Best Email Marketing Tools Uk

Email marketing is a very powerful way to go forward with your online marketing. In fact, it has been observed that creation of a strong email list can improve your ROI by upto 300%.

So the key question is from where you can get started with this process – from what platform or service providers? While there are a lot of email service providers out in the market, in this article we shall look at some of the best Email Service providers in the UK.

OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with all the best email marketing service that we mentioned above and dozens more.

WPBeginner founder, Syed Balkhi, is also the co-founder of OptinMonster. He initially built OptinMonster to help grow our own email list. After the launch in 2013, it has grown tremendously with over 1 million active installs of the WordPress plugin.

Today OptinMonster is being used by some of the largest brands in the world including McAfee, Experian, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Harvard University, Pateron, and more.

Aside from OptinMonster, you can also use the following tools to grow your email marketing list:

WPForms – #1 WordPress form builder that you can use to create contact forms, surveys, polls, and other type of forms. It comes with built-in integration with all popular email marketing services. Trusted by over 4 million website owners.
SeedProd – Want to create custom landing pages to boost conversions? SeedProd offers a far superior landing page builder experience. This is why smart website owners use SeedProd along with their preferred email marketing service since it integrates with all the popular email platforms.
LiveChat.com – One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is to connect your live chat software with your email marketing service. We use LiveChat on several of our sites.
ChatBot.com – Another smart way to grow your email list is to use chatbot software and connect it with your email marketing service.
RafflePress – this is the leading WordPress giveaway and contest platform. It lets you use viral marketing to grow your email list.

Omnisend

Best for medium-large e-commerce brands

Omnisend is quickly becoming one of the leading marketing platforms for e-commerce stores.

Designed to help e-commerce brands control their marketing across multiple channels, Omnisend offers automated email, SMS, push notifications, and most impressively, integrations with Google Ads, Instagram, Facebook Ads, Messenger, and WhatsApp – which they claim have 10X higher click-through rates than email.

By focusing purely on e-commerce, Omnisend has built innovative email templates designed to reduce cart abandonment and drive repeat buyers. From ‘wheel of fortune’ offers to virtual scratch cards and birthday discounts, it’s evident that Omnisend’s built by a team intimately aware of what works in e-commerce.

As you’d expect of an e-commerce email marketing tool, Omnisend hooks into most e-commerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Where Omnisend goes one step further is in integrating with review, loyalty and help desk platforms, such as Yotpo, Smile.io, and ReCharge.

This not only enables Omnisend to report on how your campaigns impact sales, but enables you to trigger email, SMS and social campaigns based around your customer behaviour to reduce cart abandonment, increase return buyers, drive more product reviews, and more.

If you want the features that make Omnisend stand out, you’ll need a PRO account which starts at $199/month for up to 10,000 contacts. While not the cheapest, nor the easiest to use, Omnisend is a good option for e-commerce brands that want one multi-channel platform to rule them all.

What are Omnisend’s key features?

#6 Autopilot

Best for marketing automation

Gone are the days where email marketing is about sending bulk newsletters.

In today’s digital landscape, it’s essential for email marketing to be smart; sending the right messages to the right leads at the right time, automatically.

That’s why all of our top ten email marketing providers provide marketing automation. As the name would suggest, this is Autopilot’s forte. To boot, they have one of the best-designed canvases for building email automation sequences.

Autopilot's marketing automation annotations

Anyone who has ever built an email automation sequence knows how quickly they can become confusing. Autopilot solves this in a rather quirky way, allowing you to annotate your automation sequences with emojis, stickers and explanations, making it easy for teams to collaborate on building sequences.

Yes, it can get messy – but I’d rather that and be able to understand what’s going on, than having beautiful automation sequences that take half an hour to interpret.

Another feature I love about Autopilot is its ability to trigger actions in your other tools inside Autopilot. This saves having to configure integrations using a tool like Zapier and makes your sequences much easier to understand.

Autopilot’s reporting is also excellent, though, I’ll go into this in more detail in our section on reporting and analytics below.

Starting at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, Autopilot is far from the cheapest option, particularly considering that Autopilot does not offer an in-built CRM. However, Autopilot is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we had to move from ActiveCampaign, this is likely where we’d go.

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MailerLite – Best For the Essentials at an Affordable Price

Visit MailerLite

PRICE STARTS AT $0
PREMIUM PLANS START AT $10/MO
ALL BASIC EMAIL FEATURES
A/B TESTING TOOLS

TRY MAILERLITE FOR FREE

MailerLite offers all of the essentials with none of the fat.

It’s a great option for anyone who wants a straightforward email marketing service. You’re a creator who doesn’t need a ton of bells and whistles. You just need the tools to start your newsletter or send emails—and do so well.

It’s also nice for teams. Nobody is going to be intimidated by this platform, which means everyone is going to use the core features at their disposal.

The platform still offers tools for automation, landing pages, pop-ups, and surveys, so it’s not like you’re extremely limited. But even the UI for each one is fairly spartan and straightforward.

MailerLite has a drag-and-drop editor, which makes it easy for anyone to design a high-quality message. Segment your subscribers to enhance personalization and optimize your campaigns with features like A/B testing.

I’d recommend MailerLite for those of you who want simple email software at an affordable rate.

Here’s a look at the price points for MailerLite:

Up to 1,000 subscribers — $10 per month
1,001 – 2,500 subscribers — $15 per month
2,501 – 5,000 subscribers — $30 per month
5,001 – 10,000 subscribers — $50 per month
10,001 – 15,000 subscribers — $75 per month
15,001 – 20,000 subscribers — $100 per month
20,001 – 25,000 subscribers — $120 per month
25,001 – 30,000 subscribers — $140 per month

The pricing tiers continue to rise at about $20-$40 per 10,000 subscribers. MailerLite offers a 30% discount if you sign up for annual billing, making it one of the most affordable options on our list.

There is a free plan for up to 1,000 subscribers, but you’re limited to just 12,000 emails per month, and you don’t get every feature. You can use this option as an extended free trial when you’re just starting out. Learn more and try Mailerlite for free.

Benchmark

Not only is Benchmark’s email marketing suite incredibly powerful, but it’s also free. While most tools offer free trials or very limited features in their freemium plans, Benchmark gives you (almost) all the bells and whistles of their paid plans. Along with their ridiculously simple drag and drop builder, light automations and reporting tools, they also offer more advanced features like Google Analytics tracking, heatmapping and social media integration – all for free! For SMBs, Benchmark’s email tool is the perfect place to start and the perfect tool to grow alongside your business.

Flodesk

Flodesk is an email marketing tool that lets small businesses design beautiful emails easily. The layout builder lets you design custom graphics, removing the need for a design tool like Canva. Flodesk also offers sign-up forms to build your list faster and various workflow automations.

It’s easy to use, and there are templates to help you get started. There is a 30-day free trial to test drive all the features. Best of all, it’s a fixed price service: $38/month flat for unlimited subscribers, and unlimited email sends.

BenchmarkONE

BenchmarkONE was specifically designed with small businesses in mind. The overall email marketing suite includes an intuitive drag and drop builder, professionally pre-designed email templates, and with a CRM included in one platform, they offer the ability to build your email list like a boss with responsive forms and automations. The Core pricing for BenchmarkONE is $79/month (although you can choose a smaller Lite package at $39/month). The Core package gives you five users, 500 contacts (although you can get more with an increased price), and 2,500 email sends.

Image courtesy of ConvertKit

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a great service if the backbone of your business is blogging; it’s ideal for professional bloggers and creators. Their pricing plans are based on subscribers, but up to 3,000 subscribers is only $49/month. With their simple signup forms, ConvertKit allows you to easily send enticing offers and incentives. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails.

Image courtesy of AWeber

AWeber

AWeber is one of the longest-tenured email marketing tools for small businesses, and one of the bigger advantages of their platform is that you get expert access regardless of the paid package you’re on. They also have a strong blog for those just getting started with email marketing, and offer ideas around pre-built email campaigns and more, allowing email marketing beginners to have a solid starting point.

Image courtesy of Substack

Substack

Substack is a newer place in this space; you’d need to work up to their core offerings. But, after you build a list, they make it very easy to publish and monetize that list based on your number of subscribers. If you’re a content-driven business or a visually-driven business and can send out beautiful emails, you can make money directly from your list. In most email marketing, there will be Calls-To-Action, but a lot of the revenue comes from the ultimate relationship-building. With Substack, the paid plans allow the revenue to be directly from the email subscribers. It’s a different model but worth exploring — but you need to start by building the list and the list’s trust in your offerings.

GetResponse

GetResponse comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, tracking, and autoresponders. Like many of the other tools on this list, they integrate with a variety of third-party tools like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc. Their basic plan starts at $15/month for 1,000 subscribers.

Image courtesy of Drip

Drip

Drip is great for e-commerce shops, in part because their intelligent e-commerce automation is high-level but also intuitive for new users to navigate. Their basic plan is only $49/month for 2,500 users with unlimited email sends and 24/7 support. Some of their larger customers include LiveNation and Trivago.

Intercom

Intercom is a live chat tool, but it does so much more. It allows you to use chatbots and integrate your chats with other elements of your marketing workflow.

Intercom allows you to send automatic in-app messages that go far beyond just text. You can use images, videos, emojis, and even apps to help you with your marketing. It’s easy to choose from many different massage styles, without the need to involve a developer.

Intercom also has several optional add-ons available. These include product tours, advanced lead generation, and sophisticated customer engagement.

Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon offers four different WordPress plugins that allow you to add social feeds to your website; this concerns Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

These WordPress plugins are a great way to make the most of the time you spend on social media while conveniently monitoring your email marketing. You can automatically include posts from your account or even posts with a specific hashtag, where applicable.

You can customize your social feeds in multiple ways. For example, you can create a shoppable Instagram feed, so clickable Instagram photos of your products are automatically added to your site.

RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress Contest and a free plugin that allows you to encourage user interactions.

These could include visiting a page on your site, signing up for your email list, participating in polls or surveys, watching a video, and more. You can even create your actions, like asking readers to leave a comment.

<<< Finding new ideas for your email marketing campaigns is not easy, even for seasoned marketers. Here are 17 unique email marketing ideas to build business. >>>

By creating competition for your readers, you can dramatically increase how engaged they are with your content. You can also set up actions that prompt readers to share your content on social media.

ActiveCampaign

Best for small businesses & enterprises

Once an underdog, ActiveCampaign is now one of the most popular email marketing tools with over 130,000 small businesses customers.

ActiveCampaign offers a collection of customer experience automation (CXA) tools – from SMS & email marketing to site messaging and CRM functionality.

ActiveCampaign’s intuitive drag-and-drop email marketing designer

At the heart of ActiveCampaign’s platform is the automation builder; A visual canvas for building automated marketing sequences across channels.

ActiveCampaign's visual automation editor

ActiveCampaign’s automation builder makes building automations easy, similar to reading a flowchart

Unlike some tools that require expensive consultants and training to use, ActiveCampaign’s intuitive design enables anyone to craft powerful email automation sequences from scratch or by importing one of their 500+ automation recipes.

While email A/B testing is offered by most tools in the top 10, ActiveCampaign goes one step further by allowing you to run A/B split tests of entire automation sequences. This means you can test anything – from the number of touchpoints to the delays between emails and beyond. All of this ensures that your marketing improves with time – on autopilot.

Advanced automation capabilities like split actions and A/B testing make it easier to optimize your performance

As an all-in-one sales and marketing tool for small businesses, ActiveCampaign comes with an in-built CRM system to manage yours sales, live chat, and of course email marketing automation in one place.

A built-in sales CRM makes it easier to manage deals, but also connects to ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation engine

And, incredibly, they’ve done all of this with a price tag that’s 1/10th of many email marketing tools featured in this guide – starting at $9/month.

Our survey respondents using ActiveCampaign were overwhelmingly positive about it – and it was one of the most likely tools that businesses of all sizes were likely to move to.

What are ActiveCampaign’s Key Features?

For the vast majority of small businesses looking for a great email marketing tool that’s easy to use and affordable, ActiveCampaign is likely the best balance of power, affordability and ease of use.

Conclusion

Email marketing tools allow you to outreach your target audience on a large scale. As such, they simplify and reduces the cost of acquisition while showing great ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend).