Email marketing is an effective way of reaching out to customers and prospects. Even this coming year 2023, it has become an essential part of any business’s marketing strategy and allows businesses to reach customers at all times, even offline. In this article, you’ll get to know the outstanding email marketing services for small businesses.
Here’s the quick link to the 7 best email marketing software:
- Constant Contact (Best for Small Businesses & Startups) | Read Review
- GetResponse (Best for Automated Lead Generation) | Read Review
- ConvertKit (Best for Professional Bloggers & Content Creators) | Read Review
- HubSpot (Best for Automated Email Marketing) | Read Review
- Drip (Best for eCommerce Websites and Business Owners) | Read Review
- Aweber (Best Pricing for Small Number of Subscribers) | Read Review
- Moosend (Best for Interactive Emails) | Read Review
Choosing The Right Email Marketing Service
If you are just starting to learn about email marketing we recommend reading this article Learn About Email Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide
There are several different kinds of email marketing services available today. They range from free to expensive; some even offer both paid and free versions.
Choosing an email marketing service is easy when you know what you need.
If you’re looking for a simple solution, you should consider using a free email marketing service. These services usually offer limited features and functionality, but they allow you to send out mass emails without paying any fees.
However, if you’re looking to build a robust email marketing strategy, you should consider choosing a paid service. Paid services typically offer more advanced features and tools than free services, allowing you to customize your campaigns and track results.
What To Look For In An Email Marketing Solution
Consider these factors when choosing an email marketing solution:
- Enables you to create newsletters that are both interesting and easy to use
- Allows you to send a lot of personalized, targeted emails in bulk without a lot of work
- Lets you easily manage your email list, segment users into groups, and track how well your email marketing campaigns are doing
- Makes sure that your email campaigns don’t end up in the spam folder
Here are seven of the best small business email marketing tools.
1. Constant Contact (Best Email Marketing Service for Small Businesses & Startups)
Constant Contact is a fast-growing email marketing service worldwide. It’s the easiest email marketing service for beginners.
Your email lists, contacts, email templates, the marketing calendar, and more can all be easily managed.
What’s included in each account:
- unlimited emails
- easy tracking and reporting
- social media sharing tools
- free image library
- list segmentation
- Facebook ads integration
- Shopify eCommerce integration
Additionally, their Email Plus accounts provide the following:
- email automation
- subject line A/B testing
- drip campaigns
- surveys & polls
- online donations
- coupons
These tools will allow you to send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
Constant Contact’s customer service is unbeatable, with live chat, phone calls, emails, support from the community, and a vast library of helpful resources. They also have video tutorials (YouTube) to get you started as a beginner.
They also offer live seminars all over the United States in addition to online training. This makes it easy for small business owners to learn the basics of email marketing quickly and start using it like a pro to grow their business.
Constant Contact gives you a free trial for 30 days (no credit card required). After that, they charge as little as $9.99 per month.
Visit Constant Contact website
2. GetResponse (Best Email Marketing Service for Automated Lead Generation)
GetResponse isn’t just a simple email marketing service. It’s more of an automation-focused, all-in-one solution.
With tools and features like automated emails, audience segmentation, autoresponders, landing page builders, advanced analytics, and even webinar software, you’ll be able to get a lot of leads, put them in the proper workflows, and turn them into returning customers.
Autofunnel is one of the best tools that GetResponse has to offer. It can be used to build sales funnels, lead generation funnels, webinar funnels, and more. It works by itself and is very easy to use.
Emails, landing pages, exit pop-ups, marketing automation, Facebook ads, and eCommerce integration are all part of a funnel. It depends on your goals and how you want to set them up. But GetResponse gives you everything you need to grow your list of subscribers and make money off those people.
GetResponse takes care of everything once a person enters your funnel. Using multiple digital touchpoints to guide customers through the conversion process is best. They also have video tutorials (YouTube) to guide you how to use GetResponse.
GetResponse is the best email marketing software for automated lead generation.
GetResponse offers four plans ranging in price from $15 to $99 per month. A customized enterprise-level option is also available, which requires you to reach out for a quote. Prices depend on your list size, and you can pay either monthly or yearly. Each plan has a free trial, so you can try the service before paying for it.
3. ConvertKit (Best Email Marketing Service for Professional Bloggers & Content Creators)
ConvertKit is a powerful platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers to use for email marketing. It is very easy to use and has a lot of power.
The unique thing about ConvertKit is that you can easily use email signup forms to offer content upgrades and incentives. It also has auto-responders that are easy to set up and let you send drip emails from their emailing service.
With ConvertKit, it’s easy to divide your subscribers into two groups: those interested and those who have already bought something. This lets you send more personal emails that an automated system sends. This is what marketers call “targeted email marketing.”
They have all the powerful features you’d expect from an excellent email marketing service, like a/b testing, beautiful email templates, a landing page builder, smart workflows, and more.
ConvertKit provides support through email and has an extensive knowledge base with excellent learning materials. They also have video tutorials (YouTube) so you can easily be guided on how to use ConvertKit.
Many of its features, like paid newsletters, are made for creators and professional bloggers.
They even added the ability to sell digital products and subscriptions from the same platform.
ConvertKit gives you a free trial for 14 days, and their prices start at $29 per month. Also, you can get your money back within 30 days.
Their Creator Pro plan has advanced features like a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
4. HubSpot (Best Email Marketing Service for Automated Email Marketing)
HubSpot is one of the best-known CRM and email marketing software programs.
Their service is free to create and has many powerful automation features to help your business grow.
You can easily use their drag-and-drop email builder and various templates to make a newsletter that fits your brand’s colors and personality.
Because HubSpot CRM is built-in, you can personalize emails for each subscriber based on their device type, country, membership in a list, or any other custom information you might have about them.
HubSpot has all the powerful features you have to expect from enterprise-level software:
- send time optimization
- high email deliverability
- A/B testing
- detailed performance analytics
- marketing automation
- drip campaigns
HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing platform is a significant reason why small, medium, and large businesses choose it. That all-in-one platform includes:
- email marketing
- CRM
- automation workflows
- sales tools
- website builder
- operation hub
Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan that lets you store unlimited subscribers and send up to 2,000 emails. You can make custom popup and signup forms, manage and track your online ads, and build landing pages. It has everything you need to get going.
You can pay $45 per month for one of their paid plans if you want more advanced features.
5. Drip (Best Email Marketing Service for eCommerce Websites and Business Owners)
Drip is a robust enterprise email marketing platform for online retailers, bloggers, and digital marketers. They provide a variety of tools that facilitate marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization.
Their email software integrates seamlessly with all prominent website builders, including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add opt-in sign-up forms and pop-ups to your website and capture more leads.
Drip’s intelligent marketing automation tools, more innovative email segmenting, split testing capabilities, list groups, and visual drag-and-drop builder for automation workflows distinguish it from competitors like Campaign Monitor. These features allow you to target your email list’s recipients to increase sales.
Drip offers live chat support, webinars, training in automation, detailed courses, free guides, and excellent documentation.
We utilize Drip for many of our businesses because it enables us to send mass emails while connecting and engaging with each customer personally through their intelligent eCommerce marketing automation.
Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature reveals precisely how much revenue each email campaign generates.
For eCommerce websites and business owners who want advanced features to boost their marketing, Drip is the best email marketing software.
Drip offers a free trial, and their monthly plans start at $49 with all features included.
They recently added SMS notifications to all plans, allowing you to connect with your users via email and SMS marketing channels. This makes them a comprehensive platform for email marketing for store owners.
6. Aweber (Best Email Marketing Service Pricing for Small Number of Subscribers)
AWeber is one of the world’s most prominent and oldest email marketing service providers. They provide a wide variety of email marketing management tools for small and medium-sized businesses.
AWeber makes it simple to get started. It is compatible with the majority of platforms, including WordPress. Refer to our comprehensive guide on connecting AWeber to WordPress for specific instructions.
With Aweber you can easily access the following:
- list management
- autoresponders
- HTML email templates
- a/b testing
- email tracking with detailed insights
In addition to AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag-based subscriber segmentation, AWeber offers additional powerful features, such as tag-based subscriber segmentation.
Support options that are available:
- Live chat
- phone support
- email support
- live webinars
- a vast library of how-tos and tutorials
AWeber offers a free plan with a limit of 500 subscribers. After that, their prices begin at $19 per month. Sign up for quarterly or yearly plans to save even more money.
7. Moosend (Best Email Marketing Service for Interactive Emails)
For small businesses, Moosend is an affordable email marketing service. It includes an array of practical email list-building tools, marketing automation features, landing pages, and more.
You can easily create an email newsletter and customize the design to match your brand by selecting from their dozens of pre-designed email templates or a completely custom template.
All Moosend plans include marketing automation capabilities, which is a plus. With their automation workflow designer, you can offer your newsletter subscribers a personalized subscriber journey.
Moosend provides comprehensive email analytics that displays crucial metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predicted demographic information.
All plans include robust conversion optimization tools, including A/B testing, email heatmap analytics, countdown timers, conditional content, an AI engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, and newsletter signup subscription forms, among others.
Moosend provides a free 30-day trial that includes unlimited emails (no credit card required). After that, their Pro plan begins at $9 per month and consists of a landing page builder, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, and team management, among other features.
Bonus: Mailchimp
Mailchimp is another popular email marketing service in the world, mainly because they have a plan that is free forever.
It comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, the ability to divide contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also lets you set delivery times based on the user’s time zone and set up segmenting based on where the user is.
MailChimp is easy to connect to WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and a lot of other platforms. If you use WordPress, check out our complete guide to using MailChimp with WordPress for more information.
Its platform doesn’t have as many marketing automation features as HubSpot, Drip, or ConvertKit, which are also on our list.
Mailchimp has tried to add many “advanced” features in the past few years, but I’ve tried a lot of them, and they’re not really advanced.
You can get help with Mailchimp through email, live chat, and a large database of tutorials. But their customer service is often slow and not as good as what you get from Constant Contact.
Mailchimp has a free plan that lasts forever and lets you send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is pretty limited because you don’t get things like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variable testing, etc. You also have to include their logo in your email. Last but not least, the only way to get help is through email, which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but not if you’re running a serious business and need reliable support.
Their paid plans start at $10 per month for up to 500 users, and the price goes up with each additional 500 users.
But if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, you’d have to switch to their $299 per month plan.
Conclusion
There are a lot of email marketing services out there, and we want to ensure you choose the right one for your business. Here’s what we think is the best:
We suggest you use Constant Contact if you have a small business, a non-profit, or a new blogger. Their prices are great, and their customer service is top-notch. Their onboarding team will help you get results immediately with email marketing.
If you have an online store or eCommerce site, you should use Drip because it has the best email marketing software for eCommerce. Their features for personalization and automation are compelling. Drip is used on many of our own business websites.
We recommend using ConvertKit if you are a professional blogger or content creator. They have an easy-to-use platform with advanced segmentation and funnels to help you take your blogging business to the next level.
HubSpot is a good choice if you want an all-in-one solution for email marketing. They offer a powerful suite of marketing tools, such as email marketing, CRM, sales tools, live chat, website builder, and more. The free plan is great for getting leads because you can store as many subscribers as you want.
Pro Tip: Grow Your Email Subscribers Faster
Once you’ve chosen an email marketing service for your business, you’ll probably want to start getting more email subscribers.
OptinMonster is a tool we use and recommend. It is a powerful toolkit for conversion optimization toolkit that helps you turn website visitors who are about to leave into email subscribers and customers.
OptinMonster works well with the best email marketing services discussed above and dozens of others.
Syed Balkhi, who started WPBeginner, also started OptinMonster. He made OptinMonster at first to help us grow our own email list. Since it was first released in 2013, it has grown a lot, and there are now more than 1 million active installations of the WordPress plugin.
Some of the biggest companies in the world, like McAfee, Experian, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Harvard University, Paterson, and more, use OptinMonster now.
Aside from OptiMonster, these tools will help you grow your email marketing list:
- WPForms – the best form builder for WordPress. You can use it to make contact forms, surveys, polls, and other forms. It is already set up to work with the most popular email marketing services. Over 5 million website owners trust it.
- SeedProd – If you want to make custom landing pages that get more people to buy, SeedProd is a much better landing page builder than its competitors. Smart website owners use SeedProd with their favorite email marketing service because it works with all of the most popular email platforms.
- LiveChat.com – Connecting your live chat software to your email marketing service is one of the easiest ways to get more people on your email list.
- ChatBot.com – Using chatbot software and linking it to your email marketing service is another smart way to grow your email list.
- RafflePress – the best platform for giving away things and holding contests on WordPress. It lets you grow your email list by using viral marketing.
Bonus Tip: Increase Email Deliverability Effectively
Take these few steps to ensure your marketing emails are always delivered:
1. Use a Professional/Business Email Address
There are algorithms on email platforms such as Gmail, Outlook, and others that look for spammy behavior. One of them is the email address of the sender.
As a business, it is essential that you use a professional or business email address ([email protected]) and not a generic email address such as hotmail or gmail.
This will ensure that your email deliverability rate exceeds the average for the industry.
2. Send Interest-Based Targeted Emails
It is crucial that you customize your emails based on user segments. Email marketing software such as Constant Contact and HubSpot enables you to easily segment your subscribers into groups such as the most active, the least active, those interested in particular topics, and custom segments.
This will increase the open rate and click-through rate of your email marketing campaigns, which is a significant factor in future email deliverability.
We always suggest sending a personalized welcome email to new subscribers and then segmenting them based on their interests.
It is also vital to provide users with a clear unsubscribe link, so they can opt-out without marking your emails as spam.
FAQs
Can I use Gmail or Outlook to send several emails to market my business?
In principle, yes. However, your email accounts will be shut down quickly if you do this. G Suite and Outlook are not designed to send several emails at once. They are a great way to handle business emails.
Which free email marketing service is the best?
Many email marketing services have free tiers that you can use for a limited amount of time. Free email marketing plans are available from HubSpot, Omnisend, MailerLite, and Mailchimp.
How much does it cost to market via email?
Your email marketing costs will depend entirely on how many subscribers you have, how many emails you send each month, and which email platform you use. If a small business runs its own email marketing campaign, it will spend between $20 and $300 per month on email marketing. If you hire an email marketing agency, your monthly costs could be $500 or more.
Can SEO be helped by email marketing?
SEO is not changed by email marketing in any direct way. But it can help you get more people to visit your website, leading to more shares and sometimes backlinks or mentions.
Search engines like Google use social signals such as shares and mentions to rank websites. Email marketing can indirectly improve your website’s SEO rankings.
You might also want to improve your rankings using these best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.
What is the best app for Shopify email marketing?
Many of the email marketing services listed above have easy-to-use Shopify apps. We recommend using Drip because it has powerful tools for automating eCommerce marketing that works well with Shopify and WooCommerce.
Some eCommerce power users prefer Klaviyo for Shopify email marketing, but their platform is costly for small businesses.
Are there any email marketing platforms not on this list?
Yes, there are a lot of email marketing services out there, but we didn’t list all of them here. We think that making a complete list of email platforms would add to the confusion and make it hard for people who aren’t tech-savvy to choose.
We’ve tried all of the best email marketing services, including many that aren’t on the lists above. These include MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, Mailjet, Campaign Monitor, InfusionSoft (now Keap), Klaviyo, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, MailPoet, and more.
The best email marketing services on our list have the best features for the best prices.
Which are the best email marketing services in your opinion?
Our top choices for the best email marketing services are:
- Constant Contact – Best email marketing services for small business.
- GetResponse – Best for Automated Lead Generation.
- ConvertKit – Best for Professional Bloggers & Content Creators
We hope this article gave you a good overview of the best email marketing services for your business.