7 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Do you want to improve your email marketing? Are you looking for the best tools to help create engaging newsletters and marketing emails that foster stronger customer relationships?

Choosing the right email marketing software is essential to effectively marketing your products and services and maintaining communication with current customers.

In this article, we’ll share seven of the best email marketing tools and compare them to help you decide which is the right solution for you.

Why Is Email Marketing So Important?

Not sure if email marketing is worth your time? Let’s take a look at a few reasons why it is.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for online businesses.

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email marketing has consistently accounted for the highest returns on investments of any marketing channel. In fact, the group states that for every $1 spent, marketers can expect an average return of $42.

Direct Ownership

Unlike social media platforms, you have complete control of your email lists, segments, and content. Algorithm changes and platform restrictions often limit businesses that rely solely on social media marketing.

Customer Acquisition & Retention

Email marketing can be used to attract new customers and retain current ones. According to a recent study, 59% of consumers reported that marketing emails influence purchase decisions.

Additionally, personalized emails increase click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversion rates by 10%.

Measurable Results

The best marketing tools provide detailed analytics to help you track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. You can use the data to make changes to your campaigns over time.

Still hesitant about using email marketing for your business? Take a look at 6 Tips to Sending Better Marketing Emails. The guide offers several ways you can leverage email marketing to improve the customer experience, stay connected to your donors or customers, and boost sales.

What to Look for in an Email Marketing Service

The right email marketing service will let you create engaging newsletters, welcome newsletter series, and other marketing messages with a user-friendly interface.

It will also allow you to segment customers and potential customers accordingly, ensuring that you’re sending the most effective messages to the appropriate audience.

Additionally, you’ll want to be sure you choose an email marketing tool that lets you manage your contacts, create newsletters with little effort, and use A/B testing. Your email marketing service provider should also integrate with some of your existing tools so you can set up automation for specific tasks related to your workflow.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in and explore the seven best email marketing service providers.

1. Drip

Drip is a powerful email marketing platform for eCommerce businesses. It offers a user-friendly interface to help you create engaging newsletters with little effort.

The platform also offers hundreds of customizable templates you can choose from to make effective newsletters for just about anything.

Its pre-built workflows let you set up automation for several different types of processes.

For example, we use Drip workflows to automate our WP Simple Pay Welcome Email Series. The automated workflow ensures we communicate effectively with our users throughout their journey with our plugin.

Drip is best-suited for eCommerce stores because it integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce. It also offers integration for WordPress users.

The platform also offers in-depth, easily accessible analytics within its dashboard, which lets you track revenue, click-through rates, open rates, and more.

Drip is a great email marketing service provider for WP Simple Pay users because you can integrate your payment forms with the platform to automate tasks such as adding a new customer to your mailing list.

Pricing: Drip starts at $39/mo. for businesses with email lists of up to 2,500. The plan lets you send unlimited emails and offers onsite campaigns and email support. You can also get started with a 14-day free trial.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a SaaS platform for small-to-medium-sized businesses that offers email marketing, marketing automation, and customer relationship management (CRM) functionality.

It is best suited for experienced email marketers serious about setting up powerful automation for triggered campaigns, sales follow-ups, automated segmentation, dynamic email content, and more.

The platform’s interface lets you create customized email templates and campaigns, build automation workflows, and track performance through its Reports feature.

Similar to Drip, if you’re using WP Simple Pay to accept payments on your WordPress site, you can integrate your payment forms with ActiveCampaign to automate post-purchase tasks.

If you’re new to email marketing and looking for a basic email marketing service that allows you to send newsletters and create email sequences like a Welcome Series, you’re better off going with Drip. ActiveCampaign offers tons of advanced features that you may not need right away.

Pricing: ActiveCampaign offers three different Marketing plans for email and marketing automation starting at $49/mo. for businesses with 1,000 contacts.

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular AI-powered email marketing and automation platform.

It’s perfect for those new to email marketing and who want to create engaging marketing emails with a user-friendly, drag-and-drop editor. You can also use the platform to easily organize your audience, segment customers, and schedule emails.

What’s unique about Mailchimp is its ability to use hundreds of millions of data points to provide users with suggestions and recommendations for creating optimized emails. Its AI tools help you generate professionally written emails that represent your brand.

When it comes to tracking performance, Mailchimp offers advanced analytics and reporting tools to help you get the most out of your campaigns.

Like with Drip and ActiveCampaign, you can integrate WP Simple Pay payment forms with Mailchimp to automate purchase-related tasks.

Pricing: Mailchimp offers a free plan that lets you create email campaigns and send up to 1,000 emails per month. To use more advanced features like Generative AI and Creative Assistant, you’ll need to purchase the Standard Plan, which starts at $20/mo.

4. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is another popular email marketing and digital marketing platform designed to help businesses of all sizes grow their audience and strengthen customer relationships.

Like Drip, the platform offers easily customizable templates and a user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder.

You can also use Constant Contact to set up automation for welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, and other triggered campaigns.

Its analytics and reporting features are easy to use and provide insights into the performance of your emails.

Constant Contact offers advanced features beyond marketing emails, including a website and landing page builder, social media marketing tools, creative tools for surveys, polls, and donation forms, and basic CRM functionality that allows you to manage contacts.

Similar to Mailchimp, Constant Contact provides AI-generated content suggestions based on keywords you enter.

The platform is a great option for nonprofit organizations because it offers discounted plans.

Pricing: The Lite plan starts at $12/mo. and depends on the number of contacts and emails sent per month. You can also get started with a 30-day free trial.

5. Campaigner

Campaigner is an email marketing and marketing automation platform tailored for both small-to-medium-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises.

It comes with a drag-and-drop email builder, 900+ email templates, and advanced segmentation features that allow you to target specific audience groups.

Campaigner’s intuitive visual builder enables you to create automation workflows using an extensive list of events, triggers, and conditions.

For example, conversion tracking triggers a new set of actions based on where a customer is in their particular journey.

The platform lets you expand your campaigns to multiple channels using email + SMS workflows. This ensures you’re communicating with your customers via their preferred channel.

Campaigner’s interface is more challenging than Mailchimp, Drip, or Constant Contact, making it best suited for experienced digital marketers.

Pricing: Campaigner offers a free 30-day trial that lets you try out all of the platform’s features. Premium plans start at $59/mo. for up to 5,000 contacts.

6. Brevo – Formerly Sendinblue

Brevo (formerly known as Sendinblue) is a cloud-based marketing platform that offers a suite of tools to help businesses build relationships with their customers.

At the core of the platform is its powerful email marketing capabilities. It includes a drag-and-drop email builder with several responsive email templates from which you can choose.

The platform also offers advanced email automation features that let you create welcome series sequences, abandoned cart messages, and behavior-based triggers.

Like Campaigner, you can use Brevo to send transactional and marketing text messages.

If you’re using WP Simple Pay to accept Stripe payments on your WordPress site, you can easily integrate your payment forms with Brevo to automate purchase-related tasks.

For example, you can create or update a contact once they’ve completed a purchase or add a new customer to a specific list.

One of the best parts about Brevo is that it offers a generous free plan that lets you send up to 300 emails per day. Keep in mind that all your emails will have Brevo’s branding using the free plan.

Pricing: Premium Plans start at $25/mo. for unlimited contacts and up to 20,000 emails.

7. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a comprehensive suite of software tools for marketing, sales, and customer service.

Its Marketing Hub offers email marketing and automation services that let you create, personalize, and optimize marketing emails.

Your CRM database powers its email marketing tools to ensure your emails are personalized accurately.

HubSpot also features AI content writing abilities to help you craft the perfect email copy in minutes.

What makes its email marketing tools so popular among small-to-medium-sized businesses is its user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder and its extensive library of templates for newsletters, product announcements, re-engagement, and promotional offers.

Pricing: Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan that includes the CRM database and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools. The free plan allows you to send up to 2,000 emails per month and includes unlimited contacts. You can get started with the Starter Customer Platform for advanced features for $15/mo.

There you have it! Hopefully, this article has helped you learn more about some of the best email marketing service providers and determine which is right for you.

If you liked this article, you might also want to check out 6 Tips For Sending Better Marketing Emails and How to Send Push Notifications From Your WordPress Site.

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