Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers and grow your business. It’s fast, inexpensive, easy to do, and best of all—you can reach a lot of people.
But before you start an email campaign, you need to choose the right email marketing software. So how do you know which one is right for you? This article will help you figure out what features are important and what questions to ask when selecting the right email marketing software provider.
Table of Contents
How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Software
Drag-and-drop builder, plus templates
Modern email marketing software provides an easy way to create beautifully branded emails. Save time by starting with a variety of pre-built, mobile ready templates. Use an easy-to-use builder to tweak to your brand’s guidelines, no coding required.
2
List growth and signup forms
Successful email marketers know that bigger isn’t always better. Grow your audience in meaningful ways with people who are actively interested in what you are saying. Consider using a platform with native signup forms for your website, or in-person, to capture customer emails and reach more people.
ENLISTSashi KumarGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: Boston, USA
WUFOODave DavisGENDER: MALELOCATION: Oakland, USA
SUMOMESarita RaoGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: New York, USA
OPTINMONSTERDavid MatoviGENDER: MALELOCATION: Moscow, Russia
WORDPRESSJessica FloresGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: Sydney, Australia
SUBSCRIBE PAGEJim HentGENDER: MALELOCATION: San Francisco, USA
FORMSophie BurtGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: Paris, France
ENLISTChris NaraGENDER: MALELOCATION: Boston, USA
FACEBOOKKate SmithGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: Oakland, USA
SUBSCRIBE BUTTONWill PerryGENDER: MALELOCATION: New York, USA
OPTINMONSTERAmy LewisGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: Moscow, Russia
WORDPRESSJustin JonesGENDER: MALELOCATION: Sydney, Australia
SUBSCRIBE PAGEAllison DeloGENDER: FEMALELOCATION: San Francisco, USA
WUFOOAndre SchwinGENDER: MALELOCATION: Paris, France
3
Apps and integrations
Apps and integrations can help you grow your audience by pulling in rich customer data that you can turnaround and use in your targeted emails. Your apps can give you a ton of valuable customer insights including purchase history, demographics, preferences and more.
4
Segmentation and personalization
Segmentation is the first step to hyper-targeted emails. Slice up your subscriber list into common groupings and suggest products and services accordingly. Start segmenting by gender, then get more granular from there by including past purchases and VIP segments. Personalize your email and you’ll have even more success.
All recipientsOr, the subscribers of:Male customersFemale customers5
A/B testing
With the right email marketing software you can test anything—subject lines, images, messaging, CTA buttons, send times, even message length. If you can see what’s working for your audience you can learn from there, and polish, to create the most successful emails ever.
Campaign Monitor gives you everything you need to run beautifully-designed, professional, email marketing campaigns to grow your business.Get started for free6
Reporting and analytics
The most powerful email marketers are highly strategic and analyze data over days, months and years to truly understand their click throughs, click-to-open rates and overall engagement trends. Look for a detailed set of dashboards that translate this information into actionable insights.7
Marketing automation
Consider this “set-it-and-forget-it” technology. Create a personalized customer journey based on actions your subscribers take – like signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase. These actions trigger additional and highly relevant emails to keep the customer engaged over time.
8
24/7 support
Support is critical even with the best email marketing software providers. Think about the kind of support and communication you’ll be most comfortable with. Do you anticipate needing basic tech support or more strategic guidance? Choose a provider that will give you the kind of help you need, on the channels you prefer, to hit your email marketing goals.99%CUSTOMER SATISFACTION24/7GLOBAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT9
Deliverability
It’s not just about sending, it’s about receiving. Deliverability means that your email actually reaches the inbox without any blockers. Partner with a provider that understands deliverability best practices so you can be sure the max number of people see your campaign.
10
Options for developers
Drag-and-drop email marketing for the DIY marketer is a beautiful thing, but some marketing teams have developers who can code HTML emails. If this is an option for you, select a platform that provides this capability and will support your developer with the resources to do so.
free email marketing tools
1. Sendinblue
Free Plan: Up to unlimited subscribers and 300 emails per day
Paid plans: Start at $25 per month
SendinBlue offers a range of plans aimed at firms at different stages of their growth:
- Free – for those getting started with SendinBlue
- Lite – for new marketers
- Essential – for growing businesses
- Premium – for marketing pros
- Enterprise – for marketers who need more
The Free plan limits users to sending 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts. Higher plans remove the daily sending limit (replacing it with a monthly figure), remove the SendinBlue logo from emails, and expand channels to include Facebook ads, landing pages, and marketing automation.
Users of all plans gain access to a mobile-friendly email designer, an email template library, email and SMS personalization, SMS marketing, and A/B testing.
2. Omnisend
Free Plan: Up to 500 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $16 per month
Omnisend is an all-inclusive marketing automation platform. The free plan, though, is designed for merchants starting to promote their products with email marketing. While the free plan comes with a limited number of international SMS credits and Web Push notifications, you can purchase additional SMS credits if needed. In addition, the free plan allows you to use email campaigns and automated workflows to reach your customers with relevant messages – if you don’t exceed sending 500 emails per month.
If you opt for the standard plan, you can send 12x your contact list size; you also receive a limited number of SMS credits and unlimited Web Push notifications. Should you need additional SMS credits, these are available for purchase. The paid plans also significantly increase the number of segments. For instance, you can set up a flow to automatically reach people who reached a particular webpage in your online store but left or people who abandoned their shopping cart before completing the purchase.All plans come with the ability to segment your contact lists, build automations, and use features like popup boxes, sign-up boxes, landing pages, and the wheel of fortune.
3. EngageBay
Free Plan: Up to 500 contacts and 1,000 branded emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $7.79/mo for the Basic Marketing plan, paid biennially
EngageBay offers a range of products to attract targeted web visitors, engage and capture leads, nurture and turn them into happy customers. Email marketing is included in both their Marketing Bay plan and their All-in-One Suite.
You can choose from a wide array of email marketing templates to suit your business needs. You can use pre-designed templates or personalize one to meet your requirements. Use their drag and drop interface to create a template that suits your business needs. Design beautiful email templates with rich text formatting.
Apply filters of your choice. Their filters range from filtering based on country, created date, source, to tags, and a lot more. In addition, EngageBay helps you personalize your emails by adding your contacts’ attributes to the emails, rendering a personal touch.
4. EmailOctopus
Free Plan: Up to 2,500 subscribers and unlimited emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $19 per month
Email Octopus runs via Amazon SES. It offers all the main features required for email marketing and automation. All its plans follow a “fishy” theme, and the name for the free plan is the Shrimp Plan. This plan allows you to run email campaigns only, with the emails including Email Octopus branding. The sending stats are only kept for 90 days. Although Email Octopus permits you to send unlimited emails, Amazon charges you $0.10 for every additional 1,000 emails, once you exceed 62,000 emails per month.
The paid plans (which start with a 10,000-subscriber limit) allow both email and automation, send unbranded emails, and keep the stats forever.
All users have access to email marketing templates. You can also upload your own, with no limits on the number of templates. You can use Email Octopus to send beautifully designed newsletters or simple personalized plain text emails.
You can use their hosted forms, to collect email addresses without any complex integrations or code. Alternatively, you can use their embedded forms or WordPress plugin and collect subscriber information on your website, without writing a line of code.
Email Octopus provides real-time analytics on your campaigns.
5. MailChimp
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Free Plan: Up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $9.99 per month
MailChimp is probably the best-known emailing mailing tool covered here. They regularly update their product and add new features. They have recently expanded to become an all-in-one marketing platform.
MailChimp has always been known for the quality of its free offering. It includes all the basics for businesses that are just getting started. It now offers fewer email marketing features in the free plan than previously but has instead added a basic service for a wider range of marketing channels: email, landing pages, Facebook and Instagram ads, social posting, postcards, and pop-up forms. The higher paid levels add in an additional channel – retargeting ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram. The free version also includes a basic CRM with a single audience and related dashboard, tags and segments, and contact profiles.
You gain access to Mailchimp’s Content Studio in the free version, allowing you to sync and store all your photos, graphics, and other files, so your campaigns are always consistent. It also includes a range of basic templates, with additional ones available in the paid plans.
You can access some single-step automation on the free plan, such as welcome emails, order notifications, abandoned cart, and more.
6. MailerLite
Free Plan: Up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $10 per month
MailerLite was born in 2010 to give businesses a simple yet powerful email solution to help them grow. It offers a limited free plan for those with fewer than 1,000 subscribers wanting limited features. All the paid plans offer the full feature set (and allow you to send unlimited emails), varying only by the number of subscribers,
You still gain access to many useful features with the free plan, however. These include the drag and drop editor, the rich text editor, and the built-in photo editor. You can organize things in their file manager and create mobile-friendly email newsletters. You have access to email automation and advanced segmentation, and unlike some of the competition, MailerLite includes A/B testing in its free plan.
7. MoonMail
Free Plan: Up to 2,000 subscribers and 300 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $23.99 per month
MoonMail describes itself as the next generation omnichannel communication platform. This means that it includes email, SMS, Voice, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Bots.
The Free Forever plan allows you to send up to 300 emails/month for free – one campaign per day to a maximum of 10 recipients per campaign. This is quite a limitation, so most people will quickly move onto the Starter pack.
Free plan users still have access to a powerful drag and drop editor, although MoonMail’s branding appears in the footer if you are on the Free plan.
It is ok for beginning firms, however, as you can build a list of up to 2,000 recipients and begin segmenting them. Once you have segments of greater than 10 people, however, you will have to move into the Starter Plan, though.
8. Moosend
Free Plan: Up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $10 per month
Moosend could be an excellent choice for somebody with a small email list, as it allows you to send unlimited emails to 1,000 subscribers per month. You gain access to all Moosend’s features and only begin paying once you exceed that 1,000-subscriber limit (at which point you have built a successful list).
Moosend provides custom sign-up forms to help you build your email list. You can segment your list to help you better target your emails.
Moosend offers a user-friendly drag and drop editor with a free template library. It includes multiple tools to help you design your emails.
It provides an entire tool chest of automations, simplifying your emailing process, using a three-step process:
- Select the event that will set the automation in motion
- Set the filter(s) you want for the trigger you selected
- Choose from the list the action to be performed
Of course, you will want to know how successful your email campaigns have been. Moosend includes a comprehensive set of analytics.
9. Sender
Free Plan: Up to 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $10 per month
Sender provides a full range of features to help lead to effective email marketing. The free plan allows you to access all the features, with the only limitations being the subscribers and maximum monthly emails.
All the company’s technical servers and legal entities are based in the EU, so it makes a point of being GDPR compliant.
You can use the software to prepare stylish emails in seconds. It includes free newsletter templates and can customize all aspects of the template to suit your unique needs. You simply choose a template from the gallery and drag and drop content elements, such as text, images, or videos. You can personalize your newsletter’s subject line or body.
Sender includes a range of automation features, including drip campaigns, welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, happy birthday emails, nurture-your-subscribers campaigns, and emails to onboard your newcomers.
10. Campayn
Free Plan: Up to 500 subscribers and 12,500 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $19 per month
As its name indicates, you can use Campayn to build quality email campaigns. If you only have a small email list (fewer than 500), then you can access their free Basic Plan. This offers all the core features.
As with most modern email marketing tools, Campayn features a simple drag and drop interface. You can set the perfect backdrop for your email message with a beautiful design that reflects your brand. You can use one of their templates or design your own.
It includes a contact manager that helps you keep your contacts up-to-date and track how they’re interacting with your emails. You can segment your list.
Campayn provides numerous options for designing sign-up forms, including website forms, hosted forms, Facebook forms, and pop-up lightbox forms.
It also makes life easier by enabling you to automate your most popular email marketing campaigns based on triggers for key customer activities.
Once you’ve started sending emails, you can track the success of every email campaign with detailed, real-time reports that allow you to see who opened it.
Conclusion
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