The Best Email Marketing Services and Survey Software of 2023

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.

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.

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.

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 offers 75 templates, custom analytic and data reporting options via the audience analytics dashboard, advanced segmentation options, SMS marketing and additional e-commerce automation capabilities.

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. In addition, users can take advantage of Intuit Assist, a generative AI assistant that utilizes knowledgeable insights to help users create content and develop marketing strategies using natural language prompts. Through an understanding of your brand and its history, target audience and existing customers, Intuit Assist offers users guidance, provides personalized recommendations and assists in content creation, including improving writer tone, lengthening or shortening content and more. With this seamless integration, users don’t have to waste time learning a new tool — Intuit Assist is built into the program to naturally work with users’ existing workflows.

We like how Mailchimp has partnered with Wix.com to enhance its marketing capabilities during the busy holiday season. The collaboration integrates Buy with Prime, advanced generative AI and SMS features into Mailchimp’s offerings, giving its users more tools to target, personalize and automate campaigns. The partnership allows seamless syncing of customer data, aiding in personalized campaign creation based on real-time behavior.

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.

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 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.

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.

Recently, Salesforce moved it’s Marketing Cloud servie to the newly-built Einstein 1 platform, an AI platform that helps companies connect their data to build out AI-powered apps and workflows. With Einstein 1, organizations can create bespoke customer experiences through various low-code platform services, such as Einstein, Flow and Lightning. The latest generation of Einstein includes the support of a conversational AI assistant, Einstein Copilot. Salesforce users can ask Einstein Copilot questions and receive answers rooted in data, as well as additional steps and suggestions that go beyond the initial query.

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.

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 recently unveiled a new tool that allows users to extend their email marketing to popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. The new release offers AI-powered tools for creating and posting engaging social media content directly from within iContact. Users can take advantage of pre-designed templates and stock images to customize their content to suit their brand. 

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.