Email marketing is a great way to increase your company’s visibility and earn more revenue, but it’s not always easy. There are so many factors to consider, and there can be so much variation in what works for one company versus another that figuring out the right approach to take can seem impossible.
However, you’re in luck: we’ve compiled a list of the best email marketing software of 2016. We’ve considered everything from the ease of creating emails to their formatting options and ease of use, and we’ve brought it all together into this handy guide.
Table of Contents
Best Email Marketing Software 2016
There is no single best solution. Move the sliders on the left according to your priorities, and the list will reveal your personal winner. You may also compare the apps head-to-head and see all the arguments for each contender.
- Campaign Monitor
- Constant Contact
- MailChimp
- AWeber
- Low Pricing
- Design
- Frontend Features
- Backend Features
- Reports & Statistics
- Flexibility
- Automation
- Extensibility
- Support
Best Email Marketing Software: Characteristics and Important Criteria to Consider for your Decision
Email marketing software allows you to send commercial emails and newsletters to a group of subscribers. Most email marketing software offers a wide variety of tools and features, some to help you attract new customers, other to help you track your current marketing campaigns. Most apps allow you to choose to pay on a monthly or yearly basis. If you choose to pay yearly, you’ll get a pretty significant discount. Some systems also charge depending on the number of emails you send. When selecting an app, it’s important to find a system that caters for your specific needs. In general, it is important to look out for the following criteria:
PRICING
Based on your conversion rate and the volume of emails you send every month, you can select a model that fits your needs. Also, if you’re planning to send out long term campaigns you can save money by paying on a yearly basis. A few of these apps charge based upon the number of emails you send, and some of them even have sneaky hidden fees, so by careful when choosing.
DESIGN
All of these services allow for various design options. Some offer many templates to choose from that you can tweak to suit your needs.
There are some services that offer better templates out of the box, so if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on design, those might be for you.
FRONTEND FEATURES
This section is all about the features that your subscribers will see. It will tell you how easy the templates are to navigate, and what kind of things you can put in the emails. It will also tell you how useful these features are for different types of campaigns.
BACKEND FEATURES
The user interface is really important when looking for a good email marketing app. If the user interface is confusing, it can be a big pain to get your emails sent out efficiently. This section will tell you all about the user interface and will help you to make a choice that has the right balance of features and usability.
STATISTICS AND CONTROLLING
Reports and statistics are a strong point for email marketing campaigns, since you need the stats in order to improve your delivery and open rates, as well as the efficiency of your signup forms. Without proper data and a solid analytics dashboard, it’s difficult to improve open rates and conversions.
FLEXIBILITY
This section will tell you how easy it is to adapt a particular email marketing app to your needs. Most apps will have different templates with many different uses, but some are more fully featured than others.
AUTOMATION
Any email marketing app worth its salt will provide at least a modicum of automation. This section will discuss what different kinds of automated emails you can send, and how easy it is to set up automated messages.
EXTENSIBILITY
Usually, all email marketing software provides enough features for everyone. If there is email marketing software that you like, but it is missing a feature that you need for your business, there might be an extension that can integrate that feature into your email marketing dashboard.
SUPPORT
It can be difficult to get stated with a new piece of software, so good customer support is crucial. This section is all about the effectiveness of the support department of each respective application.
It’s important to be able to get help quickly. Support can be offered live via online chat or phone, but many companies also provide knowledge bases, eBooks, videos or forums online.
10 email marketing platform
1. Pabbly Email Marketing
Pabbly Email Marketing is an email service provider that is highly desirable for larger-sized companies. This is because all the plans Pabbly include access to workflow automation, email scheduling, and SMTP routing in addition to many other desirable features.
Pabbly also has a drag-and-drop email editor that makes it extremely easy for customers to customize their emails. Scheduling emails to be sent in the future is also very easy with the Pabbly Email Marketing automation and autoresponder tools.
2. SendPulse
An integrated messaging platform, SendPulse has crafted an artificial Intelligence-based system that enables it users to communicate with all devices by email, SMS, Web push and SMTP (users enjoy a free SMTP server). Renowned for its ease-of-use, SendPulse can be relied on to carry out enterprise-level email campaigns. Offering a pretty extensive free trial period, you’ll be able to send bulk emails (i.e. 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers, SendPulse’s equivalent of HubSpot’s contacts). We recommend you check out the GIF-creation feature. Adding these to email campaigns can result in major spikes in click through rates.
3. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email service providers in the world. In fact, this company has millions of users in over 175 countries. Large and small companies alike use MailChimp due to its simple, yet highly-effective features and tools.
One of the most important benefits of MailChimp is the fact that there are over 300 integrations on MailChimp that help you match the perfect tool to your business. MailChimp also allows you to create and implement landing pages, and other digital marketing tools. So, if you want to create more advanced strategies, you can do so with MailChimp. MailChimp also has a free email service plan.
MailChimp is also compatible with Cincopa, a video email marketing software program that makes it easy to embed videos into emails. Cincopa helps companies to see a 150% increase in click-through rates with video thumbnails. Cincopa can also be integrated with other top-tier email service providers like GetResponse and ConstantContact. Cincopa can capture lead information from people who interact with videos. It can also provide in-depth analytics which are extremely beneficial. Did we mention that you can send videos in email from within MailChimp when using Cincopa?
4. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the most widely used email marketing platforms in the world. This is because it is highly user-friendly, it comes with over 100 email templates, and it is extremely easy to manage contact on the platform. Further, setting up and running drip campaigns and scheduling regular emails at certain points of the year such as holidays or birthdays is very simple with Constant Contact. In addition to these beneficial features, bounces and unsubscribes are updated automatically, give you tremendous insight into your email lists.
5. HubSpot
HubSpot offers a wide variety of email templates that users can choose from. Additionally, the ESP makes it easy for users to create custom email templates. So, whether you prefer custom or stock templates, HubSpot is ideal. With this platform, you can also run A/B testing so that you can see which email version is having the most success.
This is very beneficial for any company trying to generate leads or revenue through email. HubSpot also has a very high deliverability rate, and allows you to personalize your emails based on factors such as country, device type, and list inclusion. You can also get highly detailed analytics regarding your email campaign performance with HubSpot, and you can easily integrate with social media. As with MailChimp, integrating HubSpot with Cincopa can yield amazing conversion results.
6. AWeber
Unlike email marketing tools such as HubSpot and MailChimp, AWeber is primarily aimed at entrepreneurs and smaller sized businesses. Simplicity is the primary goal of AWeber and they accomplish this goal very well with their software. People who are just getting started with email marketing often find that the AWeber setup is ideal. AWeber also has a very high deliverability rate, which ensures that your emails actually make it to the recipients as they are intended to.
7. iContact
iContact is an email service provider that is mostly known for having excellent customer support. This makes this service ideal for customers who are not very tech savvy and who will need a lot of help getting set up and running the emails on a regular basis. iContact has been in existence since 2003 and was one of the pioneering companies in this space. All customers get matched with strategic advisors who assist with email marketing efforts and help customers to use tools effectively. This is a very nice feature.
8. GetResponse
GetResponse is another top ESP. This platform offers landing pages, a CRM, and other helpful tools such as a webinar solution in addition to offering a great email platform. One of the most important features of GetResponse and one of its key competitive advantages is that it is available in over 20 languages. This makes GetResponse a truly global ESP. It also has a lot of storage space. Additionally, GetResponse has over 500 email template and a calendar interface-based drip campaign tool. This makes it much easier to schedule email send dates.
9. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is another email marketing tool that offers live chat. So, if having good customer service is important to you, then this is a good option for you. ActiveCampaign also has a high-quality CRM, which is a beneficial tool. The CRM can help you to provide your customers with high-quality content in within your emails. Further, ActiveCampaign has a tool called “lead scoring” which rates the quality of your leads. Tools like this are extremely valuable for sales teams.
10. SendinBlue
SendinBlue has many different pre-made automation campaigns which you can browse. You can select the campaign that you feel is best for you or your company and get started on it. SendinBlue is a widely used platform and that is why over 30 million emails and texts are sent on it every single day.
Even though SendinBlue has create pre-made automation campaigns, it is also easy to create custom ones. So, if you do not find a pre-made campaign you like, then you can easily build one from scratch with your own preferences. SendinBlue also has a forms tool that you can use to collect leads with. You can categorize your leads into lists once you capture them.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines