EMAIL MARKETING

Top Email Marketing Tools

04/06/2020
               

Today, email marketing is still one of the most powerful ways of communication that supports other marketing channels.

Email marketing allows you to build your own audience and increase engagement by using personalization and segmentation capabilities. It also helps you create brand loyalty and impress your audience’s buying decisions. Research by HubSpot shows that using personalized messages while creating campaigns provides almost 760% increase in revenue.

Even though many spend efforts on reaching and attracting users, it’s equally important to continue communication after attracting your potential customers. Email marketing comes into play here, helping to engage, convert and retain potential customers. So it focuses on MOFU - the middle of the funnel - and BOFU - the bottom of the funnel.

After understanding all fundamentals of email marketing, it’s the right time to choose an email marketing tool to start your email marketing strategy*. Also, if you think that your email marketing strategy is not effective, you should first analyze the metrics and then evaluate the capabilities of the email marketing tool of the tool you use, which may fail to satisfy your business needs further on. 

There is a wide range of email marketing tools with which you can manage audiences and send them campaigns. These tools have some common features like drag and drop editor, ready-made templates, split testing to ease your work, but each tool comes forward with a feature depending on the size and needs of your business.

The Factors that Affect You to Choose an Email Marketing Tool

Email Database and Frequency: Specify your marketing automation needs

Before you decide, you should establish the size of your database which you will send emails to. Also, you need to determine the approximate number of emails you will send. Are you going to send automated emails* to a large database? Or are you going to just send monthly newsletters to a medium-sized audience? These factors affect the pricing while choosing the tool, and the effectiveness of your campaigns in terms of the tools’ automation workflow capabilities. 

*Marketing automation allows you to send event-based triggered emails, and it is effective to tackle relevant information. You can send messages such as welcome series, abandoned cart emails, birthday wishes to create personal touch or to nurture your leads.

The Integration Capability of the Tool

The integration of your email marketing tool with your CRM or e-commerce platform is important. If you integrate your CRM or e-commerce platform, you will be able to gain better insights from your audience data. Moreover, you will be able to monitor your users’ behaviour and send event-based automated emails accordingly.

So, make sure the integration capability of your email marketing tool meets your needs regarding tracking all subscribers’ data. 

Responsiveness of the Tool

In a world where user experience is getting more and more important, sending responsive emails is crucial to your customers and sales prospecting.

Your emails should be responsive, which means the user experience should be seamless in all screen sizes and devices.

Now, let’s have a look at the top 10 email marketing tools according to businesses.

All-In-One Email Marketing Tools for All Business Sizes

Here’s a list of some of the most popular all-in-one marketing tools. 

If you are a small business, you might not need all the advanced capabilities and features (customer relations management, landing page creation, social media marketing, etc.) of these tools. We will also evaluate the email marketing tools for SMEs later in the article.

1. Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is an all-in-all email marketing platform to actualize the email marketing strategy. It is one of Zoho’s SaaS applications for Sales and Marketing.

In addition, Zoho Campaigns saves time in email campaign designs with its numerous collections of templates which are known for its conversion capabilities. Zoho CRM, which is another SaaS app, can be integrated into Zoho Campaigns to make greater engagement with your customers and drive your sales funnels.

There are some unique features such as having more autoresponder scenarios and more detailed reporting capability. One of the catchiest features of Zoho Campaigns is the drag-and-drop workflow builder, which eases creating email journeys for all of your sales funnels.

It is possible to connect your everyday applications to over 1500 apps (including Shopify, Salesforce and Wordpress) with Zoho Campaigns. With this feature, you can track leads and get better ROI with the help of automation scenarios like abandoned cart reminders and more. 

Pricing:

It is free to send 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers. Subscriber-based paid plan starts from $5 for 1-500 subscribers. If you need a custom plan for your business, it is possible to contact support teams to get a quote.

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

2. HubSpot 

HubSpot is one of the most comprehensive tools not only for email marketing but also overall sales and marketing. It is suitable for all business sizes but effective for ones that are looking for more than an email marketing tool.

Consider your business needs, and check whether it requires all-in-one inbound marketing solutions from driving traffic to your pages to tracking entire marketing and sales funnels rather than focusing on finding an effective email marketing software. When you want to benefit from other features of Hubspot, you can easily expand the features you use on the tool.

From this point of view, Hubspot should be considered more like a CRM and its email marketing solution is just a tool which is covered in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. 

It is possible to create a sustainable email marketing plan, personalize your messages to boost key analytics like open rates and optimize the campaigns according to advanced analytics and A/B testing. 

Pricing: 

It is free to send 2,000 emails per month and starts from $50 to upgrade it to Marketing Hub. 

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

3. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a sales and marketing tool that offers communication via email, SMS, landing pages, sign-up forms, etc. in order to track customer journey in one platform. 

As an email marketing tool, it offers drag-and-drop builders to design your message, and a chance to personalize to deliver more attractive content. It allows you to optimize your email marketing campaigns with A/B testing. As an additional advantage, there is a time optimization feature of Sendinblue to send the messages to your audience at their best click time.

 

 

Sendinblue’s marketing automation features work great in terms of deliverability of your messages. The set of actions in a workflow serve as a good service for you to automatically send campaigns because there are both basic automation workflows and advanced automation workflows that fit your needs. 

TIP: It is important to remember that it is a very sensitive tool to GDPR compliance, so make sure you examine the steps Sendinblue takes to secure user rights.

Pricing: 

It is free to send 300 emails to unlimited subscribers per day, and the paid plan starts from $25 for 40,000 emails to unlimited subscribers.

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

4. ActiveCampaign 

ActiveCampaign is a tool with which you can build a customer journey with its features such as email marketing, CRM and messaging. Unlike other all-in-one marketing automation tools, ActiveCampaign is mostly preferred by small businesses. It’s mainly because the analytics feature is more advanced for a large scale audience than for smaller ones.

As an email marketing tool, besides its segmentation and tagging capabilities, you can send triggered emails by setting goals such as visiting a website, making a purchase, etc. Its marketing automation capability is great for small businesses to send optimized messages. A/B testing works together with marketing automation and tool capabilities to let you automatically send optimized content to your audience.

ActiveCampaign can be easily integrated with more than 250 websites and e-commerce stores like Zapier, WooCommerce, Unbounce, and Facebook.

You can build a sign-up form for your website to start a journey and create automation, analyze the campaign’s performance by split testing to deliver your audience personalized content, and track their moves to learn their behaviour. All this is for creating a sustainable email marketing strategy.

Pricing:

ActiveCampaign does not offer a free plan, its paid plan starts at $15 to up to 500 contacts to send unlimited messages. 

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

Email Marketing Automation Tools for SMEs

If you are looking for a simple email marketing platform (without other capabilities and features) these tools can fit your business needs.

5. Mailchimp 

Mailchimp is another helpful email marketing tool for all business sizes, even for beginners with its user-friendly simple interfaces. It is mostly preferred by small and medium-sized enterprises.

It has a wide range of important features like drag-and-drop builders, ready-made email automation scenarios and real-time analytics. 

Its most prominent feature is its simplicity. You can build professional email marketing campaigns easily to reach new customers by sending them personalized messages. Automation scenarios are suitable for event-based automation such as sending welcome emails or triggered emails based on actions users take.

Mailchimp can integrate with many platforms, especially eCommerce tools. For instance, you can integrate it with WooCommerce to boost engagement with automated emails such as abandoned cart reminders, product recommendations, etc.

Pricing:

It is free to send 10,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers and starts from $9,99 for 1-500 subscribers. 

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

6. Constant Contact   

Constant Contact is mostly preferred by small enterprises to easily create email campaigns with mobile-optimized templates and drag-and-drop editors. It is suitable for small businesses and nonprofits to start their email marketing journey to get more engaged with their audience.

It is possible to create well-designed email content which can help with conducting surveys, collecting donations and promoting events through its integration with enterprises like Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey and etc. If you are interested in these types of niche features such as event announcements and fundraising, Constant Contact will fit your needs.

Constant Contact also provides simple automation features like creating sequences. But note that there are no advanced features on it in terms of automating the messages. 

Pricing:

It is free to send emails for the first month and starts from $20 to upgrade it to the paid plan. All free and paid plans’ prices are based on the number of contacts. However, you should be in contact with them to get detailed information. 

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.    

7. GetResponse

GetResponse is another email marketing tool with many features. In addition to emailing features, GetReponses’s Webinar Solution can fit businesses to run webinars on one platform.

It is also possible to build sales funnels to see the whole customer journey by starting from creating landing pages.

GetResponse’s drag-and-drop builders, free templates, and autoresponders work better than other tools for SMEs. In addition, its “Perfect Timing” feature helps to send emails tailored to each subscriber’s optimum time by running real-time analysis. 

It can help to track more detailed analytics to grow a business for small-medium enterprises, and it has decent analytics to get valuable insights to create sustainable personalized email campaigns. 

Pricing:

It is free to send unlimited emails to up to 1,000 contacts and try its all landing page, marketing automation, webinar, and funnel solutions for 1 month

Paid plan (Basic) starts from $15 for 1-1,000 contacts, but the features included differ from the basic plan to the enterprise plan.

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

Email Marketing Automation Tools for Beginners

If you are looking for an easy-to-use tool that does not require any technical knowledge, some of the easy-to-use tools are listed below.

8. MailerLite

MailerLite, fits your needs if you are developing your personal project and looking for an easy-to-use tool to send emails. 

It allows you to create landing pages, email campaigns and pop-ups with its targeting and segmentation features to engage with your audience and send them personalized messages. The tool also highlights an embedded survey feature to get valuable feedback from your audience and optimize your email marketing tactics. 

Pricing:

It is free to send 12,000 emails to up to 1,000 subscribers per month and starts from $10 to send unlimited messages.

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

9. Sender

Sender has a wide range of drag-and-drop elements to deliver the best content. Its Product Wizard makes it easier to show your product details if you have an e-commerce site. 

It can also be integrated with Magento, WooCommerce, Wordpress easily. Audience management, creating campaigns and tracking analytics are practical to manage in Sender even for beginners, and sending automated emails is visible in a workflow as well. You can easily send welcome emails, abandoned cart emails and birthday cards through this tool.

Pricing:

15,000 emails to up to 2,500 subscribers per month, and the paid plan starts from $9 for60,000 emails to up to 5,000 subscribers.

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

10. AWeber

AWeber is a user-friendly tool even for those who are not tech-savvy. It is suitable for entrepreneurs and small businesses to start their email marketing strategies.

 

AWeber has sufficient features to use in all marketing activities for small businesses to be engaged with prospects or customers. Drag-and-drop design ability, ready to use templates, automation scenarios, A/B test capability and analytics help to create effective email campaigns and grow your business. 

You can also create sign-up forms to collect email addresses for your database. It can be published on your website if it is WordPress or on your Facebook page to provide your social network with a chance to subscribe.

Pricing: 

It is free just for 30 days to send unlimited messages. AWeber’s paid plans start from $19 per month for 0-500 subscribers with the chance of using all features of it.

We suggest you check the pricing as there may be changes in paid plans.

As you can see, all the email marketing tools we mentioned have free plans, except for one. Therefore, before you make a decision, we recommend you to use free plans before paying the full amount to see how much the tool meets your needs and requirements. 

Bonus: Email Marketing Tactics

Here’s also a wide range of Email Marketing tactics we have prepared for you to implement your growth marketing activities. You can choose the tactics according to your main goals (Brand awareness + traffic generation, conversion, and retention) as well as the difficulty level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

Let’s start your email marketing journey!