Email marketing is the act of sending commercial email messages, under permission from the recipient, directly to a subscriber’s inbox. It’s been around for years and it will be here for many more. However, over the past couple of years, email marketing automation software has grown in popularity by leaps and bounds.
Email marketing automation software can help you deliver targeted, personalized emails to your customer base. Most email marketing platforms allow you to automate a lot of the routine actions involved in running an email campaign. To help you choose the best one for your business, we discuss some of the best email marketing software options
With the growing importance of social media marketing and content marketing, many companies have started to place an emphasis on email marketing automation. Thanks to email automation, you can automate your entire customer communication process and also make better use of what’s called “the permission-based marketing channel.” When used properly, automation with email marketing allows you to: save time, improve relationships with your customers, reduce costs and boost sales.
Email marketing automation is the process of sending automated emails based on certain triggers. Using this process, you can generate leads, promote your products and services, and nurture relationships with your customers. This process helps you to gain more ROI from each prospect or customer. Below are some free email marketing automation tools and paid email marketing software platforms that will help you to grow your business.
What Does Email Marketing Software Typically Include?
Almost all email marketing software allows you to design emails, upload contacts, schedule email campaigns, and see data on how your emails are performing. Advanced software lets you A/B split test aspects of the email, segment your contact list based on interests, and automate emails based on how contacts interact with any of your marketing channels. There are also typically lead generation capabilities such as putting lead forms on your site and creating landing pages to get more subscribers into the database.
Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign is now used by over 60,000 organizations of all shapes and sizes.
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing automation tool which simply enables you to create drip emails that will boost your subscriber interaction, interests, demographics, history, and more.
You can use Active Campaign as a CRM and marketing automation software. You’re going to like this email marketing automation software in terms of email deliverability, affordability, customer support, and integrations.
Pros:
- Excellent customer support
- Flexible and versatile
- Advanced features
Cons:
- The learning curve is a bit challenging.
- There are some glitches reported by some users.
- The forms feature isn’t sufficient and not customizable enough
Pricing
The minimum price plan costs $9/mo with annual payment for 500 contacts. The highest price plan is the Enterprise plan costing $229/mo.
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5
Hubspot
There are 48,000 small companies that use Hubspot which means it is ranked as one of the top email automation tools. In order to support your email marketing campaigns, it provides
- all-in-one CRM
- email marketing automation
- landing page builder platform
Probably the most advantageous part of HubSpot is its analytics. You can track your email campaigns in terms of conversions. But what about pricing?
Well, you should consider that it’s very affordable in the first place, costs about $50/month. However, the pricing can quickly get out of control. For example, if you want to add bonus features and grow your email list, you may have to pay $2,000/month annually. So, better be careful.
Pros:
- Ability to customize the user experience based on behavior
- Great user interface
Cons:
- Prices are too high for most startups.
- Not HIPAA compliant
Pricing
The starter plan for HubSpot Marketing Hub costs $50/mo.
G2 Rating: 4.4 out of 5
Constant Contact
As an effective email marketing automation software, Let Constant Contact allows you to send powerful emails with unique designs. Also, it is simple to use. You can arrange Facebook fan promotions, coupons, and deals with Let Constant Contact.
As the other email marketing automation software in the market, it provides an autoresponder. One of the important parts of this email marketing automation software is its affordable prices.
Pros:
- Clear overview of demographics of email recipients
- Simple and easy to use UI
- Excellent customer support
Cons:
- Has Constant Contact branding at the bottom of the emails
- Email templates tend to distort based on the platform recipients’ use.
- Email builder is a bit limited in terms of designing options
Pricing
Price based on number of contacts, starting at $20/mo
G2 Rating: 3.9 out of 5
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you the power to automatically collect and segment email addresses. These can be segmented based on the user’s activity, inactivity, cookies, geographical location, and more.
OptinMonster lets you build stunning lead generation forms that are proven to grow your email list.
With its easy-to-use drag and drop builder, 50+ lead generation form templates, and 6 different campaign types, your forms will both work and look great.
It also offers seamless integration with many of the leading email service providers. That means you can exponentially grow your email list with OptinMonster and then send personalized automated emails via your email service provider.
Email Marketing Automation with OptinMonster
OptinMonster also offers a Real-Time Behavior Automation engine. This powerful engine identifies what users are looking for and shows the perfect optin campaign that’s more likely to convert them into customers.
For example, you can:
- Detect when your visitors are actively leaving leave your site to show relevant campaigns to convert
- Show targeted campaigns to visitors based on the area of the site they are visiting
- Recognize how visitors interact with other offers and follow up with new targeted campaigns
- And much more…
In a nutshell, OptinMonster boosts your email list by showing the right optin campaigns to the right people at the right time.
That means you can also collect and tag emails based on the users’ behavior and other available information.
Once you have segmented your email list, the only thing you need to do is integrate OptinMonster with your favorite email marketing service. Then, you can start sending targeted emails.
Features like this make OptinMonster one of the best tools for your digital marketing strategy.
Want to know what the end results will look like with OptinMonster? Take a look at a few examples:
- Before using OptinMonster, AdamEnfroy.com was getting just a few email subscribers. With OptinMonster, he added over 3000 subscribers to his list, which brings in $20,000 each month.
- Cosmetic Capital increased leads by 300% using a floating bar optin.
- After switching from another popup software, the Eczema Company saw an instant 2.5X boost in conversions.
Pricing: Starts at $9/month (when billed annually), so it’s perfect for small businesses to get started.
RafflePress
One of the best ways to increase your email subscriber list is by running contests and giveaways. With RafflePress, you can host these contests on your own blog and social media platforms.
That makes it flexible enough to build campaigns for all of your favorite marketing channels.
Pricing: Starts at $49/month (billed annually), but you can get a lifetime license for $449!
Contactually
Contactually is one of the neatest tools on the list. It’s a CRM platform that focuses on vetting contacts. First, it gathers contacts from your email inbox, website, and social media profiles. Then Contactually collects as much information as possible to guide your messaging.
If you’re looking for an email marketing tool and CRM for real estate professionals, you found it!
Pricing: Starts at $69/month for the Professional plan; the Accelerator plan is $119/month.
Snov.io
Snov.io is probably the most comprehensive platform for cold outreach automation. With it, you can generate leads and use different mailing tools to streamline your outreach campaigns. The all-in-one toolset offers multiple email search features, 7-step email verification, triggered drip emailing campaigns, text personalization, email tracker, and integrations with Pipedrive and Zapier that allow seamless email export.
Within a modest budget, Snov.io generously offers you a wide range of tools, including but not limited to:
Snov.io CRM
Combine all your team’s sales processes on one platform – Snov.io CRM. Here you can link up all your sales processes, streamline sales with unlimited teamwork, create pipelines that actually reflect your sales process, and much more, for free!
Email Finder
Find email addresses, full names, and job titles anywhere – by companies, domains, or professional social profiles via the app or on company websites and search results via the Chrome extension. You can even find email addresses in bulk!
Email Verifier
Verify emails individually or in bulk. Filter out abandoned, invalid, and catch-all email addresses, as well as boost your email reputation score and delivery rates.
Email Drip Campaigns
Build and send complex email drip campaigns with auto follow-up messages, goals, and triggers. Use the easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool to build highly targeted multistage mailouts and analyze your campaign performance.
Email Tracker for Gmail
Get push notifications when your contacts open your emails or when they click on links with absolutely free and unlimited Gmail email tracker extension.
Price: Free plan that opens access to all tools. Paid plans start at $39 per month.
Encharge.io
This email marketing software suits early-stage product startups — mobile apps and SaaS tools. It allows its clients to convert more trials and free users into paying customers. While using Encharge, you can import customer data, create precise user segments, and send automated targeted behavior-based emails to the right prospects at the right time.
Encharge supports deep native integration with a range of products and tools like Segment, Stripe, Intercom, or HubSpot. This way, it’s easy for marketing experts to create event-based emails by engaging developers as little as possible.
Price: 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $49 per month.
AeroLeads
This lead generation tool has the inbuilt feature of bounce analysis. With its help, you’ll also be able to detect abuse accounts, fake domains, spam trapping, and disposable emails.
AeroLeads is the CRM software that allows appending personal data and IP-related information for better cleaning purposes. It uses the SMTP verification system that comes along with email address syntax checker.
Price: Paid plans start at $49 per month.
Drip
Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
Their email software offer seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.
What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual drag and drop builder for automation workflows. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.
Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides and excellent documentation.
We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.
Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.
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 starts 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 channel. This makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.
Does CRM Software Include Email Marketing?
Some CRM software does give you the functionality to email contacts within the database. However, it does not have the robust set of features that software dedicated to email marketing will have. The email marketing tool in a CRM is really for people that just need to send the occasional email and don’t need a design or automated campaigns.
If you want to increase engagement with your subscribers through automations or get more advanced reporting, then it makes sense to get a separate email marketing software from your CRM.
Conclusion
The success of email marketing campaigns largely depends on the quality of your subscriber list, the number of times you send emails, time when you send emails, your email subject line, the content of your campaign and your ability to segment not only your contacts but also a time when you send emails and use appropriate channels.
Email marketing automation software is the best way to convert your website visitors into customers. Using automation tools can help you capture more leads, retarget website visitors, and convert leads with abandoned cart emails. Try it free today!