Figuring out what the best email marketing tools are for your ecommerce business might be overwhelming at first. Email Marketing has been used by most online stores throughout the years. There are many different platforms and email marketing services for ecommerce you can use for your business. It’s important to choose carefully and be strategic when it comes to choosing an email marketing platform so that you can get the best performance out of it.
Ecommerce email marketing is serious business, and requires the right tools. For example, if you aren’t segmenting properly or your emails aren’t being tracked and measured, then you’re spinning your wheels — it’s easy to make these mistakes in the confusing email marketing world. With a little planning, though, you can set up ecommerce email campaigns that put cash back in your business’s pocket; I’ll show you how.
Ecommerce email marketing is one of the most profitable industries in the world with 23 billion being spent annually, according to Statista. It’s quite simple. Customers who receive email promotions are more likely to purchase more products from you than those who don’t. As any ecommerce business owner knows, word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising hands down. This is what makes email marketing so powerful!
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing is vital because it:
- Provides a direct link between businesses and customers
- Allows retailers to ride the growing trend of personalization
- Permits gathering and testing data-driven insights
- Is the best way to segment and target customers with customized offers and promotions.
To leverage the benefits of a quality email campaign requires a robust platform that can handle the segmentation demands of current marketing trends.
1. MailChimp
MailChimp has over 14 million customers and is popular with small and medium-sized businesses. It gained a reputation for ease-of-use and its focus on eye-catching, beautifully designed email templates, and opt-in forms.
MailChimp also integrates with a wide array of third-party tools, including many eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, to name just a few. Features include trigger-based messaging, spam score checking, and a full array of reporting. You can also preview your messages in various email clients, use geo-targeting and time-zone-based delivery.
Pricing: Free for up to 2000 subscribers, around $5/month for every additional 500 subscribers. They charge $199/month for enterprise-level features.
2. Constant Contact
Constant Contact stands out for its intuitive dashboard and easily-accessible features. It’s user-friendly and comes with support over the phone or live chat. They offer extensive training materials. They include a variety of templates to run surveys, coupons, invitations, and add video. It is also a complete contact management system.
Pricing: Plans begin at either $20/month (for the basic plan) or $45/month (for the “Plus” plan), each for up to 500 subscribers. The monthly price increases incrementally with more subscribers. One month free.
3. Klaviyo
While most platforms are designed to send email, Klaviyo was designed to capture customer data from eCommerce sites and leverage it for personalized email campaigns. They include multiple abandoned cart follow-up sequences to increase conversions and sales.
Klaviyo integrates with all eCommerce web designer customer designed and standard CRM platforms to maximize your lead generation. It offers a complete automated marketing system that includes emails and ads. It is highly customizable for any targeted segmentation.
Pricing: Starts at $25/month for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails.
4. AWeber
AWeber is another considerable email service provider and was one of the first email marketing tools to enter the market. Like MailChimp, one of its main strengths is the number of integrations it offers with eCommerce platforms.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with access to top-quality support and a wealth of training materials, AWeber is a solid choice. It integrates with BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify along with a host of other eCommerce-related apps and CRM platforms.
Pricing: Plans start at $19/month for up to 500 subscribers. For a subscriber base above 25,000, custom plans are available, and they offer a 30-day free trial.
5. Active Campaign
Active Campaign provides a multi-faceted platform. Dynamic campaign content helps maintain relevant content to your segmented lists. They offer unlimited personalization. Every custom field you create automatically becomes a new personalization tag.
It has fifteen tools including on-site and SMS messaging, CRM tools, extensive site, and email analytics.
Pricing: They have a sliding scale tool to display the pricing based on volume. However, the beginning level or “Lite” plan starts at $69 per month. They offer free migration from another platform.
6. HubSpot
Hubspot’s email marketing tools are part of their much larger Marketing Hub plan, which includes everything from lead analytics to blog content management. It’s an intuitive platform, with all the features you would expect, and is ideal for those looking for a full suite of tools, not just an email marketing solution.
Pricing: Basic plans start at $200/month, and contracts must be pre-paid for a year. Enterprise plans start at $2,400/month. The free plan does not include email marketing. They offer a free demo.
7. Keap
Much like Active Campaign, Keap is a full-fledged solution for managing all aspects of your email marketing campaigns. Designed for smaller businesses, it includes features for segmentation, tracking, and automation. There are also hundreds of integrations with CRM systems, eCommerce platforms, and third-party software providers. They offer a 10-minute, webinar or one-hour live demo.
Keap’s features benefit online retailers, such as product promotion templates, payment integrations, and re-engagement campaign automation.
Pricing: Basic plans start at $85/month but increase to $174/month if you add the “eCommerce” and “Sales pipeline” features. There is also a one-time $299 fee “for new user training not included in the monthly quote.”
8. Omnisend
Difficulty 🛠: Normal
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰💰
Unique feature 💡: Rich in ecommerce features and multichannel automation
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.7/5 (3,921 reviews)
Omnisend is a top-rated email marketing automation platform on Shopify, used by over 50,000 merchants. It features pre-built automation workflows and intuitive, no-code editing that make it easy to set up advanced email campaigns.
Omnisend comes with beautiful, stoppable automated emails for:
- Cart abandonment
- Product abandonment
- New subscribers (welcome emails)
- Customers likely to churn (win-back and reactivation emails)
- Customer feedback and product reviews
All messages, subject lines, and workflow settings are ready-made, so you can start running campaigns right away.
Omnisend features also include a drag-and-drop email builder, dynamic coupon codes, automatic product picker, and fully customizable pop-ups. You also get access to push notifications and robust segmentation to send messages across SMS, and you can use the built-in audience sync for Google and Facebook ads.
Omnisend also offers thorough analytics, campaign metrics, and unsubscribe tracking. These help you analyze campaign performance with personalized benchmarks compared against industry brands. You also can see product analytics and where customers are in your funnels.
After a 14-day free trial with Omnisend, you decide whether to keep the paid features, upgrade, or continue using the free plan (of up to 15,000 emails per month).
9. Drip
Difficulty 🛠: Normal
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰💰💰
Unique feature 💡: Behavioral automation triggers
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.6/5 (50 reviews)
With Drip, you get access to a world-class email and SMS marketing platform that ensures simplified A/B testing, smart segmentation tools, and powerful reporting to help you build effective drip campaigns. Key features include drag-and-drop design tools, pre-made mobile responsive email templates, autoresponders, and a one-click integration with Shopify.
To top it off, Drip provides marketers with tailored campaign recommendations for your store. You’ll never have to wonder what campaign to build next—Drip will tell you what will make the biggest impact on your sales and marketing.
Start with Drip on a 14-day free trial. Then upgrade to a paid plan starting at $19 per month. Prices increase based on the number of subscribers in your account.
10. SmartrMail
Difficulty 🛠: Easy
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰💰💰
Unique feature 💡: Backed by machine learning technology
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.9/5 (398 reviews)
SmartrMail is an easy-to-use, affordable, and powerful email marketing tool. Launched in 2016, its founders began SmartrMail because they were looking for an email marketing platform to market their online art marketplace and couldn’t find one.
They built SmartrMail with lots of automation tools for building email campaigns, including abandoned cart, welcome series, and thank you messages, with a goal in mind of making it quick and easy to send beautiful, well-designed emails for your ecommerce store.
Today, SmartrMail has a growing library of email templates to choose from. Or you can create your own with its WYSIWYG and full HTML editor. It also can help you decide which products to recommend to customers, using your Shopify data, to improve sales and customer retention.
If you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers, you can send up to 5,000 emails per month on the free plan. Paid plans start at $19 per month.
11. Constant Contact
Difficulty 🛠: Beginner
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰💰💰
Unique feature 💡: Event management features
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 3.9/5 (23 reviews)
Constant Contact was one of the first email marketing vendors, dating back to 1995. In this time, it’s developed a very easy-to-use and beginner-friendly platform to help everyone from ecommerce stores to bloggers improve their email marketing strategy.
With this email marketing service, you can easily organize and build your email list, manage templates, and more. It offers over 1 GB of storage for your files, plus an email tracking system and built-in social media sharing tool .
If you’re new to email marketing, you can take advantage of Constant Contact’s library of training and webinars to learn the email automation basics. Merchants enjoy a 60-day free trial of Constant Contact before pricing starts at $20 per month.
12. Campaign Monitor
Difficulty 🛠: Normal
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰
Unique feature 💡: Easy HTML email builder
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.6/5 (1,044 reviews)
When it comes to all-around features, ease of use, and value, Campaign Monitor is one of the premier email marketing services. Its drag-and-drop editor and email templates prioritize beautiful design, or you can build your own custom emails in HTML from the ground up.
Campaign Monitor is one of the few platforms placing emphasis on transactional emails, in addition to marketing emails, helping you squeeze more value out of every email you send. Its unique visual journey designer makes it simple to keep all of those campaigns organized.
Campaign Monitor is free to install. Paid plans start at $9 per month, based on number of subscribers.
Finding the best tool for your ecommerce platform
New and capable email and online marketing tools for small businesses and startups pop up every day, extending well beyond those on this list. Your goal should be not only to find a solution that’s more than just a great email marketing service. You also need a solution that’s the best email software for you, working for your business and your customers, and helping you drive more engagements, more sales, and more loyalty.
Hopefully this roundup has given you an idea of where to start. Now it’s time to take full advantage of those free trials and test the waters so you can start putting email marketing to work for your business.
Conclusion
Email is the original app. Whenever I get a new mobile device, one of the first things I do is install my main email application and configure it to work with my Gmail account (yes, it’s strange that I do this). Through email I’ve seen how businesses come and go and how products change over time. Not only does sending email make up a significant portion of all internet traffic, it’s also an email marketing platform (sometimes colloquially called just an “email marketing tool”) that lets me engage with targeted people at scale. Big surprise: this makes it really useful for ecommerce!
If you sell products online, email is one of your best sales and marketing tools. Customers often forget to buy items they’ve added to their carts. It happens all the time. They need ongoing nudging and reminders to help them complete their transactions. That’s where email comes in – it makes sure they don’t miss out on this chance to buy more and more of your products!