Everyone is looking towards social media, influencers, chatbots, and other methods to reach their ideal customers. In the meantime, email marketing sits in the back unused by so many people.
Email brings in $38 for every dollar spent and yet, so many marketers and online business owners see it as a waste of time. A 3,800% ROI doesn’t sound like a waste of time, and we believe that email is still the most powerful tool for reaching your audience.
There are so many email marketing services available to small business owners; it can seem challenging to choose only one. But in the end, picking one that is best for you is most likely what you should do. Luckily there is a lot of affordable and free email newsletter software these days, and they are loaded with features. So it is sort of a kid in the candy shop type of selection, what is your flavour? We have 17 of our favourite options to choose from, and by the end of this article, choosing an email marketing provider that’s right for you should be a no-brainer.
Gist
Gist is an all-in-one growth software that serves as a central source of truth through the entire customer journey. They have powerful automation features, a clean and fast UI, and many tools for not only email marketing but other useful features needed to run a small business. These include live chat, forms, meeting, and a knowledge base.
They offer a free plan and their professional plan starts at $29/month.
Sender.net
Sender is an email marketing tool, which has all features to create powerful email campaigns. The 5 most important things that make the Sender tool the best:
- High deliverability and GDPR compliant.
- Free forever plan up to 2500 contacts and send up to 15000 emails/month. Without daily limits. All features included.
- With any plan you will get all features and 24/7 support. Doesn’t matter whether it is a small or medium plan.
- Have API and CMS integrations.
- Have free email templates, allow to create your own email design with photos, videos or import HTML code.
All this ensures a smooth email marketing process.
Pricing starts at $9 for a premium account with 5000 subscribers.
MailChimp
MailChimp is simple, easy to use, great for beginners, and the most popular email service provider on our list . The service allows you to collect complex statistics about your audience while building a list that is sure to generate an ROI. From the dashboard, you can import lists, create campaigns, and even send surveys to your email subscribers.
Using MailChimp, you can also track who has opened emails so you can figure out open rates and tweak your email headers and copy. It allows you to make changes based on the success of your campaign. Overall, MailChimp is a simple yet powerful option, and is an excellent start for someone looking for the fundamentals.
The service is free for up to 2,000 subs or 12,000 emails. Pricing starts at $10 for a premium account.
Ontraport
Here is a service that offers an all in one solution for people looking to scale their business. Ontraport offers a complete CRM autoresponder, task management system, and payment processing. This service has a lot more features than many email marketing services.
Ontraport also has a high deliverability rate, so marketers don’t have to worry about their emails making it into the inbox as much. This software starts at $79 per month, and they have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Constant Contact
The main thing that separates Constant Contact from some of the competitors is the amount of customization and design options you have with your emails. You can roll through hundreds of templates and an assortment of cool features like polls, surveys, and videos.
As with most other services, you can create reports, including bounce rates, email forwards, click-throughs, and shares. Constant Contact also allows you to include social sharing buttons in your emails, which can help boost traffic.
Constant Contact pricing starts at $20 per month for the basic plan, and they have a premium option at $45.
HubSpot
The HubSpot platform offers a ton of different tools with one of them being an email marketing service. With this software, you can generate emails, search for specific emails, look at data like bounce and delivery rate, and edit emails.
You also have the choice to create your emails or use their templates. You can schedule emails in advance and personalize emails with variable population tools.
Something we love about HubSpot is that it offers two different unsubscribe options for your list. They can choose to unsubscribe permanently, or they could take a quick break from your emails, which helps convince people to stay aboard.
HubSpot has three different pricing options. The starter pack is $50 per month, and you get lead analytics, flows, collected forms, and the CRM. The basic plan is $200, and you get everything we mentioned plus email marketing, landing pages, and an analytics page. Finally, the pro plan is $800 per month, and you get everything we discussed plus automation tools, smart content, split testing, and more.
They also have a $2,400 a month plan that offers special events, advanced reporting, and lead scoring that you may want to look into if you’re starting to get some huge ROI from your email marketing.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor provides a useful tool that allows you to see what your emails will look like on popular email platforms like Gmail and Yahoo. This tool helps you ensure that emails are displaying correctly across all platforms.
You have the choice of uploading your own templates, but it doesn’t appear that they provide templates for you. You would need to have a basic understanding of HTML. Using Campaign Monitor, you can set up autoresponders and segment your subscribers, so only certain people receive specific responses.
This service has two pricing platforms. Basic starts at $9 per month, and the upgraded plan is $29.
AWeber
AWeber is a popular tool for digital marketers and is one of the more established email service providers out there. They have an autoresponder that allows you to engage with your subscribers. You also get access to 150+ templates that provide uniqueness and variability to your emails.
You can also integrate AWeber with other services and CRMs to help create a seamless process. AWeber is also especially popular in the e-commerce world because you can integrate it with your shopping cart. This feature allows you to add customers to your list as soon as they make a purchase.
With AWeber, you can have 500 subscribers for $19, and they have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Infusionsoft
This platform is incredible, and while it’s expensive; if you have the budget, it’s well worth it. Building campaigns is simple and easy with Infusionsoft because you have a ton of customization and personalization options to make your subscribers feel like their email was made for them.
This platform really stands out when we look at its lead scoring feature. They provide more lead management tools than most other CRMs, and while they are at a higher price point, they’ll bring you an ROI.
Their most basic package starts at $199 per month, and it continues to go up from there.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a crowd favourite for those who love lead management and automation options. It’s slightly lower priced compared to some other vendors with similar functionality, and it offers a lot of benefits with an easy to use dashboard.
You get everything you would ever need to manage lists, send emails, customize emails, manage auto-responses, and create sales automation. They even offer incredible training and one-on-one video chats with representatives to help you understand the platform. ActiveCampaign takes things up a notch.
They offer a variety of payment options that get as low as $7.65 if you pay for a year in advance. Their pricing plans go up as high as $149 for everything if you pay monthly.
ConvertKit
This service might be newer to the game, but they bring a lot to the table. ConvertKit uses a tag-based subscriber system that allows you to organize your leads based on the tags you associate with each one.
Automation with this service is also simple, and they use a system that closely resembles what ActiveCampaign does. They allow you to build your workflow using their visual builder that takes subscribers through the campaign from beginning to end.
If they opt-in, they go down a different path than they would if they opened and bounced. That’s an example, but there are many ways to push your leads through the campaign.
One of the best things about ConvertKit is that you can do all of this editing directly from the workflow dashboard. You can change emails, forms, and entire automations directly from your workflow. It’s like the Wix of email marketing services.
ConvertKit offers a ton of subscription plans ranging from $29 per month to almost $4,000.
Drip
We chose to review this one next because it closely resembles both ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit. Drip uses features like message personalization, e-commerce integration, and deep analytics.
With this software, you can build visual emails and create workflow automations, and it contains some seriously powerful segmentation options. One thing that Drip offers is a conversion tracking feature that is easy to use and integrate into your email marketing strategy.
Drip has a starter plan that’s free up to 100 subs, and their basic package is $41 for 2500 subs.
Sendlane
Sendlane makes generating email marketing campaigns simple and is one of the newer kids on the block . They provide you with detailed training and a simple interface to help prepare email lists. The service also offers complete automation at an affordable price. You can manage behaviour-based automation trees and track events because every action your subscriber takes gets recorded in the system.
You also get smart retargeting that initiates specific workflows based on the actions your subscribers take. Here are some of the features:
- Visual editors
- Journey tracker
- List management
- Third-party integrations
- Machine learning
- Real-time reporting
Sendlane offers a variety of pricing options ranging from $25 a month to over $219 per month. They also offer special pricing choices for larger companies looking for more than 25,000 profiles.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is great for e-commerce because it integrates well with major platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce. For as low as $20 per month, you get advanced email marketing, auto-responders, drip campaigns, images, templates, and landing pages.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue does both marketing emails and transactional emails, and they offer a lot of the features you would expect from an email marketing service. They have email preview options that allow you to view your emails on mobile and different platforms. You can create lists of subscriber data, segment lists, and create profiles for each lead.
Sendinblue offers plenty of customization and personalization tools as well. They offer a free plan that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day, which is great. If you need more than that you could upgrade to their $66 per month plan that offers you 120,000 emails per month.
MailerLite
MailerLite has a wide assortment of free options like marketing automation and a simple to use interface. You also get an easy to operate landing page editor to allow you to host on their sponsored hosting or you can get your own domain.
They have simple reporting and an easy to understand dashboard. MailerLite is both pleasant and simple to use without all of the unnecessary bells and whistles. It’s a great service that has its purpose in the marketplace. It’s a place where you build lists, customize emails, and send emails.
They have four primary pricing options. For 2,500 subscribers you pay $15 per month, and it goes all the way up to $75 a month for 15,000 subscribers.
Moosend
We find the main upside of Moosend to be its user-friendliness. This platform is easy for people with little email marketing experience to jump right in. The software also offers an assortment of reporting tools, split testing, and great customer support. They are also a relative new-comer and are rapidly releasing new features.
They offer a few different pricing options. For up to 1,000 subscribers the service is completely free, and their plans run up to 1,000,000 subscribers. It appears that their plans are catered to the individual because they also have pay-as-you-go plans that use credits.
SendPulse
This cloud-based marketing software allows users to manage their email, texts, and push notifications using one tool. Setting up emails using a drag-and-drop system and templates makes the entire process simple and easy.
The software also offers different split testing tools, and if subscribers elect for text notifications, users can send personalized messages directly to their list in over 200 countries.
SendPulse uses predictive analytics to help their users determine the best time to reach out to clients based on a number of factors.
SendPulse has a monthly subscription-based payment plan that varies depending on how many messages you want to send. For example, its $8.85 for 10,000 messages and as much as $275 for 500,000. They also have similar plans for email.
GetResponse
In addition to other features you’d come to expect from a powerful email service provider, GetResponse has an assortment of tracking options that allow you to view who views your emails, who unsubscribes, and who complains. You’ll also gather data on how many of your emails didn’t reach their destination. The data is easy to interpret because you’ll receive it in pie charts and graphs.
GetResponse also provides you with plenty of training via FAQ sections, webinars, and tutorials. Their pricing starts at $15 a month, and this plan offers you 1,000 subs.
What Service Do You Use?
If you use a service we didn’t list here drop us a comment and let us know what you use and why. All 17 of these email marketing services have their pros and cons, but overall, they are all excellent choices depending on where you are at with your email marketing. Make sure you do plenty of research and make the right choice for your business! Don’t be afraid to demo various vendors, audit them, and ask them plenty of questions. Since email marketing is essential to any business that does their marketing online, choosing the right email marketing service for you can be a game-changer and really take your email marketing to the next level.
