Diverse ways have emerged to promote your services to your customers. However, even today, not many methods beat email marketing when it comes to reaching your target audience effectively. Email has been an essential toolkit for every marketer, but it has changed and evolved over the years. Over the last decade, the way email is crafted, the technologies that are used, and the results email marketing brings have seen a paradigm shift. In this blog, we will explore the basics and find out the top 25 email marketing tools small businesses can use.
So, let’s dive in! Let us start with the basics.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-efficient ways of promoting your business online. It involves sending effective emails to your customers and target audience to get leads and improve brand awareness and loyalty. Though it is cost-effective, you can still customize it, track performance, and use it to establish long-term relationships with your target audience. Email marketing is scalable, and you can use it to target a dozen customers or hundreds, depending on your needs. If you are a small business, you can work with a small team to craft your emails. As you grow, you can dedicate a much larger team to build drip campaigns targeting specific demographics and their product preferences.
In the next section, let us learn about the top 25 email marketing tools you can use as a small business. Pricing can vary, so it is recommended to check the exact pricing on the official website.
Top 25 Email Marketing Tools
If you use it correctly, there are not many better ways to get leads and make sales than email marketing. It helps you create a targeted marketing channel to reach your audience and communicate in a personalized way. There are certain tools that help you reach your marketing goals effectively.
In the next section, let us learn about the top 25 email marketing tools you can use as a small business. Pricing can vary, so it is recommended to check the exact pricing on the official website.
HubSpot Email Marketing:
Let us start our discussion with one of the most popular email marketing tools, i.e., HubSpot. It offers a fully-featured and trustworthy platform for ensuring your business growth for free. Using the platform, you can craft professional emails with user-friendly drag-and-drop options. You can start using the tool to improve and engage your audience without waiting for IT professionals and designers to help you out.
HubSpot also offers you a CRM platform to track and analyze customer data so that you can better personalize your emails. Utilizing data such as form submissions and website activity helps you make your emails more personalized, which in turn drives better results. Small businesses can use the HubSpot starting package for free, but there is a limit of 2,000 emails per month. Paid versions start from $15/month.
Mailchimp-
Mailchimp Software is one of the most popular platforms that are out there. Though the cost is a little on the higher side, it gives good value for your money. Most notable features include a drag-and drop builder, professional templates, and a user-friendly interface. Utilizing premade templates, you can create unlimited landing pages and get leads via popup signup forms to your website. There are advanced options as well like custom list segmentation, send time optimization, A/B testing, etc.
Through e-commerce plugins, you can also include product recommendations and personalize your emails. Mailchimp also enables you to take your marketing efforts multi-channel using social media ads and scheduling. The free plan includes 500 emails per month and 500 contacts. Though there is no customer support with free plans, you can leverage your knowledge base to find a resolution to your queries. Mailchimp offers flexible pricing options that start at $13/month.
MailGenius-
It is widely used and one of the best free email marketing tools that prevents your email from being marked as spam. The tool assesses your emails and looks for any trigger points that make them look like spam. It also allows you to run a deliverability test that ensures that mail can get received in the inbox. It informs you of all the trigger points you can avoid in your email to stop it from going to the spam folder.
If it detects any issues, it helps you fix them by offering explanations and actionable advice. No matter how effective your email copy looks, you won’t get the results if your email lands in the spam folder. It is important to avoid this situation by using the MailGenius tool. It is recommendable for small businesses because it starts just at $8/month.
Litmus-
Litmus is one of the most versatile tools widely used for monitoring and testing emails. It allows businesses to test their emails on conventional web browsers and popular mobile devices like Apple, Android, and Windows. It is an appropriate tool for conducting render testing, which is basically a process of finding out how the email will appear on different operating systems, email clients, and devices. It helps you test your emails against 40+ devices and clients. It also gives you a complete report of the test in a streamlined manner. Litmus also provides an ESP tracking report that lets you know how the user interacted with your email. Small businesses can go for the 7-day free trial to see whether the tool fulfills their needs. Litmus Plus is the most popular package comes to around $127/month and provides access to a small team of five users.
Reach Mail-
Reach Mail gives you several hundred email design template options to choose from. If none of them works for you, you can even get their in-house designer to create a custom design for you. There are also sophisticated features that let you find out who clicked on your links, the number of users who have forwarded your message, and users who prefer not to click on your links. Using this data, you can craft a good follow-up email targeting those users who chose to click on your email.
There is also a feature called “Message Testing Feature” to find out direct performance data of five email campaigns. This feature is also useful for monitoring content in the email or subject lines. This data will allow you to optimize both content and subject line wordings. You can also assess the performance of any email design compared to others. The pricing falls within the range of $10-70/month.
Brevo-
It is often regarded as one of the best email marketing tools for fledgling businesses. It fulfills all your marketing requirements and gives you a comprehensive sales and marketing toolkit. All the features in this centralized platform work in cohesion to streamline your email marketing strategy from start to finish. Brevo offers powerful features like A/B testing, drag and drop email editor, send-time optimization, audience segmentation, email metrics like click heatmaps, email content personalization, etc. With Brevo, creating eye-catching and effective emails becomes both fast and easy. You can even upload your branding elements like colors, logo, etc. and use them over and over again in all your emails. The pricing plans start at $15/month.
Target Hero
Target Hero entails all the capabilities you need in your reliable email marketing software. Packed with multi-featured editor, HTML, image hosting, plain text emails, etc., Target Hero gives you all you need to make your email campaigns a success. The tool is basically suitable for those businesses that require diverse features to drive their campaigns but don’t have a large list of subscribers. In order to use Target Hero, you need to verify your account. For this, you are required to complete the signup process followed by SMS authentication. The free version gives you access to 1000 contacts with unlimited emails. The paid subscription plans start from $9.90.
Klaviyo-
Klaviya is equipped with all relevant features and is a relevant tool for all email marketers who are focused on sales. The main capabilities of the software include e-commerce features, support for third-party integrations, and targeted solutions for retail. It is known for its analytics and reporting capabilities, which is one of the best in the market. The rich feature set makes this tool highly relevant for the experienced email marketing team.
Even if you are a beginner, its responsive email service and live chat feature help you get familiar with the tool. Other major characteristics include REST API, marketing automation, social media integration, A/B testing, limited free trial, etc. There is also a limited free trial which helps you test the tool for your marketing strategy. You can go for free plans or choose paid versions starting at $45/month.
Drip-
Drip is known for its versatility which consists of a great range of features, integration capability with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, advanced data analytics, etc. It offers support to both text and visual-based tools for email building. This empowers you to ensure image-driven marketing that can create maximum impact. Using this tool, you can also execute follow-up messages that are more personalized and targeted to a specific audience.
There is also a customized conversion tracking feature that puts businesses in complete control on how to assess the effectiveness and performance of Drip email campaigns. In the starter package, you do not have to pay any amount and target up to 100 subscribers. Drip pricing plans start at $39/month.
Mad Mimi-
Mimi contains a simple yet feature-rich WYSIWYG editor. You can easily write professional-level emails and customize them to add links. You also get options to choose from 39 available social media pins such as like pin, retweet, share, etc. It can not only help you create original campaigns but also allow you to clone your previous work. This will help you reuse your campaigns with minor adjustments without even altering your previous versions.
Even if you accidentally delete something, you can always undo the deletion and get your document back. With its detailed reporting, you can get some idea of how many emails were opened, who opened the email, the number of shares on social media, and the number of embedded links. It also gives integration facility with Google Analytics to ensure click tracking and access to in-depth statistics. The pricing starts at $10/month. Check out its official website to know more.
Campaigner-
Popular features include versatile tools and options, valuable automation tools, 24/7 support, user interface that prioritizes productivity, and versatile templates and options. It is highly customizable email marketing software with an impressive range of features. Businesses who are planning long-term should invest in the tool to streamline their email campaigns. Its user-friendly interface minimizes initial training and deployment time.
With a great workflow designer, integration capabilities with third-party software, and an image library allow businesses to get the best solution. It is suitable for mid-size businesses who are looking to scale their marketing campaigns in the future. The 24/7 support enables you to get instant support for your queries and get the most out of the software. You can check out its website to find the best deals. The starter package comes around $59/month.
CakeMail-
As a small business, you can get CakeMail to get your email campaigns covered. It’s most highlighted feature is split A/B testing. This helps you determine the most ideal mailing list and SPAM Assassin score to make certain that your emails always appear in the inbox rather than going in the Spam folder. There is also a feature for Google integration that lets you assess the performance of each email campaign with detailed statistics.
This will allow you to create group contacts into lists factoring in user interests and email patterns. Pricing ranges are very affordable, which is ideal for small businesses. You can choose to test CakeMail risk-free with a free monthly plan of 35,000 emails. The paid plans are also economical and start from $8/month.
ConvertKit-
If you are a YouTuber and blogger looking to grow your reach, then it is one of the most ideal email marketing tools for you. Its key features include the ability to personalize campaigns using tags, A/B testing for writing subject lines, segmenting your lists, etc. The tool offers customized signup forms and landing pages designed precisely to raise conversions. You can configure auto-emails with predefined content for users who choose to fill out the form.
Using the automation software, you get a visual way to create drip campaigns utilizing your subscriber data. The workflow edits let you take a closer look at your sequences. You can alter it as well quite easily once you get insights on the path that your subscribers take. You do not need to worry about getting started as well because there are launch templates for typical cases like product launches and seminars. If you need help, you also get email support and live chat. You can choose pricing plans depending on the number of subscribers you want to target. The creator plan tentatively comes around $9/month.
Mailjet-
Using this tool, you can combine transactional email sending and template-driven marketing in a single app. There are libraries that allow you to integrate Mailjet support into several programming languages like Ruby, PHP, and Python. If you get stuck somewhere, you can easily get support through a 24/7 active helpline. There is an in-built email template designer and if you don’t like it, you can upload your own. There are also features that enable you to segment your emailing list and customize email content using your contact details.
There is an A/X testing feature that makes it easy for you to compare different versions of the same email design and select the suitable one. Utilizing a comparison feature allows you to compare the current campaign with previous campaigns to make sure that the quality is retained. You can choose to use UUI to set up email campaigns or go for API integration to set up formatted emails using just a few lines of code. The essential plan starts at just $17/month with 15,000 emails included.
MailerLite-
This is one of the best email marketing tools for small businesses as it covers all your beginner needs. It lets you create email campaigns of any kind with a simple-to-use editor packed with a drag-and-drop feature. Using this tool, you can easily improve your email list with eye-catching landing pages. You can even set up a dedicated website using the tool’s website builder and configure suitable signup forms.
If you want to send transactional emails, you can integrate a third party called MailerSend. You can ensure customization driven by quality customer data and set up email automation to boost your productivity. If you have Woocommerce and Shopify stores, you can also design emails for abandoned carts. Smart delivery by time zones and A/B testing features also help you streamline campaign results. Moreover, there are sophisticated analytics and reporting features to help you monitor your performance effectively. Growing businesses can choose a plan that comes around $9/month.
Flashissue-
If you want to craft the best newsletters, then Flashissue is one of the best tools you can use. The interface is simple and easy to use and allows users to combine content creation with email marketing. The setup process is also extremely convenient. All you have to do is sign in using your Facebook or Google account. Then, in hardly five minutes, you can make your mail letters reach your recipient’s inbox. For your newsletters, you can use the content using your blog posts, and websites, or find them using your website
The tool automatically summarizes the information and helps you create the best newsletter. The tool does not restrict you to creating just generic news that makes your readers feel bored. In fact, you can create personalized newsletters tailored for your intent and readers. You can also choose how you want to deliver your newsletter. Even the free version of this tool lets you choose between Flashissue, LinkedIn, Gmail, Google+, etc. As a small business, you can use a starter pack at $9.99/month that lets you target 300 contacts with a monthly credit of 100 emails.
iContact-
It is one of the best email marketing tools for beginners that gives you the best value for your investment. It has an appealing interface and gives access to a wide range of resources and email-building tools. The interface is user-friendly with drag-and-drop creation functionalities. It boasts a strong anti-spam policy and utilizes effective filters to make sure businesses don’t face any problems. Moreover, there is an open API, Zapier support, and a rich library of predefined integrations. Thus, it makes integrations with other business systems feel like a cakewalk. It is an ideal tool for all businesses who are new to email marketing. The standard package starts at $9/month and there is also a 30-day free trial.
Aweber-
If you wish to engage your customers via your emails, then autoresponder tools from Aweber are the best choice. It gives you 150+ options in email design templates that makes your email design process absolutely hassle-free. You can also integrate your email marketing tool to other web services to streamline your business processes. If you already employ tools like Salesforce, then it will be a lot easier for you to personalize your account and get valuable information. You will be able to automatically display details such as number of emails your customers have received from you and the number of customers that have subscribed to Aweber
It also enables you to integrate your Aweber account to well-known shopping cart software. Using this, you can simply add new customers once they finish making a purchase on your website. You can even take your marketing approach to the next level by using Aweber Lab which lets you build your own productivity tools and apps using Aweber API. This flexibility and ease- access to customer data makes this tool one of the best for email marketing strategies. The monthly subscriptions begin at $15/month.
GetResponse-
It lets you maintain your contacts list in an organized way and create professional-level marketing campaigns. It contains a contact section where you can copy your contacts, create custom fields, and also carry out searches. It tracks and gives you report on the number of subscribers that open your emails and follow your links. It also gives you insights on the unsubscribers and complaints from customers. If your emails fail to reach the inbox of your subscribers, the tool lets you know that as well
You get all the data in the form of bar graphs and pie charts which lets you get the complete picture easily. If you send out a few surveys, you can also easily view its summary on the platform. If you are a beginner, the platform supports you through tutorials, glossaries, webinars, PDFs, FAQs, chat and email services, etc. You can choose between a monthly, yearly, or 24-month plan as per your choice. You can check out complete pricing details from the GetResponse website. The plans start at $19/month.
Constant Contact-
Often described as best for non-profits, this platform gives you complete marketing services which are not just limited to email. When you talk about emailing services, it gives you a great range of email templates absolutely free. It also offers you a tool to customize your own templates depending on your Facebook page and website.
Other powerful features include A/B testing, multi-step automated emails, automatic resends, survey tools, and online donations. There is also a dedicated feature for advanced segmentation that automates your contact management depending on clicks on emails. You can also create custom segments using your own criteria like purchase activity, subscriber engagement, etc. The constant contact pricing plans begin at $35/month.
Mobile accessibility also lets you have access to your email marketing data on your fingertips. You can also utilize scheduling features to organize which group of emails to send and when. Tout also lets you integrate analytics and CRM to take your marketing approach to the next level. This gives you deeper insight into the performance of your emails whenever you want. The desktop notifications and alerts also give you regular updates and keep you on your toes. Visit the official website to find pricing information and other details.
Campaign Monitor-
It is a no-frills platform, offering only the essential features businesses need. The user interface is extremely friendly to use and attractive to look at. Even if you have no prior experience in email marketing, you can get the job done with Campaign Monitor. If you just want to write emails, setup campaigns, and monitor your performance, then this is the right choice for you. It does not offer automation capabilities and CRM features but if you are a small organization, it can fulfill your need in a cost-effective way. You can get started with the free version or use the lite version packed with core features at just $12/month.
LeadPages-
The LeadPages lets you create eye-catching and organized landing pages with ease. The most attractive aspect of the tool is that you do not need any advanced knowledge to work with this platform. You can create a broad variety of landing pages, which are not just essential for email marketing but for online presence in general. It also provides the flexibility to personalize these landing pages, filling your branding elements in it. The loading speed is also quite fast, which ensures that users stay on your page when they open the link. You can integrate it with any of the email marketing tools with only a few clicks. The standard package starts at $37/month but you can start creating your landing pages right now with the free version.
InfusionSoft-
If you are running a small business, you might find the pricing on the higher side, but you will get great returns in the longer run. In the US alone, the average ROI was found to be approximately 44%. Moreover, companies have reported as much as 300% profit and eight times revenue after working with InfusionSoft. If you are starting out and invest in this platform, this might even prove to be a game changer. The flowchart-style campaigns look highly attractive and building campaigns is easy and fun. You can also ensure that your subscribers get engaged in a highly personalized way, which takes your brand loyalty to another level. The starting price is $249 and you can find the best plans on its official website.
BenchMark-
The last tool in our list is BenchMark. It is known for providing multiple templates for all intents and purposes. Irrespective of whether you want to compose an email for greetings, newsletters, giveaways, promotional templates, etc., you can find a template for that. You also get visual editor software for adding HTML and CSS codes to give your emails a more customized look. Using the built-in spam filter, you can filter your emails and identify any objectionable materials if they are present. You can start using the free version by just signing up. The paid version starts at 15$ per month.
Tout App-
Tout app has made its name as the top 25 email marketing tools thanks to its impressive range of features and functionalities. It excels in the area of providing the best templates to the sales team so that they can make their campaigns as effective as possible. It also provides complete visibility into aspects like what emails reached your subscribers, which ones they opened, links they clicked, attachments they opened, and PDF pages they accessed.
Mobile accessibility also lets you have access to your email marketing data on your fingertips. You can also utilize scheduling features to organize which group of emails to send and when. Tout also lets you integrate analytics and CRM to take your marketing approach to the next level. This gives you deeper insight into the performance of your emails whenever you want. The desktop notifications and alerts also give you regular updates and keep you on your toes. Visit the official website to find pricing information and other details.
Conclusion
Email marketing is vital for your business as it lets you communicate with your subscribers in a personalized way. However, you must have the right approach, right template, and content to get the best results. The blog focuses on the top 25 email marketing tools you must know to kickstart your email marketing campaigns in an effective way. Pricing of all the tools are mentioned, but they might change as they are decided by the company. To know the exact prices, visit the official website of these tools. There, you can get comprehensive details related to free trial, pricing, and packages.
