Top 10 Email Marketing Tools

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is one of the top tools used by digital marketers, marketers and by small and big owners alike with which you can promote your business. With email marketing you can make new customers and keep your current customers engaged. In other words email marketing is a tool of marketing in which you send email to potential customers or existing customers, keeping in mind the purpose of enhancing the relationship and to increase customer loyalty and to repeat business. Email marketing is done whenever any advertisement, request for business, sales or donation is done.

Why to use email marketing?

The top reasons why you should consider using email marketing are as follows : –

E mail has been there almost since the inception of Internet and is predicted to be there for forever.
E mail has the largest reach than any other service on the internet. There are 3 times more email accounts registered than facebook and twitter combined.
E mail delivers the exact message you want to convey to the recipient.
E mail marketing has a higher return on investment( ROI ).
E mail is the preferred form of communication for most of the people. Unlike any other social media where you just scroll down to see photos of your friends and family, people actually expect to receive information about products and services and businesses.
E mail is an open platform, which means other social media are owned by companies and they can change the algorithm which can reduce your post visibility or even delete your content without any prior notice. On the contrary, you are in control of your email

How to use email marketing

For email marketing you need to have a database of email ids and names of customers and clients or you can make a very well planned database of email lists differentiated according to demographics, age bracket, interests and engagement levels. If you are serious about email marketing and increasing business and customer database you can automate this by using many of the email marketing tools available. We will look into the top 10 email marketing services available which operate at affordable prices and also provides different packages to cater businesses of different size.

Read this article to find out the top 10 email marketing services providers :

1. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing service which is simple and very easy to use and also suitable for small businesses as they provide a 60-day free trial period before you go head on and choose Constant Contact as your email marketing service provider. After which the plans start from around 1000 INR (around 15 $).

Plans offered:

Constant Contact offers a wide range of plans from which you can choose a plan according to your business needs and the size of your subscriber base. The most basic offering is 15$ per month as we said earlier and it offers a subscriber cap of 500. another offering is of 35 $ per month which will emails for up to 2500 subscribers. The next offering charges 85 $ for 1000 subscribers and the top plan for large businesses is a little expensive being priced at 295 dollars but offers to send emails up to 50000 subscribers. You can have even various have add-ons, each one of those are charged separately.

2. Sendin Blue

This service offers its customers to not only send Emails to your subscribers but also to leverage SMS marketing campaigns to inform, engage and convert. With Sendin Blue you can make custom marketing work flows to guide customers through a personalized buying journey. You can also reach to your customers through email and SMS messages triggered by their previous interactions with you. Sendin Blue has very beautifully designed simple user interface which offers result driven campaigns.

It caters several plans such as the Bronze plan which offers 60000 emails for 39 $ per month, the Silver plan offers 120000 emails for 66$ per month and the Gold plan offers emails up to 350000 emails at the price of 173$ per month. Sendinblue offers a micro plan for 17$ in which you can send 20000 emails. And breaking the bank at 1946$ you can get 15 million emails for your companies subscribers. There is also a free plan which you can use before opting in on any of the above mentioned plans to know if your expectations fit in place.

3. MailChimp

Much like other Email marketing services, MailChimp also provides many different offers to its customers. The free plan lets you have many of its features and send 12000 emails to your subscribers up to a limit of 2000 subscribers. Its paid plans are 10$ per month for 500 subscribers, 15 $ for 1500 subscribers. MailChimp also provides a feature unique compared to its competitors, which is known as pay-as-you-go feature allows its customers who feel the free offer is not enough and the other plans are priced too high to pay as they send email to its clients as and when needed. Many of the small businesses choose MailChimp for its simplicity and a wide range of offerings, and some prefer this plan as they have to pay only when they send emails.

4. GetResponse

The offering of GetResponse starts from 15 dollars per month. The free trial does not require a credit card to start your account allows up to 1000 contacts. Another plan offered is at 25 dollars for 2500 contacts. The top plan allows you send up to 100,000 contacts for 450 $ per month. Each plan is charged on a monthly basis. And if you choose to get a plan on an annual basis then you can get a rebate of 18 percent and if you lock in on a 2 year plan then you can get a discount of 30 percent. No other email marketing service provider gives you such an offer.

5. Aweber

Aweber is one of the most popular and one of the earliest email marketing service provider in the world. Aweber offers a wide range of tools to help small and large business owners to increase their sales. Aweber connects smoothly to any platform including WordPress. Aweber offers ready to use email templates, list management, auto email responders and detail insights and email tracking. Aweber offers a 30 day free trial to its users, so that users can get a feel of the software. Aweber’s plan starts from 19 $ per month. They provide a very good customer support which offers options like email support, chat support, video support, live support and a vast blog on how to’s and frequently asked questions

6. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is very easy to use email marketing tool which has a very smooth and wonderful user interface. Campaign Monitor also provides a wide range of plans and has features like action based auto responders. But Campaign Monitor lacks facilities like third party integration. With Campaign Monitor you can easily move from one service to another and connect your marketing program with your C R M software.

The Campaign Monitor offers a wide range of plans the cheapest being priced at 9 $ for a month for 500 subscribers and you will get a total of 2500 mails. At 29$ per month, you will get 25000 emails for 5000 subscribers. And at 300 $ you will get up to 250000 mails which you can send to 50000 subscribers. Also you have an option of customizing your own high end plan if you want a plan which will cater to a larger audience than 50,000 subscribers. If you have just started off and don’t plan to send emails regularly then you can subscribe to pay as you go plan in which you will have to pay 5 dollars per campaign.

Campaign monitor follows a minimalistic theme with only 5 tabs on the top left they are an overview, campaign, transactional, automation, and list and subscribers, which in turn makes the dashboard look very clean. There is a big green button under the overview tab to crate your first email marketing campaign in which three steps are involved : – customize template, add subscribers and the third one being test and send.

7. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a very strong email marketing tool for bloggers and internet marketers. It is very easy to use and yet very powerful. This tool kit also offer you to easily update content upgrades and discounts while signing up. It has inbuilt email auto responders, which allows you to send multiple emails and schedule your email and allowing you to send drip emails.

Support provided by Convert kit has email based support and a vast knowledge base.

Other features include: designing your landing page , easily customize any text and colors with Convert kits visual editor, add detail with custom and add custom CSS, drag and drop to reorder emails, email scheduling, segmenting, excluding purchasers, save segments and also broadcasts.

8. Zoho Campaigns

Zoho is a company who has been in the internet services and software game for a long time. They offer a wide range of office and internet tools like zoho mail, zoho CRM and zoho Docs to name a few. They also provide Zoho accounting, management and human resource tools. Campaigns is an email marketing tool created by Zoho which offers the least expensive paid plan at 5$ per month. When you start out by registering with them for their service, you can add one service or several others as add ons. You can spontaneously get a fully integrated task suite which you can run across several teams.

The user interface of Zoho campaigns looks somewhat old but it is still easy to navigate and the features offered by the top email marketing service providers are found in Zoho campaign which includes Google analytics and auto responders, by which you can link campaigns to Zohos other product offerings such as Google Apps. But if your choice of preference is design and modern functionalities then you can try the earlier mentioned email marketing tools. Much like Mailchimp, zoho also offers you a pay as you go feature which allows you to pay only when you decide to run a campaign.

The offerings start from 80$ for 5000 email subscribers and $750 for 100000 credits. Zoho offers monthly subscriptions which offers unlimited emails. And 350 $ you can get 150000 subscribers. You can also get a custom high value plan if you need to send mails to more than 100000 subscribers.

9. Pardot:

Before jumping into the features we will quickly go through the advantages and disadvantages of Pardot.

Pardot is a nice email marketing tool that provides a nice and simple looking user interface and many features of the top email marketing tools with prices a lot higher than the others

Advantages

Pardot has a nice user interface with drop down and graphical automation branching.
Pardot has unlimited graphical options
Pardot is capable of searching and social marketing.

Disadvantages

The disadvantage and may be the only disadvantage is that Pardot is very pricey and small businesses will find it difficult to manage funds for purchasing this email marketing tool.

10. Hubspot:

Hubspot has a vast library of resources and knowledge with well strucured courses and tutorials on everything about Inbound Marketing.

This email marketing tool is very easy to integrate with your website,google analytics,C R M. Besides email marketing it can also be used to be as your social media marketing tool and your campaign tracking tool. It has the ability to automate workflows, so that you don’t have to waste your time on each and every task.

So I hope that out of these above 10 email marketing tools you will be able to choose an email marketing service appropriate for your business or that of your client. If you were to ask me about the best marketing tool I would like to suggest Mailchimp, Sendin Blue and Aweber in the mentioned sequence.