5+ Best Email Marketing Services, Software & Platforms (2023)

Choosing the best email marketing services is important for your business if you want to engage with, and build a loyal customer base. From personalising the emails, to tracking open and click-through rates, you can meet your business goals by signing up with the best email marketing platforms.

Here’s my round-up of 5+ best email marketing services for your emailing pleasure, so that you can pick the best one for your business.

Let’s get to it.

Email Marketing Services – My Top 5

Why Should You Do Email Marketing? The answer is simple. Among all marketing channels surveyed, email marketing gives you the highest return on investment (ROI) – $42 for every $1 spent, according to Oberlo.

And if that’s not convincing enough, there are over 4 billion email users worldwide. They’re all your potential customers.

But, how do you choose the right email marketing software for your business?

Every email marketing services, software and platform have their unique features and prices. And your business has its unique emailing needs. So, one size doesn’t fit all in this case.

Email marketing platforms are great in their own way – but not all of them is right for you.

Whether what you need is email personalization or shopping cart recovery or welcome email automation, there’s a tool here for you.

This email marketing services and software guide will help you to;

  • Pick the best email marketing platform, according to your unique needs.
  • Save money by choosing only the features you need.

Disclosure: This article contain some affiliate links. To keep this website online, we get a commission when you buy a product via our affiliate link, but this does not add any extra cost to you. Please read our full affiliate disclosure here.


What Makes Great Email Marketing Services?

The email newsletters you receive from companies everyday are all powered by email marketing software.

They’re great for sharing new product features, blog posts or just to engage with your audience in their own personal space.

Because there’s a plethora of email marketing tools to choose from, and all you want is just to get the word out about your business, any email marketing platform you choose should offer you the following features;

  • It should be affordable
  • You should be able to see and monitor your campaign performance using reports
  • Lots of email templates to design great-looking emails
  • It should be easy to use – even for a beginner

Most of the email marketing services mentioned here have these features and even more advanced features like A/B testing, drip marketing campaigns, etc.


What Are the Best Email Marketing Services?

The best email marketing software or platform is the one that has a very high deliverability.

It doesn’t matter what message you’re sending or how well designed your email looks. The most important thing is that your email hits your targets’ inbox.

Because email marketing is about sending the right message to the right audience, the best email marketing service should have segmentation features, thus allowing you to personalise your messages and tell each person what they need to hear.

The best email marketing service should also have good integration with other marketing software like CRMs.

Below is my list of the best email marketing services, platforms, and software to try out now;


Best Overall Email Marketing Tool for CRM ($9/month)

ActiveCampaign homepage

What I Think About ActiveCampaign

If you’re serious about email marketing and you want a platform that is as serious as you are, then ActiveCampaign is for you.

They have probably the most sophisticated tool in the market. From top-notch automation to brilliant lead-scoring systems, ActiveCampaign is the tool you need to launch automated and drip campaigns for your business.

  • Best For: Automated Email Campaigns
  • Price: $9/month – $149/month
  • Discount: Yes. Between 20% – 40%
  • Promotion: Get 14-day Free Trial
  • Rating: 9.2/10

What More You Should Know About ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a cloud software platform for email marketing and customer relationship management. The company is based in Chicago, Illinois.

Machine Learning play a key role in ActiveCampaign’s ability to move your customers down the sales funnel, based on a predetermined action point.

With 890+ integrations, ActiveCampaign connects you to the tools that help drive your business. ActiveCampaign integrates seamlessly with tools like Facebook, Zapier, WooCommerce, Unbounce, Salesforce, ClickFunnels, WordPress, Shopify, Google Analytics and more.

Apart from integrating with the tools you already use, automating your workflow is easy with ActiveCampaign and they give your business advanced segmentation and dynamic automations that save you valuable time.

You also get to take action based on what really matters to your business by understanding every touchpoint with your customers in the moment. Deliver more 1:1 communications, bring in more data through forms, and build completely customized reports.

ActiveCampaign Customer touchpoints

ActiveCampaign also have mobile apps that enable you to review your email reports, track customer activity, and manage your CRM data on the go.

Email deliverability is ActiveCampaign’s strong selling point. With deliverability score around 90% as at the time of writing, they trump every other platform on this list. Meaning, they have a higher chance of reaching your customers’ primary inboxes.

Predictive sending from ActiveCampaign uses machine learning to email your customers at the perfect time, when they’re more likely to click or open them.

Key Features of ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign Key Features
  • 14-day free trial to test out their features helps you determine if they’re a good fit.
  • Free Expert Migration Service helps you to; Import your lists, contacts, custom fields, and tags, Re-create opt-in forms, Recreate your automation workflows and email templates.
  • Gmail and Outlook extensions make it easy to see your CRM info from your inbox, create and update deals on the go, stay connected to your leads, save time, and keep your team aligned.
  • A library of recipes and automations to do just about anything.
  • Integrate Facebook to reach the right type of customer through razor-sharp targeting as part of a complete omnichannel strategy that automates the customer experience.
  • Event tracking lets you see what people are doing in your app, membership site, website, or online portal.
  • Automation Map shows you at a glance, how automations connect to each other. So it’s easy to edit your marketing and find new opportunities for business growth.

ActiveCampaign User Experience

ActiveCampaign User Dashboard

The ActiveCampaign email marketing service has an easy-to-use and intuitive dashboard.

The intuitive interface has options to the left of your screen, and makes it easy to access.

The visual elements of the dashboard shows at a glance, the progress you’re making, and it’s easy to focus on what’s pushing the needle.

You can send an email, notification, site message and create workflows from the dashboard in a breeze.

ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign has four pricing plans, and all prices are based on your list size. They are;

  • Lite: $9/month
  • Plus: $49/month
  • Professional: $149/month
  • Enterprise: Custom price

All ActiveCampaign’s plans come with a 14-day free trial.

ActiveCampaign Likes And Dislikes

Likes:

  • Extremely robust automations. The automation builder diagram is addictive.
  • Beginner-friendly and intuitive interface.
  • Lots of live videos, webinars and resources to explain complicated stuff.
  • Free expert migration service to get you up and run in no time.
  • Super attentive and helpful support team.

Dislike:

  • Because of the so many features of this platform, the learning curve can be steep when you’re just starting.
  • The reporting can be a bit limited sometimes.

ActiveCampaign Product Updates

  • ActiveCampaign recently integrated with HelloSign. An easier and faster way to sign documents online.
  • New and improved email designer allows you to automate segmentation and workflows with link actions.

ActiveCampaign is your best all-in-one email marketing, workflow automation and CRM tool.

Get ActiveCampaign 14-day free trial.


Best Email Marketing Platform For Small Business ($9.99/month)

Constant Contact Homepage

What I Think About Constant Contact

I recommend Constant Contact as the best all-in-one email marketing solution for small businesses. Constant Contact provides all the digital tools a small business needs to thrive online, including email marketing, automations, social media and list building.

  • Best For: Small Businesses
  • Price: $9.99/month- $45/month
  • Discount: No
  • Promotion: 30-Day Free Trial
  • Rating: 8.6/10

Constant Contact was founded as Roving Software in 1995 and is headquartered in Massachusetts, USA. They took the name Constant Contact in 2004. ClearLake Investments acquired Constant Contact in 2021.

Constant Constant has from inception, has a focus on small businesses. They deliver everything you need to build deeper relationships with your most important audiences.

From email marketing, to SMS, to social media marketing, and marketing automations, Constant Contact gives small businesses the power they need to grow.

Their email builder has 100s of pre-designed templates to choose from, and their drag-and-drop feature means you can create emails that stand out on any device.

Constant Contact has A/B testing feature to make sure you find out what works best before sending your emails, thereby guaranteeing great open rates. Reporting and analytics is one of their top features.

Key Features of Constant Contact

Constant Contact Key Features
  • Pre-designed Templates: Constant Contact has more email templates than you need and you can choose from their library of 100s of design templates.
  • Integrations: With over 300 apps in their integration library, Constant Contact makes it easy to connect with the tools you already use for your business.
  • List Building: Constant Contact gives you the tools to build your contact list faster, with lead generation landing pages and lots more.
  • Marketing Automation: With marketing automation from Constant Contact, you can increase engagement, nurture leads and expand your audience, all on auto-pilot.
  • A/B Testing: This feature from Constant Contact helps increase your email open rates by allowing you to test out different versions of your email to find out which one sticks better with your audience.
  • Event Marketing: Whether you’re hosting a local meet-up, webinar, class or seminar, their event marketing feature hands you the tools you need to plan every detail of your next event, from registrations, to ticket sales, promotions to reporting and more.
  • Social Media Marketing: Connect your social media platforms, design ads in a few clicks, schedule posts, read and respond to conversations in real time, all from one dashboard.

Constant Contact User Experience

Constant Contact User Dashboard

Constant Contact user dashboard is very visual and easy to navigate. Much of the options you’ll be working with are placed to the left of your screen.

With their drag-and -drop feature, you can easily create or customize email templates according to your taste.

You can also easily add apps that you use often to the ‘Action Blocks’, and create automations in a breeze.

Landing pages, email forms and one-page websites for event registration is also easy from the dashboard.

Overall, the user experience on the Constant Contact platform is great.

Constant Contact Pricing

Constant Contact pricing is tiered based on your list size. And they have two plans;

Core Plan: Pricing starts at $9.99/month for up to 500 contacts and grows to $300/month for up to 50,000 contacts on the Core plan. You get access to;

  • Hundreds of email templates
  • Sign-up forms to grow your list
  • Post to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
  • Integrations with popular tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, Canva and Etsy,
  • Award-winning live chat and phone support.

List sizes over 50,000 contacts are automatically upgraded to their Plus plan.

Plus Plan: The plus plans starts at $45/month for up to 500 contacts and grows to $410/month for up to 50,000 contacts. This plan guarantees you everything in the Core plan, plus;

  • List-growth tools including Google ads and text-to-join
  • Automated emails for many scenarios
  • In-depth reporting including conversion and sales
  • Customer list segmentation
  • Personalized consultation to maximize your capabilities

List sizes above 50,000 contacts on the Plus plan require a custom quote from the sales team.

Constant Contact Likes And Dislikes

Likes:

  • Very beginner-friendly, and easy to use platform.
  • Lots of professionally designed email newsletter templates for those for lack design skills.
  • Several useful capabilities, like the ability to create registration forms, build web pages, and even manage online polls.
  • Responsive design and ability to create multiple, clean, attractive templates with varying brand elements.

Dislikes:

  • Customer service can be slow or lacking sometimes. This can be improved upon.
  • Mobile app can get better, as it crashes sometimes.

Constant Contact Product Updates

  • Constant Contact has added booking tool that makes it easy for clients to book appointments with you.
  • Email Assistant: It might be a change to your subject line or something else,  this tool will look over your email for errors and suggest ways to improve your email.

Overall, if you’re looking for email marketing software that packs top-notch features for your small business, you should give Constant Contact a serious look. They have excellent email deliverability and their list building tools makes sure you keep acquiring potential customers.

Get started with Constant Contact’s no-risk, no credit card 30-day free trial.


Best Email Marketing Tool For Large Businesses ($59/month)

Campaigner homepage

What I Think About Campaigner

If you’re looking for an email marketing platform that allows you to scale your email marketing effort at the right price for your large business, go with Campaigner. With powerful marketing automation features, advanced personalization, and intuitive reporting, Campaigner ensures you increase your revenue by reaching the right audience at the right time.

  • Best for: Larger Businesses
  • Price: $59/month – $649/month
  • Discount: No
  • Promotion: Get 30-Day Free Trial
  • Rating: 9.1/10

Campaigner helps you turn email into revenue with advanced email automation.

But Campaigner gives you much more than that. You get the ability to create an entire customer journey, drive sales and revenue using advanced marketing automation, intuitive reporting and powerful personalization.

Campaigner helps you drive meaningful connections with your contacts by sending highly personalized messages with dynamic content, purchase behaviour, geolocation and much more.

With best-in-class reporting and data analytics, you can track which customer or audience segment is converting the best, and make business decisions that improve your ROI.

Key Features of Campaigner

Campaigner Key Features
  • Workflows: Allows you to send highly personalised messages to your contacts, with event and trigger-based automation.
  • Autoresponders: Turn one-time visitors into brand advocates by automatically sending them series of targeted email messages as a response to customer actions like newsletter sign-ups, preference updates, etc.
  • Recurring Campaigns: Create and schedule recurring campaigns, triggered by specific customer actions like clicking a link, opening your email, etc.
  • SMS Marketing: Use SMS, either as part of your overall email marketing strategy or a standalone campaign to reach more of your customers.
  • Send Time Testing: Test different send times for your email campaigns to know the best open and click times and improve open and click rate.
  • Personalization: Use personalization features like segmentation to send targeted email campaigns based on customer activity, past purchase, campaaign engagement, and more.

Campaigner User Experience

Campaigner User Dashboard - the best email marketing services

The Campaigner software has a very user-friendly and easy-to-use dashboard. With options at the top of the user screen, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Again, Campaigner packs a very powerful visual element, and your information and reports are displayed in easily-digestible tables.

Furthermore, the email builder is easy to use and is one of the best email marketing services, with a wide array of customization options, so that you can create powerful and professional emails that reflect your brand.

You can create emails using Campaigner’s suite of professionally designed templates or you can code yours in HTML from scratch.

Campaigner Pricing

Campaigner pricing - the best email marketing services

There are four pricing plans available on Campaigner;

  • Starter: $59/month (Up to 5,000 contacts, experiments, autoresponders and more)
  • Essential: $179/month (Up to 25,000 contacts, experiments, dynamic content and more)
  • Advanced: $649/month (Up to 100,000 contacts, purchase behaviour, automation workflows and more)
  • eCommerce: $79.95/month (Includes unlimited contacts, Shopify and Magento integrations and other ecommerce features)

Campaigner Likes And Dislikes

Likes:

  • High email deliverability compared to the industry standard
  • I like that you can easily schedule the sending of emails to subscribers at a time of your choosing
  • The learning curve is minimal even if you’re a tech novice.
  • Excellent workflow feature
  • Create beautiful, visually appealing newsletters seamlessly with lots of customizable templates

Dislikes:

  • User interface could use a little face-lift to reflect current industry trends.

Campaigner Product Update

  • For better customer security, Campaigner recently launched two-factor authentication (2FA) to enable customers login securely and manage their accounts.

Get started with Campaigner’s risk-free 30-Day trial.


Best Budget Email Marketing Automation Software ($25/month)

Sendinblue homepage - the best email marketing services

What I think About Sendinblue

If you’re on a budget, and interested in building your contacts and email list, Sendinblue starts you off with a free account that allows you to communicate with your audience over email, SMS or chat without the extra charges. Early start-ups without extra cash to spend on marketing are better off using a free tool like Sendinblue.

  • Best for: Email Automation On A Budget
  • Price: $0/month – $65/month
  • Discount: No
  • Promotion: Get a free account
  • Rating: 8.1/10

Who Is Sendinblue Best For?

Sendinblue is more than ideal to get started for any small business on a budget. They allow you to build unlimited contacts, and send up to 300 email newsletters a day.

When things start improving for your business, you can upgrade to their Lite plan for $25/month and get up to 20,000 email sends, with no daily send limit.

Sendinblue is an easy-to-use platform, and with it you can create elegant-looking templates, and automated welcome email series.

Their free plan also offers sales CRM, advanced segmentation, page tracking, workflow automation and email support – all advanced tools included in premium email marketing tools.

Sendinblue uses send-time optimization and machine learning to send your emails at the best time of day, to guarantee higher open rates.

You can also use real-time reporting to track the results of your campaigns in real time.

Their email automation workflow is their most useful feature. It allows you to set triggers and move your contacts down the sales funnel, segmenting them, and pushing them into separate lists while doing so.

Sendinblue key features

Sendinblue key features - the best email marketing services
  • Segmentation gets better clicks and open rate by sending your marketing messages to a more targeted audience.
  • Setup, design and deliver transactional messages in a breeze.
  • SMS marketing helps you deliver time-sensitive offers to customers directly.
  • Chat feature makes sure you’re there with your customers when they’re browsing your website, in the likely case they have questions.
  • Landing pages lets you create a dedicated and more targeted message for each of your campaigns.
  • Facebook Ads means you can retarget contacts or reach new audiences without leaving your dashboard.

User Experience

Sendinblue user dashboard - the best email marketing services

Sendinblue makes creating your marketing campaign easy. They provide a guide at every step to help you accomplish your goal in no time. Furthermore, the user-friendly and intuitive interface means it is easy to track the progress of your campaigns.

Sendinblue’s machine learning, knows your contact’s best engagement time, so can help you decide when the best time is, to send your emails.

The user-friendliness also helps users to manage multiple campaigns simultaneously.

Above all, Sendinblue offers great customer care service and the team is extraordinarily supportive to solve all your queries.

Plans And Pricing

Sendinblue pricing - the best email marketing services

Sendinblue has a free plan and 3 paid plans:

  • Lite: $25/month
  • Premium: $65/month
  • Enterprise: Custom quote

The Lite Plan is perfect for new marketers and can get you started with all the advanced features Sendinblue offers.

Sendinblue Likes And Dislikes

Likes:

  • Affordable and easy to use marketing platform.
  • Great customer support.
  • Lots of ready-made templates to get craft emails in no time.
  • SMS API and easy integration with lots of 3rd party software.

Dislike:

  • The free plan limits your ability to test out all the features of the platform.
  • Livechat support will be a great addition to the service.

Sendinblue Product Update

Sendinblue recently added Conversations app to their arsenal. With Conversations, you can talk with your customers in real time with Live Chat, create automated FAQs on your website using their Chatbot, and connect additional messaging channels including FB Messenger and Instagram.

You can read our full Sendinblue review here to find out more about their platform.


Best Advanced Email Marketing Automation Tool For Large Businesses ($50/month)

HubSpot homepage - the best email marketing services

What I Think About HubSpot

Email alone cannot do all the magic when it comes to marketing. You need a combination of tools for sales, marketing, customer service and even content management. HubSpot is your answer, as it provides all the tools and integrations you need to provide excellent experiences for your customers and help boost your inbound marketing strategy.

  • Best For: Email Automation
  • Price: $45/month – $3600/month
  • Discount: Yes. Save 10% Annually
  • Promotion: Get 14-Day Free Trial
  • Rating: 8.5/10

HubSpot has probably the most advanced all-in-one marketing suite on the market.

The HubSpot Marketing Hub, which is where the email marketing happens, is insanely robust in its feature offerings and capabilities. Yet this monster of a platform manages to be very easy to learn.

The email marketing services on this hub is super easy to use and makes designing, optimizing and sending beautiful emails a breeze.

HubSpot Email Builder

Their email builder has a ton of ready-to-use templates. You can include a lot of assets like images, buttons, dividers, and text.

Their email builder is super-fast, responsive and easy to use. It tops most of the other tools on this list in terms of user-friendliness.

Email Preview

One very useful feature of this platform is the email preview feature. When you’re done designing you’re emails, you can preview it to see what it looks like in different email clients like Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, AOL and Apple Mail.

HubSpot takes email personalization a notch further.

Email Personalization

While with other tools, you can personalize emails based on industry standard merge tags like recipient’s name, with HubSpot you can personalize emails based on not-too-common merge tags like the user’s device, geographic location and list segment.

HubSpot A/B Testing

A/B testing is another useful feature of their email builder. You can A/B test your subject lines, buttons, texts, etc to find out how recipients respond to them, before sending the rest of your emails, to maximize email open and click rates.

When you’re ready to send your email, HubSpot’s Smart Send feature adjusts your send time for greater engagement.

HubSpot Analytics

Then there’s email analytics. After sending your email, HubSpot provides you metrics most email providers don’t. Analytics like the amount of time users spent viewing your email and whether recipients Glanced, Skimmed or Read your email.

These statistics give you an idea of how engaging your email is.

All that said, HubSpot is in my opinion, the most complete marketing software on the market.

HubSpot Key Features

Hubspot key features - the best email marketing services

This marketing software has email marketing plus every thing else that brings your marketing and sales efforts together.

  • Craft professional email campaigns that display perfectly across any device, using HubSpot drag-and-drop builder, without the help of designers or IT.
  • Boost average email open rates by using HubSpot tools for email segmentation, A/B testing and automation.
  • Schedule emails to be sent at the optimal time for your audience regardless of their time zone.
  • Send emails with the most up-to-date customer data, with HubSpot built-in CRM platform.
  • Using analytics, dive deeper into your data to see who’s engaging with each email and when, the most popular content, and more.

HubSpot perfectly combines your inbound and outbound marketing efforts in one seamless platform. That’s why they’re on this list.

HubSpot User Experience

HubSpot email platform - the best email marketing services

HubSpot provides users with a very streamlined experience, with solutions that integrate all your marketing tools in one convenient dashboard. And their platform is easy to navigate.

It’s easy to track your progress and see the performance of your campaigns with the visual interface.

If you need more insight into your marketing performance, you can also create custom reports.

In addition, you can analyze the health of your marketing campaigns with built-in analytics tools.

You will rarely run into problems, but if you do, there are help features right there in your dashboard to the rescue.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot Pricing - the best email marketing services

HubSpot has three pricing plans for their Marketing Hub;

  • Starter – $45/month for up to 1,000 marketing contacts
  • Professional – $800/month for up to 2000 marketing contacts
  • Enterprise – $3,600/month forup to 10,000 marketing contacts

You can quickly get started for free, then upgrade to the Marketing Hub Starter plan for $5/month as you grow.

HubSpot Likes/Dislikes

Likes:

  • Hubspot’s Smart Content feature for emails and landing pages makes it easy to show unique information, forms, and images to specific people based on different contact lists.
  • Aggregate and analyse marketing data. With HubSpot, you can link data from multiple sources such as Facebook and Google ads to have one centralised place to track campaign data.
  • Lead Management: You can easily move your leads along the buyer’s journey as their lead management tool makes it easy to nurture and qualify your leads.
  • List Building: Easily grow your email list using HubSpot’s list building tools.

Dislike:

You might have to do a little bit of learning as HubSpot’s array of tools can make it sometimes difficult to find what you’re looking for.

HubSpot Product Update

  • Payments feature: It is now easy to accept payments directly from your website using HubSpot’s payment feature.
  • Integrations: HubSpot has created 50+ data-sync integrations, to easily connect your account with other platforms for better workflow.

You can get started today with HubSpot’s free marketing tools.


What is Email Marketing?

The simplest way to define it is this:

Email marketing is a type of direct/digital marketing that uses emails to promote a company’s products or services, while developing customer relationships.

For most businesses, email marketing play a lot of useful role in their overall marketing strategy, by helping them to:

  • Generate leads
  • Build brand awareness
  • Nurture their leads
  • Keep their audience engaged.

Email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their audience.

Email marketing can also help you drive traffic to your webinar, blog, social media, or any other place you want your customers to visit.

Using email marketing services, you can also target a specific demographic, by segmenting your list, so that you send your email list only what they’re interested in.


How Does Email Marketing Services Work?

Email marketing is simply using online tools to send out emails in bulk to your subscriber list.

The platforms used to achieve this is called email marketing services.

Email marketing services allow you to plan, execute and monitor email marketing campaigns.

These marketing campaigns allow you to acquire new customers, build relationships with them and encourage customer loyalty.

Sending bulk emails involves time-consuming processes, which include;

  • Preparing a list
  • Segregating it into subgroups
  • Sending the actual emails
  • Creating feedback reports

Email marketing software does away with these and automates much of the manual workflows.

The best email marketing services work in the following ways;

1. A/B Testing

You can send different sets of emails to different small test groups to test design, subject, line, email copy, etc. This will allow you to edit and fine-tune your email campaign and send the best-performing copy to the rest of your list. This improves your email open rate.

2. WYSIWYG Editor

Most email marketing platforms have a user-friendly drag-and-drop (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) tool that allows you to see what your email will look like while building it and before launching. Most drag-and-drop editors come with photo-editing features, built-in templates and have responsive formats.

3. Merge Tags

This feature of email marketing software allows you to replace variables in your email content with a personal element, like the recipient’s name or location. This works, because customers warm-up to you, and in general, people respond better to personal salutations than to generic salutations.

4. Analytics And Reports

In this day and age, data is king.

Email marketing services have analytics and reports that help you determine whether your campaign is successful and if you’re meeting your campaign objectives.  You get to measure key metrics like open rates, CTRs, readers’ length of stay on your email, trending content, and demographics.

5. List Segmentation

This feature of email marketing tools lets you segregate your mailing list into smaller, targeted groups based on your metrics. Customers or subscribers can belong to multiple groups that match their profile. You can segment your list based on geolocation, demographics, autoresponder feedback, purchase history, and other metrics.

6. CRM integration

Most popular email marketing solutions have good integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) tools. This integration makes sure your sales and marketing activities are aligned.  Leads from your CRM tool can be added to the mailing list and included in email marketing campaigns.

7. Bulk mailing

Email marketing platforms are the only tools that allow you to send emails in bulk to over, say 50,000 people at a go. Most email clients like Yahoo, Google, AOL, have restrictions on the number of contacts you can email at once.


How Do You Choose the Best Email Marketing Services?

The better way to choose the best email marketing software will be to start by listing out what features you are actually looking for in an email marketing service.

This list of feature requirements will help you to narrow your focus to those email marketing tools which actually meet your expectation.

Choosing based on price alone, and neglecting what features you need because of a discount can have devastating effects on your marketing efforts.

When you are putting down the list of features that you are expecting to be present in the email marketing platform, you need to definitely include these important features:

1. CRM Integration

Manually updating your email list is not only time-consuming, but ineffective as well. Your email marketing software should integrate well with most good CRM software. A good CRM can help you with email list segmentation and create highly targeted lists based on things like consumer position, interest, location or category, for instance.

2. Excellent deliverability

When choosing an email marketing tool, deliverability is important. The industry average for deliverability is around 80%. Compare different email marketing providers’ benchmarks to ensure that your emails will find its way to your customers’ inbox.

3. Viewing/Reading Options

It is no longer news that most people view emails and perform searches more from their mobile devices than on desktop. Therefore your email marketing software of choice has to cater to your mobile users.

You have to pick a platform that makes your email visible on every viewing device.

4. Analytics and reporting

Your email marketing tool of choice has to give you the ability to check how well your marketing campaign is performing against already established objectives.

You should be able to track important metrics like open rates, clicks, opens, click rates, bounces and more.

5. Customer Support

Before choosing a provider, find out how easy it is to get a hold of them.

Do they have an actual phone line or do they operate through email only? Is there a live chat option?

If they do have a support line, how easy is it to talk to an actual person? These are all things you’ll have to evaluate before you pick a provider.

6. Opt-in forms

Your email tool of choice should have opt-in forms, and provide you with embeddable links or codes to add to your website to capture email leads.

7. Price

Price should be the last of your considerations when looking for the best email marketing service to use. Some email platforms will charge you based on the size of your lists, while some will only charge you on the number of subscribers.

The difference is that some of your subscribers can be in more than one list, and some platforms will charge you for every list where they are found, while other platforms will charge you only for a unique subscriber email.


What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing Services?

Email marketing is still a very effective marketing strategy for many businesses. It can help you build a loyal following, generate sales and is a direct line of communication with your customers.

When a customer signs up for your email, they’re simply saying, “I’m interested in your business, please tell me what more you have on offer.”

In fact, 40 percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters is key to their marketing success.

Additionally, B2B marketers say that new product and feature announcement marketing emails have the highest click-through rates.

Besides, statistics show that 99% of consumers check their emails every day, and have identified emails as their preferred method of receiving information from brands.

Email also fosters strong and long-term customer relationships. This helps to reinforce the positive feelings they have about your organization, and ensures that you’re their first port of call whenever they need the services you offer.

Here are additional benefits you get from using email marketing services:

  • It is a very cost effective marketing strategy – You get back $42 for every $1 spent.
  • It benefits your business by allowing you to optimize your content and messaging for the greatest effect.
  • You can personalise your message. Email marketing campaigns allow you to address your customers by name, speak directly to them, and show the human side of your company and team.
  • You can also generate traffic to your site using email marketing. Adding a call-to-action that redirects your list to your site is an effective way of generating site traffic.
  • Emails can drive conversions. With a well-written and well-designed email content, you can include CTA buttons that drive recipients to a landing page, where they might end up making a purchase.
  • It helps you reach your audience where they are – their inbox.
  • With email marketing software, you can create stunning and good-looking emails, optimised for mobile.
  • Email is a free-flowing platform, unlike other marketing channels like social media and search engines that have algorithms to filter-out content.
  • Email marketing provides endless possibilities to show your credibility, expertise and your brand voice. This allows you to earn customer trust and build your reputation.


What Are Email Marketing Best Practices?

Whether you’re a seasoned email marketing professional or a complete email marketing novice, follow these best practices to keep your audience (customers) engaged, improve click-through rate, and consequently your ROI this year and beyond.

1. Send welcome emails

Welcome emails have been shown to be very effective and have a high open rate of 80%. Sending welcome emails also help to keep your list clean and improve email deliverability.

After receiving your welcome emails, your recipients are assured that their signups worked and that the information they need is on it’s way.

With welcome emails, you also get to connect with your subscribers at the start of their journey with you, offer something valuable that they need, and watch your click-through rates soar to the roof.

2. Use Confirmed opt-in

For this point, the first thing you should remember is that email quality beats quantity.

When you compare email marketing results by industry, industries with double opt-in have way higher deliverability rate than those who don’t.

They outperform the industries where marketers don’t pay the same amount of attention to who joins their email list – and how.

If you need more convincing about why you should use double opt-in, read this article.

3. Segment your audience

While building an email list for your business, sending an email blast to your entire subscriber list might work from time to time, but you stand a better chance of generating sales when you send personalised emails to a specific audience group (segment).

Remember the Pareto rule? 20% of your customers generate 80% of your sales.

Find out who your most engaged customers are, and target them separately with your campaigns. You will get better results.

4. Do not purchase email lists

When people subscribe to your email lists, it’s because they love your content and want to hear more from you. That’s the reason email marketing is super-effective.

Buying an email list, means you’ll be selling to a bunch of disgruntled people who probably don’t even know you. This takes away trust.

And there are penalties for failing this rule.

Under the CAN-SPAM Act, you can be fined up to $16,000 for failing this rule.

With this Act in place, hitting the spam folder will be the least of your worries.

The health of your email campaign is dependent on a great open rate.

Interacting with a purchased list leads to spam complaints, low open rates and you can even be blacklisted.

And with the General Data Protection Guarantee (GDPR) in place, it’s worth repeating – do not buy email lists.

How Do You Avoid Your Emails Being Marked As Spam?

After you have spent time designing and fine-tuning your emails, the last thing you want is for your email to end up in the spam or junk mail folder. The best way to avoid this is to have the recipient add you (your email) to their safe contact list.

Here are some other best practises to make sure your emails don’t land in that dreaded junk folder:

  • Make sure you’re Compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act.
  • Make use of spam checkers.
  • Enable email authentication.
  • Ask your recipients to whitelist you.
  • Avoid phishing phrases and trigger words.

5. Use click-worthy subject lines

Studies show that up to 50% of email recipients decide to open an email based on the subject line.

Subject lines with 50 characters or less result in 12% higher open rates and 75% higher click-through rates than emails with longer subject lines, according to estimates.

Email subject lines should be compelling, concise and create a sense of urgency. And it should have enough information to let recipients know what it’s about.

Your email recipients will generally see only three things before they decide to open or ignore your message:

  • Sender name
  • Subject line
  • Preheader

And given that the subject line is usually much longer than sender name and preheader, it plays a big part in determining the action of your subscribers.

Your email subject line is arguably the most important element of your email campaign. Treat it as one.

6. Make it easy to unsubscribe

As an email marketer, one of your goals is usually to grow your email list. But there comes a time when subscribers no longer want to hear from you.

It could be either because they have found a better alternative to your product, or they moved to a location where it’s no longer feasible for them to use your product.

At this point, it’s best to just let them move on, by making it easy for them to unsubscribe.

If you make unsubscribing difficult, they will either move your emails to a folder they never open, or worst – report your email as spam. Both of which is bad for your business.

There’s no point holding on to a person who doesn’t want to stay. Instead of holding a grudge, provide them an easy way out by making unsubscribing easy.

7. Test your emails before sending

It’ll only take a few minutes, and you’ll avoid silly mistakes.

We’ve seen some emails from email marketing services with broken subject lines, wrong personalization or broken images.

All of these mistakes can be avoided if you take time to test your emails before sending them to your entire list.

Send the email to yourself, and see what it looks like on different browsers and different email clients. Make adjustments where necessary before sending them out.


Frequently Asked Questions About The Best Email Marketing Services

Here are the most popular questions people and businesses are asking about email marketing;


Best Email Marketing Services – The Conclusion

The importance of email marketing for your business cannot be overstated. But what’s even more important is the means through which you drive this marketing. The best email marketing services, despite their sometimes high prices, still give you the best ROI considering how much more money you make from reaching out to one more engaged customer.

Which of these top 5 email marketing platforms are you planning to use next?

Not listed here? Tell me which one in the comments below.

Disclosure: This article contain some affiliate links. To keep this website online, we get a commission when you buy a product via our affiliate link, but this does not add any extra cost to you. Please read our full affiliate disclosure here.


Dienye Diri
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Last Update: July 4, 2023 by Dienye Diri

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