Is email marketing a top priority for your company in 2021? Do you want to find the best email marketing software?
Choosing the right email marketing service can make or break your marketing campaign’s success.
In this article, we’ll go over and compare the top seven email marketing services for small businesses.
Why is it critical to select the best email marketing service?
For a small business, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. Email marketing generates a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
This is due to the fact that email marketing is simple to manage, gives you complete control, and allows you to maintain direct contact with your customers.
Still not convinced of the value of email marketing? Check out these six reasons why creating an email list is so important today.
It is critical to understand that a large part of your success with email marketing is entirely dependent on the email marketing software you select, as they are responsible for ensuring that your emails are delivered.
If you are not careful, you will end up paying significantly more for fewer marketing features and poor email deliverability rates (which causes you to lose even more money).
What you Should Look for in an Email Marketing Tool!
A good email marketing service should allow you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an intuitive user interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor).
You should be able to easily send personalized and targeted bulk emails without much effort. This is also referred to as marketing automation.
Apart from that, your email marketing service should make it simple to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Above all, 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 see how they compare.
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the world’s biggest email marketing services. It is also the most user-friendly email marketing service for beginners.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and other important information.
Each account includes unlimited emails, simple tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, a free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ad integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.
Their Email Plus accounts also include powerful features such as email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing, allowing you to send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
Constant Contact provides unrivaled customer service via live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of useful resources.
In addition to online training, they provide in-person live seminars across the United States. This enables small business owners to quickly learn the fundamentals of email marketing and use it to grow their company like a pro.
Constant Contact is the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups for all of the reasons stated above.
Constant Contact offers a free 60-day trial (no credit-card required). Following that, their pricing starts as low as $20 per month.
Your Blog master users can get an extra 20% off with our Constant Contact coupon code.
2. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a full-service SMS and email marketing platform for businesses. They are one of Europe’s fastest growing email marketing platforms.
It is a very user-friendly platform with excellent tools for creating visually appealing and highly engaging emails. Their easy-to-use drag-and-drop email editor is ideal for beginners with no prior experience in email marketing.
SendinBlue also includes marketing automation tools for beginners that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users. It also uses AI algorithms to determine the best time to send bulk emails to ensure maximum email deliverability.
SendinBlue provides a completely free email marketing plan with an unlimited number of contacts. Their free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails per day, but all of your emails will be branded with their logo.
Their paid plans begin at $25 per month for the Lite plan. You can also add SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary depending on your sending needs.
They recently upgraded their premium plan to include more advanced features such as landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means that users are now receiving more value for the same price.
SendinBlue also provides a standalone SMTP bulk email marketing service that can be used to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. This is not required for email marketing campaigns, but it is a useful feature to have if you have a large website and want automatic real-time content-based emails.
3. Drip
Drip is a robust enterprise email marketing platform that is ideal for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They provide a variety of tools to help with marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization.
Their email software integrates seamlessly with all popular website builders, including WordPress and WooCommerce. This makes it simple to add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.
Drip distinguishes itself from competitors such as Campaign Monitor with intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmentation, split testing features, list groups, and a visual automation workflow builder. These features enable you to reach out to specific customers on your email list in order to increase sales.
Drip offers live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides, and excellent documentation as support options.
Drip is used by several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while also connecting and engaging with each customer on a personal level through their smart eCommerce marketing automation.
Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue each email marketing campaign generates.
Despite its high price tag, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners looking for more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.
Drip provides a free trial, and their plans begin at $49 per month, which includes all of their features.
They recently added SMS notification as a feature to all plans, allowing you to communicate with your users via both email and SMS marketing channels. As a result, they are a true all-in-one email marketing platform for business owners.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit allows you to easily divide your subscribers into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This allows you to increase conversions by sending personalized automated emails. This tool is known as targeted email marketing in the marketing world.
They have all of the powerful features you’d expect from a top-tier email marketing service, including a/b testing, beautiful email templates, a landing page builder, smart workflows, and much more.
ConvertKit provides email-based support and has a large knowledge base with excellent learning materials.
Many ConvertKit features, such as paid newsletters, are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers, which is why they are ranked as the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.
They’ve even made it possible to sell digital products and subscriptions from the same platform.
ConvertKit provides a 14-day free trial and pricing starts at $29/month. They also have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Additionally, their Creator Pro plan includes advanced functionality such as a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
5. AWeber
AWeber is one of the world’s oldest and most famous email marketing providers. They provide a variety of tools to help small and medium-sized businesses manage their email marketing.
It’s simple to get started with AWeber. It integrates seamlessly with the majority of platforms, including WordPress. View our guide about how to connect AWeber to WordPress for further information.
You will have access to ready-to-use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and detailed email tracking.
AWeber also has powerful email marketing features like AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and subscriber segmentation based on tags.
Live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials are all available as support options.
AWeber provides a free plan with a limit of 500 subscribers. Following that, their pricing begins at $19 per month. To save even more money, sign up for quarterly or annual plans.
6. GetResponse
GetResponse is another well-known email marketing service. It is extremely simple to use and makes email marketing for small businesses much easier.
It includes some fantastic marketing automation tools that allow you to create intelligent automated campaigns.
You can use their drag-and-drop builder to create campaigns, segment contacts, and send any number of emails tailored to specific groups. These tools assist you in creating effective email campaigns to increase your profits.
Beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, unsubscribe tracking, and autoresponders are included with GetResponse. It also works with third-party lead generation software such as OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, and others.
Phones, live chat, and email support are all available. Their help section is jam-packed with free learning resources such as videos, webinars, how-tos, and guides.
GetResponse provides a free 30-day trial. Their monthly fees begin at $15.
7. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the world’s most popular email marketing service providers, owing to their forever free email marketing service plan.
Mailchimp includes an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, grouping contacts into groups, and basic analytics tracking. It also allows you to set delivery times based on the timezones of your users, as well as geolocation segmentation.
MailChimp can be easily integrated with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and a variety of other platforms. If you’re using WordPress, detailed instructions can be found in our ultimate guide to using Mailchimp and WordPress.
When it comes to marketing automation features, the Mailchimp platform falls short of other providers on our list, such as Drip or ConvertKit.
Mailchimp has attempted to add many “advanced” features in recent years, but having tested many of these, they are not truly advanced.
Mailchimp support is available via email, live chat, and a comprehensive knowledge base of tutorials. However, their support is frequently slow and falls short of the level of service provided by Constant Contact.
Mailchimp has a free plan that allows you to send 12,000 emails to up to 2,000 subscribers for the rest of your life. This plan is fairly limited in that it does not include features such as send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, and so on. You must also include their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is limited to email only, which is fine if you’re a hobbyist, but as a serious business, you need dependable support you can rely on.
Their paid plans begin at $10 per month for up to 500 subscribers, with pricing increasing in increments of 500 subscribers.
If you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, you’ll have to upgrade to their $299 monthly plan.
Finally, what is the best email marketing service?
There are dozens of email marketing services available, and we want to ensure you select the best one for your company’s needs. Our expert recommendation is as follows:
We recommend Constant Contact if you are a small business, non-profit, or new blogger. Their pricing is excellent, and their customer service is second to none. Their onboarding team will assist you in achieving immediate success with email marketing.
If you own an online store or an ecommerce website, we recommend Drip as the best eCommerce email marketing software. Personalization and automation are extremely powerful features. Drip is used on many of our own business websites.
We recommend ConvertKit if you are a professional blogger or content creator. They provide an easy-to-use platform with advanced segmentation and funnels to help you grow your blogging business.
We recommend SendinBlue if you are a business owner looking for a powerful marketing automation tool that combines email marketing, SMTP bulk emails, and SMS messages. Their platform is simple to use, and you can manage email and SMS from a single interface. They also provide a fairly generous lifetime free plan, making them the best free email marketing software.
Pro Tip: Increase Your Email Subscribers Faster!
Once you’ve decided on an email marketing service for your company, you’ll most likely want to start gaining email subscribers.
OptinMonster is a tool that we use and recommend. It is a powerful conversion optimization toolkit that assists you in converting website visitors who are about to leave into email subscribers and customers.
OptinMonster integrates seamlessly with all of the best email marketing services mentioned above, as well as dozens more.
Syed Balkhi, is the co-founder of OptinMonster. He initially created OptinMonster to assist us in growing our own email list. Since its initial release in 2013, the WordPress plugin has grown tremendously, with over 1 million active installations.
OptinMonster is now used by some of the world’s largest brands, including McAfee, Experian, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Harvard University, Pateron, and others.
Aside from OptinMonster, the following tools can help you grow your email marketing list:
- WPForms – The best WordPress form builder for creating contact forms, surveys, polls, and other types of forms. It includes built-in support for all popular email marketing services. Over 4 million website owners have put their trust in us.
- SeedProd – Do you want to build custom landing pages to increase conversions? SeedProd’s landing page builder experience is far superior. Because SeedProd integrates with all popular email platforms, smart website owners use it in conjunction with their preferred email marketing service.
- LiveChat.com is a website that provides live chat services. Connecting your live chat software with your email marketing service is one of the simplest ways to grow your email list. On several of our websites, we use LiveChat.
- ChatBot.com – A chatbot is a website that allows you to communicate with Another clever way to expand your email list is to use chatbot software that is linked to your email marketing service.
- RafflePress is the most popular WordPress giveaway and contest platform. It enables you to use viral marketing to expand your email list.
Improve Your Email Deliverability as an Extra Bonus
All of the email newsletter tools mentioned in this article have high email deliverability rates.
There are, however, a few things you can do to ensure that your marketing emails are always delivered.
- Use a Business Email Address
Algorithms in email platforms such as Gmail, Outlook, and others look for spammy behavior. The sender email address is one of them.
As a business, you should use a professional business email address (such as yourname@yourcompany.com) rather than a generic hotmail or gmail address.
This will assist in ensuring that your email deliverability rate exceeds the industry average.
- Distribute Interest-Based Emails
It is critical to personalize your emails based on user segments. Email marketing software, such as Constant Contact, makes it simple to categorize your subscribers as most active, inactive, interested in specific topics, custom segments, and so on.
This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns have the highest open and click through rates, which are important factors in future email deliverability.
We always advise sending a personalized welcome email to all new subscribers and then segmenting users based on their interests.
See this ultimate step-by-step email marketing guide with examples for more information on how to create a successful email marketing campaign.
Email Marketing Software Frequently Asked Questions
We’ve answered a lot of questions after assisting thousands of users in selecting the best email marketing software. The following are some of the most frequently asked questions about email marketing platforms.
Can I send bulk emails from Gmail or Outlook?
Yes, in theory. However, it would swiftly result in the termination of your email accounts. G Suite and Outlook are not designed for mass emailing. They are an excellent solution for professional business emails.
Which of the following is the best free email marketing service?
Many email marketing services will provide free tiers with limited usage. SendinBlue is the best free email marketing service because their free plan has no limit on the number of subscribers. MailerLite and MailChimp both provide free email marketing plans.
What is the cost of email marketing?
The cost of email marketing is entirely determined by the number of subscribers you have, the total number of emails you send per month, and the email platform you use. On average, a small business email marketing costs between $20 and $300 per month if they manage their own campaign. If you use an email marketing agency, your monthly cost could be closer to $500 or higher.
Can email marketing aid in SEO?
Email marketing has no effect on SEO. However, it can assist you in increasing traffic to your website, which can lead to more shares and, in some cases, backlinks / mentions.
Google and other search engines rank websites based on social signals such as shares and mentions. As a result, email marketing can indirectly help your website’s SEO rankings.
You might also want to consider using these best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to boost your rankings.
Are there any other email marketing platforms that we haven’t mentioned?
Yes, there are hundreds of email marketing services available, but we have not included them all here. We believe that making a complete list of email platforms would cause more confusion and choice paralysis for non-technical readers.
MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Ontraport, Mailjet, Campaign Monitor, InfusionSoft (now Keap), Klaviyo, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Moosend, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, MailPoet, and others are among the email marketing platforms we have tested.
The top email marketing services we chose to include in our list offer the best features at the best price.
Which email marketing services do you think are the best?
Our top three picks for the best email marketing services are as follows:
- Constant Contact – The most effective email marketing service for small businesses.
- SendinBlue – The most effective email and SMS marketing platform.
- Drip is the best eCommerce email marketing platform.
In addition to email marketing, we recommend including web push notifications on your website. This is yet another effective way to stay in touch with your visitors after they leave your website. On Your Blog Master, we use PushEngage, and it has quickly become one of our top five traffic sources.
We hope this article provided you with a good overview of the best email marketing services for your company. You might also be interested in our list of 24 must-have WordPress plugins for business websites.
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