Email marketing is one of the best ways to market your mailing list. Over 80% of customers would rather receive information regularly by email instead of other opt-in methods. However, it’s not always easy to get your head around what the best email marketing software value is. Does having a free option mean that it must not be worth anything? I’m on a mission to determine what one can do for free and what’s worth paying for in email marketing.
Email Marketing Software Best Value is a competitively priced email marketing software solution that offers all the features you need to send email campaigns with ease. Set up auto-responders and save your most used email templates to streamline the process, and review data on how many emails were opened and how many clicks each link received. We offer affordable plans for small businesses.
There are so many great email marketing software products on the market today. Each one is different, and some may offer more features or better terms than others. When looking at these products side-by-side, it’s hard to tell which product is the best match for your business. This article will give you an overview of what to look for in email marketing software, as well as help you compare two popular email marketing softwares.
Email Marketing Software Best Value. Easily send professional-looking email campaigns with a simple drag and drop interface. All plans include unlimited emails per month, advanced stats, bounce and unsubscribe tracking, 99% uptime guaranteed and 24/7 support. Free 14 day trial. Start Sending Today.
Choosing the Right Cheap Email Marketing Software
The key to success with email marketing starts with choosing the right email marketing provider. Compare the options available and align them with your budget to find the option that provides you with all the features you need and is within your price range.
And remember, even though this article is about cheap email marketing services, the cheapest option may not be the best one. All the options on this list offer affordable pricing, but the best way to find the ideal email marketing platform for your business is by testing out your options!
BEST FOR E-COMMERCEDrip
I think it’s fair to say that Drip’s focus is on smaller to medium-sized e-commerce businesses, whereas our next email marketing tool (Omnisend) seems better suited to the larger e-commerce stores.
As you’d expect, Drip integrates deeply with all mainstream e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce – as well as the more obscure and custom-made ones.
With built-in revenue analytics and tools to engage customers across multiple channels (from social channels to SMS) Drip is ideally positioned as a powerful tool for growing e-commerce stores.
Their pricing is also palatable, starting at $19/month for small list sizes.
What are Drip’s key features?
- Visual automation
- Email and SMS marketing
- Dynamic e-commerce content blocks
- Discount codes
- e-commerce Segmentation
- Retargeting
- e-commerce store integrations
- Reporting dashboards
- Split testing sequences
Drip is the best email marketing software for e-commerce businesses because of it’s sophisticated workflows combined with advanced list segmentation. This combination means that subscribers receive personalized emails triggered by their shopping behaviors on your site and receive timely follow-ups based on how they interact with your emails.Pros
- Simple yet powerful drip campaigns
- Easy to set up and use
- Excellent customer support
- Sophisticated contact list segmentation
Cons
- Lacks a few key integrations
- No drag-and-drop functionality for designing templates
- Support only available weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST
Designed to improve the online user experience for shoppers, Drip is the best email marketing software for e-commerce companies. Its user support is available to help with issues setting up and using the service. We especially like how you can segment your lists so users get the best possible experience from your website and email alerts.
Drip has a 14-day free trial and has one plan that ranges from $19 to $1,599 per month depending on how many contacts are in your account. Here are a few of the price points:
- Up to 500 contacts: $19 per month
- 501 to 2,000 contacts: $29 per month
- 2,001 to 2,500 contacts: $39 per month
- 2,501 to 3,000 contacts: $49 per month
For costs above this number of contacts, it’s best to get details directly from the website. The tiered scale goes up to 140,000 contacts for $1,599 before you need to contact them for custom enterprise pricing.
Drip is built for e-commerce, which means its workflows, email templates, and lead generation forms are designed with e-commerce best practices in mind. It includes advanced segmentation and customization that allows you to hyper-target your campaigns in order to increase user engagement.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
ConvertKit’s unique feature is that allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service.
With ConvertKit, you can easily segment subscribers into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing.
They have all the powerful features you’d expect from a top-notch email marketing service such as a/b testing, beautiful email templates, landing page builder, smart workflows, and more.
ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material.
A lot of ConvertKit features such as paid newsletters are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers that’s why we rate them the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.
They even added the ability for you to sell digital products & subscriptions from the same platform.
ConvertKit offers a 14-day free trial, and their pricing starts from $29/month. They also offer a 30-day refund policy.
Their Creator Pro plan also includes advanced functionality like newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
Moosend
Moosend is an affordable email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with a suite of powerful marketing automation features, email list building tools, landing pages, and more.
You can quickly create an email newsletter and customize the email design to match your brand within minutes by either choosing from their dozens of pre-made email templates or by creating a completely custom template.
The nice part about Moosend is that they offer marketing automation features to all plans including the free plan. You can use their automation workflow designer to offer a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter subscribers.
Moosend offer detailed email analytics that shows you important metrics such as email opens, clicks, bounces, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predicted demographics data.
All plans come with powerful conversion optimization features such as A/B testing, email heatmap analytics, countdown timers, conditional content, AI-engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.
Moosend offers a forever free plan for up to 1,000 email subscribers and unlimited number of emails (no credit card required). After that their pricing starts at $8 per month for their Pro plan which includes landing page builder, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, team management, and more.
AWeber
AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.
You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and email tracking with detailed insights.
AWeber also has other powerful email marketing features such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag based subscriber segmentation.
Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
AWeber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.
Sendinblue
A good option for transactional email
Sendinblue is best-known as one of the leading transactional email services. Building on this reputation they built an email marketing automation product.
We use Sendinblue to send transactional emails for two of our ventures (Leadformly and Serene), as they’re one of the few email marketing providers with servers in the European Union (which helps with our GDPR compliance) and they have good deliverability rates (we’re currently at 98%).
While I can’t comment on their marketing automation features from first-hand experience, it’s evident from our customer surveys that it’s good, but lacks some of the more advanced features (such as goal tracking, native integrations, and annotations).
If you need an email marketing tool with a solid API to get your emails into inboxes with a good deliverability rate, Sendinblue’s pre-built developer recipes make it an excellent choice.
What are Sendinblue’s key features?
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
Although we don’t recommend it anymore since there are better solutions available in the market, the sad reality is that we cannot create a best email marketing software list without including Mailchimp due to their shear popularity.
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s timezones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.
You can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms. If you are using WordPress, then see our ultimate guide to using Mailchimp and WordPress for detailed instructions.
When it comes to marketing automation features, Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers in our list such as HubSpot, Drip or ConvertKit.
In the recent years, Mailchimp has attempted to add many of the “advanced” features, but having tested many of these, they’re not truly advanced.
Mailchimp support is offered by email, live chat, and a large tutorials knowledge-base. However their support is often slow and no match to the quality of service that you get from Constant Contact.
Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but as a serious business, you need reliable support that you can count on.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers.
However if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, then you’d have to move to their $299 per month plan.
Can email marketing help with SEO?
Email marketing has no direct impact on SEO. However it can help you get more traffic to your website which can lead to more shares and sometimes backlinks / mentions.
Google and other search engines use shares and mentions as social signals to rank websites. So indirectly, email marketing can help your website’s SEO rankings.
You may also want to use these best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to improve your rankings.
Conclusion
Your email marketing strategy fuels your business and is one of the key elements to consider in a successful online marketing strategy. In the past few years, email marketing tools have evolved significantly, which made it hard for marketers to pick what’s the best email marketing software for them.
Email marketing software is the most powerful form of digital marketing which can help you keep in touch with your customers, notify them about new products/services and boost sales. There are several email marketing softwares out there that can help you automate your marketing and let you enjoy versatile features for communication with clients.