10 Top Email Service Providers You Should Consider for Your Business
Is email marketing one of your company's top priorities in 2022? Are you looking for the best email service provider for your business?
Finding the right email marketing service can make or break the success of your marketing campaign. Email marketing is considered one of the most cost-effective marketing methods for small businesses. Email marketing generates a 4300% return on investment (ROI) for companies in the United States, according to the Direct Marketing Association. This is because email marketing is very manageable, gives you complete control, and allows you to keep in touch with your customers directly.
It is essential to understand that a huge part of your success with your email marketing campaigns are entirely dependent on the email service provider that you choose, as they are in charge of making sure that your emails are delivered to the recipient's inbox. If you are not mindful, you might end up paying a lot more for fewer marketing features and lower email deliverability rates (which causes you to lose even more money).
What Things Should You Seek in an Email Marketing Tool?
A good email marketing service should enable you to design highly engaging email newsletters with an easy-to-use interface. It should allow you to personalize your emails and send out targeted bulk emails without much effort, which we all know as marketing automation or workflows.
In addition, your email marketing service should make it easy for you to segment users into groups, manage your contact lists, pull data points, and track the analytics of your email marketing campaigns.
Above all, a good email service provider ensures that your email campaigns are not routed to the spam folder.
Following that, let's take a look at some of the most popular email marketing service providers and see how they stack up.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the perfect tool for you if you’re an e-commerce brand. It gives marketers who want to increase their revenue access to SMS and advanced email functionality. As an email marketing agency, Klaviyo is our top pick. Their editor is simple to use, and they have ready-made responsive templates. Emails can be personalized with product recommendations and dynamic blocks.
Klaviyo monitors website interactions and events, which can be used in emails, automations, and segmentation. All customer data is saved in individual profiles, stored in a CRM, allowing you to learn more about your customers.
Klaviyo also has sophisticated reporting capabilities. It provides customized benchmarks for your business in addition to metrics dashboards.
Klaviyo's free plan includes up to 50 SMS contacts and 250 email contacts and 500 emails, and 150 SMS messages sent.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an effective email service provider for authors, bloggers, and marketers. It is straightforward to use and very powerful. ConvertKit's unique feature makes it easy to offer content upgrades and other rewards with email signup forms. It also comes with auto-responders that are easy to set up and use so that you can send drip emails from their email service.
With ConvertKit, you can quickly divide your subscribers into interested and those who have already bought. This helps you send automated emails that seem more personal, which can help you get more sales. In marketing terms, this is what you call "targeted email marketing."
People who use this platform will be able to do A/B testing, make beautiful email templates, set up landing pages, and more.
ConvertKit provides email support and has a lot of information about how to navigate the platform. ConvertKit has a lot of features that are specifically made for creators and professional bloggers, like paid newsletters. That's why they are considered the best email service for professional bloggers. We can now sell digital goods and subscriptions from the same platform.
ConvertKit has a 14-day free trial, and their prices start at $29 a month. They also have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Their Creator Pro plan also has many extra features, like a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.
MailChimp
Mailchimp is by far our least favorite platform as an email marketing agency. We are not in the business to bash platforms but, we have found the interface here to not be intuitive and almost impossible for a growing company to scale.
Let’s call this a “starter” platform. Mailchimp is great if you’re a beginner and just looking to test out email marketing; however, if you’re needing a robust platform with data at your fingertips, look elsewhere.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign's email marketing service is only one component of the company's overall marketing capabilities.
The software makes it simple to personalize your emails with contact information. You can also do split testing up to five different email versions to see which content performs the best.
Segment your audience using insights such as contacts' email activity for more targeted messages. There are even website tracking features for gathering information on contacts' page visits and other onsite actions.
ActiveCampaign has great trigger options for workflows, more than any other platform we’ve seen so far.
When you upgrade from the Lite to Plus plan, you gain more advanced automation features. You can, for example, score contacts based on their engagement, split different test workflows, and obtain a visual overview of your automations and how they connect.
The Plus package also includes various marketing channels, such as SMS and landing pages. The 14-day free trial option allows you to test the platform with a set number of contacts and email sends. Live chat and email support are included in all plans.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact has a large number of free email templates. Alternatively, a tool will automatically create your own branded templates based on your website or Facebook page.
Other features include A/B testing for subject lines and automated resends to subscribers who do not open a campaign. The Email Plus package includes extra features such as multi-step automated email series and surveys and online donations tools.
Advanced segmentation allows you to manage contacts automatically based on email link clicks. Alternatively, you can use the Shopify or WooCommerce plugins to create custom segments based on criteria like subscriber engagement or purchase activity.
In addition to email marketing tools, Constant Contact allows you to build landing pages or even an online store or an entire website from scratch. You can also manage your social media activity from the platform, such as post scheduling, responding to messages and comments, and running ads.
While no free plan is available, paid plans include unlimited emails and email and chat support. Prices rise as the number of contacts increases.
GetResponse
GetResponse provides a couple of marketing tools for small businesses, including a fully-equipped email marketing service. The platform includes a library of professionally designed email templates and a drag-and-drop editor that allows you to transform your emails into beautifully branded messages quickly.
You can gather data on customer behavior and interests, then personalize your email campaigns with powerful segmentation tools. Alternatively, marketing automation can automatically tag and score contacts to trigger targeted emails.
Other automation features include time-based drip campaigns and the ability to view your email sequence on a calendar to see when subscribers will receive messages. You can also send transactional emails alongside marketing campaigns, and e-commerce plugins allow you to promote products in emails and landing pages.
Aside from email marketing, you can use the built-in tool and free templates to create and manage Facebook ads. The platform also includes tools for hosting your webinars. With pre-made automated sales funnels designed for various industries and purposes, the conversion tunnel feature helps you bring everything together.
GetResponse provides a free plan that allows you to send one email to 300 contacts per month. Live chat and email support are also included.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an easy-to-use email marketing platform designed specifically for e-commerce sites. To convert leads into consumers, it provides various options such as email automations and SMS marketing.
Omnisend combines email marketing, text messages, web browser push alerts, Google Customer Match, and Facebook ad retargeting to ensure you engage with as many customers as possible.
Segmented campaigns are possible across all of its channels. As a result, you will be able to target the exact customer you need for your product or service.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor provides a large selection of responsive email templates that you can customize using the drag and drop builder. Furthermore, personalizations can be easily added using your contact information. And, with send time optimization, you can send out emails at the optimal time for each contact. The segmentation tool allows you to go even further, creating custom segments of subscribers using multiple filters.
You can also create and send out branded transactional emails with personalized content within the same platform.
The email automation is very simple as it uses the drag and drop editor to draft each email sequence, with conditions that are drawn from subscriber behavior and previous interactions.
Also, you can utilize the platform for free for an indefinite time period, but you can only send campaigns to up to five contacts. The Basic plan is limited to 2,500 emails per month, whereas the Unlimited plan, as the name suggests, has no sending limit. Pricing rises as your contact list grows. Both plans include email support, but the Unlimited plan has priority.
MailerLite
MailerLite is an email service provider that meets all of your basic requirements. With their drag-and-drop editor, you can create any email campaign. You can also use their website builder to grow your email list with signup forms, create dedicated landing pages, and even an entire website. MailerSend, a third-party service, can be used to send transactional emails.
MailerLite also provides email automation and personalized email based on user behavior. Emails for abandoned carts are available for Shopify and WooCommerce stores. The topics of contact management and segmentation are also covered.
You can optimize campaign results by using A/B testing and smart delivery by time zone. In addition, MailerLite provides reports and analytics to help you track your performance.
MailerLite offers a free plan that allows for up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.
AWeber
AWeber offers a couple of email marketing tools that beginners can use. Aside from a wide range of email templates, the platform has a drag-and-drop editor and a design assistant that is powered by artificial intelligence. With this tool, you can easily build templates for your brand as you send out newsletters by using your social media accounts and website.
Connecting with your customers is much easier since you can automatically or manually do tags. You can readily tag your subscribers based on the information they have provided on your signup forms or if they have clicked one of your links or checked one of your emails.
With AWeber’s email automation features, you can efficiently run campaigns on autopilot like drip campaigns for your welcome series or product launch. Plus, if you do not want to stress yourself out with your campaign, the platform has pre-made workflows designed for each stage. You just need to customize them according to your audience and brand.
Aside from this, you can also have the liberty to make beautiful landing pages with their ready-to-use templates and stock images. The templates also have signup forms, allowing you to easily manage your email lists by tagging subscribers from each form.
The pricing plans for AWeber depend on the number of subscribers, and each includes phone, chat, and email support.
Conclusion
Finding the right email service provider for your business can be a bit daunting. You have to keep in mind that you always have to consider your needs - are you looking for something that offers a wide selection of templates or a user-friendly interface? Do you need some advanced segmentation or automation features? How important is reporting and data to you? What integrations do you need?
Overall, all platforms should have the basics: AB Testing, Segmentation, Templates, and Workflows. Each platform has different plans and pricing, and it is up to you to choose the one that suits your business best. Take some time to assess your requirements and do extensive research before making your decision. If you need help, contact us here!