Company in Spotlight: Elite Email
Email marketing is becoming an increasingly significant part of businesses’ marketing endeavors, as companies seek to reach their user base through email newsletters, product update notifications, promotions, and various other communications. One of the companies in the email marketing sector that I examined recently was Toronto-based Elite Email (www.eliteemail.com), which just celebrated its 11-year anniversary.
Elite Email enables businesses to create highly customizable email marketing newsletters and campaigns from their 400+ email templates. It also offers capabilities for businesses to manage and segment their email list contacts, as well as tracking and optimizing the analytics from their campaigns. Moreover, Elite Email provides a platform for mobile text message marketing, in which businesses could reach their user base and conduct contests through interactive text messages. The comprehensive feature sets that Elite Email offers helped them win many awards including the Business Excellence Award from the Toronto Board of Trade, and get featured in media outlets including Entrepreneur Magazine, CTV, Fox Business, Toronto Star.
The email marketing sector has low entry barriers and high competition, as newly formed companies offer the same basic service, thus making market differentiation all the more difficult. Elite Email’s competitors include other email marketing companies such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, VerticalResponse, iContact. Elite Email charges lower prices (free up to 500 email addresses, then $15/month and up) for its services while offering comprehensive features comparable to those of the major email marketing companies. While the major companies such as MailChimp and VerticalResponse have higher brand awareness and larger marketing budgets, Elite Email seeks to differentiate itself through its strong focus on customer service. Customers are assigned a dedicated Account Executive to help them with setting up their campaigns and developing a customized email marketing strategy.
Another highlight of Elite Email is that its services work equally well for small start-ups and large corporations. Elite Email’s system is completely cloud-based (which requires no downloads, technical skills, or learning curve on the customer’s part) so that the process of creating and sending emails is simple and easy. According to VP of Business Development Matthew Georgiadis, “even though the bulk of our clients are small to medium businesses, we are bringing on more and more larger businesses who want to utilize a service that can meet their enterprise needs without having to pay ‘enterprise’ pricing.”
Going forward, Elite Email is looking to expand its features and potential beyond just email marketing capabilities. Additional capabilities on the horizon include mobile marketing, social/landing page builder, web design, web development, surveys, and consulting on all things digital. As Georgiadis summarized, “the more options we can offer our clients, the easier it will be for them to grow their own clientele and take their own organizations to the next level,”—which has become Elite Email’s overall mission statement.
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