Email marketing is one of the very effective tools for digital marketers. Despite new modes of marketing and promotion, email marketing never lost its importance. Emails are still significant to the audience, and they open them with the same level of excitement for something important. Email marketing goes beyond direct advertisements. It provides marketers with a unique opportunity to engage customers with surveys, newsletters, and special offers. Email proves a great methodology to gain customer acquisition, retention, and engagement.
All a marketer needs are to set a strategy before using email marketing. One should be clear with the agenda, content, and design. Suppose one has the target audience in bulk, say 1k, for example, then it needs a strong marketing tool to compose, send, and track emails. Along with this, it will require you to integrate email campaign data with your other backend systems.
Email marketing services can do all that comes to the best of expectations. Once the user opens an email, it gives a stagnant scan of the content in it. So, use a great subject line, visuals, and CTA. After a set of activities to make email successful, shooting it and maintaining the data is a challenge. Email marketing tools give ease of use, support, and other features.
How to Find a Great and Best-suited Email Marketing Tool?
A great email marketing tool possesses the ability to create engaging newsletters with drag-and-drop features. Such email marketing tools are powered by smart infrastructure and easy-to-use interfaces. One should be able to send personalized bulk emails at once. Targeted emails should also be launched without much effort using a tool. This segment is also called marketing automation.
Apart from the email marketing service, an ideal tool should be capable of managing contact lists by categorizing users into groups and tracking the campaign performance.
Ultimately, a great email service makes an effort to ensure that the email marketing campaign would not end up in the spam folder.
Here are the top 10 must-have features for email marketing tools:
1. Operational Email Deliverability
Your messaging, photos and linking strategy has no use if the user does not receive your email. Deliverability is the biggest challenge in the entire game. Email service providers need to keep a hold on the pulse and ensure continuity in email deliverability. You have to keep working on your reputation as a good sender. Otherwise, your reputation starts getting spoiled. Email marketing platform has a built-in campaign monitor in the ESP software that helps to track emails. To check that are targeted as expected and which email addresses you need to delete from your distribution list.
2. Email Journey Builder
Automation for abandoned cart campaigns or nurture campaigns has the highest ROI. Such an automated process allows you to set and forget the campaign for a tentative date and time. Just drag and drop to design your email template, and shoot the email. Add text, images, and buttons without any HTML code. This way you can do this on your own without any coding knowledge. This automated tool service helps to create a professional email in the shortest possible time. Create emails that engage your current and prospective customers.
3. Personalized Emails using Dynamic Content
You can leverage your customer relations by using detailed information and shooting personalized emails. This activity positions your brand in the online market. Personalized emails and messaging have been proven to be very impactful every time, improving open and click-through rates. Tools allow you to customize email by targeting customers with their names.
4. Send Time Optimization
Time optimization includes sending emails on time and also monitoring the time when the users opened your email. You can get a complete idea about conversion opportunities, along with the optimal chances of a robust customer base.
5. Live Content
Whenever clients open the mail, whichever call to action and promotional deals you want to add, you can do that in real-time with the email marketing tool. In an instant, the tool allows you to preset the deals and offers you want to add to the time limit.
6. Support from Marketing Experts
Support is the main focus and tools are dedicated to helping you. You can learn the system and get your emails to the right inbox. Automated chatbot integration helps you to keep your customers engaged whenever they open the mail.
7. Community
Some tools allow you to connect with other marketers, learn from competitors, and share ideas. The Internet is full of information and resources, but still, a community with many users in the same niche introduces a great sort of competition. You can use emails to target that whole community and enjoy popularity.
8. 24/7 Online Tech Support
An email marketing tool must have online tech support, as the user who is trusting that tool for the marketing purpose has the right to get help regarding the same. Customers love that service where they get the best tech and process support anytime and anywhere.
9. System Status
The marketing tool should always show a dashboard with the status of ongoing campaigns; this way the markets stay engaged with the progress and think about the next marketing plan onwards.
10. Integrate with Your Tech Stack
Hundreds of apps and tools go with visibility and monitoring. The main concern comes with parallelism. The user needs to confirm whether the app is integrative with the marketing model or not.
Most Popular Email Marketing Service Providers
Now we are presenting the top 10 picks for most popular email marketing service providers, helping out with the tech stack they are using and how they are best in all manners:
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact Email Marketing Services is one of the fastest-growing email marketing service providers. It is a world-class easy to use and beginner-friendly tool, liked by most customers globally.
It allows you to manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, the marketing calendar, and more. All you need is just to create a free account.
In the free plan you can access unlimited emails, a free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.
Their Email Plus accounts offer powerful and mind-blowing features like coupons, online donations, email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, and subject line A/B testing. This way you can send targeted emails and maximize the chances of getting your mail opened, which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
They provide contact options with unmatched customer support via live chat, phone calls, email, and community support. They also offer a vast library of helpful resources. They also conduct seminars to help small businesses grow ahead with the best email marketing ideas.
Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial (no credit card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $ 9.99 /month.
2. SendinBlue
Sendinblue Email Marketing Software is a complete email marketing and messaging software for businesses. It is one of the fastest-growing email marketing service providers in Europe. It is an easy-to-use platform with excellent orientation, tools, and features to create beautiful and engaging emails. They provide a simple drag-and-drop email editor. That makes it perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.
SendinBlue is powered by marketing automation tools that are user-friendly. These tools allow you to send transactional emails. You can segment users and create workflows for automatic follow-up emails. Their AI algorithms ensure the best email deliverability and give you access to sending bulk emails in one shot.
SendinBlue offers a free email marketing plan with unlimited contacts. You can send up to 300 emails per day with their branding in the free plan. Their paid plans start from $25 per month for Lite. You can change pricing and include SMS to your account, cost changes as per preferences and requirements made in the plan per features. Their premium plan includes advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This plan has been improved and users now will get more value for the same price.
SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP protocol for bulk email marketing services. You can use it to power transactional or automated emails from your WordPress website. If you have a large website, and you have to send real-time content-based emails then this tool is perfect for you.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot email marketing CRM is one of the well-known CRM, providing email marketing space. Their email marketing service is free to start and comes with a lot of powerful automated features. This means this tool is designed to grow your business.
You can use their easy drag-and-drop email builder, along with this there are a bulk of templates to help you create a custom newsletter. You can select the template that matches your brand’s personality and colors. You can personalize emails based on certain things like device type, country, list membership, or any other custom information. You can do this by integrating the native Hubspot CRM.
Hubspot possesses all those features, you expect on the enterprise level from marketing software. You will get all the features of an ideal marketing software such as A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, send time optimization, high email deliverability, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.
All level users, whether they are small business owners, medium enterprises, or large companies, opt for HubSpot because it offers an all-in-one marketing hup. It is the platform that simplifies everything, whether it is a website builder, operation hub, email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, or more.
Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan that provides you with a CRM. The free plan also offers all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools. You can send up to 2,000 emails and store an unlimited number of subscribers. You can create custom signup forms, and pop-ups, manage and track your online ads, build landing pages, and more. It is loaded with all the tools you need to get started. Their paid plans start from $45/month, where you get uncountable advanced features for an enhanced email marketing experience.
4. Omnisend
Omnisend is a Powerful Email Marketing & SMS Platform that provides marketing services on emails and messaging for eCommerce businesses. The eCommerce store is looking for an automated omnichannel marketing solution.
It is one of the most general email marketing service providers offering genuine plans that include all the powerful features like A/B testing, performance reports, pre-built automation workflows, subscriber segmentation, and even SMS + web push notification.
Most of the time, email marketing service providers keep features restricted in the free plans. but Omnisend is confident with the service quality so they provide all the services in their free plans. Just when your contact list grows to an extent that time you will have to upgrade to the paid plans.
Omnisend is easy to integrate with all the popular eCommerce platforms and website builders like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more. It works with several other assisting business tools like live chat software, help desk service, and more.
Omnisend is different and better than others because it possesses pre-built eCommerce marketing automation workflows. These workflows are powered by features and designed to help businesses drive more revenue. Such automation plans include emails like cross-sell emails, welcome email series, cart abandonment emails, and more.
It is a seamless email builder and with a large collection of emails, templates help to create beautiful, business theme-based branding campaign emails. Omnisend has powerful targeting and segmentation features that allow you to personalize emails to target the relevant audience.
A lot of users love to use Omni send due to the SMS service built into it. This way you do not have to use or subscribe to any additional software; their SMS feature allows you to send messages in 209 regions across the globe. You can add up to 250 subscribers in Omni Send-free email marketing plan. Their paid plans start at $16 per month.
5. Drip
Drip email marketing automation software is an amazing marketing platform designed for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. This tool offers a wide range of functionalities to make sales funnels, marketing automation, and personalization easy.
Drip email software is easy to integrate with all popular website builders including WooCommerce and WordPress. It allows users to add pop-ups / opt-in signup forms to websites; this way you can capture more leads.
Drip is different from other marketing software because they introduce an intelligent marketing tool that is Campaign Monitor and more automation tools like, smarter email segmenting, list groups, and split testing features. It also provides the visual drag-and-drop builder for automation workflows where you do not need any coding knowledge; just choose a template and start working. You can reach targeted customers on your email list to get more sales.
Support options at Drip include automation training, detailed courses, live chat support, webinars, free guides, and excellent documentation. Drip is used by leading organizations to connect and engage with the audience on a personal level. You can use drip’s smart eCommerce marketing automation to enhance marketing outcomes.
An attribute of the drip email marketing software helps you to understand how much revenue you have generated from each email marketing campaign. Drip is a bit costly, but it is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites. Business owners who expect to maximize their marketing efforts can opt for more advanced features.
Drip also offers a free trial, and the subscription plans start from $49 / month for all their other features. You can use their SMS notification feature, also, this way you can connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channels. Such features make drip a true all-in-one email marketing platform for eCommerce stores.
6. AWeber
AWeber bulk email marketing software is one of the oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. It is best for small and medium-sized businesses offering them wide range of tools to manage email marketing.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. It is easy to integrate with website builders like WordPress. You can access the ready-to-use HTML email templates, A/B testing, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.
AWeber also possesses powerful email marketing features like automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, AMP emails, and tag-based subscriber segmentation. It also provides support options including email support, live webinars, live chat, phone support, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
You can send emails to 500 subscribers with AWeber’s limited free plan. Then their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also sign up for quarterly or annual plans to save money.
7. Moosend
Moosend email marketing software for small businesses is an affordable option for startups. It comes with a set of powerful marketing automation features. It possesses an email list, building tools, landing pages, and more.
You can create and customize the email newsletter. Just choose an email design from the dozens of pre-made email templates that suit your brand image. You will have a great email template in a few minutes. You can also create a customized template by editing and using the drag-and-drop feature.
The best and unique part about moosend is they also offer automation features for marketing and that is in all the plans. You can offer a personalized journey to your newsletter subscribers by using the automation workflow designer.
Moosend offers detailed email analytics, where you can check certain important metrics like bounces, product views, email opens, clicks, purchases, and custom event tracking. It also provides predicted demographics data that can help you out with creating your next marketing strategy.
Every plan on my end comes with a set of powerful tools that help with conversion and optimization. You get features like A/B testing, conditional content, an AI engine for product recommendations, email heat map analytics, countdown timers, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.
Moosend offers a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) you can use an unlimited number of emails. After a month, pricing starts at $9 per month for the Pro plan. The plan includes a landing page builder, team management, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, and more.
8. ConvertKit
ConvertKit email marketing service is a robust email marketing platform for authors, professional bloggers, and marketers. It is powerful and easy to use.
It offers content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. This feature makes it unique from others. It is powered with easy-to-manage auto-responders to help you send emails from a drip emailing service.
You can segment subscribers using ConvertKit into interested and those who are already your customers. You can increase conversions with automated emails, and they will appear like personalized ones to your customers. Such types of email marketing services are called targeted email marketing.
ConvertKit is loaded with all the features you could ever expect from a great email marketing service provider, like, A/B testing, smart workflows, beautiful email templates, landing page builder, and more. It offers email-based support and has great learning material as its extensive knowledge base.
A lot of ConvertKit features are designed for creators and professional bloggers, such as paid newsletters. This is the reason it is the most preferable email marketing service for professional bloggers. You can sell digital products & subscriptions over the same platform.
ConvertKit offers a 14-day free trial. After that the pricing starts from $29/month. They also allow you to claim the 30-day refund policy. Their Creator Pro plan includes advanced functionality like advanced reporting, newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, and Facebook custom audiences.
9. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a free email marketing service and is one of the most popular and world-class email marketing service providers. It gained sheer popularity across the globe due to its forever free email marketing service plan with displaying its branding in your email.
Mailchimp comes with features like segmenting contacts into groups, an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, and simple tracking for analytics. You can set up delivery times based on the user’s time zones. It also allows you to set up segmentation based on geolocation.
You can integrate MailChimp with several website builders and CMSs (content management systems) like WordPress, Shopify, Magento, and many other platforms. Mailchimp platform is quite limited in marketing automation features in comparison to other providers such as HubSpot, Drip, or ConvertKit.
Mailchimp offers email, live chat, and support and has a large knowledge base of tutorials. Mailchimp offers a forever free plan where you can send 12,000 emails to around 2,000 subscribers. You lack features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, etc. in the free plan.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases with an increase in subscribers. If you want unlimited audiences, multivariate testing, advanced audience segmentation, and comparative reporting, then you can subscribe to their $299 per month plan.
10. Mailjet – Best for Collaboration with Teammates
Mailjet email marketing service is a popular email marketing service provider best for SMEs, eCommerce, and Enterprises. It started as a transactional email service. Now it is one of the most successful email marketing platforms powered with advanced email marketing tools, APIs, and Webhooks.
It is based on a unique feature SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) relay service. It is easy to use and offers a drag-and-drop email builder. Its basic segmentation features are helpful to create more personalized email campaigns for targeted email marketing. You can collaborate on emails with your teammates using Mailjet allowing you to update several elements at a single time.
It does not provide any online support in the free plan. Still, it is easy to design a newsletter using its free version. It offers you basic automation tools to get started. It is loaded with features like storing unlimited contact details, email campaign co-creation and reporting, and advanced email stats.
Mailjet provides you with 6,000 emails/month (200/day) for unlimited subscribers in the free plan. The platform offers three tiers and customer support in the paid plan starting at $15/month.
Final Thoughts: The Best Email Marketing Service Providers
Being a non-profit organization, blogger, or small business, then Constant Contact is the most recommended option. Its support team and great pricing make it perfect to find success with email marketing right away.
An online store or eCommerce website can use Omnisend or Drip as they offer the best eCommerce email marketing software. Personalization and automation features are powerful and best suited for business websites.
ConvertKit is best for professional bloggers or content creators. As it offers a platform with advanced segmentation and funnels, it helps to take the blogging business to the next level.
SendinBlue is best for businesses expecting a powerful marketing automation tool. It is a combination of SMTP bulk emails, email marketing, and SMS messages, making it most recommendable. SendinBlue is an easy-to-use platform that allows users to manage both email and SMS through a single interface. You get a forever free plan with this best free email marketing software.
You can use HubSpot as an all-in-one email marketing solution. Hubspot offers a powerful set of marketing tools including live chat, website builder, email marketing, CRM, sales tools, and more. Their free plan is helpful for lead generation with access to unlimited subscribers.
