Small businesses can benefit from email marketing, which is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. Email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of 4300 percent, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
Due to its ease of use, full control, and ability to establish direct contact with your clients, email marketing has become one of the most popular marketing methods.
The effectiveness of email marketing has been proven. Your visitor traffic can increase substantially and your revenue can increase as well. The term ’email marketing’ covers a wide range of tools and strategies. Using email marketing series, we’ll show you how to select the right tool for your business and how to generate better results.
You can use email to reach your audience and drive conversions, but there are so many tools out there that it can be hard to pick one. Would you be interested in hearing about 7 of the best free email marketing tools?
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing email marketing services. In addition, it is the easiest email marketing service to use for beginners.
With the marketing calendar, you can manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, and more.
With each account, you get unlimited emails, easy tracking, a free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify.
Additionally, their Email Plus accounts come with powerful features such as email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing to help you optimize your open rates.
A variety of useful resources are available from Constant Contact’s customer support team, including live chat, phone support, email, and community support.
In addition to its online training, the company offers live seminars nationwide. Businesses can use email marketing to grow quickly once they understand its basic concepts.
All things considered, Constant Contact is the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.
There is a 60-day free trial available from Constant Contact (no credit card required). After that, their monthly pricing begins at $20.
We are offering an additional 20% off Constant Contact coupons for WPBeginner users.
Drip
Drip provides powerful enterprise email marketing tools to eCommerce businesses, bloggers, and digital marketers. With their tools, marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization are easy.
Email software from this company integrates seamlessly with all popular website builders, such as WordPress and WooCommerce. By doing this, you will be able to easily add pop-ups / opt-in signup forms to your website and capture more leads.
Unlike competitors such as Campaign Monitor, Drip provides intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmentation, split testing features, list groups, and a visual automation workflow builder. By utilizing these features, you can reach targeted customers in your email list to increase sales.
Drip offers live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides, and excellent documentation.
The smart eCommerce marketing automation that Drip provides allows us to connect with and engage with every customer on a personal level while sending bulk emails.
Each email marketing campaign is tracked in their eCommerce revenue attribution feature.
Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.
Drip offers a free trial, and their plans start from $49 / month which includes all their features.
Recently, they’ve added SMS notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channels. In this way, they are able to provide store owners with a comprehensive email marketing solution.
ConvertKit
With ConvertKit, you will be able to automate your email marketing for your professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. In addition to being incredibly easy to use, it is also incredibly powerful.
There is one of the unique features of ConvertKit that is that it allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives in their email signup forms. You can also use their emailing service to send drip emails from their emailing service since it has a built-in auto-responder that is easy to manage.
It is very easy to segment subscribers with ConvertKit so that you can easily sort out those who are interested from those who have already purchased. The automation of emails allows you to make them feel more personalized and this helps increase conversions. The term “targeted email marketing” is used to describe this type of marketing strategy.
Among the many powerful features that they offer, such as A/B testing, beautiful email templates, the ability to create landing pages, smart workflows, and more, they are one of the top-notch email marketing services you can find.
There is email-based support available from ConvertKit, as well as a great learning portal with plenty of helpful information.
In our opinion, ConvertKit is the best email marketing service for professional bloggers because it has so many features designed especially for creators and professional bloggers, which is why we rate them the best.
There is even the ability to sell subscriptions and digital products from the same platform so that you can manage everything all in one place.
The free trial offered by ConvertKit runs for 14 days, and the monthly pricing starts at $29 for the first month. Additionally, they offer a 30-day money back guarantee on their products.
In addition to the basic features that come with the Creator Pro plan, the Creator Pro plan also includes advanced features like a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
HubSpot Email Marketing
It is probably best known for its marketing automation platform, but HubSpot recently launched an email marketing tool that can accommodate a lot of the needs of small businesses in terms of transactional email marketing.
With HubSpot Email Marketing’s free version, you can send kickback emails from lead offers, thank you emails after purchases, or simply promote current campaigns that you are currently running. There is no doubt that the ease of use of HubSpot’s free email tool is one of its best features. There is a handy drag-and-drop visual editor built into the tool, and you can also take advantage of ready-made templates to get started and get it up and running right away.
HubSpot Email Marketing stands out because of its native integration with other HubSpot tools, such as the free-forever CRM, which, among other things, makes it stand out among its competitors. Upon creating an account, you get access to both tools in order to create a centralized database of contacts, organize it into lists, and manage and track the performance of your emails once you have done so.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a marketing communication platform that offers both email marketing tools and additional features such as customer relationship management and landing page creation in addition to email marketing. A great looking email can be created easily with Sendinblue’s email design features, which include over 70 design templates. It is also important to note that all of these templates are responsive to any screen size, and you can preview your results to make sure your design looks the way you want it to on any device.
Once you have designed your email, you can take advantage of features such as A/B testing and segmented recipient lists to manage the optimization of your campaigns and to target your ideal audiences without having to spend too much time and effort optimizing them.
ActiveCampaign
Best for small businesses & enterprises
In the past, ActiveCampaign was an underdog, but today, it is one of the most popular email marketing tools with over 130,000 small businesses using it.
From SMS and email marketing to site messaging to customer relationship management (CRM), ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of customer experience automation (CXA) tools.
With ActiveCampaign, you can create an email marketing campaign that is intuitive and drag-and-drop friendly
It is the automation builder – a visual canvas that allows you to create automated marketing sequences across different channels – that is at the heart of ActiveCampaign’s platform.
The automation builder in ActiveCampaign makes it easy to create automation, much like reading a flowchart
With ActiveCampaign’s intuitive design, anyone can create powerful email automation sequences by creating them from scratch or importing one of their 500+ automation recipes, unlike some tools that require expensive consultants and extensive training to use.
It is true that most tools that rank in the top 10 offer email A/B testing, but ActiveCampaign goes a step further by allowing you to run A/B split tests on entire automation sequences. As a result, you will be able to test virtually everything – from the number of touchpoints to the time intervals between emails and everything in between. As a result of all of these factors, your marketing will be able to improve on a regular basis – on autopilot.
Using advanced automation capabilities such as split actions and A/B testing, you will be able to optimize your performance in no time
In addition to being an all-in-one sales and marketing tool for small businesses, ActiveCampaign is also equipped with a CRM system, which can be used to manage sales, live chats, and, of course, email marketing automation all in one place so you can focus on your business.
There is a built-in CRM system that simplifies the management of deals, as well as connecting to ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation capabilities
The best part is that they have managed to accomplish all of this with a price tag that is just a tenth of the price tag of many email marketing tools that we have reviewed in this guide – starting at just $9 a month.
As far as ActiveCampaign is concerned, the responses from the survey users who use it are overwhelmingly positive. It is one of the tools that businesses of all sizes are likely to move to in the near future.
How does ActiveCampaign work and what are its key features?
- More than 125 email templates to choose from
- There are more than 500 recipes available for automation
- There are more than 800 integrations available
- Pages that serve as landing pages
- Messaging via SMS is a popular method of communication today
- Reporting on a custom basis
- Personalization of the web
- Customer Relationship Management
- The use of split actions and A/B testing
- Content that is predictive
- Sending messages in a predictable manner
- Tracking and attribution of goals
In my opinion, ActiveCampaign is a great choice for small businesses looking for a great email marketing tool that can easily be used and is affordable. ActiveCampaign strikes the best balance between power, affordability, and ease of use for the vast majority of small businesses.
Autopilot
Automated marketing is one of the best things about this tool
As a matter of fact, the days of email marketing being about sending bulk newsletters are long gone.
With today’s booming digital landscape, it’s essential for email marketing to be intelligent. It must be able to send the right messages to the right leads at the right time, automatically.
This is why all ten of the email marketing providers in our list offer marketing automation as a feature. It is safe to say that Autopilot is a company that excels in this area, as its name implies. On top of that, they offer one of the best-designed platforms for building email automation sequences that I have ever seen.
It is no secret that creating a sequence of emails that automates the sending of emails can quickly turn into a confusing task. This is the challenge Autopilot solves in a rather quirky manner, by allowing you to add emojis, stickers, and explanations to the automation sequences, making it easier for teams to collaborate on building sequences together.
There is no doubt that this can get messy – but I would rather have messy automation sequences that I can understand what is going on rather than beautiful automation sequences that take half an hour to figure out.
Besides its great features, I also love the fact that Autopilot can trigger actions in your other tools inside Autopilot based on the actions you take in Autopilot. It saves you from having to configure integrations with tools like Zapier in order to integrate your tools, and makes it much easier for you to understand your sequences.
I’ll explain in further detail what Autopilot’s reporting looks like in our section on reporting and analytics below, but I can assure you that it’s excellent as well.
In spite of the fact that Autopilot starts at $50/month for 2,000 contacts, it is far from the most cost-effective option, especially when you consider that Autopilot does not come with a CRM built in. There is no doubt that Autopilot is extremely intuitive and a wonderful tool for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences together. In the event that we had to move from ActiveCampaign to something else, this is most likely where we would go.
Conclusion
In order to be successful with email marketing, it’s important to understand that a lot of it depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose, since they are responsible for ensuring that your email messages are delivered as you intend.
It is important to realize that if you are not careful, then you will end up paying much more money for fewer marketing features and terrible email deliverability rates (which cause you to lose even more money).
In this article, we will discuss 7 email marketing tools that will assist you in creating, tracking, and sending high-quality email campaigns in the shortest amount of time possible. Explore an ebook on how to create a personalized welcome message with these tools, so your recipients are able to recognize your name when they open the email you send them, as well as tips for using these tools.