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 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.
Are you looking for the best free email marketing software for small business? Then here is a list of best free business email newsletter software for your campaigns. Gain more subscribers through social media integration, coupon and discount tools, and other customizable email templates.
The best email marketing tools help you grow your list, follow up on your contacts, automate your email marketing and more. Here’s a comparison of our top picks to separate the good from the better.
How did we choose these products? We didn’t—you did.
To find your ideal software match, you need information you can trust—so you can save time, stay on budget, and focus more energy on growing your business. It’s why we vet and verify all our user reviews and recommend only the tools endorsed by people like you.
In other words, our product recommendations are never bought or sold, or based on the opinion of a single individual—they’re chosen by your peers, reflecting the views and experiences of our independent base of software reviewers.
To be considered for this list, products have to:
- Have at least 20 unique product reviews published on Capterra within the past two years, with an average rating of 3.0 or higher. We selected the 6 products with the highest ratings to feature in this article.
- Offer a free, standalone version of the software (not a trial version of the software where you must purchase a product after a limited amount of time).
- Meet our email marketing software market definition: “Email Marketing software helps users leverage their email channel to deliver and optimize marketing messages — such as brand newsletters or contextually relevant, real-time and personalized communications — in support of multichannel engagement across the customer life cycle.”
ConvertKit.
Great Email Marketing Software for Bloggers ($9/month)
ConvertKit is built by creators, for creators. They understand their client’s needs and know what it takes to grow an online following.
They boast attractive forms, increase conversion rates with automated emails, and organize your subscribers to maximize engagement.
For bloggers looking to send personalized, text-based emails, their designs look like they’re coming right from Gmail.
Additionally, they offer pretty advanced email sequences based on both site actions and actions within emails. Their advanced triggers make for some excellent list segmentation options:
ConvertKit is also a strong pick for a few main reasons:
- You can use advanced segmentation based on different actions to personalize your email funnels.
- Your text emails look professional and don’t have annoying email branding.
- The best emails for your blog will be strictly text. Don’t worry about fancy design features, adding your logo, or a bunch of imagery.
Ultimately, it’s an excellent platform for lead funnels.
For example, if a sales professional were trying to close a big deal, they would close it with either a phone call or a simple text-based email. They wouldn’t use an image-heavy marketing email full of company branding.
Pricing:
With a free plan for up to 300 subscribers, their paid plans start at $9/month. This makes it a great choice for bloggers focused on building high converting sales funnels.
Omnisend.
Best Omnichannel Email Marketing Service for Ecommerce ($16/month)
Omnisend takes email marketing a step further by unifying email marketing across social media platforms, text, push notifications, Whatsapp, and more. Over 70,000 marketers use their email marketing software in 130+ countries.
For e-commerce brands, Omnisend can send visitors more relevant messages across platforms and devices. They do this by understanding website browsing behavior and user device preferences based on any custom events that you create.
For example, you can track user actions on your website and then again within welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and post-purchase automation series to segment messages more effectively.
And they integrate with all of the top ecommerce platforms.
Whether you’re using BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or other e-commerce software, you can hook up Omnisend to drive more sales.
With their $16 per month Standard Plan, you can send 6,000 emails/month and get access to their automation features. These include interactive signup forms and email elements, SMS marketing and notifications, and product recommendations.
This feature set is excellent for e-commerce conversion rates as users will receive messages based on the products they’ve interacted with on your site.
Omnisend is one of the best choices for omnichannel brands who want to effectively market (and remarket) to their visitors.
Pricing:
You can get started with their free plan and their paid plans start at $16/month.
Gist.
Best All-In-One Marketing Software (Free – $29/month)
Gist is marketing automation, live chat, and email software that provides a full 360-degree view of your business.
They also feature advanced tools like event tracking to see what people do on your website, as well as a knowledge base to provide customer support in an automated way.
Where Gist really excels is via their chatbot features. Their GistBot pre-qualifies leads and book meetings 24/7 for your sales teams – all with a modern feel and in any language. You assign conversations to different members of your team, send private notes, and organize your conversations with easy open/close statuses.
Additionally, their automation tools let you create visual workflows to engage and convert customers. You create actions and tags to understand customer behavior, segment your audiences, and use timing variables to send the right message at the right time.
Overall, with advanced live chat, event management, and marketing automation, Gist is a great all-in-one marketing solution for businesses looking to increase leads for their sales team.
Pricing:
You can get started for free for with 2 support seats included.
Omnisend – The Best Email Marketing Sevice for Ecommerce Automation
Omnisend’s mission is to give marketers ‘the power to rise above the promotional noise and get better results than ever.’ Sounds pretty appealing, right?
Due to its many automations, including browse abandonment and cart recovery, Omnisend is a great choice for online store owners.
What we like: As well as its excellent automated workflows, it also has some pretty unique features like ‘wheel of fortune’ incentives for sign-ups, interactive gift boxes, automated product recommendations, and even ‘live view’ website tracking. You’ll also be able to set up unlimited landing pages, set up SMS marketing, add your products directly in the email editor and segment lists based on specific details, for example, customers who purchased a specific product. Find out more about Omnisend’s plans here.
Where they can improve: Unfortunately, the free plan now has a lower sending allowance (just 500 emails to 250 contacts), though you can store unlimited subscribers. Creating advanced non-ecommerce automations can get a little fiddly if you don’t have much experience.
Who Omnisend is for: Omnisend includes an impressive amount of features designed to help maximize conversions, so it’s a good email marketing service for those who have an online store on platforms like Shopify.
Moosend – Most Affordable Pay-as-you-go Email Marketing Software
Moosend isn’t perhaps the most well-known email marketing platform out there, but, in light of its affordable prices and feature-rich service, we feel the tool deserves a place on this list.
Plus, it’s a great option for those looking for a free or pay-as-you-go service.
What we like: Its Free Forever plan includes access to almost all their pro features, 1,000 subscribers and unlimited ad-free emails – that’s not bad at all! You’ve also got a nice selection of around 40 email templates to choose from, spam testing, A/B testing and automations.
We like that they offer a pay-as-you-go plan, which, we might add, is significantly cheaper than Mailchimp’s.
If you’re going to be automating emails such as abandoned cart and upselling emails, or perhaps the more basic anniversary emails, this platform is definitely worth checking out – the automated workflow options are endless.
Where they can improve: We found a few small UX issues with the editor, for example, in setting up your email for scheduling.
Who Moosend is for: Those looking for a free or pay-as-you-go plan, or generally looking for a feature-rich, affordable email marketing solution.
Drip – Best Email Marketing Platform for Ecommerce CRM Features
Drip was launched in 2013 and has since become a popular email marketing service due to its ecommerce CRM features and intuitive sales and marketing automation. You will have access to all features on all paid plans. Their lowest plan starts at $19month for 500 contacts.
What we like: Their automation workflow editor is easy to use, well-designed and flexible, plus their icons and bright colors make it quite fun to use. There is a range of automation triggers to choose from including links clicked, page views, tags assigned, a purchase in your online shop, etc. Another great feature is that you can automatically tag users if they carry out a certain action, like visit a particular page.
Where they can improve: Surprisingly, Drip doesn’t offer any kind of spam or design testing and the email editor isn’t the most efficient or intuitive. You’ll also only have 6 email templates to choose from, though you can upload your own HTML templates.
Who Drip is for: Drip is a great all-in-one solution for ecommerce businesses. Their sophisticated automations and CRM features will help you save time and better organize your leads.
AWeber
AWeber is another industry leading and trusted email marketing services provider. With easy to use tools, automation, and a customer service that works round the clock to serve customers, AWeber is among the best email marketing providers you should adopt for your business.
Its easy to understand packages makes it top when it comes to user experience.
AWeber is more or less similar to GetResponse in the way, it lays out its packages. It offers the same features on all packages with the only difference between plans being the number of contacts you can store. However, the platform offers a 30 days free trial to test things out..
AWeber’s packages are also affordable and reasonable for a small business to start its email marketing campaign.
AWeber’s plans start from $19/month for a maximum of 500 users. Price increases according to subscribers count. See details here and in the image below.
If you have more than 25,000 subscribers, you can ask for a custom quote.
Should I Use a Provider Not on This List of Email Marketing Services?
Ultimately, the tool you pick for your company email should be what works best for you and your small business.
We suggest you don’t pick a provider based solely on catchy names, a big presence on social media, or if it seems cost-effective because they used an advertisement company to claim they offer the cheapest email marketing services.
You may have heard of another email marketing software not in this post (there are tons out there).
We’re familiar with and have tried all the top email marketing tools out there including tools like Moosend, MailGet, ActiveCampaign, Wishpond, Ontraport, Mailjet, Campaign Monitor, Benchmark Email, InfusionSoft (now know as Keap), Mad Mimi, Klaviyo, Zoho Mail Campaigns, Redcappi, Marketo, Emarsys, Vero, SendBlaster, Eloqua, Bronto, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, Adestra, MailPoet, and others.
The email marketing tools featured in this post ended up here because they offer the best features at the best price. Our goal is to provide you a comprehensive guide to help you grow your email marketing campaigns and business online.
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.
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.