Top Email Marketing Tools of 2020
Over the years, there have been many marketing trends that have come and gone, but email has remained consistent in its reliability and ability to generate a relatively high ROI. Email marketing is an effective tool that small businesses use to reach and establish a customer base. It is less costly than other marketing strategies and is able to directly reach target markets, and can generate reception in other social media channels.
Although many marketing campaigns nowadays look to utilize more creative means to directly reach their consumer base, email has stood the test of time. It is a safe, reliable, and easy tool that has been proven to be effective in small and large businesses alike.
But now, how do you create emails that are creative and can capture the attention of your customers? This may not be as hard as it seems if you use the email marketing tools well, which can be fairly inexpensive (maybe even free!) and useful in creating campaigns and sending out emails to your standards. Here is a list of some of the most popular email marketing platforms that have been successful in supporting thousands of businesses, both large and small.
Easiest to Use: MailChimp
MailChimp allows you to create and send campaigns using their drag-and-drop customizable templates all the while building your audience through their insight and analytic tools.
Campaign templates are flexible and easy to use, with options to segment your customers so that only a specific group gets an email and tools to see who has read your emails and clicked on your landing pages. You can create automated emails to document steps throughout a buyer’s journey and send out surveys through their platform to gauge people’s opinions and interests.
MailChimp has a free plan that you can start with to create landing pages and utilize their CRM tools, but there are limitations of 2,000 subscribers or 10,000 emails per month.
Standard price plan: $14.99/month
Best Bang for Your Buck: Sendinblue
Along with the 70+ email templates, CRM tools, and landing page functions, Sendinblue allows you to use features like A/B testing and to optimize your work and target the right consumers. Sendinblue also allows you to segment your customers into groups. Its premium plan includes both email and SMS marketing functions, CRM tools, and Facebook ad integration. Some other advanced features include live chat integration and landing page builders.
Plans start at free, which allows you to send 300 emails a day, and the next price point is at $25 a month that allows you to have an unlimited daily email sending limit.
Premium price plan: $66/month
Most Advanced: Drip
Drip is designed specifically for e-commerce businesses, and allows you to integrate your e-commerce platform accounts (i.e. Shopify or Magento) with your Drip account to create a seamless integrate pop-ups and sign up forms to your website. This integration also allows for mass emailing and also personalized emails for every customer. Drip also includes advanced marketing automation tools, smarter email segmentation, and other insight tools to help you reach your ideal consumer base.
Drip does fall on the pricier side, where the number of people on your account determines the price you pay per month. However, there is a 14-day free trial.
Most Convenient: Constant Contact
Constant Contact not only provides email marketing services, but also an e-commerce website builder. This platform allows you to build an e-commerce platform and build email campaigns while integrating your Shopify account. Within their email marketing services, they provide marketing automation, Facebook, Instagram, and Google ad services, email templates, and many other services. The plethora of services they provide all in one platform creates a convenient and beginner-friendly workspace.
Email Plus plan: $45/month
Most Customizable: Zoho
Zoho provides a useful email workflow where you can drag and drop elements to create a timeline of when automate emails can be sent out. This platform utilizes html to create and customize content when creating campaigns. Zoho also allows you to create and merge tags to personalize emails per segment of your consumer base. There are also a lot of analytical tools that include geo-location reports, phone or mobile device reports, and many others for your social media. Zoho is also incredibly useful because they also provide a mobile app for you to update mailing lists, send campaigns, and check on your reports on the go.
Payment plans start at $6 a month, but its most popular subscriber-based plan starts at $54 per year.
Most Reliable: AWeber
Since AWeber is the oldest platform, it has definitely proven to be an effective tool for businesses to use. AWeber is geared toward small or mid-sized businesses and focuses directly on email campaigns. This platform allows you to connect your account to other systems that you may use with your email marketing campaigns, such as Shopify, Facebook, Etsy, and PayPal. AWeber allows you to create emails using the templates that they provide, landing pages, and auto-newsletters. They also have a mobile app called AWeber Atom.
Payment plans are based on the number of subscribers per business.
