Is email marketing a priority for your business in 2021? Are you 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 will 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 cost-effective marketing strategy for small businesses. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 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 establish a direct contact with your customers.
Not convinced on email marketing? See these 6 reasons why building an email list is so important today.
It’s important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose because they are responsible for making sure that your emails actually get delivered.
If you aren’t careful, then you will end up paying a lot more money for fewer marketing features and terrible email deliverability rates (which causes you to lose even more money).
What to Look for in a Good Email Marketing Tool?
A good email marketing service should enable you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor).
You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation.
Aside from that, your email marketing service must 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 ensures that your email campaigns do not 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 stack up against 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 media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.
Their Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
Constant Contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources.
Aside from online training, they also offer in-person live seminars across the United States. This allow small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro.
For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.
Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.
WPBeginner users can use our Constant Contact coupon code to get an additional 20% off.
2. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.
It is an extremely easy to use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.
SendinBlue includes beginner-friendly 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 bulk emails using their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
SendinBlue offer a completely free email marketing plan that lets you send up to 300 emails per day, but all your emails will have their branding. Their paid plans start from $25 per month for Lite. You can also include SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary based on your sending requirements.
They have improved their premium plan to recently 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 separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice functionality to have if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.
3. 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.
Their email software offer seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.
What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual workflow builder. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.
Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides and excellent documentation.
We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.
Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.
Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe 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 starts from $49 / month which includes all their features.
Recently, they’ve added SMS notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channel.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
ConvertKit’s unique feature is that allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service.
With ConvertKit, you can easily segment subscribers into 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-notch email marketing service such as a/b testing, beautiful email templates, landing page builder, smart workflows, and more.
ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material.
A lot of ConvertKit features such as paid newsletters are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers that’s why we rate them the best email marketing service for professional bloggers.
They even added the ability for you to sell digital products & subscriptions from the same platform.
ConvertKit offers a 14-day free trial, and their pricing starts from $29/month. They also offer a 30-day refund policy.
Their Creator Pro plan also includes advanced functionality like newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
5. AWeber
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. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.
You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and email tracking with detailed insights.
AWeber also has other powerful email marketing features such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag based subscriber segmentation.
Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
AWeber offers a limited free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.
6. GetResponse
GetResponse is another very popular email marketing solution. It is extremely easy to use and simplifies email marketing for small businesses.
It comes with some amazing marketing automation tools which allow you to create smart automated campaigns.
With their drag and drop builder, you can create campaigns, segment contacts, and send any number of emails designed for specific groups. These tools help you create effective email campaigns to boost your profits.
GetResponse comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, unsubscribe tracking, and autoresponders. It also integrates with third party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc.
Support is provided by phone, live chat, and email. Their help section is full of free learning material including videos, webinars, how-tos, guides, etc.
GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial. Their pricing starts at $15/month.
7. 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.
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 setup delivery times based on user’s timezones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.
You can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms. If you are using WordPress, then see our ultimate guide to using Mailchimp and WordPress for detailed instructions.
When it comes to marketing automation features, Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers in our list such as Drip or ConvertKit.
In the recent years, Mailchimp has attempted to add many of the “advanced” features, but having tested many of these, they’re not truly advanced.
Mailchimp support is offered by email, live chat, and a large tutorials knowledge-base. However their support is often slow and no match to the quality of service that you get from Constant Contact.
Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding 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 that you can count on.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers.
However if you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, then you’d have to move 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. Below is our expert pick:
If you’re a small business, non-profit, or a new blogger, then we recommend using Constant Contact. Their pricing 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 run an online store / ecommerce website, then we recommend using Drip because its the best eCommerce email marketing software. Their personalization and automation features are extremely powerful. A lot of our own business websites use Drip.
If you’re a professional blogger or content creator, then we recommend using 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’re a business owner who wants a powerful marketing automation tool that combines email marketing, SMTP bulk emails, and SMS messages, then we recommend using SendinBlue. Their platform is easy to use, and they allow you to manage both email and SMS from a single interface. They also offer a fairly generous forever free plan which makes them the best free email marketing software.
Pro Tip: Get More Email Subscribers, Faster!
Once you have picked an email marketing service for your business, you’ll likely want to start getting more email subscribers.
We use and recommend OptinMonster. It is a powerful conversion optimization toolkit that helps you turn abandoning 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 the co-founder of OptinMonster. He initially built OptinMonster to help grow our own email list. After the launch 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 largest brands in the world including McAfee, Experian, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Harvard University, Pateron, and more.
Aside from 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 type of forms. It comes with built-in integration with all popular email marketing services. Trusted by over 4 million website owners.
- SeedProd – Want to create custom landing pages to boost conversions? SeedProd offers a far superior landing page builder experience. This is why smart website owners use SeedProd along with their preferred email marketing service since it integrates with all the 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 LiveChat 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 WordPress giveaway and contest platform. It lets you use viral marketing to grow your email list.
Bonus Tip: Improve Your Email Deliverability
All the email newsletter tools that we have shared in this article have great email deliverability rates.
However there are few things you can do to make sure that your marketing emails always get delivered.
1. Use a Professional Email Address
Email platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and others have algorithms that look for spammy behavior. One of them is the sender email address.
As a business, it’s important that you use a professional business email address (like yourname@yourcompany.com) and not a generic hotmail or gmail address.
This will help make sure that your email deliverability rate is higher than industry average.
2. Send Targeted Emails based on Interests
It’s very important that you personalize your emails based on user segments. Email marketing software like Constant Contact allows you to easily group your subscribers into segments such as most active, not-active, interested in specific topics, custom segments, etc.
This will help your email marketing campaigns have the highest open rate and click through rate which is a big factor in future email deliverability.
For more tips, see this ultimate step-by-step email marketing guide with examples to help you create a successful email marketing campaign.
Email Marketing Software FAQs
Having helped thousands of users pick the best email marketing software, we have answered quite a lot of questions. Below are some of the answers to the most frequently asked questions about email marketing platforms.
Can I do bulk email marketing from my Gmail or Outlook?
In theory, yes. But this will quickly get your email accounts suspended. G Suite and Outlook are not made for bulk email sending. They are great solution professional business emails.
Which is the best free email marketing service?
A lot of email marketing services will offer free tiers for limited use. The best free email marketing service is SendinBlue because their free plan doesn’t have a limit on the number of subscribers. MailerLite and MailChimp also offer free email marketing service plans.
How much does email marketing cost?
Your email marketing cost will entirely depend on the number of subscribers you have, the number of total emails you send per month, and the email platform you use. On average, a small business email marketing costs is around $20 – $300 per month on email marketing given that they manage their own campaign. If you use an email marketing agency, then your cost might be closer to $500 per month or higher.
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. So indirectly, email marketing can help your website’s SEO rankings.
You may also want to use these best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to improve your rankings.
Are there other email marketing platforms that are not listed here?
Yes, there are literally hundreds of email marketing services out there, but we have not listed them all here. We believe that making a full email platforms list would create more confusion and cause choice paralysis for non-techy readers.
We have tried all the top major email marketing service including many that are not in our email platform lists above such as: MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Ontraport, Mailjet, Campaign Monitor, InfusionSoft (now Keap), Klaviyo, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot by Salesforce, Sendloop, iContact, Moosend, Emma, TotalSend, SharpSpring, MailPoet, and more.
The top email marketing services that we have chose to include in our list provide the best features for the best price.
Which are the best email marketing services in your opinion?
Our top 3 choices for the best email marketing services are:
- Constant Contact – Best email marketing services for small business.
- SendinBlue – Best Email and SMS marketing platform.
- Drip – Best email marketing platform for eCommerce.
Along with email marketing, we also recommend adding web push notification on 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 a top 5 traffic source on our site.
We hope this article gave 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.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Can I add to this that I spent hours putting together draft campaigns in Mailchimp only to fall foul at the last hurdle when they decided that the content I was intending to send to my existing customers was “a “prospecting or introductory campaign” and that they couldn’t allow me to do it.
You would want to reach out to MailChimp’s support as depending on how you created the list, you may be getting caught in a safety measure to prevent spam.
Does free plan of sendinblue create a email list and a newsletter?
You would want to check with them for their current offerings but at the moment, you can do that with their free plan
Awesome thank you so much this is great for email marketing
Glad our recommendations were helpful
I have an unusual question — Do any of these services offer a way to have a real-time or query-driven connection to the data? If I could find a provider that supported some sort of SQL connection, that would be much better than what I am doing.
We would recommend reaching out to the support for the different services with the tools you’re using on your site to see what integrations they have available.
Thanks for sharing such a great article and it’s helpful for everyone. Great Post!
Glad you found our content helpful
Thank you for this information I found it to help me very much.
You’re welcome
I’m going to try it for my next post.
We wish you luck
You are a great writer. I like the way you present it. Surely, it helps a lot. Thanks for this and keep writing.
Glad you found our content helpful
Such a great article, Thanks for your valuable information.
You’re welcome
That’s a good one. I’m just a biginner, will know better soon
Glad you found our recommendations helpful
Are those Email marketing providers good for transactional emails?
If you wanted to you could certainly use these services for that.
Thanks for all the helpful information–a quick question I didn’t catch above: can you easily switch from one Email Marketing Service to another if you unhappy with the service/your business needs change?
Yes, you can if you wanted
Whao! This article is a great help. I will try the most top rated. It is good guide to help expose my website and products. I really appreciate this.
Glad our article could be helpful
Besides your list, I personally use CaptureCode and they offer so much then just email marketing. They offer an entire platform for campaign management and a host of other marketing tools.
Thanks for sharing your recommendation
Hi there, I just wanted to offer a tip in case you’d like to update your article. I just went to the ConvertKit website, and they have a free version now! It’s for up to 500 subscribers. I think it may get some new bloggers who would typically go to Mailchimp.
Thank you for sharing this
You’re welcome! Happy to help. Your team helps me so much. Thank you for sharing your article!
It seems mail chimp will serve the starter needs without any discouragements! lets have a good time!
Glad our recommendation was helpful
I’d say that regardless of which esp one picks we should always make sure that deliverability is ok. I.e. SPF, DKIM, DMARC records set up correctly, and blacklists are checked upon regularly.
Thanks for sharing your recommendations
thank you for providing email marketing tools and software provider for email marketing.
You’re welcome, glad our recommendations could be helpful
I used MailChimp for my tiny startup e-commerce website. I think it’s best. I think it best for those who are looking for a lower price.
Thanks for sharing your recommendation
OptinMonster is a nice tool for collecting leads and mails. I am just playing around with it on a e-commerce page.
The great thing is, that I can use it on every blog or shop system.
Thanks for sharing your recommendation
Sir can you please tell me some strategy to grow my email list because it’s no growing fastely. It is running slow like per day 2 or 3 subscriber
For growing your email list, you would want to take a look at our article here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/12-tested-and-easy-ways-to-grow-your-email-list-faster/
Thanks for the article. There are two departments in my company which uses Constant Contact whole tho other uses Mailchimp. I find Mailchimp better for a bigger campaign. Great article and thanks for the comparisons.
Thanks for sharing your experience with the services
Thanks for the wonderful comparison. Still new in email list building. Would come handy.
You’re welcome, glad our article could be helpful
I ended up going with Drip after being with Mailchimp for 3 years and it has been the best decision I could make. I have to thank the author of this article!! Thank you
You’re welcome, glad we could recommend more options to you
Great comparison article. I’ve heard great things about Aweber and WordPress sites and auto responders. Nice to be able to compare in one place.
Glad our article could be helpful
While I hear alot of good things about Sendinblue and Convertkit, I heartily recommend Mailchimp to small businesses, email marketing entrepeneurs just starting out or if you just don’t have a clue, are new to email marketing but want to find something affordable where you can start out. Then Mailchimp is for you. They miss some functions that other companies offer but the easiness and the “free up to 2 000 contacts” makes it e great starting point.
Thanks for sharing your recommendation
Thank you for this excellent article. I’m looking for an ESP that is easy to use and allows affiliate links. I understand some ESPs don’t allow affiliate marketing in your emails. I’d love to hear which do or don’t. Thank you!
Most if not all email service providers should allow for affiliate links. They just do not allow affiliate marketing and by that, it means emails only for recommending products rather than keeping up a relationship with your subscribers for your content
Thank you WPB for providing the details of Best Email Marketing Services.
I’m currently using MailChimp and I’m currently happy with it.
You’re welcome, glad you’re happy with MailChimp
Hey, thanks for supporting us out here! Really appreciate the quality training and content.
You’re welcome, glad out tutorials can be helpful
Nice Blog For The Email Marketing!
Thank you
Nice page really helpful and I have a question
1st ) if you choose a service and decide to change do you keep your list or have to start over
Most if not all of the email marketing services give you the ability to export your list of users to transfer to the new platform.
Can u guys check the maijet link because when i click it doesnt take me to the maijet website, i think the link is at the forth paragraph. but thanks for the article it is very helpuful
From testing the link appears to be working but we will be sure to keep an eye out should the links have any trouble
WPbiginner – this is the first blog that I learnt how to create wordpress back then in 2016. Today, I have also learnt a lot about the email marketing.
I really appreciate you guys existence and YES, HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Thank you, glad we could be helpful over such a long time
Nice Blog For The Email Marketing
Thank you
Very good list, added to my favorites. I like that you broke down the questions by topics.
Thank you, glad you like how we broke down our article
MailChimp does seem to be peeling back what it offers, and over time is restricting their plans more and more… however I do believe they announced they were adding automation to the free plan a while back. I’m not sure your report on them is accurate in that sense.
We will certainly keep an eye on any product in our articles and update the article should our opinion change
Please I need a email provider that could drop Gmail spamming to inbox……
If you mean you don’t want your messages being sent to the spam in Gmail’s inbox then any of these services can help with that and if you reach out, also have recommendations to help prevent your message from being sent to spam.
Very informative list. I am planning to buy any of Convert kit, Aweber, or Constant Contact. But I need to know Whether these Email services provide Landing pages and A/B testing tools? Since I am completely new in Email marketing, I have no idea. Kindly reply on this.
There are different implementations for each email marketing provider. If you reach out to their support with what you would like to set up, they should be able to let you know if that is available with their platform.
I used mailchimp for some time and then switched to Tabellarius. Both give you very powerful tools under your belt if you know how to use them correctly.
Thank you for sharing the service you’re currently using
I send bulk emails to existing customers about three times per year. Usually 250-1500 at a time.
What service would you recommend? I currently use myemma and am charged monthly whether I use the service or not.
Thanks.
You may want to start by looking at MailChimp and Drip depending on your specific needs.
I switched from Emma too, and am stuck paying their monthly bill regardless of giving 30 days notice. I missed cancelling by the auto renewal, for which no notice was given.
Besides MailChimp does any of these amazing platforms have a BA agreement or will be able to sign one? This is for a Foot and Ankle clinic.
Thanks for any feedback
Yes, however, you would want to reach out to them for specifics on if it is still available.
Great work Syed Balkhi.
Thank you for giving those great ideas. Keep up going
Glad you like our articles, we’ll continue to make them
The biggest issue I have yet to resolve is the majority of clients I work with have customer lists in the the THOUSANDS, but have never embraced email marketing. Through personal experience with several of the platforms listed here they will not let you load your current customer list and start emailing. Even if the lists are validated and cleaned through a source like NeverBounce. With the new GDPR rules, they only want emails that have current, ongoing engagement. So in other words, even though you have been in business for years and have a list of current emails from current and past customers, you cannot load them in to these platforms with any success. This makes it very difficult for legacy businesses that now want to start communicating with all their prospects and customers.
Hi Scott, yes that is correct. Most platforms will not let you upload large customer lists if you do not have specific opt-in dates. However if you can provide the data when the user opted in to receive email notifications from you, then you would be able to import the list. These rules may vary based on different providers, but this is exactly the process for switching email service providers (you have to import customer list in the new provider).
Great your post on Successful Email Marketing Campaign. It helps me a lot to understand successful email marketing. Keep up the Good Work. Excited to see your upcoming posts. Thanks.
Thank you, glad our post could help
Great list of providers for permission based email marketing. If you are a small business who incorporates purchased email lists into your strategy?
We don’t recommend purchasing email list as that would be spamming the users who did not consent to be added to your email list and many other negatives against it.
This is a great list
currently, i am deciding which one i should go
considering covertkit, mailchimp and mailerlite
Thanks, hope our article can help you choose the best one for you
Interested to know why you haven’t reviewed Active Campaign which I use for one of my businesses and find to be very good.
We had to restrict the list to 7 providers, so it’s easy for people to choose. ActiveCampaign is a powerful solution and so is Pardot or HubSpot. But those are bit more advanced solutions than what a small business would need in our opinion.
Hi,
When I go to the Drip website, I don’t see an option for Drip offers a free account for up to 100 subscribers?
Hey David, if you go on their website and type in the quote calculator that you have 100 subscribers, it’ll show you the option for free signup.
I am surprised that you didn’t include ActiveCampaign in the list.
Hi Wouter,
Yes, we had to restrict the list to 7 providers, so it’s easy for people to choose. ActiveCampaign is a powerful solution and so is Pardot or HubSpot. But those are bit more advanced solutions than what a small business would need in our opinion.
I recently switched from MailChimp to Mailerlite and have been pleased with the results. I ran into a small problem and the customer service was excellent and responded very quickly (I’m using the free plan).
Thanks for sharing your experience David