For years, Squarespace has been synonymous with lovely homemade websites–for just $18 per month; you could have your own 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 the arena of digital advertising and marketing with an email marketing campaign product that’s alleged to be as quiet–and as easy to make–as a Squarespace internet site. “There are lots of 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 ones 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 could best see where your emails are pointing humans to your internet site if you control to tie all of them together. Casalena is making a bet that small enterprise owners will want to do the whole lot via a single platform so that they don’t need to address all the equipment. That’s why 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 users pull in content from their Squarespace website, whether or not a blog submit or a product page. With competing services, like MailChimp, you usually ought to reproduction and paste over some of your content. The emails’ analytics are also built-in. Rather than having to attach MailChimp and Google Analytics to Squarespace to look at how your email campaigns are using traffic in your website, it’s all within an equal region.
The emails also are designed using a similar interface to Squarespace’s famous website builder: You choose a template, then personalize your e-mail from there. The templates are centered around sharing a weblog publish, announcing a new product or a sale, selling a product, or sending invitations. Once you’re in editing mode, every template is broken into blocks that you may change and fashion to suit your brand. You also can add blocks–which consist 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 referred to as “Really Rad Juice.”
[Image: Squarespace]
Squarespace’s director of product Natalie Gibralter says that the employer had heard from clients that email is the maximum critical device of their marketing; that is why she and her group commenced growing Squarespace’s e-mail product approximately a yr in the past. But Casalena says the idea of an all-in-one platform has been a part of Squarespace because of the beginning–though whilst 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 e-mail campaign carrier might be loose for the primary 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 you 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 additionally indicates following up with some other email about some specific merchandise.
“Small corporations available, I don’t suppose, are competing with an Amazon on price and logistics. They’re competing with their story,” Casalena says. “How you present your story is truly crucial. It’s very a great deal correlated with small commercial enterprise fulfillment to be able to tell a compelling tale and have tools that make you look truly correct.”
