Email Marketing Tools For Small Business Model
If you’re a small business owner, you’re probably already aware of the power of email marketing. Email is a cost-effective marketing tool that allows you to reach your customers where they already are: their inbox.
Not only does email give you the ability to maintain contact with your customers, it also allows for more direct communication with them than social media alone. This makes it the perfect choice for small businesses looking to strengthen their relationship with their customers and increase sales over time.
Email Marketing Tools For Small Business Model
Small businesses have a lot to focus on – without the budget and resources of a midsize or enterprise company. The decisions they make around tech tools and software suites are often more important than a bigger company, because they need tools that inherently make it easier to run a quality business with less.
There are no shortage of email marketing tools for small businesses, which is totally logical: Email marketing remains a really powerful tool for small businesses, in part because they have more flexibility with their brand and image. And it’s valuable in no small part because while it may be hot to have a cool Instagram page right now, IG is still driven by an algorithm; emails go right into a prospect’s inbox, which means a formula isn’t deciding who sees your best stuff.
Email marketing is a tremendous relationship-building channel. But with so many possible options to choose from, what is the best email marketing tool for your small business?
What Features Should I Look for in an Email Marketing Tool?
Today’s email marketing platforms do more than just send email to your list. There are many features and capabilities you’ll want to consider and evaluate before choosing the best email marketing tool for your small business.
Drag & Drop Builder
Creating eye-catching HTML emails is essential for small businesses for getting newsletters and promos read in the inbox. These emails include elements outside of simple plain text, including images, colors, different font-styles and more. The tricky part is that email clients (inboxes like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, iPhone mobile, and the multitude of others) don’t follow the same rules when it comes to displaying HTML emails.
A drag & drop email builder is essential for small businesses that want to send well-designed emails that look great in any email client. Drag & drop email builders do double duty for small businesses. They make it super simple to create email layouts, add text and pull in images – without the need to know any HTML code. And, they are designed to render your HTML email flawlessly in most ever email client.
While you are doing a trial of an email tool, spend a little bit of time in their drag and drop builder to evaluate ease-of-use. You may also want to try a few test sends to the email clients you send to the most and make sure you get the results you expect.
Admin Tools
Even small businesses can be organized in complex ways, and your email marketing tool should help you work efficiently.
You may need the ability to create sub-accounts if you want to treat communication channels differently in different departments. Small businesses that have clients, such as business coaches, consultants and marketing agencies, may require a way to share email templates across client accounts.
As your email marketing efforts grow, so do your lists of contacts. As everyone knows, there’s money in your lists – and you don’t want a rogue client or employee to take off with your proprietary data. If security is a concert for your small business, you’ll want to evaluate your options for protecting your lists.
Deliverability Tools
The cold hard truth of email marketing today is that not every email will make it to the inbox. However, there are steps you can take to protect your sender reputation and ensure you’re delivering as many emails as possible.
As you compare platforms, take note of deliverability help they provide. Email verification, spam checkers, whitelabel IP, and DKIM authentication can all give your business a boost in the battle for the inbox.
List Building
Small businesses can have a giant reach as they grow their email list. List building tools, like online forms, surveys and polls can help you capture a wider audience. As you test out new email marketing platforms, take a look at their list building tools. Do they have forms? Will they embed seamlessly with your website? Understand if you’ll need a technical resource or not to take advantage of any list building tools an email marketing platform offers.
List Segmentation
As an email marketing best practice, you want to send the most relevant message to everyone on your list. That’s where segmentation comes in. Your customer’s inbox is a competitive place to reach, and sending a generic message to your whole list is rarely a recipe for getting noticed.
Pulling a list of contacts who opened a certain email or clicked a specific link can help small businesses refine their message and improve engagement with their contacts. As you compare email tools, make sure you have an easy way to slice and dice your contact data and get the right message into the right hands with every send.
Automation
Speaking of sending the right message at the right time, automation is helping small businesses scale their email marketing efforts. Email automation can help you send one-to-one emails to a large list of contacts.
An email automation is a series of triggers and actions that fire automatically. Triggers can be signals such as a contact getting added to a list, opening an email, or clicking a link. Meanwhile, actions can be steps like sending a specific email or removing a contact from a list. Even just a few triggers and actions put together can create powerful workflows for small businesses.
For instance, an automation can send a special offer to a contact who fills out an offer form. More complex automations can including sending a reminder email to a contact who has put an item in their shopping cart, but has not bought it yet.
Automations can vary from platform to platform, so get a handle on the scope of automation actions and triggers before you make your final decision.
A/B Testing
Digital buying behavior is changing all of the time. A subject line that may have gotten noticed a year ago may feel stale today. Testing subject lines and email copy can set your email marketing efforts apart from the pack.
A/B testing features can be simple or complex. It’s definitely a feature that can help you improve engagement – as long as it’s easy to use for your business.
Reporting
Measuring the success of email marketing is simple with good reporting tools. If there are metrics you want to track that go beyond the basics of open and click-through rates, make sure you can get to the data you need with your email marketing tool.
10 Email Marketing Tools to Evaluate
Ready to find the right email marketing platform at the right price for your small business? Here’s a shortlist of the best email marketing tools serving small business customers today.
Benchmark
Not only is Benchmark’s email marketing suite incredibly powerful, but it’s also free. While most tools offer free trials or very limited features in their freemium plans, Benchmark gives you (almost) all the bells and whistles of their paid plans. Along with their ridiculously simple drag and drop builder, light automations and reporting tools, they also offer more advanced features like Google Analytics tracking, heatmapping and social media integration – all for free! For SMBs, Benchmark’s email tool is the perfect place to start and the perfect tool to grow alongside your business.
Flodesk
Flodesk is an email marketing tool that lets small businesses design beautiful emails easily. The layout builder lets you design custom graphics, removing the need for a design tool like Canva. Flodesk also offers sign-up forms to build your list faster and various workflow automations.
It’s easy to use, and there are templates to help you get started. There is a 30-day free trial to test drive all the features. Best of all, it’s a fixed price service: $38/month flat for unlimited subscribers, and unlimited email sends.
Image courtesy of Constant Contact
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is growing fast among the full slate of email marketing tools. Many email marketing platforms offer automation, A/B testing, surveys, and the like; Constant Contact has all of that. The platform also boasts intuitive forms – to make it easier to build a list – and offers online trainings and webinars among a generally-high level of support (live chat, email, phone, and more). Pricing-wise, they have a 60-day free trial (no credit card required). After that, their pricing starts at $20/month.
Mailchimp
What small business owner hasn’t heard of Mailchimp? Long-known as one of the best email tools on the market, they’ve recently expanded their platform to be more of an all-in-one solution. One of their advantages for small businesses is their pricing structure; you can start at a Free level ($0 per month) or move up to Essentials (A/B, custom branding, and more support) or Standard (automation series, retargeting ads) all the way up to Premium (multivariate testing, advanced automation, phone support). Whatever your business needs and wherever it currently is operating, they have a plan for you.
BenchmarkONE
BenchmarkONE was specifically designed with small businesses in mind. The overall email marketing suite includes an intuitive drag and drop builder, professionally pre-designed email templates, and with a CRM included in one platform, they offer the ability to build your email list like a boss with responsive forms and automations. The Core pricing for BenchmarkONE is $79/month (although you can choose a smaller Lite package at $39/month). The Core package gives you five users, 500 contacts (although you can get more with an increased price), and 2,500 email sends.
Image courtesy of ConvertKit
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a great service if the backbone of your business is blogging; it’s ideal for professional bloggers and creators. Their pricing plans are based on subscribers, but up to 3,000 subscribers is only $49/month. With their simple signup forms, ConvertKit allows you to easily send enticing offers and incentives. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails.
Image courtesy of AWeber
AWeber
AWeber is one of the longest-tenured email marketing tools for small businesses, and one of the bigger advantages of their platform is that you get expert access regardless of the paid package you’re on. They also have a strong blog for those just getting started with email marketing, and offer ideas around pre-built email campaigns and more, allowing email marketing beginners to have a solid starting point.
Image courtesy of Substack
Substack
Substack is a newer place in this space; you’d need to work up to their core offerings. But, after you build a list, they make it very easy to publish and monetize that list based on your number of subscribers. If you’re a content-driven business or a visually-driven business and can send out beautiful emails, you can make money directly from your list. In most email marketing, there will be Calls-To-Action, but a lot of the revenue comes from the ultimate relationship-building. With Substack, the paid plans allow the revenue to be directly from the email subscribers. It’s a different model but worth exploring — but you need to start by building the list and the list’s trust in your offerings.
GetResponse
GetResponse comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, tracking, and autoresponders. Like many of the other tools on this list, they integrate with a variety of third-party tools like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc. Their basic plan starts at $15/month for 1,000 subscribers.
Image courtesy of Drip
Drip
Drip is great for e-commerce shops, in part because their intelligent e-commerce automation is high-level but also intuitive for new users to navigate. Their basic plan is only $49/month for 2,500 users with unlimited email sends and 24/7 support. Some of their larger customers include LiveNation and Trivago.
The bottom line
Most of these email marketing tools for small businesses will give you the same set of basic (and advanced) features, including list-building, A/B testing, intelligent automation, segmenting, and a wide array of templates. Some will be better than others in terms of the feature set of offerings; what really distinguishes most of these email marketing tools is their level of support. Ask previous colleagues what they thought of different platforms; post on LinkedIn and other platforms to determine. Your email marketing tool won’t be perfect; things will come up that need fixing. Support is crucial! But don’t get scared off by the potential option overload of all these email marketing tools. You need email marketing to build relationships, sell, and grow. Do your research, and you’ll find the best option for you.
email marketing tools free
Marketing trends and channels evolve over time. While some trends come and go quickly, one of the channels that has remained more or less the same is email. In fact, email continues to be the top channel for content marketing with both B2C and B2B marketers. 87% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers use it to nurture their audience.
It can even help you amplify your other marketing channels such as social. With that said, marketers still face a ton of challenges in their email marketing efforts. One of these key challenges is simply the amount of time it takes to create a great looking email from scratch. Without efficient tools, marketers may end up spending a lot of time creating and sending out emails that don’t exactly look stunning. This hinders productivity while dragging down your email marketing ROI.
A lot of companies settle for this situation because they’re not ready to invest in a tool to simplify the process. However, email marketing tools don’t necessarily have to be expensive. You can find plenty of free email marketing tools that can help you save time and money.
If you’re looking for a social management solution to complement your email marketing, test out a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social:
Start your free Sprout trial
Read on for our list of the top free email marketing tools:
- HubSpot Email Marketing
HubSpot, probably best known for their marketing automation platform, recently launched a free email marketing tool that can support a lot of a small business’ transactional email needs.
Whether you need to send kickback emails from lead offers, thank you emails after purchase, or just promote current campaigns, HubSpot Email Marketing’s free version can do that. One of the best parts of HubSpot’s free email tool is its ease of use. The tool features a handy drag-and-drop visual editor, and it also comes equipped with ready-made templates to get you up and running immediately.
What makes HubSpot Email Marketing stand out is, of course, its native integration with other HubSpot tools, such as the free-forever CRM. Once you start an account, you get access to both tools so you can create a centralized contacts database, organize it in lists, and manage and track email performance.
hubspot email marketing tool
- Sender
Sender is one of the best free email marketing tools in the market with features to ensure deliverability. It lets you create stunning newsletters without any HTML knowledge. Just choose from a template and customize it with elements like images, videos and text. You can even personalize your newsletters for each recipient to create an even bigger impact.
Sender dashboard screenshot
Sender’s robust analytics feature is one of the top reasons why it’s on our list. It lets you track who opened your emails and clicked on the links, when they were opened and more. It even helps you build accurate buyer profiles based on your subscriber actions, so you’ll be able to optimize your existing email strategy and craft compelling offers.
- Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a marketing communication platform that features both email marketing tools and additional functions such as customer relationship management and landing page creation. With over 70 design templates, Sendinblue’s email design functions make it easy to create a great-looking email. Plus, all of these templates are responsive, and you can preview your results to can ensure your design looks the way you want on any screen format.
After you design your email, you can use features like A/B testing and segmented recipient lists to take the manual effort and guesswork out of optimizing your campaigns and targeting your ideal audiences.
sendinblue email editor
- Omnisend
Omnisend is a sophisticated ecommerce marketing platform that integrates all your communication platforms in one place. Its free plan includes only email, but it’s more than enough to support the email marketing efforts of small and medium businesses. It allows you to automate your email delivery using behavioral triggers and easily time your communications based on your customers’ convenience.
You can utilize its comprehensive audience insights to send out more relevant email marketing messages. Design attractive newsletters using time-saving features like the Product Picker, which lets you select all the products you want to include in your email. You can also include scratch cards, discount coupon codes and gift boxes to further optimize your email performance.
Omnisend dashboard screenshot
- SendPulse
SendPulse advertises itself as a multi-channel marketing platform, but its email marketing feature is the most popular. It comes with a ton of professionally-designed email templates that you can easily customize using a drag-and-drop editor. You can then set up these customized emails to be automatically sent out at the right time based on user behavior, event trigger and other variables.
SendPulse’s subscriber rating feature is an excellent way to identify your most valuable subscribers. It lets you analyze the open and click rates as well as the read and unread rate of each subscriber. You can even set replaceable text fields to personalize your emails by name, gender, date of birth, age and job role.
SendPulse subscriber rating
- Benchmark Email
Benchmark Email is a great option for an email marketing tool to design responsive emails that look great no matter which device they’re viewed on. If you need to add images to your email, you can even edit the image right on the platform. The email editor lets you add effects, stickers and text to effectively send across your message.
You have the option to choose from tons of pre-designed templates based on industry, type and occasion. For the more HTML savvy, you can even use the code editor to build emails from scratch. The dual view feature lets you see your email design as you’re editing it, which simplifies the whole email creation process.
Benchmark Email responsive design templates
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- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a leader in email marketing tools that you’ve probably heard of. Their free plan provides you with basic email marketing features such as email creation and scheduling. What makes this a great email marketing tool is its smart recommendations feature, which provides you with valuable audience insights to optimize your marketing efforts.
Designing emails on the platform is easy using the Content Manager, where you can store your images and files for easy access. Mailchimp lets you automate your emails at crucial steps of the buyer journey, so you can easily send out welcome emails, order confirmations, abandoned cart reminders and more.
Mailchimp content manager screenshot
- MailerLite
Sophisticated features like the landing page builder and the pop-up customizer make MailerLite stand out among free email tools in the market. In addition to the basics like the drag-and-drop email builder, the tool comes with a rich text editor and a built-in photo editor to create stunning emails.
MailerLite email customizer
You can create responsive landing pages to match the emails that you send, which will improve your chances of driving conversions. You can run split tests on different variations of your email to see what works best to drive clicks and conversions. MailerLite also provides you with a comprehensive campaign report that contains important stats like click rate, unsubscribe rate, open rate and more.
- Mailjet
Mailjet comes with intuitive and collaborative tools to help you build effective email marketing campaigns. Customize any of the pre-designed templates and create responsive emails to impress any recipient no matter which device they’re using. If you work with a team, you’ll love the platform’s real-time collaboration feature that allows for seamless collaboration.
This email marketing tool also lets you add dynamic content so you can create personalized and relevant emails for each recipient. This helps you get much better results out of your email marketing campaigns. You can also integrate the platform into your CRM and easily manage your mailing list through a single dashboard.
Mailjet contact statistics
- Moosend
Moosend is an excellent email marketing tool that lets you automate repetitive tasks and saves you time. You can design behavioral email campaigns based on your subscribers’ information and/or activities. You can use its advanced segmentation feature to send highly accurate emails to each recipient, increasing open rate and click-through rate as well as ROI.
This tool provides you with a detailed campaign performance report so you know exactly how to optimize your campaigns and get even better results. You can even integrate it with some of your favorite apps to seamlessly pass on vital information between different tools. It’s also one of the only free email marketing tools that won’t include its logo in your emails.
Moosend email performance report
- EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a simple email marketing tool that runs on the Amazon SES infrastructure. While the free plan doesn’t offer as many features as some of the other free email marketing tools on this list, it does allow a lot more emails per month than most of them.
You can send out unlimited emails from as many email addresses as you like. This makes it the perfect solution for a small agency or entrepreneur representing other brands. It also integrates with third-party apps like MailOptin, WordPress and Zapier so you can seamlessly exchange customer data between different tools.
EmailOctopus email performance report
Bottom line
Most of these free email marketing tools come with robust features even without the need to upgrade to a paid plan. Small businesses and marketers should be able to make the most of them while saving time and money. Even if you need to upgrade to accommodate your business needs, you’ll find that many of the paid plans are affordable and flexible enough to fit your budget.
Conclusion
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