior, Klaviyo picks up on that signal to improve your sales.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
Campaign Monitor is easy to use and offers affordable feature-loaded paid plans for all business sizes.
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.
Three paid plans are billed monthly with prices starting as follows:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your website landing pages help you convert visitors better—MooSend lets you create responsive and catchy landing pages to increase your site’s conversions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moosend affords you access to powerful email marketing tools at a relatively cheaper rate.
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.
MooSend offers a 30-day free trial. But its pricing starts from $9 per month.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Omnisend targets eCommerce users and offers limited features for other industries. But you can use the free plan to test drive it.
The free plan is available for 250 contacts, but you can upgrade to paid plan starting at $16 per month to enjoy premium offerings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The free version is only open to one user and has limited functions and features.
Free for up to 1000 subscribers. Monthly billing based on their annual plan:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Integrate your ConvertKit to your most preferred third-party apps. You can access eCommerce, lead capture, ads, CRM, and many other third-party integrations.
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.
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.
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.
Free for up to 300 subscribers. Monthly billing begins at $9 per month for Creator and $25 per month for Creator Pro.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Create your branded domain to increase brand awareness and customer trust. Let your URL capture your brand.
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.
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.
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.
No monthly payment plan.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
