Choosing the right email marketing service is at the root of the success of your campaigns. With the right software, you can reach your customers and drive sales more efficiently. But how does one choose the best option in a sea of hundreds of different providers? Let’s start off with what to look for in a good email marketing tool.
4 Non-Negotiable Email Marketing Features
- Enables you to create highly engaging email newsletters with an easy user interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor).
- Ability to easily send bulk emails that are personalized and targeted, also known as marketing automation.
- Easy to manage your contact list, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
- Ensures that your email campaigns do not end up in the spam folder.
Now that we have addressed these must-have email marketing factors, we are going to compare some of the most popular email marketing service providers and why they made our list.
Best For Automation: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools you need to create incredible customer experiences. By adding a CRM to their functionality, ActiveCampaign can help surface the right leads to your sales team by using features like lead scoring. The service also allows you to share dynamic content in your emails — this allows you to provide different experiences to your contacts based on the way you segment them.
Best For Ecommerce: Drip
Drip, also known as the ecommerce revenue engine, is a marketing automation platform built for ecommerce – utilizing email, onsite, and tight 3rd-party integrations to help businesses drive revenue. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy, such as seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. Other standout features include smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual drag and drop builder for automation workflows.
Best For Advanced Features: Constant Contact
With Constant Contact, you can create effective email marketing and other online marketing campaigns to meet your business goals. As one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing services in the world, Constant Contact is also the most easy to use and beginner-friendly. Each account gives you access to unlimited emails, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful ecommerce integration for Shopify stores. Their Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
Best All-in-One Marketing Suite: HubSpot
HubSpot‘s integrated CRM platform contains the marketing, sales, service, operations, and website-building software you need to grow your business – which is one of the main reasons why small, medium, and enterprise customers choose this platform. HubSpot comes with all the powerful features you’d expect from an enterprise level email marketing software such as send time optimization, high email deliverability, A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.
Best Overall: MailChimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world, primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan. Like others on this list, MailChimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on the user’s time zones, and you can set up segmenting based on geolocation. And of course, you can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms.
Believe it or not, choosing the email marketing service is the easy part. Now what about deploying these campaigns? Contact us today and let’s talk strategy!