Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business in 2023
Are you a business owner or digital marketing agency looking for the best email marketing software? Is email marketing an essential part of your business in 2023?
Finding the right email marketing service can boost your marketing campaign and drive many new customers to you.
In this article, we will review the best email marketing services for small businesses. This review and comparison will give you a clear idea of which email marketing service is best for your organization.
Why Does the Selection of The Best Email Marketing Service Matter?
Email marketing stands out as a highly cost-effective marketing strategy, especially for small businesses. According to marketing statistics, businesses in the United States typically enjoy an astounding 4400 percent return on investment (ROI) from email marketing efforts.
The appeal of email marketing lies in its simplicity to management, the full control it offers, and its ability to establish direct communication with your customers.
Still uncertain about the merits of email marketing? Here are six compelling reasons why building an email list is an essential practice in today’s marketing landscape.
It’s crucial to recognize that the level of success you achieve with email marketing hinges largely on your choice of email marketing software. This software plays a pivotal role in ensuring that your emails are reliably delivered.
Failing to be discerning in this regard may lead to excessive expenditure, limited marketing capabilities, and dismal email deliverability rates, which ultimately translates to substantial financial losses.
How to Find a Good Email Marketing Tool?
A high-quality email marketing service should empower you to craft captivating email newsletters effortlessly, ideally through an intuitive drag-and-drop editor.
It should offer the convenience of sending personalized and precisely targeted bulk emails with minimal effort, a concept often referred to as marketing automation.
Furthermore, the email marketing service should facilitate easy management of your contact list, user segmentation into groups, and comprehensive monitoring of the performance of your email marketing initiatives.
Above all, a top-tier email service provider should guarantee that your email campaigns steer clear of the dreaded spam folder.
With that in mind, let’s delve into a comparison of some of the most popular email marketing service providers to evaluate their features and capabilities.
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact stands out as one of the world’s largest and most rapidly expanding email marketing services. Moreover, it prides itself on being the most user-friendly option, especially for beginners.
Within this platform, you can seamlessly manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and more. Each account bestows upon you an array of benefits, including unlimited emails, straightforward tracking and reporting, integrated social media sharing tools, a complimentary image library, list segmentation capabilities, seamless integration with Facebook ads, and robust eCommerce integration, tailor-made for Shopify stores.
Notably, their Email Plus accounts are equipped with potent features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys and polls, coupon distribution, online donation facilitation, and subject line A/B testing, empowering you to dispatch targeted emails and optimize your open rates.
What sets Constant Contact apart is its unparalleled customer support, offering channels such as live chat, phone calls, email correspondence, community support, and an extensive repository of valuable resources. They go the extra mile by providing in-person seminars across the United States, enabling small business owners to swiftly grasp the fundamentals of email marketing and leverage it to foster business growth with expertise.
For all the reasons highlighted above, we unequivocally endorse Constant Contact as the premier email marketing service for small businesses and startups. To get started, Constant Contact offers a generous 60-day free trial, with no credit card requirement. Subsequent pricing begins as low as $9.99 per month.
2. Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue)
Brevo, previously known as Sendinblue, represents a comprehensive SMS and email marketing software solution tailor-made for businesses. As one of the swiftest-growing email marketing platforms in Europe, it has garnered recognition for its user-friendly approach.
This platform boasts exceptional tools to craft visually appealing and highly engaging emails. Its straightforward drag-and-drop email editor is particularly well-suited for novices, making it accessible even to those without prior email marketing experience.
Brevo integrates user-friendly marketing automation tools, empowering you to dispatch transactional emails, construct workflows for automated follow-up emails, and segment your user base. What’s more, it harnesses AI algorithms to pinpoint the optimal times for sending bulk emails, thereby enhancing email deliverability.
Brevo’s offerings encompass a complimentary email marketing plan with unlimited contacts. This plan permits sending up to 300 emails daily, though it does involve their branding.
For those opting for paid plans, the Lite package starts at $25 per month. The inclusion of SMS capabilities is possible, with pricing adjusted based on your specific sending requirements.
In a recent upgrade to their premium plan, Brevo has enriched it with advanced features like a landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and seamless integration with Facebook ads. This enhancement ensures that users receive more value for the same cost.
Moreover, Brevo extends a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service that proves valuable for powering automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. While not essential for standard email marketing campaigns, this feature becomes valuable for larger websites seeking to generate real-time content-based emails automatically.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most well-known software in the customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing space.
Their email marketing service is free to start, and it comes with a lot of advanced 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 completely custom newsletter that matches your brand’s personality and colors.
Because of the native integration with the HubSpot CRM, you can personalize your emails for each subscriber based on things like device type, country, list membership, or any other custom information you might have on the individual subscriber.
HubSpot comes with all the powerful features you’d expect from enterprise-level email marketing software such as send time optimization, high email deliverability, A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.
One of the main reasons why small, medium, and enterprise customers choose HubSpot is because they offer an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builders, operation hub, and more.
Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan, which includes the CRM and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools.
The free version allows you to send 2,000 emails and store an unlimited number of subscribers. You can create custom signup and popup forms, build landing pages, manage and track your online ads, and more. It has all the tools you need to get started.
If you need more advanced capabilities, then their paid plans starts at $45/month.
4. Omnisend
Omnisend emerges as a potent SMS and email marketing service, tailor-made for eCommerce businesses seeking a comprehensive omni-channel marketing automation solution.
Distinguishing itself with one of the most generous free email marketing plans, Omnisend includes an impressive array of features such as pre-built automation workflows, subscriber segmentation, A/B testing, performance reports, and even SMS and web push notifications. Unlike many other free email marketing plans that impose limitations, Omnisend stands out by offering a substantial feature set in its complimentary plan. However, as your contact list expands, upgrading to their paid plans becomes necessary.
Omnisend seamlessly integrates with widely used website builders and eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more. Furthermore, it boasts compatibility with a vast array of other business tools, including live chat software and help desk services.
One of Omnisend’s standout features is its pre-designed eCommerce marketing automation workflows, strategically crafted to boost your revenue. These encompass emails like welcome email series, cart abandonment reminders, cross-selling promotions, and more.
Simplicity is key with their email builder, which features an extensive array of customizable templates, enabling the creation of visually stunning, on-brand campaigns. Once set up, Omnisend facilitates email personalization through robust targeting and segmentation capabilities.
A notable advantage for users is Omnisend’s built-in SMS functionality, eliminating the need for a separate software solution. Their SMS feature covers a vast span, allowing messages to be sent to 209 regions across the globe.
In their free email marketing plan, Omnisend permits communication with up to 250 subscribers, while their paid plans commence at a reasonable $16 per month.
5. Drip
Drip stands out as a robust enterprise email marketing platform catering to eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to simplify marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization.
Drip’s email software seamlessly integrates with all major website builders, including WordPress and WooCommerce, enabling the easy incorporation of pop-ups and opt-in sign-up forms on your website to capture more leads.
What distinguishes Drip from competitors like Campaign Monitor are its intelligent marketing automation tools, refined email segmentation, split testing capabilities, list grouping, and a visual drag-and-drop builder for crafting automation workflows. These features empower you to reach specific customers within your email list, enhancing your sales potential.
Drip offers a wide array of support options, including live chat assistance, webinars, comprehensive automation training, in-depth courses, free guides, and well-documented resources.
We rely on Drip for several of our businesses because it enables us to send bulk emails while fostering individual connections with each customer through smart eCommerce marketing automation. Drip’s eCommerce revenue attribution feature precisely calculates the revenue generated from each email marketing campaign, providing valuable insights.
Though it comes with a slightly higher price tag, we firmly believe that Drip is the premier email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners seeking advanced features to optimize their marketing endeavors.
Drip offers a free trial, and their plans start at $49 per month, encompassing all of their features. A recent addition to their offerings is SMS notifications, available across all plans, enabling you to engage with users through both email and SMS marketing channels, making Drip an all-encompassing email marketing platform for store owners.
6. Moosend
Moosend represents an economical email marketing service tailored to the needs of small businesses. It offers a comprehensive array of robust marketing automation features, tools for building email lists, the creation of landing pages, and more.
With Moosend, you can swiftly generate a customized email newsletter that aligns with your brand’s identity in a matter of minutes. This can be achieved by either selecting from their numerous pre-designed email templates or by crafting a wholly unique template to suit your specific preferences.
One of the notable aspects of Moosend is its provision of marketing automation features across all plans. The automation workflow designer empowers you to establish a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter recipients.
Moosend furnishes detailed email analytics, delivering crucial metrics like email opens, clicks, bounces, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predictive demographic data.
All Moosend plans incorporate potent conversion optimization features, including A/B testing, email heatmap analytics, countdown timers, conditional content, AI-driven product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.
The service offers a 30-day free trial with an unlimited number of emails, requiring no credit card information. Subsequently, their pricing commences at $9 per month for the Pro plan, which encompasses features like a landing page builder, transactional emails for eCommerce websites, team management, and additional functionalities.
7. AWeber
AWeber holds the distinction of being one of the longest-standing and most widely renowned email marketing service providers globally. It offers an extensive array of tools designed to cater to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, simplifying their email marketing efforts.
Embarking on your journey with AWeber is a straightforward process. It seamlessly integrates with a multitude of platforms, including WordPress, ensuring a hassle-free connection. For detailed instructions, you can refer to our comprehensive guide on how to link AWeber to your WordPress website.
When you opt for AWeber, you gain access to a treasure trove of resources, including ready-to-use HTML email templates, robust list management, autoresponders, A/B testing, and email tracking replete with detailed insights.
AWeber distinguishes itself with several other potent email marketing features, encompassing AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email capabilities tailored for bloggers, and subscriber segmentation based on tags.
The spectrum of support options provided by AWeber is extensive, featuring live chat assistance, phone support, email support, live webinars, and an extensive library of how-to guides and tutorials.
AWeber extends a free plan with limitations, accommodating up to 500 subscribers. Beyond this threshold, their pricing initiates from $19 per month. Additionally, you have the option to opt for quarterly or annual plans, unlocking potential savings.
8. ConvertKit
ConvertKit emerges as a formidable email marketing platform tailored to professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. Its strength lies in its exceptional ease of use coupled with remarkable power.
A distinctive feature of ConvertKit is its seamless facilitation of content upgrades and incentives through email signup forms. Additionally, it simplifies autoresponder management, allowing you to dispatch drip emails through its email service.
With ConvertKit, segmenting subscribers into those displaying interest and those who’ve already made purchases becomes effortless. This segmentation enhances conversions through automated emails that exude a more personal touch, a tactic known as targeted email marketing.
The platform offers an impressive array of standard email marketing features, including A/B testing, visually appealing email templates, a landing page builder, intelligent workflows, and more.
ConvertKit provides email-based support alongside an extensive knowledge base housing valuable learning resources.
Many of ConvertKit’s features, such as those catering to paid newsletters, are meticulously designed for creators and professional bloggers. It’s precisely for this reason that we designate ConvertKit as the premier email marketing service for these individuals.
Moreover, ConvertKit introduces the capability to sell digital products and subscriptions from a single platform, streamlining monetization efforts.
Interested users can embark on a 14-day free trial, with pricing commencing at $29 per month. Furthermore, a 30-day refund policy is in place.
For those opting for the Creator Pro plan, advanced functionality awaits, including a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and integration with Facebook custom audiences.
9. Mailchimp
Mailchimp commands a prominent position as one of the world’s most popular email marketing service providers. This stature is primarily due to their offer of a forever free email marketing plan, even though it may not be our top recommendation anymore, given the availability of more advanced solutions.
In recognition of Mailchimp’s immense popularity, we must include it in our list of best email marketing software options.
Mailchimp is equipped with an intuitive drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, contact segmentation into groups, and straightforward email tracking for analytical insights. It even enables you to schedule delivery times based on users’ time zones and offers geolocation-based segmentation.
Seamless integration is possible with platforms like WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many others. If you’re a WordPress user, refer to our comprehensive guide on using Mailchimp and WordPress for step-by-step instructions.
However, in the realm of marketing automation, Mailchimp falls short compared to other providers on our list, such as HubSpot, Drip, or ConvertKit.
In recent years, Mailchimp has made efforts to incorporate various “advanced” features, but based on testing, these features may not truly be advanced.
Mailchimp’s support options encompass email, live chat, and a vast repository of tutorials. However, it’s worth noting that their support response time can be slow and doesn’t quite match the level of service provided by Constant Contact.
Mailchimp’s forever free plan permits the sending of 1,000 emails to up to 500 subscribers in a single audience. This plan, though a good starting point, comes with limitations. Notable drawbacks include the absence of features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, and the requirement to display Mailchimp’s branding in your emails. Additionally, support is restricted to email, which may suffice for hobbyists but falls short of the reliability needed by serious businesses.
Their paid plans commence at $20 per month, with pricing scaling according to the number of subscribers in your audiences. For unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, you’d need to opt for their $ 350-per-month plan.
