For years, Squarespace has been synonymous with lovely homemade websites–for just $18 monthly, you could have your aspirational logo. But Squarespace is now not just an internet site builder. Over the past few years, the New York-based enterprise has ballooned into an all-in-one platform focused on small corporations valued at $1.7 billion. You could purchase a domain, construct an internet site, sell physical and virtual goods, and track analytics.
Today, Squarespace is taking its first steps into digital advertising and marketing with an email marketing campaign product alleged to be as quiet–and as easy to make–as a Squarespace internet site. “There are many factors you want to do [as a small business] to be successful: You need to have a website, brand it properly, be able to transact, to engage with people,” says Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s founder and CEO. “We’re going to maintain searching for the one’s regions of opportunity in which our customers have a want that would be better met on an unmarried platform versus sewing collectively a bunch of different gear.”
With the upward push of direct-to-consumer manufacturers and small-scale e-commerce, Squarespace sees a marketplace ripe for conquering. Existing gear for small organizations and folks strolling agencies online are scattershot and rarely paintings together nicely, except business owners are technically savvy–you might have a Squarespace website related to Google Analytics and use Mailchimp for emails. However, you can best see where your emails point humans to your internet site if you can tie all of them together. Casalena is betting that small enterprise owners will want to do the whole lot via a single platform, so they don’t need to address all the equipment. Casalena is positioning Squarespace as an all-in-one vicinity for small organizations and individuals to behavior their enterprise online, taking on giants like Wix, Shopify, and Mailchimp inside the procedure.
UX is key. Squarespace’s new email campaign device could allow users to pull in content from their Squarespace website, whether or not a blog submission or a product page. With competing services, like MailChimp, you usually ought to reproduce and paste over some of your content. The emails’ analytics are also built-in. Rather than attaching MailChimp and Google Analytics to Squarespace to look at how your email campaigns are using traffic on your website, it’s all within an equal region.
The emails are also designed using a similar interface to Squarespace’s famous website builder: You choose a template and then personalize your email from there. The templates are centered around sharing a weblog publication, announcing a new product or a sale, selling a product, or sending invitations. Once in editing mode, every template is broken into blocks that you may change and fashion to suit your brand. You can also add blocks–consisting of text, images, buttons, spacers, traces, blog posts, or merchandise–everywhere you want. It took me about 10 mins to prepare an expert email for a demo website called “Really Rad Juice.”
[Image: Squarespace]
Squarespace’s director of product Natalie Gibralter says that the employer had heard from clients that email is the most critical device of their marketing; that is why she and her group commenced growing Squarespace’s email product approximately a year ago. But Casalena says the idea of an all-in-one platform has been a part of Squarespace since the beginning–though he commenced the company in 2003 that intended pulling collectively enhancing software, blogging software program, photo gallery software program, and hosting. Now, it approaches giving internet site customers entry to commerce tools, analytics, and–you guessed it–email.
Squarespace’s email campaign carrier might be loose for the first few months, and contemporary customers may be able to ship as many as 50,000 emails. Then, in the past due summer or early autumn, users may be asked to improve their account to send emails, with fees beginning at $eight in keeping with the month based totally on the number of emails they want to send.
Looking in advance, Gibralter imagines constructing extra gear to assist small groups with the mundane work of jogging a commercial enterprise online. Consider an analytics platform that is not most effective tells a small business which customers opened an electronic mail, who went to its website, which merchandise they considered, and which products they sold; however, it additionally indicates following up with some other email about some specific merchandise.
“Small corporations available, I don’t suppose, compete with Amazon on price and logistics. They’re competing with their story,” Casalena says. “How you present your story is truly crucial. It’s correlated with small commercial enterprise fulfillment to tell a compelling tale and have tools that make you look correct.”
