How to find the best email marketing platform to integrate with your Squarespace website
Email Marketing is an essential part of any growing business, and there are specific considerations when you are planning to integrate a Squarespace website with an email marketing platform. Finding the right email marketing software involves taking a closer look at both the needs of your business and how you want it to interact with your website.
The broader objective of email marketing is to create a long term, valuable relationship with your customer. Marketing automations enable you to anticipate the needs of your customers and provide them with solutions. This both increases the perceived value of your brand to the customer and of course, increases your sales. Email marketing is not just a one-way relationship. The way a customer interacts with your emails must be analysed, interpreted and actioned to create great emails that increase your profits month after month.
To get the best value from an email marketing platform that works with your Squarespace website, the following features are essential:
- Full integration into your Squarespace E-commerce Website
- Marketing Automations as standard
- Useful analytics including opens, clicks and conversions from your emails
- Email list management including opt-ins and unsubscribes
What is the best email marketing for a Squarespace website?
When you are working out what email marketing platform to use with your Squarespace website, it is essential first to take a look at your business and determine what you need from an email marketing platform. If you are just starting out, have very few customers or contacts and are merely wanting to send a monthly newsletter with specials to your previous clients, then starting with a rudimentary platform such as the native Squarespace Email Campaigns is a perfectly acceptable option.
If however, you are planning to grow your business, would benefit from interactivity with your customers or are planning to send a large volume of emails then some of the more robust platforms such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Drip could be a better choice.
Another thing to consider is how long you are planning to stay on the Squarespace platform. Many entrepreneurs migrate from Squarespace other platforms as their business grows. The sites that they move to most often are; Shopify for e-commerce sites and WordPress for more transactional companies. If you are planning at any stage to move your website to another platform, then steer clear of the native Squarespace email marketing solution and start with a more robust email marketing software.
What is Squarespace Email Campaigns?
Squarespace Email Campaigns is the built-in email marketing solution for Squarespace users. It is a simple email marketing software that is very similar to the offering of Wix. It integrates directly from the Squarespace website and is straightforward to operate, using a builder format to create emails from a variety of pre-made templates.
The platform is a “lite” email marketing system. Squarespace Email Campaigns principal benefit is its beautiful templates and a very easy to use drag and drop builder. Squarespace Email Campaigns has all the features of the bigger and more complex email marketing systems, but on closer inspection there are few variants on these. For example, Squarespace Email Campaigns does include automations; however, there are only two options for these automations (welcome and post-purchase), and they are both single noded automations. What this means for the average marketer and small businessperson is that whilst the feature list of the platform compares favourably, it lacks any punch and does not provide the level of sophistication of even the middle tier marketing platforms such as Mailchimp.
Is Squarespace Email Marketing free?
Squarespace Email Campaigns is a paid platform, although it is free to set up and trial with up to three email marketing campaigns or blasts. After this, there is a monthly fee based on a sliding package scale depending on the number of emails you wish to send. Whilst at first glance, the plans appear to compare favourably with Mailchimp; when you look closer, the number of emails that you can send with Squarespace Email Campaigns is significantly less. There are also limits on the number of campaigns that you can have running each month. Depending on how you structure your marketing strategy, this could also impact the end cost of the platform.
Squarespace email marketing vs Mail Chimp – what is better?
Mailchimp is the obvious and automatic main competitor to Squarespace Email Campaigns for two reasons;
- It is the only other email marketing platform that has a native integration to the Squarespace Builder
- It’s “freemium” price point and drag and drop builder make it a good option for early-stage entrepreneurs and solo team marketers.
When it comes to comparing the two platforms, however, they are worlds apart. Whilst other blogs on this site testify to the fact that Mailchimp is by no means the heavyweight of the email marketing space (see our article here) it is by far superior to the native Squarespace offering. This superiority is both in price and in features.
In the Mailchimp Essentials Plan the number of email sends, multiple audiences (or lists) and multi-step automations alone make it a far superior product. There is also much more opportunity for scale with Mailchimp, which, as a business grows, is vital to consider.
Does Squarespace Email Campaigns have an automatic double opt-in?
Yes, Squarespace Email Campaigns uses a double opt-in process for all new subscribers. The double opt-in process is also applied to those who have made a purchase on your website, unless they have checked the mailing list opt-in at checkout. Whilst this policy fits well with CANSPAM guidelines, it can be troublesome in reality. If you connect your Squarespace website to Mailchimp using the native integration, you can turn off double opt-in.
Squarespace is a website CMS that has grown significantly in popularity over recent years due to its ease of use and attractive templates. If you have based your business website on the Squarespace platform and are looking for an email marketing option, then it would be wise to look a little further than the inbuilt Squarespace Email Campaigns. To future proof the investment of your mailing list and ensure continuous growth it may be well worth looking at either Mailchimp (via the native integration) or another email marketing alternative such as Active Campaign, Send in Blue or any other option highlighted by our Email Experts via a third party integration such as Zapier.
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The Email Expert team are continually looking for new integrations and tools when it comes to email marketing so that we can give you the best advice to grow your business.
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