Email marketing is a critical component of any business’s digital marketing strategy. With so many email marketing software options available, this article aims to simplify your selection process so you can choose the right tool for you. As per HubSpot, “the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).” This means that you’re going to want a tool that can perform all of these functions, and likely more.
Your success as a startup or business will hinge on how effectively you use email marketing software to achieve your goals. According to research by Litmus, for every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they receive $36 in return.
To help you make an informed decision about which email marketing software tool to use, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the top five email marketing software tools currently available in the market for SMBs and startups. Our comprehensive reviews will help you find the right email marketing software to fit your needs and help your business succeed.
In addition, after you figure out which tool to go with, if you need help with creating drip or nuture campaigns, we recommend that you check out the following article to learn more about how to create your nurture email sequences.
Disclaimer: We receive a commission when you click on our affiliate links and purchase a plan from one of the following companies.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive email marketing, automation, lead management,and CRM platform. It offers a range of features, including email marketing, marketing automation, lead management, e-commerce integration, and a custom CRM. With ActiveCampaign, users can create and send targeted email campaigns, automate repetitive tasks, manage leads, and track customer interactions.
This makes it a comprehensive solution for tech startups looking to streamline their marketing efforts and improve customer engagement. If you’re an organization that needs advanced automated email marketing software, then you will find ActiveCampaign a worthy email marketing tool.
Ease of Use
ActiveCampaign has a user-friendly interface and provides a variety of resources, including tutorials and guides, to help users get started. The platform’s drag-and-drop automation builder makes it easy to create custom automations without any coding experience.
However, the platform can be complex, and it may take some time for users to become fully proficient with all of its features. Therefore, we recommend taking some time to familiarize yourself with the platform and use its help docs and videos. Once you get past the learning curve, you’ll see how incredibly helpful ActiveCampaign can be with your email marketing efforts.
Advanced Email Marketing Features
ActiveCampaign offers a range of advanced features designed to help businesses of all sizes streamline their email marketing efforts.
Here are some of the advanced email marketing features:
- Behavioral Tracking: ActiveCampaign allows you to track user behavior on your website and use that data to trigger personalized email campaigns based on the actions they take on your site and with your email campaigns. It allows you to create targeted campaigns that are tailored to your customers’ specific interests and needs.
- A/B Testing: With their professional plan, you can test different variations of your email campaigns to see which one performs better. However, this feature isn’t available on the plus plan.
- Dynamic Content: Create personalized content for your subscribers based on their behavior, interests, and other data points. Personalizing the experience for your subscribers can increase engagement and conversions.
- Conditional Content: You can show different content blocks within the same email based on certain conditions, such as the recipient’s location, device type, or behavior. This feature is especially helpful for tech startup founders because it allows you to create more targeted and relevant emails that are more likely to resonate with your subscribers.
- Lead Scoring: You can assign a score to each of your subscribers based on their behavior and interactions with your brand. Identify your most engaged and qualified leads, and prioritize them for follow-up and sales.
Scalability
Designed to grow with your business, ActiveCampaign is offering a range of plans to fit the needs of startups of varying sizes and levels of email marketing experience. This means that as your startup or business grows, you can easily upgrade to a more advanced plan to accommodate your increasing needs.
Deliverability
ActiveCampaign has a strong reputation for delivering emails successfully to subscribers’ inboxes. The platform uses advanced delivery technologies and follows best practices for email delivery to ensure high delivery rates.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilties
ActiveCampaign provides a range of reporting and analytics capabilities, including open and click-through rate tracking, automation reporting, and sales reporting. The platform’s reporting and analytics tools are user-friendly and provide actionable insights to help users optimize their email marketing efforts.
Customer Insights and Machine Learning
ActiveCampaign uses machine learning to provide customer insights and personalized recommendations, making it easier for tech startups to target their email marketing efforts to the right audience and improve customer engagement.
Integration Capabilities
Many tech startups have an e-commerce component to their business. ActiveCampaign integrates with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, making it easy for tech startups to manage their email marketing efforts alongside their online sales.
It also integrates with a very wide range of other tools and platforms, payment gateways, social media platforms, and more. This makes it easy for users to integrate their email marketing efforts with other aspects of their business.
Reputation
ActiveCampaign has a strong reputation in the email marketing and automation space. The platform is widely used and well-regarded by businesses of all sizes, and it is known for its comprehensive features, ease of use, and effective customer support.
Additionally, the platform’s integration capabilities and robust reporting and analytics features make it a popular choice for businesses looking for an all-in-one email marketing solution.
Customer Support
ActiveCampaign offers a variety of customer support options, including live chat, email support, and a comprehensive knowledge base. The platform’s customer support team is known for being responsive and helpful, providing users with quick and effective solutions to their issues.
And if you’re switching from another email marketing service provider, ActiveCampaign can help migrate your contacts and automations.
Pricing
ActiveCampaign offers flexible pricing options to fit the needs of businesses of different sizes and with varying levels of email marketing experience. The platform offers a range of plans, including a free plan, a lite plan, and several premium plans that offer more advanced features. Prices for the premium plans vary based on the number of contacts and the features included.
Prices start at $49/mo, paid yearly for the plus plan and $149/mo, paid yearly for the professional plan. There are monthly options available at higher prices for short term flexibility.
Free Trial
You can try ActiveCampaign for free, without any credit card required. Take a gander for yourself!
Brevo (Previously Sendinblue)
Brevo is an all-in-one marketing platform that offers a range of features, including email marketing, SMS marketing, marketing automation, transactional emails, CRM, and more. The platform is designed to help businesses of all sizes streamline their marketing efforts and improve customer engagement. With a user-friendly interface and a variety of features, Brevo is an excellent option for startup founders looking to manage their email marketing campaigns and other marketing efforts.
Ease of Use
Brevo’s user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, making it a great option for startup founders who are new to email marketing. The platform offers a drag-and-drop email editor, which allows users to easily create professional-looking email campaigns without any design experience.
Additionally, the platform offers a variety of pre-built templates and a library of images, making it easy for users to create high-quality email campaigns quickly. They even include pre-built automation templates that will help you create your drip or nurture campaigns even quicker.
Advanced Email Marketing Features
Brevo offers a range of advanced email marketing automation features that can be particularly beneficial for startup founders. With Brevo, you can create complex workflows and automation scenarios, allowing you to send targeted and personalized messages to your audience at the right time.
One of Brevo’s key automation features is its workflow builder, which allows you to create a series of automated emails triggered by specific user actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. The workflow builder is intuitive and easy to use, even for users with little or no experience with automation tools.
Brevo also offers a range of segmentation and targeting features, allowing you to create highly targeted campaigns based on user behavior and preferences. For example, you can segment your email list based on factors like location, purchase history, or engagement levels, and create custom campaigns tailored to each segment.
Additionally, Brevo offers advanced email personalization features, allowing you to create dynamic content based on user data. You can use variables like user name, location, or purchase history to create highly personalized messages that resonate with your audience.
Overall, Brevo’s advanced email marketing automation features can be incredibly beneficial for startup founders looking to improve their email marketing campaigns.
Scalability
Scalability is an important consideration for any email marketing platform, especially for startups that are looking to grow their business over time. Brevo is designed to be highly scalable, with features and capabilities that can accommodate businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.
One of the key benefits of Brevo is its flexible pricing plans. Brevo offers a range of pricing options, including a free plan that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day. As your business grows, you can upgrade to a higher-tier plan that offers more email sends and additional features like marketing automation, landing pages, and more.
Another important factor in Brevo’s scalability is its robust API and integration capabilities. Brevo integrates with a wide range of third-party tools, including CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and more. This allows you to seamlessly connect your email marketing efforts with other areas of your business, making it easier to manage and scale your email campaigns as your business grows.
In addition, Brevo’s platform is designed to be highly flexible and customizable, allowing you to create campaigns that are tailored to your unique business needs. Brevo provides the tools and features you need to scale your email marketing campaigns over time.
Overall, Brevo’s scalability is a key advantage for startups that are looking to grow their business over time.
Deliverability
Brevo boasts an excellent deliverability rate, with an average email deliverability rate of over 95%. The platform has strict anti-spam policies and offers a range of tools to help users improve their email deliverability, such as an email validation tool and a dedicated IP address.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilities
Brevo offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities, allowing users to track the performance of their email campaigns and make data-driven decisions. The platform offers real-time analytics, allowing users to see the results of their campaigns as they happen. Additionally, Brevo offers A/B testing capabilities, allowing users to test different variations of their campaigns to optimize their performance.
Customer Insights and Machine Learning
One of the key features that Brevo offers is customer insights and machine learning.
Customer insights in Brevo provide a detailed view of your customers, including their interests, behaviors, and preferences. By analyzing this data, Brevo’s machine learning algorithms can make predictions about customer behavior and automate personalized marketing campaigns to increase engagement and conversions.
For example, Brevo’s predictive audience feature can automatically segment your audience based on their engagement history and behavior, making it easier to target the most valuable customers. The platform’s product recommendation engine can also use machine learning to analyze customer behavior and recommend relevant products or services.
This feature is especially relevant for tech startup founders who may not have a large marketing team or the resources to manually analyze customer data.
By using Brevo’s customer insights and machine learning, they can automate their marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve their campaigns.
Integration Capabilities
Brevo integrates with a range of third-party apps, including Shopify and Magento, and CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot.
The platform also offers an open API, allowing users to build custom integrations with their own applications.
Reputation
Brevo has a strong reputation in the market, with over 180,000 customers worldwide. The platform has been recognized by G2 Crowd as a leader in email marketing software and has received positive reviews from users for its ease of use, customer support, and range of features.
Overall, Brevo is an excellent option for startup founders looking for an all-in-one marketing platform to manage their email marketing campaigns and other marketing efforts.
Customer Support
Brevo offers a range of customer support options, including email support, phone support, live chat, and an extensive knowledge base. The platform’s customer support team is known for being responsive and helpful, providing users with quick and effective solutions to their issues.
Pricing
They offer a range of pricing options to fit the needs of businesses of all sizes, including a free plan for up to 300 emails per day.
Brevo’s paid plans start at $25 per month for up to 10,000 emails per month, with additional features and higher email limits available in higher-tier plans.
To perform A/B testing and have marketing automations, the $65/month plan is required.
Additionally, the platform’s competitive pricing options and strong reputation in the market make it a smart investment for any startup looking to improve their marketing efforts.
Free Trial/Freemium
Brevo’s free plan is freemium, which means you don’t have any time limits on how long you use it.
You don’t have to worry if you need more time to evaluate the tool than one or two weeks!
Moosend
As a startup founder or SMB owner, you know how important it is to reach out to your customers effectively. That’s where Moosend comes in – a powerful email marketing software that provides an all-in-one solution to your marketing needs.
Ease of Use
Moosend is incredibly easy to use. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor allows you to create professional-looking emails quickly and easily. You don’t need to have any technical skills to use it, and you can get started with just a few clicks.
Advanced Email Marketing Features
Moosend offers a wide range of advanced email marketing automation features that help you to save time and streamline your marketing efforts. You can set up triggered campaigns, segment your audience, and personalize your messages for maximum impact.
Here are some of the key features:
- Workflow Automation: Moosend’s workflow automation allows you to create automated email campaigns that can be triggered by specific events or actions taken by subscribers.
- Segmentation: With their segmentation feature, businesses can divide their email list into smaller, more targeted groups based on subscriber behavior, demographics, or other criteria. This enables businesses to send more personalized and relevant emails to their subscribers, which can improve engagement and conversion rates.
- A/B Testing: Moosend’s A/B testing feature enables businesses to test different variations of their emails (e.g., subject lines, content, or images) to see which performs better with their audience. This helps businesses optimize their emails for better engagement and conversion rates.
- Personalization: Moosend’s personalization feature allows businesses to insert personalized content (e.g., subscriber’s name, location, or purchase history) into their emails. This creates a more personalized experience for subscribers and can improve engagement and conversion rates.
- Dynamic Content: Moosend’s dynamic content feature enables businesses to display different content to different subscribers based on their behavior or preferences. For example, you can display different product recommendations to subscribers based on their previous purchases or browsing history.
- Triggered Campaigns: Moosend’s triggered campaigns feature enables businesses to send automated emails based on specific events or actions taken by subscribers. For example, you can set up a triggered campaign that sends an email to customers who have not made a purchase in a while, encouraging them to come back to your website.
These advanced email marketing automation features can help businesses save time, increase engagement, and improve conversion rates.
Scalability
Whether you’re just starting or have a large email list, Moosend can handle your needs. Its scalable infrastructure can accommodate your growing business needs without compromising on speed or performance.
Deliverability
Moosend has an excellent reputation for deliverability, ensuring that your emails reach your audience’s inbox, not their spam folder. Its advanced email authentication and reputation monitoring systems help to maintain high deliverability rates.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilities
Moosend provides detailed reporting and analytics capabilities that give you insights into your email campaigns’ performance. You can track open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, helping you to optimize your campaigns and achieve better results.
Customer Insights and Machine Learning
Their machine learning capabilities allow you to gain insights into your audience’s behavior, helping you to tailor your campaigns for maximum impact. It can also help you to predict your audience’s preferences and behaviors, allowing you to send targeted messages that resonate with them.
Integration Capabilities
Moosend integrates seamlessly with a wide range of third-party applications, including eCommerce platforms, CRMs, and social media platforms. This allows you to automate your marketing efforts and create a cohesive customer experience across all your channels.
Reputation
They have a strong reputation in the email marketing industry, and its commitment to deliverability and customer support has earned it the trust of businesses worldwide.
Customer Support
Moosend offers excellent customer support, including a comprehensive knowledge base, email support, and live chat support. Its team of experts is always available to help you with any questions or issues you may have.
Pricing
Moosend offers competitive pricing plans that cater to businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. Its plans are affordable and scalable, making it an excellent choice for businesses that are just starting.
You can start Moosend for as little as $9 USD/month for up to 500 subscribers. Holy cow that’s cheap!! 🐄
Free Trial
You can get a 30-day free trial of Moosend, which is better than many other free trial durations, and no credit card is required.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular email marketing software that offers an all-in-one marketing platform for startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). With HubSpot’s email marketing service as part of its Marketing Hub, you can create, send, and track your marketing emails effortlessly.
Ease of Use
Ease of use is one of HubSpot’s strengths. The intuitive drag-and-drop email editor allows you to create professional-looking emails in minutes, even if you’re not a designer. The platform’s user-friendly interface also makes it easy to manage your email lists, contacts, and campaigns.
Advanced Email Marketing Features
HubSpot’s advanced email marketing automation features make it a powerful tool for any marketer. You can create targeted email campaigns based on subscriber behavior, such as clicks, opens, and downloads.
Here are some of the key features:
- Email automation workflows: HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter plan allows users to create email automation workflows that trigger based on specific actions or behaviors, such as when a lead fills out a form or clicks a link. This can help you automate your email marketing campaigns and save time on manual tasks.
- Personalization tokens: The Marketing Hub Starter plan also includes personalization tokens, which allow users to dynamically insert personalized information, such as the recipient’s name or company, into their emails.
- A/B testing: With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter plan, users can conduct A/B testing on their email campaigns to optimize their email open and click-through rates. Test different email subject lines, content, and design to see what resonates best with your audience.
- Contact segmentation: HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter plan includes advanced contact segmentation capabilities that allow businesses to segment their email lists based on specific criteria, such as location, behavior, or interests.
- Lead scoring: With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter plan, businesses can use lead scoring to prioritize their email marketing efforts and focus on the most qualified leads. This feature assigns a score to each lead based on their behavior and engagement with your company.
Overall, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter plan offers a range of advanced email marketing automation features that can help startups and small businesses streamline their email marketing efforts and create more targeted and personalized email campaigns.
Scalability
Scalability is another advantage of HubSpot. As your business grows, HubSpot’s email marketing service can grow with you. The software can handle large email lists and provides customizable workflows to streamline your email marketing efforts.
Deliverability
Deliverability is crucial in email marketing, and HubSpot takes it seriously. The platform uses industry-leading email deliverability practices to ensure your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilities
HubSpot’s reporting and analytics capabilities give you valuable insights into your email campaigns’ performance. You can track email open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics to optimize your campaigns and improve your ROI.
Customer Insights and Machine Learning
HubSpot’s customer insights and machine learning tools enable you to understand your audience better. You can track subscriber engagement and use this data to segment your audience and create more targeted campaigns.
Integration Capabilities
Integration capabilities are essential for any email marketing software, and HubSpot offers integrations with many popular platforms, including Salesforce, Shopify, and Zapier, and so much more.
Reputation
HubSpot’s reputation is stellar, with a 4.5-star/5 rating on G2 and a high level of customer satisfaction.
Customer Support
What’s more, the company’s customer support is top-notch, with a helpful knowledge base, community forums, and 24/7 support options.
Pricing
Pricing for HubSpot’s email marketing service starts at $45 per month and doesn’t require a credit card. But the price quickly baloons to $800+/month if you want advanced automations and features. You’ll have to be extremely successful with your marketing to meet the cost of the professional plan, as it’ll cost over $9,600/year to maintain.
Free Trial/Freemium
You can try their freemium plan and start a free trial of their starter plan once you’re logged in and using their free plan.
MailerLite
MailerLite is user-friendly email marketing software that’s fully capable of powering email operations for startups and SMBs alike. Like MooSend, they are super affordable for any business – a big plus.
Ease of Use
With its drag-and-drop editor, creating professional-looking email campaigns is a breeze.
Advanced Email Marketing Features
MailerLite has features such as A/B testing and segmentation, enabling you to personalize your messages and boost engagement.
However, instead of tags like you see in other email marketing software tools, you’ll see groups, or interest groups. You can tag subscribers automatically by behavior, like when they click specific links.
MailerLite offers a visual automation builder that makes it easy for even those without technical expertise to create complex automated workflows. What’s more, you can use the builder to create workflows that trigger emails based on subscriber actions, such as clicking a link or opening an email.
You can also set up workflows based on time intervals, such as sending a follow-up email two days after a subscriber signs up.
The platform also offers advanced segmentation capabilities, allowing you to target specific groups of subscribers with highly relevant content. You can segment your list based on a variety of criteria, such as location, behavior, interests, and more.
In addition, MailerLite offers a range of pre-built automation workflows that you can use as a starting point for your campaigns. These workflows include welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, and more.
Scalability
The software is scalable and can handle over 100,000 subscribers with their enterprise plan, making it an ideal choice for growing businesses.
Deliverability
Deliverability is a top priority for MailerLite, with strict anti-spam policies and tools to improve email deliverability rates.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilties
You can monitor your email campaign activity and subscriber engagement. Their reports include the number of campaigns sent per month, emails sent, opened, clicked, unsubscribed count, spam complaints, bounces, link activity and other metrics that are critical to measuring success.
Customer Insights and Machine Learning
MailerLite provides various customer insights and machine learning capabilities to help businesses improve their email marketing campaigns. One such feature is the segmentation of subscribers based on their behavior and interests. This allows businesses to create highly targeted campaigns that resonate with their subscribers and result in better engagement rates.
MailerLite also offers A/B testing, which is a feature that allows businesses to test different elements of their emails, such as subject lines or content, to see which version performs better. And this helps you make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns for better results.
Furthermore, MailerLite provides machine learning capabilities to analyze subscriber behavior and predict their future actions. This can help businesses create personalized campaigns that are more likely to resonate with their subscribers, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
Integration Capabilities
MailerLite integration capabilities include popular platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and Zapier. It also integrates with BigCommerce, Facebook audiences, Jotform, MailerCheck, Make, Stripe, WooCommerce, Basecamp, Airtable, ClickFunnels, Elementor, Drupal, Eventbrite, and more.
Reputation & Customer Support
MailerLite has a positive reputation for its customer support, with responsive live chat and email support available 24/7. They have a 97% satisfaction rate and a 5 minute average response time on live chat.
Pricing
You will find that MailerLite’s pricing is affordable and it’s based on the number of subscribers. They’ve plans starting at $9/month billed yearly for their first paid tier (growing business) and $19/month billed yearly (advanced).
Free Trial and Freemium Plans
You can get a free plan that allows up to 1,000 subscribers and they have a 14-day free trial for premium plans.
Email Marketing Software Summary
Best bang for your buck: MailerLite
Most user-friendly: Moosend
Most inexpensive tools: Moosend and MailerLite are tied.
The most advanced tool: ActiveCampaign (the professional plan is required to unlock most of its powerful features, and it’s expensive, but not as expensive as HubSpot)
Most expensive: HubSpot (like ActiveCampaign, to access its advanced automation, reporting, and software, you need the professional plan)
Great for huge contact lists: Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, allows unlimited contacts. Few companies offer this.
