Email marketing remains a mainstay in the digital marketing campaigns of many businesses. Even today, this tried-and-tested marketing method is still one of the best ways to reach potential customers with personalized messaging. Whether it’s for direct advertising, surveys, special brand offers, or newsletters, email marketing is sure to increase customer engagement, retention, and acquisition.
To successfully leverage this marketing technique, you’ll need the right tool to keep track, compose, and send your emails. Thankfully, an email marketing platform for small businesses can help you with this. But before that, let’s talk about why it’s so important to leverage email marketing despite the many other marketing methods available out there.
So, why is it still so significant?
One of the main reasons why email marketing is still a popular marketing tool is because it’s a simple and direct way to connect with your leads without having to break your bank. Marketers say that email marketing can give a high return on investment. And without spending too much, you can get creative with your email campaigns by adding catchy subject lines and creating eye-catching templates. There are also a lot of email marketing platforms out there that can provide scalable options that will suit your business needs.
What makes email marketing a powerful tool?
The reason why email marketing gives a high return on investment is that email subscribers join email lists on their own. This means they are extremely interested in what your business has to offer and are most likely to convert into paying customers. Moreover, it’s also a powerful communication channel since it’s able to make your email campaigns personal, purposeful, and targeted.
What makes a good email marketing platform?
With many options of email marketing tools available, knowing the best characteristics to look out for will help you as we go through them later on. So, if you want to use the most befitting platform for your business goals, then keep these things in mind:
- Costs
- Database size
- Level of automation
- Budget
- Special additions like analytics
In this blog, Proweaver has gathered some of the best email marketing platforms according to their ease of use, the support they can offer, and other special features. So, let’s dive right into it and read on to learn everything you need to know about our top picks.
- Brevo
- Mailchimp
- GetResponse
- MailerLite
- Constant Contact
- Omnisend
- Moosend
- AWeber
- HubSpot
- Drip
- ConvertKit
Brevo
Brevo is best for growing a business’ customer base. It’s perfect for small businesses as it offers complete email marketing software that has all that you need to start an effective email campaign. As a beginner-friendly platform, Brevo offers more than 40 customizable templates and easy-to-use tools for building workflows and allows you to send bulk emails with the best email deliverability options. What’s more, they also offer a completely free email marketing plan with room for as many contacts as you like. Their free version allows you to send up to 300 emails per day without spending a cent or two at all.
If you have the budget, Brevo’s paid plan starts at $25 per month for Lite. Their premium plans include more advanced tools and features, such as live chat, Facebook ads integration, sales CRM, and landing page builder.
Mailchimp
You have probably heard a thing or two about Mailchimp. It’s one of the most popular free email marketing platforms out there — and for good reasons. If you are looking for a market-leading email marketing tool, this one takes the cake. Mailchimp is best suited for businesses that have a large email subscriber list. It’s a great tool for organizations and has flexible pricing tiers that are a lot more scalable than Brevo. Mailchimp’s free plan allows users to send 12, 000 emails to up to 2,000 subscribers. However, their free plan does not offer advanced segmentation, send-time optimization, and multivariate testing, among other tools. Their paid plan offers start at $10 per month for up to 500 subscribers. For unlimited subscribers, they have a $299 per month plan that you can take advantage of.
In recent years, Mailchimp has been steadily adding smart marketing and recommendation features that offer valuable insights into optimizing your marketing efforts. While they are good additions, these new tools are not as fully baked as what other platforms can offer.
GetResponse
If you’re a startup, small, or medium-sized business, GetResponse might be for you. If you want to up your email marketing game, GetResponse can help you create powerful and simplified emails. Their easy-to-use, economical platform offers functions, integrations, and statistics and provides an all-in-one solution for users. GetResponse has a unique tool called Autofunnel that is fully automated and can be used to create funnels for webinars, sales, and leads, among others.
This email marketing platform offers an excellent balance between ease of use and stylish designs, which your email subscribers would love to see in their inboxes. Their basic plan starts at $15 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers and comes with advanced features like autoresponders, lead funnels, and sales funnels. Rates increase as your subscriber list grows.
MailerLite
MailerLite is a great email marketing platform for anyone looking for straightforward email marketing services. Among all the free email marketing tools out there, what makes MailerLite stand out is its sophisticated features. This tool comes with the basic drag-and-drop email builder, a rich text editor (if you want to get adventurous with text formatting), and a built-in photo editor to help you create sophisticated email campaigns. Moreover, it has monetization features to help you market and sell should you want to sell digital products.
Additionally, MailerLite gives you access to a thorough campaign report that includes important data like click rate, unsubscribe rate, open rate, and more.
Constant Contact
One of the fastest-growing email marketing services in the world is Constant Contact. It is the most user-friendly email marketing service for beginners, which allows you to easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, and marketing calendar, among others. Email marketing veterans as well will recognize how Constant Contact can help save them more time for their campaigns. Its UI is intuitive and elegant. Their integration also makes it easy to work with existing subscriber lists and plug into e-commerce systems.
Want to try it yourself? Constant Contact offers a free full email marketing platform for 60 days. No credit card is required! If you want more, their email plus plans start at $9.99 per month and offer powerful features, such as email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and many more.
Omnisend
Trusted by more than 70,000 ecommerce brands, Omnisend is the tailor-made platform for ecommerce businesses, offering multiple useful ecommerce features, such as automated email and SMS messaging, to help convert leads into customers. Omnisend has comprehensive audience insights to aid users in sending relevant email marketing messages. They are also best for visual-heavy email campaigns with their wide range of template libraries that can be customized using their drag-and-drop content editor. After creating stunning email campaigns, you can use their targeting and segmentation features to help you send personalized email messages.
Want to add scratch cards, discount coupon codes, or gift boxes? It’s possible with Omnisend! This helps businesses better optimize their email campaign performance.
Moosend
Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned pro in email marketing, Moosend is an excellent email marketing platform that will let you nail your campaign goals. Moosend is also great for ecommerce businesses with their machine learning and collaborative filtering that target customers with products according to the shopping habits of similar customers. This allows users to send highly accurate email campaigns.
What’s more, Moosend also provides a performance report of your email marketing endeavors to help you achieve the best results. What makes their platform even better is the automation features that are available to all their plans—yes, including the free plan!
AWeber
AWeber is a trusted and good value provider of traditional email marketing services. They provide a variety of tools for managing email marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. With AWeber, getting started is simple. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. Other strong email marketing tools offered by AWeber include AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email conversion for bloggers, and tag-based subscriber segmentation.
This email marketing tool has a simple pricing structure that is gainful for those with a smaller number of subscribers. And unlike other email marketing platforms, AWeber offers all of its features with every plan since their pricing is based on the number of subscribers on your list. Their plans start at $19 per month for 0-500 subscribers.
HubSpot
Best known for marketing automation, HubSpot offers powerful automation features and excellent email marketing solutions for any business. Since they specialized in automated emails, HubSpot allows you to easily nurture email subscribers or turn leads into customers. Additionally, Hubspot offers a plethora of pre-made email templates to assist you in achieving your campaign goals. Without the need for coding or development experience, you can generate excellent emails using their drag-and-drop builder.
HubSpot offers a free plan for up to 2,000 emails per month and paid plans starting at $50 per month. If you are looking for an email marketing platform that tracks and optimizes that whole customer journey, not just the small experience, then this one’s for you.
Drip
Drip has high WooCommerce integration and is an excellent email marketing campaign platform for businesses. If you manage an online store, it’s an excellent choice for you. It has great email segmentation capabilities and smart marketing automation features. Additionally, Drip offers vital assistance in live chat, webinars, online courses, and documentation. Depending on your email marketing goals, it might not be the most affordable choice, but it’s worth the money to maximize your marketing efforts.
They have also recently added an SMS notification feature that connects you to your subscribers not only in email. Drip’s free trial plans start at $49 per month with all their features available.
ConvertKit
If you are a professional blogger, author, influencer, artist, or creator of any kind, CovertKit is the platform you need for your email marketing goals. This is due to the fact that their email marketing services are focused on targeting audiences and nurturing them through membership sites, ecommerce platforms, and landing pages. Hence, this allows you to create leads from casual subscribers to your social media accounts. ConvertKit also comes with easy-to-use auto-responders for sending drip emails.
You can also expect top-notch tools and features, such as a/b testing, beautiful email templates, landing page builders, and smart workflows, among many others. They have a 14-day free trial available for you to try and test out what they can offer. Their premium pricing starts at $29 per month with a 30-day refund policy.
How to Determine the Best Email Marketing Platform for You
What is best for your business depends on what you need and your email campaign goals. After all, the type of industry that your business is in can vary the kind of email marketing services they require. A lot of factors also need to be considered to ensure that your chosen platform works well with you.
That is why, to help you in your decision, we have gathered the most important factors that most brands should consider before finalizing their choice.
Here is our guide to aid you in making an informed decision.
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Do they offer plenty of email templates?
No matter what your email marketing goals are, you’d want your emails to look good to your subscribers. Hence, you should choose a provider that values formatting and typesetting and offers excellent-looking and plenty of choices for your email templates.
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Do they have segmentation?
Over time, your business will grow to new heights. And as a result, your audience will also grow in number. If your business offers a variety of products or services, you will want an email marketing tool that offers good segmentation of the audience to ensure no subscriber gets a campaign they do not like.
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Do they provide in-depth analytics?
Being able to measure your email campaign’s performance allows you to do better. To that end, find an email marketing service that provides detailed metrics and KPIs to let you know how each of your email campaigns is performing.
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Do they offer easy automation?
It is always best not to worry about whether or not each of your email subscribers are in the right sales funnel. So, make sure that your chosen platform can provide automated emails that are easy to set up. This ensures you have peace of mind and can focus on what matters most.
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Do they have reliable inbox delivery?
What is the point of spending much on an email marketing platform if you never get past the spam filter? Although specific words and products can flag emails, your email marketing provider also plays a part. Ensure that they have at least 90% delivery success for anti-spam capabilities.
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Bonus Guide: Make use of free trials.
Almost all email marketing platforms offer a free trial for their services. Free trial plans are great opportunities for you to experience firsthand the services they can offer before you actually commit to your provider of choice. If you find their tools and features lacking, you’ve got nothing to lose, and just cancel the plan.
The Bottom Line
A lot of people today read emails on the go. And that is one of the main reasons why email marketing remains a good marketing strategy throughout the times. Hence, leveraging email marketing is great not just for small businesses but for medium and big businesses as well. However, choosing a provider that can do the job exactly as you want can be a difficult decision. Not to mention, there are actually quite a lot of email marketing platforms out there. Thus, this blog wanted to make sure you can make the right choice for your business needs. Because having the best free email platform for small business can go a long way.
As our one last reminder, be sure to check the prices, the features and tools they offer, their convenience, and the reliability and security of the email marketing service you are choosing! And of course, don’t forget to put the best email marketing practices into place after committing to an email service that works best for your brand.
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