Are you looking to dip your feet into email marketing? Email marketing is the best way to connect with your visitors, build an engaging relationship, and convert them into customers.
Choosing the best email marketing service that has all the features you need is crucial for the success of your business. Each email marketing service has its own unique set of features, but there’s no reason to feel overwhelmed. We’ve got your back.
In this article, we’ll compare the top email marketing services to help you pick the best email marketing service for your business.
What Is Email Marketing and Why Do You Need It?
Email marketing is a great way to get your message across, whether you’re a blogger and want to give your readers regular updates or you’re a business trying to generate more leads. With email marketing, you get your message straight into the inbox of the people you want to see it.
If you have a website of any kind that has traffic, then you need to do email marketing. Email marketing gives you the ability to contact your visitors even after they leave your website.
A few benefits of email marketing are:
- Increase repeat visits: Over 70% of website visitors abandoning your website will never return. When you build an email list, you can build a connection with your visitors by collecting their email addresses and sending them valuable content.
- Build a loyal following: Repeat visitors are more likely to convert into customers, compared to first-time visitors. In fact, studies show that it takes 3-4 visits to your website for your potential customers to actually think of doing business with you.
- Increase sales: Email conversions outperform both social and organic search traffic. So if you’re looking to make sales, then you’ll need to start email marketing.
How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Service
Choosing the right email marketing service that fits your needs is important for your business. Just because an email marketing company is popular doesn’t always mean that it’s the best solution for your needs. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with different choices since there are dozens of email marketing solutions on the market. That’s why we’re going to break it all down for you!
Here are a few basic things you’ll need to focus on when choosing an email marketing service:
- Ease of use: It’s important that the email marketing service you choose is easy to use and works with your business.
- Automation: Almost all services out there allow you to automate your email campaigns, but each one does it in a different way. Take a look at how different tools automate your campaigns and figure out if they help solve your needs.
- Industry: Some services are aimed at serving certain industries only. For example, ConvertKit was built specifically with publishers in mind. If that doesn’t describe you, then you’ll have to sign up for a service that better addresses your industry requirements.
- Pricing: Obviously, the tool you choose must fit your budget.
Also, check out our article on how to create an email blast the right way.
With these things in mind, let’s compare some of the best email marketing services for your business.
10 Email Service Providers
- Constant Contact – Best email service provider
- Sendinblue – Best bulk email service for beginners
- Drip – Best email marketing automation tool
- ConvertKit – Best email tool for publishers
- AWeber – Most popular email service company
- Mailchimp – Best all-in-one marketing automation suite
- GetResponse – Best email blast service for webinar marketing
- MailerLite – Most Affordable mass email service
- Keap – Best email service and CRM for customer service and sales
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is the most popular email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with tons of customizable email templates that help you get a head start.
When getting started, you’ll be prompted to choose your industry, and your previous experience with email marketing. Based on your selections, you’ll get customized content and promotion ideas that will help you level up your email marketing.
Constant Contact offers unmatched support with live chat, emails, and discussion forums. They also have a vast library of resources.
While most email marketing services offer 14 or 30-day free trials to test the service, Constant Contact gives you full access to their tools for 60 days.
Email Plans:
Constant Contact pricing is based on the size of your email list.
- $20/month – For 0 – 500 subscribers.
- $45/month – For 501 – 2500 subscribers.
- $65/month – For 2501 – 5000 subscribers.
- $95/month – For 5001 – 10,000 subscribers.
Constant Contact is best for smart businesses who’re just starting out with email marketing.
Get started with Constant Contact today.
2. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is an email and SMS marketing software designed with simplicity in mind. Even an absolute beginner can easily start creating marketing campaigns without prior knowledge.
Based on customer interaction, you can send transactional messages with reliable delivery.
What sets Sendinblue apart from their competition is that their pricing is based on the number of emails you send.
You can buy SMS credits separately with no expiry date.
Email Plans:
- Free – $0 for 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts.
- Lite – $25/month for 40,000 emails per month and no daily sending limit.
- Essential – $39/month for 60,000 emails per month and the ability to remove Sendinblue logo from emails.
- Premium – $66/month for 120,000 emails per month and marketing automation features.
- Enterprise – Price varies and includes all premium features, dedicated account manager, priority support, and more.
Sendinblue is best for beginner marketers.
Get started with Sendinblue today.
3. Drip
Drip is the perfect solution for you if you’re an eCommerce merchant who wants to convert your visitors into subscribers and customers with intelligent marketing automation. Drip is more than just a typical email marketing service. It lets you have deeper conversations with your customers and send emails at the right time by understanding their purchase intent and behavior.
You can customize your messages based on behaviors like cart abandonment, first-time users, returning website visitors, people who clicked a link on your site, etc.
Their vast array of integrations let you send text messages, display Facebook ads, and much more based on your customer workflow.
Drip offers a 14-day free trial.
Email Plans:
- Basic – The Basic plan costs $49/month for up to 2500 active subscribers.
- Pro – The Pro plan costs $122/month for up to 5000 active subscribers.
- Enterprise – The cost varies for this plan and is for people who have more than 5000 active subscribers.
Drip is best for eCommerce websites and savvy internet marketers.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is the best email marketing tool for bloggers and publishers. It was built specifically for online creators like bloggers, podcasters, and YouTubers.
With ConvertKit, you can create attractive forms and send custom-tailored emails to individual subscribers.
ConvertKit also makes email automation easy to understand for publishers. For example, you can use their visual automation builder to create powerful automated email funnels that help you guide a visitor through a value journey.
ConvertKit allows you to sign up for a free 14-day trial, so you can test the service without any commitments.
Email Plans:
- $29/month – For 0 – 1000 subscribers and all features.
- $49/month – For 1000 – 3000 subscribers and all features.
- $79/month – For 3000 – 5000 subscribers and all features.
ConvertKit is best for publishers.
Get started with ConvertKit today.
5. AWeber
AWeber is one of the most popular lead generation services for small businesses. It comes with all the essential tools you need to grow your email list. You can design email newsletters with the drag and drop builder, automate email sequences, and create mobile-responsive signup forms that look great on any device.
Best of all, you can integrate AWeber with your WordPress website, landing page builder, or optin form builder with ease.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. Just head over to AWeber’s website and sign up for a 30-day free trial. After signing up, you’ll get access to all their premium tools that help you grow your email list.
Support options include live chat, phone, and ticket-based emails.
Email Plans:
- $19/month – 0 – 500 subscribers for unlimited emails and all features.
- $29/month – 501 – 2500 subscribers for unlimited emails and all features.
- $49/month – 2501 – 5000 subscribers for unlimited emails and all features.
- $69/month – 5001 – 10,000 subscribers for unlimited emails and all features.
- $149/month – 10,001 – 25,000 subscribers for unlimited emails and all features.
AWeber is best for all marketers in general, especially those who’re just getting started with email marketing.
Get started with AWeber today.
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is more than just an email marketing service provider. Besides email marketing, it comes with all the important features that let you convert your visitors into subscribers and customers.
Mailchimp’s features are powerful and affordable for marketers of all sizes, whether you’re a blogger, local business, or a company with off-the-charts growth. For example, you can create beautiful landing pages to convert your visitors into subscribers and paying customers.
Connecting Mailchimp to your WordPress website or eCommerce store is a breeze. You can also find hundreds of integrations with apps you already use.
Mailchimp also offers pre-built templates and ready-made segments so that you can create professional emails in an instant.
Email Plans:
Mailchimp pricing depends on the number of subscribers you have.
- Free – $0, includes 7 marketing channels, basic templates, marketing CRM, and 1-click automations.
- Essential – Starting a $9.99/month for all email templates, A/B testing, custom branding, and 24/7 support.
- Standard – Starting at $14.99/month. Includes automation series, retargeting ads, custom templates, and advanced audience insights.
- Premium – Starting at $299/month, this plan includes advanced segmentation, unlimited seats and role-based access, phone support, and multivariate testing.
Mailchimp is best for marketing beginners and other users who want an all-in-one marketing suite at an affordable price.
Get started with Mailchimp today.
7. GetResponse
GetResponse is an email marketing software that allows you to grow your email list with beautiful emails and high-converting signup forms.
With their modern and beautiful user interface, getting your email newsletter campaign up and running is easy.
Aside from email marketing, GetResponse is bundled with many online marketing features that help you grow your business. For example, you can create and host webinars on your site, build beautiful landing pages to turn visitors into customers, and more.
Support is provided by phone, live chat, and email.
GetResponse also publishes a lot of useful marketing resources such as courses, whitepapers, and videos that walk you through different aspects of email marketing.
If you’re looking for an email marketing software that comes with a beautiful and fast user interface, then GetResponse might be the right solution for you.
If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for their 30-day free trial.
Email Plans:
- Basic – The Basic plan costs $15/month and it includes email marketing, autoresponders, unlimited landing pages, automation templates, and more.
- Plus – The Plus plan costs $49/month and includes everything in the Basic plan along with list building funnels, sales funnels, sell e-products, webinars (max 100 attendees), and more.
- Professional – This plan costs $99/month and includes webinars (max 300 attendees), paid webinars, webinar funnels, automation builder, and more.
- Enterprise – The Enterprise plan costs $1199/month and includes advanced features like dedicated IP address, deliverability consulting, transactional emails, webinars (max 500 attendees), and more.
GetResponse is best for beginners and other marketers who also want a webinar marketing solution integrated with email marketing.
Get started with GetResponse today.
8. MailerLite
If you’re looking to build an email list on a tight budget, then you might want to consider MailerLite.
MailerLite lets you grow your email list for free until you reach 1000 subscribers. They provide you with advanced technologies to attract your visitors and convert them into subscribers, such as landing page, popups and easy-to-use form builder. Plus, their drag and drop editor lets you create professional looking emails easily.
Email Plans:
With MailerLite, the more subscribers you have, the more you pay each month.
- Free – For 1 – 1000 subscribers, 12,000 emails per month, and limited features.
- $10/month – For 1 – 1000 subscribers, unlimited emails per month, and all features.
- $15/month – For 1001 – 2500 subscribers, unlimited emails, all features.
- $30/month – For 2501 – 5000 subscribers, unlimited emails, all features.
- $50/month – For 5001 – 10,000 subscribers, unlimited emails per month, all features.
MailerLite is best for users who need a simple solution to grow their email list. If you’re on a tight budget, then we strongly recommend MailerLite.
Get started with MailerLite today.
9. Keap
Keap is a sales, marketing automation and CRM service all-in-one. It’s a simpler version of Infusionsoft, which was also built by Keap.
Keap allows you to easily organize all of your client information into one place and it syncs with your Gmail and Outlook so you can manage your emails from one central place as well.
With Keap you can set up an automatic process for sending texts and emails to new leads with customizable pre-written emails that guide new leads to the next step in the buyer’s journey. You can also create a repeatable sales process that will automatically send emails whenever a lead moves from one stage to the next.
They also have a marketing campaign builder that allows you to automate any sales or marketing process you create.
Other features include proposal, estimate, and quote templates, invoices and payments, reports and insights, and more.
Email Plans:
At the time of writing this article, Keap is offering 50% off their plans for the first 3 months.
- Grow – $39/month (regularly $79/month) starting at 500 contacts for 1 user. Includes CRM, appointments, text messaging, and other features but does not include marketing automation.
- Pro – $74/month (regularly $149/month) starting at 500 contacts for 1 user. This plan includes marketing automation, recurring payments, landing page builder, and more.
- Infusionsoft – $99/month (regularly $199/month) starting at 500 contacts for 1 user. Features include advanced sales pipeline automation, lead scoring and company records, reporting, and more.
Keap is best for people that are looking for client management software that makes it easier to turn leads into clients.
Wrap Up- Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service
If you’re a small business owner who’re just getting started with email marketing, then Constant Contact is the best email marketing service for you. It comes packaged with all the features that you’ll need to grow your email list. Plus, you can make use of their 60-day free trial without any contract or commitment. That way, you can experiment and get to know their tools before you actually have to start paying.
If you have an eCommerce site where you want to personalize emails based on user behavior such as abandoned carts, first time users, return buyers, etc., then we recommend that you use Drip. They have an easy to use drip campaign funnel builder that allows you to trigger action-driven campaigns.
If you are a professional blogger who wants to send automated emails that feel personal while increasing your engagement, then you should check out ConvertKit. It’s an email marketing service built specifically for bloggers and publishers.
We hope this article helped you compare some of the best email marketing services and find the right one for your needs.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also want to read 7 best WordPress lead generation plugins compared.
Thank you for this informative review. ORINAX is another good email marketing software one should definitely give a try.
Mispelled “brnading” in mailchimp section
Thanks! just fixed it 🙂
I used Aweber, and everything was good, but the design and templates weren’t looking great. When my list grow and I had too change plan, it was way too expensive. Then I changed to MailerLite and I am super happy with their payment plan, all unlimited automation etc. I have a lot of Lead Magnets and Landing Pages to grow my list, and each Lead Magnet has it’s own Newsletter Email Campaign, and I don’t pay huge money for it, with the list of 2000 subscribers I pay 9EURO a month compare to Aweber with the same activities I was paying 49$… big difference!!! Now with new ecommerce store I would like to try SendInBlue, does anybody tried it ?
OutreachPlus are one of the best for personalized cold outreach emails. Hope people will also recognize it.
powermtaservers provides bulk mailing platform at very lowest rates. Send with confidence transactional or promotional emails and newsletters. If you are small business owner so you do not need to worry about it’s SMTP, VPS and dedicated plans are suitable for all.
I am a complete beginner (ex-lawyer now setting up my own business teaching Reiki). I have been using Mailchimp to send out a quarterly Newsletter and an automated email for 21 days after each course to the students that were on that course (maybe 6 students per mailing and 4 courses per month).
I was doing this for free, but they now want to charge me. I don’t mind paying but because I need automation and have about 510 subscribersthey want $150 per month which is way too much for me.
Can you recommend an alternative?
Thanks
I use Mail Plus Pro they are cheap and aren’t as strict as the other big ones, there support are really good, I was with mailchimp but their prices were just to high for me.
GETRESPONSE from POLAND is HORRIBLE! Made us upgrade to $150/month then they suspended our account (same contacts/emails as we used in mailchimp so we know they are good) NO REFUND POLICY so we couldn’t use service but they KEPT OUR $150.
TERRIBLE TERRIBLE.
Thanks for the information. Very helpful. If you wanna change the provider, are there any problems taking your data with you? By data, I mean email addresses, and all master data relating to that email, such as name, classifications, etc. Thanks again for the post.
For B2B cold email prospecting, Hotsol hands down. Outside of that, Mailchimp all the way.
any can try instantbulksmtp one of the best email marketing service provider.
Eloqua and Marketo are best B2B email marketing tools.But Activecampaign is also a good and easy to learn
Do you know anything about 1Point Mail?
Good info..I use Aweber but recently started using Sendlane love both but might go all in with sendlane as they’re growing fast and so the integration with other app but zapier usually fix up the misisnf link.
You missed ActiveTrail – Beats these hands down. Used by Sears, Avis, Crocs, Visa and Wix.
This is in response to Bill (4/9) regarding subscribers who haven’t opened their email.
I just read a Press Release (Sept. 2018) from Constant Contact that explains their Resend to Non Openers feature. “Users can automate the delivery of a second email to recipients who didn’t open the initial message. Not only does the feature allow users to measure their engagement rates, but it also automatically updates the subject line for the resend email, differentiating it from their original email.”
I don’t know if this feature would solve your problem, I literally just read this while doing some research today. I hope the info is helpful. I am not a customer or an employee of CC.
Thanks for the info, Lisa. Much appreciated!
After reading the article, it sounds like they all do the same things, but they each do it a little difference between vendors. If I try to figure out what you think I should use, I guess its Constant Contact.
But is it really and different than MailChimp?
Interesting read. It would however be more convincing if the comments/recommendations where not connected to affiliate links.Nice to be able to find an actual ‘independent’ review
the purpose wasn’t giving a review of their own experience. More so giving a comparison of their features.
I know it’s also impossible to know about the customer service on all the options listed above but I’ve been disappointed in ActiveCampaigns customer service. I have sent a couple emails and waited an hour on separate occasions to have someone on their chat get to my problem…only to have to “escalate it” and never hear anything back.
If it was a small problem I wouldn’t care as much but this is about only half my list getting the emails.
My company specializes in news and research for a niche audience. We send daily emails to paid subscribers, but have found that our marketing email platform does a poor job differentiating between marketing prospects and people who have paid to subscribe to our news.
Our current emails lists are comprised 100% of paid subscribers, or people who have signed up for a 2-week trial. However, our email platform is suppressing emails to recipients it considers “unengaged” – that is, they haven’t opened an email for a while. That is fine for marketing emails, but this is a problem for our subscribers.
In your experience, do any of these platforms have a good track record of working with email lists comprised of people who have paid to receive the emails? Ideally, we’d like to have one platform handle both types of emails, but we must have someone who understands paid subscription servicing. We may need to leave our current provider if they cannot understand this issue.
All email services mentioned here can help you differentiate between paid subscribers and trial users thanks to segmentation. Each of them does in a different way though.
You might want to talk to your existing email marketing provider on whether they let you classify different subscribers in your list. If you’re not satisfied with them, you can migrate your list to one of the services listed here.
Thank you for your feedback!
I recommend you Braze then
Thank you! I will look into them.
Hi!
I cannot find the “Drip for free up to 100 subscribers” option. Can you please recheck.
Asad,
Seems like they retired the plan. We just updated the post. Thanks for letting us know about it.
I have tried Benchmark Email and MailChimp and both of them are really good.
Thanks for a great review. But I would add one more tool I’ve started to use since last year, Stripo.email.
Thanks for the great post.
Could you please add Mail250 here too?
Don’t do it. No support, no service, no clear instructions. Mail250 also gets a lot of flame reviews for the mailings landing in spam folders. Don’t waste your time.
I normally don’t comment, but I just want to say thanks for making it easier for me to decide on which service/s to try out. This is precisely the information I’ve been looking for.
Glad to be of help, Kate!