Email is the most popular and talked about digital marketing channel for companies of all sizes. However, email marketing is vastly different for enterprises compared to smaller businesses. For example, enterprise email solutions are more difficult to set up and use than simple self-serve tools. They’re also more scalable and robust with hundreds of integrations and features like real-time hyper-personalization, AMP, and many others.
Updated on 7 Oct 2024
In this guide, you’ll learn how enterprise email marketing works and why it’s so different from traditional email marketing. We’ll also cover what factors to consider when comparing enterprise email marketing platforms, as well as eight of the best options on the market.
First, let’s discuss key enterprise email use cases with real-life examples from brands that used our email solution.
Why email marketing is different for enterprise companies
Like other businesses, enterprises use email marketing to:
- Educate and nurture leads. This is probably the most popular email marketing use case. Retail brand Remix used automated email campaigns to show new leads how to mark brands as favorites and save money on shipping. This helped increase first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.
- Drive website traffic and generate revenue. Email is a great channel for moving leads down your sales funnel and driving revenue, especially when combined with personalization. Chow Sang Sang created personalized emails based on the products users were interested in, leading to a conversion rate uplift of 23.5% and a 59% increase in average session duration.
- Bring back cart or browser abandoners. This is vital for enterprise eCommerce brands since losing potential customers at the cart stage can easily cost millions in lost revenue. Email, combined with other channels like SMS and web push, is great for bringing abandoners back to your site. Slazenger used a strategy involving email, SMS, web push, and on-site to recover 40% of lost revenue in a single campaign.
- Improve customer loyalty and drive repeat business. When done correctly, email marketing delivers the messages customers want when they want them. This helps enterprises engage their user base over time, drive repeat purchases, and build long-term, profitable customer relationships.
Other important enterprise use cases include sending confirmation emails and providing customer support.
These are also popular use cases for small businesses, so what makes enterprise email marketing different? Put simply — the amount of data and complexity of the entire marketing operation.
Regardless of how you define an enterprise business, it’s always an organization with hundreds of employees, multiple departments, and often — massive email subscriber lists. This makes running effective email campaigns much harder.
For example, segmentation is a crucial part of any email marketing strategy. But with thousands of leads and customers, it can be very difficult to target a smaller audience based on behavioral data, email engagement, lifecycle stage, and other similar criteria.
The required data is usually stored in different solutions that must be integrated with the email platform. This alone can cost enterprises lots of time and engineering resources to set up, test, and optimize. The same goes for other key activities like email personalization, which also requires reliable customer data.
8 Best enterprise email marketing platforms (& factors to consider when choosing)
Email is among the most competitive software categories with thousands of solutions for different businesses. Since the category is so mature, most tools offer the same standard functionality for building and automating simple email campaigns.
However, enterprises typically have more advanced use cases that require additional capabilities. Here are six factors that you should consider when comparing email marketing solutions, depending on your enterprise’s needs:
- Scalability: Most enterprises have hundreds of thousands of emails of leads, customers, and partners. They also have hundreds of automations for various user actions, like purchases, add-to-cart events, newsletter subscriptions, and so on. This requires a solution that can scale and send thousands of batch emails quickly and reliably.
- Data integrations: Enterprises use many different marketing, sales, and customer service solutions. To get the most out of their email efforts, they need to integrate their email marketing platform with these solutions. This allows crucial data to be constantly shared, so it can be used for real-time personalization.
- Personalization: The more you can personalize your emails, the better their results can be. This is only possible by leveraging thousands of customer data points — like website interactions and previous purchases — and a good personalization engine that can make use of all that information.
- Setup and management: Enterprise solutions are notorious for their complex setup. However, digital marketing teams often need to show a quick return on investment. That’s why finding an email platform that offers different ways to minimize implementation time (e.g., pre-built integrations and dedicated onboarding specialists), while also being easy to manage, is essential.
- Other supported channels: Enterprise marketing teams use many channels outside of email to engage customers — like their websites, mobile apps, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and so on. Some teams integrate other solutions with their email tool to synchronize their efforts across all touchpoints. Others prefer to use one platform for most (or all) of their channels, so many of today’s enterprise email solutions also support other channels.
- Customer support and onboarding: The better the customer support team, the easier it is to implement, manage, and ultimately — get the most out of an enterprise email solution.
With that in mind, we’ll now look at eight of the best enterprise email marketing solutions.
#1 Insider
Insider is our AI-native platform for creating cross-channel customer experiences. It’s used by 1200+ leading brands, including Adidas, Samsung, Philips, Toyota, and Allianz to create tailored experiences that drive revenue, retention, and customer loyalty.
As an enterprise marketing platform, Insider offers everything you need to build, automate, personalize, and analyze effective email marketing campaigns, including:User-friendly drag-and-drop editor: You can easily build beautiful and engaging emails by dragging and dropping elements like customers’ names, cart items, buttons, images, and much more. You also have the freedom to code your emails for maximum flexibility and preview them on all devices.
- Advanced segmentation: You can segment your email lists using all sorts of standard and predictive characteristics, like users’ locations, demographics, previous purchases, website interactions, likelihood to engage, predicted spending, and much more.
- Real-time hyper-personalization: Insider can deliver personalized product recommendations for maximum conversions and revenue. You can also add dynamic content based on real-time behavioral triggers (like making a purchase or adding to a wishlist) and additional contextual information, including weather, location, and time.
- Email marketing automation and experimentation: You can build any automated email flow or campaign, as well as A/B test different email elements against each other. Plus, our platform can direct users to the winning variant in your A/B tests, so you don’t have to manually review results and optimize your journeys.
- Plethora of proven email templates: Our template library covers all sorts of use cases — from generating and nurturing leads to celebrating customer milestones, recovering abandoned carts, and driving repeat purchases. You can easily use and customize any template without coding.
- AMP emails that captivate customers: Using AMP emails, you can create interactive, web-like experiences that let customers answer surveys, book appointments, browse products, and much more without leaving the email. This can drastically improve conversion rates and help you turn email into a revenue-generating channel.
- Fast subject line and content generation: Sirius AI™ — our patent-pending generative AI solution — can automatically create engaging subject lines and email body copy for you. All you have to do is provide short text prompts with your end goal and our AI will do the rest.
- AI-powered localization and send-time optimization (STO): Our platform lets you localize and translate campaigns in one click, depending on each recipient’s language of choice. Plus, STO automatically triggers each email at the time users are most likely to engage with it to ensure maximum engagement and open rates.
- Analyze key stats and metrics like email deliverability, conversion rates, revenue, and much more.
If you’re already using another email platform, our best-in-class customer support team can help you migrate as quickly as possible.
From answering questions to connecting to data sources and moving automated flows to our customer journey builder, our team can drastically reduce the time it takes to see value from your email marketing efforts. That’s why customers rank Insider as the best solution when it comes to ease of setup, ease of use, support quality, and time-to-value.
Finally, Insider is also more than an email marketing platform. It supports 10+ other channels, so you can easily use it to coordinate your efforts across all customer touchpoints.
Specifically, you can use our customer data platform (CDP) and journey builder to create cohesive experiences across these touchpoints.
For example, you can experiment with different channels and compare their results or have our platform automatically optimize your journeys based on metrics you set beforehand (e.g. open rates, click through rates, conversions, revenue, and so on).
If you’re interested in Insider, visit our website or click here to get a detailed demo with our team.
#2 Marketing Cloud Engagement
Marketing Cloud Engagement is Salesforce’s solution for multichannel marketing and messaging across email, mobile push, SMS, WhatsApp, and other channels. There’s a dedicated email marketing software inside the platform that’s highly advanced and suitable for enterprises. The solution is also part of the broader Salesforce Marketing Cloud, making it popular with companies that use other Salesforce products for their marketing and sales needs.
While it offers one of the most versatile and enterprise-ready email marketing tools, Salesforce is also known for being quite pricey. It can also be difficult to set up and use correctly due to the overwhelming amount of capabilities.
Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives.#3 HubSpot Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub is HubSpot’s collection of marketing tools for all sorts of use cases — from email marketing to form and landing page generation, analytics, SEO, and more. Their email marketing tool is among the most popular on the market, offering plenty of features for building and personalizing email campaigns without needing IT assistance. The enterprise pricing starts at $3600/month but also includes a one-time enterprise onboarding fee of $7000.
#4 Adobe Campaign
Adobe Campaign is a cross-channel marketing solution. Similar to the previous option, this one is also part of the bigger Adobe Experience Cloud, so it can be easily paired with tools for personalization, data unification, analytics, A/B testing, and more. In terms of email capabilities, Adobe Campaign offers plenty of advanced features like AI-based predictions for open rates, send times and potential churn, as well as the ability to pull attributes and audiences from the broader Experience Cloud.
#5 Klaviyo
Klaviyo is probably the most well-known email platform (alongside Mailchimp) that also offers tools for SMS marketing, mobile push notifications, reviews, and web forms. The platform is mostly focused on eCommerce businesses using Shopify.
The company has pricing plans for all business types (including a free plan) and a separate offering for enterprise teams. Their enterprise offering includes additional email marketing functionalities, no-code segmentation, personalization capabilities, and more.
However, Klaviyo can also be quite an expensive solution for enterprises because its pricing increases with the number of contacts in your base. This means scaling your email and SMS base can lead to a steep jump in price.
Learn more: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types.
#6 Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
Brevo is an email marketing and CRM suite that also supports SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and chat. It offers all kinds of email pricing plans, including an enterprise one that’s tailored to each business. Besides the standard email features you’d find in the other plans, the enterprise one includes unlimited contacts, sub-account management, additional security, and more. There’s also a separate plan for sending transactional emails only with an API that guarantees a 99% delivery rate.
#7 Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a platform for email marketing, as well as SMS, social media, and events. Like most other email marketing tools, Constant Contact also offers a simple drag-and-drop editor combined with hundreds of proven templates. There are also plenty of automation and personalization features that help companies send emails to the right audiences and the right times. Its Enterprise Program helps larger teams organize their accounts, control user permissions, control branding, and much more.
#8 Litmus
Litmus is an all-in-one email marketing platform. It’s used by companies across a wide range of industries, like marketing and ad agencies, financial services companies, travel businesses, and eCommerce stores. It offers features for testing, building, personalizing, monitoring, collaborating, and analyzing email campaigns from one place. It also has a special enterprise plan with additional email service provider (ESP) integrations, advanced analytics, security and user permissions, collaboration tools, and more.
Create high-converting, personalized email campaigns with Insider
Insider is the ideal email marketing platform for enterprise and midsized brands that want to maximize their spend, personalize their campaigns, and integrate email seamlessly with their other channels.
It offers standard and advanced features that let you grow and segment your contact lists, deliver tailored product recommendations, hyper-personalize email content, create automated workflows, use AI-native capabilities like A/B Test Winner-Autoselection and STO, and much more.
As a true unified marketing platform, Insider also lets you:
- Unify your customer data from all online and offline sources — including CRMs, CMSs, customer service platforms, analytics solutions, marketing automation tools, and more — into a true enterprise CDP.
- Maximize website conversion rates, revenue, and budget utilization by tailoring content, messaging, and product recommendations to each user’s preferences.
- Build, automate, and analyze campaigns across all marketing channels, including email, on-site, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications by leveraging intuitive personalization, automation, and analytics tools.
- Work with experienced in-house support teams that ensure fast deployment, easy management, and quick problem resolution.
- Leverage the full power of AI to predict customer behaviors, deliver personalized content, have unstructured two-way conversations with customers (e.g., across WhatsApp or Chatbots), and work more efficiently.
- Access a library of easily customizable templates for any channel or use case — from generating leads fast via gamification to automating cross-channel cart abandonment journeys.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Nicolas Algoedt – VP Demand Gen & Revenue Marketing
Passionate about new technologies and e-commerce, Nicolas has held various position at leading e-commerce and tech companies including Groupon, Microsoft and Bwin.
