The best email marketing software is the one that fits your needs and helps you achieve your goals. That’s why we’ve created a guide to help you pick the right one for your business.
We’ll break down the different types of email marketing software, what they can do for your business, and how to choose which one is right for you. We’ll also review some of our favorites so you can see what’s out there in the market today!
Table of Contents
Offline 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.
6. Moosend
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.
7. AWeber
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 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 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.
email automation software
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you the power to automatically collect and segment email addresses. These can be segmented based on the user’s activity, inactivity, cookies, geographical location, and more.
OptinMonster lets you build stunning lead generation forms that are proven to grow your email list.
With its easy-to-use drag and drop builder, 50+ lead generation form templates, and 6 different campaign types, your forms will both work and look great.
It also offers seamless integration with many of the leading email service providers. That means you can exponentially grow your email list with OptinMonster and then send personalized automated emails via your email service provider.
Email Marketing Automation with OptinMonster
OptinMonster also offers a Real-Time Behavior Automation engine. This powerful engine identifies what users are looking for and shows the perfect optin campaign that’s more likely to convert them into customers.
For example, you can:
- Detect when your visitors are actively leaving leave your site to show relevant campaigns to convert
- Show targeted campaigns to visitors based on the area of the site they are visiting
- Recognize how visitors interact with other offers and follow up with new targeted campaigns
- And much more…
In a nutshell, OptinMonster boosts your email list by showing the right optin campaigns to the right people at the right time.
That means you can also collect and tag emails based on the users’ behavior and other available information.
Once you have segmented your email list, the only thing you need to do is integrate OptinMonster with your favorite email marketing service. Then, you can start sending targeted emails.
Features like this make OptinMonster one of the best tools for your digital marketing strategy.
Want to know what the end results will look like with OptinMonster? Take a look at a few examples:
- Before using OptinMonster, AdamEnfroy.com was getting just a few email subscribers. With OptinMonster, he added over 3000 subscribers to his list, which brings in $20,000 each month.
- Cosmetic Capital increased leads by 300% using a floating bar optin.
- After switching from another popup software, the Eczema Company saw an instant 2.5X boost in conversions.
Pricing: Starts at $9/month (when billed annually), so it’s perfect for small businesses to get started.
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2. RafflePrkess
One of the best ways to increase your email subscriber list is by running contests and giveaways. With RafflePress, you can host these contests on your own blog and social media platforms.
That makes it flexible enough to build campaigns for all of your favorite marketing channels.
Pricing: Starts at $49/month (billed annually), but you can get a lifetime license for $449!
Integrated Email Automation Marketing Tools
3. Contactually
Contactually is one of the neatest tools on the list. It’s a CRM platform that focuses on vetting contacts. First, it gathers contacts from your email inbox, website, and social media profiles. Then Contactually collects as much information as possible to guide your messaging.
If you’re looking for an email marketing tool and CRM for real estate professionals, you found it!
Pricing: Starts at $69/month for the Professional plan; the Accelerator plan is $119/month.
4. HubSpot
HubSpot is consistently ranked as one of the top marketing automation tools across a spectrum of tasks. One of its top uses involves streamlining email marketing services through automated workflows.
HubSpot can be one of your best assets when it comes to sales and marketing.
Pricing: HubSpot has several marketing automation tools for free. Paid plans range from $50/month for the Starter plan to the Enterprise plan starting at $1200/month. Their pricing will increase on November 1, 2019.
5. Intercom
Suppose you’re trying to teach your customers/users about your app. In that case, Intercom lets you send automated email conversations directly in the app. This gives them assistance where they’re most likely to see it.
Pricing: Pricing for the All-in-One solution starts at $87/month.
6. BenchmarkONE
Just like Gmail now uses tags to optimize messages, so does BenchmarkONE. You can create tags and assign them to specific contacts based on their interests and the stage of the funnel they’re currently in.
Pricing: BenchmarkONE has a free plan for lead generation and email marketing basics. Their paid plans start at $79/month (billed semi-annually).
7. E-goi
Sometimes you want to move beyond email. With E-goi, you can break up any email campaign by sending out updates via fax, SMS, or even voice message.
Pricing: Plans start at $22.50/month, but all of the best automation features seem to be in the Corporate plan, requiring a quote.
8. Act-On
For large companies that have a bunch of different inbound, outbound, and lead nurturing programs running simultaneously, Act-On integrates them together to maximize their return.
Pricing: There are 2 pricing plans, starting at $900/month (billed annually).
9. LeadSquared
As the name suggests, LeadSquared streamlines the lead scoring process by automating email marketing services and combining them with sales activities for increased efficacy.
Pricing: Plans with marketing automation features start at $150/month (billed annually). However, automation workflows are only in the Basic plan and above, starting at $400/month (billed annually).
10. SAP Sales Cloud (Formerly CallidusCloud)
Another great lead qualifying tool is SAP Sales Cloud (formerly CallidusCloud). This technology automates the process of identifying promising leads while weeding out ones that are deemed to be unqualified or high-risk/low-reward.
Pricing: Contact for quote.
Conclusion
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