Email marketing software is an important component of an organization’s digital marketing strategy. It allows them to send out newsletters, promotional offers, product updates and other essential information to their subscribers. But according to Hubspot’s 2019 State of Email Marketing Report, more than half of marketers believe that building a quality email list is the most challenging part of their job.
This blog sheds light on the various techniques that can help you grow your subscriber list and improve your email marketing campaign.
Read on to learn some practical tips that will help you build a strong email subscriber list for your business.
Crm And Email Marketing Software
When it comes to email marketing; CRM and automation are very important. Only marketers that work on the skill of automating repetitive tasks, get productivity and ROI that is through the roof.
Email marketing with CRM offers marketers a ton of benefits. But you need the right CRM platform.
So today we’re looking at CRM tools that have email marketing functionality.
Skip directly to: the best email marketing software with built-in CRM
There are tons of CRM platforms that have email marketing functionality. Go through them all and your brain will start blinking “information overload”. We collected the best tools for you. Now before we jump to the list. Let’s start with a brief definition of email automation and CRM email marketing. Let’s dive in!
What is email automation?
Email automation is sending timed or action-triggered emails. Whether your goal for the email campaign is to nurture new leads, deliver blog updates, or send birthday wishes with a personal touch – email automation makes sure that your campaign is relevant and efficient.
Note that email automation is different from email blasts or broadcasts messages that are sent to subscribers manually. An automated email is triggered by a specific action taken by the subscriber. Email automation helps you to stay connected to your subscribers.
Examples of email automation are a welcome email or an abandoned cart email. Email automation takes repetitive tasks off your to-do list. The great thing about email automation is that after it’s set up, you hardly need to do anything to keep it running.
To show the effectiveness of email automation, then check out these statistics:
Automated emails have 70.5% more open rates than generic emails.
Companies that use email automation software are 2X more effective in lead generation than those that use only blast email software.
By automating outreach and follow-up emails, you can increase reply rates by 250%.
By nurturing leads with automated well-timed emails, you can generate 10% or more increase in revenue.
Personalized automated email messages see a 46% increase in open rates than other traditional marketing messages.
55% of e-commerce marketers use software for email marketing automation. (Emailmonday)
So email automation is really effective, but how does CRM fit into the picture?
What is CRM email marketing?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions with leads and customers. It involves using CRM software to organize, automate and synchronize sales and marketing processes.
With CRM email marketing you use customer relationship management software together with email marketing. This improves personalization and enhances direct communication with customers and prospective clients. In essence CRM email marketing focuses on the individual receiving the email, not a general audience.
With CRM email marketing, businesses can personalize each message, learn customer buying habits, and even anticipate their purchases. Pretty cool, huh?
What is the best email marketing service with CRM?
Here’s our list of the best CRMs that have email marketing functionality:
Sendinblue most affordable email software with CRM
ActiveCampaign best small business marketing automation CRM
Benchmark Email easiest email marketing tool with built-in CRM to get started with
Keap best email CRM for advanced automation
Engagebay best email CRM for tracking and analytics
Hubspot best CRM software with a full platform of apps
Freshworks best CRM for managing buyers’ journey
Ontraport best CRM tool for lead tracking and nurturing
Zoho CRM best CRM for medium-sized businesses
9 best email marketing software with built-in CRM
- Sendinblue
Sendinblue CRM with email marketing
Sendinblue allows businesses to build and grow relationships using email campaigns, transactional emails, and sophisticated email automation.
The software comes with email automation to personalize workflows, accurately manage your contact list and send emails based on page visits.
Sendinblue CRM email automation
With Sendinblue, you can automatically resend campaigns to contacts who didn’t open it the first time. It also offers advanced email marketing functionality, like send-time optimization. This feature makes use of an algorithm to determine the best time to send your email newsletters. Useful to increase email open rates.
Sendinblue also includes 40+ email templates and 8 automation blueprints to optimize your workflow. Easily connect Sendinblue to CMS platforms, eCommerce tools, and other business apps.
Sendinblue Pricing
Their free plan is generous with 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts. Pricing starts at $25/month for 10,000 emails, AB testing, and advanced statistics. See full pricing.
Try Sendinblue for free here
or read full review
- ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign email automation software with CRM
ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing automation platform with a built-in CRM. Automate email marketing campaigns, contact management, and optimize your post-sale processes. The ActiveCampaign platform has over 150,000 businesses using it around the globe.
What differentiates ActiveCampaign from its competitors is the combination of intelligent features. Email and messaging are tied to the marketing automation features, a built-in CRM with sales automation.
The platform also monitors activities across multiple touchpoints by tracking different marketing channels. Now it’s up to you to create multichannel marketing workflows and automate follow-up sequences.
ActiveCampaign integrates with over 870 apps. These apps range from analytics, and landing page builders, all the way over to accounting. Including Shopify, Unbounce, Thinkific, Jotform, Pipedrive, and lots more.
In ActiveCampaign, you can personalize the content of emails to each contact with conditional content. For instance, display different images or blocks of texts in an email depending on the pages the contact views on your website.
For example, if you’re carrying out a sales promo, use conditional content to display only products that the subscriber has interacted with in the past.
The biggest problem most users have with marketing automation platforms is the visual automation campaign builder. Some tools don’t have a visual builder and in some cases, they’re very complex. ActiveCampaign tackles the issue head-on. The drag and drop flowchart tool you use to create automation workflows is intuitive and easy to understand.
ActiveCampaign CRM email automation workflow
ActiveCampaign also offers split-testing to test subject lines and email content to identify what works best.
ActiveCampaign Pricing
They have a 14-day free trial and pricing starts at $9/month for 500 contacts with the Lite plan. See full pricing here.
Get started with ActiveCampaign for free here
or read full review
- Benchmark Email
Benchmark Email marketing platform with CRM
Benchmark Email is a simple email marketing platform with a lightweight CRM built-in. It provides a drag and drop email editor, email templates, forms, landing pages, and automation tools. The best part of the tool is that it’s very easy to use and offers great customer support.
You can integrate Benchmark Email with more than 1500 business tools like LiveChat, Stripo, Shopify, and WooCommerce. Their WordPress plugin makes it easy to add forms to your site without copying and pasting codes.
Benchmark Email uses triggers to send automated email sequences. For example, when a customer subscribes to your email list, automatically send a welcome email. The app also offers several templates to help transition subscribers into customers.
Benchmark Email CRM follow-up sequence
The tool also has a lightweight customer relationship management system with contact profiles that include email engagement data.
Other features to note are A/B testing, contact list management, real-time reports, polls, surveys, and social media integration.
Benchmark Email Pricing
The free plan includes unlimited contacts and 250 emails per month. Pricing starts at $13/month for 500 contacts and unlimited emails. Check full pricing here.
Start with to Benchmark Email for free
or read full review
- Keap (Infusionsoft)
Keap CRM email marketing automation platform
Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is an all-in-one CRM platform with strong automation functionality. Use it for SMS, email, landing pages, payments, and more. Keap has been in business for over 20 years and has served over 200,000 customers. Most customers like it because it’s super helpful in keeping customer data organized.
Capture and convert leads by designing funnels, creating segments, and automated marketing campaigns. Keap is also great for bottom-of-the-funnel activities. Choose customizable email templates to create follow-ups to get paid faster. The best part about Keap is how its lets you consolidate all your customer data into one dashboard.
Keap CRM with email marketing sales pipeline
Keap sales and marketing automation comes with a strong set of features. You’ll use them to save time and automate routine tasks. Send reminders, create drip email series, and follow up after purchases with automations.
The best part is that you can personalize all of these messages using segmentation and automation conditions.
Keap also offers a strong reporting and analytics dashboard. You’ll find different reports for sales, marketing, lead generation, and revenue. You’ll be able to visualize these data sets to gain valuable insights and stay on top of your operations.
Keap Pricing
You can get started with a 14-day free trial to test the system. All paid plans include 24/7 support, unlimited emails, and access to 1:1 coaching. Your price goes up as your contact list grows. See full pricing here.
Try Keap free for 14-days here
- Engagebay
Engagebay CRM email marketing software
Engagebay is an all-in-one business platform. It has 4 core offerings CRM, marketing automation, helpdesk software, and live chat software. You can get the all-in-one package or choose functionalities you need. For this review, we’ll focus on its CRM and marketing automation.
They started in 2018 and have over 12,000 customers. It cuts down your need to use multiple software for marketing, sales, and support, and offers many features for free. It has a short learning curve and the migration from other tools is smooth.
Engagebay has a free CRM that comes with features like workflow automation, targeted marketing, email templates, pipeline visualization, and automated data entry. With the paid plan you’ll have more capabilities like multi-currency support, sales automation, contact management, and custom reports. You’ll find it easy to get contact details, arrange them and act on your data.
Sales dashboard Engagebay CRM with email marketing
The marketing automation will let you automate tasks, emails, workflows, lead generation, and lead nurturing. Automation workflows are easy to design with the drag and drop builder. Simply select and move elements into the builder to quickly set up powerful workflows. Engagebay also comes with predictive lead scoring and smart customer segmentation.
Engagebay Pricing
Engagebay has a free plan with 500 contacts and 1000 emails. Pricing starts at $11.99 per month for 1000 contacts and 3000 emails. All plans have email and chat support. See full pricing here.
Sign up to Engagebay for free here
- Hubspot
Hubspot CRM email marketing software
HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that combines marketing automation, CMS, and sales. It eliminates the need to use third-party software. But it’s quite pricey as your email list and needs grow. At that point, lots of users are looking for Hubspot alternatives. Consider this as you make your selection.
With Hubspot’s marketing automation, it’s easy to create integrated workflows. It offers email drip marketing automation for automated email campaigns to guide prospects down the marketing and sales funnel.
Hubspot CRM email automation
The great thing about HubSpot is that you can automate a whole lot of tasks. Use the workflow templates available to easily manage bulk data, send emails, create tasks, score leads, and lots more.
HubSpot also has in-depth analytics to help you track and get detailed reporting on each of your marketing channels and customer segments.
Hubspot Pricing
In the free Hubspot plan, you can store 1,000,000 contacts and send 2000 emails per month. Pricing starts at $50/month for 1000 contacts with marketing, CRM, CMS, service, and operations tools. See full pricing here.
Get started with Hubspot for free here
- Freshworks
Freshsales email marketing CRM platform
Freshworks is a cloud-based software for multiple business functions. Their CRM platform is called Freshsales. Freshworks started in 2010 and now is serving 50,000 plus customers worldwide.
Freshsales is a sales force automation platform for medium-sized businesses. Its main value is its ease of use and price.
The CRM is customizable to fit your business and the buying journey of your customers. Set up custom lifecycle stages and build email automation to nurture leads automatically. Freshsales is a good choice for international sales teams because it supports 10 languages and 150+ currencies.
Freshsales CRM with email marketing
Automation features include workflows, sales sequences, task management, and auto-assignment rules. With these, you’ll automatically assign leads to the right salesperson, get task and appointment reminders, and close deals quicker.
Freshsales Pricing
Freshsales is free for 100 contacts. Pricing starts at $15 per month for 750 emails/day.
- Ontraport
Ontraport sales and marketing CRM tool
Ontraport is an email marketing automation platform for sales teams to manage leads, optimize content, marketing, sales, and improve customer relationships.
The most important features of Ontraport are smart automation, lead capture tools, CRM software, split testing, social media integration, email templates and a file-sharing tool. With these tools, sales teams track campaigns, send messages, and build professional web pages with ease.
The CRM in Ontraport has deal pipelines, segmentation, lead scoring, task automation, contact history. The multiple pipeline tracking and custom objects make it a good tool for medium-sized businesses with more complex sales processes.
Ontraport is a great product with an active user community. The only issue with the product is that it’s a bit pricey when compared to the other tools on the list.
Ontraport Pricing
You can test the system for 14 days, then pricing starts at $79/month for 1000 contacts and unlimited emails.
- Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM software with email marketing
Zoho CRM is an email marketing CRM suited to small to mid-sized businesses. It’s best used for lead management, workflow automation, and marketing automation. Zoho has 250,000 customers across 180 countries and supports 28 languages.
You’ll find it easy to track and close deals with Zoho’s sales automation features. Starting from the top of the funnel, use Zoho to capture leads and score leads. Then set up automations to send lead nurturing emails and keep track of lead engagement with analytics. With deal management features, track what stage of the buyer’s journey customers are in, and have your sales reps reach out.
You’ll also find useful features like customer segmentation to target customers with precise and targeted campaigns. The best part is that with Google Ads integration, you can even compare sales against your campaigns to check which ones are working and which ones need to be improved.
CRM software with email marketing Zoho
Zoho CRM Pricing
Zoho CRM offers a free plan and 15-day free trials for paid plans. Prices start at €14/month for 100 emails for each user.
9 factors to consider when choosing a CRM email marketing platform
Proper research before selecting a CRM with email marketing is important. When choosing an email automation software, these are the factors you need to consider.
- Email marketing features
These are basic features that every email marketing software needs. Here’s a list of features you should look out for in an email marketing CRM tool:
Drag and drop email builder, responsive for mobile
Advanced list management
Customer support through chat or email
Segmentation and personalization
CAN-SPAM / GDRP compliant web forms
Easy integrations with other tools
A/B testing
ActiveCampaign CRM email templates
When email marketing features are your focus, your best bet is to go for tools like ActiveCampaign or Sendinblue. They’re specialist tools that provide the best customizable email templates, the easiest workflow, and great email automation builders.
- Cost of the tool
Starting out with email automation, the tools all look affordable. Because you have only a handful of subscribers. But when you choose your email marketing tool think long-term and consider the pricing as your email lists increase.
Some tools deceptively offer a cheap marketing automation platform when you’re starting out, then exponentially increase their price as you upgrade. You don’t want to invest in a tool that will dig into your profits as you grow!
If cost is a big consideration for you, I’d suggest going with a tool like Sendinblue. Not only is it the cheapest on the list, but it also has a free plan which includes unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails a day.
- CRM and Email Automation features
CRM platforms and email automation work hand in hand. Deliver value to the customer while nurturing a long-lasting customer relationship. CRM and email marketing lets you personalize content for each contact, get to know their names, needs, and situation, and anticipate customer interest easily.
Hubspot email CRM contact profile
If your goal is to find the software with the strongest CRM and email automation tools, you’ll be happy with Hubspot. Hubspot offers a complete range of CRM tools that cut out your need to depend on any other software. Couple this with marketing automation features like drip campaigns, custom workflows, and smart segmentation. You can’t go wrong with Hubspot.
- Ease of use
It’s important that the email automation tool you choose is easy to use. An intuitive CRM with email marketing should not take you more than 2-3 hours to get a feel for. If a tool has too steep a learning curve or requires hiring a consultant to even use it, then it probably isn’t the best CRM software for you.
All marketing tools advertise an easy-to-use interface, great drag and drop email builders, and awesome visual automation builders. The reality is that some tools are seriously lagging, while others offer features that are miles ahead. Don’t just go for the sign on the label!
If you’re looking for software with a shallow learning curve, I’d suggest giving Benchmark Email a go. They have a no-frills, easy-to-navigate interface. You’re guided when creating campaigns and the next step is always clear. If that’s not enough you’ll even find videos on your dashboard to give a helping hand. If that’s not enough, Benchmark Email also offers phone support. Just hop on a call with a representative and they’ll get you sorted in no time.
- Email tracking and analytics
You need to constantly analyze your marketing campaigns to ensure that you’re on the right track. How do you know what to optimize without data? Most marketing tools fail to deliver when it comes to in-depth analytics and reporting.
Before you choose a tool, check out if they provide all the metrics you need. And don’t neglect how the data is presented. Are the reports easy to understand?
If you want detailed reports that are actionable and easy to understand, go for Engagebay. Their reports are highly customizable, with visual components and easy filtering. All these features make it the best email marketing CRM for tracking and analytics.
- Deliverability
It’s essential that your email marketing automation tool delivers your messages in the inbox and away from the spam folder. Without quality email deliverability, no matter how great your sales emails are, they would be wasted going unseen into the spam folder. - Third-Party Integrations
CRM email marketing tools are often used together with other platforms. There isn’t a single tool for everything you need. To save the stress of manually copy-pasting between multiple tools, your email marketing tool should integrate easily with your other business apps.
Easily connect CMS platforms, eCommerce tools, and other business apps like Drupal, WordPress, Magento, Shopify or, Woocommerce, and much more.
Pay attention to the difference between native integrations and connections with tools like Zapier. Native integrations are easier to set up, deeper, and usually don’t cost any extra. It’s harder to set up these connections with Zapier and costs more, too.
Hubspot email marketing CRM app marketplace
Consider going with Hubspot if you want to connect easily with the rest of your martech stack. The Hubspot App Marketplace has over 1000 integrations to directly integrate with a thousand other apps.
- Security & Compliance
There is a good chance that you’re capturing sensitive customer data from your subscribers. It’s essential that companies have a top-notch security protocol in place to keep you and your subscribers safe from hackers and scammers.
Your email marketing and marketing automation tool should also meet up to compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO.
- Customer support
If your marketing system gets all the factors above right, that is a big step in the right direction. But when you need help, you need a tool that offers efficient customer support with fast response times.
If customer support is a big factor in choosing your CRM, consider Keap. You’ll get unlimited 24/7 support along with a migration expert to help you move all your data. To get you up to speed they also offer 1:1 coaching. If that doesn’t fill your appetite, you’ll get access to a coach to help you build your funnels and pipelines.
5 reasons why you need a CRM with email marketing
We prepared this list of reasons so you can convince your boss to invest in a CRM tool with email marketing.
- Email is an integral part of lead nurturing
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to nurture leads. Email messages can be highly targeted and fit to cultivate a relationship with your subscribers. If you want to deliver the right emails at the right time, you need to use drip email campaigns.
Email automation takes out the stress of the lead generation and nurturing process. It works best if the messages are tailored to fit the different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Automation ensures that the lead receives relevant information making your lead nurturing process more effective.
- Personalization at scale, with a twist
Email automation works so well because you can personalize messages at scale.
For example, it’s almost impossible to manually send emails to thousands of contacts with personalized articles and product recommendations for each of them. But with email marketing automation tools, it’s easy. Create custom fields, tags and send dynamic content. Or just use old-school personalization like [first name] or [company name] that’s inserted into the email before it’s sent out.
Personalized emails result in higher email open rates. Research shows that personalizing your email subject line increases your open rates by 22%.
- Increases efficiency and planning
Email marketing CRM tools increase the efficiency of sales and marketing teams. Scheduling emails is essential when you’re dealing with clients in different time zones. If you want to reach your subscribers at the right time and maximize your ROI, you should be at the top of their inbox.
Besides timezone issues, it’s important that you send the emails at the right time. Messages you send at certain times might be ignored, so to be more effective, you should send emails when the recipient is most likely to receive them.
Hubspot CRM email plugin
Some automation platforms even recommend the best times to send emails, the ideal sending frequency, and the best kind of content to send, based on the buyer persona.
- Cut costs and increase ROI
With an email marketing CRM tool, you don’t need huge sales and marketing teams to run successful campaigns. Automating email sending, contact segmentation, task assignments frees up your time.
Instead of a 30 person marketing team, an automation tool handled by 5 people can get the job done in less time. An automated process saves you a lot of money you would spend on labor, increasing your email marketing ROI.
- Improved analytics and reporting
A CRM with email marketing gives your reporting tools to analyze your email campaigns extensively. Without analytics, you can’t find ways to improve and you’re just shooting in the dark.
Compared to simple email marketing tools, automation platforms show you deeper data. Like goal tracking, custom events, and conversion reports. These give you a better understanding of your whole email marketing.
best email marketing software
Is email marketing a priority for your business in 2022? Are you looking for the best email marketing software?
Choosing the right email marketing service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign.
In this article, we will review and compare the 7 best email marketing services for small businesses.
Best email marketing services compared
Why Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service is Important?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategy for small businesses. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States.
This is because email marketing is easy to manage, gives you full control, and allows you to establish a direct contact with your customers.
Not convinced on email marketing? See these 6 reasons why building an email list is so important today.
It’s important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose because they are responsible for making sure that your emails actually get delivered.
If you aren’t careful, then you will end up paying a lot more money for fewer marketing features and terrible email deliverability rates (which causes you to lose even more money).
What to Look for in a Good Email Marketing Tool?
A good email marketing service should enable you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor).
You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation.
Aside from that, your email marketing service must make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Most importantly, a good email service provider ensures that your email campaigns do not end up in the spam folder.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the most popular email marketing service providers and how they stack up against each other.
- Constant Contact
Constant Contact Email Marketing Service
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.
- SendinBlue
Sendinblue Email Marketing Software
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.
- HubSpot
HubSpot email marketing CRM
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.
- Omnisend
Omnisend – Powerful Email Marketing & SMS Platform
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.
- Drip
Drip email marketing automation software
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.
- Moosend
Moosend email marketing software for small business
Moosend is an affordable email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with a suite of powerful marketing automation features, email list building tools, landing pages, and more.
You can quickly create an email newsletter and customize the email design to match your brand within minutes by either choosing from their dozens of pre-made email templates or by creating a completely custom template.
The nice part about Moosend is that they offer marketing automation features to all plans including the free plan. You can use their automation workflow designer to offer a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter subscribers.
Moosend offer detailed email analytics that shows you important metrics such as email opens, clicks, bounces, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predicted demographics data.
All plans come with powerful conversion optimization features such as A/B testing, email heatmap analytics, countdown timers, conditional content, AI-engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.
Moosend offers a forever free plan for up to 1,000 email subscribers and unlimited number of emails (no credit card required). After that their pricing starts at $8 per month for their Pro plan which includes landing page builder, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, team management, and more.
- AWeber
AWeber bulk email marketing software
AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.
You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and email tracking with detailed insights.
AWeber also has other powerful email marketing features such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag based subscriber segmentation.
Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
AWeber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.
Bonus: ConvertKit
ConvertKit email marketing service
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
ConvertKit’s unique feature is that allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service.
With ConvertKit, you can easily segment subscribers into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing.
They have all the powerful features you’d expect from a top-notch email marketing service such as a/b testing, beautiful email templates, landing page builder, smart workflows, and more.
ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material.
A lot of ConvertKit features such as paid newsletters are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers that’s why we rate them the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.
They even added the ability for you to sell digital products & subscriptions from the same platform.
ConvertKit offers a 14-day free trial, and their pricing starts from $29/month. They also offer a 30-day refund policy.
Their Creator Pro plan also includes advanced functionality like newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
Bonus: Mailchimp
Mailchimp free email marketing service
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
Although we don’t recommend it anymore since there are better solutions available in the market, the sad reality is that we cannot create a best email marketing software list without including Mailchimp due to their shear popularity.
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s timezones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.
You can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms. If you are using WordPress, then see our ultimate guide to using Mailchimp and WordPress for detailed instructions.
When it comes to marketing automation features, Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers in our list such as HubSpot, Drip or ConvertKit.
In the recent years, Mailchimp has attempted to add many of the “advanced” features, but having tested many of these, they’re not truly advanced.
Mailchimp support is offered by email, live chat, and a large tutorials knowledge-base. However their support is often slow and no match to the quality of service that you get from Constant Contact.
Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but as a serious business, you need reliable support that you can count on.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers.
However if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, then you’d have to move to their $299 per month plan.
Final Thoughts: The Best Email Marketing Service
There are dozens of email marketing services out there, and we want to make sure you choose the right one for your business needs. Below is our expert pick:
If you’re a small business, non-profit, or a new blogger, then we recommend using Constant Contact. Their pricing is great, and the support team is absolutely top-notch. Their onboarding team will help you find success with email marketing right away.
If you run an online store / ecommerce website, then we recommend using either Omnisend or Drip because they offer the best eCommerce email marketing software. Their personalization and automation features are extremely powerful. A lot of our own business websites use Drip.
If you’re a professional blogger or content creator, then we recommend using ConvertKit. They offer an easy to use platform with advanced segmentation and funnels that will help you take your blogging business to the next level.
If you’re a business owner who wants a powerful marketing automation tool that combines email marketing, SMTP bulk emails, and SMS messages, then we recommend using SendinBlue. Their platform is easy to use, and they allow you to manage both email and SMS from a single interface. They also offer a fairly generous forever free plan which makes them the best free email marketing software.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one email marketing solution, then we recommend using HubSpot. They offer a power suite of marketing tools including email marketing, CRM, sales tools, live chat, website builder, and more. There free plan is great for lead generation because it lets you store unlimited subscribers.
Pro Tip: Get More Email Subscribers, Faster!
Once you have picked an email marketing service for your business, you’ll likely want to start getting more email subscribers.
We use and recommend OptinMonster. It is a powerful conversion optimization toolkit that helps you turn abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
OptinMonster Email marketing growth toolkit
OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with all the best email marketing service that we mentioned above and dozens more.
WPBeginner founder, Syed Balkhi, is also the co-founder of OptinMonster. He initially built OptinMonster to help grow our own email list. After the launch in 2013, it has grown tremendously with over 1 million active installs of the WordPress plugin.
Today OptinMonster is being used by some of the largest brands in the world including McAfee, Experian, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Harvard University, Pateron, and more.
Aside from OptinMonster, you can also use the following tools to grow your email marketing list:
WPForms – #1 WordPress form builder that you can use to create contact forms, surveys, polls, and other type of forms. It comes with built-in integration with all popular email marketing services. Trusted by over 5 million website owners.
SeedProd – Want to create custom landing pages to boost conversions? SeedProd offers a far superior landing page builder experience. This is why smart website owners use SeedProd along with their preferred email marketing service since it integrates with all the popular email platforms.
LiveChat.com – One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is to connect your live chat software with your email marketing service. We use LiveChat on several of our sites.
ChatBot.com – Another smart way to grow your email list is to use chatbot software and connect it with your email marketing service.
RafflePress – this is the leading WordPress giveaway and contest platform. It lets you use viral marketing to grow your email list.
Bonus Tip: Improve Your Email Deliverability
All the email newsletter tools that we have shared in this article have great email deliverability rates.
However there are few things you can do to make sure that your marketing emails always get delivered.
- Use a Professional Email Address
Email platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and others have algorithms that look for spammy behavior. One of them is the sender email address.
As a business, it’s important that you use a professional business email address (like yourname@yourcompany.com) and not a generic hotmail or gmail address.
This will help make sure that your email deliverability rate is higher than industry average.
- Send Targeted Emails based on Interests
It’s very important that you personalize your emails based on user segments. Email marketing software like Constant Contact and HubSpot allows you to easily group your subscribers into segments such as most active, not-active, interested in specific topics, custom segments, etc.
This will help your email marketing campaigns have the highest open rate and click through rate which is a big factor in future email deliverability.
We always recommend sending a personalize welcome email to all new subscribers and then segment users accordingly based on their interests.
It’s also important to have a clear unsubscribe link for users, so they can unsubscribe rather than marking your emails as spam.
For more tips, see this ultimate step-by-step email marketing guide with examples to help you create a successful email marketing campaign.
Email Marketing Software FAQs
Having helped thousands of users pick the best email marketing software, we have answered quite a lot of questions. Below are some of the answers to the most frequently asked questions about email marketing platforms.
Can I do bulk email marketing from my Gmail or Outlook?
In theory, yes. But this will quickly get your email accounts suspended. G Suite and Outlook are not made for bulk email sending. They are great solution professional business emails.
Which is the best free email marketing service?
A lot of email marketing services will offer free tiers for limited use. The best free email marketing service is SendinBlue because their free plan doesn’t have a limit on the number of subscribers. HubSpot, Moosend, MailerLite and MailChimp also offer free email marketing service plans.
How much does email marketing cost?
Your email marketing cost will entirely depend on the number of subscribers you have, the number of total emails you send per month, and the email platform you use. On average, a small business email marketing costs is around $20 – $300 per month on email marketing given that they manage their own campaign. If you use an email marketing agency, then your cost might be closer to $500 per month or higher.
Can email marketing help with SEO?
Email marketing has no direct impact on SEO. However it can help you get more traffic to your website which can lead to more shares and sometimes backlinks / mentions.
Google and other search engines use shares and mentions as social signals to rank websites. So indirectly, email marketing can help your website’s SEO rankings.
You may also want to use these best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to improve your rankings.
Which is the best email marketing app for Shopify?
Many of the above email marketing services offer an intuitive Shopify app that’s easy to use. We recommend using Drip since it offers robust eCommerce marketing automation tools that seamlessly integrates with both Shopify and WooCommerce.
Some eCommerce power users prefer Klaviyo for Shopify email marketing, but their platform is quite expensive for small businesses.
Are there other email marketing platforms that are not listed here?
Yes, there are literally hundreds of email marketing services out there, but we have not listed them all here. We believe that making a full email platforms list would create more confusion and cause choice paralysis for non-techy readers.
We have tried all the top major email marketing service including many that are not in our email platform lists above such as: MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Ontraport, Mailjet, Campaign Monitor, InfusionSoft (now Keap), Klaviyo, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, MailPoet, and more.
The top email marketing services that we have chose to include in our list provide the best features for the best price.
Which are the best email marketing services in your opinion?
Our top choices for the best email marketing services are:
Constant Contact – Best email marketing services for small business.
SendinBlue – Best Email and SMS marketing platform.
HubSpot – All in one email marketing and CRM for growing businesses.
Bonus: Omnisend or Drip as Best email marketing platform for eCommerce.
Along with an email marketing strategy, we also recommend adding web push notification on your website. This is another powerful way to connect with your visitors after they leave your website. We use PushEngage on WPBeginner, and it has become a top 5 traffic source on our site.
We hope this article gave you a good overview of the best email marketing services for your business. You may also want to see our list of 24 must have WordPress plugins for business websites, and our comparison of the best business phone services for small businesses.
Conclusion
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