Are you looking to include email marketing in your business model? Do you want to boost your business’ revenue with a reliable and cheap email marketing platform?
Choosing the right email marketing service for your business can have a detrimental significance to the success and growth of your marketing campaigns.
In this article, I am going to review the 7 best email marketing services that can help small businesses to really grow.
The Importance of Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service
Email marketing is known to be the most cost-effective and efficient marketing strategy for small and large businesses alike.
The reason is that it gives you control over who to contact, it’s easy to manage and your email campaigns go out to people that already know and trust your brand.
The key thing to remember is that: the success of your email marketing efforts solely depends on the email marketing service you use because they will ensure that your emails meet your design expectations and are getting delivered.
If you make a poor choice, your marketing costs may rise significantly and your emails may be sent out later than planned – which means losing money.
What are the Features of a Good Email Marketing Platform?
Every email marketing tool has its own merits and custom-made features.
However, when searching for the best email marketing service you should be looking for the following features:
- Create highly-engaging emails/newsletters with an easy-to-use interface. Independently of your coding expertise, a drag-and-drop editor always makes things easier and faster.
- Have the ability to personalize emails and target the right groups of users with minimal effort.
- Easily manage and segment your existing and new contact lists.
- Track performance of your email campaigns from email opens to purchase or lead capture depending on what the goal your business is.
- Ensure that your email campaigns do not end up in the spam or junk folders which entirely depends on your email marketing provider.
Having all the above in mind, let’s see all the top email marketing software out there and how well they do against each other.
List of Best Email Marketing Tools
1. GetResponse
GetResponse is one of the most popular email marketing solutions for digital marketers, bloggers and businesses of all sizes. It's the service I use on many of my websites (including this one) and it’s suitable for both beginners and more advanced users.
It offers some amazing marketing automation features that allow you to automate your campaigns based on triggers that fire when a certain action is made on your website. One of their recent upgrades was the addition of funnels, called AutoFunnels which can direct specific groups of customers to customized page flows making the journey from lead capture to sale a piece of cake.
GetResponse offers an easy to use drag and drop builder so that you create your emails or landing pages in the way you envisioned. You can create autoresponders and sales funnels, segment contacts, and send customized emails designed for specific contact groups. These features cover everything a blogger, marketer, or e-commerce business needs to seriously boost their sales and overall revenue.
In addition to the vast library of beautiful responsive forms and landing pages, GetResponse offers A/B testing, webinars setup, analytics dashboard, Facebook Ads integration, and unsubscribe tracking. It also integrates with other third-party providers like OptinMonster, SalesForce, ZenDesk, and more.
They provide support across different channels including phone, live chat, and email. You can also learn more about email marketing and tool via their free learning library which includes videos, webinars, how-to guides, and more.
GetResponse Pricing
GetResponse has four pricing tiers:
- Basic – starting at $15 per month
- Plus – starting at $49 per month
- Professional – starting at $99 per month
- Max – custom pricing based on business size and needs
They also offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) across their first three pricing plans so you can test out their full capabilities.
2. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the easiest and most beginner-friendly email marketing services out there. It has been around for some time and it’s been steadily growing due to its ease of use.
You are able to easily create and manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, landing pages, and more.
Once you sign up for your free account trial, you will have access to analytics and tracking, built-in social media sharing tools, a free image library, and integration with Facebook Ads and Shopify stores for your e-commerce business.
The Constant Contact Email Plus account has excellent tools for email automation and improvement of conversion rates. Among many others, you will be able to run A/B tests on the subject line, create coupons, run surveys & polls, customize pop-ups and create automated emails that trigger based on the actions visitors took on your website.
Did you encounter a problem or not sure of how to do specific things on the platform? No problem! Constant Contact customer support will always be there to support you via live chat, phone, email, and an extensive archive of FAQ resources.
If you want further training on the platform or email marketing in general, you can either join one of their live seminars across the United States or attend an online training to quickly transition from a beginner to a pro.
Constant Contact Pricing
Constant Contact has two simple pricing tiers for unlimited emails:
- Email – starting at $20 per month
- Email Plus – starting at $45 per month
You can also get a 30-day free trial without adding any credit card details.
3. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is an excellent SMS and email marketing platform for businesses that want to have multiple outreach channels under one roof.
Do you like drag and drop email editors? You are in luck as SendinBlue provides you with a powerful and easy to use drag-and-drop email editor that allows you to create highly engaging emails. Their tools are perfect for both beginners and experts in email marketing alike.
SendinBlue is stacked with automation tools that let you send transactional emails, send out SMS campaigns, design workflows for follow-up emails and send emails at the highest-converting time of the day using their AI algorithm for maximum click-through rates.
Their Premium plan delivers even more advanced tools like a landing page builder, multi-user access, Facebook & retargeting ads integration, heatmap reporting, and A/B testing.
If you have a large website already, SendinBlue also has an SMTP bulk email marketing service that you can use to send automated and transactional emails from your WordPress site.
SendinBlue Pricing
SendinBlue has an entirely free email marketing plan where you can send up to 300 emails per day – as long as you don’t mind their branding within the email.
The pricing tiers are split into four main categories:
- Free – up to 300 emails at $0 per month
- Lite – starting 10K emails and $25 per month
- Premium – starting at 20K emails and $65 per month
- Enterprise – custom quote based on business needs
You can get your free account with SendinBlue here.
4. Drip
Drip is a great email marketing provider for e-commerce stores and bloggers. Their features include email automation, sales funnels, and personalization of emails based on customer segments.
Drip delivers an easy integration with most website builders like WordPress and WooCommerce. You can easily create and add pop-ups forms on your site in order to capture leads and increase overall revenue.
The Campaign Monitor which is part of their main features allows you to use their marketing automation tools, create smarter email segments, A/B test different elements, and manage list groups. In this way, you can send targeted emails to leads or customers from your email list and increase sales.
They also offer excellent customer support including live chat, automation training, free courses, and great documentation so you can quickly find an answer to your problem.
Drip Pricing
Drip may be higher in pricing when compared to other email marketing solutions but its e-commerce focus and expertise makes up the difference by the features and results it delivers.
Drip has a free trial, and the paid plan starts from $49 per month which gives you access to all their features.
5. Aweber
AWeber offers a wide variety of features designed to help small and medium-sized businesses run their email marketing campaigns. It’s one of the most known and oldest players in the market.
AWeber can be seamlessly integrated with the majority of website platforms out there including WordPress.
As soon as you subscribe you will able to use HTML email templates, manage your contact list and groups, send out autoresponders, and track how your emails are performing using their analytics dashboard.
If you have questions about email marketing or run into trouble, they provide a vast range of tutorials and guides, live chat, phone, and email support.
AWeber Pricing
AWeber pricing is split into two simple pricing tiers:
- Free for up to 500 subscribers
- Pro starting from $19 monthly with slightly lower prices if billed quarterly or annually.
6. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an email marketing solution mostly used by professional bloggers, authors, and digital marketers. As with the rest of the platforms mentioned already, it’s very quick to learn and easy to use.
One of the features that stands out is the ability to offer content upgrades on your website using email signup forms. Another function worth mentioning is the autoresponders which you can use to send drip emails as part of their email service.
ConvertKit allows you to segment subscribers into different groups based on the action they have performed – for example, purchased on your website. In this way, you can split the different groups into people that have purchased already and those who have shown interest only. Having this separation will allow you to send different marketing campaigns and your retargeting using the right message.
For any queries or issues, ConvertKit can be contacted via email if needed or alternatively you can access their knowledge base and get all the information you need from there.
ConvertKit Pricing
ConvertKit has three pricing plans to choose from:
- Free – up to 1000 subscribers
- Creator – starting at $29 per month
- Creator Pro – starting at $59 per month
You can sign up for your free trial here.
7. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is very popular among beginners and small start-ups due to the fact that it offers a forever free email marketing service plan.
Mailchimp offers a drag-and-drop email creator, autoresponders, contact segments, and basic email tracking. It also lets you manage delivery times and segment your customers based on geolocation – however, this comes with the paid versions.
You can integrate MailChimp with your WordPress, Shopify, Magneto, and other website or e-commerce platforms. Their platform however is fairly limited in email automation, autoresponders and funnels when compared to GetResponse or ConvertKit.
They also offer support via email, live chat, and a knowledge-base. The free version has email support only and increased waiting times.
Mailchimp Pricing
Mailchimp has four pricing tiers
- Free – that lets you send 12,000 emails to up to 2,000 contacts. This is fairly limited in the number of features you can use and their branding is also included in the emails.
- Essentials – starting from $9.99 per month
- Standard – starting from $14.99 per month
- Premium – starting from $299 per month
Best Email Marketing Services – Final Thoughts and Key Tips
Now, you may be thinking, are there are any more email marketing platforms out there? Yes, of course – a dozen of them. The focus of this review was to give you a list of the tools perfect for small businesses and help you choose the one that best works for you.
Still unsure of what service to go for? Here is a quick summary.
If you are a blogger, a business of any size, or a generic digital marketer, GetResponse and Constant Contact are my top recommendations. The range of their features and user-friendly interface is truly amazing! The pricing plans are great and their support team is always there to help you achieve the results you want.
If you have an e-commerce website then Drip could be the best tool to go for. They provide great personalization and automation features that are ideal for online stores.
Finally, if you run a business that requires to combine email marketing and SMS messages, SendinBlue would be my recommendation. They have a great interface where you can run and manage both SMS and email campaigns, all under one roof.
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