A good email marketing strategy is a crucial part of every business, big or small. Having an effective email marketing strategy helps businesses become successful by increasing brand awareness, conversions and sales. For small businesses, a good email marketing software platform is crucial for them to build their business and compete with large enterprises. Also, you should use the best email marketing tools to improve your email campaigns and drive more traffic to your site. In this article, I am listing some of the best and affordable email marketing software platforms along with the key features of each and highlighting their strengths over their competitors.
Do you want to know the best email marketing software for small business growth? Here are 2021’s best email software tools and platforms, which allow you to create stunning and responsive emails, as well as segment contacts, create sign up forms and track your campaigns’ success.
Email marketing software is here to stay and in use by almost every business. Marketers use the best email marketing software to stay in touch with their customers. This article will give you information about email marketing services and tools. The article also has information about several of the best services available for email marketing and for list management.
What is Email Marketing Tools?
Email marketing tools are tools that marketers use to create, send, test, optimize and report on their email campaigns.
An email marketing tool could be a specific tool related to email marketing like an email subject line generator, or an inbox placement testing tool or a suite of tools that enables a marketer to do all their email marketing end-to-end. So as long as you’re using these tools right, email is still one of the most valuable and targeted channels for reaching your audience. It’s also a great way to make money.
MoonMail – powerful, but at a price
MoonMail leverages Amazon’s cloud network to send their email and was built with volume in mind. Their free plan however is one of the most restrictive, with just 300 emails a month, and a daily cap of 1 campaign a day (with only 10 recipients per campaign). You’re obligated to use their own domain as the email sender address, and have no access to automations. Support and the ability to edit custom fields is also limited. Plus, we have to say their tool isn’t the easiest to use, with a lot of back and forth required to set up campaigns.
Free Trial: moonmail.io
CleverReach – professional but limited
CleverReach offers a complete, enterprise-grade email marketing service, with functions like marketing automation, forms, and reports. Their Lite plan gives you access to most of their features and allows up to 1,000 emails to a maximum of 250 subscribers every month for free.
What we liked: Their editor is easy to use. We also like their workflow-based automation editor, comprehensive reporting, and handy campaign calendar.
Where they should improve: The free plan is very limited in terms of automations, templates and registration forms. And it’s a shame that not all their templates are responsive.
Who should use the free plan: If your list is small and EU compliance is a big priority for you, CleverReach is the way to go – double opt-ins come as standard, and data is hosted within Europe.
Free Trial: www.cleverreach.com
EngageBay
CRM software EngageBay is billed as one of the best solutions, amongst the cohort of new products available in the market. Sales, Marketing, and Service solutions are all integrated into one intuitive dashboard. Aimed at SMBs, this allows users to be on top of all CRM-related business processes all at once in one platform.
Looking deeper into its marketing software, EngageBay provides extensive marketing solutions. Users can design their marketing workflow into the CRM interface without much trouble. The marketing software will then initiate the workflow, and users can choose to either oversee the emailing process or have it automated – email sequences can be set up so that you can focus on more pressing tasks.
EngageBay’s marketing system also generates lead scoring based on customer behavior when they visit your website or check their email – potential leads are then passed onto the sales system to generate the appropriate pitch.
Try out EngageBay with their free trialVISIT WEBSITEFREE TRIAL
Free plan:
One of EngageBay’s strongest selling points is their free trial plan. Their free trial plan is one of the most feature-filled plans in the market. Their features include 1000 contacts and 1000 branded emails to go with email marketing, autoresponders, email broadcast, sequences, lead grabbers, landing pages, as well as CRM with Helpdesk and live chat functionality.
Paid plans:
Paid options start from $8.99 per month to $47.99 per month, respectively. Availing of the varied paid plans increases the limit cap for contacts and branding emails as well as storage space. The Growth and Pro plans give users access to more advanced CRM solutions like custom domains, call records, web and proposal analytics, and role management capabilities.
SendinBlue Email
Email platform SendinBlue Email is a solution that lets you easily manage transactional emails and marketing campaigns. Offering an email builder with drag-and-drop navigation, it allows users to build attractive, mobile-friendly emails without the need for coding know-how. It provides several options for transactional and autoresponder emails as well as responsive design templates, so you can easily pick a template for different purposes and simply customize them however you like. The platform also comes with features such as contact management, campaign creation, and tracking, as well as email scheduling.
In addition to its impressive features, SendinBlue Email comes with API functionalities that allow you to tightly integrate it with your existing systems or with new third-party applications. This way, you can be sure that you can configure it according to the changing needs of your email marketing efforts.
Free plan:
SendinBlue Email’s free plan can support unlimited contacts and send up to 300 emails per day–that’s up to 9,000 emails per month. This is inclusive of its mobile-friendly email designer, email template library, and email and SMS personalization.
Paid plans:
SendinBlue Email currently offers three monthly plans: the Lite plan at €19.00/month which can support up to 40,000 email per month and has no daily sending limit; the Essential plan at €29/month which allows you to remove the SendinBlue branding and provides you with advanced statistics; and the Premium plan at €49/month which comes with landing page builders, unlimited automation workflows, and a send time optimization tool. They also offer an Enterprise plan, which is only available by quote and comes with a dedicated account manager.
MailChimp
Popular email marketing tool MailChimp is a go-to platform for small businesses. Known for its easy-to-use, no-code interface, this product has a campaign builder that lets you easily craft emails that suit your message—whether it’s for a product launch or news announcement, for a start. Some of its features include email templates, in-suite apps, integration with eccommerce platforms, and campaign archiving, among others.
To add to its stellar set of email marketing features, MailChimp is also trusted for its business-enhancing analytical technology. With it, you can learn who’s opening your messages, where they are opening it from, and how they are interacting with your emails. This is great for understanding the browsing behavior of your target customers and finding out what marketing techniques they respond to the most. With this, it is easier to improve your campaigns in the future.
Detailed MailChimp ReviewREAD MORE
Free plan:
MailChimp’s free plan, “New Business,” enables you to send 12,000 emails per month for up to 2,000 subscribers. This includes automation, built-in signup forms, report and data insight, and campaign creation without coding required.
Paid plans:
MailChimp only offers two paid plans: the Growing Business plan at $10/month and the Pro Marketer Plan at $199/month. The first one unlocks unlimited sending, email delivery by timezone, predicted demographics, and email and chat support while the second one comes with enterprise-level features that can support the needs of high-volume senders.
MailJet
Emailing application MailJet is a Paris-based platform that sends, tracks, and delivers emails for both marketing and transactional purposes. Passport, its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, lets you create email campaigns easily with free and responsive email and newsletter templates. What makes this great is that you can personalize the email and see how it looks like from the receiver’s end to ensure it’s well-crafted. Moreover, it integrates with REST and SMTP servers to guarantee delivery. This way, you can be sure that your emails aren’t getting lost or ending up in the spam folder.
MailJet also prides itself on its analytics capabilities. It has a campaign comparison system that lets you develop campaigns based on previous performance and future performance forecasts. In a nutshell, it analyzes how your customers are responding to your campaigns, collects the data on click or view rates, and provides you with comprehensive reports, from which you can pull insights from later on.
Detailed Mailjet ReviewREAD MORE
Free plan:
The MailJet free plan allows you to send 6,000 emails per month or up to 200 emails per day. This is inclusive of full API access, unlimited contacts, advanced email editor, and advanced statistics.
Paid plans:
MailJet offers some of the most affordable email marketing plans on the market. They have a Bronze plan starting at $7.49/month. It comes with all the premium features and can handle up to 30,000 emails monthly. They also have a Crystal plan that starts at $21.95/month that can support 60,000 emails, offers premium features, and comes with expert deliverability support.
EmailOctopus
Free Plan: Up to 2,500 subscribers and unlimited emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $19 per month
Email Octopus runs via Amazon SES. It offers all the main features required for email marketing and automation. All its plans follow a “fishy” theme, and the name for the free plan is the Shrimp Plan. This plan allows you to run email campaigns only, with the emails including Email Octopus branding. The sending stats are only kept for 90 days. Although Email Octopus permits you to send unlimited emails, Amazon charges you $0.10 for every additional 1,000 emails, once you exceed 62,000 emails per month.
The paid plans (which start with a 10,000-subscriber limit) allow both email and automation, send unbranded emails, and keep the stats forever.
All users have access to email marketing templates. You can also upload your own, with no limits on the number of templates. You can use Email Octopus to send beautifully designed newsletters or simple personalized plain text emails.
You can use their hosted forms, to collect email addresses without any complex integrations or code. Alternatively, you can use their embedded forms or WordPress plugin and collect subscriber information on your website, without writing a line of code.
Email Octopus provides real-time analytics on your campaigns.
Best Email Marketing Platforms
As you can see from the list above, you won’t run out of email marketing platforms to choose from. However, it’s also important to note that each software has features not available on others, which means that each platform works best for specific use cases.
Our Top Picks:
- For businesses looking for a powerful email marketing software that can do other things to help elevate your brand to the next level, you can go wrong with ActiveCampaign.
- If you’re looking for a freemium email marketing tool to help you get started with building a list and sending emails, the free plan of Sendinblue should suit you well.
- While email automation workflows help you earn money while you sleep, setting up can be a pain. Thankfully, ConvertKit has an intuitive builder to make building funnels easy for beginners.
- If you want to focus on building an email list for your eCommerce business, Omnisend has unique features that allow you to truly track the full customer journey of your subscribers.
Conclusion
Email marketing software can be a very useful tool for any business. And considering the amount of customers who prefer to do shopping online, email marketing is the most suitable way of promoting products and services these days. It doesn’t matter whether you run an ecommerce business or not – you need email marketing software that can help you create captivating emails without thinking much about it.
There are different types of email software out there that businesses can use to manage their email marketing campaigns more effectively. But different email marketing tool doesn’t always mean better. When it comes to picking a great email marketing tool, it’s never just about the features — it’s also about the time-saving benefits that come with using it.