Here’s the deal:
Email marketing is not difficult, but choosing the best email marketing automation software is.
There are hundreds of platforms, software, and services for email marketing. Some are built for content creators, small businesses, and some for high-demanding massive brands.
Choosing the right email marketing service is crucial. It will define how successful your email campaigns & sales funnel are. If you are using the right platform, you’ll get better ROI and profit faster.
Because the email marketing service you’re using affects the deliverability of your emails. Things I look for and expect from a robust email marketing software/service are:
- Extensive, accurate reporting and analytics.
- High email deliverability rate.
- Easy to navigate dashboard + modern email editor with custom templates
- Features like list segmentation, A/B testing, subscriber tagging, retargeting triggers
- Workflow automation with easy to implement drip campaigns
- A vast list of third-party software integration
- Quick support to solve critical problems
- Additional features depending on your requirements.
In this list, each and every email marketing software offers all of the above-mentioned features. You can choose any one of these for your online business, and you won’t regret your decision.
Whether you’re a small business owner, blogger, or a CRO from a corporate team looking for a platform to streamline your email marketing efforts, You’ll find the perfect tool here.
Keap
If you’re looking for smart email marketing software that can do whatever you wish, I recommend you check out Keap.
From sending transactional emails, drip campaigns, retardation users from your website to sending a beautiful email using templates. Keap allows you to do anything with your emails.
Some of the biggest businesses have been using InfusionSoft, a CRM software recently acquired by Keap. InfusionSoft and Keap combined are a complete set of email marketing tools.
You don’t need a landing page builder, sales funnel builder, pipeline system, optin form builder, or checkout software if you’re suing Keap. It has everything you need – from setting up your email autoresponders to invoicing your customers. It also supports recurring invoicing.
Keap Marketing Automation allows you to automate your drip campaigns using logical triggers. The pipeline allows you to track your sales and understand how cold-prospects become customers.
You get access to GeoTargeting, email scheduling, and lead scoring, high converting templates as standard.
You can also create SMS campaigns using Keap. It has a subscription form builder that helps you create optin forms quickly and without guesswork.
The report and insights section is what I’m most excited about. It is as extensive as it gets. With the in-depth reports, you know exactly how subscribers interact with your emails. And how to improve the user experience.
Coming to integrations, it supports in-app connection with Instapage, Gmail, ThriveCart, Privy PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, and PayPal Credit. You can expand integration possibilities using Zapier.
Keap has an active support system. You can reach their support experts via phone, email, or live chat. The support is live 24×7 and is quick to resolve any queries: pre or post-sales.
The basic plan costs $24/month. Which is cheaper than most of its competition. You can also try Keap for 14 days completely free.
HubSpot
HubSpot is the most popular CRM and lead generation software. It is highly popular among internet marketers due to three reasons:
- It’s super easy to use. It doesn’t have a learning curve. HubSpot is very intuitive and has tons of features that make complex tasks of email marketing simple.
- HubSpot has the best inbound marketing strategies applied to its software. Its optin forms and pipeline structure is conversion-focused to the core.
- Reporting & analytics offered by HubSpot are on another level. You’ll have to put multiple tracking software and cloud-app to gather the information that HubSpot does for you. The insights are detailed and straightforward that you can scale your campaigns by studying the reports and finding low points in a few days.
In terms of features, HubSpot is the richest of all. It has every feature that other tools have to offer under the sun. Starting from retargeting to creating a multi-level sales funnel and interactive email campaigns.
For SaaS websites and small businesses that sell digital products, HubSpot is the ultimate tool. It has a robust CRM, easy-to-use email marketing software, and you can create a complete lead-to-sales pipeline using one tool.
Other features include CMS and customer service software. HubSpot allows you to create a blog or a custom content website using their Content Management Software (CMS). It also supports SMS broadcasts and drip campaigns for eCommerce websites.
Service Hub by Hubspot allows you to integrate their support system. It provides direct ticket support to your customers while helping you to collect customer feedback as well.
There is a whole suite of marketing tools offered by HubSpot, along with its growth hacking educational materials.
HubSpot integrates with most of the cloud-apps as an advantage of being hugely popular.
The basic software is free, and HubSpot only charges if you want more features. In my recommendation, the premium features are necessary to utilize the full potential of HubSpot. The pricing starts at $50/month.
GetResponse
If you’re looking for email marketing software that allows you to build sales funnel as well, you’ve got to pick GetResponse.
GetResponse offers a unique software called Conversion Funnel, aka Autofunnel. As the name suggests, it is a system to build a powerful sales funnel, and it comes with the email marketing platform offers by GetResponse.
Using Conversion Funnel, you can create sales funnels almost automatically using the templates and pre-determined stages for converting cold prospects into customers.
Depending on your requirements and industry, there are dozens of sales funnel templates to choose from. You can either build a funnel from scratch or pick a template matching your industry and customize it. Either way, Conversion Funnel makes this complex task much easier.
If you’re new, It is the easiest way to understand different stages of sales to funnel work. And how you can make more money using these funnels to nurture your subscribers and boost the conversion rate.
On the other hand, the GetResponse email marketing platform is equally powerful. There are different automation templates you can choose and customize to build an autoresponder automation workflow without guesswork.
There are hundreds of email temples, and GetResponse’s WYSIWYG editor can help you create custom email templates. Email templates are also categorized based on the industry.
These templates are already optimized for high conversion and click-through rates so, all you need to do is replace the content using your own words.
The automation workflow can accomplish complex drip campaigns, and the re-targeting campings work smoothly. The deliverability rate is higher than that of MailChimp & Aweber. It also shows you how active a subscriber-based by tracking their activities.
Support from the GetResponse team is quite quick. I know this from a personal experience of using it for the last 8 months.
The basic plan starts at $15/month. GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial, and you can use it to test the software.
Get started with GetResponse>>
ConvertKit
Blogging is now considered an online business and a very profitable one too. This list would be incomplete without mentioning an email marketing software specifically for bloggers.
If there is any tool that is exactly what a blogger needs to grow an email list to a high-value asset, it is ConvertKit.
ConvertKit is built for creators by a creator himself. Its founder Nathan is a former blogger himself. His knowledge of what a typical blogger needs turned out to be ConvertKit.
Unlike other email marketing services, ConvertKit doesn’t support email templates. It has a simple, easy-to-understand automation builder that displays the automation pipeline in a mind map format.
The automation builder and drip campaign workflow system in ConvertKit, by far, is the most straightforward. I’ve used more than 9 different services, but none come close to ConvertKit’s automation regarding conversion features and ease to use.
And ConvertKit offers something. Others don’t. An easy tagging and segmentation system.
Tools like MailChimp and InfusionSoft make tagging, grouping, and segmenting email subscribers very complicated. Even if you have some experience as an online marketer, segmenting in most email marketing services is a pain.
ConvertKit does this in a simple way. Unlike others, It doesn’t count a unique email twice. If one person is subscribed to multiple email lists inside ConvertKit, it is counted as one.
For example, let’s say you’ve list numbers 1, 2, and 3. If a person named A subscribes to your list 1, 2, and 3 combined, it is still counted as one email.
If an email subscriber is going through one of your automation and you wish to add him to another automation, you can do so with a single click using tagging and segmentation.
The deliverability percentage offered by ConvertKit is one of the highest in the industry. They ensure to manually verify each customer to maintain quality.
Also, since one email isn’t double-counted, you save money on how many unique subscribers you have in your list inventory.
The basic plan starts at $29/month. However, you can use ConvertKit for free up until you’ve 1,000+ subscribers.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is largely popular among small businesses and startups.
It has an amazing interface, high email deliverability, and leads scoring features. But one unique thing is it has no limit on how many emails you store on your mailing list.
SendinBlue charges based on the numbers of emails send in a month, while you can store as many emails in your list as you may want. That means unlimited email subscriber storage.
Its pricing has no match. You can send up to 1,00,000 emails starting from the base plan. The most affordable plan is $25/month, allowing you to send 10,000 emails in a month. There is no limit on how many emails you can send in a day.
They also offer pay-as-you-go email plans to pay a one-time fee for sending a set number of emails.
This is a huge benefit for startups when they have a lot of cold-subscribers. You don’t want to spend money on storing leads that won’t return your investment.
SendinBlue is a good choice if you’re looking for an email marketing service to store leads and identify and separate cold-subscribers from potential clients. Even when you start growing your business, you won’t need to switch to other services.
It does have all the other important features, such as marketing automation, retargeting for social media ads, landing page builder, subscriber segmentation, SMS sender, and SSO access.
The only drawback of SendinBlue is they don’t have an extensive list of third-party integration. The support is good, and if you’re purchasing a premium plan, you’ll get priority phone support too.
Drip
For an E-commerce website, Drip is a perfect email marketing software.
Drip allows you to create highly complex automation based on your social media ads, audience interaction, and website analytics.
It is a complete set of tools you can use to boost your product sales and revenue. Whether it’s physical or digital products, SaaS, or an online course. Drip enables you to customize the user experience by sending personalized emails via automation.
Custom workflows based on retargeting website visitors and drip campaigns for E-commerce store customers are two things that Drip does better than any other tool.
When you take a look at Drip’s interface, you realize the possibilities of optimizing your sales funnel and pipeline are huge. There is definitely a bit of a learning curve, and you’ll have to spend some time to get the best result using Drip.
Features like Automatic Revenue Attribution help you understand how precisely you can optimize customer experience to generate more revenue. It shows you what products are performing well when was the highest revenue collection, what pages generate more ROI, and tons of other insights.
Drip has a visual workflow, a drip campaign, and an automation builder. Segmentation, GeoTargeting, tagging, logical autoresponders these features are standard across all Drip plans.
Using the visual editor, you can look at the automation and understand how exactly a potential customer will go through the whole process of lead nurturing. This also enables you to find potential blind-spots in your pipeline.
The analytics and reporting section is as detailed as it could get. From starting with a lead to generating a sale, each step is tracked by Drip and pinned together in ease to read reports. You can read the reports in different formats, including charts and graphs.
With relevant, personalized information and in-depth reporting offered by Drip, it is one of the best eCRM for eCommerce stores and online course instructors.
Many bloggers and SaaS sellers use Drip since its automation is flexible enough to create custom automation that suits your marketing needs.
Drip is quite affordable. Its pricing starts at $19/month, and there is a 14-day free trial.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the oldest email marketing services, and it’s still innovative enough to keep up with the latest competition.
It is a very beginner-friendly, cost-efficient email marketing service.
Some of the best Constant Contact features are:
- Drag and Drop visual email editor
- Automation builder with triggers, segmentation, and drip series.
- Ecommerce tools such as retargeting and pixel integration to get more return visitors.
- Social media posting with scheduling and insights to understand social network referral audience.
- Ad maker – you can build Facebook and Instagram ads right from the Constant Contact dashboard.
The resend email feature is quite a rare feature. Using Constant Contact, you can resend un-opened emails back to subscribers who didn’t open them.
Interactive features such as Surveys and Polls help you to connect with your audience while generating valuable feedback.
Constant Contact also comes with a decent landing page builder, marketing calendar, and integrated shipping management.
It also has a good email deliverability rate. But the support isn’t up to the mark.
The basic plan starts at $20/month.
Get started with Constant Contact>>
Special Mention: Benchmark
Benchmark is a beginner-friendly email marketing service. It’s free to get started.
It is easy to use the Benchmark email editor. There isn’t much of a learning curve. You can immediately begin creating autoresponders and add them to the automation workflow.
It offers features to streamline lead generation and email automation for small businesses. Such as:
- Visual email automation builder
- Lead generation tools – popup builder, polls and surveys, sign-up forms.
- Click Heatmap – a unique reporting feature
- Live engagement reports for email campaigns.
- Unlimited video storage
- List verification, free up to 200k subscribers.
- Email deliverability management
More features help you utilize the Benchmark to its full potential and discover new opportunities for your sales funnel.
Benchmark is free to get started, and you can store unlimited emails. You pay for how many emails you send in a month rather than how many subscribers you have.
The pro plan starts at $13/month.
Apart from the email marketing platform, Benchmark also has CRM software.
Benchmark ONE is a budget-friendly CRM software built for small businesses. It is straightforward to use, and you can get creative with your marketing pipeline using it.
Benchmark ONE is powerful enough and comes with tons of growth hacking features.
You get access to features such as drip campings, visual lead pipeline builder with smart triggers, custom email templates, landing page builder, Popup subscriber form builder, just to name a few.
It has everything you need to generate more profit from your leads.
Usually, CRM software does a lot of things, which is why it is complex. However, Benchmark ONE is intuitive and very straightforward. A good tool to get started with CRMs.
Let me know when you sign-up for a paid Benchmark email or Benchmark CRM plan for your business. I’ll connect you to one of the senior customer relations & onboard team for free. It will highly benefit you, your company, and your employees.
They’ll guide you through the whole platform and provide the best knowledge on improving your current email marketing campaigns to generate more profit. It’s equal to saving about $499 on getting training and education costs.
There are many email marketing services available. Some may be extremely affordable, while others charge a very high premium.
However, pricing doesn’t define value.
I created this list after using more than 7 email marketing tools this year alone. I’ve personally used each of these services and software. I’ve even talked to their team members to understand if they are value for money or not.
I hope you’ve found the right email marketing for your business. You should also check How to send multiple lead magnets to different subscribers in one list.
Share this list with your friends and colleagues.
Sendinblue is one of the best email automation software that help marketers seeking advanced email marketing software while operating on a tight budget. This email automation tool also incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence. So if any one is looking for the best email marketing tool then there’s no better option than Sendinblue.