The Best Email Marketing Services and Survey Software of 2024

Why Mailchimp is Best for Beginners

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 Pricing and Services

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:

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 Advantages

• While other platforms offer a free plan, Mailchimp’s is more generous in the features it bundles in as well as the number of contacts you can add and emails you can send.
• We love the user experience in Mailchimp. Every aspect of the platform has been simplified so that it’s easy to build lists and launch campaigns straight away for first-time users.
• The AI on the platform is excellent, especially for company owners and staff who may not be confident with campaign planning and composing/designing email marketing adverts.

Mailchimp Disadvantages

• We love the send time optimization feature which broadcasts your campaigns on the optimal time or day for greater responsiveness. However, this is not available to Free or Essentials subscribers.
• Mailchimp counts your unsubscribes as part of your subscriber limit. This means that you’ll be charged for contacts you’re no longer able to send marketing emails to.
• Although the on-site knowledge base is excellent and the company offers 24/7 email and chat to all users, we were disappointed that phone-based support is only available for Premium plan subscribers.

Mailchimp Customer Reviews

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”.

Why Campaigner is Best for Larger Businesses

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 Pricing and Services

Campaigner offers three main pricing tiers and separate plans for e-commerce businesses. Here’s an overview of each plan’s costs and features.

Campaigner Advantages

• Campaigner is highly customizable and supports email automation, personalization, experimentation and reporting.
• Built-in marketing automation tools enable users to easily segment contacts and optimize email marketing campaigns with minimal manual input.
• Integrated social media feeds support a holistic marketing strategy and makes it easier to unify marketing efforts across multiple digital channels.

Campaigner Disadvantages

• Campaigner is expensive compared to other email marketing software we reviewed, and you’ll need to provide your credit card information to access the 30-day free trial.
• There is no free plan available for Campaigner.
• E-commerce customers will have to consider a separate set of e-commerce plans in order to get the most useful features for their businesses.

Click here for our full Campaigner review.

Why Constant Contact is Best for Small Businesses

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.

Constant Contact Pricing and Services

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 Advantages

• The monthly plans are affordable and all plans, including the entry level plan, offer an impressive range of easy-to-use features.
• We really like the BrandKit feature that will populate all templates with your brand’s logo, images, and color by providing the platform with your URL. It’s available to all subscribers.
• In addition to your free trial, Constant Contact will refund you if you decide to close your paid account within 30 days of signing up.

Constant Contact Disadvantages

• The A/B testing only allows you to change subject lines and not the content of the email. There is no multivariate testing either.
• Unlike many of its competitors, Constant Contact doesn’t have a free plan you can test-drive the system on.
• Dynamic content, one of the platform’s break-out features, is only available to customers on the Premium plan.

Constant Contact Customer Reviews

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

Why Hubspot is the Best Bundled Marketing Solution

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 Pricing and Services

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:

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.

HubSpot Advantages

• HubSpot is a robust, feature-packed, elegant and user-friendly email marketing platform whose subscriptions start from just $15 per month per person.
• There is an impressive range of well-executed tools for each stage of email marketing from content creation through to reporting and analytics.
• HubSpot doesn’t stop just at email marketing; you can run text marketing, telemarketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization campaigns and more from the one dashboard.

HubSpot Disadvantages

• You can only send email campaigns to “marketing contacts” on your HubSpot database. You can buy additional marketing contacts for your plan, but this will push up the cost.
• Many of the most useful features like A/B testing and duplicate data record management are only available on the more expensive tiers.
• There is no phone support available for companies on the Starter Professional package.

HubSpot Customer Reviews

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.”

Why monday.com Email Marketing is Best for Campaign Management

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.

monday.com Email Marketing Pricing and Services

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.

monday.com Email Marketing Advantages

• monday.com makes it much easier for teams to manage and progress multiple simultaneous email campaigns thanks to its mix of visual progress charts and stage-by-stage customizable automated workflows.
• Its deep integration with email marketing platforms like Mailchimp makes it possible to plan and launch campaigns on the monday.com dashboard and track results.
• The ability to bring in others easily at every stage from ideation to execution can lead to better campaign results thanks to the sharing of knowledge and different perspectives.

monday.com Email Marketing Disadvantages

• monday.com will make it easy to organize and execute multiple campaigns but you’ll need an additional subscription to a service like Mailchimp to run your campaigns.
• The pricing, based on a fixed number of seats, is inflexible and unhelpful. You may end up paying for excess seats and have to deny some users access to avoid overpaying.
• The integrations you need to link monday.com to email marketing platforms like Mailchimp are on the Standard plan upwards – they’re not available to Basic Users.

monday.com Email Marketing Customer Reviews

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

Why Benchmark is the Best User-Friendly Solution

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 Pricing and Services

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:

• Removal of Benchmark’s branding
• Landing pages
• Advanced audience segmentation
• Polls and surveys
• Email scheduling
• Engagement automations
• Lead branching

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:

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:

• $3.00 for verifying your email lists per 1,000 contacts
• $5.00 per month for unlimited image hosting
• $28.95 per month for a dedicated IP (this can help you achieve higher deliverability rates)
• $14.00 to check how your email campaigns will display across a wide range of devices.

Benchmark Advantages

• With 7,500 emails and up to 100,000 contacts for $13 per month, Benchmark’s base plan is ideal for small businesses with basic email marketing needs.
• If you need additional campaigns, you can buy extra credits from Benchmark at very low prices, keeping your costs under control.
• The A/B testing feature is well-executed and easy to use and will help you determine which email designs and offers generate the best response.

Benchmark Disadvantages

• There are native integrations with other platforms like Zoho and Shopify but they’re few in number. You can connect to other apps with Zapier but you may need to pay a developer for this unless you have programming expertise.
• Although the platform offers high deliverability rates, you have to pay an additional fee to improve on those by purchasing a dedicated IP address.
• While the company charges very reasonable prices for add-on emails, you lose any unused credits at the end of the month.

Benchmark Customer Reviews

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

Why Freshmarketer is Best for Marketing Integrations

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.

Freshmarketer Pricing

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:

• 500 marketing contacts
• Free marketing campaigns up to 20 times the number of marketing contacts on your database.
• Up to 50 subscription types
• AI-powered subject line generator, campaign builder, and product recommendation tool
• AI-powered send time optimization
• Up to 25 custom domains
• 100 active marketing journeys
• AI-powered deduplication and contact scoring
• API access

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 Advantages

• The drag-and-drop email designer and personalization tools are among the easiest to use on any email marketing platform.
• The tight integration with both Shopify and WooCommerce is ideal for companies wanting to use email marketing to generate revenues from online customers.
• Dynamic personalization (tailored content) is one of email marketing’s most effective features and you can access it at a much lower cost on Freshmarketer compared to other platforms.

Freshmarketer Disadvantages

• The number of marketing contacts on the Enterprise plan is very low at 500 which could make the platform uneconomic for larger businesses.
• A/B testing and other useful features like personalization, polls and feedback, and personalization are not included in plans and will add to your costs.
• Customer service is generally excellent however it’s currently offered on a 24/5 basis, not 24/7.

Freshmarketer Customer Reviews

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.