Best Email Marketing Tools For Startups

Startups are constantly in search of the next best tool to help them reach new heights and acquire customers. Any business owner knows that there are dozens –if not hundreds –of tools promising impressive results, so it’s hard to find one that actually delivers or fits into your budget. We’ve researched the  market and have  narrowed down our top choices for the best tools for startups.

Best Email Marketing Tools For Startups

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is one of my favourite email marketing tools. Their interface is simple and easy to use. Nathan Barry, Founder of ConvertKit, is a designer himself, and he has taken a personal interest in designing the user interface.

The ConvertKit plan starts with $29 a month for up to 1,000 subscribers. If you have 10,000 subscribers, you would pay $119 a month. The cost goes up based on the number of subscribers you have.

ConvertKit is the only tool that allows unlimited email sending for any given number of subscribers you have. Most of the email marketing tools have a sending limit of seven to 12 emails per subscriber per month, and if you send more emails, you will be billed separately.

For example, if you have 1,00,000 subscribers, you will be able to send a total of 5,00,000 emails a month and if you send another 5,00,000 emails to the same subscriber base, you will be charged the equivalent of having 2,00,000 subscribers. Such pricing is unpredictable and gives early-stage startups surprise bills.

ConvertKit is made for bloggers and info-product marketers, but it works for anyone who has a focus on personal branding.

Many email marketing tools come with a lot of bells and whistles, which include fancy HTML email templates. ConvertKit keeps the focus on the conversation and doesn’t encourage you to add fancy designs. The email editor is plain and simple, and your HTML emails look more like plain text emails.

If you are looking to send heavy branded HTML emails, then ConvertKit might not be the right option for you. However, if you are trying to leverage 1:1 communication with your subscribers with written content, ConvertKit is the best fit for you.

ConvertKit also has the best delivery rate in the industry and has a high conversion ratio for emails sends to opens. They have maintained the reputation of their email servers very well by carefully monitoring all the users and preventing spam complaints.

One downside of ConvertKit is that they do not support highly customisable automation. If you are looking to build custom marketing automation funnels, then ActiveCampaign might be a better fit for you.

ActiveCampaign

There are three reasons why ActiveCampaign is better than ConvertKit. The pricing of ActiveCampaign is slightly lower than ConvertKit at higher subscriber slabs.

For 1,000 subscribers the monthly pricing plan starts at $29 a month – which is almost the same as ConvertKit. If you have 10,000 subscribers, the pricing is $129 a month.

At higher subscriber slabs, there are significant differences in pricing. If you have 100,000 subscribers, you will be paying $459 a month for the Lite Plan on ActiveCampaign, and $679 a month for ConvertKit.

While ConvertKit doesn’t have multiple plans, ActiveCampaign comes with four different plans.

The Lite plan of ConvertKit is good enough for most of the bloggers, information product marketers, and startups. If you also want sales automation with features like Lead Scoring, then the Plus plan will be the right fit for you.

The professional plan comes with predictive sending and site messaging. And there is also an enterprise plan for people who want to customise the entire offering.

ActiveCampaign allows you to add webhooks in the automation, which helps you pass data to other tools. You can also set up an SMS drip campaign with ActiveCampaign – which is not available with tools like ConvertKit.

If you have a lot of subscribers, are very price conscious, and if you want to have the possibility of upgrading to a CRM automation suite in the future with the same subscriber database, I would recommend ActiveCampaign over ConvertKit.

The only downside of ActiveCampaign is that the tool is much more complex to use than ConvertKit. You might find it difficult to create a simple drip marketing automation and finding an email template that looks like plain text emails (if plain text emails are your preference).

Aweber

Aweber is one of the oldest email marketing companies in the world. Aweber has a very simple interface and allows users to send plain text emails. Plain text emails have a higher chance of landing in the primary tab of Gmail (and 90 percent of internet users who use email are on Gmail).

Aweber has high-reputation email servers that have built trust with the email ISPs over the years. This helps to get very high delivery rates and open rates for your email campaigns.

The pricing of Aweber is very simple. The basic plan for 500 subscribers comes at $19 a month. If you have 10,000 subscribers, it would cost $69 a month. It’s $149 a month for up to 25,000 subscribers. And beyond that, it’s $8 additional for every 1,000 new subscribers that are added to the database.

Aweber supports the creation of a simple drip marketing campaign but is not the best tool to build complex automation.

Drip.com

Drip is one of the most sophistical email marketing and CRM tools out there in the market.

Initially Drip was competing against ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit with the same set of features and pricing. Later Drip has rebranded itself into a communication tool for e-commerce companies.

If you are an ecommerce startup, Drip.com might be the right option for you as they have custom built the features keeping in mind the needs of an ecommerce startup.

The pricing starts at $49 a month for 2,500 subscribers and goes up to $1,300 per month for 100,000 subscribers. Drip.com is the highest priced tool on my list.

Drip allows advanced rules and liquid templating, which helps you dynamically change the content on the email based on Subscriber tags. Unless you are an ecommerce startup, I wouldn’t recommend using Drip.com.

MailChimp

Any mention of email marketing tools for startups brings MailChimp into the conversation. MailChimp is the largest provider of email marketing services for the internet, and one of the oldest and most profitable companies in this field.

MailChimp is the only tool that comes with a free plan. For up to 2,000 subscribers, there is no cost. You can upload your subscribers and send emails for free. Just make sure that the subscriber list you have is an option subscriber list. If your email campaigns have a high spam complaint rate and bounce rate, MailChimp will immediately ban your account.

If you want all the features of MailChimp that include marketing automation, I recommend the Pro plan. It costs $199 a month, and then additional pricing based on the number of subscribers you have. For 1,00,000 subscribers, you will pay $475 per month plus $199 a month, which puts you at a cost of $674 per month.

MailChimp, being a leader in the email marketing field, has the best email servers that help you get the best delivery and open rates for your email marketing campaigns. Advanced automation is still difficult with MailChimp and the learning curve is steep.

The pricing is very similar to ConvertKit. And ActiveCampaign is much cheaper with a better set of features.

best free email marketing software

Here are the top solutions that we’re going to cover:

1. Sendinblue (www.sendinblue.com)
2. Mailchimp (mailchimp.com)
3. MailerLite (www.mailerlite.com)
4. Benchmark (www.benchmarkemail.com)
5. Omnisend (www.omnisend.com)
6. Sender (www.sender.net)

Before we dig in, here’s a quick summary of the free email marketing tools that we’ll cover, along with the various limits on each service’s free plan:

Note; while there are other popular email marketing solutions on the market as well, like ConvertKit, GetResponse, Mailjet, AWeber, Constant Contact, Moosend, HubSpot, SendPulse, ActiveCampaign, and more, we felt that their free offerings were either not up to par with the lineup that we settled on in the end (or nonexistent at all). Keep reading for a deeper look at each service that has made the final list.

Conclusion

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