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Updated Mar 06, 2024

Best Email Marketing Software and Services of 2024

Sean Peek, Business Ownership Insider and Senior Analyst
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This guide was reviewed by a Business News Daily editor to ensure it provides comprehensive and accurate information to aid your buying decision.
Best for Beginners
  • Free plan
  • Easy-to-use design features
  • Extensive email template library
Visit Site
Links to MailChimp
  • Free plan
  • Easy-to-use design features
  • Extensive email template library
Best Bundled Marketing Solution
  • All-in-one marketing/CRM solution
  • Free version
  • 15 million standard contacts
Visit Site
Links to HubSpot
  • All-in-one marketing/CRM solution
  • Free version
  • 15 million standard contacts
Best for Campaign Management
  • Easy project management
  • Automation features
  • Free version
Visit Site
Links to monday.com Email Marketing
  • Easy project management
  • Automation features
  • Free version
Best for Ease of Use
  • Low-cost solution
  • User-friendly website design
  • Free version with 175,000 contacts
Visit Site
Links to Benchmark Email Marketing
  • Low-cost solution
  • User-friendly website design
  • Free version with 175,000 contacts
Best for Larger Businesses
Campaigner
Campaigner company logo
  • Powerful marketing automation
  • Customizable customer journeys
  • 30-day free trial
Links to Campaigner
  • Powerful marketing automation
  • Customizable customer journeys
  • 30-day free trial

Table of Contents

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Email marketing software and solutions can help businesses plan, organize, automate and track their internal and customer-facing email campaigns. Email marketing software allows you to streamline and scale this process while measuring customer engagement. When evaluating email marketing solutions, you should consider price, features and your business’s needs to make the best choice for your company. We did the research so you don’t have to and selected the following as our best email marketing software for small businesses.  Whether you want something that’s easy to use and quick to set up or a solution with more advanced features, there’s something in our best picks for your needs.

[Learn more about what to look for in email marketing software by reading our email marketing software buyer’s guide.]

Why You Should Trust Us

At Business News Daily, our team of small business experts regularly evaluates hundreds of products and services that are essential to business operations. To determine the best email marketing software, we scoured the market and narrowed down our list of recommendations after in-depth, hands-on investigations that considered cost, features and ease of use, among other criteria. All evaluations were conducted with accuracy and fairness at top of mind. Learn more about our methodology.

Compare Our Best Picks

BND Ribbon
Our Top Picks for 2024
MailChimp
HubSpot
monday.com Email Marketing
Benchmark Email Marketing
Campaigner
Constant Contact Email Marketing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Freshworks Freshmarketer
ActiveCampaign
iContact
Rating9.4/109.2/108.0/109.2/109.2/109.5/109.0/109.2/108.8/108.8/10
Use case

Beginners

Bundled marketing

Campaign management

Ease of use

Campaign analytics

Small businesses

Enterprise marketing

Marketing integrations

E-commerce

Scalabilty

Starting price

Free

Free

Free

Free

$59 per month

$9.99 per month

$400 per month

$19 per month

$9 per month

Free

Free trial period

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

30 days

60 days

No

21 days

14 days

N/A

Free version available

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

Max number of contacts on standard plan

100,000

15 million

N/A

175,000

5,000

50,000

500,000

5,000

100,000

50,000

Monthly billing option

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Live chat support

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

A/B testing

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Automation features

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Campaign analytics
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Review Link
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Our Reviews

MailChimp: Best Email Marketing Software for Beginners

  • Mailchimp offers a free version that includes essential features.
  • The user interface is easy to navigate.
  • Mailchimp’s free version limits you to one audience group.
Editor's Rating: 9.4/10
Visit Site

Mailchimp is our choice for the best email marketing software for beginners. With Mailchimp, you can send 10,000 monthly emails to up to 2,000 contacts. The free plan provides all of the key features you need to run an effective email marketing campaign. It is easy to use and includes plenty of customizable options, and you can access Mailchimp’s list-building and automation tools. However, the free version allows for only one audience, which means you’ll have to get creative with tags to segment your audience.

We found that Mailchimp makes it easy to scale up if your needs grow beyond the parameters of the free option. It offers multiple paid plans that can fit into nearly any business’s budget. Each paid plan includes multiple user accounts, an extensive knowledgebase, marketing automation, targeted and segmented lists, and analysis and testing features. We like that you can create and publish email campaigns, landing pages, pop-up forms, Google remarketing ads, and Facebook and Instagram ads on any plan.

The platform also features more than 75 email templates, SMS marketing integration, customized analytics and data reporting options, e-commerce automation functionalities and advanced segmentation capabilities.

Mailchimp also makes it easy for beginners with its AL-powered Email Content Generator. The tool enables customers to create marketing email campaigns with the assistance of GPT AI technology. It can assist in tasks like generating and optimizing content to save time and resources. It can help marketers create email campaigns based on industry and marketing intent—in addition to infusing brand voice. Additionally, Mailchimp rolled out Intuit Assist, an advanced AI tool designed to help users craft marketing plans and produce content via intuitive language prompts. Drawing on your brand’s identity, history and customer base, Intuit Assist delivers tailored advice, offers specialized suggestions and aids in content creation backed by in-depth insights, allowing users to fine-tune their tone, lengthen or shorten content or even request content rewrites. It effortlessly merges into the platform, eliminating the need for users to familiarize themselves with other software.

Mailchimp recently teamed up with Wix.com to boost its marketing tools. This partnership brings new features like the Buy with Prime option and AI-powered improvements to SMS messaging, providing Mailchimp users with more ways to tailor and automate their marketing campaigns. This collaboration makes it easy for users to share customer data between their Mailchimp and Wix accounts so they can create more personalized marketing campaigns based on up-to-date consumer behavior.

Even if you’ve never used an email marketing platform before, Mailchimp is extremely easy to learn and use. The dashboard is simple to understand and includes all of the features and tools you’ll need. Mailchimp’s email creator offers step-by-step directions, so it’s hard to miss a step even if you’re totally new to email marketing. We also like the drag-and-drop tools that make it simple to create emails and add pictures.

HubSpot: Best Bundled Marketing Solution

  • HubSpot offers a robust all-in-one Starter bundle to kick-start your inbound marketing efforts, with the option to customize your own bundle.
  • Several free tools allow you to test “lite” versions of the paid products without bundling.
  • The pricing and plan options for different HubSpot tools can be confusing and may be too extensive for a small business’s basic needs.
Editor's Rating: 9.2/10
Visit Site

HubSpot is one of the best-known names in marketing software. Its product suite includes Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub, all of which are built on the company’s renowned CRM platform. The Starter CRM Suite includes all of these tools for the same price as the Starter Marketing Hub ($45 per month when you pay for a year up front), making it an excellent bundled solution for your growing business’s marketing needs. You also have the option to create your own bundle by selecting the services you need the most.

HubSpot’s email marketing capabilities are part of its Marketing Hub. This software serves as an all-in-one inbound marketing solution that works in tandem with your email efforts to cover blogging, landing pages, lead management, social media, ads and marketing automation. Email marketing is also available as a stand-alone free tool, which comes with limited features from HubSpot’s paid platform.

Like all of the best email marketing solutions, HubSpot allows you to easily create effective email campaigns from a series of professionally designed drag-and-drop templates. We like that HubSpot emails can be automatically personalized based on an email subscriber’s stage in the customer journey, list membership, or any information in their contact records, so you can deliver the most relevant campaigns based on that individual user’s behaviors and preferences.

The platform also offers a personalized AI solution with its ChatSpot.ai and Content Assistant. Content Assistant gives marketing teams the power to curate personalized blog posts, landing pages, sales and marketing emails, and other forms of content. ChatSpot.ai stands out from other well-known AI tools, such as ChatGPT, because it draws response data from the HubSpot CRM and other internal sources so users can further personalize email marketing campaigns using curated internal data. These tools will streamline processes for marketing teams and increase customization for customers.

With HubSpot’s powerful reporting tools, you can gain deep insight into your campaign performance and subscriber data to help you craft effective campaigns that convert. When bundled with HubSpot’s other services, the Marketing Hub is an email campaign powerhouse.

monday.com: Best Email Marketing Software for Campaign Management

  • Monday works well as a project management tool to help you plan and create email marketing campaigns.
  • You can use monday to configure integrations, automations and workflows to help your team track email campaigns.
  • Although you can send and receive emails through monday, it is not dedicated email marketing software and may not offer all of the email management features you need.
Editor's Rating: 8/10
Visit Site

Monday is a powerful project management tool that can help your marketing team brainstorm, plan, refine and track email marketing campaigns. It offers many customizable templates, workflow automations, multiple views, and an ideas and requests board to monitor progress on tasks.

Within monday, you can create granular, detailed views of each campaign request and organize each line item by account, priority, goal, audience, send date, reviewer and request status. The software also includes helpful workflow automations to cut down on the manual work you have to do when handling requests and updating campaign progress. Examples include sending notifications to the involved parties and automatically updating the status of a request. This functionality streamlines campaign management and gives you more time to work on other projects.

Monday recently launched a product called WorkForms, which gives teams the ability to create personalized business forms and visualize progress in columns. WorkForms aims to save users time, which can be especially helpful for busy marketers who manage multiple email campaigns. You can create automated columns that connect existing work documents to boards so your teams can access all of their materials in one place. These columns reduce manual tracking work by allowing you to set up custom trigger-based automations. WorkForms can be very helpful in collecting, tracking, analyzing and managing data from email subscribers. You can try WorkForms for free before committing to a plan.

Recently, monday.com unveiled WorkCanvas, an online feature aimed at improving workflow management for email marketing initiatives. WorkCanvas allows businesses to seamlessly exchange ideas within a unified collaborative framework, using virtual canvases to create everything from workshops to visual designs such as organizational charts, detailed brainstorming diagrams and mood boards. Users can craft their own canvas designs or choose from a variety of ready-made templates, offering both creative freedom and ease of use.

It’s important to note that monday is not a dedicated email marketing software platform. Though it does integrate with products such as Mailchimp for overall campaign tracking, and with Gmail and Outlook for sending and receiving emails, it may not offer all of the traditional email marketing tools and features you need. However, monday is an excellent tool for planning and managing campaigns from ideation to execution, and the software can help you view and analyze data about your email marketing efforts.

Benchmark Email Marketing: Email Marketing Software for Ease of Use

  • Benchmark offers easy-to-use services with detailed instructions, including a free drag-and-drop email editor.
  • Benchmark has various customer support options for both self-service and direct assistance.
  • Additional services that help to streamline campaign management are available only with paid plans.
Editor's Rating: 9.2/10
Visit Site

Benchmark is our choice for the best user-friendly email marketing service. The company offers a free plan that includes 250 emails per month for up to 500 contacts. Paid plans begin at $13 per month and include unlimited sends for 500 contacts. Both of these affordable plans include many features that make this provider the easiest to use of the email marketing software we reviewed, making Benchmark perfect for new businesses or teams that are looking to save time on campaign planning.

Benchmark offers a drag-and-drop editor for email creation, in addition to a code editor for those with HTML experience. If you’re unsure how to use any of Benchmark’s tools, you can get help with various support options, such as a blog, live chat, a monthly newsletter and videos describing how to use each feature. You can also contact customer service by phone or email. Benchmark also makes it easy to include images in your emails. Its editing capabilities allow you to quickly make width adjustments to any image and seamlessly wrap text around any image.

Benchmark Email customers can also use Smart Content, a new copywriting feature, to make drafting excellent email marketing campaigns easier. Smart Content creates new written content for users from scratch. It can also revise existing content by having the user input a few simple items. The feature is designed to save marketers time by drafting copy for e-commerce, B2B, and B2C audiences. It is available in both the free and paid subscriptions of Benchmark Email. Smart Content is the second in a line of Benchmark Email’s AI suite of features after Smart Sending. Benchmark plans to release more tools in its Smart catalog in the future, including predictive sending and design features.

The Benchmark Help Center offers a variety of valuable resources for users, including easy-to-find help articles, how-to-videos, goal-oriented categories and subcategories, and options that make it simple to connect with support team members via chat and email.

All plans also include automation, lead generation and reporting features. However, the free version’s email marketing, automation, lead generation and reporting functions are somewhat limited and simplistic. The lowest-priced paid plan, the $13-per-month Pro plan, is still very affordable and gives you access to these advanced, easy-to-learn features that will help streamline your marketing efforts.

Campaigner: Best Email Marketing Software for Larger Businesses

Campaigner
Campaigner company logo
  • Email automation workflow services help you visualize and create successful customer journeys and conversions.
  • You get access to top-tier engineering experts for technical advice.
  • Campaigner’s most attractive features are limited to the most expensive plan.
Editor's Rating: 9.2/10

Campaigner should be a serious contender for midsize and large businesses that are looking for an email marketing provider. The company has a solid history of working with large global companies such as Adidas and Tripadvisor.

Campaigner starts at $59 per month for the entry-level Starter plan. However, you need to sign up for the Advanced plan – which costs more than 10 times as much, at $649 per month – to gain access to the real star of Campaigner’s offerings: automation workflows. For larger businesses that can afford it, this feature makes Campaigner an attractive email marketing platform.

The email automation workflow provides users with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder to create unique, personalized customer journeys. In addition to email marketing, Campaigner’s automation tools can be used for SMS marketing campaigns. Users can even integrate e-commerce stores, like Shopify or WooCommerce, into automation workflows to help generate more conversions.

The Advanced plan also offers exclusive access to a specialized sales engineering team for technical advice, the option to purchase behavior analyses, and the ability to build integrations with an open API. Campaigner offers a 30-day free trial with full access to all features.

Constant Contact Email Marketing: Best Email Marketing Software for Small Businesses

Constant Contact Email Marketing
Constant Contact company logo
  • Constant Contact’s affordable monthly plans and robust feature set should meet the needs of most small businesses.
  • You’ll have plenty of time to test out all of Constant Contact’s features with its 60-day free trial.
  • Unlike other popular email marketing options, Constant Contact does not offer a free version.
Editor's Rating: 9.5/10

Constant Contact is our pick for the best email marketing service for small businesses. It has everything a small business needs to create effective email campaigns, with affordable plans and easy-to-use tools. The plans let you send a nearly unlimited number of emails, and prices are based on the number of subscribers on your contact list.

Constant Contact has two email marketing plans: Core and Plus. With a starting price of $9.99 per month, these plans can easily fit into most businesses’ email marketing budgets. Constant Contact also offers a CRM platform to help integrate your marketing efforts with sales.

We like that each plan comes with customizable templates; contact management and list-building tools; popup forms; tracking and reporting features; an image library; a mobile app; a knowledgebase; and support. We were also pleased with the 60-day free trial to test out Constant Contact’s features. (The free trial is limited to an email marketing contact list of 100 users.)

Constant Contact also offers an AI Content Generator that effortlessly generates SMS messages, emails and landing page content by utilizing a few keywords, streamlining the content creation process.

Constant Contact is one of the easiest email marketing services to use. The email editor automatically scrubs your website to find your logo, colors and social media profiles. Once it has this information, you can easily customize templates to fit your business. The software has dozens of templates to pick from, and you can save your favorite templates to quickly create a new email.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Best Enterprise Marketing Solution

Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud logo
  • Email Studio is part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a data-first marketing solution designed to build lasting customer relationships.
  • Salesforce is one of the most respected names in CRM software, which means you get top-notch features and support.
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing starts at $400 per month, which may be cost-prohibitive for some businesses.
Editor's Rating: 9/10

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an excellent tool for midsize and large companies that want to improve their email campaigns and marketing strategies. Email Studio is just one of the many marketing tools in Marketing Cloud, which helps businesses leverage powerful data and email personalization to maintain relationships between their customers and sales teams.

Salesforce is a feature-rich platform with some of the best CRM software functionality to allow deep customization of your emails. Email Studio alone has a variety of features with practically limitless options to digitize and customize your workflow. You can easily target your campaigns to as small or as large of an audience you need. Salesforce’s data-driven email customization features offer plenty of unique and engaging options for your campaigns.

Marketing Cloud allows you to seamlessly integrate your sales, marketing and service data with the rest of the Salesforce CRM. For integrations with outside software, Salesforce provides an open API that allows development teams to create their own integrations. Salesforce also offers an automation API that is designed to automate personalization and engagement, which is a huge plus for marketers. With this, marketers can create and share segments within their customer data platform.

Marketing Cloud allows you to seamlessly integrate your sales, marketing and service data with the rest of the Salesforce CRM. For integrations with outside software, Salesforce provides an open API that allows development teams to create their own integrations.

Salesforce recently announced that it has moved Marketing Cloud to the Einstein 1 platform, which empowers companies to develop AI-powered apps and workflows through connected data. Organizations can use various available low-code platform services — including Einstein, Flow and Lightning — to improve the customer experience. Einstein 1 includes the support of Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant that is designed to improve team productivity by answering user questions based on proprietary data, as well as provide next steps and suggestions beyond the initial request.

As one of the most recognized and well-rounded marketing platforms available, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is priced accordingly. Small and midsize businesses may find the $400 monthly starting price too high, but larger businesses with higher budgets will find the software’s features incredibly useful.

Freshworks Freshmarketer: Best Email Marketing Software for Marketing Integrations

Freshworks Freshmarketer
freshmarketer company logo
  • Freshmarketer offers marketing integrations across various platforms, with the option to integrate Freshsales.
  • You can try Freshmarketer free for 21 days or take advantage of the company’s free (though more limited) plan.
  • Freshworks’ pricing tiers may be confusing for new users.
Editor's Rating: 9.2/10

Freshmarketer by Freshworks is a great solution for businesses that are looking for marketing integrations. Freshmarketer provides multichannel engagement to help grow your Shopify storefront and send personalized campaigns across multiple channels, including WhatsApp, SMS (text message) and chatbots.

Freshworks delivers tools and multiple engagement options to help your sales and marketing teams reach your customers. You can send promotional emails, schedule newsletters, dispatch event invitations, communicate product updates and announcements, and even deliver internal campaigns. You can try all of these features and more by taking advantage of the platform’s 21-day free trial or by using the more limited free model. Three other pricing tiers (Growth, Pro and Enterprise) are priced per month and per number of marketing contacts.

We were impressed with Freshwroks’ AI-powered assistant, Freddy. With this tool, marketers can save time and money to accomplish customer-facing tasks more efficiently. Freddy includes new GPT-based conversational enhancements that mimic human marketers’ tone, creative copy and communication style. Using this, customers can experience more conversations and fewer clicks.

Freshworks also offers Freshsales, an all-in-one solution for businesses that are looking to automate marketing and sales processes for an affordable price. In our review, we found that the email marketing tools integrate seamlessly with Freshsales, offering sales teams a fast and reliable way to communicate with prospects and giving marketing teams the ability to segment customers and target them with custom email marketing campaigns.

ActiveCampaign: Best Email Marketing Software for E-Commerce Integrations

ActiveCampaign
Active Campaign company logo
  • ActiveCampaign integrates with popular e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
  • E-commerce businesses can take advantage of ActiveCampaign’s powerful sales automation and advanced segmentation features.
  • The full e-commerce integrations and features are available beginning at the Plus tier, which starts at $49 per month when billed annually ($70 per month when billed monthly).
Editor's Rating: 8.8/10

Email marketing is an important tool for e-commerce businesses, which need to send frequent customer communications, such as surveys and updates on purchases and sales. ActiveCampaign’s marketing solutions are perfect for online sellers, thanks to a wide array of tools to streamline sales and marketing efforts. Recently, ActiveCampaign made platform speed enhancements to decrease the time spent building or designing emails and campaigns. The company also recreated its email designer function with more features that can be added to emails to make them stand out.

We like that ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 850 customer engagement solutions, including Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. This means your sales data from those platforms automatically feeds into your ActiveCampaign e-commerce dashboard, which allows you to create effective and personalized email campaigns based on your customer data. With over 125 templates to choose from and unlimited email sends to up to 250,000 contacts, it’s easy to develop targeted marketing communications for every customer on your list.

Additional features we are impressed with include multi-factor authentication for its apps, a Chrome extension and Outlook add-in, the ability to add personalization tags to titles and descriptions in a task name action within automations, and segmentation capabilities via its “goal action” tool.

One downside of ActiveCampaign is that the best features for e-commerce businesses are available only at the Plus tier or higher. The Plus plan starts at $49 per month (when billed annually) for up to 1,000 contacts, which may not be enough for e-commerce businesses that want to scale quickly. The more expensive Professional plan begins at $149 per month when billed annually.

For businesses that can afford those higher-tier plans, ActiveCampaign provides tons of powerful and useful tools to help online sellers effectively communicate and build relationships with their customers. Specialized e-commerce features include custom order management, revenue reports, customer service management, product landing pages and lead scoring.

iContact: Best Scalable Email Marketing Software for Scalability

iContact
icontact email marketing blue logo
  • iContact offers a free plan that allows up to 500 contacts and 2,000 sends per month.
  • The software is very scalable, allowing you to easily increase the number of contacts on your list as your business grows.
  • The free plan’s automation features are limited.
Editor's Rating: 8.8/10

iContact is a great email marketing solution for businesses that want to start free and scale up in the future. With 500 contacts and up to 2,000 sends per month, the free version of iContact offers everything you need to get started with email campaigns as you build up your subscriber base.

We like iContact’s drag-and-drop email designer and its professionally designed template library. Both iContact pricing plans grant access to the company’s template and stock image library; landing page creation and hosting option; A/B testing capabilities; real-time campaign reports; API integrations; and automation features. However, automations are limited in the free iContact plan; if you want features such as Smart Sending (which optimizes send times based on your contacts’ time zones), audience segmentation, engagement follow-ups and multiple event series campaigns, you’ll have to upgrade to the Advanced plan, which starts at $23 per month for 1,500 contacts.

iContact recently rolled out a Social Creation and Posting feature, enabling users to connect their email marketing efforts with their presence on popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. This product update incorporates AI-driven tools that allow users to craft and share compelling social content right from iContact’s interface. With access to ready-made templates and a plethora of stock photos, users can tailor their posts to align with their brand’s identity.

For businesses with basic email marketing needs and relatively few contacts, this software offers affordable access to powerful email marketing tools. It also includes room to grow, making it our choice for the best scalable email marketing software.

Email Marketing Software Costs

Most email marketing software providers offer a range of plans with monthly fees based on the number of email contacts you have or the number of emails you send. Free options typically provide limited features and cap you at a certain number of contacts and/or monthly email sends, while some paid plans allow you to send an unlimited number of emails each month. 

If you know or can estimate the number of emails your company will send each month or how many subscribers you expect to have, these numbers will dictate which pricing tier you should choose. Depending on your estimates and the features you want in your software, you can expect to pay anywhere from $9 to $400 per month for premium email marketing plans. For businesses that need an email marketing service only occasionally, some providers offer per-email or pay-as-you-go pricing. This is a flexible option that lets you pay only for what you use, rather than for a monthly subscription with features that may go to waste. 

Most email marketing services offer a free version of their software or a free trial so you can test the software and see how it works for you. The free trials we found range from 14 to 60 days. We recommend trying as many free trials as you can during your search. 

TipTip

Pay attention to how easy it is to design emails with the software you’re considering, what marketing automation features it includes, and which other services it can integrate with.

Email Marketing Software Features

Here’s a breakdown of the core features that email marketing solutions offer.

Email Creation Tool

Most services provide a library of customizable templates or an intuitive drag-and-drop tool that allows you to customize your emails. Some providers have templates that show you how your email will look on multiple devices (such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones) to help you design a flexible and responsive email. 

Analytics

Many email marketing services offer analytics on your email open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, audience geolocation, conversion tracking, customer behavior trends and more. Some integrate with Google Analytics, while some provide their own analytics that present the information in easy-to-read charts and graphs. 

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the ability to send specific, targeted emails to customers when they complete a certain action. For example, if a visitor to your website signs up to receive emails from you, your marketing automation tool triggers a welcome email to go to that customer’s inbox. 

Did You Know?Did you know

Marketing automation can save you time, and many email marketing services offer ways to make automated emails more personal, which increases engagement and your return on investment.

Segmentation

Segmentation is another helpful way to deliver more relevant messages to your prospects and customers by grouping them according to age, location, gender, industry, interests or other factors. Segmentation allows you to send different emails to different groups, rather than sending one mass email that may not be relevant to your entire customer base. 

Contact Management

A contact management tool helps you acquire, sort and manage email contacts. It also provides features such as automatic deletion of dead or duplicate contacts; importing; exporting; grouping; and integration with other management tools, like a CRM or CMS. 

Social Media Integration

Most email marketing services integrate with social media platforms, allowing you to grow your contact list, schedule posts, and track your followers’ engagement to determine what’s popular. Integrating your social media with email marketing helps you make the most of multichannel marketing by providing more information about your customers as well as more opportunities for them to see messages from you.

How to Choose Email Marketing Software

If you’re looking for an email marketing solution, follow this step-by-step guide to help you choose the right one.

1. Define your budget, parameters and goals for your email campaigns.

As with any marketing strategy, you’ll want to define the scope of your efforts before searching for a software solution. Figure out how much of your marketing budget you want to allocate to email marketing, and establish your plans for campaign frequency and the overall goals of your campaigns (brand awareness, sales, customer loyalty, etc.).

. Read reviews to narrow down your options.

Read reviews from customers and best picks lists like this one to learn about the pricing, features, limits, pros and cons, and customer support of each service you’re considering. This will help you eliminate providers that are outside your budget or that don’t offer the right mix of features and value for your needs.

3. Sign up for free trials.

Many popular email marketing solutions offer free trials or fully free versions of their software. Create an account to try out each of your top contenders, and play around with the templates, email builders and other features. Consider ease of use, API and integration options, automation features, and the contact or send limits of your preferred plan. You may also wish to contact customer service to ask any additional questions and to test the level of support you might receive as a customer.

4. Decide on your email marketing software, and begin running campaigns.

Once you’ve tried out your top software choices, commit to one and begin building your email list to start running campaigns.

Advantages of Email Marketing Software

There are many benefits of email marketing software for businesses that want to develop strong, direct relationships with their customers.

Personalized, Automated Customer Engagements

The best email marketing software allows you to use customer data to create and deliver personalized campaigns that will resonate with each recipient. With automation tools, you can set up workflows to automatically send tailored emails to certain customers based on metrics such as purchasing behaviors and special dates, like birthdays, anniversaries, and approaching contract milestones.

Reports and Insights

Email marketing software offers a treasure trove of data to help you improve your marketing campaigns. You can see which subscribers opened, ignored or deleted your emails, as well as which campaigns were opened multiple times and led to website click-throughs. With A/B testing features, you can send two versions of a campaign to see which one elicited the most engagement.

Scalability

Most email marketing solutions offer multiple pricing tiers that allow you to scale up your contact lists and email sends as your business and subscriber base grow. You can reach and manage hundreds of thousands of contacts from one easy-to-use platform.

Integrations With Other Marketing Solutions

Email marketing platforms that are part of larger marketing software products, such as CRM solutions, allow you to manage your contacts and communications throughout the customer journey. When your email marketing software integrates with your other systems, your whole team will have access to important customer data and insights.

Email Marketing Software FAQs

As with all marketing channels, no two email marketing strategies are the same. An email marketing strategy is designed to help you reach your marketing goals, such as improving brand recognition, increasing sales or keeping your customers up to date. Once you identify your marketing goals, you can create a series of emails and workflows with tools such as automation, email templates and list segmentation.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your products and reach your customers. If executed correctly, email marketing campaigns can build trust with your customers, encourage users to visit your website, and ultimately result in more sales and satisfied customers.

The best email marketing services have extensive reporting and analytics. To determine if your email marketing campaigns are successful, check the recorded data once an email is sent. The reports should indicate how many people received your email, the click-through rate, bounces and other metrics.

Email marketing services offer several tools to help you obtain and manage email addresses from your customers. Most software options integrate with your current email address book to start your list. In addition, many provide the ability to embed sign-up forms on your website and social media accounts to grow your contact list.

Automation tools allow you to set up recurring emails that automatically go to certain subscribers based on the actions they take. For example, if you set up a welcome series, a contact will receive a welcome email once they subscribe to your list.

One of the biggest reasons email marketing is so popular with businesses is that you can track its success. Services typically provide details such as who opened your email, who immediately deleted it, who forwarded the email to others, and who bought your product or service. You can drill down into the data by looking at the days and times emails are being opened and the demographics (e.g., male, female, old, young) of customers who engage with your emails most. All of this information helps you increase the success of future campaigns.

Yes, most email marketing services let you take advantage of the social media following you’ve built. Many providers let you connect your campaigns with your social networks, so your emails automatically post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms. In addition, the services let you collect email addresses for your contact list with prebuilt social media sign-up pages.

Traditional email marketing is designed to communicate with many people. These emails can share information about your business, such as news, promotions and special events. You can send these emails to your entire subscriber list or certain segments of your list.

Transactional emails are sent to individual customers after they perform certain actions. For example, when a customer makes an online purchase from a business, the confirmation email they receive is a transactional email.

Yes, most email marketing services integrate with at least some popular business applications. The most common integrations are with Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify and Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento). These integrations save you time and resources by automatically transferring content between your email marketing platform and your other software. Some providers also let you tap into their application programming interface to build custom integrations.

What to Expect in 2024

In 2024, much of the world’s population is still stationed at home and the sending of emails shows no sign of slowing down. Data from The Radicati Group estimates over 376 billion emails will be sent by the end of 2025. Knowing how valuable this medium continues to be, the Digital Journal predicts a massive CAGR growth of 11.6 percent by 2029 for the global email marketing software market.

The increased need for digital advertising at a cheaper rate is impacting the future of the market. Additionally, many major brands are focusing their messaging to include their company mission or adapt to industry trends. They are aiming to include a more personal style of messaging to better connect with their consumer base.

We expect email marketing software providers to continue to focus on adding more automation and personalization tools. Both will help streamline the email marketing process while also increasing the critical engagement businesses are looking for when using email marketing as a key component of their overall marketing strategy.

We also expect artificial intelligence (AI) to play an increasingly important role in streamlining the email marketing process. In fact, 57 percent of marketers in large organizations have incorporated artificial intelligence into their email marketing strategies, as reported by MarketingDive.

With the explosive growth of generative AI, more businesses will likely adopt it in 2024 to brainstorm campaign concepts, draft marketing copy and even create visuals to incorporate into emails. Companies can also use AI to develop alternate campaign materials and copy to facilitate A/B testing, as well as leverage its analytics to further personalize and tailor messages to customers. However, Email marketers should remember that AI is not designed to replace the human element or other marketing tools and strategies. Using AI as one tool in the toolbox, rather than the only tool, will likely drive the best results.

Another industry change that will affect some marketers is the new sending requirements for campaigns going to Gmail and Yahoo/AOL Mail! addresses. As of February 2024, qualifying users who send over 5,000 messages per day or 150,000 monthly on these platforms will need to adhere to these new guidelines aimed at bolstering security. The requirements are set to protect recipients from potential email frauds like phishing, while also ensuring that messages reach actual, interested users.

As part of these changes, senders who meet the criteria will need to verify their email identities using DomainKeys Identified Mail. In addition, the unsubscribing process for recipients must be simplified, with a mandated one-click option in emails and adherence to unsubscription requests within 48 hours. Moreover, there will be a new standard for maintaining a spam rate below 0.30 percent to confirm that emails are sent only to willing recipients, although the platforms recommend a more stringent target of 0.10 percent.

Sean Peek, Business Ownership Insider and Senior Analyst
Sean Peek is the co-founder of a self-funded small business that employs more than a dozen team members. His years of hands-on entrepreneurial experience in bootstrapping, operations management, process automation and leadership have strengthened his knowledge of the B2B world and the most pressing issues facing business owners today. Peek uses his expertise to guide fellow small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs in the areas of marketing, finance and software technology. Peek excels at developing customer bases and fostering long-term client relationships, using lean principles to drive efficiency and cost-saving, and identifying growth areas. He has demonstrated his business savvy through collaborations with Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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