Give Your Business a Boost With Email Marketing Software [+ Top 5 Software Solutions]

As technology evolves, automation has become a must for business owners worldwide. From automating payroll to social media, businesses use automation every day to streamline their responsibilities. One task you may opt to automate is email marketing. And to do that, you can use email marketing software. But, how can email campaign software benefit your business? And, what are the best email platforms out there? Let us walk you through it.

What is email marketing software?

Email marketing software solutions are applications that allow you to plan, execute, monitor, and improve email marketing campaigns for your company. Instead of sending the emails out yourself, you can automate emails so they’re automatically sent out to leads and customers during their purchasing journey.

Email marketing is a popular way for business owners to build relationships with leads and clients, gain trust, and personalize experiences. In fact, roughly 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers. 

You can use email marketing software to:

• Build emails
• Schedule emails and campaigns
• Streamline operations
• Review metrics, such as open and click-through rates
• Get to know your customers
• Send personalized messages
• Upsell and cross-sell products and services
• Boost sales

With email marketing tools, you can avoid time-consuming tasks and automate email campaigns so you can spend more time focusing on your business. 

What are the benefits of email marketing platforms?

There are plenty of perks to using email marketing software to help grow your business and contact prospects and current customers. Here are just a few ways that email marketing software can benefit your small business. 

1. Automates tasks

Obviously, the major appeal to email marketing software is the ability to automate time-consuming tasks, like sending email campaigns, reminder emails, etc. 

If you want to save more time for your business and stop stressing about sending out emails, consider using email marketing automation software.

With email software, you can automate:

• Reminders
• Promotional emails
• Sending coupons and discounts
• Welcome emails
• Drip campaigns

Automating tasks also helps you optimize your time, giving you more to spend on other business tasks. 

2. Personalizes customer experience

Email marketing systems also allow you to personalize your customers’ experience, which is a win-win.

Customers love personalization and feeling seen and heard. Software can help you stand out and make specialized emails for customers.

With software, you can personalize:

• Copy
• Images
• Design
• Timing (e.g., “You left something in your cart!”)
• Subject lines
• Campaigns

The more you try to personalize different steps of the journey for your leads and customers, the better. 

3. Builds customer relationships

Email automations help you engage with your customers. And thus, build relationships with said customers.

With email automation, you can personalize messages for groups or individuals. Plus, you can use email and customer analytics to refine your targeting and messaging. 

4. Gives you insight 

With email services, you can learn a lot about your prospects and customers, like:

• What they react to (e.g., offers)
• Preferences
• Their buying journey

To find out if your campaigns are successful, your customers’ preferences, and what triggers your customers, you can track and measure the following metrics:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Number of contacts
• Subscribers 
• Number of unsubscribes

Best email marketing software for small businesses

Now that you know some background information on how email marketing software works and its perks, let’s get into the best software out there. Keep in mind your business’s needs while shopping for software. One software that works well for another business may not be the best fit for yours and vice versa. 

Without further ado, here are our top five email marketing services picks based on factors like features and pricing. 

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a complete email marketing SMS software for businesses. It’s easy to use for businesses with little to no email marketing experience and offers unique features made for non-designers and newbies. Sendinblue is also well known for its ability to send transactional emails (e.g., You left something in your cart). 

Highlights of Sendinblue:

• Beginner-friendly marketing automation tools
• AI-powered system to send emails at the perfect time to ensure best deliverability
• Smart segmentation to separate contacts into groups and personalize emails
• Drag and drop builder to design professional-looking emails
• Well-developed customer relationship management (CRM) section
• Various template-building options

Pricing:

• Free plan lets you send 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts, but the emails will have SendinBlue’s branding
• Paid plans start at $25 for 10,000 emails per month and no daily sending limit
• SMS marketing pricing can vary based on your sending requirements

A few disadvantages to Sendinblue include a somewhat complicated interface, and advanced template creation is an additional cost.

Drip

Drip is an email marketing platform that is popular for e-commerce businesses, digital marketers, and bloggers. The platform offers a variety of tools to make sales funnels, marketing automation, and personalization simple and easy for users. 

Highlights of Drip:

• Visual email builder
• Library of pre-made workflows and strategies
• Customizable lead generation forms
• Seamless integration with website builders, like WooCommerce
• Automations to nurture post-purchase customers
• Plenty of support options for customers
• E-commerce segmentation
• Reporting dashboard

Pricing:

• 14-day free trial 
• Plans start as low as $19 per month for unlimited emails to 500 active subscribers
• Pricing increases as your contact list grows

Although Drip can be a little pricier than other options, it offers competitive features for e-commerce websites and business owners looking to maximize their email marketing efforts. 

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the most well-known and reputable platforms for businesses in the email marketing world. It has a wide range of customization and features, making it a good fit for many small businesses. 

Highlights of HubSpot:

• All-in-one marketing platform with email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builder, and more
• Easy email personalization and template customization
• Seamless integrations with other HubSpot solutions (e.g., Sales Hub)
• Top-notch marketing automation
• Smart send feature for optimal sending times

Pricing:

• Free plan includes the CRM and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools; allows you to send 2,000 emails; and lets you store an unlimited number of subscribers
• Paid plans start at $45 per month

One of the downsides to HubSpot is that it’s more expensive than other solutions. And, you may need to pay extra costs, like for additional contacts. 

Constant Contact 

Constant Contact is another great beginner-friendly email marketing platform for businesses. With Constant Contact, you can easily manage your lists, contacts, templates, and marketing calendar. Not to mention it comes with customizable options and advanced tools.

Highlights of Constant Contact:

• Easy to use and set up, especially for new businesses
• Detailed reports
• Over 100 email templates to choose from or customize
• Automated campaigns and drip series
• Helpful customer service
• “Plus” features allow for specific types of campaigns, such as coupon offers, donation collections, or surveys
• Online training and in-person live seminars for customers
• Wide range of third-party integrations

Pricing:

• Free trial with unlimited access
• Plans start at $20 per month and can vary based on the number of contacts you have

With Constant Contact, pricing can add up quickly depending on how many contacts you need in the system. And, it lacks multi-channel automation where users can create workflows for not only emails but also SMS and social media.

AWeber

AWeber has been in the game a while and offers a wide range of tools for small- and medium-sized businesses to manage their email marketing. The platform was specifically built with small businesses and entrepreneurs in mind. 

Highlights of AWeber:

• Behavioral automation
• Advanced audience and account analytics
• Powerful email marketing features, such as AMP emails and tag-based subscriber segmentation
• Good for businesses with limited budget 

Pricing:

• Free plan up to 500 subscribers with limited features
• 30-day free trial on the Pro version
• Starts at $19.99 per month
• Users can sign up for quarterly or annual plans to save more money

AWeber lacks a number of advanced features that other platforms offer, such as sophisticated automations. The user experience isn’t as intuitive as it could be for users, either. 

Additional email marketing platforms

Of course, it goes without saying that there are tons of email marketing software options to choose from. Here are a few more that didn’t make our top five list, but are still strong options for small businesses:

• ActiveCampaign
• Campaign Monitor
• ConvertKit
• EmailOctopus
• MailerLite
• Moosend
• Omnisend

Review the pros and cons of each platform before making any email marketing software decisions. When looking at software, consider must-have features for your business, pricing, and disadvantages. Check out customer reviews to see what others have to say and what their experience was with the software. 

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