is email marketing a priority for your business in 2022? Looking for the best email marketing software?
Choosing the right email marketing service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign.
In this article, we’ll review and compare the 7 best email marketing services for small businesses.
Why Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service is Important?
Email marketing is one of the most profitable marketing strategies for small businesses. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average generates a 4,300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States.
This is because email marketing is easy to manage, gives you full control, and allows you to make direct contact with your customers.
Not convinced about email marketing? check out these 6 reasons why building an email list is so important today.
It’s important to understand that much of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose, as they are responsible for making sure your emails actually get delivered.
If you’re not careful, you’ll end up paying a lot more money for less marketing features and terrible email delivery rates (causing you to lose even more money).
what to look for in a good email marketing tool?
A good email marketing service should allow you to create very attractive email newsletters with a simple user interface (ideally a drag and drop editor).
You should be able to easily send mass emails that are really personalized and targeted without a lot of work. this is also known as marketing automation.
Other than that, your email marketing service should make it easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Most importantly, a good email service provider makes sure your email campaigns don’t end up in the spam folder.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the most popular email marketing service providers and how they compare to each other.
1. constant contact
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar and more.
each account gives you access to unlimited emails, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, facebook ads integration, and a powerful ecommerce integration for shopify stores .
Your email plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & surveys, coupons, online donations, and subject line a/b testing that help you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
constant contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and an extensive library of helpful resources.
In addition to online training, they also offer live, face-to-face seminars in the United States. This allows small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro.
For all of the above reasons, we rate Constant Contact as the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.
constant contact has a free 60-day trial (no credit card required). after that, their prices start from $9.99/mo.
wpbeginner users can use our constant contact coupon code for an extra 20% off.
2. sending blue
SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.
is an extremely easy to use platform with great tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no email marketing experience.
sendinblue includes easy-to-use 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 mass emails using its artificial intelligence algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
sendinblue offers a completely free email marketing plan with unlimited contacts. your free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails per day, but all of your emails will be branded.
Their paid plans start from $25 per month for lite. you can also include sms in your account, but the price will vary depending on your sending requirements.
They have recently upgraded their premium plan to include more advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, sales crm and facebook ads integration. this means users now get more value for the same price.
sendinblue also offers a standalone smtp bulk email marketing service that you can use to push transactional or automated emails from your wordpress site. You don’t need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice feature if you have a large website and want automated emails based on real-time content.
3. center point
HubSpot is one of the most well-known softwares in the CRM and email marketing space.
Their email marketing service is free and comes with a host of powerful automation features designed to grow your business.
You can use their easy drag-and-drop email builder and a selection of templates to create a fully customized newsletter that matches your brand personality and colors.
Thanks to the native integration with hubspot crm, you can customize your emails for each subscriber based on device type, country, member list, or any other custom information you may have about the individual subscriber.
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hubspot comes with all the powerful features you’d expect from an enterprise-grade email marketing software, like send time optimization, high email deliverability, a/b testing, detailed performance analysis, automation marketing, drip campaigns and more.
one of the main reasons small and medium business customers choose hubspot is because they offer an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, crm, automation workflows, sales tools, builder of websites, operations center and more.
hubspot email marketing has a free plan, which includes the crm and all free hubspot marketing, sales, service and operations tools.
The free version allows you to send 2000 emails and store an unlimited number of subscribers. you can create custom popup and signup forms, create landing pages, manage and track your online ads, and more. has all the tools you need to get started.
if you need more advanced capabilities, then their paid plans start at $45/mo.
4. omnisend
Omnisend is a powerful SMS & email marketing service for eCommerce businesses who are looking for an omni-channel marketing automation solution.
offer one of the most generous free email marketing plans because it includes all the powerful features like pre-built automation workflows, subscriber segmentation, a/b testing, performance reporting and even sms + web push notification .
Most other free email marketing plans are restricted, but omnisend is confident in its value proposition, so it offers almost everything in its free plan. as your contact list grows, you’ll need to upgrade to their paid plans.
omnisend seamlessly integrates with all popular website builders and eCommerce platforms like woocommerce, shopify, bigcommerce and more. they also have integration with hundreds of other business tools like live chat software, help desk service and more.
The best thing we liked about omnisend is its pre-built ecommerce marketing automation workflows that are designed to help you generate more revenue. this includes emails such as welcome email series, cart abandonment emails, cross-sell emails, and more.
Their email builder is very easy to use and comes with a great selection of email templates, so you can create beautiful branded campaigns. once set up, you can personalize the email using its powerful targeting and segmentation features.
What many users love about omnisend is that they offer integrated sms, so you don’t have to pay for separate software, and their sms feature allows you to send messages in 209 regions around the world.
omnisend’s free email marketing plan allows you to contact up to 250 subscribers, and their paid plans start at $16 per month.
5. drip
Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
Your email software offers seamless integration for all popular website builders including wordpress and woocommerce. this allows you to easily add popups/signup forms on your website and capture more leads.
What sets drip apart from the competition, like campaign monitor, is its intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmentation, split testing features, list groups, and a visual drag-and-drop builder for automation workflows. These features allow you to reach targeted customers on your email list for more sales.
support options at drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, in-depth courses, free guides, and excellent documentation.
We use drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send mass emails while connecting and engaging with each customer on a personal level using their intelligent eCommerce marketing automation.
Its eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.
Although it’s a bit pricey, we think drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.
drip offers a free trial and their plans start from $49/month which includes all their features.
Recently, they added sms notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on email and sms marketing channel. this makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.
6. aberrative
AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
Getting started with aweber is easy. seamlessly connects to most platforms including wordpress. For detailed instructions, check out our ultimate guide on how to connect aweber to wordpress.
You get access to out-of-the-box html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and detailed email tracking.
aweber also has other powerful email marketing features like expanded emails, automatic rss to email for bloggers, and tag-based subscriber segmentation.
support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and an extensive library of how-tos and tutorials.
aweber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. after that, its price starts from $19/month. You can also sign up for quarterly or yearly plans to save even more.
7. moose
Moosend is an affordable email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with a suite of powerful marketing automation features, email list building tools, landing pages, and more.
You can quickly create an email newsletter and customize the email design to match your brand in minutes, either choosing from dozens of pre-made email templates or creating a completely custom template.
The good thing about moosend is that they offer marketing automation features for all plans, including the free plan. you can use your automation workflow designer to deliver a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter subscribers.
moosend offers detailed email analytics that show you important metrics like email opens, clicks, bounces, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predicted demographics.
all plans come with powerful conversion optimization features like a/b testing, email heat map analysis, countdown timers, conditional content, smart engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars , newsletter subscription forms and more.
moosend offers a 30-day free trial with unlimited emails (no credit card required). after that, your pricing starts at $9 per month for their pro plan which includes landing page builder, transactional emails for ecommerce websites, team management, and more.
bonus: convertkit
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
The unique feature of convertkit is that it allows you to easily offer content updates and incentives with email signup forms. it also comes with easy-to-manage autoresponders that let you send drip emails from your email service.
With convertkit, you can easily segment subscribers between those who are interested and those who have already purchased. this helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing.
They have all the powerful features you’d expect from a top-tier email marketing service, like a/b testing, beautiful email templates, a landing page builder, smart workflows, and more.
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convertkit offers email-based support and has an extensive knowledge base with excellent learning material.
many features of convertkit, like paid newsletters, are designed specifically for creators and professional bloggers, which is why we rate them as the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.
They even added the ability to sell digital products & subscriptions from the same platform.
convertkit offers a 14-day free trial and its price starts from $29/month. they also offer a 30-day refund policy.
Your professional plan for creators also includes advanced features like a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and facebook custom audiences.
bonus: mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
Although we no longer recommend it because there are better solutions available on the market, the sad truth is that we cannot create a list of the best email marketing software without including mailchimp due to its sheer popularity.
mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. it also allows you to set delivery times based on user time zones, and you can set targeting based on geolocation.
you can easily integrate mailchimp with wordpress, magento, shopify and many other platforms. if you use wordpress, check out our ultimate guide to using mailchimp and wordpress for detailed instructions.
When it comes to marketing automation features, mailchimp’s platform is pretty limited compared to other providers on our list, like hubspot, drip, or convertkit.
over the past few years, mailchimp has tried to add a lot of “advanced” features, but after trying a lot of them, they’re not really advanced.
mailchimp support is offered via email, live chat, and a large knowledge base of tutorials. however, their support is often slow and doesn’t match the quality of service you get from constant contact.
mailchimp offers a free forever plan that allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. this plan is pretty limited because you don’t get features like shipping time optimization, advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, etc. You must also display your brand in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only, which is fine if you’re a hobbyist, but as a serious business, you need reliable support you can count on.
Their paid plans start at $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the price increases in increments of 500 subscribers.
however, if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and benchmarking reports, then you’ll need to switch to their $299 per month plan.
final thoughts: the best email marketing service
There are dozens of email marketing services out there and we want to make sure you choose the right one for your business needs. Here’s our expert pick:
If you’re a small business, nonprofit, or new blogger, we recommend using constant contact. its price is great and the support team is absolutely top notch. their onboarding team will help you find success with email marketing right away.
If you have an online store or e-commerce website, we recommend using omnisend or drip because they offer the best email marketing software for e-commerce. its customization and automation features are extremely powerful. many of our commercial websites use drip.
If you are a professional blogger or content creator, we recommend you to use convertkit. they offer an easy-to-use platform with advanced segmentation and funnels that will help you take your blogging business to the next level.
if you are a business owner and want a powerful marketing automation tool that combines email marketing, smtp blasts and sms messages, then we recommend using sendinblue. Their platform is easy to use and allows you to manage both email and SMS from a single interface. they also offer a pretty generous forever free plan which makes them the best free email marketing software.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one email marketing solution, we recommend using hubspot. they offer a powerful set of marketing tools including email marketing, crm, sales tools, live chat, website builder and more. This free plan is great for lead generation because it allows you to store unlimited subscribers.
pro tip: get more email subscribers, faster!
Once you’ve chosen an email marketing service for your business, you’ll likely want to start getting more email subscribers.
we use and recommend optinmonster. is a powerful set of conversion optimization tools that help you convert leaving website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with all the best email marketing service that we mentioned above and dozens more.
wpbeginner founder syed balkhi is also a co-founder of optinmonster. he initially created optinmonster to help grow our own email list. after launching in 2013 it has grown tremendously with over 1 million active installs of the wordpress plugin.
today optinmonster is being used by some of the world’s biggest brands including mcafee, experian, tripadvisor, pinterest, harvard university, pateron and more.
In addition to optinmonster, you can also use the following tools to grow your email marketing list:
- wpforms – #1 wordpress form builder that you can use to create contact forms, surveys, polls and other types of forms. It comes with built-in integration with all the popular email marketing services. Trusted by over 5 million website owners.
- seedprod – Want to create custom landing pages to increase conversions? seedprod offers a far superior landing page building experience. this is why savvy website owners use seedprod in conjunction with their preferred email marketing service as it integrates with all popular email platforms.
- livechat.com: One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is to connect your live chat software with your email marketing service. we use live chat on several of our sites.
- chatbot.com – Another smart way to grow your email list is to use chatbot software and connect it with your email marketing service.
- rafflepress – this is the leading platform for wordpress giveaways and contests. allows you to use viral marketing to grow your email list.
bonus tip: improve the deliverability of your emails
All of the email newsletter tools we’ve shared in this article have excellent email deliverability rates.
However, there are a few things you can do to make sure your marketing emails always get delivered.
1. use a professional email address
Email platforms like gmail, outlook and others have algorithms that detect spam behavior. one of them is the sender’s email address.
As a business, it’s important that you use a professional business email address (such as yourname@yourcompany.com) and not a generic hotmail or gmail address.
This will help ensure your email deliverability rate is higher than the industry average.
2. send targeted emails based on interests
It is very important that you personalize your emails based on user segments. Email marketing software like Constant Contact and HubSpot allow you to easily group your subscribers into segments, such as most active, non-active, interested in specific topics, custom segments, etc.
This will help your email marketing campaigns have the highest open rate and click rate, which is an important factor in future email deliverability.
We always recommend sending a personalized welcome email to all new subscribers and then segmenting users based on their interests.
It’s also important to have a clear unsubscribe link for users, so they can unsubscribe instead of marking your emails as spam.
For more tips, check out this step-by-step email marketing guide with examples to help you create a successful email marketing campaign.
frequently asked questions about email marketing software
Having helped thousands of users choose the best email marketing software, we’ve answered a lot of questions. Below are some of the answers to the most frequently asked questions about email marketing platforms.
can i do mass email marketing from my gmail or outlook?
In theory, yes. but this will get your email accounts suspended quickly. g suite and outlook are not made for mass emailing. are a great professional business email solution.
what is the best free email marketing service?
Many email marketing services will offer free tiers for limited use. the best free email marketing service is sendinblue because their free plan does not have a limit on the number of subscribers. hubspot, omnisend, mailerlite, and mailchimp also offer free email marketing service plans.
How much does email marketing cost?
Your cost of email marketing will depend entirely on the number of subscribers you have, the total number of emails you send per month, and the email platform you use. On average, small business email marketing costs around $20-$300 per month in email marketing given that they manage their own campaign. if you use an email marketing agency, then your cost could be closer to $500 per month or more.
can email marketing help with seo?
email marketing has no direct impact on seo. however, it can help you get more traffic to your website, which can lead to more shares and sometimes backlinks/mentions.
Google and other search engines use shares and mentions as social signals to rank websites. therefore indirectly email marketing can help your website seo rankings.
You may also want to use these best wordpress search engine optimization plugins and tools to improve your ranking.
what is the best email marketing app for shopify?
Many of the email marketing services above offer an intuitive shopify app that is easy to use. We recommend using drip as it offers robust ecommerce marketing automation tools that integrate seamlessly with both shopify and woocommerce.
some advanced ecommerce users prefer klaviyo for shopify email marketing, but their platform is quite expensive for small businesses.
Are there other email marketing platforms not listed here?
Yes, there are literally hundreds of email marketing services, but we haven’t listed all of them here. We believe that making a comprehensive list of email platforms would create more confusion and cause choice paralysis for non-tech savvy readers.
We’ve tested all the major email marketing services, including many not on our previous email platform lists, such as: mailerlite, activecampaign, getresponse, ontraport, mailjet, campaign monitor, infusionsoft (keap now) , klaviyo, marketo, eloqua, salesforce pardot, sendloop, icontact, emma, totalsend, sharpspring, mailpoet and more.
The top email marketing services we’ve chosen to include in our list offer the best features at the best price.
What are the best email marketing services in your opinion?
Our top picks for the best email marketing services are:
- constant contact: the best email marketing services for small businesses.
- sendinblue: the best email and sms marketing platform.
- hubspot: email marketing and crm all in one for growing business.
bonus: omnisend or drip as the best email marketing platform for ecommerce.
Along with an email marketing strategy, we also recommend adding web push notifications to your website. this is another powerful way to connect with your visitors after they leave your website. we use pushengage on wpbeginner, and it has become one of the top 5 sources of traffic on our site.
We hope this article has given you a good overview of the best email marketing services for your business. You may also want to see our list of 24 must-have wordpress plugins for business websites and our comparison of the best business phone services for small businesses.
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