9 of the Best Email Marketing Services in 2023
Email marketing has always been and remains one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing strategies for small business. Email reaches more people on a personal level than other types of marketing and serves to deliver a message directly to those you most want to influence.
Blogging, video marketing, and social media are all important. But nothing approaches your audience like email. It is more personal and allows you to present your pitch directly where others tend to address an entire audience on public forums.
But how do you best use your tools to create your email marketing strategies?
There are many services available today that do make email marketing more accessible. Some are automated tools that serve as autoresponders to answer emails when you are away. Others are designed to target or retarget your audience to recover potentially lost sales.
Top 9 Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses
We’ve compiled 9 of the best email marketing tools and services in this post. Take a look at these and see which ones might help your email marketing efforts.
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing and management services in the world. Perhaps that is because it is so easy to use, even for beginners. Functions like email list management, email templates, and contact management are a few of the reasons people keep coming back to Constant Contact.
You can track and report your stats and share with social media. There is also 1GB of storage for your files, and you’ll have access to a full image library that you can use in your emails. You can’t beat that!
We found that Constant Contact lives up to its name nicely, by keeping you in “constant contact” with your target audience and thereby increasing your chances for success. Developing relationships with clients is what sales are all about, and Constant Contact seems to be one of the most effective tools that you can find today to handle this for you. The software gets you started by making the connections. Then it is up to you to follow up on the contacts.
The cost of starting with Constant Contact is $20 per month but that’s only after a free 60-day trial. So you’ll have plenty of time to test drive this one before purchasing or committing.
2. AWeber
You have probably heard of Aweber.com. It is one of the most popular email marketing services around. The automated features of this application allow you to send automatic email messages, use the email templates to set up professional emails for your audience, and even track your email with detailed insights on how you are doing.
This is a great tool to grow your business and keep up with your prospects as you grow. AWeber is one of the most popular tools available today to fine-tune your email marketing campaigns.
You can start Aweber with a 30-day free trial; then the service is billed at $19 per month. This is not a bad deal when you think about the fact that you are buying time that you don’t have to sit by your computer and reply to each email yourself!
3. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a comprehensive email marketing tool that allows you to offer upgrades and incentives within your email signup forms. There are auto-responders and other tools that you can use to upgrade your marketing plan. It is easy to use and comes with tools that allow you to segment your contacts into groups that allow you to manage them quickly and easily. This can save you a great deal of time in the long run and help you plan your strategies.
The cost of ConvertKit is $29 per month to start, but they offer a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.
4. Drip.com
Drip.com is a new platform that allows you to use native integrations and unique new sales tools to increase your activity among customers and drive more sales. They use a compilation of tools, and they focus on saving sales from abandoned shopping carts and personalized emails.
Email is meant to have a personal approach, as we mentioned in the introduction. So Drip.com seems to answer that problem by creating connections from your company to the customer and increasing engagement with your brand and products.
This could be seen as a great retargeting campaign tool as well when you need to focus on lassoing in the people that would have lost otherwise.
You can get a free trial account for up to 100 subscribers. Then the cost is $41 per month. This service is a bit more costly than some of the others, but it offers some fresh tools that you may not have seen in any other automated programs.
Their site is unique and almost looks like it was drawn “freehand.”
5. GetResponse
GetResponse is a great email marketing solution. It is very comprehensive in scope and we couldn’t find one thing that it does not cover in terms of email marketing tools. It’s easy to use but don’t let that make you think it is not a robust solution. You can do any of the following things with GetResponse:
- Create email marketing campaigns
- Create custom landing pages
- Conduct online webinars
- Set up autoresponders
- Set up automatic resell campaigns
- Customize forms
All of these tools allow you to improve your marketing efforts and increase conversions. These tools are automatic and worry-free. Once you set them up, you can log in anytime to tweak the settings, launch a webinar, or do whatever you want to do. You control the features, but the smart “AI” works for you, even while you’re away.
Creating forms for customers that give you important information and using data efficiently can all be achieved with this service.
The interface is also beautiful, making for a positive UX (user experience). You can do active forms to get feedback on what customers want, segment your audience with the segmentation tools, and even conduct A/B testing to see which type is converting more.
Integration is also not a problem with GetResponse. You can integrate your email campaigns with many third-party programs like SalesForce, ZenDesk, and OptinMonster. So you can even expand on what GetResponse already does to enhance further and grow your email marketing campaigns.
To get started with GetResponse, just sign up for your 30-day free trial. Then the price will be $15 per month.
6. MailChimp
MailChimp has a lot to offer that goes beyond the task of email marketing. Another advantage to MailChimp is that it allows you to quickly integrate with other platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and other eCommerce or blogging platform solutions. This makes it painless to import and export your data and contacts, leads, and additional information to send the messages to the people that will provide the most significant potential for return.
Like many of the other solutions we’ve discussed, MailChimp has autoresponders and tracking and analytical tools to help you track your results. You can even set up your delivery times based on your users’ timezones.
Their price is an attractive aspect of their platform. You can use the “forever free” plan to get up to 12,000 email sends up to 2,000 subscribers. They have many other programs that also allow you to obtain the mailing addresses of potential prospects for a certain fee.
The business plan is only $10 per month. For that, you get automatic emails, delivery by time zone, advanced testing tools, and access to 24/7 help and support.
7. Google Mail for Business
Gmail is the standard email service provided by Google, which has the market on all Android devices. Many business owners use the tools like Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google Drive, and others. There are plenty of add-ons too such as helpful apps that help you organize your time or count the time worked.
For business owners, you may want to look into the business email plan. The starter plan for a business email with your company address starts at $5 per user per month for 30 GB of storage for Google Drive. If you want the unlimited plan, it will cost you $10 per user per month.
Alternately, you can use your regular personal Gmail email account for your business and come up with a unique name at the beginning of your email that symbolizes your business name. This will keep you from having to pay the premium price, but it does not allow you to have your domain in your emails.
8. Active Campaign
Active Campaign gives you an entire sales dashboard at your fingertips. It combines your email marketing, automation, and sales campaigns with easy-to-use email template editors and signup forms. You could say that this solution puts everything in one place so that you can control the features.
A critical aspect of this application is that it allows you to segment your audience, a crucial element of email marketing. Remember that not everyone will respond the first time you send out an email message. You need to narrow down your focus and figure out which ones are most likely to appreciate specific products or services. The smart technology that’s included in this program allows you to segment your contacts based on their location, behavior, actions and social data.
In other words, Active Campaign puts “big data” in a small space so that you can control it. That’s pretty amazing!
You can start with this service for only $9 per month. The more you need to use, the higher the price will be. But it may be worth it to the serious entrepreneur and small business owner who wants to ramp up their results.
9. GMX Email
If you prefer not to turn over your email marketing to the “AI” machine just yet, perhaps all you need is an efficient online web mail service such as GMX. GMX Email. You get unlimited storage and allows you to send up to 50 MB of attachments. Also, you’ll get a few nifty tools that are similar to Google like an online calendar, email archive, and antivirus.
This service will not help you create automatic email marketing campaigns, though. If you want an electronic system to market your business, you need to use one of the other services we discussed above.
How to Choose the Best System
The email marketing system you choose will depend on some factors including your budget, how many emails you think you’ll need to send each week or month, the amount of specialized marketing you need such as retargeting campaigns, and specialized forms, and other factors.
Look over the information we’ve provided about these top 9 solutions and then find #10. We left this one intentionally blank because we feel that it is essential for everyone to do their research, too.
In our opinion, the best tools are GetResponse or ConvertKit because of their vast array of tools that allow small businesses to grow their businesses fast with their automatic weapons and integrations. But you should also scour the web for other tools to see what you can find. There are new email marketing tools that come out all of the time.
The key is to consider your priorities and then find the best solution that meets those needs. There is no one-size-fits-all service for every business owner.
But we hope that this list and the descriptions we’ve included will serve to let you know the tools that are out there and inspire you to look for the best tool for your business.
Technology has come a long way recently, and in 2018 and beyond, there is no reason why a small business cannot grow their business by leaps and bounds using one of these tools.