In this article, I’ll be exploring the best email marketing tools available to help you promote your business online. Whether you want to promote your products and services or want to increase your subscribers/list, these tools will allow you to create a series of personalized emails that are targeted
An Email Marketing Software refers to the process of sending emails. It can be used for various purposes like sending promotional emails (to make a sale), announcing special offers and discounts, announce promotions and discounts, invite new customers to your business or newsletter, sending out thank-you or feedbacks to customers, acknowledging important event in the life of your customers. This can also be used for sending bulk newsletters as well as reaching a large audience at a time.
Are you wondering if you should be running an email drip campaign? Maybe you’ve reached out to other companies and asked them how their email campaigns are going, but haven’t found any helpful information. During my years in customer support for one of the largest online marketplaces, I saw how a company’s responses directly affected their bottom line.
Depending on your business, you might use standalone email marketing tools or could be using services from a third party platform to send emails. Regardless of what type of customer experience you want to create, we’ll take a look at the tools that will suit you best.
Looking For A Free Email Marketing Service To Scale Your Business?
Selecting the email marketing service that suits you best shouldn’t be a tedious or complex process.
To succeed, you need a tool that offers liberty and adequate features, without any hidden charges. Moreover, it should be easy to master and ideally provide features that have a definite impact on the success of your campaigns, such as A/B testing.
Don’t forget to look at its pricing as a whole as well! Once you outgrow the free plan, you’ll need a trustworthy with tested functionality that doesn’t break the bank!
Maropost
Maropost is an email marketing software that helps you connect to your subscribers mainly via email but also via social, SMS and web notification.
It is evolving to focus on eCommerce businesses and adding extensive reporting to its suite of features. It has a drag and drop editor but it lacks a bit of flexibility when it comes to heavily visualised emails. No doubt that it’s great for text based emails.
Building Drips:
With Maropost, you can create complex customer journeys & send targeted messages. The best part is that you will get key metrics for emails that are part of journeys. This will help you optimise your campaigns.
Their chat support is available 24/7 for Enterprise users.
Reporting:
For reporting you can use their built-in dashboards or create your own custom reports.
Pricing:
Maropost pricing starts at $500/mo. They don’t offer a free trial.
Sendloop
Easy-to-use yet powerful self-service email marketing platform designed for small businesses, entrepreneurs, eCommerce businesses.
Editor:
Sendloop’s editor is a drag-and-drop editor with 80+ email templates. According to most reviews, it gets a good reputation because of its easy to use editor. It allows you to import new subscribers via excel files or csv files consisting of contacts with their details. You can also manually add your contacts. You can create segments of your contacts and send automated emails to each segment based on certain conditions.
Automation:
Sendloop helps automate your email marketing campaigns with the help of plugins and integrations with your site. Sendloop’s Automation features also allow you to customize JavaScript.
You can trigger emails automatically based on certain user actions, like site visit, sign-ups, opening an email etc.
You also get features like single or double opt-in confirmation, Google Analytics integration, email preview and social share.
Pricing:
Sendloop pricing is based on the number of subscribers. At any price plan, you can send unlimited emails.
The pricing starts from $9/mo for 500 contacts. You can also choose ‘pay when you send’ offer. Under this, you pay $10 per thousand emails and there is no subscription fee.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing software. It became famous due to its graphic templates, easy to use editor. But it also has solid automation capabilities.
Editor:
When creating an email, you will find 5 main categories of templates to choose from: Layouts (Featured & Basic), Themes, Saved Templates, Campaigns, and Code Your Own. All layouts are mobile-friendly.
Drip:
For drip campaigns, Mailchimp uses its new automation features that comes with built-in drip campaigns for welcoming new subscribers/customers, following up after a sale etc. You can also create your own completely customized drips.
Pricing:
Mailchimp’s pricing starts off cheap but gets really costly as your audience increases. You can sign up for a forever free plan but that only allows you to access only a few features. Forever Free plan: $0, 2000 contacts, 10K emails Pricing for other plans is based on a combination of features you use and the number of contacts you have. For 500 contacts, pricing would be:
- Essential plan: $10/mo, 500K emails
- Standard Plan: $15/mo 1.2M emails
- Premium Plan: $309/mo, 3M+ emails
And remember, the Mailchimp counts subscribers & unsubscribers to calculate the list count. Mailchimp is actually one of the most expensive newsletters tools out there for small-to-medium businesses. If you are looking for a budget-friendly solution we’d encourage you to try SendX.
You’ll be joining many other former Mailchimp users who’ve shifted to SendX and never looked back.
Mailchimp’s Venture Into ECommerce
One important update for all those looking at Mailchimp as an option is that Mailchimp has also recently launched its own online stores for SMEs, and a new service for booking appointments. The appointment booking service went live on 28th April 2021, and the new eCommerce features are scheduled to become available for the US and UK Mailchimp customers by May 18th 2021.
New ‘Websites and e-commerce’ plans will be introduced (and free-plan users will have to pay 2 percent transaction fee). Transaction fees will be reduced for users of different pricing grades, for example, those who go for a Plus plan at $29, only 0.5 percent transaction fee will be applicable.
Besides, for $10 extra, Mailchimp’s branding will be removed and you will get email and chat support, and you will only have to pay 1.5 percent transaction fees.
All their plans will also include SEO tools and Google Analytics integration. Plus, you can build websites with unlimited pages and without bandwidth restrictions.
And when it comes to the online stores by Mailchimp, you can build your product catalogues, manage your orders, and taxes and shipping configurations.
But if you don’t need all of these additional features and services, you should still proceed with comparing Mailchimp with other email service providers, like SendX.
Woodpecker
This email automation platform positions itself as a personal AI assistant that helps lead gen, sales, and recruitment professionals get the most out of their cold email campaigns. Woodpecker saves time spent on outreach and turning cold leads into loyal clients.
Features:
Follow-up Automation that allows you to use email templates, schedule follow-ups, set triggers, detect replies, set auto-replies, etc.
Email Personalization. Send emails one by one with the desired frequency, use custom fields and snippets, and send emails from MS Exchange, Gmail, or Office 365 to give them a human look.
Email Analytics and Reports: open, bounce, click-through, and reply rates.
Email Integrations: Pipedrive, Zapier, and more.
Pricing:
- $49/month — 50 contacts daily
- $54/month — 200 contacts daily
- $59/month — unlimited contacts daily
You can have 2 months for free if you get an annual plan. Woodpecker also has a free trial. For 14 days, you get full access to all the features and can send up to 150 cold emails for free.
Reply
Reply.io is a sales outreach automation platform that helps businesses streamline one-to-many communication, generate more leads, attract new clients, and grow income faster. With this toolset, you can automate email outreach, social interactions, calls, and tasks according to your sales plan.
Features:
Out-of-the-box email templates and multichannel sequences that help users accelerate the launch of campaigns.
AI features such as Email Sorting into six default folders to focus on the hottest leads, Email Quality Check, and Email Assistant to create effective email copy.
CRM integrations, rich API, and the power of Zapier to automatically sync data and keep CRM records up to date.
Pricing
Reply.io paid plans start at $70 per user per month and have 3 pricing categories: Individual, Business, and Enterprise, where Enterprise is the custom plan that can be specifically created for large businesses.
Individual and Business categories include 3 plans each, depending on the number of team users or contacts you want to reach per month. For example, an Individual plan will cost you:
- $70/month per user — 1,000 contacts
- $90/month per user — 3,000 contacts
- $120/month per user — unlimited contacts
You get 20% off when you pay per year. Besides, Reply offers a 14-day free trial.
Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps teams create an automated sales outreach process, accelerate it, and reach sales goals. With it, you can send personalized sales emails, automate your follow-ups, and fill your CRM with warm deals.
Features:
Liquid Templates to dynamically personalize text for every recipient and adjust your message based on day, time, and other lead data.
Custom Placeholders (employee name, industry, gender, etc.) that help users personalize emails and make them more engaging.
Automatic reaction-based follow-ups targeted at boosting reply rates. They allow sending different email copies to recipients based on how they reacted to your previous message.
Integrations and analytics.
Pricing:
- $55/month per user — Email Cadences, API, Zapier
- $85/month per user — Cadence Playbooks, Multichannel Outreach, CRM Integrations
- $145/month per user — IP based login restrictions, Monthly customer success review, Monthly deliverability reports
You can also try Klenty for free with its 14-day free trial.
Pabbly Email Marketing – Send Drip Emails Free & Easily
We all know that Pabbly Email Marketing is a leading email marketing brand in the market. This is because of its affordable price, quality services, and awesome features. Drip emailing is a facility which comes preloaded with this marketing software.
You can easily automate email delivery of different marketing campaigns using drip emailing features and reach out to customers at times when they are most available to interact.
Drip Emailing In Pabbly Email Marketing –
With Pabbly Email Marketing drip mailing service you just have to create series of emails, schedule campaign, add contacts and the emails will automatically get delivered at the specified date & time in customer’s inbox without any manual efforts.
You also get free access to 500+ email templates which accept all types of customizations. Still, if you want to design your own emails that process is also simplified by Drag-Drop email builder which is easy to use and helps you design eye-catchy emails.
Pricing –
- Pabbly Email Marketing offers a free trial for sending unlimited emails to 100 subscribers for 7 days.
- After that, you can choose from multiple paid plans which range from $29 for 5000 users to $1599 for 1 Million users a month.
What can I expect from free email marketing software?
You’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how much you can get for absolutely nothing! Some don’t even set a cap on the number of subscribers you can have or the number of emails you can send a month.
You’ll also see that other features such as landing pages, transactional email and automation are sometimes included, so look out for these nice extras.
The specific features that appeal to you will depend on the needs of your business. However, there are a few things to look out for when selecting an email marketing service:
- Are email templates included for free? And are the designs attractive?
- Does the free plan include landing pages and what are the designs like? (These can be very useful if you don’t have a website yet)
- Is email automation included? And can I segment my contacts into different lists?
- Will the reports offered give me the data I need?
- Is there a limit to the number of forms I can create?
- Are transactional emails included (if that’s something you need)
- Most often, the provider will include its own logo in your email, you might want to see what this actually looks like as some are more subtle than others
- What other tools does it integrate with? (Especially worth considering if you have an ecommerce site)
- What kind of support do you get? Mailchimp, for example, is notoriously difficult to get in contact with on the free plan
Conclusion
E-Mail marketing can be an effective and easy to use way to market a new product or service, interact with customers, or respond to inquiries. While its pretty intuitive for regular email senders there is much more to it than sending an e-mail and hoping for the best.
If you’re currently using drip email software to send out your leads, it’s likely that you are not getting the ultimate ROI that you are looking for. Perhaps you waited too long to implement a lead management system, or you haven’t drafted the perfect lead capture form and consent policy.