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Take your marketing to the next level with email campaigns, newsletters and surveys via Mailchimp or another top platform.
To generate the greatest returns from email marketing, you need to build a list of recipients and then create and send eye-catching, personalized messages that keeps your audience engaged. You also need the tools to analyze your performance over time to see which messages and product selection resonate with your target audience the most. The right email marketing software can help you manage and simplify these important processes. To help you choose the best email marketing software for your business, we reviewed 25 platforms and evaluated them on their range of features, user-friendliness and affordability.
At business.com, our marketing software experts and operations analysts routinely evaluate the essential marketing tools and services small and growing businesses require, while providing playbooks for executing social media campaigns, email marketing newsletters, text message marketing promotions and more. Our guides are infused with advice from real digital marketing experts, project managers, SEO professionals, social media directors and advertising consultants. Our rigorous review process includes vendor interviews, product demonstrations, firsthand testing and head-to-head comparisons. After each assessment is completed, it’s verified by a top editor to ensure accuracy and objectivity. Learn more about our editorial process.
When it comes to email marketing services and survey software, we tried a number of platforms and judged their user-friendliness, functionality, integrations and more. We looked for features like customizable templates, A/B testing, automated workflows,...
When it comes to email marketing services and survey software, we tried a number of platforms and judged their user-friendliness, functionality, integrations and more. We looked for features like customizable templates, A/B testing, automated workflows, drag-and-drop editors and campaign analytics. Pricing and plan options also factored into our ratings, as did customer service quality.
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When it comes to email marketing services and survey software, we tried a number of platforms and judged their user-friendliness, functionality, integrations and more. We looked for features like customizable templates, A/B testing, automated workflows, drag-and-drop editors and campaign analytics. Pricing and plan options also factored into our ratings, as did customer service quality.
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Our Top Picks for 2024 | Mailchimp | Klaviyo | Campaigner | Constant Contact Email Marketing | HubSpot | monday.com Email Marketing | Benchmark Email Marketing | Freshworks Freshmarketer |
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Rating (Out of 10) | 9.4 | 9.1 | 9.2 | 9.5 | 9.2 | 8.2 | 9.2 | 9.2 |
Best use case | Beginners | Data-Driven Marketing | Larger businesses | Small businesses | Bundled marketing solution | Campaign management | User-friendly solution | Marketing integrations |
Starting monthly price for paid plans | $13 per month | $20 per month | $59 per month | $12 per month | $15 per month | $12 per month | $13 per month | $15 per month |
Free trial | 1 month | Free plan; 60-day free email support | 1 month | 1 month | 14 days | 14 days | Free plan | 21 days |
Inclusive monthly sends (at basic plan) | 5,000 per month | 5,000 per month | 30,000 per month | 500 per month | 5,000 daily | N/A | 7,500 per month | 20x number of contacts |
A/B testing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (subject line only) | Yes | N/A | Yes | No |
Review Link |
From the reviews we carried out on over 20 email marketing platforms, we found Mailchimp to be one of the easiest to set up and get started with even for email marketing newbies. The AI-powered Intuit Assist tool helps you generate campaign ideas based on your line of business and the goal of your campaign in seconds. We especially liked that Mailchimp has 75 email templates built-in that you can easily customize in minutes. If you’re new to writing ad copy, the Email Content Generator creates the content for your campaign, all using natural language prompts.
Mailchimp lets you build emails using a drag-and-drop interface so you can create your own text and add images and action buttons. Source: Mailchimp
We love Mailchimp’s tools to help you build lists and automate the process of sending campaigns so you and your staff save time. The segmentation tools are among the best in class too, allowing you to create separate lists from your wider database based on factors you choose like location and age so you can better address the unique needs of different customer segments. The easy-to-use reporting and analytics feature is superb and will help you understand better which campaigns generate the best returns. Best of all, for new starters, Mailchimp offers a free plan so you can test-drive the platform before committing to a paid plan.
Mailchimp currently offers a free plan which has a limit of 500 contacts to whom you can send either 500 emails in one day or 1,000 emails over the month. Their paid plans are:
Plan | Price | Features |
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Essentials | Starts at $13 per month |
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Standard | Starts at $20 per month | As Essentials plus:
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Premium | Starts at $350 per month | As Premium plus:
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Charges for overages apply. For example, sending an extra 2,500 emails per month and adding 500 additional contacts on the Essential plan cost $12.75 per month.
Mailchimp is popular and valued among its user base, scoring 4.3 out of 5 from over 1,000 reviews on Gartner. One client’s opinion reflected our belief that the platform is excellent for beginners stating that “the template editor is nice to use, even for novices.” Another reported “I’ve had a good run with Mailchimp. It’s loaded with features that make email marketing a breeze”.
Klaviyo allows businesses to send the right consumer messaging across email, SMS and push notifications. It is especially valuable for those seeking an email marketing platform with a strong focus on data-driven marketing. When we tested the software, we liked that the Klaviyo platform was data-first. For example, its AI-powered tools like predictive analytics, personalized product feeds and industry-specific benchmarks, enhance email marketing by delivering highly targeted, data-driven campaigns that boost engagement and revenue. To make this powerful platform even more valuable, Klaviyo seamlessly integrates with 350 third-party applications – no coding needed.
Klaviyo’s dashboard shows alerts and overall conversion metric performance. Source: Klaviyo
Plan | Cost | Features |
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Free Plan | Free | Up to 500 monthly email sends, 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits, email support for first 60 days |
Email Plan | Starts at $20/month | Starting at 5,000 email sends, mobile push notifications, 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits, email and chat support |
Email and SMS Plan | Starts at $35/month | Everything in the Email Plan, plus thousands of SMS/MMS credits |
Klaviyo has thousands of user reviews, with a TrustRadius score of 9.0 stars out of 10 and a G2 score of 4.6 stars out of 5. In their reviews, many users highlighted Klaviyo’s useful templates and automation tools, as well as their integration and segmentation capabilities. However, some users noted dissatisfaction with the steep learning curve and limited customer support.
Campaigner stands out as the ideal email marketing solution for larger businesses, primarily due to its ability to handle extensive contact lists across all pricing tiers, and offering six times the number of contacts for monthly email distributions. For companies that require large-scale email campaigns, this capacity is indispensable. While the entry-level cost of $59 per month is higher compared to other platforms we reviewed, the Starter plan is equipped with robust features tailored for bigger operations, such as dynamic email content, automated workflows, and, at higher pricing levels, in-depth purchase behavior analytics.
Even with these sophisticated features, Campaigner remains user-friendly, requiring only a brief learning curve for new users. The platform’s drag-and-drop functionality across its various tools makes it easy to design visually appealing emails, set up automated workflows, and create triggered email sequences. Additionally, we found the inclusion of Reputation Defender particularly valuable, as it helps ensure your emails bypass spam filters, thereby improving both engagement and deliverability.
Campaigner offers more than 900 customizable email templates that set you up for success, even if you have limited experience designing email marketing campaigns. (Source: Campaigner)
Campaigner offers three main pricing tiers and separate plans for e-commerce businesses. Here’s an overview of each plan’s costs and features.
Plan | Price | Features |
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Starter | $59 per month | Drag and drop editor, full code editor, 900+ templates, geolocation, social Integration, landing pages, suppression lists, basic segmentation, recurring campaigns. |
Essential | $179 per month | Everything in Starter plus removal of Campaigner branding, dynamic content, custom footer, exclusion lists
e-commerce integrations, conversion tracking, localization. |
Advanced | $649 per month | Everything in Essential plus automation workflows,
sales engineering, purchase behavior, API access, static segment sampling. |
E-Commerce | Starts at $79.95 per month | Includes specific e-commerce tools, such as integrations with e-commerce software platforms and abandoned cart emails. |
Click here for our full Campaigner review.
Many SMB owners enjoy early success with the email marketing campaigns but are frustrated when they try to scale up their efforts. That’s because the plan that has the features and limits they want can be too expensive. We found that, out of every email marketing platform we reviewed, Constant Contact achieves the best balance, offering competitively-priced plans with generous sending volumes and a comprehensive range of useful features. Even on its entry level plan, you get access to tools like the system’s excellent customizable drag and drop email templates, AI content generator and contact management tools. On the next tier up, we loved the extra features, particularly the scheduled email feature allowing you to time campaigns up to a year in advance.
Constant Contact’s clever AI system lets you build campaigns from scratch to grow your audience, increase sales, promote events and more. Source: Constant Contact
Other stand-out features include its excellent segmentation options, subject line personalization, and resends to recipients who don’t open your emails. Step up to the top tier and your send limit doubles and you can now use features like dynamic content for super-personalized campaigns and engagement heatmaps showing you which parts of your email recipients viewed the most. With a free trial, a 30-day money-back guarantee and a range of competitive pricing options, Constant Contact enables SMBs to optimize their email marketing without breaking the bank.
Plan | Price | Features |
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Lite | Starting at $12 per month |
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Standard | Starting at $35 per month | As Lite plus:
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Premium | Starting at $80 per month | As Standard plus:
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You can save 15 percent on subscription fees by paying annually. The Premium plan includes 500 SMS text messages while add-ons are available for Lite and Standard users. Sending emails in excess of your allowance attracts a fee equivalent to an average of $0.002 per email sent. There is a 30-day money back guarantee on all plans.
Constant Contact’s users are impressed with the service, rating it at 4.2 out of 5 on Trustpilot. Clients have been very impressed with the platform’s customer service team in particular. Praise on Gartner is just as effusive where Constant Contact scores 4.4 out of 5. One client noted that “Constant Contact has helped us tremendously in growing our presence and brand. The experience has been really positive, due to its ease of use, thanks to the drag and drop editor it offers to create landing pages, emails, etc.”
Click here for our full Constant Contact review
HubSpot offers the set of features companies need to overcome two modern marketing challenges – keeping your messaging consistent and getting great results across email, SMS, social media, and other media. Focusing on email first, HubSpot’s range of tools like drag-and-drop email design, optimization features and goal-based templates, make it easy to quickly create and refine campaigns. We were impressed by HubSpot’s customer segmentation tools in particular and how they let you tailor individual emails based on recipient demographics, psychographics and their past interactions. HubSpot’s reporting tools give marketers deep insights into email campaign performance and subscriber data to help them understand which approaches are working and which aren’t. Beyond email marketing, this is a highly-capable, user-friendly one-stop service that shines in helping companies organize and manage coherent marketing campaigns across multiple channels including social media, SEO, blogging and more.
With HubSpot, you can personalize emails by including recipients’ names, company names, and many other custom fields Source: HubSpot
HubSpot is a rich and feature-packed CRM with market-leading email marketing software built directly into the platform. The company offers a free plan which allows you to send 2,000 emails per month with HubSpot branding. The following paid-for plans are also available without HubSpot branding:
Plan | Price | Features |
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Starter Customer Platform | From $15 per month | Everything in the free tier plus:
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Professional | From $800 per month for three users (each additional user costs $45 per month) | Everything in Starter Customer Platform plus:
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Enterprise | From $3,600 per month for 5 users (each extra user seat costs $75 per month) | Everything in the Professional package plus:
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Bear in mind that you’ll pay extra for more marketing contacts and you may be liable for usage-based fees relating to features like transactional emails, dedicated IPs, API calls, and more. Professional plan subscribers must also pay an onboarding fee of $3,000. Please note that the Professional and Enterprise plans require 12 months’ payment in advance, whereas you can pay monthly on the Starter Professional plan.
Customer satisfaction with HubSpot is very high with the platform scoring 4.5 out of 5 on Capterra. Users were enthusiastic about the platform as a whole with one reviewer stating that the “email marketing tool is very robust, almost as good as Mailchimp”. One user on Software Advice (also 4.5 out of 5) stated that “HubSpot excels in many things, contact/company/deal creation and association, email marketing, and automation.”
Many businesses struggle to run consistent and successful email marketing campaigns. Meeting deadlines for multiple campaigns and ensuring team members have access to up-to-date customer data for analysis and strategy development are often their biggest challenges. We found, following our reviews, that monday.com offers the organization and centralization you need.
Plan email marketing campaigns and campaigns over other channels on handy Gantt boards within monday.com. Source: monday.com Email Marketing
Although monday.com is not an email marketing platform itself, you can run campaigns directly from within it thanks to its range of third-party plug-ins, including Mailchimp. Where monday.com adds real value is the ability it gives you to plan, automate and track every campaign from brainstorming to execution and beyond, even if you have multiple campaigns on the go. We loved the WorkCanvas tool which provides a customizable structure so teams can collaborate and share ideas with each other more easily, even across departments. We were also impressed by the WorkForms tool which collects, tracks, and analyzes data from your campaigns so everyone has access to and works from the same information. monday.com’s enhanced functionality together with how easy it is to use make it a great solution for managing email campaigns from start to finish.
Plan | Price (for 3 users) | Features |
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Basic | $12 per month, per user |
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Standard | $17 per month, per user | Everything in Basic plus:
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Pro | $28 per month, per user | Everything in Standard plus:
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Enterprise | Call for quote | Everything in Pro plus:
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Unlike other providers, monday.com has set amounts of seats you must purchase each month. The minimum is three which increases to five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 , 100 or 200+ users. This means you might have to subscribe to more seats than you need or limit access to certain employees, depending on the subscription level you choose.
On review site Capterra, monday’s clients rate the platform a solid 4.7 out of 5. One user appreciated its built-in automation and task-tracking features, specifically referring to the time he saved “automatically sending emails, creating new leads, and making changes based on certain conditions”.
Click here for our full monday.com review
Benchmark stands out on both usability and price. This overcomes two frustrations many business owners experience when choosing an email marketing platform. For ease-of-use, Benchmark shines. Its drag-and-drop email editor is very intuitive and comes with a great choice of customizable templates. If you find writing email content hard, the Smart Content AI feature is excellent, creating compelling copy from scratch so you can get your campaigns out faster. The range of smart automations is impressive too, especially behavior-based email follow-ups and customer journey templates.
See at a glance how your campaigns have performed on Benchmark’s intuitive dashboard. Source: Benchmark
We were also impressed by the reporting and analytics functionality on Benchmark, too which show you real-time and historic data on campaign opens, click throughs and unsubscribes. The powerful A/B testing feature is also particularly intuitive and well-executed. The company offers a free plan that includes 3,500 emails per month for up to 500 contacts. Paid plans begin at $13 per month and include 7,500 emails to 500 contacts. An Enterprise plan is available for companies particularly reliant on emails – contact the company for more information.
Benchmark’s free trial offers access to a collection of email templates, its built-in drag-and-drop email builder and the ability to send plain text emails. It also includes basic automations, an image gallery of up to 1GB and basic segmentation of your sending lists.
When you switch up to the $13 per month plan, you can build your list to 100,000 subscribers and send off 7,500 inclusive emails per month. Other features this subscription level unlocks are:
You can increase the number of contacts in the Pro plan to over 100,000 however, as you’d expect, the price goes up. Whichever volume you select, you get 15 times the number of emails you can send out each month. For example, subscribing to Pro with 50,000 contacts costs $237 per month and allows you to send up to 750,000 emails in the month.
Limits on the number of emails that can be sent from either the free or paid account are low. You can buy top-ups for which Benchmark charges the following prices:
Email Plan | Emails Sends per Month | Price | Overage Price per Email |
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10,000 | 10,000 | $39/mo | $0.0040 |
50,000 | 50,000 | $149/mo | $0.0030 |
100,000 | 100,000 | $249/mo | $0.0025 |
250,000 | 250,000 | $449/mo | $0.0018 |
500,000 | 500,000 | $799/mo | $0.0016 |
1,000,000 | 1,000,000 | $1,299/mo | $0.0013 |
2,500,000 | 2,500,000 | $2,499/mo | $0.0010 |
5,000,000 | 5,000,000 | $4,499/mo | $0.0009 |
10,000,000 | 10,000,000 | $7,999/mo | $0.0008 |
15,000,000 | 15,000,000 | $9,999/mo | $0.0007 |
Please note that a company representative told us that you must use your allocation within the month and that unused text credits do not roll over.
Benchmark also charges:
Benchmark users score the service highly online, recording a score of 4.3 out of 5 on Capterra. While some users expressed concern that not as many emails arrived in recipients’ inboxes as they would like, clients commented favorably on the open rates they’d achieved and how easy the platform was to use. Users felt the platform offered value for money and great customer service.
Click here for our full Benchmark review
Freshmarketer offers three great advantages. First, this well-executed email marketing platform integrates excellently with other platforms allowing you to power campaigns and conversations by SMS, WhatsApp, live webchat, Google Business Messages, Apple Message, and more. You can be on all the channels customers and prospects demand from the one dashboard, overcoming a major challenge for modern client-facing businesses. Second, it’s built on a unified, robust and constantly updated customer database so every team works from the same source of truth. Third, you can up productivity among team members thanks to the platform’s flexible and customizable workflow automations.
For email marketing, Freshmarketer excels. It offers first-class functionality like timed emails, 150 email templates, a drag-and-drop designer and excellent dynamic personalization which allows you to remind customers of their purchase history or products they’ve recently viewed on your site in your campaigns. We loved the intuitive segmenting tool on the platform that means you can precisely target groups of customers with offers they’ll find interesting.
The WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) drag and drop editor in Freshmarketer is intuitive and easy to use. Source: Freshworks Freshmarketer
We also liked the vast marketplace that has hundreds of apps including very well-executed integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce, and found it excellent for emailing online customers using the latest purchasing data. Better still, Freshmarketer plugs directly into the wider Freshworks suite, a very capable CRM platform that bridges the gap between marketing and sales.
There are two Freshmarketer plans – one free and Enterprise costing $15 per month. The free plan offers up to 100 marketing contacts and free marketing campaigns up to twice the number of marketing contacts on your database.
The Enterprise plan offers:
In addition to your subscription, there are extra fees for messaging agents to manage chat conversations with customers. There are also charges for more marketing contacts in excess of the plan limit, dedicated IP addresses for email deliverability, and conversion rate optimization services.
Freshmarketer wins the seal of approval for the platform from its customers on review sites. Scoring 4.4 out of 5 on Capterra, one user mentioned the following features as its main pros – “heatmaps, session replay, A/B testing, among others (as well as) integrated form analysis”. On G2 (4 out of 5), the platform’s three most popular features were its integrations, email marketing, and ease of use.
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that delivers a range of content directly to leads’ and customers’ inboxes. This content includes promotional content, information about sales and discounts, and behaviorally triggered emails like reminders to check out when a user leaves products in their e-commerce cart.
To conduct email marketing most effectively, we recommend using email marketing software. These platforms allow you to import your email contact list and create audience segments to ensure you’re delivering relevant content to the right users. They also include tools for creating email marketing messages, often with a simple drag-and-drop interface that anyone can learn quickly. If you plan on repeatedly sending similar content, such as a monthly newsletter, you can save templates so that future content is delivered in a consistent format and style.
The best email marketing software also includes compliance tools to help ensure your email contacts have all opted-in to receive marketing materials from your brand. Some even include artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can support you as you create email marketing content, optimizing it to drive even more conversions and personalizing it to individual recipients to boost engagement.
Email marketing is an effective, low-cost method of communicating with your customers and building loyalty to your company when executed correctly. “Give compelling content and a valid reason for the customer to open your email and act the way you want them to,” Cross said. “If you provide valuable and relevant content that addresses the customer’s needs and interests, you’ll attract and retain customers.”
Here are just a few of the benefits of investing in a software solution for email marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When choosing email marketing software, you should keep some key factors in mind, regardless of the type of business you run. We talked to email marketing experts and business owners who have gone through the process to learn more about the most important criteria to examine before making a purchase.
Before you begin investigating the email marketing solutions on the market, take some time to consider what your business needs in a platform. Sit down and make a list of the most important things for your purposes. This may include the ability to import an existing email contact list from a spreadsheet, audience segmentation tools for organizing contacts into buckets like “leads” or “repeat customers,” and a low-code drag-and-drop content creation tool
“Our research was directed by the identification of our unique needs in email marketing at the outset of the journey,” said Jake Munday, co-founder and CEO of Custom Neon. “We were able to determine real-world application and satisfaction levels by reading through many customer reviews and case studies.”
Many business owners we spoke with considered aspects like available features and ease of use, balancing advanced functionality with complexity, customization and scalability; ensuring platforms were flexible enough to adapt to their needs and grow with their business over time; customer support responsiveness and quality; and pricing.
Take time to research the leading vendors on the market and consider which might have the right offerings for your business. Start putting together a shortlist based on this research — you’ll dig deeper into many of these vendors later on.
For now, consider your most important criteria and add names to the list based on those. For example, if you’re primarily concerned about your budget, add only options that have all the most important features you need at a cost-effective price.
“We initially carried out an exercise to look at as many different options as possible and compare costs for different numbers of subscribers and to check if specific automation functionality we needed was available,” said Laura Grant, marketing manager at Bluesky Solutions. “This then gave us a small shortlist of potential software which we looked at in more detail.”
To narrow down your list, check out the available features each email marketing software offers. The absence of some tools or functionality may be a dealbreaker, helping you cross some names off your list.
“To support targeted campaigns, we searched for strong analytics, extensive segmentation tools and customization choices,” Munday said. “Ease of integration with our existing CRM and e-commerce platforms was crucial to streamline our workflows.”
These tools were common requirements among the entrepreneurs and professionals we spoke with. However, it’s equally important to balance the slate of features with overall usability. If advanced functionality comes at the expense of user experience, you may find a platform to be more disruptive than it is helpful.
“I needed robust automation, list segmentation capabilities and integration with other tools like my CRM and analytics platform,” said Bassem Mostafa, market analyst and owner of GlobeMonitor Market Research Agency. “Some tools were feature-rich but overly complex, so it was essential to strike the right balance.”
Similar to considering balance between functionality and usability is to consider overall value, not just the total price. The cheapest platform may not provide value if it doesn’t have all the tools you need for example. Finding a solution that combines cost-effective pricing with a strong slate of features is key.
“I personally recommend that while considering tools, think about long-term value, not just the initial price,” said Tom Jauncey, CEO of Nautilus Marketing. “A more expensive option may save you time and ramp up your results in the longer term.”
Once you’ve established a list and refined it with feedback from other professionals and entrepreneurs, begin scheduling live demonstrations and signing up for free trials. We recommend doing both whenever possible; live demonstrations give you a chance to ask questions of sales representatives and see how they use the software, while free trials offer you the freedom to test the software out in real-world situations.
“There is no replacement for a good free trial,” said Brandon Rollins, founder and CEO of Pangea Marketing Agency. “Blog posts, reviews, and even videos are all helpful, but there’s no replacement for using the tool directly and seeing if [it] does exactly what you need it to do.”
Email marketing software is often fairly easy to set up, but it’s still helpful to have onboarding support. Dedicated account managers and onboarding specialists are especially helpful if it’s your first time setting up email marketing software or if you’re importing an email contact list from a spreadsheet. And, if anything goes wrong, a good onboarding team can help you troubleshoot and resolve your issues quickly.
“For some platforms, the onboarding process was included in the demo, which gave me a good sense of how much support and training was available,” Mostafa said.
Some platforms may not offer an onboarding team but do maintain a library of self-guided resources and how-to video tutorials. Many of these libraries are comprehensive, so if you’re confident they’re sufficient to get you started on the right foot, you may choose to forgo working with onboarding specialists.
Consider the first month (or however long your contractual obligation is) an extended trial. After getting your email marketing program off the ground with your new tool, review key metrics to determine whether it’s working. You should see improvement in most of them, especially if you’re moving from a manual spreadsheet approach or just beginning email marketing for the first time.
“When it came to user engagement, conversion rates, and deliverability, the platform [we chose] not only met but surpassed our expectations,” Munday said. “Customer satisfaction and retention have significantly improved as a result of the capacity to produce tailored content depending on user behavior and preferences.”
If you see flat or negative trends in your metrics, take a look at how you’re using the tool. Did you segment your audience correctly? Are you using engaging email subject lines? Is your content actually being delivered to user inboxes? If you’re certain you’re abiding by all the best practices and your metrics are still down, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
As you compare email marketing services, look for these core features:
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.
Test different iterations of email campaigns with A/B testing. Above is multivariant testing on the iContact platform. Source: iContact
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most platforms, like Campaigner above, allow you to segment your data allowing you to send campaigns with different offers to different audiences based on their interests. Source: Campaigner
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.
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.
Some email marketing experts also advise looking for AI-powered features. “AI can definitely help with efficiencies like automation, writing content, optimizing send times, subject lines and other content,” said Jon Cross, CEO of All In One Email.
Dave Charest, director of small business success for Constant Contact, agreed. “AI makes digital marketing easier for small businesses to create, design and send their campaigns. Spending less time on marketing minutiae helps you get back to running other aspects of your business,” he said. Charest pointed out that his platform’s AI technology “lets our customers use our almost 30 years of marketing experience to create campaigns and reach the right customers with the right messages … It’s certainly enabled some new outcomes we’re able to offer our customers.”
However, Cross cautioned such tools are “still fairly new” and said “not to rely on it too much” if your experience with using AI is limited. Users need to “know what they’re doing enough to know when [or] if AI steers them in the wrong direction.”
Email marketing is worth the investment when done properly. Almost half of all users buy from a marketing email at least once per month, meaning this channel is effective for generating revenue through direct sales — and thanks to email marketing reports, you can track these sales. An additional 60 percent of users have said that marketing emails have influenced their purchases, so even if you don’t drive direct sales from your email marketing campaigns, you may still be nurturing leads in a meaningful way that leads to a sale later on.
Of course, email marketing is only worth it if you do it correctly. That means understanding the best practices surrounding email marketing and sticking to them from day one.
To make the most of your email marketing campaigns, make sure you’re adhering to email best practices. These include meeting basic compliance requirements and setting your email content up for success.
If our best picks above don’t suit your business, these fine alternatives might.
Many e-commerce businesses find email marketing challenging because they can’t base their campaigns on live customer data like order history or pages visited. So, instead of offering products their customers are most likely to want, they’re forced to rely on generic or outdated information. Active Campaign solves this through its smart integration with 850 ecommerce platforms, including major vendors like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.
This eliminates guesswork for marketing teams as they get data on campaign performance and customer behavior. Active Campaign’s e-commerce dashboard helps them to create personalized and highly targeted email campaigns quickly from the platform’s selection of 125 customizable templates. We were impressed by the volume of emails you can send to – an unlimited number up to 250,000 contacts. We loved the automation tools, especially ‘goal actions’ and ‘go actions,’ which take email recipients to the next sales stage if they choose an action like making a purchase before, for example, a drip campaign ends. Marketing teams can also score contacts based on factors like location and email opens as well as build specific landing pages for campaigns to generate better responses.
The steps between plans offered by many email marketing platforms can be steep. For example, moving from paying for 2,000 emails and contacts up to the next plan with 10,000 emails or contacts pushes the price, denting campaign profitability until subscriber numbers increase.
We love iContact’s approach to this. You can start with a free plan and scale up gradually (750, 1,500, 2,500, 5,000 contacts) with small and manageable increases in price ($8.50, $27, $41, $73). We also appreciate how iContact makes every feature available to subscribers at all levels.
There was a lot else we really liked about this platform when we reviewed it. The drag-and-drop email designer was one of the easiest we’ve used. Their library of customizable and professional templates is also very generous. Sending out campaigns takes no time. We also thought the real-time reporting on live campaigns was excellent, which gives marketing teams instant insights into engagement and revenue.
When creating campaigns for use across different media like email, SMS, and social media, marketing teams face a major challenge. They need consistent data to build coherent marketing campaigns across all touch points. This is often difficult because they use different platforms to run campaigns on different media – for example, one for email, one for WhatsApp, one for SEO, and so on. When reviewing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we were impressed at how well that platform solved these issues. Underlying the system is the core CRM product and its powerful and constantly-updated customer and prospect database. This becomes the central source of truth for all your sales, marketing, and customer service data, helping them to inform, direct and unify their marketing efforts.
We love how easy Marketing Cloud makes creating, launching and reviewing data-driven campaigns across multiple channels from one dashboard. For the purposes of this review however, we’re focusing on the app’s excellent Email Studio. It excels at personalizing messages with live customer data – this level of customization strengthens customer relationships and keeps conversations ongoing. We appreciate how easy it is to build powerful, effective pieces with Marketing Cloud’s stylish drag-and-drop content blocks. Creating segmented lists for more targeted campaigns is a breeze on the platform too.
The reporting and analytics features are excellent – you can track campaigns in real-time or run reports to monitor your progress over time. For businesses with more complex marketing and operational needs, Salesforce Marketing Cloud should be a candidate for adoption by your company for all of the reasons set out.
Click here for our up-to-date review of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
To determine the best email marketing services and survey software on the market, our team of marketing experts and software analysts evaluated an initial list of 25 platforms.
We narrowed this list down by examining key criteria such as pricing plans, available features, onboarding support and customer service. We also took a look at customer reviews to see what real entrepreneurs had to say about their experiences with each platform. We used these insights to narrow our initial list down and select the email marketing software we wanted to put through more in-depth testing.
After narrowing our list down to 14, we participated in live demonstrations and signed up for free trials with each company to test out their offerings firsthand. We asked pointed questions of company representatives and put their platforms to the test in real-world situations. Ultimately, we chose six email marketing platforms as our top recommendations. Our experts and analysts studied each solution’s functionality and evaluated the products on nearly 30 factors.
These factors were weighted differently in our overall conclusion. The weights were determined based on how much business owners prioritize these criteria when shopping for business software and services and making purchasing decisions.
Based on these criteria, we not only determined which email marketing services and survey software our readers could trust but also the ways in which each solution could best serve different business needs. Some platforms were better at certain tasks than others or more suited to a particular type of company. These takeaways informed the “Best for” use cases you see on this page.
To learn more about our methodology, see our full editorial process.
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.).
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.
Yes, email marketing software integrates with other business software, such as top CRM systems and other marketing tools. These integrations create a seamless connection that allows these individual platforms to share data, reducing the need for double-entry and the risk of human error, as well as keeping all stakeholders apprised of new developments in real time.
Yes, you can automate email marketing blasts so they’re scheduled for delivery ahead of time. You can set these up to run once or on a recurring basis. However, when setting up automated email marketing blasts repeatedly, you should periodically check the content to ensure it remains accurate and up to date.
Yes, email marketing is worthwhile for almost every business and can generate a return on investment when best practices are followed. Many users make purchases directly through email marketing content and even more are influenced by this content toward making a purchase at a later date.
Yes, many email marketing platforms now offer AI tools like generative content creation (including text and images) and AI-powered personalization features. AI helps automate some key functions and provides guidance on optimizing your email marketing campaigns, making it an ideal companion for entrepreneurs conducting email marketing for the first time and those who simply want to save time.