The Best Pieces of Email Marketing Software for Growing Online Businesses
Email marketing is, once again, becoming a key part of helping online businesses grow and reach new audiences.
While it may have taken a back seat to social media marketing and search engine rankings in recent times, it’s now becoming more important than ever.
Search engines and social media have been gradually making it harder to organically drive traffic to your website or online store. Instead, there’s been much more of a push on paid services resulting in costly marketing campaigns for businesses.
With email marketing, you are in control of your mailing list. You can reach out to your customer base whenever you want to and as frequently as you want to.
To make the most effective use of email marketing, it’s a good idea to use email marketing software that can make communicating with your customers as easy as possible.
With so many to choose from though, it can be challenging to know which one is right for you and your business.
In this article, we look at some of the best pieces of email marketing software that can help you grow your online business.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software that is currently used by more than 145,000 businesses from all over the world.
It has hundreds of templates that you can use to contact your customers in a range of ways. Whether you are reaching out to share a regular newsletter, acknowledge an abandoned cart, welcome a new customer to your business, or for any other reason, you should be able to find a template suitable for your needs.
A great feature of ActiveCampaign is its ability to integrate with over 800 third-party tools. This gives you scope for even more automation, as you’ll be able to connect your social media, your e-commerce platform, and other useful systems to your email marketing campaigns.
When looking for the best email marketing software, it’s a good idea to think about how useful it could be to your business as a whole, and not just about its intended purpose. ActiveCampaign has a built-in CRM system (Customer Relationship Management). This means that it can be used to manage your leads, sales, and customer database as well as email marketing campaigns.
It also gives you the option to use SMS marketing too, which is another effective way of giving yourself the best chance to be seen by your customers and prospects.
Despite being a comprehensive piece of software that is easy to use and very well thought out, you’d be surprised at how little it can cost.
Firstly, a 14-day free trial is available giving you the opportunity to make sure ActiveCampaign fits nicely into your business. After that, you can get ActiveCampaign for as little as $9 per month.
There are other levels of subscription available that unlock various additional features so you can find the one that best suits your business needs.
Drip
Drip is an email marketing software that is very well suited to small or medium-sized e-commerce businesses.
More than 30,000 businesses use Drip to keep in contact with their customers.
It can integrate with pretty much any e-commerce system. While this is obviously a very positive feature, it actually goes beyond a basic integration. Drip is able to integrate extremely effectively making it a great piece of software if you want to see multiple data points in one place.
Drip has revenue analytics built into its system, so it can show you how your business is performing and help you create marketing campaigns that can generate more sales. It can even offer recommendations about your next campaign based on the information in its reports.
You can reach out to your customers via email, social media, and SMS with Drip.
In terms of pricing, Drip is a relatively cheap piece of email marketing software. After a 14-day free trial, subscriptions start at a cost of $19 per month.
It’s worth bearing in mind that as your mailing list grows, the cost of Drip will increase. That means it might be a good choice while you’re running a growing business, but the price might get too high as you get more and more customers.
Omnisend
Omnisend has been designed for e-commerce businesses so it has features that help grow your online business very effectively.
It has more than 50,000 users and it’s not difficult to see why.
Firstly, you don’t need to have any coding knowledge to be able to create advanced email campaigns with Omnisend. It can automate a lot of customer contact for you, as well as allowing you to design and make your own interactions.
Automated emails with Omnisend include welcome emails, customer feedback, cart abandonment, and more.
Another impressive feature is the level of assistance the software gives you when it comes to reaching out to your customers.
Email subjects and complete message content are both created and pre-set in the software so you can very quickly begin email marketing campaigns.
As well as allowing you to contact customers via email and SMS, Omnisend also integrates with Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and even Whatsapp. This is something that could be extremely useful to your business as a huge number of people use these apps every day.
It’s easy to ignore or quickly delete an email but if you’re receiving a Whatsapp message from a business – that could be a very effective way of raising brand awareness. Omnisend actually says that contacting customers through social media and Whatsapp has a click-through rate that’s ten times higher than email marketing alone.
Omnisend being designed for e-commerce businesses gives it some additional features that other email marketing software probably won’t have. One example is the very clever email templates you can use. Templates such as virtual scratch cards, birthday discounts, and other creative content show that the developers understand what works in the world of e-commerce.
The tracking of your email campaigns is another useful feature. It shows you how many emails have been opened, how many customers unsubscribed, and also how your campaign results compare to other similar businesses in your industry.
Like lots of other email marketing software, you can try Omnisend free for 14 days. After your free trial ends, you have multiple options of how to continue.
If you are a small business with less than 250 contacts and want to send less than 500 emails a month, you can actually continue using Omnisend for free. The price then rises depending on how many contacts you have and how many emails you want to send. You could end up paying anywhere between $16 per month (500 contacts and 6000 emails) all the way up to over $300 per month (50,000 contacts and 600,000 emails).
MailerLite
If you have a strict budget to stick to but still want a good quality piece of email marketing software, MailerLite might be ideal for your business.
It might not be able to offer you some of the more advanced features other software can, but it can certainly help you create impactful and creative emails to send to your customers.
MailerLite is all about helping you generate interaction with your audience. It does this through its automated email templates and its drag-and-drop email editor if you want to put your own personal touch on things.
You can quickly and easily have your emails made and ready to go. Once sent, MailerLite tracks their success and shows you how each email sent impacted sales.
You can integrate MailerLite with your e-commerce system. It can then create pop-ups and landing pages to help build your mailing list or even to show off a featured product you are trying to push.
Probably the best thing about MailerLite is you can use it long-term for free. If you have less than 1000 contacts and want to send less than 12,000 emails per month – you don’t need to pay for a subscription.
The cost only increases if you want unlimited emails or your contact list grows beyond 1000. Once you reach that threshold, pricing ranges from $10 per month to $100 per month.
Even paying full price for MailerLite, it’s still substantially cheaper than many other pieces of email marketing software.
Mailchimp
Perhaps the most well-known email marketing software, Mailchimp has been used by millions of businesses all over the world.
It’s very easy to use and you can very quickly have an email marketing campaign ready to go. The drag-and-drop creator allows you to put your own style and branding across your campaigns as well as use the built-in templates.
Mailchimp may have started out as a basic email marketing software, but it has evolved into much more than that. It’s now a comprehensive marketing dashboard where you can see the details and results of all campaigns and keep track of them all in one place.
It also now offers options to design and create websites that can be hosted through Mailchimp too.
Like with a lot of email marketing software, Mailchimp provides SMS marketing as well as integration with social media and e-commerce platforms too.
One of the best things about Mailchimp is its free plan. If you have less than 2000 contacts and send less than 10,000 emails a month – you don’t have to pay to use Mailchimp.
For premium level subscriptions, prices start at $299 per month for up to 10,000 contacts. The price increases as your contact list grows up to the top level of more than 200,000 contacts which costs $1300 per month.
Email limits are set at 15 x the number of contacts you have, but you can also request a custom plan if you need more than this.
HubSpot
HubSpot covers all bases when it comes to marketing, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), forms, landing pages, and pretty much anything else you can think of relating to marketing and sales.
With HubSpot, it’s easy to attribute sales to specific contact with your customers. This is a great feature as it allows you to see exactly what works and what doesn’t. With this knowledge, you have the ability to design your campaigns to have the highest possible chance of success.
HubSpot is particularly useful if you have a WordPress-based website. There is a plugin that can be installed on your site that allows you to send emails, use forms, and live chats to capture leads all through your WordPress interface.
The biggest issue with HubSpot is its price.
While the starting point of $45 may not seem too high considering the features you get, if you want to add an extra feature, or your contact list grows, the price very quickly goes up.
The top-level of HubSpot is priced at well over $1000 per month. To get its full features, HubSpot may well be too pricey for small businesses, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful to them.
Even at the lowest level of subscription, you still get enough useful features to justify the price. It would only really be an issue if you wanted all of the features the software offers as this would make things much more expensive.
Towards the higher end of the subscription options, it would only be larger businesses that would likely need that level of service. By the time a business gets to that point, they can probably afford to put more investment in email marketing software like this.
One of the best ways to describe HubSpot is that it does everything to do with sales and marketing very well. It does come at a hefty price though. If you don’t mind missing out on a few additional functions (like being able to directly track what influenced each sale), there are cheaper alternatives out there than HubSpot.
Autopilot
Autopilot is very well designed to allow your business to send the most effective message to your customers at exactly the right time.
It goes far beyond sending out regular newsletters to your contacts and instead, automates interaction in the form of welcome emails, abandoned carts, and other useful emails to your customers.
Creating automated emails can be a tricky and somewhat confusing process. The developers of Autopilot understand this as well as understanding that it’s not necessarily a single person creating the automated marketing content.
That’s why they have included the ability for you to add emojis, annotations, and comments at various points throughout the creating process. This lets all team members communicate with others to ensure consistency in email marketing.
When it comes to reporting, Autopilot provides basic reports on click-through rate, conversions, and similar.
Where it stands out though is in the way you can set a specific goal for each automated marketing campaign you create. You can then generate a report showing how your campaign performed in relation to the goal you set for it.
This gives you a useful insight into whether your campaign was successful or not. If it wasn’t, you can clearly see what could be changed for your next campaign. If a certain campaign was successful, you can then replicate this in different forms to help continue to grow your business.
Pricing could be an issue though. The most budget-friendly option is $49 per month for businesses with up to 2000 contacts.
While $49 doesn’t immediately sound like a big investment, the fact that Autopilot is missing a few features, like a built-in CRM, could make you question whether it’s your best option for the price.
Despite the lack of a built-in CRM, it’s incredibly good at helping you create effective and professional email marketing. It also does a very good job of helping teams collaborate on the creation of the campaigns.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo has been created for e-commerce use.
If you’re running an e-commerce business, then incorporating software specifically designed for your industry can make a huge difference.
Software like this has features that fit perfectly into your business and can create email marketing campaigns that directly drive customers and sales into your business.
It has over 50,000 users and can integrate with over 100 different third-party systems.
Like any good email marketing software, Klaviyo has built-in templates that can be used to create a range of campaigns.
A particularly useful feature that Klaviyo has is that it can send personalized recommendations for products that customers might like as well as content that they are most likely to interact with. This is all based on records of previous interactions that the software tracks.
As Klaviyo has been designed for e-commerce businesses, you’re also able to use it for paid social campaigns.
This can be game-changing for your social media marketing, as having software that can build relevant audiences for your ads gives them a higher chance of being successful.
When it comes to cost, Klaviyo is a strong contender too. It’s completely free to use for businesses with less than 250 contacts. Once you pass that cap, a $20 per month subscription is required.
With no contracts or minimum commitment needed, you can cancel your subscription at any time – although you probably won’t want to once you start seeing its results.
Benchmark
This is a less well-known piece of email marketing software but it’s been proving itself as being more than capable of competing with the bigger names in the industry.
Benchmark is probably one of the best pieces of software for creating visually pleasing emails, but also emails that offer a rewarding user experience.
While these two things alone don’t necessarily result in sales, they do go a long way in portraying your business as somewhere potential customers might want to check out.
It’s particularly useful for smaller businesses who don’t have huge sums of money to spend on email marketing, but still want to be able to send good-looking and effective content to customers.
It can massively speed up the process of creating automated systems which leaves you more time to focus on other aspects of your business.
Benchmark is free to use up to 500 contacts and 250 emails per month. The price then increases depending on the number of contacts and emails needed to be sent. Small businesses will likely pay between $10 and $20, and much larger businesses could end up paying between $800 and $1000.
What To Look For In Email Marketing Software
When shopping around for email marketing software, you will probably notice that most have very similar features.
It then comes down to the additional features some have and your personal preference as to which one you ultimately choose.
As a minimum, you’ll want your email marketing software to have pre-made templates for emails and automated systems.
You’ll also want the software to track customers’ interactions with each contact and automate new content based on this. Having to manually monitor how effective each one of your campaigns is will take up more time than most business owners can spare. Software that has this ability built-in makes monitoring success much easier.
Even things such as how successful your emails are at actually making it to your customer’s inbox will make a difference.
If your marketing software creates amazing emails and can send them to hundreds of thousands of people every day – this is only useful if all the emails actually get there.
Emails going into spam folders or failing to deliver will have a big impact on your email campaigns, so this is an important thing to monitor.
The limits placed on the numbers of contacts and emails is also something to think about. If you have a marketing plan based on sending thousands of emails and texts each month, the software you use will have to be able to meet those requirements.
While a lot of software will be able to comfortably do this, price is the final factor to consider. With the majority of email marketing software, the more contacts your business has, and the more emails you want to send, the higher the cost will be.
For small businesses, the cost will likely be the biggest factor in which software you eventually go with. Email marketing can generate a large number of sales (if done correctly) so investing in good software is a worthwhile thing to do. However, if the money isn’t there, some of the more advanced software might be too expensive for now.
In simple terms, you want email marketing software to be easy to use, intuitive, able to integrate with other systems, and be at a suitable price.
Any other features will be an added bonus for you.
