Everyone who works for an Ecommerce business knows the importance of having an email marketing strategy. There are many list building strategies you can use to boost your sales and revenue. Since you are integrating email service with your ecommerce site and promoting products or services through emails, it is recommended to have one best email service for ecommerce to help you build better digital strategies for the success of your business.
If you run an e-commerce business, then you probably already know that effective use of email marketing is one of the easiest ways to increase your sales. However, choosing the best email marketing platform for your needs is not as easy as it might seem. Ecommerce platforms encompass order tracking, cart abandonment recovery, newsletters and much more.
Since our idea of ecommerce is mainly shopify, we have put together the best email service for Shopify 2021. It’s hard to find the right email marketing provider if you are not familiar with the industry and in this guide we will reveal step by step which is the best email marketing automation app for Shopify and why
Ecommerce e-mail marketing outperforms social media and excellent for repeat purchases. We’ve reviewed the best email service providers for eCommerce (2021). Email is still the most effective marketing tool for driving growth of your online business. And it’s not a surprise — this marketing channel really provides everything you need: audience targeting, personalization, and a tracking system.
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.
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.
Shopify Email
Difficulty 🛠: Beginner
Cost (out of 3 💰): Free
Unique feature 💡: Native to Shopify, ecommerce focused
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4/5 (869 reviews)
Shopify Email is an easy-to-use email solution to help you connect with subscribers and build long lasting customer relationships. Its clean and minimalist app removes the hassle found in apps like MailChimp or GetResponse, and it’s perfect for merchants who want powerful email functionality with little effort.
Shopify Email lets you:
- Send branded emails to subscribers in a few clicks, directly from your Shopify admin
- Save time with pre-built templates that automatically incorporate your logo, product images, descriptions, prices, and URLs from your store
- Customize your emails by editing text, buttons, images, and more to make it your own
- Import customer lists into Shopify
- Segment emails to personalize each message and get it to the right person
- Track results including click-through and open rates, products added to carts, and purchases in real-time
With Shopify Email, you get 2,500 emails free each month and pay $1 for every 1,000 emails you send after that. There are no monthly commitments, and you’ll have access to all the features.
Sendinblue
Difficulty 🛠: Easy
Cost (out of 3 💰): Free
Unique feature 💡: Advanced features, low cost
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4/5 (50 reviews)
Sendinblue is an email marketing service aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. With powerful CRM and automation features that streamline redundant tasks, it’s become a complete digital marketing hub for Shopify stores.
Key features include a library of templates you can use to create beautiful email newsletters that engage subscribers. It also lets you build subscription forms quickly and offers pre-built automation flows for welcome sequences, abandoned cart emails, and more.
Sendinblue also offers powerful features for Shopify merchants. For example, you can connect your customer list and purchase data to your Sendinblue account. With that information, you can segment and target groups of customers based on their purchase history and other details.
You’ll also be able to reach customers through multiple channels like SMS through the Shopify plugin, which businesses often use for order and shipment confirmation.
ActiveCampaign
Difficulty 🛠: Easy
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰
Unique feature 💡: Sophisticated workflows and CRM capabilities
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.4/5 (295 reviews)
ActiveCampaign is a popular email marketing service trusted by over 145,000 businesses around the world. Whether you’re an established brand or just starting out, ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation is like having another employee on your team.
Once you integrate ActiveCampaign with Shopify, you can access a library of 500+ pre-built automations to launch campaigns, like abandoned cart emails or a welcome series, or design a landing page in minutes. ActiveCampaign also has over 850 pre-built integrations so you can connect all your business tools.
ActiveCampaign pulls directly from your Shopify data to send personalized emails that drive sales. Use one of ActiveCampaigns 125 email templates and deliver 1:1 messages to customers based on past interactions with your brand. This email marketing platform also offers merchants SMS marketing capabilities, as well as integrations with Google Analytics and Facebook Audiences.
You can start with ActiveCampaign today with a free 14-day trial. If you like it, you can upgrade to the Lite Plan, which starts at $9 per month.
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.
MailerLite – Best For the Essentials at an Affordable Price
- PRICE STARTS AT $0
- PREMIUM PLANS START AT $10/MO
- ALL BASIC EMAIL FEATURES
- A/B TESTING TOOLS
MailerLite offers all of the essentials with none of the frills.
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 manage a simple campaign.
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.
HubSpot – Best for Automated Email Marketing
- PRICE STARTS AT $0
- POWERFUL EMAIL AUTOMATION
- STUNNING EMAIL TEMPLATES
- TRAFFIC AND CONVERSION ANALYTICS
HubSpot is the king of marketing automation–so it’s no surprise they offer a fantastic email marketing solution for any size business.
Hubspot’s tool allows you to quickly and easily create, personalize, and optimize your emails without the need for designers or IT.
Where the software really shines is in the automated workflows. This allows you to easily set triggers for your email subscribers and nurture the leads into customers (or whatever else you want them to do).
The software’s handy mapping tool also lets you visualize this for greater clarity and easy optimization.
Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure journey that you set for your subscribers. Depending on the specific actions they take, you can have them branch off to experience different, targeted things via email.
The email marketing service is just one tool in the Swiss Army Knife that is Hubspot. It can stand alone or be used in tandem with other offerings such as Marketing Hub and their CRM. Your email marketing only becomes stronger when coupled with those products, too.
Hubspot also has plenty of pre-made email templates to help you get the results you want. With their drag-and-drop builder, you can create great emails with no coding or development knowledge needed.
HubSpot is simple to use and allows you to customize your layout, add calls-to-action and images, and modify your content and colors to match your brand.
Use their advanced personalization tools to personalize your emails in order to boost your open and clickthrough rates with ease. You can use any information in an email subscriber’s contact records to automatically serve up the most relevant subject lines, content, links, attachments, and calls-to-action.
Their A/B testing tool is top-notch. Use it and dive into the in-depth analytics after you send your emails to see which performed better—and why.
Use this data to determine which subject lines get the most opens and the content and calls-to-action that will earn you more sales. You can also leverage this with landing pages and signup forms to accurately get a sense of the ROI of email campaigns.
The HubSpot email tool is free for up to 2,000 email sends per month, with paid plans starting at $50/month.
Join HubSpot for free to create and send email campaigns that look professionally designed and display perfectly across any device—all by yourself.
How To Pick An Ideal Email Marketing Tool For eCommerce?
Since there are many options for email marketing services with somewhat similar features, you should focus and look for below-listed key characteristics in them –
- Your chosen email marketing tool should provide readymade email templates so that you don’t have to waste time in creating from scratch.
- The chosen email marketing software must be able to automatically send emails when your customers perform some actions like purchase, payment, order cancellation, etc.
- It would be great if your chosen software facilitates complete marketing automation.
- You should be also able to categorize and segment your customer lists on the basis of their interests and behavior. This could help in yielding maximum conversions.
- If your chosen email marketing platform for eCommerce offers signup forms or landing pages then it would be of great value. This feature is essential in replenishing your email lists by capturing new leads.
- Your picked software must be able to tell you about the performance of your email campaigns via graphs and reports.
- The emailing solution should be integrable with either your eCommerce store or any third-party application. This could eliminate many manual tasks.
In addition to this, your chosen email marketing application must be easily scalable and most importantly, it should be inexpensive.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools when it comes to increasing your sales and generating more leads. Not only does email have a reach of billions and can have very targeted audience, but also email is easy to use.
Email marketing is the crux of any good ecommerce business plan. Sure, your conversions might be on the rise because of other things, but when it all comes down to it, creating permission-based relationships from email and continuously nurturing them will improve your conversion campaigns.