A few decades ago, the term “email marketing” was considered an oxymoron. Today, email marketing is one of the most trusted and cost-effective ways to reach a targeted audience. Innovative service providers are constantly springing up to connect companies with consumers by offering some of the best email marketing tools and platforms on the market. Read on if you want to learn more about what makes these services so outstanding.
Nowadays, there are many email marketing tools, and choosing the right one is a challenge. I’ve selected some of the best tools for your business based on usability, client service, design tools, and analytics. In this article, you will find useful information about Best Email Marketing Tools and their features.
Are you curious about best email marketing tools? Are you on the lookout for an email marketing platform for your startup? Are you in search of a better way to promote products and services via emails? Well, look no more. In this article, we will be looking into the best email marketing platforms that can be perfectly used by startups and small-scale businesses to build their subscriber base and cultivate relationships with their customers.
What’s the best email marketing tool for your business? If you’re looking to send personalized emails, but want to save money and keep it simple, try a free email marketing tool. But if you’re looking for more advanced features and better customer support, pay-as-you-go tools could be a better fit.
What is an Email Marketing Service or ESP?
There are two main parts that belong to an ESP (email service provider): software that helps you set up a newsletter, manage your contacts and forms. The other building block is an email engine that will deliver your newsletters. On top of that, email marketing service providers can cover everything from automation and segmentation to customer relationship management (CRM) and reporting. These marketing tools exist to make our lives easier and are crucial to a strong marketing strategy, so it’s important to find one that’s easy to use and has the functionality you require.
Some may prefer to go for an all-in-one email marketing service with all of the features formerly mentioned, others might prefer to keep it simple with an easy-to-use email newsletter service. We’ll introduce you to various options below so you can make an informed decision and make sure your marketing efforts don’t go unrewarded.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns offers email marketing services to help users create responsive designs, customize messages, deliver emails to inboxes, trigger automated workflows, and connect with new customers. The toolkit has all the bells and whistles you need to meet your email marketing tasks.
With Zoho Campaigns you can create responsive emails by using the tool’s drag-and-drop functionality for marketing designs and dynamics fields. The revamped user interface offers a large selection of email templates, including 274 pre-designed templates, and a host of new autoresponders. A seamless integration with the Zoho suite allows for 360 degree email marketing services for small businesses.
Zoho Campaigns comes with dynamic content, email polls, and automated list segmentation to help you send personalized messages to your audiences. With A/B testing campaigns, you can test which design or subject line resonates well with your audience while the list management keeps your list clean and spam-free.
The most popular subscription is $5 per month for up to 500 subscribers. It includes unlimited emails, autoresponders, workflows, dynamic content, batch sending, email polls and more.
Mailchimp
One of the Biggest Names in Email Marketing (Free – $14.99/month)
MailChimp is one of the biggest names in email marketing with over 1 billion emails sent every day on their platform and over 14 million customers as of 2017.
Their free plan gives users a user-friendly interface and up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 email sends per month – more than enough if you’re a small business.
Their free plan includes autoresponders, transactional emails, analytics, and lots of third-party integrations. There’s a free Mailchimp app too for iPhone and Android.
They charge based on the size of your email list, so if you go over the threshold of 2,000, you join their 2,000-2,500 plan at $30/month.
Overall, MailChimp may be the most well known free email marketing service on the market, with over 17 million users as of a few years ago.
However, they are down on my list as everyone uses them, but there are plenty of other good options that can create more customized emails.
And to dive deeper, check out my full review of Constant Contact vs. Mailchimp and my ultimate guide to the 21 Best Mailchimp Alternatives to try this year. You can also check out this great comparison of Mailchimp vs. SendGrid.
Pricing:
If your needs are basic and you want one of the more basic options, give MailChimp a try.
Mailigen
Best for Integrations
Mailigen is a cloud-based email marketing solution that caters to small and midsize businesses across industries including e-commerce, advertising, banking, media, and more.
Key features include email list segmentation, email automation, campaign analytics, sign-up form builders, pre-made templates, and online surveys.
Additionally, users get access to online survey integrations and text messaging capabilities.
Mailigen allows users to drag text boxes, images, and other components to design the perfect marketing emails. The solution provides users with design tools and configurable templates as well as email styles that help users to create and manage their campaigns.
With nine different types of content blocks, you can configure emails with ease, and even add dynamic content with if/or statements:
Another powerful feature is functionality with its open API. Mailigen offers integrations with the biggest plugins out there like Zapier and WordPress.
Furthermore, they integrate with e-commerce platforms and social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Pricing is tiered and scales based on your number of email subscribers. For small lists up to 500 subscribers, it’s $10/month. If you have 2,500 subscribers, you’ll pay $25/month, and this goes up to $400/month for 100,000 subscribers.
They offer customized high-volume pricing if you have over 150,000 on your list.
If you’re looking for a strong email marketing service that integrates with lots of apps and has an open API, you can get started today with a 30-day free trial.
Benchmark
Best Drag-and-Drop Email Templates ($13/month)
Present in 15 countries around the world, Benchmark prides itself on its international service. We’ve spoken with numerous members of their support team (in different languages) and the service was friendly, fast and gave good answers.
We’ve also been pleasantly surprised by how easy and intuitive the platform is while offering powerful marketing tools. This is particularly impressive when you can access many of the features without spending a dime.
What we like: Intuitive editor. A great choice of flexible and varied mobile-optimized templates. The support is top-notch.
Where they can improve: The automations are lacking. Storage space is limited, and you have to pay extra if you run out. Also, they have consistently performed badly in our deliverability tests.
Who Benchmark is for: Multilingual teams looking for an affordable and intuitive tool.
Benchmark is an easy-to-use, full-featured email marketing software. Its main features include an intuitive email builder, advanced automation campaigns, and tools like surveys, polls, and opt-in pop-ups to grow your list.
First, you can add their email sign-up forms and pop-ups to get users to join your list.
When they join, you can use triggers to add them to automated email workflows like welcome series, post-purchase series, abandoned cart emails, and more.
Once users are on your list, you can nurture them with surveys, polls, and exceptionally-designed emails (on all devices) to build a loyal following.
Benchmark also features analytics tools like A/B testing subject lines, content, and delivery times. Plus, they feature a helpful inbox checker to preview what your email will look like on all email platforms.
Finally, they integrate with 300+ other services. Connections include a WordPress plugin, Facebook sign-up forms, Google Docs, Zendesk, PayPal, and tons of other SaaS platforms to extend your email functionality.
Pricing:
You can test drive Benchmark for free and upgrade to their premium plans starting at $13/month.
Constant Contact – Email Marketing Veteran
Maybe because Constant Contact have been doing email marketing since 1995, they managed to find new avenues that no other providers had touched. For instance, they were the only solution to offer event management tools, surveys or social campaigns. Unfortunately, they recently removed the event management tool, instead offering an integration with Eventbrite.
They now have around 650,000 users worldwide, and 270+ apps for integrating extra services to their platform. Is it still enough to make them relevant?
What we like: Consistently good deliverability results. Niche features such as the ability to manage event invitations, registrations, and tickets.
What they should improve: Expensive and relatively basic automation. In general, Constant Contact lacks basic functions that you find elsewhere (see our Constant Contact alternatives guide). The editor is lacking in design options, and their templates could do with a revamp. See Constant Contact pricing details here.
Who is Constant Contact for: We see Constant Contact as too expensive for what it offers. You’d get more for your buck with ActiveCampaign or MailerLite.
Mailify – Speedy and Slick Email Platform
This French email marketing provider recently revamped its desktop software with a smart new design and a web-based version of their tool. It’s packed with new features, too, including automations, landing pages, and SMS. They offer a great selection of modern-looking email templates, and a drag and drop email editor that’s easy to use.
Bonus feature – if you’d prefer your data to stay offline, Mailify’s desktop version will actually let you keep your data hosted locally.
What we like: Great user interface, and some very fresh email designs. The editor is fast and easy to use, giving you plenty of flexibility to edit email marketing campaigns.
Where they can improve: Contact list management and automations are quite simple – would be great if you could do more with them. As they charge based on email sends, the service can also get a little pricey. Deliverability rates could also be better.
Who is Mailify for: If ease of use and good email designs are important to you, Mailify could be well-suited to your needs. We’d also recommend it for anyone wanting to keep their data offline.
ConvertKit
Speak about best email marketing software, ConvertKit is worthy of mention. The company has a number of packages and plans for businesses to try out and the good part: all packages come with a 14-day trial period.
The least plan starts at $29 per month for a max of 1,000 subscribers. Some accompanying features of ConvertKit’s email marketing services include high deliverability, customizable forms, automation, subscriber tagging etc.
See more details on ConvertKit’s pricing page.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign runs an affordable, flexible and multi-user accounts for businesses to run their marketing campaigns. For as low as a $9, you can send unlimited emails, newsletters, promotions to a maximum of 500 subscribers in the entry level Lite plan.
The service offers three more premium plans Plus, Professional, and Enterprise starting at $49, $129, and $229 respectively.
Some of the more advanced packages can be great for your marketing toolkit. Features like lead and contact scoring, SMS marketing, and predictive sending can be great for marketers.
Pricing is also based on subscriber counts and you can determine price estimates on the company’s pricing page by inputting the number of subscribers you wish you market to.
Conclusion
Businesses today rely heavily on email marketing as part of their marketing strategy. Email has the advantage of being a personal touch, so it’s much more effective for getting leads and bringing people back to your site. But doing email marketing effectively does not have to be complicated. The most important thing is to develop a strategy and use the right tools.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate with customers and fans. Unfortunately, among all tools and platforms designed to help you create and manage effective email marketing campaigns, not all are created equal. These email marketing tools ratings are based on many direct personal tests as well as other online resources such as client reviews and what experts recommend.