That in itself is huge; but now you need to make sure you have the right tool to help you get the job done right and done well.
With so many great affordable email providers available today, choosing the right email email service can be a daunting task.
Hint:
There’s no “one size fits all” email marketing platform. Each marketing tools come with different features, functionalities and pricing charts.
So, how do you know which email marketing tool is right for you?
In this article, we’ve handpicked 5 best email marketing services to help you pick one that meets your business’ unique needs.
These email marketing software tools allow you to capture leads, automate your marketing workflows, track your performance. send better emails and build stronger relationships with your audience.
Let’s dive in.
Related reading: Why You Should Start Building an Email List
The best email marketing services for Small Businesses and Bloggers
| Services | Free plan limits | Best Features |
|---|---|---|
| Brevo | Up to 300 emails per day/ 9,000 emails per month | SMS marketing, Transactional emails, Email heat map |
| Constant Contact | 60 days of free trial with no strings attached | High deliverability rate (98%), Autoresponder, Social Media Integration |
| ConvertKit | Up to 1,000 subscribers | Engaging Templates, Content upgrades, Visual automation workflows |
| ActiveCampaign | 14 days of free trial/up to 100 emails to 100 subscribers | Marketing automation, Smart autoresponder, Site and event tracking |
| SendPulse | up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers | Email Automation 360, Spam checker, Drip emails |
1. Brevo (Formerly SendinBlue)
It gives you all the tools you need to craft a successful email marketing strategy such as email newsletter templates, drag and drop email builder, marketing automation, A/B split testing, sent time optimaztion and real-time statistics.
Interestingly, Brevo is a remarkably powerful tool that goes beyond email marketing. It also offers SMS marketing and social media marketing.
You can use it to send bulk SMS marketing campaigns to a contact list from your database. Not only that, you’re able to launch Facebook ads to reach a larger audience and keep track of your ads performance, from your Brevo account.
Aside from creating and sending regular newsletters, you can also send out transactional emails with ease.
If you don’t already know, transactional email is a type of automated email that’s triggered by a purchase, request or account sign-up.
Examples of transactional email include:
- Order Confirmations
- Password reset
- Email receipts
- Log-in attempt notifications
- Support and feedback requests
- Abandoned cart emails
- Shipment status email
So, if you’re selling products and services on your website, you’ll find this feature particularly useful.
For instance, if you run an eCommerce site, you can send transactional email to people who abandon their carts to encourage them to complete their purchases. It can help you recover more of your previously lost revenue and boost eCommerce sales.
What’s more, unlike most email marketing services that charge per contact in your list, Brevo offers unlimited contacts and charges you for each email you send. You only pay for what you send, so you won’t pay for features you don’t need.
The best part?
Brevo offers a free plan (with limited features) that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day, which is a fantastic way of starting out. As your business grow, Brevo can be a big help, providing all advanced tools you need to grow your customer base at scale.
Brevo Key Features:
- Powerful email automation – You can set up email automation workflows to automatically send highly personalized emails.
- Extremely easy to use -Even if you’ve never done any marketing in your life, you’ll find Brevo suprisingly intuitive.
- Best value all-in-one marketing platform– Brevo has a lot to offer -Email, SMS, Facebook, Chat, CRM, and more, all-in-one platform at affordable prices.
- Transactional emails – Automatically send triggered based emails based on your visitors’ behavior on your website.
- Signup Forms and Landing Page Builder – Grow your email list with beautiful sign-up forms and landing pages without needing any coding skills.
- Live Chat – Set up your chat environment, connect with your leads and customers on your website.
- Facebook ads Integration – Create, manage and measure your Facebook ads campaign to reach a larger audience.
Free Plan: Up to 300 emails per day
Paid Plan: Starts at $25 per month
Constant Contact is an easy and affordable email marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, customizable email templates, marketing calendar, performance of your email campaigns and more, from one convenient dashboard.
The visual email editor has some amazing pre-made templates that you can use to design professional, mobile-responsive emails that look great on every device.
Most importantly, using Constant Contact will be able to ensure that you’re compliant with CAN-SPAM laws. Which basically means that your emails won’t end up in the spam folder!
Plus, you get access to free gallery of stock photos, list segmentation, Facebook, Instagram & Google ads integration, social media marketing tools, comprehensive tracking & reporting and eCommerce integration for Shopify.
Here are few things you can do with Constant Contact email marketing automation:
- Send a timely welcome email to new subscribers
- Send trigger-based emails based on where your visitors click
- Segment contacts to send the right message to the right people
- automatically resend emails to non-openers
- Grow your customer list with powerful list-building tools
Other than sending standard marketing emails, Constant Contact has Plus features that allow you to launch specific types of campaigns such as surveys, donations, coupons, polls and events to achieve your goals
Learn how to use Constant Contact email marketing to grow your website here.
Constant Contact Key Features:
- Great email marketing automation – The feature-rich platform helps you to create email marketing campaigns effortlessly. Automatically send out emails to keep your audience engaged and builds strong customer relationships.
- eCommerce email marketing – connect with your leads, nurture them and turn them into customers with automated and segmented emails.
- Manage your contacts all in one place – You can add new contacts on your website, from Facebook and more. The easy-to-use email list building tool will automatically update bounces, unsubscribes and inactive emails.
- Real-time tracking tools – see who’s opening, clicking, and sharing your emails, so you can plan for even more effective campaigns.
Free Trial: While Constant Contact does not offer any free plan, you can Sign-up using this special link to enjoy TWO Free months of Constant Contact.
Paid Plan: Starts at $20 per month
ConvertKit is a simple and robust email marketing tool for authors, course creators, vloggers, publishers and professional bloggers.
While most email service providers focus on serving the needs of everyone, ConvertKit doesn’t. Rather, it is designed specifically to cater to content creators and bloggers.
And you don’t need social media or a website to start email marketing with ConvertKit. Use the well-designed free landing page templates to create your first landing page and start collecting email addresses from your audience.
ConverKit keeps things simple, while giving you complete control and essential tools to create and send targeted emails to your audience.
What makes ConvertKit stand out is the visual automations. With the visual automation builder, you can actually see how your email sequences play out as you edit your email automation.
Secondly, ConverKit’s email designer can help you create simple emails that deliver and convert. Instead of spending hours in creating emails that filled with graphics, video, and complicated code, you’ll focus on writing plain-text emails. Because simple emails have a better chance of being seen, read, and clicked.
Not only that, you can easily organize your subscribers from one list with tags and segments, A/B test with your email subjects as well as intergrate with your eCommerce store (Shopify), online course (Teachable), webinar platform (Crowdcast) and more.
If you’re a content creator who’s looking to run ultra-targeted plain text email compaigns, ConvertKit is perfect for you. Check out my ConvertKit review here.
ConvertKit Key Features:
- Easy to Use – If I were to describe ConvertKit in One Word, it’s: Simplicity. The simple and clear interface will show you all important features you need, it won’t overwhelm you.
- Email signup forms with content upgrades – You can easily add your content upgrade to your opt in form. You can offer incentives such as a printable, free checklist, tool list, worksheet and more to attract visitors to join your mailing list. ConvertKit makes it easy to deliver your content upgrade, tag those subscribers and send targeted messages.
- Visual automation workflows – Create powerful, automated funnels by setting the rules. ConvertKit will then automatically send targeted content to the right people at the right time.
Free Plan: up to 1,000 subscribers
Paid Plan: Starts at $29 per month
ActiveCampaign is a full–fledged email marketing tool. It allows you to handle email automation, offering live chat, performing multi-channel marketing and managing customer data (with built-in CRM) and more, all in one single dashboard.
You can use ActiveCampaign to automatically send many different types of emails:
- Send one-time broadcast email to anyone on your list.
- Send triggered emails based on purchase
- Send targeted emails to specific subscribers
- Send welcome emails with email responders
- Set up email funnels and turn your contacts into paying customers
- Schedule emails to send at a later time
Use the drag & drop builder to create highly personalized emails and send targeted message to your subscribers based on their unique interest.
With the visual automation builder, you can easily create drip campaigns and use workflow to nurture your leads automatically.
Additionally, you can also use advanced features like segment your list and A/B test your email campaign to get more opens, clicks, and conversions.
But wait- there’s more.
ActiveCampaign’s one-stop-shop model also includes tools to run SMS and text marketing campaigns, marketing automation across sites and events, keep track of leads in a sale automation CRM.
This makes ActiveCampaign a good option for small businesses and large enterprises, where having a tool that’s easy to use and setup, yet powerful enough to drive results from automated email campaigns without breaking the bank.
ActiveCampaing Key Features:
- Comprehensive sales and marketing platform – ActiveCampaign has a generous feature set that combines marketing automation with email marketing, sales, and CRM
- Site and event tracking – See how you visitors interact with your website, understand their behaviour, so you can offer exactly what they’re looking for.
- Lead scoring – You can find the most engaged subscribers and visitors.
- Dynamic content – You can send more personal emails to different groups of people by changing your email images and content with just a few simple clicks.
Free Trial: Get a 14–day free trial of ActiveCampaign to to test out all their features
Paid Plan: Starts at $9 per month (billed annually)
SendPulse pride itself on offering businesses a multi-channel marketing platform, that includes SMS, Facebook & Telegram chatbots, marketing automation, CRM, and of course email marketing.
When it comes to email marketing, SendPulse has a lot to offer. You get 130+ beautifully-designed email templates that you can edit right away. Build 100% customized emails with the drag-and-drop builder. Next, the built-in spam checker will analyze your campaign and give actionable tips to improve your email deliverability and open rate.
You can then set up these emails to be automatically sent out at the right time based on user behaviour, event trigger, and other conditions.
In addition to that, you can segment your subscribers to give them more relevant and personalized content. You don’t need to specify conditions for segmentation manually. SendPulse provides with the ready-to-use segments which will automatically divide your subscribers into 3 groups (new subscribers, active subscribers and inactive subscribers) based on their activities.
You can also create email drip campaigns, split test your campaign emails, resend emails to users who didn’t open it, track your campaigns, view statistics and integrate emails into your CRM.
Moreover, there’s a mobile version of SendPulse, allowing you to send emails, add new subscribers, track and evaluate your email marketing performance on the go.
SendPulse Key Features:
- Convenient email editor – If you can drag and drop, you can use SendPulse to create professional email campaigns. No technical skills or HTML knowledge is required.
- Email Automation 360 – Set up automated emails, SMSs, and Web Push notifications. Nurture your leads, keep your subscriber engaged, and convert them to customers, without moving a finger.
- Subscriber rating – Segmentation your email list is easy. With the subscriber rating, you get to know more about your subscribers, understand their needs, see who to prioritize, delete inactive subscribers and send targeted emails.
- Transactional emails– Send automatic emails triggered by a user’s unique behaviour.
- Outstanding free plan – SendPulse has one of the most generous free plans in the industry. The free subscription is more than enough for most brands and small businesses that send newsletters and promotions. You can send up to 15000 emails per month to 500 subscribers for free, with professional features such as free templates, easy-to-use email editor, 24/7 customer support via live chat and email, and fast email delivery with high inboxing rates.
Free plan:up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers per month
Paid plan: Starts at $7.08 per month
Conclusion
With so many email marketing platforms that offer a great variety of features for different prices, it’s a challenge to separate the chaff and spot the really exceptional ones.
With that said, I hope this article gives you a good overview of some of the best email marketing software tools and help you make your decision a lot easier.
- Brevo – Best for ecommerce businesses and digital marketers.
- Constant Contact -Best for small business and marketers (both novice and experienced)
- ConvertKit – best for bloggers and content creators
- ActiveCampaign – Best for small and medium enterprise and larger scale businesses
- SendPulse– Best for multi-channel marketing (email, SMS, chatbots and web push)
Spend some time to test the platform that you’re most comfortable with. And stick with the one best fits the needs of your email marketing strategy.
You’ll be well on your way to running a successful email marketing campaign.
Which email marketing service do you use for your business?
Tell me in the comments!
Last but not least, if this post was of any help to you, please share it with your friends and families!
Related reading:
- Constant Contact Review: The Best Email Marketing Software for You?
- Email Marketing Guide: How To Get Started With ConvertKit – Guide 2020
- 5 Best Shopify Apps to Reduce Cart Abandonment
- 7 Best Time-Saving Instagram Scheduling Tools
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