10+ Best Email Marketing Software For 2024 (Comparison)

powerful email marketing services compared featured

You need an email marketing service provider. After all, email has a higher ROI than any other marketing channel.

The only problem? There are many email marketing tools to choose from.

The best tool for the job depends on your needs.

In this post, I’ll be comparing the best email marketing services and sharing recommendations for various use cases towards the end.

The best email marketing software – summary

Top Picks:

  1. MailerLite – Best email marketing software overall. Free plan available.
  2. Moosend – Best for ease of use.
  3. ActiveCampaign – Best email automation software.
  4. Omnisend – Best all-in-one automation solution for ecommerce. Includes email, SMS, and web push notifications.
  5. Kit – Best email marketing platform for bloggers and content creators.
  6. Brevo – Affordable solution for low volume email sends. Includes SMS + transactional emails.

1. MailerLite

MailerLite Homepage

MailerLite is the best email marketing service for most users. This is thanks to its feature-rich free plan, extensive feature-set, and affordable paid plans.

You get access to a simple interface, effective subscriber management, drag and drop editor, and full-featured visual automation builder.

You can segment your subscribers, remove inactive subscribers with a few clicks, and view subscriber activity. You can split test your campaign emails, or send emails via RSS.

The visual email builder has some nice templates included and it can be used to design emails used within your automations (paid plan required).

One particularly neat thing about MailerLite is that accounts require approval. This stops spammers from signing up and ensures the platform maintains better email deliverability rates.

Overall, I was very impressed by the simplicity of the service, given the features included.

Key features:

  • Drag and drop editor
  • Visual automation builder
  • Email builder
  • Templates
  • Subscriber management
  • Split testing
  • RSS emails
  • Landing page & opt-in form builder
  • Transactional emails
  • Website builder
  • Email verifier

Pros:

  • Superb delivery rates
  • Easy to use
  • Very affordable (much cheaper than most other providers)
  • Generous free plan

Cons:

  • Self-service support only on the free plan
  • Some recent confusion relating to the classic version of their software

Pricing:

A free starter plan is available with access to most features and limited support. You’ll get a free trial of premium features. Paid plans starting at $10/month which offers access to all features. Annual discounts available.

Read our MailerLite review.

2. Moosend

Moosend Homepage

Moosend is one of the best all-round email marketing platforms on the market. It stands out for its ease of use, excellent support, and powerful personalization and segmentation features.

With an average 4.7/5 rating on G2 and thousands of happy customers, including major businesses like Vogue, Gucci, Dixons, Dominos, and TEDx, it’s clear that Moosend is a platform users trust.

It comes with all the core email marketing features you’d expect: a library of professional, fully-customizable drag and drop email templates; a visual newsletter editor to customize them on, campaign scheduling and email sequencing, automation workflows, etc.

However, on top of that, it also comes with some of the most advanced segmentation and personalization tools we’ve seen.

You can leverage the AI-powered product recommendation engine to upsell products your customers will love in your emails. Recommendations can be based on previous customer actions (like products they’ve viewed or purchased) and various other factors.

You can even set it up to take the weather into account. I’m not joking—Moosend uses real-time weather data to determine the best upsells and cross-sells based on the weather in their area. Cool, huh?

You can also personalize your emails to your different list segments. How you manage your list is up to you. You can segment it up by demographic information like gender, age, and location, or zoom in even closer and group subscribers up based on things like past purchase times.

On top of all that, you can also use Moosend to build landing pages and forms that you can use to grow your list.

Key features:

  • Email templates
  • Newsletter editor
  • Automation workflows
  • AI-powered product recommendations
  • Subscriber management and segmentation
  • Landing page builder
  • CRM
  • Reporting & analytics

Pros:

  • Very easy to use
  • Outstanding support
  • Best-in-class personalization and segmentation capabilities
  • Scalable ‘pay as you go’ pricing model

Cons:

  • Free plan is fairly limited
  • Landing page creator could be better

Pricing:

Moosend offers a generous free trial. You can try it out for free with no credit card required for 30 days, but you’ll be limited to one landing page and form. The Pro plan starts from as little as $9/month but prices increase based on the number of subscribers you have. Larger enterprises can reach out to Moosend for a custom plan quote.

Read our Moosend review.

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign Homepage

ActiveCampaign is a leading email marketing service that offers an excellent balance between functionality and affordability.

It has an extremely rich feature-set that goes beyond email marketing. The visual automation builder is extremely powerful – one of the best I’ve tested. However, it has a higher learning curve than other tools and is best suited to more advanced users.

When it comes to the core emailing functionality, you have all the features you need. For example; you can choose from a selection of email templates, or design your own with a drag and drop editor.

You have several options for sending your campaign emails; one-off emails, timed campaigns, automated emails, RSS-based, A/B testing, or auto-responder.

ActiveCampaign has a lot to offer in terms of contact management. You get plenty of ways to filter contacts, and full history of how your contacts have interacted with you – this works in sync with their site & event tracking functionality. List cleaning functionality is included, which can also be done via automation sequences.

Segmenting your email list is easy, and you have access to advanced functionality such as A/B testing and dynamic content. These two features alone can help you get more opens, clicks, and conversions.

You’ll find user accounts available for your team, live chat, on-site messaging, custom domains, CRM & sales automation, and plenty more.

Key features:

  • Visual automation builder
  • Contact management
  • Email templates
  • Drag and drop editor
  • RSS emails
  • Timed campaigns
  • A/B testing
  • Pre-built automation sequences
  • Site and event tracking
  • Live chat
  • CRM

Pros:

  • Email automation capabilities are second to one
  • Wide selection of email templates
  • Easy to use drag and drop editor 

Cons:

  • UI could be better
  • High learning curve

Pricing:

Plans start at $19/month for their lite plan which includes all the important email & automation features most people will need. Increase your plan to unlock site messaging, custom domains, CRM, SMS marketing, and more.

Read our ActiveCampaign review.

4. Omnisend

Omnisend Homepage

Omnisend is the best marketing automation platform for ecommerce stores. It doesn’t just handle email marketing – it also handles SMS and web push notifications.

In terms of email marketing, Omnisend has everything you need to craft engaging and high converting email campaigns.

You can choose from a range of optimized templates to create your emails, and you use Omnisend to add shippable elements to your emails like scratch cards and product pickers.

Omnisend also has a range of segmentation features that can help to make your email campaigns more personalized, and improve conversion rates. You can also make use of the A/B testing features to perfect your strategy.

In addition to all this, Omnisend also gives you access to powerful automation tools, a landing page builder, form and popup tools, and much more. It’s the perfect all-in-one email solution for ecommerce businesses.

Key features:

  • Email templates
  • Shoppable emails
  • Drag & drop email builder
  • Segmentation
  • Subscriber history
  • Campaign booster
  • AB testing
  • Reports
  • Click maps
  • SMS 
  • Push notifications

Pros:

  • The best solution for ecommerce websites
  • Supports multiple communication channels (email, SMS, and web push notifications)
  • Good selection of professionally-made templates

Cons:

  • Not ideal for those that don’t run an ecommerce store
  • Setting up an A/B test is unnecessarily complicated

Pricing:

Omnisend has a free plan as well as 2 paid plans. The free forever plan includes up to 250 contacts and 500 emails/month. If you need a little more flexibility, paid plans start from as little as $16/month.

Read our Omnisend review.

5. Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

kit homepage

Kit is an email marketing service with a strong-focus on bloggers & content creators.

Most services focus on trying to please everyone. Kit doesn’t. Instead, they cater to the needs of a specific audience – bloggers & content creators.

The result is a well-crafted tool that is incredibly simple to use. You get the all important features such as visual automation, with the addition of opt-in sign up forms & landing pages. While you’ll get more mileage out of a dedicated landing page builder, it’s a nice option to have for building your email list.

Simple reporting gives you a good top level view of how your forms are performing, and how your email list is growing overall, and tagging/segmentation is extremely easy.

You can add email sequences, then pull them into the visual automation builder. You can do the same with forms too. With most email marketing services, you’d need to jump between these options, but you can open both directly while editing your automations.

Given Kit’s simplicity, there are some limitations. For example, filtering your subscribers isn’t as easy as other services, there’s no spam scoring, and there’s no visual drag and drop builder as such.

But, if you’re new to email marketing and you’re after simplicity without sacrificing powerful email automation functionality, be sure to give Kit a try.

Key features:

  • Email designer
  • Templates
  • 99%+ delivery rate
  • 40%+ average open rate
  • Automatic download delivery
  • Automated funnels
  • Insights and analytics
  • Segmentation and tagging
  • Forms and landing pages
  • Automations
  • Commerce tools

Pros:

  • Built specifically for content creators and bloggers
  • Very easy to use
  • Excellent, simple user interface

Cons:

  • Missing some important native integrations with popular tools so you might have to rely on Zapier

Pricing:

A free plan is available for up to 10,000 subscribers with limited features. Paid plans start from $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited email sends.

Read our Kit review.

6. Brevo

Brevo Homepage

Brevo stands out as an email marketing service that delivers incredible value without sacrificing functionality. It’s especially well suited to infrequent email senders due to it’s send-based pricing.

You’ll find core features such as a drag and drop email builder, feature-rich marketing automation, and more specialised features such as spam testing & A/B split testing.

Brevo stands out in a few ways. Firstly, they offer transactional email.

Transactional emails are related to product purchases and account sign ups – the sort of emails need by default. So, if you run an ecommerce website or any other site that needs to send account related emails – you’ll find this especially useful.

What is transactional email? Well, there are two types of email. Marketing & transactional. If you send newsletters, then this is classed as marketing email.

Not only that, but Brevo prices its services based on the number of emails you send, not the number of subscribers. So, if you find yourself sending emails occasionally, you could save a lot of money with Brevo.

It’s worth noting that automations are capped at 2,000 contacts unless you’re on the Premium or Enterprise plans.

Overall, Brevo offers a deep feature set which is extremely impressive when you consider their low price point. And they have an impressive user interface which makes the service enjoyable to use.

Key features:

  • Drag and drop email builder
  • Marketing automation
  • Spam testing
  • A/B split testing
  • Transactional emails
  • Send-based pricing
  • Landing page builder
  • Facebook Ads integration
  • Live chat
  • Email API
  • SMS marketing
  • Chat
  • Inbox
  • Sales CRM

Pros:

  • Send-based pricing makes it an economical choice for low-volume senders
  • Includes advanced features like A/B testing and spam testing
  • Great for transactional emails

Cons:

  • The automation tool has a bit of a learning curve
  • Low usage limits on the free plan

Pricing:

Send up to 300 emails per day for free with limited features. Go for the Lite plan in order to send 20,000 emails per month, and unlock more features. Higher plans unlock even more features, and “Pay as you go” style pricing is available.

7. AWeber

AWeber Homepage

AWeber was the first email marketing service I ever used and it’s improved a lot since those early days.

If you want a robust solution for sending emails that’s simple (but not too simple), AWeber is a good choice.

They have a great drag and drop email builder and a huge selection of 700+ templates to make your emails look great. And since they’re a popular platform, you’ll find that a lot of tools integrate with them.

Adding tags is easy, and split testing allows you to test your subject lines, email content, and more.

You can filter your email subscribers and access robust reporting. AWeber do offer automation but there’s no visual builder. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your preferences.

The UX is great and the platform has improved a lot since I first used it. They’ve even added web push notifications which is a nice extra feature.

Key features:

  • Drag and drop email builder
  • 700+ email templates
  • Tagging
  • Split testing
  • Reporting
  • Subscriber filters
  • AI-powered designer
  • Landing pages
  • Pre-built auto-responders
  • Full automations
  • Canva integration
  • Free stock images

Pros:

  • Excellent email design tools
  • Large catalog of professional-looking email templates
  • Auto-responder tool is great for simple automations

Cons:

  • No visual automation builder
  • Split testing only available on the paid plan

Pricing:

Free plan available for 500 contacts. Paid plans start from $19/month for 500 contacts and unlimited email sends.

Read our AWeber review.

8. Drip

drip homepage

Drip position themselves as an ecommerce CRM, and while they do that job incredibly well, they are one of the all-round best email marketing services I’ve tested.

So, if you don’t run an ecommerce store, don’t let their focus on ecommerce put you off – the platform is well suited to a variety of business types.

Create drip email campaigns, individual broadcasts, or use their robust visual automation builder. One particularly great feature is the ability to split test within automations.

You can send simple emails that do a good job of getting out of the promotions tab, or use their visual email builder for branded emails.

They have plenty of reporting functionality available. And for those of you with ecommerce sites, you’ll find ecommerce specific reports that are actually useful.

Even if you’re not running an ecommerce site, Drip is well worth testing out. Hands down, it’s one of my favourite email marketing platforms. And it offers excellent email deliverability.

Key features:

  • Drip campaigns
  • Broadcasts
  • Split tests
  • Automation builder
  • Email builder
  • Reporting
  • CRM
  • On-site tracking
  • Segmentation & personalization
  • Forms & popups

Pros:

  • Strong ecommerce-focused feature set
  • Powerful email automation builder
  • Good value if you’re running multiple sites

Cons:

  • Plans start at a higher price than Moosend and MailerLite

Pricing:

Plans start from $39/month for 2,500 subscribers and unlimited email sends.

9. GetResponse

GetResponse Homepage

GetResponse is a veteran amongst email marketing services.

While there was a time when they were losing ground to other email marketing tools, they have really stepped up their game by adding a slew new features.

While their core email marketing product has always been strong, the addition of visual marketing automation, landing pages, webinars, CRM, and other new features has helped GetResponse become more of an all-in-one platform.

There is a great selection of email templates, which are organized by industry. Split testing is available for your newsletters too. The visual email builder is drag and drop and has built-in preview functionality & spam scoring.

Contact management offers easy filtering, list hygiene, and reporting. You’ll find a visual automation builder that’s functional, and like ActiveCampaign, comes with automation templates to get you up and running.

Out of all of the features GetResponse offers, what impressed me most was their Conversion Funnel feature. Together with their other features, they’ve created a platform that gives you everything you need to build an entire sales funnel.

This includes ad creation to fill your funnel, the creation of your landing pages, webinar creation, exit-intent popovers, sales page creation, ecommerce integrations & payment processor integrations. You can also build your own store within the platform.

And since you can do this within a single tool, analytics & reporting are exceptionally convenient.

The only issue I have with GetResponse is it’s convoluted pricing. It seems designed to confuse. For example, some basic automation functionality such as segmentation, and on-site tracking isn’t available until you get to the higher plans.

Key features:

  • Drag and drop email creator
  • Free stock photos and GIFs
  • Templates
  • Newsletters
  • Autoresponders
  • Design tools
  • Transactional emails
  • Perfect Timing and Time Travel delivery
  • Automations
  • Dynamic content
  • Customer segments
  • A/B testing
  • Website builder
  • Landing pages and signup forms
  • SMS
  • Live chat

Pros:

  • All-in-one marketing platform
  • Advanced marketing features 
  • Really useful auto funnel tool

Cons:

  • Might be overkill for some users
  • Confusing pricing structure

Pricing:

Plans start at $12.30/month (paid annually) with access to basic features. Higher plans unlock more features. Unfortunately not all automation features are available until you get to those higher plans.

A free plan is available with limited features for up to 500 contacts.

Read our GetResponse review.

10. Constant Contact

Constant Contact Homepage

Constant Contact is an all-in-one digital marketing platform built for small businesses. It offers a good balance of affordability, ease of use, and sophistication.

When you sign up for Constant Contact, you get access to all the core email marketing tools and features that you’d expect, including a drag and drop email editor and hundreds of professionally-designed pre-made email templates.

The editor is super beginner-friendly and flexible. Customizing your templates is a breeze and you can even add action blocks to your emails that invite your customers to buy a product or make a donation.

Constant Contact also offers plenty of automations. At the most basic level, you can set up automatic welcome, anniversary, and birthday emails. If you want to create more complex automations, you can build automated drip campaigns targeted to your different audience segments.

You can trigger email sequences based on things like how recipients interact with your previous emails. For example, you might choose to resend emails with a modified subject line out to contacts that don’t open them the first time.

Once your campaign is up and running, real-time analytics let you see who’s opening and clicking your emails as soon as they interact with them.

Constant Contact also gives you access to basic list management features. You can upload contacts from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, or anywhere else with ease.

Another feature we liked about Constant Contact is the survey tool. You can create surveys and polls to collect feedback from your audience and embed them in your emails (or share them on your website) in a few clicks.

In addition to all the core email marketing features, Constant Contact also gives you access to tools to help with other areas of your marketing operations. This includes landing page tools, paid ad tools, SMS marketing features, social media marketing features, and more.

Key features:

  • Branded email templates
  • Sign-up forms
  • Landing pages
  • Social media inbox
  • Reports
  • Live chat support
  • List-growth tools
  • List management tools
  • Dynamic content personalization
  • Automations
  • Customer segments
  • Survey tool
  • Paid ad tools

Pros:

  • Good balance of affordability and features
  • Ideal for small businesses
  • Easy-to-use

Cons:

  • Automation features are only included in the higher priced plan

Pricing:

Starts at $12/month. Get started with a free trial.

11. Wishpond

Wishpond Homepage

Wishpond is an all-in-one marketing solution designed to offer users the whole gamut of tools needed to capture, nurture, and convert leads.

But don’t think Wishpond is a jack of all trades but master of none. On the contrary, its built-in email features are excellent and every bit as good as your average dedicated email marketing platform.

With Wishpond, you get access to a simple but powerful email builder, advanced automations, and powerful a/b testing tools that can help you to get the most opens and clicks out of every email.

Emails can be personalized for individual customers based on the information stored in your integrated leads database, and automated workflows can be set up to automatically send out welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and more.

Aside from the above, you also get access to other nifty marketing features including a landing page builder, appointments scheduler, and powerful social promotions tool.

The social promotions tool is particularly impressive. You can use it to set up viral giveaway campaigns that generate a ton of leads and can help you to quickly grow your list.

Key features:

  • Email builder
  • Advanced automations
  • A/B testing
  • Social media contests and promotions
  • Personalization
  • Welcome sequences
  • Abandoned cart emails
  • Landing page builder
  • Appointments scheduler

Pros:

  • All-in-one solution
  • Advanced automation and marketing features 
  • Conversion and lead capture features included 

Cons:

  • Pricing details are hard to find 
  • No free plan is available

Pricing:

Wishpond offers both monthly and annual pricing plans.  Plans billed yearly are a little cheaper and start at $49/month. You can try the platform out for free for 14-days.

12. Sendlane

sendlane homepage

Sendlane is a relative newcomer to the email marketing service space, when compared to some on this list. That said, they have a rich feature set.

You can do all of the basic campaigns, and newsletters. Choose from a selection of email templates, or build your own with the drag and drop email builder. Use tags and custom fields to segment your list, and view real-time analytics.

Sendlane has a particularly well-refined visual editor for creating emails. It’s drag and drop with a slick user interface.

Like some other platforms on this list, you’ll find that some features are locked behind higher plans. Although, some plans are only available on certain list sizes.

Regardless, Sendlane has a lot to offer and is really sticking it to some of the more established email marketing heavy-hitters with it’s deep feature set. Give it a try for yourself!

Key features:

  • Email templates
  • Drag and drop email builder
  • Custom fields and tags
  • Real-time analytics
  • Visual editor
  • Send time optimization
  • Automatic list cleaning
  • Visual automation builder
  • Pre-built sequences

Pros:

  • Advanced features
  • Easy-to-use dashboard
  • Good support options

Cons:

  • High starting price
  • SMS and email features are priced separately
  • No free plan is available

Pricing:

Plans start at $99/month while additional features are available on higher level plans.

13. SendX

sendx homepage

SendX is one of the newer email marketing software tools on the market.

Despite competing with a lot of established brands, they’ve come out of the gates swinging with a feature-rich platform that is a lot more affordable than some of their competitors. In fact, on a per subscriber basis, it beats most platforms on this list.

The interface is simple and easy to find your way around, and it’s easy to manage your contacts. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts are easy to find. In your contact history you can see a timeline of their activity.

Campaigns can be setup as a newsletter, or a drip campaign. You can also A/B test your campaigns, or trigger campaigns based on site activity.

They have a drag and drop email builder and a reasonable selection of templates you can use.

SendX doesn’t have a visual automation builder yet (it’s on their product roadmap). What they do have is a rule-based if X happens then Y happens style system.

If you have any issues integrating SendX with other tools, you can use Zapier to open up the ability to connect to 1,500+ other apps.

Key features:

  • Drag and drop email builder
  • Templates
  • Newsletters
  • Drip campaigns
  • A/B testing
  • Rule-based automations
  • Zapier integration
  • Landing page and popup builder
  • Email heat maps
  • Team collaboration
  • Stock photos

Pros:

  • Budget-friendly
  • Easy-to-understand pricing model 
  • Full-featured easy to use solution

Cons:

  • Lacks some advanced features like spam scoring
  • No visual drag-and-drop builder
  • Few third-party integrations are available

Pricing:

Plans start from $9.99/month for up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited email sends.

14. HubSpot

HubSpot for email

HubSpot’s email software tools are part of their comprehensive marketing platform, designed to help businesses create, send, and analyze email campaigns effectively.

This email marketing toolset has a user-friendly interface and helps users craft visually appealing emails using drag-and-drop editors and pre-designed templates.

You can use the software’s A/B testing capabilities to optimize email performance and track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions you get.

You can also segment your contact lists for targeted messaging and set up automated email workflows to nurture leads. 

Finally, integration with HubSpot’s CRM allows for personalized content based on customer data thus further improving conversion rates.

Key features:

  • Drag and drop email builder
  • Pre-built sequences
  • Email templates
  • Custom fields and tags
  • Intuitive visual editor
  • Campaign send time optimization
  • Real-time analytics
  • Visual automation builder

Pros:

  • All-in-one solution
  • Plenty of customizable free templates
  • OpenAI-powered email headline and copy generation
  • Advanced automation and marketing features
  • Conversion and lead capture features included

Cons:

  • Gets very expensive if you decide to upgrade to a paid plan
  • Free version is heavily limited in some areas
  • Takes some time getting used to the tool, especially if you have no experience with any other email marketing software.

Pricing:

You can get HubSpot’s email software for free, and a paid plan is available for more advanced users and larger businesses.

Features to look for in email marketing software

As you can see, there are many different email marketing software solutions out there — some of which have more advanced features than others. Here are some key features to look out for when you’re comparing your options.

Email templates

Templates are a staple feature of email marketing platforms. Most services will provide you with a library of professionally-designed, ready-made templates that you can use in your email marketing campaigns. These templates are typically fully customizable so you can change the content, layout, and design as needed.

email templates activecampaign
Source: ActiveCampaign

Ideally, you should look for an email marketing solution that gives you a wide range of templates to choose from. That way, it’ll be easier to find a template for the specific type of marketing or transactional email you want to send.

At a minimum, there should be templates for common types of emails like welcome emails, newsletters, offers and discounts, customer feedback forms, events, and re-engagement emails.

Email editor

Another core feature to look for is an email editor. Most email marketing solutions will have some kind of built-in drag and drop email editor that you can use to put together professional-looking newsletters in an intuitive interface complete with a real-time preview.

The best email marketing services will offer powerful, flexible editors with tons of useful widgets and modules that you can drop in to spice up your emails.

At a minimum, you should be able to add images, buttons, videos, and text — these are the core components of any email.

email editor activecampaign
Source: ActiveCampaign

However, some platforms will go beyond the basics and enable you to add advanced widgets like countdown timers, product recommendation tables, and other interactive elements. These kinds of widgets can help to incentivize your customers to take action and improve your email conversion rates.

You’ll also want to make sure you choose an email marketing platform with a responsive editor. This ensures the emails you design will look great on any screen — mobile or desktop. It should offer complete customization, be easy to use, and ideally also let you add your own HTML code if needed.

Automations

You’ll almost certainly want to use automated email sequences in your marketing campaigns, which is why it’s important to choose software that offers sophisticated automation capabilities.

Almost all email platforms will support simple automation like autoresponders and triggered welcome emails. However, if you want to create more complex and sophisticated workflows, you’ll want to look for a platform that offers a visual automation builder.

Automation builders enable you to create your own automation paths by connecting trigger events to conditional control steps and actions. The best automation builders will be easy to use and integrate seamlessly with the platform’s email editor so you can build out your whole campaign from one interface.

automations activecampaign
Source: ActiveCampaign

Contact management

Contact or list management features are also super important. In order to send out targeted emails to your subscribers, you’ll need a way to segment your list.

Contact management features allow you to categorize your subscribers and create custom audience segments based on properties like geographic location, interests, and previous actions. You can then send out personalized messages to each of these segments individually in order to run highly targeted campaigns.

Depending on the email platform you use, you should also be able to add tags to individual subscribers, add or remove subscribers from your list (or import them from an external file), identify and remove fake sign-ups, etc.

The best platforms will offer built-in list cleaning features that filter out all the unwanted contacts from your list to help improve your email deliverability rates.

Opt-in forms and landing page builder

If you plan on using your email marketing platform to capture leads as well as to send out emails, look for an ‘all-in-one’ platform that provides a range of other marketing tools in addition to the core email features.

Of these additional tools, the most important two features to look out for are opt-in form and landing page builders.

Form builders enable you to create high-converting opt-in forms. Your website visitors can fill out these forms in order to join your mailing list.

Landing page builders enable you to create the pages on which you host your opt-in forms with no coding required. They’re typically beginner-friendly and have a drag-and-drop interface. Most platforms will also offer landing page templates that you can customize in the builder.

optin forms mailerlite
Source: MailerLite

However, it is worth noting that “all-in-one” tools will not offer in-depth form & landing page functionality in the same way as a dedicated tool such as Instapage.

A/B testing

If you want to drive the best possible results from your email campaigns, you need to constantly test, refine, and hone your email marketing strategy. And the best way to do that is by running A/B testing campaigns.

ab testing convertkit
Source: ConvertKit

Many email marketing service providers will give you access to A/B testing (or split testing) tools that you can use to compare two variations of your emails and see which one performs the best.

For example, you might create two versions of the same email with a different subject line. Each variation can then be sent out to a portion of your subscribers. 50% of recipients might receive email A, and the other 50% email B.

Your email marketing platform can then monitor the results to see which email subject line generates the best open rates and then select that variation for use in the future.

Analytics and reporting tools

It’s also important to keep an eye on the data when you’re running email marketing campaigns so you can see what’s working and what isn’t, and measure your performance against your marketing goals.

The best email marketing software solutions will provide robust analytics and reporting features that give you an in-depth view of all the most important metrics and key performance indicators.

You’ll probably want to keep an eye on things like average open rates, clicks, subscriber/unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, deliverability, etc. And speaking of deliverability…

Good deliverability

The last thing you want when running an email campaign is for the carefully crafted marketing messages you create to bounce or end up confined to your recipient’s spam folder. That’s why deliverability is so important.

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email service provider to deliver emails to the recipient’s inbox, without bouncing or getting rerouted to the spam folder.

The best email service providers will have a stellar sender reputation and an infrastructure in place that ensures maximum deliverability. Ideally, you’ll want to choose a service provider with an average overall delivery rate of at least 99%.

However, you should also remember that your email service provider isn’t the only factor that impacts deliverability. Things like poor list hygiene (failing to maintain your list and clean out cold/inactive subscribers), using URL shorteners, and making it difficult for recipients to unsubscribe can all negatively impact deliverability.

Integrations

And of course, don’t forget to think about integrations. It’s unlikely that your email marketing software will be the only tool in your marketing arsenal, so it’s important to make sure it integrates well with the rest of your marketing stack.

For example, if you want to automatically import new subscribers from your WordPress website to your email marketing platform, it’ll need to integrate well with WordPress. Most email marketing platforms have their own dedicated WP plugin for this reason. You might also want to hook it up to your automation software, CRM, etc.

integrations mailerlite
Source: MailerLite

Many email marketing platforms offer hundreds—or even thousands—of integrations with all the most popular marketing and sales tools.

However, if your email marketing platform doesn’t offer native integration with another tool in your stack, you may still be able to connect it via Zapier, as long as it offers Zapier integration. Make sure you’re clear on this before you buy.

Final thoughts

Email marketing has a higher ROI than any other marketing channel. It’s not just important for businesses – it’s critical.

With all the tools we’ve discussed in this post, you’ll be able to find an email marketing tool that aligns perfectly with the needs of your business.

Everything from simple sending of email newsletters to all-in-one platforms to power your entire sales funnel. For example, some providers offer marketing automation, landing pages, and live chat on top of their core email functionality.

The best part is most of these email marketing services offer free trials, and most of them won’t require a credit card to get started. So try a few and see what you think – ultimately it’s your opinion that matters most.

Finally, if you also need help with transactional emails, check out our comparison of transactional email services.


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