If you are reading this, you already understand how important email marketing is to your business, and want to pick a solution that that is complete, easy and powerful. Picking the right email marketing software solution from diverse and numerous options can be overwhelming but can make a significant impact on your marketing campaigns.
As a rule of thumb, you need to consider and compare different elements before zeroing in on the best fit for your business.
Don’t panic, because we’ve got you covered and have narrowed down tons of choices on the Internet, and boiled them down to the ten best in the market.
Before we delve into the top ten list of best email marketing software services, let’s see why you might need an email marketing solution in the first place.
Why use an email marketing solution?
All kinds of businesses – startups, small, medium and large – today can benefit from an email marketing solution. Using traditional business emailing methods like Gmail, Yahoo mail to send bulk emails could, sometimes, put you at the risk of being tagged as a phisher. Not just that, creating and managing an enormous mailing list could look quite formidable without an email marketing solution.
An email marketing software clean sheets your emailing efforts by automatically managing the list from unsubscribes, so you don’t have to manually remove each one. It automatically triggers a drip campaign for nurturing leads who opt-in through a web form.
The primary feature of email marketing services is that they make sure you abide by the national standards, like CAN-SPAM Act, while sending the business emails. These services automatically regulate according to the standards and update regularly on the restrictions.
In addition to these, they provide many other features like email tracking, segmentation, in-built rich design templates, social media monitoring, A/B testing, surveys which are the basic needs of any marketer.
How do you choose the best email marketing service?
Most of the email marketing services try to fit in the mold by offering different plans for different sizes of businesses. Assess your business’s email needs in terms of the size of the mailing list and how often you email this list. Startups might not need as much automation as an established large enterprise, so based on the business choice, you can customize the offer.
Email marketing services base their offerings on:
- The emailing list – Depends on the number of contacts for emailing
- Frequency of emailing – How many emails per contact in a month
- Pay-as-you-go – Ideal for businesses which are not regular email senders. Opt-in for the credits, which are cumulative and don’t expire, and then use. Price depends on the quantity – more credits, less cost per credit.
- High subscriber volume – If the subscriber volume is high, usually beyond 25000, you need to approach the team with a custom pricing.
To come up with this list, we considered the features included in a starter plan for different emailing solutions, along with the kind of support offered. Discusses as follows are some of the best email marketing services meant for businesses to run successful campaigns (presented in alphabetical order) –
#1 Agile
Launched in 2013, in California, USA, Agile has picked up the pace among competition with a started plan at $8.99 for 10,000 contacts and 5000 free emails. The potential lying in Agile’s offer is the number of features included in that price. Right from email tracking, real-time alerts, email campaigns, contact level analytics, form builder, email templates builder, landing page builder, automation to social monitoring, everything included in the package.
What renders Agile truly popular among the users is its inbuilt CRM features for sales, marketing and customer support along with 2-way email integration and ten nodes per campaign. Automatically save the sent and received emails into the CRM without manually pushing them. Agile nodes allow you to pause the email campaigns for a period of time, check recipient’s actions (opened, clicked) within a particular time frame, automatically adjust the score of the leads, and more.
#2 AWeber
AWeber is popular among 100, 000+ small businesses and entrepreneurs for email marketing solutions. Its starter plan starts at $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers and unlimited emails. AWeber uniquely places its offers by providing all the features uniformly across plans but restricting the number of subscribers. It offers automation, segmentation, analytics with detailed insights.
AWeber’s uniqueness lies in its 700+ well-designed email templates, HTML email templates with a drag-and-drop editor, and integrations, including social media, landing pages, eCommerce and more. If the list of subscribers is beyond 25000, you will get a custom quote uniquely designed for your business needs.
#3 Campaign Monitor
With its deep-rooted philosophy of serving small and medium-sized businesses, Campaign Monitor from CA, USA, serves 200,000 businesses across the world to manage their email marketing. Its basic plan starts with $9 per month for 2,500 emails. While not many features are included in the basic plan, it offers email customer support (phone support included in higher plans), core email marketing features like drag-and-drop email builder with well-designed templates, analytic suite features of subscriber growth and engagement, and basic marketing automation features.
Campaign Monitor easily creates personalized customer journeys with visual journey designers for different business models. VIP offers, welcome series, reminders, birthday offers, re-engagement offers and more.
#4 Constant Contact
An Endurance International Group company from MA, USA, starts their offer at $20 per month for up to 500 subscribers and unlimited emails. It provides 1GB file storage to store images and documents right in the software and share whenever necessary without referring different files. It offers single and multiple user functionalities where account owner, account manager and campaign creator can work on the same account.
It provides an award-winning customer support along with a knowledge base of guidelines for small businesses to quickly learn and use Constant Contact for email marketing. What it does not include in the basic plan, however, are email automation and surveys.
#5 GetResponse
Staying in the business for more than 15 years, GetResponse serves over 350,000 customers across North America, Poland. and Asia. It’s designed especially for entrepreneurs and small businesses, with the initial offer of $13.38 per month for 1000 subscribers. They launched marketing automation during 2016. The drag and drop workflow builder allows simple yet powerful workflows with a real-time view and tracking option. The basic plan includes email marketing and marketing automation restricted to 1 user with workflows and tags.
GetResponse’s high mobile responsive landing pages result in better conversions. It has more than 1000 iStock images for you to quickly insert with a built-in image editor. Its autoresponders for online coaching and travel industries help in increased engagement and boosts the conversions.
#6 iContact
Founded in 2003, iContact is an automation and email marketing solution built for small and medium businesses. Headquartered in NC, USA, it starts the basic offering from $14 per month for a list of 500 subscribers. What it includes in the offer is, autoresponders, list management, drag and drop editing, scheduling messages on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, spam check and reports. It offers analytics and custom design templates at an additional charge.
iContact’s list management helps you keep the mailing list clean thus increasing the deliverability. Custom signup forms on websites, landing pages and social media increase the mailing list and also clean up the existing list. iContact’s Strategic Advisor eases the A/B testing by comparing different variables like subject line, offers, design and more.
#7 MailChimp
MailChimp is a well-known email marketing solution available in the market which offers a free plan (forever) for up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month and charges $25 per month for 1501 – 2000 subscribers with unlimited emails per month. The free trial includes marketing automation, signup forms, templates and reports, and an additional $10 per month adds unlimited emails, segmentation, delivery based on time zones, customer support through email and chat.
MailChimp offers huge e-commerce integrations with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Woocommerce, Prestashop, and many more, so that e-businesses can link their store and capture order information and send personalized campaigns to consumers. Been in the business since 2001, MailChimp serves 16 million people and businesses around the world.
#8 WebEngage
Founded in the year 2011, WebEngage is an email marketing solution focused on consumer businesses which provide personalization, segmentation and cross-channel engagement. It has over 40,000 customers with 250 million monthly users. It provides a free plan for up to 10,000 monthly active users and beyond that number, it offers an enterprise plan. It’s live segmentation feature segments audiences in real-time, based on their web behavior across multiple channels.
WebEngage’s cross-channel communication provides a coherent messaging to audiences across different channels like email, mobile, in-app, web and more. However, the enterprise plan includes conversion tracking, A/B testing, geofencing, data import, personalization, white labeling and more.
#9 ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is highly focused on delivering verified emails to customers, through its email validator. It’s pay-as-you-use subscription model where you buy credits beforehand and use them for email. Hence, the pricing is unique starting from $0.003 per email for subscribers from 5000 to 100,000 and $0.0006 per email for subscribers beyond 5 million. As the number of subscribers increases, the cost per email decreases.This is ideal for businesses which occasionally send emails.
When businesses send emails once in awhile, they are more interested to know if the email has made it to the inbox rather than segmentation, behavior etc. Its services include email bounce detection – cleans the list by removing invalid emails, email abuse, and spam trap detection – removes email complainers from the list, email data append – locates missing data of name, location gender etc.
#10 Zoho Campaigns
Part of Zoho, Zoho Campaigns was developed during 2012 as an email marketing software for small and medium businesses. Zoho Campaigns offers as pay as you use and monthly subscription models, pricing as $5.6 for 250 emails in a month for pay as you go and $4.7 for up to 500 subscribers. It also includes a free plan for up to 2000 subscribers and 12000 per month. Marketing automation is available exclusively in a monthly subscription model, and not in pay as you use or free models.
It includes email marketing, list management, A/B testing, well-advanced email templates and social message monitoring. You can also manage email campaigns with a mobile app so that you have access to mailing list on-the-go.
We hope that you would try some of the choices mentioned here. Take your time, do your research, try the free version, and then select one solution. Let us know your opinion on each.
