Best Email Marketing Service Based on In-Depth Reviews
- 200+Hours of research
- 40+Sources used
- 20Companies vetted
- 3Features reviewed
- 5Top
Picks
- Review your email content to keep your spam score low.
- Many companies offer free plans with an upgrade path.
- Not everyone needs the most advanced automation tools.
- Avoid yearly subscriptions before trying out a service.
How We Found The Best Email Marketing Service
Our Top Picks: Email Marketing Service Reviews
Email marketing services are powerful tools that must be used wisely and with moderation. They feature a wide range of functionality that make each service better for different user groups. We identified three categories of email marketing services based on what they are best for, plus one based on its overall affordability.
SendX review
Most Affordable Email Marketing Service
Screenshot Sendx.io, November 2020
SendX states that, as a business, they only care about serving their customers well and making enough revenue to sustain themselves. Of all the email marketing services we evaluated, SendX had the most affordable plans for the number of features offered. The company charges clients per number of opted-in subscribers instead of per month, with a simple plan formula that starts at $7.49 for 1 - 1,000 subscribers and scales up to two million subscribers. All SendX plans enjoy the same features, including an unlimited number of emails sent per month.
Other Highlights
- Email Deliverability Parameters: SendX is able to optimize user email campaigns based on more than 30 parameters, including past open behavior, time zone, domain name, email client, ISP, and more.
- Campaign Heatmaps: Users can see a heatmap report for their different types of campaigns. This offers them a quick visual overview of which calls to action are working and which links are people clicking.
- Responsive Email Templates: Users have access to over 50 free responsive email templates fitting for a variety of use cases and industries.
- Award-winning Support: SendX has been awarded for its customer support by several sources, including Capterra, G2 Crowd, SoftwareWorld, and GoodFirms.
Sendinblue review
Best Email Marketing Service for Newsletters
Screenshot Sendinblue.com, November 2020
Sendinblue features one of the most advanced and intuitive newsletter editors in the industry right now, making it an easy pick for this category. The company offers an expansive gallery of mobile-friendly newsletter designs, drag-and-drop design tools, and a hosted image library for users to begin customizing their templates. Users can also include personalization fields in the templates, preview newsletters in the inbox, and test them to see their effectiveness.
Other Highlights
- Great for One-on-One Campaigns: Sendinblue’s platform is one of the best for trigger-based and transactional emails, thanks in part to its powerful automation features. Its workflow designer allows users to build campaigns triggered by clicks, opens, and webpage visits, while its dedicated transactional section allows for messages such as password resets or sign-up and purchase confirmations.
- Built-in CRM: Unlike traditional email marketing tools, Sendinblue provides a built-in customer relationship management software (CRM) solution, allowing clients to manage their list of contacts from within the email marketing platform. Contacts can then be organized in single or multiple lists based on particular characteristics or functions.
- SMS Marketing: Clients can manage two types of marketing activities, SMS, and email, from the same user interface. They can create, send, and manage all of their automated SMS marketing campaigns from the Sendinblue platform.
- Facebook Ads: Sendinblue can help clients set up ads on Facebook to target new customers or retarget existing leads. Users can keep track of their Facebook ads' performance directly from the platform, including people reached, impressions and clicks, and click-through rates.
Sendinblue plans start at $25/month. The free version of its software allows for up to 300 emails per day.
GetResponse review
Best Email Marketing Service for Nonprofits
Screenshot Getresponse.com, November 2020
Nonprofit organizations, especially small ones, often need to juggle between their activities and the rising overhead costs of their work. GetResponse offers nonprofits 50% off their purchase, which enables them to keep their costs low while sending out a high volume of emails. GetResponse also integrates with popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which makes sharing messages on them that much easier.
Other Highlights
- High Deliverability Rates: GetResponse has shown its commitment to combating spam on its platform by shuttering accounts that commit violations. This practice increases the overall deliverability of emails sent via its platform and has given it a stellar reputation within the industry. It has also led to a number of “whitelisting” agreements with major ISPs like Outlook and Yahoo.
- Granular Segmentation: GetResponse allows users to segment audiences based on attributes like personal information, location, and engagement. Moreover, the platform can segment contacts further by their current place in an automated workflow, the last time you sent them an email, and the content asset they used to subscribe to the list.
- Automated Workflow Tracking: GetResponse analytics are a standout feature of the platform, with in-depth reporting about ROI, different possible versions of each email sent, and social sharing. The platform lets clients see the impact of both individual email and email sequences.
- Long Trial Duration: GetResponse’s free trial length of 30 days is well past the industry standard of 14 days. This lets clients test out the software for longer and really settle into their workflow before they commit to the platform.
GetResponse plans start at $15/month. There is no free version of its software.
Omnisend review
Best Email Marketing Service for Ecommerce
Screenshot Omnisend.com, November 2020
Previously known as Soundest, Omnisend positions itself as an email marketing service specifically tailored for eCommerce. The software works with Shopify, Woo Commerce, Magento, Tictail, and many other eCommerce platforms via API. Features like dynamic discount codes, a product picker, and click-through rate boosters, such as interactive email elements, make it an even better platform for small and large eCommerce outlets.
Other Highlights
- Campaign Booster: 48 hours after users send out their campaign, Omnisend’s Campaign Booster will send out the campaign again to the people who didn’t open it and are most likely to buy, but with a new subject line.
- Robust Segmentation: Omnisend’s segmentation allows clients to filter their audience based on various transactional events and purchase behaviors. For example, audiences can be segmented based on the items they’re buying, their average order value, and how recently they have purchased an item.
- Seamless Migrations: Omnisend claims it can get users up-and-running on their platform in 30 minutes. Contact data, including contact properties, tags, segments, and engagement stats, are all automatically synced to the platform when migrating. Its live support team is available 24/7 to help with the process, as well.
- Widely Popular: Omnisend has thousands of positive reviews across several feedback platforms, including Shopify, G2 Crowd, and Capterra.
Omnisend plans start at $16/month. The free version of its software allows for up to 15,000 emails/mo.
Drip review
Best Email Marketing Service for Automation
Screenshot Drip.com, November 2020
All major email marketing services currently offer some type of automation. However, Drip excels in this area thanks to its automated workflows. These use complex sets of rules and triggers to set almost anything on autopilot, from simple tasks like capitalizing first names and sending SMS messages to more complicated ones, like testing email campaigns and showing personalized ads. The accompanying visual workflow builder, automation grouping, and workflow sharing further enhance Drip’s automation features.
Other Highlights
- Visual Workflow Builder: Drip’s straightforward visual editor is one of its main selling points. It makes it easy to see how your automation is set up and what path your subscribers will take. It also shows statistics, such as how many subscribers have gone through a specific automation step.
- CRM-based System: Drip functions more like a CRM than a traditional email marketing service in that it does not host multiple lists of subscribers. Instead, all of a client’s emails are located in a single database. Subscribers are more accurately accounted for and can be selected via tags.
- Liquid Language: Drip supports liquid language, an open-source template language developed by Shopify. This opens up the doors for more complex automation processes, such as branching decisions inside workflows, more data in automation rules, setting up custom fields for subscribers, countdowns, and more.
- Lead Scoring: A scoring system lets Drip users immediately see who their top-quality subscribers are. Drip automatically reduces the score of inactive leads every week. Advanced settings let users set points for certain actions, like when someone visits a specific page on your website.
Drip plans start at $19/month. There is no free version of its software, but it does have a 14-day free trial.
Further Insight Into Our Methodology
Social media has changed the way businesses interact with their clients. Despite this, email remains one of the most powerful engagement channels today. They are customizable, highly accessible, and can reach a wide audience. Email marketing services make this channel an even greater tool for reaching your audience. It’s no surprise that individuals and businesses alike would want to take advantage of these handy services. However, it can be hard to narrow down your choices given the number and variety of services online.
Our first step was to learn all we could about email marketing services and the companies that provide them. We spent more than 140 hours researching these services: what they are, how they work, and how they are best used. We looked at statistics, read reports on the industry, and spoke to email marketing expert David Calhoun, who has over 15 years of experience working with email marketing systems, about the pros and cons of these services. Then, we made a list of 20 service email marketing service providers that fulfilled our basic expectations.
We used 16 criteria split into three groups—cost, features, and user experience—based on our research to compare these companies.
Cost
Like most software as a service (SaaS), email marketing services are subscription-based services paid for on a monthly basis. SaaS companies generally offer several plan tiers that scale in price. The higher the tier, the greater the features included. For email marketing services, this could mean a higher number of emails that can be sent per day, larger contact lists, automation features, and unique tools.
Not all email marketing providers charge for their service in the same way, though. Some companies charge per email and others do so per subscriber. Ultimately, how a company bills its clients did not impact its score with us. Instead, we focused on evaluating the variety of plans companies offered. We favored a wider variety of tiers with options for individuals, small businesses, and mid-to-large businesses.
Lastly, we also looked at the availability of free trials and the length of money-back guarantees. Free trials or versions are a big benefit for clients who may not have experience dealing with an email marketing service beforehand or who may have previous experience and want to make sure the platform is actually what they are looking for. Money-back guarantees are a must for any service as software, as they ensure that unsatisfied customers can transition out of a platform without becoming unhappy or bitter about the experience. The longer, the better is our metric for evaluating money-back guarantee length.
Features
Most of our criteria fell into this second category. “Features” are any and all tools an email marketing service extends to its users. Some of the features we evaluated include:
- Analytics (e.g., open and click rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, integration with Google Analytics)
- Email scheduling
- Custom autoresponders
- Custom workflows and triggers
- Spam filters
- Social media integration
- CRM integration
- A/B testing
- Pre-built templates
- Special campaigns (e.g., coupon offers, donation collections, surveys, forms)
Not all of these features were equally important, but we did consider them all when we compared the 20 companies on our list.
User Experience
We evaluated user experience by two criteria: ease-of-use and customer support.
The first is very important for any service or software that is leased to a client. If a customer feels like they cannot fully learn to use a company’s tool, they’ll be discouraged from using the product in the future. By having an intuitive platform, clients can focus on what they actually want to do with the service or software instead. For email marketing services, this means clients will be able to create email campaigns, build email templates, test different campaigns, and more, with as little hassle as possible.
In case a client does need to contact a customer representative, it’s important to know that their response will be prompt and helpful. We compared the comments and feedback from online customers worldwide to form an informed opinion on the quality of each email marketing service’s customer support department. Ultimately, because this experience may range widely between individuals for a single company, this is the single hardest piece of information to evaluate accurately.
Helpful information about Email Marketing Service
What is email marketing?
In the broadest sense, email marketing is the process of sending a commercial message to a group of people over email. This usually takes the form of an email campaign, a set of individual messages sent across a specific time period and with a specific purpose in mind. For example, when a company sends an email with the intention of advertising, requesting business, or soliciting sales or donations—that’s email marketing. In fact, any email a company sends could technically be considered email marketing, other than direct response and pre-programmed response emails, such as order confirmations.
More specifically, email marketing is a method for individuals, businesses, and organizations to grow and promote their brand. It’s a way for them to keep their audience informed and tailor their marketing to specific groups instead of sending uninspired, cookie-cutter messages. They can also keep their audience up to date regarding any activities or events organized by the sender. Marketing emails can serve to share a general message on the company's behalf, such as in the wake of a natural disaster or company scandal.
For companies trying to sell something, email marketing can also keep customers aware of new products, services, and discounts. Newsletters, a common type of marketing email, often include sales promotions and exclusive deals for subscribers.
Email marketing can help build:
Customer Loyalty, by…
✓ Creating loyalty programs and newsletters to incentivize engagement.
✓ Catering to the needs of specific audiences through personalized emails and segmentation.
Consumer Trust, by…
✓ Sending surveys and feedback emails to reach out and get your audience’s opinion.
✓ Creating automated emails that activate when a consumer digitally interacts with your brand.
Brand Awareness, by…
✓ Reaching out to potential new audiences regularly.
✓ Using creative and eye-catching templates to create an exciting image for your brand.
Why use email marketing services?
Email marketing services are software that facilitate the creation of an email campaign. This includes every part of the email campaign process, from building your template to managing your list of leads to scheduling your emails. Some of these services even let you test campaigns beforehand and automate emails according to different triggers.
The biggest advantage of email marketing services can be summed up as price and ease of use. As it is, emailing is already an affordable way to advertise your brand or your company’s products and services when compared to other types of marketing, such as social media. Many of the most popular email marketing services companies only charge between $5 and $30 per month for their software. Considering the high return on email marketing investment, these services are easily worth their own weight in gold.
As for ease, Bremail marketing services are generally designed to be intuitive and accessible. The idea is to make the process of drafting your campaign as seamless as possible. The most obvious example of this are the ready-made templates included with most services, many of which feature drag-and-drop mechanics for easy implementation. Email marketing services also keep all your leads and marketing information under a single roof for easy and fast access when needed.
The Lasting Advantages of Email Marketing
Despite the impact of social media on Internet marketing, email continues to be one of the most cost-effective and accessible channels of marketing.
Source: www.litmus.com
Source: www.episerver.com
Source: www.salecycle.com
Source: marieennisoconnor.medium.com
It's surprisingly easy to set up and track a campaign with an email marketing service, making it accessible for individuals and small businesses. Large companies often depend on these services, making them a popular marketing solution for just about anyone.
FAQs about Email Marketing Service
What are the different types of marketing emails?
Marketing emails can be roughly split into two groups: informational emails and transactional emails. The former are sent to people to bring them up to speed regarding someone or something’s latest content, product announcements, product offers, etc. The latter are one-to-one emails triggered by specific actions, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. Specialized software is needed to set up transactional emails.
How do I create a marketing email template?
To create an email marketing template from scratch, you'll need to have advanced knowledge of HTML or work with a developer who does. Nearly every email marketing service offers ready-made templates precisely because of this. Templates vary widely, but many can also be edited thanks to drag-and-drop editing software. Because the process of creating an HTML email from scratch can be time consuming and requires much effort, it is generally recommended to either work with a professional developer or use one of a pre-made template.
What is a good response rate for email marketing?
On average, 10% is a good response rate to aim for. This number could be higher or lower by 5-10%, depending on how experienced you are and how much work you've put into your campaign. Ultimately, response rates are hard to calculate in a vacuum. They are something that individual email marketers will have to keep tabs on themselves.
What is a good day to send email marketing?
According to several studies, Tuesday is the best day to send emails. Thursday is also a good day, making it a good second day to send out an email campaign. Lastly, while no single study showed that Wednesday was the most popular, it came in second place several times.
Additionally, the best time to send an email seems to be late in the morning. Several studies concluded that the best time to send emails is at 10 a.m., for example. Another notable time is from 8 p.m. through midnight since emails are generally opened later in the evening. This might be due to people checking their email before going to bed.
What are the most useful performance metrics for email marketing?
Each email marketing campaign is different. As such, the performance metrics you should be looking for will vary from one campaign to another if, say, the goal of one is generating leads and the other of growing a subscriber base. There are some basic metrics every email marketer should learn how to track, though, such as:
- Clickthrough Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Bounce Rate
- List Growth Rate
- Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
- Overall ROI
- Open Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
What is KPI in email marketing?
Email key performance indicators (KPIs) are the leading indicators used to measure an email marketing campaign's success. Measuring a campaign using a single metric is impossible, so you need to measure a set of metrics. Finding the right KPIs is a delicate balancing act and may necessitate several iterations to find the right ones that really measure your email campaigns' success.
What is a good open rate for a cold email?
Like the response rate, the average email open rate can vary based on the targeted audience’s industry. A generally accepted percentage for an email campaign success open rate is 15%-25%. To determine the email open rate, subtract the total bounced emails from the total emails delivered, then divide that number by the total number of emails opened.