There are a lot of misconceptions floating around about email marketing. We’ve lost count of how many business owners, whose bottom lines could benefit hugely from an email marketing plan, we’ve heard write it off as either spam or something only major enterprises ever do.
Equating all email marketing with spam is like equating all food with airline food: there’s a wrong way to do it, yes, but there are also many ways to do it right. And if you think email marketing is only a tool for big corporations, you’re basically leaving money in their pockets.
We’d like to help you leverage the insanely powerful customer relationship tool that is email. To do that, we’re going to run down some of the best subscription software for email marketing, and help you decide which is the best for your business.
Why Email Marketing?
The goal of all marketing is to build fruitful relationships with customers. From solutions as low-tech as hanging a sign outside your business to platforms as high-tech as social media, the best thing a marketing campaign can do is win you a customer’s loyalty.
Like all relationships, your connection with your customers has to be constantly worked on and strengthened. Email is one of the best tools out there to reach your customers no matter where they are, personalize your appeals to different sorts of customers, and keep them thinking about your business — so that they keep coming back.
The evidence backs that up: studies show that email marketing offers a better ROI than social media or paid search boosting, with some researchers claiming a return of up to $38 for every dollar spent.
Better yet, email marketing is cheap and easy. Why spend money putting up a billboard, or break your back and dry your mouth sending out snail mailers, when you could spend much less effort and money on a campaign that’s way more likely to catch eyes?
The only expense of email marketing is in licensing software to help manage it, but it’s an investment that’ll easily pay for itself. With email marketing software, you get a wealth of features that go far beyond what you’d be able to do if you wrote and broadcast all your customer outreach emails yourself:
- Autoresponders to automate email sends when customers take certain actions or meet certain conditions — cutting down on your workload.
- A/B testing to help you decide what sort of email campaign is most effective.
- Drip campaigns to guide customers steadily toward new levels of your sales funnel.
- List managers to organize your lead information and easily classify potential customers — who you can then target with personalized campaigns.
And so on. We’ll go more in-depth in just a moment, but hopefully, this convinces you of the benefits of email marketing and how it can add value to your business.
How To Choose An Email Marketing Tool
Before you read our list, take a moment to think about what your business goals are. Do you want to build a bigger contact list? To drum up excitement about a new product? To build buzz about a sale or event? Or just to move more units?
Once you’ve picked a goal, the next thing to decide is how much work you’re willing to put in. What’s your comfort level with visual design? How good are you at writing? Do you like to spend a lot of time curating a mailing list and a set of personalized messages, or do you want your email campaigns to mostly run themselves so you can get back to work?
Ease of use was a primary consideration for us in building our list, and it should be for you, too. Never forget that you’re seeking a tool to make your life easier, and be careful with anything that might require you to know how to code. A wide variety of premade templates can bump an editor’s usability way up — but make sure they’re mobile-responsive and won’t be too big to read on a phone, where over 70% of your customers will first see it.
Another critical point is deliverability. This is a measure of how many of your marketing emails will actually arrive where they’re intended to go. No matter how well-crafted your campaign, if you send it out as a mass broadcast (and you will) it runs the risk of being flagged as spam. Make sure to choose a tool that will get you past the most overactive spam filters.
Finally, yes, price should absolutely factor in. The most important thing here is not necessarily to always choose the cheapest subscription: you might miss the perfect tool for you that way. Rather, you should choose one that your business budget can handle. Use the size of your business — both right now, and the size you’re hoping to grow to — as a benchmark for how much to pay.
If you want to know even more about the most powerful things you can do with email marketing in 2020, check out this helpful 10-minute video that’ll give you an idea of the best features to look for.
What Makes These Products Different From Each Other?
Lots of the email marketing platforms currently available have suites of features that look similar at first glance, making the choice more difficult. However, with a little examination, major distinctions begin to appear, with reverberating effects on who they’ll be the best choice for.
One significant difference between email marketing tools is how the price scales based on the number of subscribers. Some tools, such as Constant Contact and MailerLite, specify how large your mailing list can be in their subscription tiers.
Others, like MailChimp, divide subscriptions by other features and change the prices of individual tiers based on your number of subscribers. Still others, like SendInBlue, offer unlimited contacts from the very beginning, but vary prices based on the number of emails you send.
Another important difference is that many of these tools are designed with specific target markets in mind. For example, Drip is aimed toward e-commerce, while ConvertKit is built for content creators, and Constant Contact works best for new business owners as they work to grow their lists.
As we mentioned above, not all email marketing managers boast equal deliverability levels. The good folks at Email Tool Tester ran tests over three years to determine which newsletter tools could claim not just high but consistently high deliverability.
In July 2019, MailerLite scored the highest with 94.8% of emails reaching their intended destination, while Benchmark scored lowest with a dismal 41.8% (though this was an outlier — the next lowest was CleverReach at 79.6%).
Finally, there’s the size of the product to think about. Email marketing ranges from tightly streamlined services like MailerLite, to enormous package suites like Keap, which bundles email marketing with a complete customer relationship manager. Make sure that you don’t end up paying for something that offers way more than you need.
What else do you need before you get started with email marketing?
Choosing a service is just the beginning. Once you’ve settled on your platform, you’ll need a strong marketing plan to make use of it.
That plan needs to include a way to gather signatures — whether on paper, through social media, using an online sales funnel like ClickFunnels, or through traditional email blasts.
With those contacts on your list, you’ll need to write the content for those emails: welcome emails, thank-you emails, come-back emails, and eye-catching content related to your specific offers. Don’t forget the subject line is the most important part of the email — it’s all most people will see!
It all sounds a bit daunting, but don’t fear: a great marketing tool is the very first step. Without further ado, let’s look more closely at some of the best.
Our 6 Favorite Email Marketing Tools of 2020
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact’s website claims that everything about their marketing platform derives directly from their core mission: “to empower small businesses and nonprofits to grow customer relationships and succeed.”
Having been around since the early days of internet commerce in 1995, they’ve grown into a whole suite of products and played a major role in pioneering email marketing to become what it is today.
Constant Contact’s expansive marketing platform goes beyond simple mailing list management and email design. They boast a website builder that can create professional landing pages where your emails can send potential customers, along with a suite of features to enhance e-commerce.
They’ve got the option to bring in more views through social media ads. They’ve even ventured into automation, in case email marketing is taking up too much of your time.
Constant Contact aims to position themselves as the email marketer that makes sure your emails are branded — a goal that encompasses design, content, style, and product. Branding is the best way to stand out in a crowed e-commerce field, and Constant Contact aims to help your emails leverage that power.
Pros
Unlimited emails on all plans: This is straight-up great. The freedom and luxury of being able to send any number of emails can’t be overstated, and the fact that it starts at the lowest-tier plan makes perfect sense for a tool trying to be friendly to small businesses. In addition to money, it saves a lot of anxiety — no need to worry that you wasted some of your precious monthly messages on a newsletter that fizzled.
Library of design options: Much like the emails, this is a feature that all price ranges offer full access to. The huge variety of templates all look good, and it’s great that they’re mobile-responsive — even better that you don’t have to pay extra to use any template you want. On top of that, they still look good when filled up with your branded content. The library of stock photos is just as extensive.
Wide range of features: Constant Contact has done a lot of work to make their service into a one-stop-shop. With the addition of the page builder, the ease of getting native ads onto Facebook and Instagram, and the smart decision to partner with Eventbrite, a single subscription can create a heady buzz around your small business or nonprofit.
Anything you can’t do within the app can be accomplished with one of nearly 500 integrations, though it’s great that options like surveys and coupons are included in the editor so you don’t need to go third-party.
Cons
No free membership: You can put Constant Contact through its paces for a 60-day free trial, but once that’s over, you have to cough up. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that the price point compares poorly to alternative email marketing tools. These other tools’ price tiers rise much less steeply than Constant Contact’s at higher subscriber numbers.
Automation doesn’t stack up: Compared to the dynamic automation workflows that come standard with MailerLite, Drip, and others, Constant Contact’s autoresponders feel static, and aren’t very adaptable to a diverse customer base.
You can automate responses and schedule emails to be sent at certain times without your input, but the interface is cumbersome, especially if you plan a series of multiple follow-up emails.
Limited control options: You can’t create your own email designs, and in order to keep the templates from breaking down, you aren’t allowed to change them very much.
The rigid templates too often subvert that user-friendliness, leading to Microsoft Word-style frustration when design elements refuse to go where they’re supposed to. Advanced options like rule-based subscriber segmentation and A/B testing are similarly nowhere to be found.
Pricing
Constant Contact offers two plans: Email and Email Plus. The price of each scales based on the number of contacts in your manager.
Both plans offer unlimited emails, access to full tech support, the entire library of templates and stock photos, all integrations except Eventbrite, all analytics, and the mobile app.
The basic Email plan starts at $20 a month and allows one user and 1GB of file storage. The price scales to $45/month at 500 subscribers, $65/month at 2,500 subscribers, and $95/month at 5,000 subscribers.
The Email plus plan starts at $45 a month, and allows ten users and 2GB of storage, making it the better choice for larger marketing teams. It also adds email automation, event management, and the ability to include coupons and surveys in emails. Price scales to $65/month at 500 subscribers, $95/month at 2,500 subscribers, and $125/month at 5,000 subscribers.
Starting at 10,000 subscribers, both plans cost the same: $195/month up to 15,000, $225/month up to 25,000, and $335/month up to 50,000. On either plan, you can save 10% with a 6-month deal, and 15% with a 12-month deal.
2. MailerLite
MailerLite is a newcomer to the world of email marketing, founded in 2010 in Lithuania, but they’ve already burst onto the scene with a major splash. This July, they beat longer-established competitors in a deliverability test, with 94.8% of their emails reaching their intended destination.
MailerLite’s focus is on being affordable and easy to use without sacrificing power, and they manage that balance well. Their main draw, other than the clean, enticing UI in their editors and list manager, is their “Forever Free” plan — a godsend for smaller senders, who can access a flexible suite of features without paying a cent if their subscriber list stays under 1,000.
Pros
Forever Free plan: This is the kind of plan that looks so good you’ll swear it must be full of hidden catches. But it’s not too good to be true — what catches there are stand right out in the open, and they’re not bad.
Most small senders will be happy to overlook unobtrusive MailerLite branding on their emails in exchange for free use of excellent page and photo editors, landing page builders, and, of course, unlimited email sends. Even if you scale above 1,000, $10 a month is not that bad, and it gets you all the premium features.
Wide variety of basic features: Your marketing plan is in good hands with MailerLite. In addition to tools for designing eye-catching emails and editing templates, you can use another user-friendly editor to build landing pages that keep people’s attention after they click.
Whether you want to captur