Is email marketing a priority for your business in 2024? 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.
Why Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service is Important?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for small businesses.According to
marketing statistics, email marketing, on average, sees a 4400 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 direct contact with your customers.
Not convinced about email marketing? See these
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 a 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.
1.Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest-growing email marketing services 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, a 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 allows 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 and especially their ease of use, we rate Constant Contact as 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 $12 /month.
WPBeginner users can use our
Constant Contact coupon code to get an additional 20% off.
2.
Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue) Brevo, formerly known as 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.
Brevo includes user-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 its AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
Brevo offers a completely free email marketing plan with 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 Starter.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.
Brevo 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 software in the customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing space.
Their email marketing service is free to start, and it comes with a lot of advanced 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 features you’d expect from 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, a 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 start 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 notifications.
Most other free email marketing plans are restricted, but Omnisend is confident in their value proposition, so they offer almost 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 builders 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 through customer journey optimization.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 customizable 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.Campaigner Campaigner is an advanced email marketing suite that comes with powerful automation features to increase conversions and sales.
With their easy visual builder, you can quickly build simple or complex automation workflows to nurture subscribers and customers through your conversion funnel.
You can even build combined email and SMS automations to connect with customers on their preferred channel.
You can choose from many different events, triggers, and actions to create workflows for welcome series, abandoned cart series, re-engagement campaigns, milestone campaigns, customer service series, and much more.
Plus, you can add personalization options like advanced segmentation, custom fields, geo location, purchase behavior, past engagement, and
dynamic content.This helps you create highly relevant messages based on the unique traits on your subscribers.
Creating beautiful email campaigns is also easy with Campaigner.It includes a drag-and-drop editor and over 900+ responsive email templates that you can use to get started.
Other smart features include conversion tracking, autoresponders, A/B testing, sign up forms, landing pages, and more.You can also get the Reputation Defender addon to protect your list from invalid or risky emails that can harm your deliverability.
Campaigner offers a free 30-day trial that gives you access to all of their features.
Pricing starts at $59 per month for up to 5,000 subscribers.
If you have a large email list, Campaigner’s pricing is more affordable when compared to other email marketing solutions.For example, Omnisend costs $88+ per month for 5,000 subscribers.
6.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 offers 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, including WPBeginner, 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.We can also use the
WPForms integration to add specific customer data tags to improve personalization.
For more details, you can see
why WPBeginner switched from Mailchimp to Drip.
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 start from $39 / 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 channels.This makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.
7.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.You can use their automation workflow designer to offer a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter subscribers.
Moosend offers 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, an AI engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.Moosend offers a 30-day free trial with an unlimited number of emails (no credit card required).
After that, their pricing starts at $9 per month for their Pro plan, which includes a landing page builder, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, team management, and more.
Bonus: AWeber AWeber is one of the 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 has other powerful email marketing features such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag-based subscriber segmentation.
It also offers many integrations with popular CRM software,
email verification tools, membership plugins like MemberPress, lead generation tools, and more.
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 $12.50/month.You can also sign up for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.See our complete AWeber review for more details.
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 it 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 has an extensive knowledge base with great learning material.
A lot of ConvertKit features, such as
paid newsletters, are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers, which is 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 $9/month.They also offer a 30-day refund policy.
Their Creator Pro plan also includes advanced functionality like a 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 the best email marketing software list without including Mailchimp due to their sheer popularity.
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple
email tracking for analytics.It also allows you to set up delivery times based on the user’s time zone, and you can set up 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, or check out our picks of the best Mailchimp plugins.
When it comes to marketing automation features, the Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers in our list such as
HubSpot, Drip, or ConvertKit.
In 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 tutorial 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 1,000 emails to up to 500 subscribers in 1 audience.
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 $20/month, and the pricing increases based on the number of subscribers in your audience.
However, if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, then you’d have to move to their $350 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, a 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
Brevo.
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.Their free plan is great for lead generation because it lets you store unlimited subscribers.
Pro Tip: Get More Email Subscribers, Fast!
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 seamlessly integrates with all the best email marketing services 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 1.2 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, Patreon, and more.
You can read our in-depth
OptinMonster review for more details.
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 6 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 softwarewith 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 softwareand 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 a few things you can do to make sure that your marketing emails always get delivered.
1.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’s email address.
As a business, it’s important that you use a
professional business email address (like [email protected]) and not a generic hotmail or gmail address.
This will help make sure that your email deliverability rate is higher than the industry average.
2.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 personalized welcome email to all new subscribers and then segmenting 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 solutions for 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
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, because their free plan doesn’t have a limit on the number of subscribers.HubSpot, Omnisend, 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 either
Omnisend or Drip since they offer robust eCommerce marketing automation tools that seamlessly integrate with both Shopify and WooCommerce.
Some eCommerce power users prefer Klaviyo for Shopify email marketing, but their platform is quite expensive for small businesses.
Which is the best email marketing platform for WordPress?
Most email marketing platforms have deep integration with WordPress because it’s the most
popular website builder on the planet, powering over 43% of all websites.With that said, the best email marketing platforms for WordPress are Constant Contact, Brevo, and HubSpot.
Over the last few years, a lot of business owners are also switching to native WordPress email marketing solutions like
FunnelKit Automations because it helps you save on costs big time while offering all the powerful features like broadcast emails, automated drip emails, CRM, and more right from inside WordPress.
Website owners use FunnelKit for creating emails and then use the
WP Mail SMTP plugin along with an SMTP service like SendLayer, Amazon SES, SendGrid, or others to ensure that all emails reliably get to customers’ inboxes.
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 services, including many that are not in our email platform lists above, such as:
MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Ontraport, Mailjet, Benchmark, Campaign Monitor, InfusionSoft (now Keap), Klaviyo, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, MailPoet, Email Octopus, Sendy, and more.
The top email marketing services that we have chosen 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.
Brevo(formerly 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 notifications 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 the
must have WordPress plugins for business websites, and our comparison of the best business phone services for small businesses.
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