Sending emails is still one of the most cost-effective digital marketing methods for any business. That’s why we’ve selected the best email marketing software to help you get your messages to your customers fast and for less.
Marketing campaigns are the lifeblood of every business. Therefore, to successfully run a marketing campaign and accomplish your goals as a business owner, you will have to outsource the process to a specialist. Email marketing has become an integral part of any marketing campaign because it is still one of the most cost-effective ways for customers and potential customers not only to learn about brands but also to establish relationships and purchase products. There are several email marketing campaign software that can help you organize your email campaigns better and boost results.
Are you curious about best marketing campaign software, or about best email marketing campaigns? Read this article and learn what is top notch email marketing campaign software and how to run email campaigns without it. Also find out what are some of the powerful features each email marketing platform has to offer.
Email marketing is a great way to stay in contact with your customers, promote products and increase sales. By using email marketing, you increase your chances of getting customers. That’s why you should use email marketing campaign software to manage your email messages and campaigns.
How much does email marketing cost?
Your email marketing cost will entirely depend on the number of subscribers you have, the number of total emails you send per month, and the email platform you use. On average, a small business email marketing costs is around $20 – $300 per month on email marketing given that they manage their own campaign. If you use an email marketing agency, then your cost might be closer to $500 per month or higher.
Freshworks CRM
Developed by one of today’s leading SaaS providers, Freshworks CRM is a comprehensive sales and marketing tool ideal for businesses of all sizes. It provides three essential modules—customer-for-life cloud, sales cloud, and marketing cloud—which offer powerful features to help you attract more customers, gain high-quality leads, and automate marketing and sales processes.
In addition, Freshworks CRM offers conversion optimization tools to improve your lead generation. Using Freddy AI, the software’s built-in artificial intelligence feature, you can easily find high-quality leads based on each customer’s buying behavior. The software also improves your conversion rates by helping you create personalized email campaigns and communicating with your customers using AI-powered chatbots.
Furthermore, the software offers rich APIs that allow you to integrate your system with third-party business platforms and marketplace applications.
Moosend
Moosend is an excellent email marketing tool that lets you automate repetitive tasks and saves you time. You can design behavioral email campaigns based on your subscribers’ information and/or activities. You can use its advanced segmentation feature to send highly accurate emails to each recipient, increasing open rate and click-through rate as well as ROI.
This tool provides you with a detailed campaign performance report so you know exactly how to optimize your campaigns and get even better results. You can even integrate it with some of your favorite apps to seamlessly pass on vital information between different tools. It’s also one of the only free email marketing tools that won’t include its logo in your emails.
Moosend is an affordable email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with a suite of powerful marketing automation features, email list building tools, landing pages, and more.
You can quickly create an email newsletter and customize the email design to match your brand within minutes by either choosing from their dozens of pre-made email templates or by creating a completely custom template.
The nice part about Moosend is that they offer marketing automation features to all plans including the free plan. You can use their automation workflow designer to offer a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter subscribers.
Moosend offer detailed email analytics that shows you important metrics such as email opens, clicks, bounces, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predicted demographics data.
All plans come with powerful conversion optimization features such as A/B testing, email heatmap analytics, countdown timers, conditional content, AI-engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.
Moosend offers a forever free plan for up to 1,000 email subscribers and unlimited number of emails (no credit card required). After that their pricing starts at $8 per month for their Pro plan which includes landing page builder, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, team management, and more.
EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a simple email marketing tool that runs on the Amazon SES infrastructure. While the free plan doesn’t offer as many features as some of the other free email marketing tools on this list, it does allow a lot more emails per month than most of them.
You can send out unlimited emails from as many email addresses as you like. This makes it the perfect solution for a small agency or entrepreneur representing other brands. It also integrates with third-party apps like MailOptin, WordPress and Zapier so you can seamlessly exchange customer data between different tools.
AWeber
AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.
You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and email tracking with detailed insights.
AWeber also has other powerful email marketing features such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag based subscriber segmentation.
Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
AWeber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
Although we don’t recommend it anymore since there are better solutions available in the market, the sad reality is that we cannot create a best email marketing software list without including Mailchimp due to their shear popularity.
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s timezones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.
You can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms. If you are using WordPress, then see our ultimate guide to using Mailchimp and WordPress for detailed instructions.
When it comes to marketing automation features, Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers in our list such as HubSpot, Drip or ConvertKit.
In the recent years, Mailchimp has attempted to add many of the “advanced” features, but having tested many of these, they’re not truly advanced.
Mailchimp support is offered by email, live chat, and a large tutorials knowledge-base. However their support is often slow and no match to the quality of service that you get from Constant Contact.
Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but as a serious business, you need reliable support that you can count on.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers.
However if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, then you’d have to move to their $299 per month plan.
ActiveCampaign
Best Email Marketing Software ($9/month)
Adam’s Take
If you want to drive your customer experience, then ActiveCampaign is the way to go. From email list automation to a top-notch lead scoring system, I thoroughly recommend ActiveCampaign for those serious about their email marketing.9.4out of 10
Best For
Overall Email Marketing
Price
$9/mo-$258/mo
Annual Discount
Yes – Save 20%
Promotion
Free 14-Day TrialTry ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is #1 on my list as it is the best overall email marketing software due to its advanced automation features and deliverability.
As the smartest tool on this list, machine learning plays a key role. With Predictive Actions, ActiveCampaign answers tough questions about your customers to automatically take action for you and lead them down the sales funnel.
ActiveCampaign also integrates with 850+ other apps like Facebook, Shopify, WordPress, and a whole lot more.
Automating your list segments is intuitive, and you can build list triggers and move users based on dynamic email content, sales follow-ups, and more.
Email workflows are robust and easy to manage. All of this data syncs with their built-in CRM to provide sales teams with advanced lead scoring.
Their lead scoring system is flexible too. If you’re not familiar with lead scoring, it’s a way to award points to individual email subscribers based on the actions of your choosing. Then once they hit a point threshold, they either enter a new automation funnel or can be contacted by your sales team.
Here are the steps:
- First, you select your engagement metrics. These could be anything from an email open or click, all the way to a content download or consultation request.
- Next, you add your lead scoring rules and points based on these conditions. These should be set based on the level of effort and propensity to convert.
- Maybe an email open is worth two points, and a link click is worth five points. Or actions like non-opens or unsubscribes are worth negative points. Once a subscriber reaches a pre-determined point threshold, subscriber data flows to the Deals CRM where they enter a new stage of automation:
It’s a great system that large companies use to nurture email leads in the most personalized way possible.
Another strong selling point is email deliverability, ranking higher than all other platforms on this list. Their email sends are the least likely to be marked as spam and have the best chance of hitting primary inboxes on Gmail and Outlook.
Pricing:
Pricing is based on the account features and the size of your email list.
- Lite: $9/month
- Plus: $49/month
- Professional $149/month
- Enterprise: $258/month
All plans come with a 14-day free trial.
Overall, ActiveCampaign is the best tool if you’re looking for the best email marketing, CRM, and automation tool in one place.
Are there other email marketing platforms that are not listed here?
Yes, there are literally hundreds of email marketing services out there, but we have not listed them all here. We believe that making a full email platforms list would create more confusion and cause choice paralysis for non-techy readers.
We have tried all the top major email marketing service including many that are not in our email platform lists above such as: MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Ontraport, Mailjet, Campaign Monitor, InfusionSoft (now Keap), Klaviyo, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, Omnisend, MailPoet, and more.
The top email marketing services that we have chose to include in our list provide the best features for the best price.
Conclusion
The best email marketing campaign software is an important part in creating and running a successful marketing campaign. It can be confusing trying to choose the right product, so it’s best to look at what your options are, how they differ and what they can do for you.
One of the most important parts of email marketing is having a well-organized mailing list – and since email marketing campaigns are based on it, you will also want to keep track of your recent lists. Email marketing campaign software does a lot more than that: it helps you create effective email templates, track your campaigns’ efficiency and split test your messages.