What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is simply marketing and promoting your product or business using email. If you want to get specific, Wikipedia says, “Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations.” Some types of email marketing are:- Newsletters
- Affiliate Marketing
- Cold Emailing
- Backlink Prospecting
- Recruiting
Best Email Marketing Platforms
Below are some of the best email marketing platforms with our top picks:Best Overall
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is one of the best email marketing software for authors, bloggers, and marketers.
Most Affordable
Aweber
Aweber is one of the oldest email marketing software platforms on the market.
Runner Up
Drip
Drip is a robust enterprise marketing platform for bloggers, digital marketers, and eCommerce.
1. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is one of the best email marketing software for authors, bloggers, and marketers. It is very simple to use and has great features that allow you to perform several activities. Not only does ConvertKit allow you to do email marketing but you can also:- Create Landing Pages
- Build Custom Sign Up Forms
- Email Automation
- Sell Digital Products
Pros
- Email-based support system
- Affordable
Cons
- Can be expensive with a large list
2. Metrics Watch
Metrics Watch is an email-first, all-in-one marketing reporting tool for agencies that want to automatically get reports sent by email. It connects to all your data sources to generate automated reports that give your clients full visibility into their marketing performance. Just set it and forget it – Metrics Watch handles the reporting so you can focus on strategy. With custom dashboards, white labeling, and scheduled email reports, Metrics Watch makes it easy to track all your vital metrics in one place
What does email-first mean? Great question! The reports are not only sent by email, but they’re not a PDF or a link to a web page; they’re in the body of the email. You can also share the reports as a web page or PDF if you’d like. Finally, they offer a free migration service if you’re coming from a competitor!
- Automated email-first reports
- Integrates with the most common platforms (+ Google Sheets for your custom needs)
- White-label options in all plans
- Free migration service if you’re coming from a competitor!
- Simple and affordable pricing
Metrics Watch Pricing
All plans include white-label options and unlimited data sources.
- Starter (2 reports*): $29 / month
- Pro (10 reports*): $50 / month
- Premium 25 (25 reports*): $100 / month
- Premier 50 (50 reports*): $175 / month
- Plans exist for 100, 150, etc, up to 500 reports.
- Enterprise plans available for custom needs
Typically, 1 report = 1 client, no matter how often the reports are sent (can be daily, weekly AND monthly and still count as one).
3. Active Campaign
Many marketers love this email marketing software because of the sophisticated automation features that come with it. Active Campaign uses machine learning techniques such as Predictive Action to provide answers to tough questions regarding your customer behavior. This makes it easy for you to take appropriate actions and direct them through the sales journey. ActiveCampaign can be easily integrated with more than 800 apps such as WordPress, Facebook, Shopify, and many more. You can also intuitively automate your list segments as per the sales follow-ups, email content, and many more. ActiveCampaign is a great service used by many large organizations that are keen on improving their sales in a more personalized way.Pros
- Powerful Email Automations
Cons
- It can be cumbersome for some people
4. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the oldest email marketing platforms emerging into the email marketing industry in 1995 and rebranded to its current name in 2004. They became a subsidiary of Endurance International Group in 2015 and provide a robust email marketing platform with a ton of great features for small to enterprise businesses. The main objective of Constant Contact is to help small businesses harness the power of email marketing. Constant Contact has more than 100 optimized email templates to help you engage and convert users into active paying clients with emails. One of the coolest features found on this email software is event management as well as the ability to manage registrations, tickets, and invitations. It also has one of the highest delivery rates when it comes to email delivery compared to its competitors at more than 90 percent. For those looking for email marketing with features like event management and so on, then Constant Contact will be a great option.Pros
- They have both free and paid plans.
Cons
- It’s slightly expensive
5. Aweber
Aweber falls into the category of some of the oldest email marketing software in the world. They have a variety of email marketing tools for small and medium-sized businesses looking to grow their business with email marketing. For example, they have integrated Canva, so you can create custom designs right inside Aweber. Most businesses love using this email marketing tool for a number of reasons. The drag-and-drop email builder makes it simple and fast to create stunning emails your customers will love. Not only that but they have landing pages, web push notifications, forms, funnels and more.Pros
- It has one of the simplest pricing structures
- Pricing is strictly tied to the number of subscribers
- It has more than 700 built-in templates
- It has both free and paid plans
Cons
- Its free plan is limited to 500 subscribers
6. Drip
Drip is a robust enterprise marketing platform for bloggers, digital marketers, and eCommerce. They have a lot of tools meant to make sales funnels, marketing automation, and personalization much easier. The email software provides seamless integration for all major website builders like WooCommerce and WordPress. This helps you to add opt-in signup forms and popups to your blog or website. One major thing that sets Drip apart from its competitors is the intelligence marketing tools, list groups, and split testing features that come with it. These features make it easy for you to quickly reach targeted customers. They have a support system that includes a live chat, automation training, perfect documentation, free guides, and webinars.Pros
- Robust Tools
- Track Revenue from Email Marketing
Cons
- Their paid plans are a bit expensive
- Some of their features are complicated to use
7. GetResponse
GetResponse is also a widely used email marketing software. It is very easy to use making it a perfect solution for small business owners. The service comes along with great marketing automation tools that allow one to create customized and automated campaigns. GetResponse offers a landing page builder that gives you access to more than 150 templates. Not only that, but you also get free hosting for any page that you create, drag-and-drop features, and a large variety of page elements. One of their popular features is a drag and drop builder that allows you to create segmented contacts, campaigns, and whatever number of emails you would want to send to targeted groups. Another cool feature of GetResponse is that it offers over 5000 free Shutterstock images that you can include on your page. This tool is primarily known for its email marketing service, so its no surprise that it makes it very easy for users to collect emails from their landing pages. GetResponse specializes in creating forms that are designed to capture leads at faster rates. And this is great in terms of growing your lists. All these tools are meant to make your life easy when it comes to creating effective marketing campaigns to boost your sales.Pros
- It has wonderful responsive forms, landing pages, and autoresponders to make your work easy
- The software is able to easily integrate with other third-party led generation services such as SalesForce, OptiMonster, ZenDesk, Google Docs among others.
- There is support offered via phone, email, and live chat
- It also offers a one-month free trial
Cons
- After the 30-day free trial, users can’t access any useful tools.
8. SendinBlue
SendinBlue is comprehensive SMS and email marketing tool for businesses. It is one of the easiest email marketing software to uses and offers a free plan for up to 300 email contacts per day. But if you are serious about your marketing strategy, then you better go for their Lite plan that begins from $20 per month. With that, you can send up to 40,000 emails every month without a daily limit.Pros
- They have a free platform that is very easy to use. It allows people to customize their own templates, automate emails and create opt-in forms
- They have a live chat as well as the CRM feature win their free plan
- You are able to check statistics on a real-time basis and get accurate reports about the performance of your marketing strategy
- You can schedule emails and trigger them using a special feature
Cons
- The number of emails one can send is limited in their free plan
9. Mailchimp
There’s no doubt that Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing software that exists today. This is probably because they provide permanent free email marketing services. You don’t need to subscribe every month like most of the service providers. Mailchimp is an email management system that allows webmasters to collect emails and send out newsletters, sales letters, and promotions via email. Mailchimp is a great email software for beginners and advanced users alike. They have several great features including autoresponders, a drag-and-drop email builder, the ability to segment contacts into groups, and tracking analytics features.Pros
- You can also set up email delivery times according to the time zone of every user.
- You can integrate it with popular sites such as Shopify, WordPress, Magento, and many other websites.
Cons
- Mailchimp has limitations as far as automation features are concerned compared to other services such as ConvertKit and Drip.
10. Hubspot
Hubspot is widely known as the king of marketing automation and it works the same way as an email marketing tool. The service gives marketers an opportunity to create, optimize and personalize emails without the help of IT or web designers. One of the greatest benefits of Hubspot is its ability to automate workflows. This makes it easy for anyone to set email triggers and direct the leads to targeted customers It has an awesome mapping tool that gives you greater visibility over your email management system.Pros
- Hubspot is simple to use and easily customizable
- It aligns inbound and outbound marketing efforts in a perfect way
Cons
- Some people may find it difficult to use