For starters, let’s define email marketing software. Email marketing is a form of electronic communication that allows businesses to connect and exchange information with customers and prospects. While email marketing is simple, getting the most out of it requires patience, creativity and tailored tactics. Not only can it helps businesses grow their brands, but also it can improve customer service because it offers a more direct connection with customers than any other marketing channel.
The importance of email marketing has been acknowledged in nearly every industry and for every business on Earth. Marketing through email has always remained popular and thanks to technological advancement, it has become easier than ever before. You may think that owing to the many advanced features and techniques of it, email marketing is left behind by the latest trends of digital marketing, but this is not the case. What makes you think so?
Email marketing has proven to be one of the most valuable yet underused marketing strategies of growth-stage companies today. The most valuable asset in your startup is not your coder, designer, or salesperson — it’s your subscriber base. These are the people that are relying on your product or service and help spread the word about your brand. And email is essential for driving traffic to your website and guiding people through the purchase funnel.
The best email marketing software enables you to send targeted emails and track their performance. You can choose the right tool for your company, by figuring out first what are you most interested in: the number of contacts you can upload and how many emails you can send
What Makes Great Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing platforms are the tools that power the majority of newsletters and emails you receive from companies every day. Their automated nature makes them a great way to promote blog posts, share new product features, and generally keep customers engaged, directly from their inbox.
While there’s a multitude of tools providing a very, sometimes even intimidatingly complex set of marketing automation features, we’ve focused on the simplest yet powerful solutions allowing you to achieve your primary goal: get the word out about your business in the easiest and fastest way.
All of the email marketing tools we’ve selected are characterized by the following features:
- Performance reports
- Strong choice of templates
- Usability
- Affordability
That being said, some of the platforms in their premium plans offer more advanced features such as drip marketing campaigns or A/B testing so that you can expand your email marketing toolkit as you grow your business.
AWeber – Phone support included for free!
AWeber is a Pennsylvania-based free email marketing service, and with over 20 years of experience under their belt, it’s fair to say they know the business. In fact, AWeber’s claim to fame is that they invented the autoresponder. But what does the free plan come with and how does it compare to the other emailing services on the list?
What we liked: AWeber’s free plan includes many of its paid features, including simple marketing automation, landing pages, unlimited users, phone support and thousands of stock photos.
You’ll have access to its entire newsletter and landing page template library, which comes with a good selection of mobile-responsive designs.
Where they should improve: The analytics are a bit thin on the free plan. If you want access to webpage and email sales tracking, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid plan. Bear in mind that your emails will include AWeber branding, and you can only manage 1 list.
We also find the subscriber limit quite low compared to other email marketing services like MailerLite and Mailchimp.
Who is the free plan suited to?
AWeber’s free plan is a good option for those who want 24/7 support and would rather receive this over the phone. It’s also an advantage that there’s no daily sending limit.
Mailjet – lots of potential
Another newsletter provider traditionally known for sending transactional emails, Mailjet has evolved into a more complete email service, although their features are still relatively basic. Their free plan is generous in terms of capacity (unlimited contacts and up to 6,000 emails a month, with a 200-email daily limit). It’s a little less generous in terms of access, however – premium features like automations, segmentation and A/B testing are only available to try out for free for 30 days.
What we liked: The drag-and-drop editor is a breeze to use, and they have a decent range of email templates to choose from.
Where they should improve: Everything still feels a little new and unpolished – there’s just a handful of automation workflows available, for example, and lots of features still under development.
Who is the free plan suited to? If volume is important to you, and you don’t need sophisticated features, Mailjet’s free plan will serve you well.
Free Trial: www.mailjet.com
Benchmark – sleek and simple
With a clean and minimalist design, Benchmark is one of the most user-friendly newsletter tools we’ve tried. What’s more, their free Starter plan gives you access to all areas – marketing automation, forms, surveys and reporting included – with a few caveats (you won’t be able to activate automations or A/B tests, for example, and sign-up forms will only allow you to add 75 subscribers a day). You’ll also only have 250 emails/month, which is not many at all.
What we liked: They have a great variety of modern-looking and mobile-friendly templates, and a drag-and-drop editor that’s hard to beat in terms of usability. Support, even on the free plan, is fast and responsive. And they offer integration with over 300+ tools, including WordPress, Facebook and Shopify.
Where they should improve: Deliverability rates with Benchmark were disappointingly low (particularly to Outlook and Hotmail inboxes). You’re also unlikely to stay on the free plan for very long, as they charge $5/month to upgrade your image storage from 10MB to unlimited and only allow for 250 emails/month.
Who is the free plan suited to? Businesses who tend to send more text-based emails might have a better chance of staying under the file storage limit (and having their emails delivered) – so if you’re after a nicely designed and straightforward tool, Benchmark is a good choice.
Omnisend
Ecommerce marketing platform Omnisend allows you to drive sales by combining all your communication channels into one. You can get in touch with your customers through SMS, social media, and more. Furthermore, you can use the pre-made templates, so you do not have to write personalized emails and messages from scratch. It also helps you segregate your emails and send them to the right group of people.
Aside from maintaining a connection with your existing customers, you can capture and nurture leads. The platform comes with Popups, Signup Boxes, and other CTA elements. These make it easy to capture lead information such as email and other contact information.
Try out Omnisend with their free trialVISIT WEBSITEFREE TRIAL
Free plan:
Omnisend’s Free plan is enough to get you started. You can develop email campaigns. On top of that, you can already use the signup forms mentioned above. The marketing service provider even allows you to send 15,000 emails a month, free of charge.
Paid plan:
The paid plans start at $16 per month for their Standard package. Aside from the features included in the free plan, you can create SMS campaigns. Also, you can take advantage of the automated email workflows. This can also help you create audience segmentation for more personalized customer engagement. If you need more features such as push notifications, social media functionalities, and priority support, you can upgrade to the Pro plan at $99 a month. Omnisend offers a custom Enterprise plan for more features.
Wix ShoutOut
Email marketing application Wix ShoutOut is a simple platform built for small businesses. It simplifies the way you build and share email newsletters using its email marketing tools, designer-made templates, and intuitive builder. This allows you to customize the email’s design by changing the color, text fonts, and backgrounds, among others. It also ensures your email campaigns will look good when viewed on any device as they are mobile-ready. Furthermore, it comes with a powerful mailing list management tool that makes it easy to segment your contacts and create targeted email marketing campaigns.
It also has features such as contact integration, social media tools, and stats tracker based on your campaign’s open, view, and click rates. Since it’s a product by Wix, a robust website builder, Wix ShoutOut works best with your website made on the platform. At the same time, you can also subscribe to the product on its own.
You can get to know the features firsthand at no cost and without commitment.
Try out Wix ShoutOut with their free trialVISIT WEBSITEFREE TRIAL
Free plan:
The Wix ShoutOut free plan lets you utilize all of the features the product has to offer. Ideal for small businesses and growing startups, this plan only includes a course of 3 ShoutOuts per month where you can send up to 5,000 emails. This resets every first day of the month.
Paid plans:
Wix ShoutOut has three paid plans that are priced depending on the number of ShoutOuts you need to do monthly as well as the number of contacts you need the platform to support. The Basic plan costs $4.90/month, the Business Essential package is priced at $12.90/month, and the Pro Unlimited plan is available for $44.90/month.
Zoho Campaigns
Email marketing platform Zoho Campaigns is built to create, send, and track email campaigns for small- to medium-sized businesses. It connects with other applications in the Zoho ecosystem, hence, it’s wise to also include this product for your email marketing needs if you’re already using Zoho apps, especially Zoho CRM. It automates email marketing with permission-based access and personalized campaigns.
Aside from its powerful campaign creation tools, Zoho Campaigns also comes with a wide range of features that will allow you to fine-tune your email marketing efforts. For one, it has a recipient activity tracking tool and engagement measurement capability that will help you determine how your customers are interacting with your messages. Furthermore, the platform comes with built-in A/B testing functionalities so you can gauge the efficacy of your campaigns before you even roll them out.
Free plan:
Zoho Campaigns offers a forever free plan that can support 12,000 emails/month for up to 2,000 subscribers. This allows you to use all of the features that the platform has to offer.
Paid plans:
The vendor currently offers two types of plans: the Pay-As-You-Use plan and the monthly subscription package. The former lets you purchase email credits according to the number of emails you expect to send. This costs anywhere between $6 for 250 credits to $750 for 100,000 credits. Meanwhile, the subscription plan is priced according to the number of subscribers you have. Prices for this may range from $5/month for 1 to 500 subscribers to $350/month for 50,001 to 100,000 subscribers.
EngageBay
Free Plan: Up to 500 contacts and 1,000 branded emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $7.79/mo for the Basic Marketing plan, paid biennially
EngageBay offers a range of products to attract targeted web visitors, engage and capture leads, nurture and turn them into happy customers. Email marketing is included in both their Marketing Bay plan and their All-in-One Suite.
You can choose from a wide array of email marketing templates to suit your business needs. You can use pre-designed templates or personalize one to meet your requirements. Use their drag and drop interface to create a template that suits your business needs. Design beautiful email templates with rich text formatting.
Apply filters of your choice. Their filters range from filtering based on country, created date, source, to tags, and a lot more. In addition, EngageBay helps you personalize your emails by adding your contacts’ attributes to the emails, rendering a personal touch.
How Do You Optimize Email Campaigns?
To optimize your emails and improve engagement, you need to conduct A/B split testing and view analytics reports to improve your numbers.
You should always test one variable at a time to understand how your data reacts. For example, you can conduct a test on the time of day, email subject lines, customer segment, the content of the email, the imagery used, and the call-to-action.
Once you formulate a hypothesis on what to test, view your reports, and see how the changes impact your open rates, click rates, unsubscribers, and sales.
Conclusion
If you have a business presenting your product or services, generating leads for your sales team is a very important part of making sales. And in this case, sending email to the right leads count a lot. In order to send emails that are worth reading, you will need reliable software to support your project.
You might be wondering what best email marketing software or service is for your company. You want to communicate with your clients and customers via email, but not just any kind of email services will do. If you want to set up the best online email marketing campaign you need a reliable email marketing software that creates professional-looking emails in minutes!