20 Email Marketing Services and Tools

For a small business, choosing the right email marketing services and tools can help you reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales at an affordable cost. Often overlooked, email marketing does have a significant impact on the bottom line of your business. Email continues to be the best-performing marketing channel. In fact, email marketing delivers an average Return on Investment (ROI) of 4400% or a $44.25 return for every single $1 spent.

By 2023 the number of daily global email users will jump to 3.473 billion and there will be 4.371 billion email users. Current trends suggest email accounts will grow faster than the number of worldwide email users, underscoring why your business should focus on email marketing campaigns. And the right email marketing services are essential to ensure the success of your business in this area.

Why is choosing the right email marketing software so important?

Email marketing isn’t just about sending promo emails and feelers to people with the hope that you can make conversions. It is also about communicating with customers and using targeted content to deliver your message across different targeted segments.

The benefits of email marketing for small businesses are numerous. Email marketing services can be used to promote businesses and grow revenue. Unlike some other marketing channels, email marketing allows you to frequently keep in touch with your customers. In addition to having the ability to send bulk emails, you can also customize them for different audiences so your emails are always engaging.

With email marketing, you can boost your conversions and build your brand without breaking your budget. No matter your level of experience, you can create professional email marketing campaigns quickly. But in order for your email marketing efforts to succeed, you need to use the right email marketing software. Updating lists and sending emails manually is time consuming. So you will need to choose an email marketing platform that integrates seamlessly with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. You will be able to manage content and customer data, as well as getting an overview of key analytics that include open rates, click-through rates and overall engagement trends to see which campaigns are performing the best.

What should you look for in a great email marketing software?

In a nutshell, the best email marketing services should deliver the following:

Customizable Templates

Your service should include personalized email marketing. Most providers offer a library of templates for users to choose from, customize, and fill with information about their businesses. You can select one template to use every time, or pick a different one whenever you write a new email if you like to keep things fresh. It is also important for your marketing services provider to allow you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface, preferably a drag and drop editor.

List Segmentation

Your email service should provide the ability to segment your subscribers based on your marketing strategy. The email marketing service should give you the ability to segment your list based on the different stages of their buying cycle. Successful marketing is all about connecting customers with the right service and product. You will need to break up your subscriber list into common groupings and suggest products and services that suit their particular needs.

Personalization is key here by crafting the perfect subject lines, copy, and images that resonate with your customer so you can deliver effective personal feeling messages. This will also help lower the chances of your emails violating email SPAM laws.

Customer Service and Support

Should issues arise, a good email service provider should help you implement your marketing strategy at all times. Your email service provider must offer round the clock support whenever glitches take place.

Automation

With email automation, you get the opportunity to respond rapidly to your customers for inquiries, purchases, or even canceling purchases. Autoresponders can help you stay in touch with your customers using automatically generated emails based on key milestones, welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank you emails for recent purchases.

If your customers are making a purchase, they are prime candidates for additional sales. You want to send follow up messages that could include thank you emails with messages such as ‘Customers like you also found these similar items very interesting’. They could also be valuable sources of information to gauge the reasons for abandoned carts and determine why your customers have opted out of a purchase.

Analytics

Analytics are important for any marketing effort. A good email marketing service provider should be able to provide you with analytics to help improve your campaigns. These include measuring open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and spam complaints. All these data points will help you track engagements and see how your campaigns are preforming.

Top Email Marketing Services

So here are some of the most popular email marketing tools on the market. We’ve also included descriptions and some of the main features that set each email marketing service apart.

1. Hubspot

HubSpot is considered among the best email marketing services on the market. It offers end-to-end marketing technology solutions combining marketing automation with email marketing, sales, and CRM under one umbrella. With this email marketing service, you can quickly and easily create, personalize, and optimize your emails without the need for designers or tech support.

HubSpot’s easy-to-use email marketing tool gives you the option of a standalone or a combination of other offerings such as Marketing Hub and its Customer Relations Management (CRM) platform. Also on offer are features like pre-made email templates along with calls-to-action and images, and the ability to modify content in line with your brand using its drag-and-drop editor. Your email campaigns also come with A/B tests and robust analytics. HubSpot offers its email tool free for up to 2,000 email sends per month, with upgrade solutions starting at $45 per month. The robust all-in-one marketing package comes in at $800 per month.

2. Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns offers email marketing services to help users create responsive designs, customize messages, deliver emails to inboxes, trigger automated workflows, and connect with new customers. The toolkit has all the bells and whistles you need to meet your email marketing tasks.

With Zoho Campaigns you can create responsive emails by using the tool’s drag-and-drop functionality for marketing designs and dynamics fields. The revamped user interface offers a large selection of email templates, including 274 pre-designed templates, and a host of new autoresponders. A seamless integration with the Zoho suite allows for 360 degree email marketing services for small businesses.

Zoho Campaigns comes with dynamic content, email polls, and automated list segmentation to help you send personalized messages to your audiences. With A/B testing campaigns, you can test which design or subject line resonates well with your audience while the list management keeps your list clean and spam-free.

The most popular subscription is $5 per month for up to 500 subscribers. It includes unlimited emails, autoresponders, workflows, dynamic content, batch sending, email polls and more.

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing service that brings all your audience data, marketing channels, and insights together so you can reach your marketing strategy goals faster — all from a single platform.

This easy?to?use email builder provides individual profiles on each subscriber, which shows their activity on your website. Using its pre?designed templates and drag?and?drop builder, you can easily create engaging emails. Real-time analytics helps you keep tabs on your campaigns to quickly identify what’s working and to make smart decisions moving forward.

Mailchimp touts its inbox acceptance rates are 96-99% – well above the industry standard. Mailchimp’s subscription starts at $9.99 per month though a free plan is also available that comes with a marketing CRM, a creative assistant, website builder, forms and landing pages, and up to 2,000 contacts.

4. Constant Contact

With Constant Contact email marketing software, you get tools to build a professional brand online, attract customers, and sell more products. The platform helps you create professional emails, find new customers, and drive sales for your business. The easy to use email automation is a key benefit of Constant Contact as you are able to trigger welcome messages for new subscribers and set up drip campaigns based on their actions.

The website builder gives you a custom-designed website in just minutes along with a free logo maker with hundreds of customizable options in seconds. Constant Contact also offers social media campaign integration that lets you add contacts into a form using various formats (CSV, TXT, XLS, or XLSX), import from Gmail, or pull from Microsoft Outlook and other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

For your campaigns, you can use a template to get started using the drag-and-drop feature and choosing from a variety of layout options. The editing tool lets you tweak text with access to Google fonts as well as images and colors. With Constant Contact, you can also add a blog post teaser and import PDFs which transform into interactive emails.

Constant Contact offers two kinds of plans according to the size of the customer’s email list. Pricing starts at $20 per month where you get unlimited email sends, customizable templates, branded templates, tracking and reporting, automated email resend to non-openers, subject line A/B testing and more. Like most email marketing platforms, subscription rates will be based on the number of subscribers on your list.

5. SendinBlue

SendinBlue offers both SMS and email marketing solutions for businesses. The intuitive platform gives users the tools to create beautiful and highly engaging marketing emails through its drag and drop email editor making it easy for beginners with no experience in email marketing. The platform helps to boost your marketing efforts by providing an all-in-one solution with marketing automation features, email marketing, SMS marketing, live chat, Facebook Ads, CRM, and transactional messages via email and SMS.

SendinBlue includes beginner-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.

It offers a free email marketing plan that lets you send up to 300 emails a day, but all your emails will have SendinBlue’s branding. Meanwhile, paid plans start from $25 per month.

6. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor offers an email marketing solution that enables businesses to send personalized emails, creating a reliable channel to grow engagement with subscribers and promote loyal readership and conversions. It comes with customizable templates which can be tweaked using its drag-and-drop builder. When it comes to your mailing lists, Campaign Monitor seamlessly integrates with Salesforce or WordPress for better impact.

Campaign Monitor includes features like email marketing, automation, and reporting features starting at $9 per month. This includes the ability to send up to 2,500 emails a month, comprehensive email marketing features, an insights analytics suite and more.

7. GetResponse

GetResponse offers businesses email marketing, landing pages, e-commerce, sales funnels and webinars all under one roof. This email marketing platform helps you create mailing lists, send emails, automate emails and view and analyze statistics related to your email campaigns including open rate, click through, forwards, and others.

When it comes to creating emails, the drag-and-drop email creator lets you design and send pixel-perfect emails in a few clicks. The layouts and sections help you build your message, and also preview designs on desktops and mobile devices.

GetResponse’s email marketing software plans start at $15 per month. Since the pricing model is based on the subscriber count, you can send out an unlimited number of emails to your list. This email marketing software also offers unlimited landing pages, unlimited automation templates, one sales funnels, Facebook and Google ads and more.

8. Omnisend

Omnisend’s email marketing platform is tailored for ecommerce sites. It offers small businesses with features such as automated email and SMS messaging in order to convert leads into customers. To dive up sales, it offers pre-built automation for cart abandonment, a welcome series and transactional emails.

With this platform, you can provide your recipients with an omnichannel customer experience combining text messages, web browser push notifications, email marketing, Google Customer Match, Facebook ads, and more. You also have the capability to allow for segmented campaigns to target the right customer for your products or services. The free plan comes with the option for omnisend-branded email campaigns of up to 15,000 emails a month, signup forms, boxes, pop ups and reports.

The starter package begins at $16 per month which offers SMS campaigns and automation, email automation, audience segmentation, reports, and more.

9. MailerLite

MailerLite can help you create newsletters using its customizable templates through its drag and drop tool within minutes. This email marketing service offers tools for automation, landing pages, pop-ups, and surveys. With it, you can also segment your subscribers to enhance personalization, and optimize your campaigns with features like A/B testing.

The free plan comes with a drag and drop feature, rich text editor, built-in photo editing, file manager, mobile-friendly email newsletters, video tutorials, and A/B Testing. However, the free plan limits you to only 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. The paid tier starts at $10 per month with unlimited emails and can accommodate up to 1,000 subscribers along with reports and analytics.

10. Sender

Sender is an email marketing tool that lets users create newsletters without any HTML knowledge. By simply choosing from its template library, users can customize their newsletters with elements like images, videos and text within minutes. By connecting Sender with your website, web shop or any other system, all subscriber data will be synchronized automatically. In terms of analytics, it offers reports on open and click tracking, date and time analysis, click map, subscriber profiles, Google Analytics integration and more. In addition, it offers desktop push notifications, transactional and automated email sequences, API integrations, and an easy to use drag and drop subscription form builder.

Sender’s pricing starts at $11.00 per month. The free forever offering allows you to accommodate up to 2,500 subscribers, send up to 15,000 emails per month and access all features, including automation.

11. Campaigner

Campaigner is an email marketing automation platform that comes with an intuitive interface to create emails, tweak email campaigns, view feedback from contacts, and perform across the board email marketing tasks. It also provides users with the ability to integrate their email marketing campaign with social media accounts that include Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The platform generates real-time reports of your email marketing activities, thus allowing you to improve upon every email campaign you carry out. For customization of emails, you have the option to choose from over 900 templates.

Campaigner offers three plans: Starter, Essential and Advanced. The first tier which is the Starter plan starts at $49.95 per month and includes full code editor, geolocation, A/B testing, analytics, landing pages, suppression lists, segmentation, recurring campaigns and conversion tracking.

12. SendPulse

SendPulse offers a multi-channel marketing platform including email marketing, SMS, Web Push Notification, and Viber and Facebook Chatbot messenger through a single platform email marketing solution. The suite of marketing tools helps you collect customers’ contact information, create responsive templates, and set up automated flows.

In terms of trigger emails with automation 360, you can set up trigger flows using emails, web push notifications, and SMS and send messages based on your customers’ behavior. You also have the option to remind customers about their abandoned cart, invite them to upcoming webinars, or ask them about their experience with your product or service.

The drag and drop editor helps users create responsive emails without any HTML knowledge. You also have more than 130 free templates to customize your emails for any event or promotion. Additional features offered by this email marketing solution provider include segmentation, A/B testing, analytics, SPAM checker and more.

SendPulse pricing starts at $6.40 per month and comes with the option to accommodate up to 500 subscribers, send unlimited emails and take advantage of other professional features. There is also a free plan available.

13. AWeber 

AWeber offers a simple and easy to use email marketing service with a robust set of email marketing features. This includes a landing page builder, newsletters, emails to RSS, and, autoresponders to help grow your number of subscribers.  With AWeber, you get all of the basic features that you expect with an email marketing service that includes over 700 pre-built templates, drag-and-drop email builder, email analytics, A/B testing, sign up forms, automation, third-party integrations and subscriber segmentation.

AWeber also offers phone, email and live chat support and comes with a monthly subscription plan of $16.15 billed annually. With this email marketing tool, you get an unlimited number of subscribers, behavioral automation, cart abandonment and purchase tagging, click-tracking links, unlimited landing pages, AWeber e-commerce services, audience analytics, custom domains and more. You also have the option to try the free version which allows you to engage with 500 subscribers with limited capabilities. AWeber’s email marketing services come with 24/7 support via phone, email and live chat.

14. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing service provider and landing page builder that lets you create easy forms and drip campaigns to automatically send mails to new subscribers.

With its email designer, you can easily create many branded email templates. You can also add buttons, images or videos to your email with a simplified interface for a great writing experience. ConvertKit boasts a high delivery rate of 98% and a 30% average open rate. In addition, you get unlimited landing pages and forms, A/B testing, analytics, automated funnels and sequences, and more.

The ConvertKit plan starts from $29 per month to $79 per month for 1,000 subscribers to 5,000 subscribers respectively.

16. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software that offers reporting and automation tools to help you achieve your email marketing goals. This solution not only allows autoresponders based on numerous conditions, but it also allows automation of your contacts and email list management, as well as automation within its CRM system. It also has features that enable you to text message your subscribers. 

Furthermore, with the conversations feature you can send targeted messages straight to your website visitors, therefore optimizing the overall customer experience. When it comes to offering lead/contact scoring, you can set it up using rules or automation, and it also allows you to assign scores to contacts based on their demographic, or actions they take. This covers page views, open emails, email clicks and more.

ActiveCampaign subscription starts at $9 per month and includes marketing automation, unlimited email sending, subscription forms, segmentation, site and event tracking, 500+ automation recipes and more.

17. Drip

Drip’s email marketing software offers a broader CRM platform that is built with eCommerce in mind. You also get insights into customer’s browsing history, social media interactions, cart abandonment and purchases, and email engagement. You can add your contacts in three standard ways: individually, importing emails in bulk from a file, and copy and pasting.

The visual email editor affords you a generous amount of freedom in template options and design, and it’s easy to add or remove segments, buttons, and images where you want them. Drip’s platform integrates with WordPress, WooCommerce, Facebook Ads, and other tools to help you boost your e-commerce sales. This includes additional tools you’re using to sell online, analyze, collect data, and personalize marketing for customers.

Drip’s paid plans start at $19 per month and offer behavior and event tracking, segmentation, revenue attribution, multichannel automation, detailed email analytics, customizable forms, and more. A 14-day trial is also available which allows you to add 500 people to your account and get access to all of Drip’s core features including sending unlimited emails after the trial period.

18. Mailjet

Mailjet’s email marketing solution allows users to create, send, and track their marketing and transactional emails. Mailjet’s intuitive user interface is available in 5 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian) and enables marketing teams to create, test, and send compelling emails. Through its drag and drop email builder, you can easily create responsive emails and thanks to its intuitive user interface, you have the option of the five languages.

In terms of ease of use, Mailjet provides a full setup and use guide in one place. This starts with creating a test email campaign and moves on to importing your contacts, designing an email template, managing your contacts, and using more advanced features such as A/B testing and segmentation.

Mailjet also helps you optimize transactional emails including delivery notifications and change in payment details by providing real-time notifications if there are problems with email delivery. Its collaborative email editor gives you the ability for multiple users to make changes in real-time thus making collaboration easy.

Mailjet pricing starts at $9.65 per month. There is a free plan with limited capabilities that includes an email editor, email templates, unlimited contacts, and integration.

19. iContact

iContact offers an email marketing platform that helps small businesses achieve their email marketing goals.

This email marketing platform can help save considerable time as it is easy to use, offers customizable templates, and enables anyone to send out email messages — which is great for first-time email marketers. Users are not required to have any HTML knowledge while automated email campaigns can deploy once a subscriber interacts with a landing page, makes a purchase, clicks a link, or meets any specific criteria that you have established.

The platform offers the full gamut of email marketing services that include drag and drop editing, email list management, autoresponders, SPAMCHECK, reports, social amplify email campaigns, scheduled messages on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and more. iContact’s paid plans start at $15 per month for 1,500 subscribers. A free trial is also available.

20.Emma

Emma’s email marketing service offers automation features to help you send campaigns and connect with your subscribers for maximum impact. This platform makes it easy to manage your email marketing service across multiple departments or locations, share templates and creative assets, and quickly approve every email before it goes out. It also offers templates that are mobile-responsive, integrate with social networks and connect to Google Analytics to see stats.

Through its list segmentation tool, you can target subscribers bases on zip code, birthday, purchased items, and even if they have opened your last email. Segmented groups are easily searchable, and you have the ability to create an unlimited number of segments when it comes time to send targeted campaigns which comes in handy when you want to test your markets and fine-tune your results.

Emma’s branching logic can help you deliver the most relevant message based on whether or not someone opens a specific email or makes a certain click. The next email in your drip sequence can be matched to the activity of your audience. When integrated with your site, Emma can track recent purchases and send an automated email that ensures your customer gets a timely touchpoint to support the purchase, encourage an upgrade, or schedule a follow-up.

The service starts at $89 per month for up to 10,000 contacts and includes drag and drop email editor, an email template gallery, real-time reporting and analytics, guestbook app, list importing, segmentation tools, lightbox signup forms, A/B content testing and built-in integrations.

What is the best email marketing service?

When trying to determine the best email marketing service around, Hubspot quickly jumps to the top of the list. Here’s why.

Hubspot offers a wide variety of tools giving you great flexibility when creating your email marketing campaign. Hubspot also offers lead management and SEO features as well as tools to boost your email marketing campaigns and community support that extends even to its free services. See details below.

Q: What tools are available with Hubspot email marketing services?

• Email·
• Websites
• Search Engine Optimization
• Marketing automation
• Landing pages
• Analytics
• Social media
• Blogging

Q: What can you do with Hubspot’s Email Marketing Solution?

• Create new emails
• Edit columns to show metrics like bounce rate, delivery rate, and other important metrics
• Export your email information
• Filter by email type or campaign
• Navigate through sent, scheduled, drafted, or archived messages
• Search for specific emails
• View most recently edited, created, and sent emails with a performance summary
• Create your own HTML emails, or choose from Hubspot’s templates
• Schedule emails up to one year in advance
• Create emails that are automatically mobile friendly
• Take advantage of an unsubscribe feature mandated by CAN-SPAM laws
• Benefit from a feature allowing those who unsubscribe to be given the option to opt-out of certain email topics or take a temporary break as opposed to a permanent unsubscribe
• Personalize emails to improve your open rates.

Q: Does it help in lead management and SEO?

Hubspot helps you to access each contact’s information and see every interaction you’ve had with them. The data gleaned from subscribers will be used to create targeted campaigns that close more deals. In regards to SEO, you can plan a content strategy around topics that will elevate your authority in search engines, get as-you-type optimization advice as you’re creating content, and measure real SEO ROI with integrated analytics.

Q: What tools does HubSpot offer to boost my email marketing services?

With HubSpot you get free CRM, marketing, sales, and customer service tools. You get free marketing tools that help you achieve a myriad of objectives. These include: tools to convert website visitors into leads for free, contact management, integration with Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ads, live chat, traffic and conversion analytics.

HubSpot’s free CRM gives you everything you need to organize, track, and nurture your relationships with leads and customers. You can connect HubSpot’s free CRM tools to Gmail, G Suite, and many versions of Outlook. While HubSpot’s free Sales Hub provides your business with time saving tools that help you get deeper insights into your prospects, automate the tasks you hate and close more deals faster.

And what’s more, HubSpot allows you to invite your entire team to collaborate in one place. You can also store as many as one million contacts and companies.

Q: Can I get support from HubSpot for its free services?

HubSpot’s free users have access to the HubSpot Community at community.hubspot.com for support. According to HubSpot, the mission of this inbound community is to provide users with a vibrant channel to ask questions, find answers, and engage with professionals from around the world about HubSpot software best practices.

What are the best free email marketing tools?

Here are some of the best email marketing software tools that come with free plans.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp receives good ratings for its reliability, scalability and secure delivery service for transactional emails from websites and applications. And for those who use WordPress to power their business website, MailChimp is one of the best available. Particularly for a cost conscious small business, since it’s free.

MailChimp provides a wide range of professional quality email templates with customizable fields and features, so you can create campaigns that match your company’s branding. There are easy sharing tools for social channels, and the platform integrates seamlessly with WordPress, as well as other popular services. In addition, MailChimp offers full-featured tracking and analytics for smart campaign management making it a solid email marketing service provider.

AWeber

AWeber has gained popularity among users because it focuses on auto response emails. The platform makes it easy to create forms prospects can fill out. The service then auto responds with whatever message you set up. It offers a robust set of tools including email service, newsletters, emails to RSS, and, of course, autoresponders.

SendinBlue

Sendinblue is another WordPress compatible email marketing platform ideal for small businesses that run both email and mobile campaigns. This all-in-one email marketing service helps you manage email marketing, transactional emails, text messaging and more. It includes detailed, real-time analytics and tools for campaign creation, contact management, and trigger marketing. Integrating SendinBlue with WordPress is as simple as installing the WordPress plugin.

Constant Contact

With Constant Contact, automated triggers come easy. Inside its interface, users can easily trigger a single email or an entire series of messages based on user actions. The platform also has a strong toolbox of email marketing tools from HTML newsletter templates to personal coaching on how to get your email campaigns done right. Event management has also been added so you can handle online registration and online survey tools to gather info from customers and prospects.

ManyContacts

Simple, unique and free to use, ManyContacts is a free drop down email collection bar that runs across the top of your website. The drop down animation grabs attention, and the bar can be fully customized by color, form field and text, giving you the ability to add subscribe offers.

ManyContacts also includes enriched data collection that can be accessed through a Contacts Manager dashboard, showing your subscribers’ location, IP, social profiles and more

Sender

Sender offers free email marketing tools with features to ensure deliverability. It lets you create stunning newsletters without any HTML knowledge. Just choose from a template and customize it with elements like images, videos and text. You can even personalize your newsletters for each recipient to create an even bigger impact.

Emma

Emma is a Web-based service that combines do-it-yourself with free personal assistance when you need it. Custom email design comes at an additional charge. Emma has strong tracking and analytics components that allow you to learn what works — or doesn’t — with your audience.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "20 Email Marketing Services and Tools" was first published on Small Business Trends