Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

January 24, 2022 February 20, 2022

Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Email Marketing Software and Tools

It sounds simple enough, but with 450+ email marketing tools to choose from - and every email marketing company's website saying the same thing, it's anything but simple.

To identify the best email marketing software for different businesses, we surveyed 1,700+ marketers - from single-person startups to Fortune 500 CMOs - who was in the process of transforming email marketing software to understand what they are doing. Moving on from the tool and - and why.

The following top 10 list is the result of hundreds of hours of research, I hope will help you choose the right email marketing software for you.

The 10 Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

1. ActiveCampaign - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

2. HubSpot - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

3. Sendinblue - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

4. Drip - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

5. Omnisend - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

6. Autopilot - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

7. Benchmark - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

8. MailerLite - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

9. ConvertKit - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

10. EmailOctopus - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

1. ActiveCampaign - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Once the underdog, ActiveCampaign is now one of the most popular email marketing tools with over 130,000 small business customers.

ActiveCampaign offers a collection of customer experience automation (CXA) tools - from SMS and email marketing to on-site messaging and CRM functionality.

At the heart of ActiveCampaign's platform is the automation builder; A visual canvas for creating automated marketing sequences across channels.

Unlike some tools that require expensive mentors and training to use, ActiveCampaign's intuitive design enables anyone to create powerful email automation sequences from scratch or by importing one of their 500+ automation recipes.

While email A/B testing is offered by most of the tools in the top 10, ActiveCampaign goes a step further by allowing you to run A/B split testing of entire automation sequences. This means you can test anything - from the number of touchpoints to the delay in email and beyond. All of this ensures that your marketing improves overtime on autopilot.

As an all-in-one sales and marketing tool for small businesses, ActiveCampaign comes with an in-built CRM system to manage your sales, live chat, and of course email marketing automation all in one place.

And, unbelievably, they've done it all with a price tag that's 1/10th that of many of the email marketing tools featured in this guide - starting at $9/month.

Our survey respondents who used ActiveCampaign were overwhelmingly positive about it – and it was one of the most likely tools for businesses of all sizes to move.

ActiveCampaign’s Key Features:

125+ Email templates
500+ Automation recipes
800+ Integrations
Landing pages
SMS messaging
Custom reporting
Web personalization
CRM
Split actions and A/B Testing
Predictive content
Predictive sending
Goal tracking and attribution

For the vast majority of small businesses looking for a great email marketing tool that's easy to use and affordable, ActiveCampaign is probably the best balance of power, affordability, and ease of use.

2. HubSpot - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

HubSpot is world-class in providing businesses with an all-in-one sales and marketing platform that includes a CRM, landing pages, email marketing, marketing automation, chat, forms, and everything in between.

While some argue that trying to do everything is HubSpot's downfall, it enables them to do one thing exceptionally well; Reporting.

By using HubSpot as the backbone of your marketing and sales, you can more easily channel the revenue back into the marketing campaign, newsletter, or blog post that impacted each sale. In this sense, HubSpot is more of a CRM that offers email marketing and automation in contrast

And if your website is built on WordPress, you get the added benefit of using HubSpot as your email marketing tool. HubSpot has a WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to send email campaigns directly from WordPress. The plugin lets you use HubSpot Forms or Chat Widgets to automatically capture contacts in your CRM, without leaving WordPress.

HubSpot may come at a price

While much-loved, HubSpot's second most likely response (behind Mailchimp) is "What email marketing software are you giving up?" In our survey of 1,700+ email marketers. The reason is almost always the same; Price.

HubSpot positions itself as an affordable option for small businesses by offering free versions of its products -- but don't be fooled by the HubSpot gateway drug. As your list or feature requirements grow, their platform becomes increasingly expensive.

With a business owner, I started on a $50/month plan and needed a $2,000/month plan that had to be paid for annually within a year. The only difference was adding 15,000 contacts and marketing automation, yet they jumped from seeing $50 left in the bank to $24,000.

That's where I feel conflicted about HubSpot.

On the one hand, you can get similar functionality for a tenth of the price by using ActiveCampaign, Benchmark, or half the tools in this guide. On the other hand, if the value of knowing what effect each sale had is a problem to pay a five-figure sum to solve, then HubSpot is a strong contender.

That's why we suggest HubSpot is an ideal choice for B2B service companies where the value of winning a handful of additional customers a year will easily cover the cost of HubSpot. This extends to larger or more sophisticated agencies, which must provide clients with in-depth reports on their marketing funnels.

If you only need email marketing software, then HubSpot is probably overkilled. But if your search for email marketing software is part of a broader plan to step up your marketing game and improve performance across your entire sales and marketing funnel, HubSpot is a strong contender—but don't expect it to be cheap.

3. Sendinblue - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Sendinblue is best known as one of the leading transactional email services. Based on this reputation he created an email marketing automation product.

We use Sendinblue to send transactional emails for two of our enterprises (Leadformly and Serene), as they are one of the few email marketing providers with servers in the EU (which helps with our GDPR compliance) and they have a Good delivery rate (we are currently at 98%).

While I can't comment on their marketing automation features from direct experience, it's clear from our customer surveys that it's good, but it lacks some of the more advanced features (like goal tracking, native integration, and annotations).

If you need an email marketing tool with a solid API to get your emails into your inbox with a good delivery rate, Sendinblue's pre-built developer recipes make it an excellent choice.

Sendinblue’s key features:

Marketing automation
SMS
Live chat
CRM
Transactional email
Landing pages
Sign-up forms
Facebook Ads

4. Drip - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Best for Small Ecommerce Stores

I think it's fair to say that Drip's focus is on small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses, while our next email marketing tool (Omnisend) seems better suited for larger e-commerce stores.

As you'd expect, Drip integrates deeply with all mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, as well as the more obscure and custom-built.

With built-in revenue analytics and tools to engage customers across multiple channels (from social channels to SMS), Drip is ideally positioned as a powerful tool for growing e-commerce stores.

Their pricing is attractive too, starting at $19/month for a smaller list size.

Drip’s key features:

Visual automation
Email and SMS marketing
Dynamic e-commerce content blocks
Discount codes
e-commerce Segmentation
Retargeting
e-commerce store integrations
Reporting dashboards
Split testing sequences

5. Omnisend - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Omnisend is fast becoming one of the leading marketing platforms for e-commerce stores.

Designed to help e-commerce brands take control of their marketing across multiple channels, Omnisend offers automated email, SMS, push notifications, and most effectively integrations with Google Ads, Instagram, Facebook Ads, Messenger, and WhatsApp Offers - which they claim has 10X more clicks. - Compare rates via email.

By focusing solely on e-commerce, Omnisend has created innovative email templates designed to reduce cart abandonment and drive repeat buyers. From 'Wheel of Fortune' offers to virtual scratch cards and birthday discounts, it is clear that Omnisend is built by a team that is well-versed in what works in e-commerce.

As you'd expect of an eCommerce email marketing tool, Omnisend joins most eCommerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Where Omnisend goes a step further is in integrating with the review, loyalty, and help desk platforms, such as Yotpo, Smile.io, and ReCharge.

Not only does this enable Omnisend to report how your campaigns impact sales, but emails you based on your customer behavior to reduce cart abandonment, increase return buyers, drive more product reviews, etc. Enables triggering of SMS and social campaigns.

If you want the features that make Omnisend unique, you'll need a PRO account that starts at $199/month for up to 10,000 contacts. While not the cheapest and easiest to use, Omnisend is a good option for e-commerce brands that want one multi-channel platform to rule them all.

Omnisend’s key features:

Visual email builder
Email, SMS, and Push notifications
Transactional and marketing emails
Dynamic discount codes
e-commerce Segmentation
Retargeting
Surveys and Polls
Reporting
Popups and forms – wheel of fortune, scratch cards, etc.
A/B Testing

6. Autopilot - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Gone are the days when email marketing is all about sending out bulk newsletters.

In today's digital landscape, email marketing needs to be smart; Automatically sending the right messages to the right leads at the right time.

That's why all of our top ten email marketing providers provide marketing automation. As the name suggests, this is a feature of the autopilot. To boot, they have one of the best-designed canvases for building email automation sequences.

Autopilot's Marketing Automation Annotations

Anyone who has ever built an email automation sequence knows how quickly they can get confusing. Autopilot solves this in a quirky way, letting you annotate your automation sequences with emoji, stickers, and explanations, making it easier for teams to collaborate on building sequences.

Yes, it can be messy - but I'd rather be able to understand what's going on than pretty automation sequences that take half an hour to interpret.

Another feature I love about Autopilot is the ability to trigger actions in your other devices inside Autopilot. This avoids configuring integration using tools like Zapier and makes your sequences much easier to understand.

Autopilot Third-Party Integration

Autopilot's reporting is also excellent, however, I'll go into more detail about that in our section on reporting and analysis below.

Starting at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, Autopilot is far from the cheapest option, especially considering that Autopilot doesn't offer a built-in CRM. However, Autopilot is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we were to move beyond ActiveCampaign, this is probably where we go.

7. Benchmark - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Benchmark is an interesting option for any business looking for a well-designed and easy-to-use email marketing tool.

While the other tools in the top ten aren't as well known, they are "What tool are you turning to?" have become an increasingly popular response. in our survey.

Benchmark does everything very well and is reasonably priced, but there is one thing that sets them apart from other email marketing tools – and that is the design.

Everything from their templates to the platform is beautifully designed – and not just visually appealing, but a great user experience. While this may seem trivial to some, it makes a big difference when it comes to understanding your data and making the right impression with contacts.

Benchmark is a good choice for any small business that needs simple, easy-to-use email marketing and automation software. This is likely to be an especially good choice for smaller agencies and consultancies where design is important from a staff training perspective - and also provides a great experience for clients.

Benchmark’s key features:

Visual email builder
Marketing automation
1,500+ Integrations
Landing pages
Surveys and Polls
Reporting
Sign-up forms
A/B Testing

8. ConvertKit - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

ConvertKit is a relatively simple email marketing tool used almost exclusively by bloggers and online course instructors to develop their brands.

There are no bells or whistles on their stage. It also doesn't have email templates, as ConvertKit encourages its users to send plain-text emails to increase engagement. Since most of its users are individuals trying to build a personal brand, this is understandable, but it also makes ConvertKit a poor fit for other use cases.

If you are a creator who just needs a simple tool to serve your audience with regular content, then there is no better tool than this.

9. MailerLite - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

On the opposite end of the price spectrum, we have MailerLite, one of the best email marketing tools for the money (it's free to send up to 12,000 emails/month to less than 1,000 contacts).

Unlike other early email marketing tools, MailerLite is a universally good tool regardless of industry. Whether you're starting a small charity, a side-hustle, or a freelancer, MailerLite provides everything you need to send out bulk email marketing campaigns.

If you're a small business, I suggest a tool like ActiveCampaign may be a better fit, as they offer a built-in CRM and more advanced marketing features for roughly the same price.

For beginners and personal projects where you only need to send beautiful email campaigns to engage your audience, MailerLite is ideal.

If you want to give MailerLite a spin, the folks out there have kindly offered Venture Harbor readers an extended 30-day trial (instead of 14 days).

10. EmailOctopus - Best Email Marketing Software and Tools

Email marketing has long held the belief that the most economical way to send email is to use Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES). Still, the UI isn't built just for marketing teams to create campaigns.

Several email marketing services have tried to bridge this gap – from Sendy to MoonMail, but they often either fall short on features or tend to be more developer-focused.

What should you look for in email marketing software?

Email marketing software is all you need to grow your business by saving you time and converting your leads into customers and those customers on autopilot - into repeat customers.

From a survey of 1,700+ marketers in the process of transforming their email marketing software, we discovered nine factors that separate the good from the great: