Email marketing is the process of sending promotional or informative emails to customers, subscribers and prospects in order to nurture leads, build relationships, retain customers and influence purchase decisions. It can also be used to get customers involved with a brand through things like contests or surveys.
Email marketing is at the root of many successful businesses, but it can be difficult to know where to start. That’s why we’ve compiled this guide in which you’ll learn everything you need to know about email marketing.
Table of Contents
Black Hat Email Marketing Software
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and more.
Each account gives you access to unlimited emails, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.
Their Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
Constant Contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources.
Aside from online training, they also offer in-person live seminars across the United States. This allow small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro.
For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.
Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $ 9.99 /month.
WPBeginner users can use our Constant Contact coupon code to get an additional 20% off.
2. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.
It is an extremely easy to use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.
SendinBlue includes beginner-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users. It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
SendinBlue offer a completely free email marketing plan unlimited contacts. Their free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day, but all your emails will have their branding.
Their paid plans start from $25 per month for Lite. You can also include SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary based on your sending requirements.
They have improved their premium plan recently to include more advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means users now get more value for the same price.
SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice functionality to have if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most well-known softwares in the CRM and email marketing space.
Their email marketing service is free to start, and it comes with a lot of powerful automation features designed to grow your business.
You can use their easy drag-and-drop email builder and a selection of templates to create a completely custom newsletter that matches your brand’s personality and colors.
Because of the native integration with the HubSpot CRM, you can personalize your emails for each subscriber based on things like device type, country, list membership, or any other custom information you might have on the individual subscriber.
HubSpot comes with all the powerful feature you’d expect from an enterprise level email marketing software such as send time optimization, high email deliverability, A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.
One of the main reasons why small, medium, and enterprise customers choose HubSpot is because they offer an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builder, operation hub, and more.
Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan, which includes the CRM and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools.
The free version allows you to send 2,000 emails and store an unlimited number of subscribers. You can create custom signup and popup forms, build landing pages, manage and track your online ads, and more. It has all the tools you need to get started.
If you need more advanced capabilities, then their paid plans starts at $45/month.
4. Omnisend
Omnisend is a powerful SMS & email marketing service for eCommerce businesses who are looking for an omni-channel marketing automation solution.
They offer one of the most generous free email marketing plans because it includes all the powerful features like pre-built automation workflows, subscriber segmentation, A/B testing, performance reports, and even SMS + web push notification.
Most other free email marketing plans are restricted, but Omnisend is confident in their value proposition, so they offer most everything in their free plan. As your contact list grows, you will need to upgrade to their paid plans.
Omnisend seamlessly integrates with all the popular website builder and eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more. They also have integration with hundreds of other business tools like live chat software, help desk service, and more.
The best thing that we liked about Omnisend is their pre-built eCommerce marketing automation workflows that are designed to help you drive more revenue. This includes emails like welcome email series, cart abandonment emails, cross-sell emails, and more.
Their email builder is very easy to use and comes with a large selection of email templates, so you can create beautiful, on-brand campaigns. Once it’s set up, you can personalize the email using their powerful targeting and segmentation features.
What a lot of users love about Omnisend is that they offer SMS built-in, so you don’t have to pay for a separate software, and their SMS feature allows you to send messages in 209 regions across the world.
Omnisend free email marketing plan allows you to contact up to 250 subscribers, and their paid plans start at $16 per month.
5. Drip
Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
Their email software offer seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.
What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual drag and drop builder for automation workflows. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.
Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides and excellent documentation.
We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.
Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.
Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.
Drip offers a free trial, and their plans starts from $49 / month which includes all their features.
Recently, they’ve added SMS notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channel. This makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.
email marketing forums
WARRIORFORUM
WarriorForum is the most popular internet marketing forum you’ll find here! However because of its popularity this forum attracts also a lot of newbies, which can be a good thing if you plan on sharing your experience, building trash or to help promote your own blog. You can start here if you’re beginner, people over there are very friendly. Maybe I am still beginner, but I like this forum the most for now… maybe it’s because I found a lot of great marketing tools, reviews about them and great feedback from people who actually tested those tools.
Also I should mention this forum has a premium section called War Room, for 37$ You’ll get access to their private section, where you’ll get very useful advice from administrators and replies to your questions from experienced marketers, like personal mentorship. I just bought their subscription myself and will leave my feedback about it real soon.
Forum topics I found very valuable:
- Top 10 Internet Marketing Products of 2010 – this is one of the rare places where I trust to product reviews. Because they sound and are real, maybe exceptions would be some trusted marketing blogs, but I find this forum post super valuable for myself, for promotions.
- Amazon Affiliates – Are You Seriously Making Money? – Yes, people are making money with Amazon, but how to do it? You might read a while here…but along the way you’ll get a lot of smart points helping you to earn and sell more through Amazon, interesting reading!
WICKEDFIRE
This is more advanced forum than WarriorForum, don’t try to ask there newbie questions, people may not enjoy that. But if you’re not beginner, you’ll feel here like home! More advanced stuff here, I like to follow WarriorForum and WickedFire together.
Forum topics I found very valuable (you will need to register to view their forum):
- Tools. (from WF members) Ever. – One more tools list but from WickedFire, never gets old.
- Free Ebook Download Section – many bloggers release their free reports for email exchange, people here are sharing the most useful free e-book guides.
PPVPLAYBOOK (PAID SUBSCRIPTION – 67$)
Oh man, I really would be much happier if I would know about this forum earlier! This forum subscription easily would have been my most valuable investment! If you want to see what this blog can give to you, go to their coaching page and watch their tour video.
For me the most useful section there definitely is Case studies where you can read detailed, documented guides with success stories and understand how site was built and monetized. Currently there are 24 case studies, but of course that’s not it, there are a lot of lessons, tips, webinar replays and much, much more.
In case you decide to buy this subscription, consider saying thanks and using my affiliate link. Soon however I will do more in depth review about this forum, sharing my experience using this forum! I hope you’ll enjoy it and remember I won’t suggest you anything I have not bought myself.
Forum threads I particularly enjoyed (I cannot give links since its private forum):
- Are you up for the 30 day campaign challenge? – Funny, I am doing this currently with 3 friends of mine to keep up competition, cool inspiration!
- Success Stories – loving all 24 of them, stories how to build first profitable campaign, how one (Froknowsphoto: Go Above And Beyond Auto) has earned 300$/day or another person 500$/day. Gold mine.
SEOCHAT FORUM
This is a very active forum for SEO addicts with very detailed sections and big community. From my findings this seemed to be one of the best forums about SEO, correct me if I am wrong, but I am going back there to learn more.
Forum topics I found very valuable:
- The Sticky for Meta Description, keywords, keyword density, and title tags – some good SEO basics and interesting discussion about particular topic.
- Email Marketing for SEO – I didn’t know anything about it, was pretty good discovery for me.
HIGH RANKINGS
Most active section here is SEO Tips & Techniques, link building, SEM/SEO resources and advice… Well, basically one more hardcore SEO related forum. I don’t know if that’s just me, but I really enjoyed overall design here and helpful answers to forum topics. Questions there are answered really detailed and impression is very well, even if I am first time visitor.
My thoughts? – I am coming here back for more to share knowledge and receive it, I only disliked that I cannot sort posts after the most views or most replies.
BLACKHATWORLD
This is the most popular forum for different SEO techniques – black hat SEO, white Hat SEO, cloaking, blogging, making money. While black hat SEO may seem too dangerous to use sometimes, still you’ll find many interesting tips and probably gain many new ideas about what’s possible. Don’t draw any lines and learn what’s possible!
This list was brought to you by Adstuck which itself is an email forum provider. So let us know about Adstuck.
Adstuck: Adstuck is a digital marketing practice agency working from all over the world with four locations India, Singapore, Estonia and US. Its mission is to provide instant access to a talented workforce to enterprise. They have 491 clients and worked over 700 projects, with 30 fortunes 500 firms.
Adstuck provide services in:
- Improving marketing results
- Creating social media marketing strategy
- Proper assessments of current trends
- Market research
- Campaign creation
- Email marketing
- Email marketing campaign
- Growing market share
- Launching new product or enter new market.
It is a strong and leading digital media marketing service provider which can help you with cost cutting, plan execution, perfect reporting, strategy making, data collecting, and response collection from consumers. It handles all the aspects of your business. They don’t focus only on new on emerging brands who wants entail success and distribution in the market but also on brands that have successfully established the customer retail space, and need some assistance in managing their business.
Conclusion
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