The shifting marketing landscape, with escalating PPC costs and restrictive social networks, demands an effective solution.
As a seasoned marketer, I’ve already pivoted towards email marketing, a strategy that lets you control your audience rather than bow to constantly changing platform rules.
Let’s dive in and explore 15 leading email marketing tools because there’s no better time than now to start building your list.
Top Email Marketing Tools
Now it’s time to take a look at our individual product reviews, covering features, deliverability rates, pricing, and lots of other useful information.
Active Campaign
Marketing automation platform
Sendinblue
E-mail builder and marketing tool
Omnisend
Marketing automation platform for E-commerce
1. Active Campaign (Editor’s Choice)
While other email marketing tools compete for 90% of the market looking for a basic email broadcasting tool, Active Campaign does not.
Their target demographic instead is anyone with a large email list that needs powerful tagging and segmentation features along with high-end automation.
And while you do get everything you need to conduct typical email marketing campaigns Active Campaign’s real standout capability is as a marketing automation platform that allows you to precisely control your sales funnel and customer pipeline.
It is entirely sales-focused.
Putting together a campaign is very straightforward – you simply choose a list/segment, design your email layout from scratch or with a template, and then you hit ‘Send’.
They offer a migration service for anyone who wants to move to a paid Active Campaign plan, which is a time-saver for new customers.
‘Conversations’ allow you to interact with customers via web chat, email, and Facebook messenger but without using third-party email marketing tools, so all of your customer data, leads, and engagements are kept in one place.
You even get a Gmail add-ons so you can leverage the power of Active Campaign without leaving your inbox.
It’s also remarkably affordable, with paid plans available for just $7.50 per month, but you can incrementally upgrade your plan as your business grows.
Price: From $7.50 per month (500 contacts)- Free trial: 14 days
- Deliverability: 91.1%
- Intended for: Businesses that want to actively monetize their email list
2. Sendinblue
Sendinblue exists at the opposite end of the spectrum to HubSpot’s email tool in that it has a freemium version.
But even the paid plans start at just $25 monthly for up to 10,000 emails per month, spread across your entire contact database.
What this means is that you can send 10 emails to 1,000 people per month, for example.
The features available to you do depend on what pricing tier you’re in, so you’d need to upgrade to their $65/mo ‘Premium’ plan if you want A/B testing as standard.
And the same applies to your ability to create landing pages i.e. you have to upgrade first.
Users get a nice drag-and-drop email builder to create the exact look and feel they want for your email sequences.
Sendinblue also makes setting up your first campaign very straightforward, and the automation feature makes it easy to set up a workflow.
The ‘Contacts’ database feature is also easy to use. There are dozens of integrations for you to work with, plus they also support SMS marketing and the ability to create Facebook ads from within the dashboard.
One nice feature is the ability to use their SMTP to track the performance of your transactional emails – you’d typically have to sign up for an entirely separate service to gain this type of functionality for your marketing emails.
- Price: From $0 per month
- Free trial: Yes (Permafree)
- Deliverability: 96.3%
- Intended for: Can scale from beginner to enterprise
3. Omnisend
Omnisend is a service aimed squarely at online store owners who want to use multiple marketing channels.
They offer an extensive list of integrations with online stores and e-commerce platforms from Shopify to Wix, Amazon, and WooCommerce.
So once you’ve integrated it with your store, you can then set up a basic email marketing campaign with A/B testing if you want.
But Omnisend’s real power lies in its pre-built automation that caters to everything from basic transactional emails to cart abandonment sequences.
Users can also leverage the audience segmentation capabilities of this tool to narrow down their audience and provide a more personalized shopping experience.
And then finally, Omnisend offers SMS marketing functionality, so you can contact your customers (locally or internationally) by text message.
Something to watch out for, however, is their email deliverability rate which stands at 85.1%.