Email marketing is essential for small businesses looking to broaden their reach and engage their customers. Gone are the days of generic mass emails ending up in your customers’ spam folders. With the right strategy and a robust software solution, you can send targeted, personalized messages to your audience to build brand awareness, drive traffic, and ultimately increase sales.
But with so many different email marketing platforms available, how do you know which is best for your needs? Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. These are some of the most popular and effective email marketing software options on the market, their features, benefits, and drawbacks, so you can make an informed decision and get the most out of your marketing efforts.
1. Mailchimp
While you could be forgiven for thinking Mailchimp is only useful for mailing lists and surveys, the company has spent the past few years acquiring smaller competitors and transforming itself into a full-fledged marketing email platform and customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
Mailchimp now offers a wide range of features and functionality beyond mere mailing lists, from conducting A/B testing and booking appointments to designing landing pages and carrying out behavioral testing. It also boasts a forever-free plan for up to 500 contacts, and it offers affordable paid plans starting at $11 per month, making it a top pick for small businesses and startups that want to scale on a budget.
There are some limitations, however. For example, some of Mailchimp’s most impressive features are locked behind a paid plan, and there are limits placed on the number of emails sent in a single day and month.
While these issues are not something smaller businesses will have to worry about, they’re something to keep in mind as your enterprise grows, especially since Mailchimp’s paid plans can jump in price significantly when you’re dealing with very large contact lists.
2. Constant Contact
While it started as a tool for event management, Constant Contact has quickly evolved into one of the most popular email marketing platforms. Its success can largely be attributed to its intuitive drag-and-drop email editor, as well as its foolproof integrations with major e-commerce platforms and other marketing tools like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Salesforce.
As with all email marketing software, there are some potential downsides. The most obvious one is that Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan, and some of its most convenient integration and email automation functions are reserved for its premium plan, which starts at a whopping $45 per month.
As such, it may not be the ideal choice for entrepreneurs with a tight marketing budget. But for businesses that can spare the cash and leverage its more sophisticated features (such as adding products from a Shopify store directly into emails), Constant Contact is an effective and user-friendly option.
3. Omnisend
As you might have guessed from the name, Omnisend is a marketing tool aimed at leveraging the power of omnichannel marketing, combining email, social media, and mobile app advertising channels to create a broader and more cohesive marketing strategy.
Even for email marketing alone, Omnisend includes some very handy features:
- A collection of no-code templates to help create more visually interesting emails
- A built-in analytics dashboard that lets you measure the success of your campaign and identify areas of opportunity or improvement
- Recommended workflows that expedite and simplify marketing for solo entrepreneurs or small businesses
While Omnisend’s free version is fairly generous, it’s another tool that only reaches its full potential if you’re willing to spring for the paid version. Other downsides to using this software include a lack of convenient data import options when creating new marketing campaigns and relatively limited design options compared to some competitors.
4. Brevo
For e-commerce stores and small businesses that frequently send out order confirmations, invoices, or shipping and delivery notices, it’s hard to beat a marketing email platform that prioritizes transactional emails like Brevo (ex-Sendinblue). This email marketing software seamlessly integrates with most other third-party tools, allowing you to easily incorporate it into your existing workflow.
Additionally, Brevo’s automation functionality is impressive compared to most other email marketing platforms. It can save small marketing teams quite a bit of time compared to handling everything manually.
While Brevo has a free plan, their premium solutions are required in order to lift daily sending limits, and some features that competitors include for free (such as A/B testing and basic reporting and analytics) are paid add-ons, and the premium tiers escalate in price quickly.
5. ActiveCampaign
If you’re planning to market to several distinct target audiences simultaneously, a traditional email marketing approach just won’t cut it. Instead, you should look to a tool tailored toward segmentation like ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign makes it easy to separate contacts into sub-lists so you can tailor your message based on their specific preferences. Its automated dynamic content tool can switch images, email copy, and even the call to action based on saved customer data, creating a personalized message that can significantly increase your email open rate.
ActiveCampaign does not offer a free version of its software, and the price quickly starts to jump once you hit 2,500 or more unique contacts. Still, it’s an attractive option for small businesses that want to scale up quickly, even with a small number of employees.
Harness the Power of Email Marketing
While we’ve looked at some of the most popular and feature-rich options above, this is by no means an exhaustive list. There’s an endless array of marketing software to choose from, so it’s always important to carefully consider the goals and specific needs of your business and weigh those against what each marketing email platform has to offer.
Email marketing platforms are some of the most powerful tools available to small businesses and marketers who want a simple and direct way of connecting with potential new customers. Not only is it highly effective as a marketing channel, but it’s also one of the easiest and least expensive for small businesses and startups to implement successfully.
If you’re looking for help with your email marketing strategy and feel overwhelmed by your myriad choices, consider reaching out to an expert partner like Galaxy Fed for assistance.
As a leading email marketing service provider, we can help simplify the process and tailor a suite of tools and software based on your goals. This way, we take the guesswork out of the equation and ensure that your campaigns are more successful.
