Email marketing is an integral part of your wider marketing campaigns and having the right tools to carry out the job to create tailored comms for your customers or prospects is essential.
Some email marketing software simply allows you to send out campaigns to pre-determined or imported lists, while others integrate a full CRM platform, allowing you to track the entire relationship and sales funnel. Which of these you decide to use depends on your business needs and budget.
The ability to autorespond to signals is a vital element of a marketing campaign, showing your business to be proactive and responding to user actions, while A/B testing formats will help you hone in on what gets the most clicks and determine why, meaning you can adapt your messaging to get the best response going forward.
It's also important to keep track of who's opening which emails and how they're taking actions so you can determine the most engaged customers.
We round up the some of the best email marketing software for businesses to help you find one to meet your objectives. We will be adding to this roundup, so do check back for the latest updates.
Campaign Monitor
One of the most well-known email marketing platforms, Campaign Monitor is simple to use and effective, allowing you to create perfectly-targeted emails to send to your marketing list.
It uses a drag and drop UI to create the emails, allowing you to add personalised details from your email list where you wish. Using the pre-loaded templates, you can produce a marketing campaign fit for your business, whichever sector it's in.
Autoresponders are simple to set up if you want to send more targeted emails to customers. What's more, if you're using it to send out an RSS to HTML newsletter, data imports nicely although you're pretty restricted on templates for that type of campaign.
Reporting is top-notch too, helping you to easily understand where the weak links are in each campaign as well as the hot leads.
Pricing: From $9/month (6.85/month)
Campaigner
Unlike some of the other options detailed here, Campaigner integrates a CRM within its email marketing platform, making it much more useful than a tool for simply sending out emails (and perhaps justifying its comparatively high price point).
A vast number of autoresponders are available, including one that will send out a personalised email if a contact clicks on a certain link in an email, which makes Campaigner a great tool for targeted campaigns.
Email workflows are pretty sophisticated too, triggering emails if a contact changes something to do with their profile, or if there hasn't been interaction with your brand for a while.
For those wanting to monetise their newsletters, it's easy to slot in a variety of tracked ad formats in Campaigner, including video, to the array of templates, making content more engaging and it more likely to result in clicks or actions.
Pricing:From $149/month (113.45/month)
Autopilot
Autopilot is a full-on marketing automation platform, with email marketing forming just one part of the offering.
You can create personalised journeys, sending out text messages, emails or other marketing collateral based on your customers' preferences.
It also fully integrates with a range of third party apps including Lob. Salesforce, Slack,Zapier, Twilio and more, so if you're already using one of these services, Autpilot is a great addition.
The UI is easy to use and with a whole host of autoresponder options, email and reporting templates, it makes it easy to set up attractive campaigns and report on them in real time.
Pricing: From $20/month (15/month)
ActiveCampaign
One of ActiveCampaign's best features is its range of Autoresponders and templates, allowing you to create a wide range of campaigns to match your business end goals.
Although the UI is a little complicated because there are so many options, once you get started, it's pretty easy to keep on top of everything.
The more expensive options tags on a fully-functioning CRM into the mix, which is a useful addition and something only the more marketing automation-centric products offer as standard, so it's nice to have the option to upgrade here.
Pricing:From $23/month (17.50/month)
Hubspot
Hubspot's email marketing tool is just one part of its much bigger, much more expensive marketing platform (although there is a free version, with limited functionality, too). Although it is one of the more expensive options if you just want to send emails out, the tips available for your entire marketing strategy and support is second to none.
Emails are simple to create and send and its CRM platform is much more insightful than many other of the options outlined here.
With Hubspot, you'll not only be able to create wonderfully targeted campaigns, but you can integrate it with your content marketing and social strategy too.
Hubspot will help you build personas and the buyer journey to make sure everything is completely in line with your bigger marketing goals.
Pricing:From 42/month
