Is email marketing a priority for your business in 2016? Are you looking for the email marketing software? Choosing the best email marketing service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign. In this article, we will review the 7 best email marketing services for small businesses.
Why Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service is Important?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tool. It is easy to manage, gives you full control and allows you to establish direct contact with your customers. For more on this topic, see our guide on why you should start building your email list right away.
While you can use OptinMonster to easily get more email subscribers, the actual email delivery part comes down to your email marketing service provider.
If you aren’t careful, then you might end up paying a lot more money for fewer features and terrible deliverability (which causes you to lose even more money).
A good email marketing service enables you to create highly engaging emails. It also allows you to manage your contacts, segment users into groups, and track the performance of your email campaigns.
Most importantly, a good email marketing service ensures that your emails do not end up in the spam folder.
Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the best email marketing service providers and how they stack up against each other.
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, and more.
Each account gives you access to easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, an image library and 1GB of storage for your own files.
Constant Contact offers unmatched support with live chat, email, community support, and a vast library of resources.
They also offer online training as well as live seminars in your neighborhood. This allows small business to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it like a pro.
For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses.
Constant Contact has a 60 day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.
2. AWeber
AWeber is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seemlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.
You get access to ready to use email templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.
Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
AWeber offers a 30 day free trial. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month.
3. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
ConvertKit allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails.
With ConvertKit, you can easily segment contacts into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This is great for marketing automation.
ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material.
Pricing for ConvertKit plans start from $29/month with a 30-day refund policy.
4. GetResponse
GetResponse is a hugely popular email marketing solution. It is extremely easy to use and simplifies email marketing for small businesses and absolute beginners.
It comes with some amazing marketing automation tools which allow you to create smart automated campaigns. With a drag and drop builder, you can create campaigns, segment contacts, and send content designed for specific groups. These tools help you create effective campaigns to boost your profits.
GetResponse comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, tracking, and autoresponders. It also integrates with third party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc.
Support is provided by phone, live chat, and email. Their help section is full of free learning material including videos, webinars, how-tos, guides, etc.
GetResponse offers a 30 day free trial. Their pricing starts from $15/month.
5. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers. They offer a very easy to use interface with great tools and awesome support.
It integrates beautifully with WordPress, Magneto, Shopify, and many other platforms. If you are using WordPress, then see our ultimate guide to using MailChimp and WordPress for detailed instructions.
MailChimp also comes with easy email creator, merge tags, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking and analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on user’s timezones and setup segmenting based on geolocation.
Support is offered by email, live chat, and a huge knowledge base with how-tos, videos, and tutorials.
MailChimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for upto 2,000 subscribers. Their paid plans start from $10/month.
Because of their free plan, we rate MailChimp the best email marketing software for nonprofits.
6. Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is another popular email marketing solution. It gives you everything you would need to run successful campaigns and then some more.
They have a beautiful drag and drop email builder. It allows you to use professionally designed email templates and make them your own. They also offer a drag and drop segmenting tool to create different campaigns for different contacts based on behavior and actions.
You can personalize each message using the rich customer data. This makes your emails more personal and gives much better results.
Not to mention their easy to use A/B testing, tracking, optimization, and social sharing tools.
Support is available 24/7 via email and support forums. Premier customers can also avail phone support. They have extensive documentation step-by-step how-tos to help you get started and fix things on your own.
Campaign Monitor’s pricing plans start from $9/month.
7. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign combines your email marketing, automation, with CRM and sales. It comes with all the tools you will need to create smarter email marketing campaigns.
ActiveCampaign comes with a beautiful email template editor and mobile friendly signup forms. It allows you to segment contacts based on their actions, location, behavior, and social data. It can also fetch additional data about your contacts using only their email address.
It integrates beautifully with many third party software including WordPress. You can also send SMS messages to your contacts for follow up on campaigns.
ActiveCampaign’s plans start from $9/month. You can also request a demo with limited features for a test run.
Although the pricing on ActiveCampaign gets quite high, it’s totally worth the money if marketing automation is what you’re looking for.
We hope this article gave you a good overview of the best email marketing services for your business. You may also want to see our list of 24 must have WordPress plugins for business websites
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post 7 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business (2016) appeared first on WPBeginner.