What is an email marketing service?

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy where you send emails to customers and prospective customers. When email marketing is leveraged effectively, it can turn a one-time customer into a loyal customer. Email marketing services help you create eye-catching, professional emails, but it doesn't end there. Many services let you create automated responses, such as an email series welcoming a new subscriber who has signed up for your email list or offering a discount on a customer's birthday. This automation is helpful for small businesses u2013 it allows owners to focus on running their business while their marketing strategy runs in the background; small businesses can continually gain new customers and grow. Finally, many services integrate with contact management so your contact data is always synced and up to date.

What are the most important elements of email marketing?

Your business should aim to provide a balanced mix of promotional content and organic content. Much like a social media marketing strategy, you need to add value to the inbox or feed of your subscribers. If a customer subscribes to your emails, send them emails that relate to them. This is where segmentation becomes valuable. Writing in a tone that matches your business's brand is also a best practice. If you stick to your brand identity and send emails that add value to your subscribers, you'll be in good shape.

How can I make my email marketing stand out?

With so many businesses using email marketing, it's important that your campaigns are relevant to your customers and subscribers. Selecting the email service that best fits your business is the first step in helping your campaigns stand out. After that, you'll want to use tools like list segmentation and automated responses to best cater to the wants and needs of your customer base.

The Best Email Marketing Service Reviews of 2023- business.com

The Best Email Marketing Software

Constant Contact: Best for Small Businesses
Salesforce: Best Enterprise Marketing Solution
FreshWorks Freshmarketer: Best for Marketing Integrations
monday: Best for Campaign Management
Campaigner: Best for Larger Businesses
Benchmark: Best for User-Friendly Email Marketing Service
MailChimp: Best or Beginners
ActiveCampaign: Best for E-Commerce
iContact: Best for Scalability
HubSpot: Best for Bundling

Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment of any digital marketing channel, with the potential to earn around $36 for every dollar spent. Businesses of all sizes can invest in email marketing software to help boost their reach and customize their efforts. The best email marketing services are easy to use and affordable, and they provide list-building tools and the ability to create eye-catching messages. To help you choose the right software for your business, we evaluated the top options on their usability, affordability and features.

Compare Our Best Picks

Email marketing software	Editor’s score	Best use case	Starting monthly price for paid plans	Free trial	Free version available	Maximum number of contacts on standard plans	Live chat support	A/B testing	Campaign analytics
Constant Contact	9.5/10	Small businesses	$9.99	60 days	No	50,000	Yes	Yes	Yes
Salesforce Marketing Cloud	9/10	Enterprise marketing	$400	No	No	500,000	Yes	Yes	Yes
Freshworks	9.2/10	Marketing integrations	$19	21 days	Yes	5,000	Yes	Yes	Yes
Monday	7.5/10	Campaign management	$30	Free plan	Yes	N/A	No	No	No
Campaigner	9.2/10	Larger businesses	$59	30 days	No	5,000	No	Yes	Yes
Benchmark	9.2/10	User-friendly software	$11	Free plan	Yes	175,000	Yes	Yes	Yes
ActiveCampaign	8.8/10	E-commerce	$9	14 days	No	100,000	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mailchimp	9.4/10	Beginners	$11	Free plan	Yes	100,000	No	Yes	Yes
iContact	8.8/10	Scalability	$23	Free plan	Yes	50,000	Yes	Yes	Yes
HubSpot	9.2/10	Bundled marketing solution	$45	14 days	Yes	15 million	Yes	Yes	Yes

How Much Will You Spend on an Email Marketing Service?

Most email marketing service providers charge a monthly subscription fee based on the number of contacts you want to engage with and the number of emails you plan to send. Plans then vary further based on specific features. Some providers offer free versions of their software with limited features, subscribers and sends, which are a great way for businesses to try out email marketing risk-free.

On average, plans range in price from $10 per month for 500 contacts to $4,000 per month for 1 million contacts. For businesses that only occasionally need an email marketing service, some providers offer per-email or pay-as-you-go pricing. This is a flexible option, as you pay only for what you use rather than paying the same amount each month for a subscription that may largely go to waste.

Email marketing services that do not offer a free version often allow you to sign up for a free trial so you can test out the software and see how it works for you. The services we examined offer trials ranging from 14 to 60 days.

Tip

Use as many free trials as you can during your search to determine which email marketing service is right for your business. Pay attention to how easy it is to design emails and build your audience with each platform.

Buying Guide

Email Marketing Services Features

As you compare email marketing services, look for these core features:

A/B Testing

Many services offer A/B testing, which is the ability to test out various components of an email message to see what will resonate more with your audience. Before you do, it is important to understand how A/B testing works. A specific example is to try out two different subject lines. You can send a portion of your email list one subject line and another section of your list a different subject line. Whichever gets more engagement can be used for the majority of your audience.

Drag-and-Drop Email Design Tools

Most services provide a user-friendly drag-and-drop tool that allows you to customize your emails or customizable premade templates. Some providers have templates that show you how your email will look on multiple devices (laptops, tablets and mobile phones), which can help you design a flexible and responsive email.

Analytics and Reporting

The ability to measure your campaigns’ performance is critical to understanding your ROI. Email marketing services typically include a detailed analytics platform that provides information such as your open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, audience geolocation, conversions and customer behavior trends. Some integrate with Google Analytics, while others provide their own analytics platforms that present the info in easy-to-read charts and graphs.

Marketing Automation

With marketing automation features, you can configure your email marketing software to automatically send targeted emails to certain customers when they take a specific action. For example, if a visitor to your website signs up to receive emails from you, a marketing automation workflow triggers a welcome email to go to that customer’s inbox.

FYI

Marketing automation can be an effective timesaver, and many email marketing services offer ways to make automated emails more personal, which leads to higher engagement and ROI.<

Segmentation

Segmentation is another helpful way to improve email deliverability to your audience by grouping or tagging them by factors like age, location, gender, industry or interests. Email segmentation allows you to target different groups rather than sending one mass email that may not be relevant to your entire customer base.

Contact Management

A contact management tool helps you acquire, sort and manage email contacts. It also provides features like automatic deletion of dead or duplicate contacts, importing, exporting, grouping, and integrating with other management tools, like a CRM or CMS.

Social Media Integration

Integrating your social media with email marketing helps make the most of multichannel marketing by providing more information about your customers as well as more opportunities for them to see messages from you. You’ll be able to grow your contact list, schedule posts and track your followers’ engagement to determine what’s popular.

Benefits of Email Marketing Software

Email marketing is an effective, low-cost method of communicating with your customers and building loyalty to your company. Here are just a few of the benefits of investing in a software solution for email marketing.

1. Easily manage your campaigns and contacts.

An email marketing service provides a centralized place to create, manage and analyze your email campaigns. The software manages the entire process of creating and sending your email campaigns. It also gives you feedback on how your campaigns are performing.

2. Improve click-throughs and engagements on your website.

A professional-looking email campaign will entice customers to click on the links you include in the email, which means higher click-through rates and increased traffic to your website.

3. Provide personalized, one-to-one communications with your customers.

Today’s customers expect content that is personally tailored to them, rather than a rote email going out to a company’s entire customer base. Email marketing services allow you to segment your customers by qualifiers such as age, gender, location and interests to help you customize your messages.

4. Integrate email with your other digital marketing channels.

Many email marketing services allow you to embed or link to your social media platforms in your emails, which creates the opportunity for your business to advertise through multiple channels. This helps increase brand awareness and the likelihood of return customers.

Bottom Line

Choosing the right email software for your business can be a tough task, so it is important to prioritize your needs and the benefits you are looking for to make sure the software you ultimately select hits all of those notes.

5. Be environmentally friendly.

According to a recent analysis from Sendinblue, one email produces 0.174 grams of carbon dioxide. In contrast, a paper letter sent by mail produces an average of 19.5 grams of carbon dioxide. Though email has a much smaller footprint than snail mail, email marketing campaigns often send hundreds or thousands of emails at a time, which means the impact can add up.

How to Choose an Email Marketing Solution

If you’re looking for a new email marketing solution, follow this step-by-step guide to choose the right one.

1. Set goals and a budget.

Before you look for an email marketing solution, define your goals for your campaigns, and determine how much you want to spend. Consider the campaign frequency and overall types of campaigns you want to run, such as special sales, general brand awareness or customer engagement.

2. Research the top email marketing providers.

Search for the best email marketing software providers online, or ask fellow business owners which solutions they use. The top services will often appear high up in your search results and be featured on numerous “best picks” lists.

3. Explore product reviews.

Online customer reviews and reviews on sites like business.com can give you a better idea of an email marketing company’s pricing, features, benefits, limitations and disadvantages, and customer support. This research will help you determine which solutions fit into your budget and deliver the features you want.

4. Try out a few different solutions.

Whether you sign up for a free trial of a paid plan or use a free “starter” plan, make an account with each of your top email marketing providers and get to know each one. Try using their templates, email builders, contact management tools and other features. As you use the software, note how easy (or difficult) it is to use, which software integrations it supports, and what its limitations are. It also helps to contact customer service to ask any questions you have and to gauge how well each provider supports its customers.

5. Decide on your email marketing software and begin running campaigns.

When you find a software provider you love, sign up for a plan and start building your first official campaign.

Tip

Define your goals for the campaign in the planning stage so you can focus your efforts and measure your success.

FAQs

What is email marketing, and what are its benefits?

Email marketing is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy that allows you to build a direct relationship with your customers through their email inboxes. There are many benefits of email marketing, including building trust with your audience, encouraging website click-throughs and promoting sales.

What are the best email marketing services?

The best email marketing services offer the right combination of value and features at an affordable price. Look for services that offer adequate subscriber and send limits for your needs, extensive templates, automation features, contact management and analytics. Based on our analysis, the best email marketing services are Constant Contact, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Freshworks, monday.com, Campaigner, Benchmark, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, iContact and HubSpot.

What is the role of email marketing?

Email marketing is just one component of a company’s overall marketing strategy. It can be used for a number of internal and external business communications, including company updates, product and sale announcements, and customer surveys.

Who should use email marketing?

Any business that wants to build strong customer relationships and improve their website traffic and revenue for a relatively low cost should consider email marketing.

What are the types of email marketing?

There are several types of email marketing. The most common type is the informational newsletter, which provides general company news and updates, transactional emails that are part of the sales or billing process (order and shipping confirmations, receipts, invoices, etc.), and behavioral emails that are sent after a subscriber takes a certain action on your website (signs up for a mailing list, abandons their cart, sends an inquiry, etc.).

What to Expect in 2023

Email continues to be a major communication channel. The number of email sends and click-throughs by recipients will only continue to increase in 2023 and beyond. In fact, data from The Radicati Group estimates that more than 376 billion emails will be sent by the end of 2025.

Now through 2029, a massive CAGR growth of 11.6 percent is expected for the global email marketing software market, according to Digital Journal. Many major brands are pivoting their messaging to focus more on their company mission or adapt to industry trends, and to be more personal within automated emails to connect with their consumer base on a deeper level. Additionally, the increased need for digital advertising at a lower cost is influencing the future of the global email marketing software market.

User software, which allows businesses to create and send messages to their mailing lists, allows for key metrics, such as open and click-through rates, to be tracked. Such advanced platforms work to increase the likelihood of recipient engagement when coupled with personal messaging relating to the recipient’s interests. The possibility of automated email marketing software to create a bankable market potential is present.

With the increase in automation, companies will be trying to deliver a message in the most compact and transparent way possible. Email marketing experts predict that companies will ditch templates in favor of plain text and pared-down descriptions. Bite-sized content, including short videos, will rise as companies compete for customers in the age of content overload.

Reviews

Campaigner: Best Email Marketing Service for Larger Businesses

Campaigner

Campaigner's email automation workflow services can help large businesses increase conversions.

Customers love Campaigner's top-tier support services.

Many of Campaigner's best features are available only at the higher price point.

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If you’re looking for the best solution for your midsize or large business, Campaigner is an excellent choice. This email marketing service has a little bit of everything your team may need to launch a successful campaign, including a plan that caters specifically to e-commerce.

Editor’s score: 9.2/10

The Starter plan begins at $59 per month. It allows up to 5,000 contacts and provides A/B testing, a library of more than 900 prebuilt, customizable templates, and HTML-ready landing pages. However, businesses will have to upgrade to the Advanced plan at $649 per month to get up to 100,000 contacts and other exclusive features, like automation workflows, purchase behavior data and static segment sampling. The higher price point and advanced capabilities make Campaigner more suited for large businesses.

The real standout feature at Campaigner is the email automation workflow available in the Advanced plan. The email automation workflow allows users to “design and guide leads and customers through highly personalized buyer journeys.” Campaigner notes that customers “typically see up to six times more conversion and sales” using these workflows. This feature is great for large businesses that want to increase conversion and drive customers toward a sale.

Read Campaigner Review

monday.com Email Marketing: Best Email Marketing Service for Campaign Management

monday.com Email Marketing

Monday's workflow management capabilities can help you plan, create and track email marketing campaigns.

You can configure automations and workflows in monday to track email campaigns in progress.

While monday lets you send and receive emails, it is not a dedicated email marketing platform and may not offer all the features you need.

One of a marketing department’s most difficult tasks is managing all steps of every campaign idea that its members present, from gathering data, tracking and executing each campaign to analyzing each one’s performance. We were impressed with how monday’s workflow management capabilities help your team track email marketing campaigns through their entire lifecycle, from brainstorming to execution.

Editor’s score: 8.2/10

As a monday user, you can leverage the platform’s many template options, workflow automations and views to process incoming requests and monitor progress. You can track and filter email marketing campaigns by account, priority, goal, audience, send date, reviewer and request status. We like how the automation functions, such as notification and update triggers, reduce the manual work of handling requests and updating campaign progress. This will help you easily manage each campaign, no matter what stage it’s in.

You can also take advantage of WorkForms, which lets you create personalized business forms and visualize campaign progress in columns. This tool can be particularly useful for collecting, tracking and analyzing data from your email subscribers. WorkForms offers the ability to create automated columns that connect existing documents to its boards, which means teams can access all their email campaign materials in one place.

Be aware that monday is project management and CRM software, not dedicated email marketing software. This tool does integrate with products like Mailchimp for overall campaign tracking and syncs with Gmail and Outlook accounts to send and receive emails, but may not natively offer all the features you might look for in a traditional email marketing software. However, it’s still a great tool for managing a campaign, from planning to measuring its performance.

Read monday.com Email Marketing Review

Benchmark Email Marketing: Best User-Friendly Email Marketing Service

Benchmark Email Marketing

Benchmark's free, convenient drag-and-drop email editor is an easy way to get started with email marketing.

The lowest-priced Benchmark plan starts at just $13 per month, which is affordable for most small businesses.

You will need to invest in a paid plan to access the best Benchmark features.

Small businesses that want an affordable email marketing service with user-friendly features should consider Benchmark. Paid plans start at $13 per month, with unlimited sends to 500 contacts. This provider also has a free plan that maxes out at 250 emails per month.

Editor’s score 9.2/10

All Benchmark plans include features that make the service easy to use, including automation, lead generation and reporting features. We found these functions to be somewhat limited and simplistic in the free version, though, which is missing some key features that businesses may find useful. Fortunately, the lowest-priced Pro plan ($13 per month) is still very affordable for businesses on a budget and gives you access to more advanced automation features like behavior-based email follow-up, list management and website engagement automation, automated customer journey templates, and A/B testing. These more advanced features plus the access to premium support services – including phone, email, live chat, blogs, newsletters and videos – makes Benchmark even easier to navigate, something that businesses new to email marketing will appreciate.

Benchmark’s drag-and-drop email editor is exceptionally easy to use, and it offers an HTML code editor for more complex customizations. The multitude of email templates made for every occasion provides an easier solution than having to design your own. In addition, Benchmark offers improved image editing within text blocks. You can adjust-in-place an image width adjustment for any inserted image and better wrap text around images.

Benchmark also offers its AI-powered Smart Content. This copywriting tool writes content from scratch or can rewrite existing content from simple inputs. It has the ability to write for any marketing audience, including B2B, B2C, and e-commerce. With this feature, marketers will be able to save time by turning out compelling content at a quicker rate.

The platform also includes a ton of valuable help resources. Benchmark’s help center includes easy-to-find help articles and videos, goal-oriented categories and options that make it easy to connect with the support team via chat and email. The help center also supports users in all languages.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp's interface is easy to learn and ideal for new users.

The free version has numerous useful features.

You can create only one audience on the free plan, limiting your segmentation options.

For businesses just starting to explore the world of email marketing, Mailchimp is a solid option. Even if you’ve never used an email marketing platform before, this platform is very easy to learn and use. It’s simple to find all the features you need to start creating and running email campaigns from the dashboard.

Editor’s score: 9.4/10

You can start risk-free with Mailchimp’s free plan, which allows 10,000 monthly sends and up to 2,000 contacts. We were impressed that it has everything you need to run an effective email marketing campaign, including a drag-and-drop email editor, customizable templates, detailed tag-based audience segmentation, and some automation tools.

In case your business outgrows the free plan, Mailchimp offers multiple paid plans to fit nearly any budget. Paid plans offer multi-user accounts, an extensive knowledge base, marketing automation, A/B testing and analytics tools. You can also create and publish email campaigns, landing pages, pop-up forms, Google remarketing ads, and Facebook and Instagram ads on any Mailchimp plan.

Mailchimp also incorporates artificial intelligence into its platform. The Email Content Generator uses GPT AI technology to allow customers to create marketing campaigns based on their audience members’ industry and the marketing intent of the campaign. It can also infuse brand voice.

Constant Contact Email Marketing: Best Email Marketing Service for Small Businesses

Constant Contact Email Marketing

Constant Contact's affordable monthly plans and robust feature set should meet the needs of most small businesses.

You'll have plenty of time to test out all of Constant Contact's features with its 60-day free trial.

Unlike other popular email marketing options, Constant Contact does not offer a free version.

Constant Contact is our choice as the best email marketing service for small businesses. We were impressed with how this software comes with everything you need to easily create effective email campaigns at an affordable price. Constant Contact’s plans, which are priced based on the number of subscribers you have, allow you to send a nearly unlimited number of emails, whereas many of its competitors impose lower send limits.

Editor’s score: 9.5/10

The company is well known for its top-tier email marketing services. In the past year, it has improved its marketing automation, campaign design and e-commerce features. When it comes to marketing automation specifically, there are new behavioral triggers and automated email campaign flows that create hyper-relevant experiences for customers based on real-time data, as well as new methods for users to manage personal data and account privacy.

Constant Contact offers two email marketing plans starting at $9.99 per month, which should fit into most small businesses’ budgets. Both the Core and Plus plans include customizable email templates with an image library, contact management and list-building tools, detailed tracking and reporting features, a mobile app, and comprehensive self-service and direct customer support resources. We were impressed with its easy-to-use email editor, which automatically pulls your logo, brand colors and social profile links from your business’s website to help you customize the available templates.

We like how Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial, the longest trial period of all the providers we researched. The trial is limited to 100 contacts but gives you access to all of Constant Contact’s features. We also were impressed by the new support services offered. Users can expect to have easier, more direct access to customer service professionals experienced in their specific industries.

Read Constant Contact Email Marketing Review

HubSpot: Best Bundled Email Marketing Solution

HubSpot

HubSpot's bundled Starter CRM Suite includes email marketing to kick-start your inbound marketing efforts.

You can access "lite" versions of HubSpot's other marketing tools.

HubSpot may be too advanced for a small business's basic marketing needs, and the pricing options can be confusing.

HubSpot offers a robust marketing product suite that includes its Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub and Operations Hub. Each of these tools is built upon HubSpot’s popular CRM platform and included in its Starter CRM Suite. This bundled option is the same price as the Starter Marketing Hub ($45 per month when you pay for a year upfront), making it an excellent and affordable solution for a growing business’s marketing needs.

When purchased as part of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, the company’s email marketing software allows you to plan campaigns in tandem with your blog efforts, landing pages, lead management, social media, ads, marketing automation and more. We found that this combination of services makes it easier for your business to create a campaign and promote it all at once. If you’re not interested in bundling, email marketing is also available as a stand-alone free tool, which includes limited versions of the paid features in Marketing Hub.

HubSpot’s professionally designed drag-and-drop email templates allow you to create effective email campaigns easily. We like how you can automatically personalize your emails based on a subscriber’s stage in the customer journey, their list membership or any information in their contact record. HubSpot’s powerful reporting tools also give you deep insights into your campaign performance and subscriber data, helping you craft campaigns that convert.

HubSpot has entered the AI arena with its ChatSpot.ai and Content Assistant. While these tools can be used for a variety of projects, they were specifically designed to help marketing and sales teams curate more personalized content and expedite processes. Content Assistant can quickly produce accurate content in the form of blog posts, landing pages, and sales and marketing emails with simple prompted commands. ChatSpot.ai works hand-in-hand with ChatGPT in that it pulls from ChatGPT’s wide range of data. However, ChatSpot.ai also pulls response data from the HubSpot CRM and other internal data sources, giving HubSpot users extremely personalized internal organizational data that ChatGPT cannot access. Having this extensive internal data at the touch of a button will save marketing teams time and make it easier to provide customers with curated, personalized outreach.

Freshworks Freshmarketer: Best Email Marketing Service for Marketing Integrations

Freshworks Freshmarketer

Freshmarketer has numerous marketing integrations and the option to combine marketing and sales.

Freshworks offers a 21-day free trial, as well as add-on packages to boost lower-tier plans.

Freshworks' multiple plans with similar offerings at different price points may be confusing.

If you want to automate and integrate your marketing processes at a small business-friendly price, Freshworks’ Freshmarketer platform may be the right choice for you. Freshmarketer offers businesses the opportunity to increase conversions through multichannel engagement with Shopify, email, SMS, WhatsApp and Freshmarketer’s chat.

Freshmarketer also allows you to deliver messages across these channels at scale. We like how users can build out campaigns tailored to a specific target audience and customize them with personalized messages. The Growth Plan starts at $19 per month with 2,000 marketing contacts billed annually and includes all of the important integrations you’ll need.

Freshworks makes it easier for marketing teams to communicate with customers using its newly enhanced AI-powered assistant, Freddy. The enhancements add new GPT-based conversational enhancements that will save email marketers time and money. Freddy integrates with the Freshmarketer employee suite of products, meaning marketers will have optimized email content that maximizes campaign efficiency. The service also assists in creating compelling, original copy in half the time it would take a human marketer to craft it. By providing intelligent, tone-sensitive and creative copy, Freddy allows email marketing professionals more time to focus on other creative projects that will add to the business’s bottom line.

In addition to Freshmarketer’s email marketing software, you can also upgrade your plan to include Freshworks’ CRM platform, Freshsales Suite (learn more in our full review of Freshsales), to bridge the gap between marketing and sales. We like how this provider offers Freshmarketer as an all-in-one marketing solution that integrates seamlessly with Freshworks’ CRM platform. This enables your business to easily and effectively communicate with prospects using custom email marketing campaigns. A nice option we like is the free trial, letting you test out the software for several weeks before you commit to a plan.

Read Freshworks Freshmarketer Review

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Best Enterprise Marketing Solution

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud's data-first marketing tools are excellent for large businesses that want to improve their customer relationships.

You'll get top-tier marketing features and excellent customer support with Salesforce.

With its plans starting at $400 per month, small and midsize businesses may not have the budget for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Larger companies that want to improve their overall marketing strategy with effective email campaigns should consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a suite of marketing tools designed to streamline and enhance data-driven email marketing campaigns.

Editor’s score: 9/10

The feature-rich Marketing Cloud is built on Salesforce’s core customer relationship management (CRM) offering, which seamlessly integrates with your sales, marketing and customer service data. The included Email Studio tool is excellent at personalizing messages using customer data, which strengthens relationships between your business and its customers. We like that it offers a variety of useful features, with countless options for customizing your campaigns and workflow. With all its capabilities, Email Studio lets you easily create and scale campaigns for audiences of any size.

Salesforce offers an array of automation features for its marketing service. This includes a new API enhancement that is designed to automate personalization and engagement via the use of new integrations for the company’s CDP and external segmentation tools. Knowing how critical personalization is, this is a nice value add.

With a starting price of $400 per month, Salesforce Marketing Cloud may be out of reach for small businesses with a limited budget. However, we think larger businesses that can afford Salesforce will find its features incredibly useful.

Read Salesforce Marketing Cloud Review

ActiveCampaign: Best Email Marketing Service for E-Commerce

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign's sales automation and advanced segmentation tools are perfect for growing online retailers.

Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and other popular e-commerce software can integrate seamlessly with ActiveCampaign.

To access ActiveCampaign's best e-commerce integrations and features, you'll have to invest in the Plus plan (starting at $49 per month).

ActiveCampaign is an excellent choice for e-commerce businesses that need to send frequent customer communications, such as transactional notifications, product updates and sale announcements. It has a multitude of marketing features and tools for online sellers, like custom order management, revenue reporting, customer service management, product landing pages and contact scoring. Recently, ActiveCampiagn made platform speed enhancements to help email marketers get work done faster and reconstructed its email designer. Both updates help ensure that emails are created efficiently and appeal to customers.

Editor’s score: 8.8/10

We were impressed with ActiveCampaign’s integration options. ActiveCampaign integrates with hundreds of customer engagement solutions, including popular options like Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Sales and customer data from your integrated platform automatically go to your ActiveCampaign e-commerce dashboard so you can create targeted, personalized email campaigns from the tool’s 125-plus templates. This email software also includes unlimited sends up to 250,000 contacts, so it’s easy to scale and send numerous email campaigns to your customer base.

Other standout features and tools include multi-factor authentication for logging into its apps, Chrome extension and Outlook add-in, a personalization tag that allows you to add titles and descriptions in automated task name actions, and a “goal action” feature that provides greater segmentation capabilities.

The best e-commerce marketing features ActiveCampaign has to offer are available only with the Plus plan or higher, starting at $49 per month for up to 1,000 contacts. This may not be enough for e-commerce businesses that want to scale quickly on a limited budget, but if you have only basic email needs right now, ActiveCampaign still provides many useful tools for you to build relationships with your customers as an online seller.

iContact: Best Email Marketing Service for Scalability

iContact

iContact is a scalable solution that allows you to increase your contact limits easily as your subscriber list grows.

You get 500 contacts and 2,000 sends per month with iContact's free plan.

iContact's free plan has relatively few automation features.

If you want to start with a free email marketing plan and scale up as your audience grows, iContact is an ideal solution. The free version of this software allows 500 contacts and up to 2,000 sends per month. We like that it includes all the features you need to get started with email campaigns as you build up your subscriber base.

iContact includes a drag-and-drop email designer and a comprehensive, professionally designed template library. You can access iContact’s template and stock image library, landing page creation and hosting option, A/B testing capabilities, real-time campaign reporting, API integrations, and automation features on either plan.

One potential downside is that there aren’t many automations in the free plan. You can upgrade to the Advanced plan (starting at $23 per month for 1,500 contacts) for full access to features and tools like automatically optimized send times (“smart sending”), audience segmentation, engagement follow-ups and multiple event series campaigns.

The Best Email Marketing Services and Survey Software of 2023

Here are our picks for the best email marketing services in 2023, including for small business, large business, free, low-cost, overall and survey software.