Email Marketing Services and tools have been around for a while. 85% of U.S. retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. Why? Because with email marketing you get to directly engage with your subscriber, contact, lead, and customer and you can create more personalized communication that will convert 100 times better than for any other marketing channels such as Organic or Display.
Email Marketing includes regular email newsletters you send to your list, promotional emails to inform your list about deals and sales, transactional emails to confirm a customer’s actions such as purchase confirmation, webinar registration, birthday email, reminders, etc. and email automation, also called triggered emails to send email series and sequences to a particular segment of your list of contact and based on a set of rules and triggers.
There are a lot of email marketing tools and platforms that offer email solutions to help you better engage with your list and increase passive email income. Choosing the right email marketing service that will help you achieve your goals, grow your business, and auto-pilot your revenue may be hard with so many options in the market.
I researched, and tested many email marketing tools and put together a list of the best email marketing services for entrepreneurs, and small and mid-size businesses you should use this year. All are based on performance, ease of use, customer reviews, features, email deliverability, and price.
Let’s get started!
What are the Best Email Marketing Services?
Here is my list of the best Email Marketing tools and platforms you should check out this year. Most of these email marketing providers offer marketing automation features, SMS marketing, and for some, free email services:
- Constant Contact
- Sendinblue
- GetResponse
- HubSpot
- ConvertKit
- ActiveCampaign
- Aweber
- Omnisend
- Moosend
- Pabbly
- AutoPilot
- IContact
- MailChimp
- Klaviyo
- Listrak
- Mailerlite
- Mailigen
- Benchmark
- SendPulse
- MoonMail
- Ontraport
- Campaign Monitor
- Gist
- Automizy
- Mailjet
- Vertical Response
- Reach Mail
- EmailOctopus
Constant Contact
Best Email Marketing Service For Small Businesses & Non-profits
| PRO High Deliverability RatesEase of Use | CON Limited advanced automation Limited Design Testing |
Constant Contact is the perfect email marketing service for small businesses and nonprofits. You can quickly and easily craft beautiful emails and landing pages, segment contacts to send the right message at the right time, create welcome series for your new subscribers and automate email series to build and increase your overall list. If you don’t need to create advanced automation using multiple conditions or advanced filtering, then Constant Contact is the email platform of choice to send email marketing campaigns.
Top Features:
- You can choose from 100+, easy-to-customize responsive email templates that will make your brand stand out from the crowd.
- You can collect email addresses on your website, from Facebook, through mobile, and more—so your business reaches more and more people.
- The platform offers excellent real-time reporting and robust analytics, so you know who’s opening what and which emails work best.
- Stellar expert advice and live support.
Pricing:
Constant Contact offers 2 paid plans based on your email list size: EMAIL and EMAIL PLUS. The EMAIL plan is offered at $20/mo but only allows for 500 subscribers. Custom plans are also available for customers with lists of over 50,000 subscribers. If you are not satisfied with the service, Constant Contact offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Get started in just a few clicks with Constant Contact. Start your FREE TRIAL for 60 days
Sendinblue
Best Cloud-Based Email Marketing Platforms with the most competitive pricing plans
| PRO Low-Cost plans Advanced forms & Email Automation | CON Limited integrations Free Plan limited to emails/day |
Sendinblue was founded in 2012 and is located in France. It is by far one of the best email marketing platforms that are worth every penny. The service offers affordable plans with more advanced automation features than Contact. Sendinblue is the perfect tool for you if you plan to craft unique campaigns and trigger automated emails. A complete solution if you are in the E-commerce niche and operate an online store as the tool offers advanced sets of triggers based on purchase behaviors. On top of that, they offer an SMS marketing feature to complement your campaigns and reach more users.
If you are a data freak like me, you will love the real-time statistics and reports SendinBlue offers with metrics like open rates, click-through rates, deliverability, and heat maps.
Top Features:
- Easy-to-use and complete reporting platform
- Solid Email automation to create unique and tailored email experiences
- SMS marketing campaigns to build multi-touch campaigns.
Pricing:
SendinBlue offers several plans based on the number of emails sent per month and with no daily sending limits. You can get started for only $25/mo but if you are looking to quickly scale, I recommend the ESSENTIAL Plan at $39/mo. If you are looking to build more email automation, invest in the PREMIUM solution then, perfect for marketing professionals at $66/mo.
You can try SendinBlue Free Trial and see how powerful this email platform is.
GetResponse
Best Email Marketing Software for Lead Generation and Webinar Registrations.
| PRO Best Spam and Design Testing tools Great integration with other products | CON Deliverability |
GetResponse is the perfect email marketing service if you are actively looking to generate leads and generate webinar registrations using beautiful and high-converting landing pages. It offers flexible forms, a landing page editor, Google Analytics integration, and sophisticated and highly-visual marketing automation features for segmenting your emails.
Top Features:
- AutoFunnel Feature: automated Sales Funnels you can choose from over 30 professionally designed and conversion-optimized scenarios.
- Intelligent List Automation.
- Thorough reports, with geo-tracking available and desktop vs. mobile.
Pricing
You can get started with a 30-day FREE trial to get access to unlimited email marketing and automation (no credit card required) and then you can upgrade based on your list size and on your needs. Premium plans start as low as $15/mo. If you plan to expand your list, check out the PLUS plan at $49/mo, which is very complete and can help you maximize your profits.
HubSpot
Best CRM and Email Marketing Software for inbound Marketing and Lead Nurturing
| PRO High Email Deliverability rates Stellar Marketing Automation | CON Expensive Options High Learning curve |
HubSpot was founded in 2006 and is a suite of products that cover marketing, sales, and service software solutions. HubSpot Marketing Hub is the Marketing software to help you grow traffic, convert more visitors, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale.
You can create, personalize, and optimize your marketing emails without waiting on designers or IT. With the Smart Rule feature, you can target a specific segment of your customers and send them more personalized communication that better converts.
Since the entire marketing and sales experience can be done through HubSpot, you are able to collect data on that contact’s journey in order to pinpoint your return on investment. This makes HubSpot an ideal choice if you are prepared to commit to using many of the HubSpot features and not just the email tool.
I found Hubspot a bit overwhelming in the beginning when testing the tool. Nevertheless, the company has an extensive resource section with articles, e-books, and free courses to help you navigate through all the features.
Top Features:
- Lead Generation
- Marketing Automation
- A/B Testing
- Contact management
- Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ads
- Live Chat
- Extensive library of integrations you can connect with
- Analytics
- HubSpot Academy to get your email marketing certification
Pricing:
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub includes a free plan for solopreneurs and entry-level marketers. So if you want to get started with a solid CRM and all-in-one marketing tool, try HubSpot FREE CRM.
The Marketing Hub Starts at $50/month, with the Professional Plan starting at $800/month.
ConvertKit
Best Email Marketing Services for Professional Bloggers
| PRO Landing page editor Ease of use | CON Premium Price Limited Advanced Features |
ConvertKit is a complete email marketing and automation service for creators, whether you are a blogger, a creator, or a podcaster. My favorite feature is the automation tool that helps create an email sequence to send to targeted segments of your audience. You can tag your customers based on a set of common behaviors and send them tailored and well-timed triggered emails.
If you are creating or planning to create email series such as email courses or new service launches, the use of text-based emails is more impactful than the use of heavy image-based visuals. I currently use ConvertKit as I find this minimalist HTML email builder simple and efficient for the end result I am looking for when creating my email courses.
Top Features:
- Create Beautiful Landing pages even if you don’t have a website
- Automated email sequences with advanced logic and tags to create ultra-targeted campaigns
- Highly effective when integrating with your social media audience
Pricing:
You can get started with the FREE trial and then you can upgrade to their Premium starting as low as $29/mo and build your automated email sequences.
Read our full ConvertKit Review
ActiveCampaign
Best Email Marketing and CRM solution for Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
| PRO Advanced Automation System Deliverability | CON Higher Learning Curve |
ActiveCampaign is a very complete solution for your email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM automation needs. Overall It is a good email marketing service if you own an eCommerce store or if you heavily rely on CRM data management.
You can choose from 25+ professional pre-made email templates and rebrand them with your own colors look and feel. Conditional content and A/B testing feature also enable you to test your design, your copy, and your content.
When it comes to marketing automation tools, ActiveCampaign offers an easy-to-use feature with which you will be able to create anything you want and need for your customers from triggered campaigns, sales follow-ups, automated segmentation, dynamic email content, and so on.
Top Features:
- ActiveCampaign has one of the best marketing automation
- Works with more than 300 integrations
- CRM built-in feature to help you with lead nurturing
Pricing:
ActiveCampaign pricing plan starts at $9/mo for 500 contacts for the LITE version to $229/mo for the ENTERPRISE Plan. If you don’t need to work with CRM data and own a small list when you just start out, the LITE version is a good plan to start with as you can access most of the most important email features: email marketing, marketing automation, subscription forms, and email support. If you plan to rapidly scale, the PLUS plan at $49/mo may be more suitable for your needs, especially if you plan to run heavy A/B testing and dynamic content.
Although it is limited to 100 contacts and 100 sends, you can get started with the ActiveCampaign Free trial to discover the dashboard, the templates, and the features.
Read our full ActiveCampaign Review
Aweber
Best Email marketing software with stellar customer service support
| PRO Smart Designs Customer Support | CON Pricey |
In business for over twenty years, Aweber is one of the pioneers to develop and implement email autoresponders. It is à great email marketing software because it offers a powerful and simple email marketing solution for small businesses and has great email marketing capabilities; you can create advanced email automation by Assigning triggers and flows to your emails that deliver the right message, to the right person – at the right time. With the automated tagging feature, you can bring your automation to the next level and send hyper-personalized emails to a specific segment of your audience.
Top Features:
- AI-powered smart designer assistant to help you create amazing branded email templates.
- Pre-Built Analytics and reporting with data that matters to you and to your business.
- Hundreds of app integrations connect your Aweber account to your landing pages, websites, social media accounts, and more.
Pricing:
Aweber recently released their FREE account. With Aweber FREE you are able to create beautiful emails and unlimited landing pages designed to highly convert. You will also be able to automate your email marketing and continue to grow your list. The FREE plan allows you to send 3,000 emails/mo to 500 subscribers. It is a bit limited if you are already reaching the 500 thresholds but it is definitely a good choice to pick if you start out to grow your list. If you already manage a sizable list, Aweber offers 100% free migration over its platform.
The premium Plan pricing is based on the number of contacts you have on your list. The bigger your list the higher your monthly fees with the service.
Omnisend
Best Email Marketing Tool for E-commerce Businesses
| PRO Omnichannel automation Email deliverability rate | CON Poor customer service Limited templates to choose from |
Omnisend is the right email marketing software pick for your email strategy if you own or operate an eCommerce business. The platform has a solid automation feature that can help you build advanced email workflows to target your eCommerce customers. The form builder and content editor allow the creation of unique customer-centric online and email experiences. The report also gives you actionable insights to see top campaign performers and areas of opportunities to increase conversions.
With Omnisend, You can create multi-channel email and SMS campaigns to support your customer through their purchase journey with your store. Omnisend works with any eCommerce platform and can integrate your social medial and paid advertising efforts into 360* campaigns.
I tested many email marketing tools for eCommerce and Omnisend is of the few solutions that I found perfect for building automated workflows and campaigns such as:
- Transactional Emails
- Welcome email/SMS series
- Shopping cart/ Browse Abandon series
- Winback campaigns
- Reward Campaigns
- Any type of post-purchase campaigns
Omnisend offers a complete email marketing system to use for your marketing campaigns and will help you maximize engagement with customers at every stage of the purchasing cycle.
Top Features:
- user-friendly drag-and-drop visual composer for emails and email capture features
- SMS and push notifications feature to complement your email campaigns
Pricing:
You can get started with the Omnisend Free trial. Their premium plans range from $16 to $99 per month with discounted offers if paid annually.
Moosend
Best Email Marketing Tool for advanced automation on a budget
| PRO Great value for money High Deliverability Rate | CON Limited templates Limited integrations |
Moosend is a popular email marketing service that helps you build email and automation in no time. The platform offers advanced features to segment your lists, powerful real-time Analytics, custom opt-in forms, and a pre-built workflow template to get you quickly started and help you grow your list and expand your business.
Moosend’s automation utilizes a visual workflow builder that includes subscriber welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and even lead scoring. The predefined “recipes”, as it is called, help you save time and build an effective automation campaign quickly.
Whereas a limited list of native integrations to connect Moosend with, the platform works with the most popular ones such as WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce, and Zapier to name a few.
Top Features:
- Advanced list segmentation
- Easy-to-use interface
- Advanced Automation functionality available across all plans
Check out our full Moosend review
Pricing:
Try Moosend core features for Free for up to 1,000 subscribers or give it a full trial with premium plans starting as low as $9/mo.
Pabbly
Best Email Marketing Platform for Growth-Focused Businesses
| PRO Affordable Pricing Plans High Open Rates | CON No emails can be sent on a FREE trial |
Pabbly is a platform that offers complete email marketing solutions, Recurring billing and Subscription management software, online form builders, Email list cleaning, and data transfer management. You can integrate in-built or 50+ external SMTPs and send emails without any additional charges. The platform handles bounce and spam complaints about all popular SMTP services such as Amazon SES, SendGrid, MailGun, Mandrill, etc.
Top Features:
- Solid Email autoresponder and automation feature
- Email list hygiene management brought to the next level
- Great Form Builder to collect leads and payments.
- Connect multiple SMTPs to route emails through multiple vendors
Pricing:
Pabbly offers the marketing automation feature across all plans. You can start for Free and explore all the features. Premium plans start at $29/mo for 5,000 subscribers to $99/mo for $50,000 subscribers and more. Get 20% off if you pay yearly.
AutoPilot
Best Email Marketing Automation for Agencies and Creative Teams
| PRO Simple and visual Marketing Automation Customer Service | CON Pricey |
AutoPilot was founded in 2012 and offers a solid email marketing solution to creative teams and small businesses. You can create a multi-channel experience and launch in minutes.
With AutoPilot marketing automation you can automate the entire customer journey with visual marketing automation, segment your leads and customers, and design and build amazing online experiences for your customers without the use of coding.
You can simply connect Autopilot with tools like Salesforce, Facebook, Segment, Slack, Typeform, Twilio, and Zapier or plug in your own using our API.
Top Features:
- Easy-to-use Canva design creator to build beautiful emails
- Dashboard with intelligent insights and data reporting
Pricing:
AutoPilot offers three premium plans. You can try any plan for FREE for 30 days. Month-to-Month premium plans range from $49/mo to $249/mo for up to 10,000 contacts. Save 10% if you pay monthly and commit to a year. Save 20% if you pay once a year.
IContact
Best Email Marketing and Social Media Software
| PRO Great List Management Easy-to-use templates | CON Fair deliverability rates |
IContact is one of the oldest email marketing software companies on the market today. The web-based email marketing tool is designed for businesses of all sizes. You can connect IContact with 50 integrations to help you streamline your marketing efforts across multiple tools and maximize a seamless experience for your customers.
Top Features:
- Simple and straightforward email marketing automation to drive higher ROI
- Drag and Drop email editor to create and customize your emails and series in minutes.
- A/B Split testing to quickly test email subject lines, incentives, layouts, or color schemes.
- Personalized landing pages to boost your conversion rates
- Performance Reporting to keep track of what works and what are the areas of improvements
- Integrate your application with iContact’s flexible and easy-to-use API for a user experience tailored to your liking.
Pricing:
Premium plans start at $30/mo for 500 subscribers. If you are looking to create more advanced automation and transactional emails the PRO plan starting at $60/mo is a better choice then. Save 15% off when you pay yearly. You can also get a 20% off discount
You can start with IContact FREE trial for 30 days.
MailChimp
Best Email Marketing Solution for Newsletter Creation
| PRO Great Reporting Generous Free Plan | CON High cost Limited email automation |
MailChimp is probably the first email marketing platform that you would come to mind when thinking about newsletters and emails. Over the years, MailChimp continued to provide great all-in-one solutions to e-commerce, blogger, nonprofit, or business owners.
MailChimp offers great features such as opt-in forms, landing pages, and automated drip campaigns to connect with your audience.
If you are an affiliate marketer, MailChimp is not the solution for you. MailChimp has a strict policy prohibiting affiliate marketing under its Terms of Use. Severe penalties apply. A great alternative in terms of similar features you can choose is ActiveCampaign.
Top Features:
- MailChimp integrates with hundreds of tools
- Built-in CRM to set up customer profiles and assign lifetime customer value, an essential KPI if you run an e-commerce site for example.
Pricing:
Mailchimp offers a FREE Plan to get started with the platform. The free plan offers great features such as surveys and 1-click automation for up to 2,000 subscribers. Once you are ready to upgrade, premium plans range from $9.99/mo for 500 subscribers to $299/mo.
Mailerlite
Best Email Marketing for Solopreneurs and Freelancers
| PRO Landing page editor Contact tagging and segmentation | CON Reporting DesignTesting |
MailerLite is a very complete email marketing solution, especially if you are starting out your business and don’t have or plan to have a team to help you with your email marketing efforts.
You can create amazing email campaigns and newsletters and signup forms, landing pages, popups, and embedded forms and connect the platform to 100+ app integration such as Shopify, OptinMonster, WordPress, and Zapier.
Do you need to re-engage with inactive subscribers with a win-back email campaign? Do you need to boost your webinar registrations? MailerLite is the right tool for you if you need to quickly implement campaigns that convert.
Top Features:
- Ecommerce campaigns
- Newsletter templates
- Landing page builder
- Drag and drop editor
- Subscriber management
- Website Builder
- Email Automation
- Personalization & Segmentation
- Surveys
Read our full MailerLite Review
Pricing:
With the FREE plan, you can send up to 12,000 emails to 1,000 contacts. If you need to upgrade, MailerLite offers premium plans that range from $15/mo up to $50/mo for small lists and $75/mo to $140/mo for midsized lists. If you have a list of 30,000+ contacts, plans start to be a bit pricey. Get a 30% discount if you pay yearly.
Mailigen
Best Email Marketing solutions for Tech Novices
| PRO Dynamic Segmentation Excellent autoresponder functionalities | CON Limited send option Basic Landing pages and Email templates |
MailiGen is a New York-based email marketing company founded in 2010 to help marketers and business owners create cost-effective, flexible, and simple-to-use emails and automation. Forbes and BMW are notable clients of the company.
The platform allows users to create email newsletters and automation that keep their customers coming back. Mailigen integrates with your social media to deliver multi-touch and cohesive campaigns that convert.
MailiGen automation allows you to trigger personalized communication based on real-time customer behavior. Welcoming new subscribers has never been that easy!
Key Features include:
- Intelligent Email Builder
- Powerful Integrations and API
- Multi-User Account
- Effective Online Surveys
- SMS campaigns
- Real-Time Reports
Pricing:
MailiGen offers pay-as-you plans based on the size of your list and the number of credits you would like to buy. Premium plans start as low as $10/mo for 500 contacts ($8/mo if you pay yearly). All features are accessible regardless of the size of your list.
Get Started with MailiGen 30-Day Free Trial! The free trial gives you full access to the platform with 100 free emails.
Benchmark
Best Email Marketing Platform for Beginners
| PRO Ease of use Flexible Templates | CON Poor deliverability Small File Storage |
Benchmark Email was created in 2004 and is one of the email marketing services to offer very easy-to-use functionality to create newsletters.
Benchmark is entirely cloud-based and does not require any installation on your computer.
If you are using videos a lot, Benchmark is one of the few email services to support video emails.
With Benchmark, you can count on its solid online survey feature. I am a huge fan of surveys myself as I believe this is the best way to gain legit intel on your audience’s needs, pains, concerns, feedback, etc. Benchmark allows you to create professional-looking online surveys to use on your website, blog, or directly on your emails.
Finally, if you are a blogger and rely on newsletter emails, BenchMark has a solid RSS-To-Email that will help you create your newsletters from your blogs automatically through the RSS-to-email feature. Users only have to set up a campaign and template within Benchmark once.
Top Features:
- Fast and intuitive drag-and-drop email editor
- Hundreds of industry-specific themed templates to use
- Connect with 1,500+ app integrations including social media, CRMs, and the most popular products
Pricing:
Benchmark offers a FREE plan for up to 250 emails per month and unlimited contacts. PRO plan pricing varies based on the number of contacts in your list. It starts at $13.99/mo for unlimited emails and up to 600 subscribers. You can save 15% if you pay yearly.
SendPulse
Best Omni Channel Email Marketing Platform
| PRO Generous FREE Plan | CON Poor Customer Service Support |
SendPulse is a cloud-based 5-in-1 multi-channel platform that offers email automation, web push, SMS, transactional emails, and chatbot services.
Top Features:
- Adaptive emails
- 130+ FREE email templates
- Integrates SendPulse with 40 apps such as Shopify, Hubspot, Slack
- Free Chrome Extension
- Facebook Chatbots
Pricing:
SendPulse is available with a monthly subscription or pay-as-you-go pricing. Plans start as low as $8/mo and offer professional features and unlimited emails for up to 500 subscribers. Save 20% if you pay yearly.
MoonMail
Best Email Marketing Platform for tech-savvy users & Developers
| PRO Great Life Chat Support | CON Complicated segmentation process Lack of email templates |
MoonMail is an all-in-one cloud-based email and messaging platform designed to help you connect with your customers via multi-channel campaigns.
World’s international brands and companies, including Warner Bros., Nespresso, and Amazon use MoonMail.
Messages API, Push Notification API, or the Chatbot AI API, are designed for handling an OmniChannel system. They are meant to help you deliver excellent customer experience through the whole customer journey.
The software operates using Amazon AWS, but an Amazon AWS account is not required to use MoonMail.
Top Features:
- The powerful and user-friendly drag-and-drop editor
- Spam check
- Unsubscribes, bounces & complaints management
- Email wizard segmentation
- Integration with AWS
- Send time optimization
- Web Forms with Machine Learning powered Dynamic Email Validation
Pricing:
You can send up to 7,500 emails a month and that is with the free version or you can execute bigger campaigns with their priced editions starting as low as $21/mo. If you have a list of 2,000+ contacts you can pay an additional $24.00 additional contact fee per 1000 contacts until you reach the next tier plan priced at $129/mo for 25,000 active contacts.
Doing the math, it is cheaper to get the $129/mo STARTER plan and grow without worrying about additional fees in the long run. Save up to 25% off when you pay yearly.
Ontraport
Best CRM and Email Marketing for Coaches, Speakers, and Authors
| PRO Full CRM Capabilities Great Customer Support | CON Premium prices Fair Deliverability Rates |
OntraPort provides a well-optimized customer relationship management system that helps both salespeople and marketers maintain favorable engagements with their customers.
The platform also offers an email marketing and automation tool designed to help you with your promotional campaigns and provides a robust CRM solution
Ontraport just released the new membership sites feature to help you easily create, launch, and manage your entire membership site directly into the platform.
Top Features:
- Minimalist Interface design
- Powerful contact management feature
- Marketing automation and CRM combined via an intuitive visual flow.
- Host of features for enhancing e-commerce sales.
- Accurate campaign performance reports
- All emails sent from Ontraport use dedicated IP addresses.
- Flexible campaign builder to support complex automation involving a wide range of variables and parameters.
Pricing:
Get Started with Ontraport 14-day trial. Ontraport offers four plans: Basic ($79/month), Plus ($147/month), Pro ($297/month), and Enterprise ($497/month). They also offer custom pricing for accounts with up to 5 million contacts.
Campaign Monitor
Best Email Marketing for SMBs
| PRO Powerful analytics Easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface | CON No event-triggered email feature Poor online support |
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing and automation that helps small to midsize businesses (SMBs) create beautiful and engaging email campaigns.
Founded in 2004, the platform has a 99% customer satisfaction rate and is very people-focused. Campaign Monitor excels at providing insights and analytics that can help inform marketing strategies.
Templates represent one of Campaign Monitor’s strongest selling points. There are around 60 Campaign Monitor templates available.
Top Features:
- Easy to use drag-and-drop email editor
- Flow chart-style interface to build your email automation
- Create fancy forms. Fancier forms if you are a WordPress user with the Campaign Monitor forms plugin.
- Split testing
- White labeling options are very useful if you are an agency.
Pricing:
Get started for FREE and update with Campaign Monitor Premium Plan. Pricing is based on the number of contacts. There are three plans to choose from:
- BASIC – starts at $9/mo and is great to unlock all the core features of the platform.
- UNLIMITED – Starting at $29/mo is perfect if you plan to create and manage frequent email campaigns.
- PREMIER – starts at $149/mo to optimize your email strategy for the best results with send time optimizations and advanced link tracking.
Save 15% off every day if you are a non-profit organization.
Gist
Best Marketing Suite and Automation
| PRO Good price-value ratio Live Chat feature | CON Does not play well with new Google sites |
Gist is a complete online solution to communicate with your customers online via email marketing automation, chatbots, meetings, and more. If you are looking for an overall suite of tools to help you acquire, engage and nurture your leads, Gist is the right tool for you then.
With Gist Email Marketing products, you can grow traffic, convert more visitors, and run complete email marketing campaigns at scale.
Create beautifully-designed professional email marketing campaigns to grow your business. You can create different emails such as broadcast emails, drip campaigns, automated emails, scheduled emails, email funnels, upsells, and cross-sell emails with Gist pre-design template or start your email campaigns from scratch using the easy drag-and-drop editor.
To improve your email strategy, you will get actionable insights on your campaigns. Gist advanced reporting will help you make more informed decisions on how to duplicate high-performing campaigns and eliminate low-performing ones.
Top Features:
- Intuitive Visual Workflow builder
- Use complex logic to control the journey’s flow
- Tag lists and sequences
- Segment your lists
- Connect with integration apps such as woo commerce, Zapier, and WordPress
- Embed videos and countdown timers
- Add your custom domains
Pricing:
You can get started with the FREE plan for two users. Premium plans start as low as $29/mo with access to social media integrations and chat transcript features.
If you are serious about building automation and drip campaigns to skyrocket your passive income, I recommend you to check the Marketing suite offer with plans starting as low as $19/mo with 1,000 contacts.
Gist offers a Startup Plan for startups with less than 10 employees. You get a 93% discount on the premium plan.
Automizy
Best Email Marketing for stellar open rates
| PRO AI-powered feature Ease of use | CON No RSS feed |
Automizy is an email marketing platform created to increase your open rates. With Automizy, you will send emails and create campaigns, manage forms and contacts, and create easy-to-build automation, optimized for high open rates and conversions.
The platform highly focuses on an AI-powered subject line tester, A/B testing and automatic resend features to focus on your high-engaged audience.
Top Features:
- Essential Email Marketing Features
- Proven Templates and Blueprints
- AI feature to predict open rates based on data from over 1 million campaigns,
Pricing:
You can get started with Automizy’s 14-day FREE trial to test all the features of the platform. When you are ready to upgrade, premium plans start as low as $9/mo. Below is what you will be charged monthly based on the number of subscribers you have:
- 500 subscribers pay $18/mo
- 1,000 subscribers pay 29/mo
- 5,000 subscribers pay $69/mo
- 10,000 subscribers pay $119/mo
MailJet offers a 60-day money-back guarantee just in case.
Mailjet
Best Email Marketing for Experienced Marketers and Large Companies
| PRO Collaborative email editing Great Transactional email templates | CON Limited autoresponders feature Lack of segmentation options |
MailJet is a complete email and SMS marketing solution for businesses with established lists.
The company offers a feature for marketers to easily create emails and manage lists at a large scale. But also offers solutions for developers to create more advanced email API and SMTP relay to send billions of emails.
MailJet is an extremely powerful email marketing tool for organized companies that are looking to expand businesses and collaborate on team-based projects.
You can connect the platform to hundreds of pre-built apps such as Magento, Shopify, WordPress, and more.
Top Features:
- Advanced Responsive Email Builder
- Collaboration toolkit to work with different teams and control user permissions
- Engage your contacts with automated workflows
Pricing:
You can get started with a MailJet FREE plan and send up to 6,000/mo. Premium plan pricing is based on the number of emails sends and starts as low as $9.65/mo. If you need to start using segmentation and automation, the PREMIUM plan will be the right choice for you and start as low as $20.95/mo. Save 10% if you pay for the full annual plan.
Vertical Response
Best Email Marketing for Freelancers
| PRO Full-feature free plan Great Customer Support | CON Generic pre-designed templates No RSS or SMS features |
Vertical Response is a marketing solution designed to make the marketing process simpler and more effective for Freelancers and for small businesses.
You can create all the campaigns you need to reach every customer and visitor at any stage of their online experience. Reach up to 40% more of your audience with automated follow-up emails. Save time with autoresponders and triggered email series to nurture relationships with your visitor, client, and customer, and keep your level of engagement high.
With Vertical Response’s easy drag-and-drop editor, you can create beautiful,high-converting landing pages and professional-looking emails in minutes.
Top Features:
- Integrations with Salesforce, Magento, BigCommerce, and many other tools
- Build your email list and boost engagement with powerful, customized pop-up forms.
- Test Kit’s easy-to-use Inbox Preview, Subject Line Preview, and Link Checker to ensure your emails look and perform the way you want them to.
Pricing:
VerticalResponse offers a free plan for 60 days that includes 1,000 contacts and 4,000 emails per month, and lets you link two social media accounts. You can upgrade your plan with one of their two premium plans. Pricing varies based on the size of your list: :
- BASIC, starting at $11/mo
- PRO, starting at $16/mo if you want to get more advanced reporting and run regular A/B testing.
VerticalResponse will give non-profits 10,000 email credits per month for FREE or get 15% off a monthly subscription plan.
Reach Mail
Best Email Marketing with tailored plans
| PRO Easy-to-Use Functionalities Top-notch customer support | CON Limited templates Basic email automation |
Reach Mail offers tailored email solutions for small and large companies but also for marketing firms.
Grow your audience and extend your reach with Reach mail tools such as customized sign-up forms, intelligent segmentation, and an automated drip campaign builder to autopilot your conversions and revenues.
Reach Mail reports are very complete; you can gain intel and analyze data from your campaigns reports, autoresponder reports, list reports, survey reports, and advertiser reports, and you can integrate the data with external analytic tools such as Google Analytics, Oribi, and Matomo.
Top Features:
- Professional, eye-catching emails
- A/B testing to deliver successful and highly-converting emails based on data not on guesswork.
- Dynamic segmentation to build laser-focus email campaigns
- “Engagement Scanner” feature to target active subscribers and improve delivery
Pricing:
Start sending emails today with the Reach Mail FREE plan that includes 15,000/mo for up to 5,000 contacts. Premium plans start as low as $10/mo.
Email Octopus
Best Value Email Marketing Software
| PRO High deliverability Low-Cost | CON No A/B testing No Surveys Features |
Email Octopus is fairly new in the market but already brings a lot to the email marketing world. Founded in the UK in 2015, this email marketing software allows users to create, automate, and bulk-send email campaigns to a particular target audience. You can also grow your list with custom forms, directly hosted by Email Octopus, to capture email addresses without any complex integrations.
With Email Octopus, you can integrate more than 2,000 apps such as Salesforce, Zapier, and SurveyMonkey.
The Software has high deliverability rates while it costs less than the rest of the market. If you are looking for a cheaper and easy-to-use email marketing alternative for your email marketing campaigns. Octopus is the right pick for you.
Top Features:
- Mobile-Optimized emails
- List management
- Customized reports
- Responsive templates
Pricing:
You can test Email octopus for FREE. The FREE plan includes up to 2,500 subscribers and up to 10,000 emails per month. You can upgrade to the PRO plan starting as low as $20/mo for up to 5,000 subscribers. As pricing scales with your business at a reasonable cost, you can end up with 40,000 subscribers and pay below $100/mo for up to 400,000 emails/mo. This is a great value. Finally, email octopus also offers a 20% off discount for non-profit organizations.
What are the Best Free Email Marketing Services?
Mailchimp is one of the few email marketing services to offer free email marketing service Mailerlite, MailerLite, Omnisend, Sendinblue, and Benchmark also offers free features and freemium plans. You can build a robust email marketing strategy with free email marketing software but I recommend a paid plan and get access to more advanced automation features.
What makes the best Email Marketing Software?
- High Deliverability Rates
- Templates and customization features
- Segmentation Capabilities to craft targeted messages to increase subscriber engagement
- Automation Features to streamline processes and grow passive revenue
- Technical Support to help you troubleshoot errors and fix issues
- Knowledge Base Resources to develop expertise in the tools
- Pricing and Plans that fit your budget and align with your goals
How to get started with your Email Marketing Strategy?
Email marketing starts with sending emails to a list of contacts. So far, if you read this article you are looking for either an email marketing software to start with or another email marketing solution to switch from your existing Email service provider ESP. In either case, you own a list of contacts. Your list can be 100 or fewer subscribers or it can be high volume such as 15,000+ contacts.
1- Build and grow your email list
The bigger your list, the higher the engagement and conversions you can get from your email marketing efforts. Check out this article on How to Build Your First Email Sales Funnel and Scale Your Online Income in which I explain lead magnet techniques to use on your blog to capture new leads and grow your list.
2- Choose an Email Marketing Service
Once you prepare your lead magnet strategy to capture leads and grow your list, you need to find what is the best email marketing service that will help you engage with your list via various sets of email series. This can be:
- Welcome email series to introduce your business, welcome your subscriber, offer a Welcome incentive or offers, etc.
- RSS feed and Newsletter Updates to send regular updates about products, services, new articles, etc.
- Transactional emails to communicate with your contact every time an action takes place such as a purchase, a reminder, a birthday email, etc.
- Create email automation to specific segments of your list based on triggers and a set of actions and/or behavior. This is commonly called automation, drip, or triggered emails. Popular email automation is shopping cart abandonment series, win-back email series, rewards program emails, surveys and feedback emails, product/services launch emails, etc. Most of email marketing software offers customers a very visual workflow of automated emails to visualize the email conversation and properly set up advanced conditional statements and rules based on the segment to which it applies.
ConstantContact, ActiveCampaign, and ConvertKit do an excellent job in automation visualization and make it easy for customers to build relevant and high-converting email automation.
Every email marketing service has its pros and cons and I hope you found the beginning of this article useful in your search for the best email marketing for you to start scaling your business.
3- Understand your customers and segment your list
It goes without saying that visitors who opt into your newsletter have an interest in your business or in a solution you may provide to them. It is great for sending them emails on a regular basis but it is not enough to convert them into loyal customers and prevent high bounces and unsubscribes.
By segmenting your list into manageable subsets of subscribers who share common traits or characteristics such as demographics or behavioral actions, you can create more effective and impactful campaigns, tailored to each segment that converts 10 times better than a regular email blast for all your list.
Segmentation can be very diverse such as :
- New subscribers
- Active Subscribers
- Inactive Subscribers
- Segment based on Location
- Segment based on age
- Segment based on email open rates
- Segment based on abandoned carts
- Segment based on specific actions taken on your website
- etc.
Top 5 Email Marketing Best Practices to Put In Place
When you do email marketing, there are 5 best practices and things you absolutely need to do to guarantee high performance:
1-Run A/B testing and update your email automation and series
When you run email marketing campaigns, it is vital to A/B test your landing pages, email content, and email subject lines to understand what works with your subscribers and what does not.
Most of the Email marketing software and Services listed in this article offer A/B testing features to help you remove the guesswork on what performs and what does not.
This will improve your conversion rates and your bottom line. Once you decide what to test – CTAs, subject lines, headlines, images, body, the layout of the email- review performance and select the winning variation.
The winning variation can be based on conversion rates, open rates, Clickthrough, revenues, or any other goals you want to measure.
You just need to eliminate the poor-performing variation and apply the winning variation across your entire targeted segment or your entire list.
Remember that it is better to only test ONE variable at a time to really see results.
2- Do Not SPAM your list
This is a no-brainer. You know what I am talking about. How do you feel when you are getting spam all over the place in your email inbox? Same for your subscribers. If you are serious about blogging or building a brand based on trust with your audience, avoid spamming your list. For Example:
- Personalize your opt-in forms and always make the “name” field mandatory. This will help remove SPAM signals and get your email delivered to your subscriber inbox and not Junk mail.
- Do not buy lists or at least try to avoid buying lists from unknown companies without a solid reputation behind them. You need to know as much as possible where your list of contacts comes from and if contacts on this list have knowledge of the intended use of their email information.
- Do not opt-in visitors who have not opted in beforehand.
- Avoid sending ‘salesy’ and pushy emails with a lot of “!!!!” capital letters and highly commercial messages to your list. This is truly considered SPAM.
It is difficult and time-consuming to recover from blacklisting and spam-flagged folders. So do not SPAM your list
3- Choose meaningful metrics to track and analyze the performance
Most of the email marketing tools in the market provide reporting and email performance dashboards to track real-time email data that let you see who’s opening, clicking, and sharing your emails.
If you create email automation for targeted segments, you should be able to see what segment performs better in terms of open rates, CTR, and conversions. It is important to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. You should pay close attention to :
- High Delivery rates mean that you are reaching your list. High delivery rates are in around 99% + of your list.
- High Open rates indicate that your list is actually opening your emails. It is getting “crowdier” in our email inbox. The best way to increase open rates is to optimize send time, a segment of the list you send your email to, and of course craft eye-catching subject lines.
- High ClickThroughs. The more useful and relevant your email content is to your audience, the higher the clickthrough rate. For that work on your list segmentation to maximize the metric.
- High Conversions. By delivering relevant and well-timed emails to your list, you can trigger more conversions that can maximize your bottom line. To track conversions ensure you are using Google Analytics to tag your campaigns and see which ones are the most converting.
4- Clean Your Email List Regularly
You will rapidly notice that not everybody on your list reacts the same to your emails. Some users are very engaging and active with your email while others are just hanging there, called inactive subscribers, and don’t provide any value to you. A large portion of these inactive subscribers may not opt out of your email list. That is why it is important to regularly clean your list and remove these inactive contacts that are killing your open rates.
Deciding to remove these inactive customers from your list is based on how you define inactivity and customer LTV and if you selected an email marketing service capable of running this health list report and automatically cleaning your list. Don’t wait a year to update your list. If your business heavily relies on Emails, opt for Campaign Monitor or Pabbly which are great email marketing solutions handling this for you
5- Use converting landing pages to direct your email traffic to
Having a subscriber opens an email and read through it is great but what if you could improve your website’s average time spent engagement, and final conversions?
You can do it by simply creating landing pages that closely match the emails the traffic is coming from.
- You can match the email subject line to your landing page title
- You can design a similar layout and look and feel to create a seamless online experience from one channel to another
- You can offer a bonus or additional elements once users land on your landing page to incentivize actions and conversions.
Email marketing should work hand-in-hand with your other marketing efforts. This will skyrocket your user experience and engagement with your brand.
Wrapping up
While there are other email marketing tools in the market, I ranked and reviewed these 26 email marketing service providers as they offer many features to help you grow your email list to send personalized and targeted messages. Based on your goals and budget, if you are looking for high email delivery rates, great customer services, multichannel solutions, and automation features, if you are on a budget or have financial flexibility, there is a perfect email marketing solution for you.
If you are currently working with an email marketing tool that delivers amazing results for you, don’t hesitate to drop a comment and let all of us know about it!
