Email marketing has always been a very important part of any marketers strategy for gaining new customers and staying in touch with existing ones. Email marketing’s importance is not diminished by the rapidly changing technological development in the digital world. In fact, the more our lives are based on internet and the change of traditional media increases, the more email marketing becomes important. That is why we decided to create a list of best email platform-tools…
Email marketing these days offers a variety of opportunities. You can’t use just any email creation platform or email marketing tool. It has to offer flexibility, creativity, and the technology to put your campaigns at the top of the inbox. To help you make the right decision, take a look at some of my favorite email tools.
One of the easiest ways to market your products and services is by using email marketing tools. For years, many marketers have relied on existing email marketing platforms for their email campaigns. But in recent years, more software providers have been offering free online tools that allow you to create professional-looking emails. It’s never been easier to get started with email marketing — and if you want to find the best email marketing tools, you’ll definitely want to keep reading.
Email marketing is for sure an effective way to reach your prospect. And who’d be better at it than you? Especially with all the free powerful email marketing tools, if you don’t take advantage of them, you’re just leaving money on the table. In this post, I’ll show you some of the best email marketing tools that every marketer needs, as well as some nice ones to make your life easier.
Best marketing services
There are numerous digital marketing tools now. So, it’s important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of at least the main ones to choose what is most suitable for your business.
1. SEO promotion
Choosing effective marketing tools, you can’t ignore this method. It allows you to make your resource attractive in terms of popular search engines. This, in turn, brings the site to the top in the ranking of search engine responses to user queries.
2. Contextual advertising
These advertisements appear below the search bar or to the right of it after the relevant keywords have been entered into the search. Such ads are marked with an “advertisement” icon.
The advantage of contextual advertising is that your site will immediately be at the top of search results without any special settings, and you will be able to independently determine the budget and duration of the advertising campaign.
At the same time, contextual advertising is more expensive than search engine promotion, and the price for it is not fixed but determined according to the principle of an auction. Also, of course, there is an intrusiveness effect and, due to this, click-through rates are usually low.
3. Banner advertising
This is a tried promotion method to attract the attention of a large audience. The development of modern technologies has made it possible to make banner advertising brighter and more effective; it instantly attracts attention and increases the reach of the target audience.
4. Social networks
Social networks are another effective tool for attracting new customers. To reach them, groups are created that allow you to establish live contact with existing and potential clients, organize promotions, and provide information about new products and upcoming sales.
The undoubted plus of social networks is the rapid spread of information from your subscribers to their contacts, which ultimately expands the audience of your influence.
5. Mailing lists
This is the cheapest and most convenient option for an advertising campaign, especially if you consider that you can pre-select mailing recipients based on important criteria for you, get reports, and analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can even put your data in an email report template to see your results better.
Automizy
Email Marketing Tool that Improves Open Rates by 34% ($29/month)
Automizy is an email marketing platform that is designed to increase your open rates, by giving you all the necessary tools to make your emails stand out in a crowded inbox.
Automizy provides the essential email marketing feature set that includes sending campaigns, building automations, creating forms, managing your contacts.
You’ll get everything you need to reach your email marketing goals, all in one intuitive interface.
When using Automizy, you’ll gain access to proven email marketing best practices to help you increase your open rates with built-in best practices, create email automation, automatically resend campaigns to non-openers, save time with email templates and automation blueprints.
To maximize your email open rates, Automizy provides an email subject line tester so you can get scores for your subject lines before sending them. This feature helps to predict subject line performance based on data from over 1 million campaigns.
Lastly, you can AB test automated emails. Write up to 4 subject line variations and let our AI optimize.
Pricing:
Get started for $29/month and you get access too all features including the user-friendly email workflow builder to map your best-converting email sales funnel.
AWeber
Best Email Marketing Software for Small Businesses with Helpful Support (Free – $16.15/month)
Over 100,000 email marketers use AWeber with features suited best for small businesses. With high-quality email and phone support, plus helpful support articles and videos, you get answers fast and can focus on growing your business.
Like other tools on this list, they offer over drag-and-drop email builders, list management tools, and analytics reports.
With AWeber list management, you can import an email list and create a database from common file types like XLS, XLSX, TXT, CSV, and TSV.
They make it easy to manage your lists with any rules you create automatically. Additionally, with their marketing automation tools, you can create an autoresponder workflow based on actions like email opens, link clicks, site visits, and purchases.
One selling point is their 700 design templates – this compares to 500 with GetResponse and just 80 with MailChimp. Some of their templates look outdated, but some also look great and remind me of high-quality Instagram ads.
They also just released the ability to use web-fonts in addition to standard fonts.
Overall, with the sheer amount of template designs, helpful support team, and knowledge base, AWeber is an excellent choice for small business owners.
Pricing:
You can get started with AWeber’s free plan, which gives you access to nearly all of their features, including unlimited landing pages, sign up forms, automated email campaigns, hundreds of powerful integrations, and award-winning 24/7 customer support. AWeber’s Pro plan starts at $19/month and is based on the number of subscribers on your list.
Campaign Monitor
People-First Company with 99% Customer Satisfaction ($9/month)
Campaign Monitor was founded in 2004 and is an excellent all-around email marketing platform. There isn’t one specific or unique feature that sets them apart. However, there is something to be said about doing everything well.
With a 99% customer satisfaction rate and a Giving Back program, they are a global company with people-first values.
Campaign Monitor employees spend thousands of volunteer hours every year. They provide groceries to local food banks, pick up trash from local parks and beaches, and donate supplies to at-risk youth groups.
Their striking email template designs are perfect for non-profits and businesses alike. Plus, its customer service and people-first approach help them stand out from the pack.
First, their email builder gives users complete customization of their designs down to individual web fonts and color choices. If brand standards are essential to your business, you can lock sections of emails with their Premier Plan. This added security helps keep your brand consistency intact.
A bonus is the ability to add videos to your emails from either YouTube or Vimeo.
Next, their automation suite is comparable to other platforms based on triggers and email actions. Data segmentation is also a winner with Campaign Monitor, as you can exclude multiple segments and create advanced rules before sending them.
They have over 250 pre-built integrations to connect with 3rd party apps like Salesforce, Magento, and WordPress.
Pricing:
Finally, pricing is slightly higher than other tools on this list. Their Basic Plan is $9/month and lets you send 2,500 emails. Once you hit this limit, I recommend their Unlimited Plan for $29/month.
Pay attention to your list size – pricing scales quickly based on the size of your list.
For example, with a list of over 25,000 subscribers, the Basic Plan costs $299, and the Unlimited Plan costs $699.
Essentially, if fast support and well-designed templates are your top priorities, Campaign Monitor is worth a try.
You can get started with a completely free account to test out their features.
Mailjet – Emailing Service for Transactional Emails
Like the aforementioned Sendinblue, Mailjet is based in Paris, France, and also used to focus on transactional emails. Their recent foray into the world of email marketing seems logical enough, and the editor works great for such a relatively new product. SMS, plus features such as autoresponders, A/B testing, sub-accounts (e.g. for agencies) and team collaboration are all included.
What we like: Very affordable plans and the free offer is generous too. Drag and drop editor works well, and the automations are decent. Mailjet also have good deliverability rates (most of the time) according to our tests.
What they should improve: In order to access features like automations or A/B testing, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their higher-level plans (Premium or Custom).
Who is Mailjet for: For beginners looking for something simple and affordable, it’s a great tool. Being able to manage multiple sub-accounts also makes it interesting for agencies too.
ConvertKit – Email Marketing Software for Bloggers
Another young player in the email marketing services space, ConvertKit is taking an interesting approach by focusing on creators. That means Vloggers, YouTubers and bloggers, amongst others.
It’s a strange angle, especially since the features are basically the same as with other providers (for example, MailerLite). On the plus side, you get all the features, even on the cheaper plan.
What we like: Good email subscriber management features. Tags let you create advanced segmentation. Helpful support and excellent deliverability rates.
What they should improve: Plans are pricey, especially when compared to more advanced email marketing services like MailerLite. Not many design options (only 3 templates available). Reports could have more options – they do not even show bounce rates. Their free account is very limited, not even including reports. The landing page editor is lacking in options and is not user-friendly at all. The landing page templates are also not the best.
Who ConvertKit is for: Individuals or small teams of digital marketers with a budget who are only looking to send plain text newsletters. Good enough for small companies without complex email marketing workflows.
CleverReach – Emailing Service With Some Good Pro Features
CleverReach’s free plan has a decent email allowance (10,000), but with an allowance of 250 subscribers, you’ll quickly outgrow it. Plus, you can only use it if you are from the US, Canada, India, New Zealand or Australia.
They do offer a lot of different pricing options, which may seem overwhelming at first, but they give you a lot of flexibility. Among them are flat-rate, pay as you go, and high-volume options. Then there are pro features such as their content segmentation that allows you to customize content blocks to your reader’s preferences.
What we like: Their very decent deliverability rates. They feature a decent automation center and let you set up your own tracking domain for outgoing links.
Where they can improve: It’s a pity that signup forms aren’t responsive. The editor has its quirks but nothing too bad.
Who CleverReach is for: Senders who require a newsletter tool with a broad range of features.
SendPulse
What sets SendPulse apart from its competitors is the multichannel approach to marketing automation.
The platform promises to automate your marketing emails, SMS and web push notifications. But wait..! There’s more. SendPulse also offers a Messenger chatbot tool which can come in handy if you want to boost your Facebook business page performance.
When it comes to bulk email functionality – SendPulse has all the necessary tools and features to make your marketing life easier.
Subscription forms, email template builder, pre designed templates gallery, A/B tests, statistics, you name it. To top it all off, the email platform pricing is among the most affordable ones.
The great plus for this service if you are in Nigeria is that you pay in Naira. Price starts at ₦2,890 per month for up to 500 contacts and unlimited email sends.
You can also try a free plan that supports up to 500 contacts and up to 15,000 email sends.
What is automation?
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies, which involves sending emails to prospects and existing customers. Such emails can be of different types: information emails, digital newsletters, product updates, transactional emails, follow-ups, etc.
But before you create your email marketing campaign, you need to build your prospect list that will contain valid email addresses only. And this is where different tools come into play.
Email marketing automation is the minimization of time and effort spent on routine processes in the marketing department through the use of software.
The main function of automation is to simplify and speed up work in the following areas of marketing:
- Content creation and distribution.
- Campaign management.
- Lead management.
- Measuring results.
Most commonly, email automation is used in such cases:
- Marketing. In such services, you can upload your contact database and send mailings to it. Email sequences are usually created in a drag-and-drop editor or with the help of ready-made templates.
- Transport. Distribution transport services are used by programmers. With their help, they send automatic emails.
- Plugin. These are microservices that are embedded in other services. For example, there are dedicated WordPress plugins that have limited email marketing functionality. These are not specialized services, so they are quite cheap.
There are several important factors to consider when choosing the right email automation tool:
- Audience segmentation options.
- Simple user interface with friendly functionality.
- Integration with other software.
- Automatic category updates.
- Email search options.
- Email verification.
- Email drip campaigns.
Conclusion
Nowadays, email marketing is the essential method to connect with your website users and potential customers. Email marketing is bringing a growing amount of customer to your business site on each passing day. Some people called it one of the best free email marketing tools. However, in the market, there are plenty of email marketing software are available. I cannot say that they are just the same.
E-mail continues to be one of the most popular online marketing channels for lead generation. In fact, if you aren’t using email as part of your lead generation strategy, you are missing out on 88% of all sales made today.