Top Email Marketing Tools for Small Business Success

Social media – the undisputed king in the marketing domain… And then there’s email. Think of it as a grandparent to social media marketing. Don’t be fooled, it’s still reliable if used the right way. Today’s marketers may not be as email savvy, nor do they consider it to be a “cool” way of contacting clients, however, it has stood the test of time and proven itself to be an effective method of communication.

As long as you’re using it right, email is still one of the most valuable and targeted channels for reaching your audience. It’s also a great way to make money.

You can use your email marketing strategy to promote your app. You can also communicate with clients about your white label services or anything else that adds value to their needs.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools to ensure you hit the mark every time.

HubSpot Email Marketing

HubSpot offers a reliable and feature-packed email marketing tool that’s suited for growing businesses — for free. You can create professional marketing emails that engage and grow your audience with the easy drag-and-drop email builder. With the drag-and-drop email builder, you don’t need to wait on IT or designers for help. On top of the free email tool, you can use the HubSpot CRM for free to create tailored touch-points for your customers. HubSpot Email is automatically connected with the HubSpot CRM, so you can tailor relevant emails based on any details you have — such as form submissions and website activity. Using the CRM, you can include personalized content in your emails, like first name and company name, to ensure your contacts feel like they are being personally addressed, all while tracking email activity in the CRM.

The HubSpot email tool is free for up to 2,000 email sends per month, with upgrade solutions starting at $50 with Marketing Hub Starter.

Pricing:
FREE

MailGenius

MailGenius is a free tool that inspects your emails and finds possible triggers that might get your message sent to the spam folder. You can run a deliverability test to ensure your email actually reaches your recipient’s inbox. Otherwise, it won’t be opened.

The tool lays out all the things you can do to avoid landing in the spam folder along with actionable advice and explanations on how to fix any issues you may have.

Even the best email copy and subject line can only go so far if your message lands in spam. Deliverability problems can severely impact your email marketing campaigns, so it’s important to be proactive and run a test to ensure you’re following best practices.

Pricing:
FREE

Litmus

Litmus is a highly versatile tool through which you can use to test and track email. You can test your emails in traditional web-clients and also popular mobile devices like Android, Apple and Windows.

Use Litmus for render testing and make sure your creative is optimized for any given device. You can test more than 40 clients and devices and with a mere click, Litmus can generate a test email to an address so you can send it to your ESP. Within minutes you’re going to see desired browsers, ISPs and devices.

Want your link testing stream-lined? Put the email through a landing page test and within minutes, you’re going to get an overlay of that email with complete results for every link. The ESP tracking report inserts a tracking pixel in your email and you get subscriber data such as how and where the email was opened, how much time the user spent time reading it, and if it was organically forwarded or printed.

Pricing:
Litmus comes with a free 7-day trial, while the premium version can be had for $399 a month, $149 for the Plus version, and $79 for the basic version.

Mail Chimp

Feature	HubSpot	MailChimp
Free Email Sends	2,000 per month	12,000 per month
CRM Integration	Yes, with HubSpot CRM	Yes, with Salesforce or Google Analytics
Personalization	Yes, using CRM data	Yes, with segmentation
Pricing	Free, upgrades from $50	Free for 2,000 subscribers, upgrades from $10

Don’t let Mail Chimp’s links to funny YouTube clips or humorous messages throw you off. It’s all business when it comes to collecting statistics, sending emails and improving performance.

You can even send out surveys. This is a great opportunity for subscribers to vote on the best icon for your app.

The dashboard lays it all out clearly: import lists, create and send campaigns, and proceed to build your audience.

As the import happens in the background, you can work on building your campaign. You have the option to choose if everyone in your list gets the email or a specific segment only – the process is very customizable.

Creating a segment is simple, use filters to build contacts subsets, use previously created segments or cut/paste from a recipient email address list. The tracking options let you know who has opened the email messages and which campaign links receives the most clicks.

The enhanced tracking option links to your website through Salesforce or Google Analytics.  To use “auto-responders”, you must have a paid account – you can automatically trigger specific responses or segment users based on actions they take. After sending out your emails, MailChimp allows you to integrate your social channels to post regular updates on Twitter and Facebook.

Pricing:

MailChimp offers free subscription for 2000 subscribers or 12,000 emails per month.  For unlimited account, the pricing starts from $10.

Reach Mail

Use Reach Mail’s Message Testing feature to see a direct performance metrics comparison of as many as five individual email campaigns. This feature also takes into account different subject lines or content within each email, so you can optimize the subject line wording or determine how any given email performs in contrast to others.

Through this feature, you can also decide on the percentage of your subscriber list that should be used to test the message. Once the ‘test campaign’ has finished, the system will generate a snapshot report highlighting open and click rates for each version. All you need to do is select the best-performing one and schedule the rest of your emails.

Reach Mail also gives you the option to choose from  several hundred email templates or let one of their designers custom-design it for you.

Advanced tracking lets you see who clicked on your links, how many users forwarded your message or who opted out. From there on, you can send a follow-up email campaign to the users how clicked on specific links.

Pricing:

Reach Mail starts from $10 per month to $70/month.

Target Hero

Target Hero has a prominent WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, image hosting, HTML as well as plain text emails, and a host of features you’d want to have in email marketing software.

This tool is ideal for businesses that require a wide spectrum of features to run their campaigns, but often lack the large subscriber lists.

Target Hero requires account verification, to do this, you’ll have to sign up, then follow the SMS authentication process.

Pricing:

Their free plan gives you 1,000 contacts with unlimited emails. For up to 3,000 contacts, you need to get the $9.90/month Mini Hero plan. The Hero plan gives you as many as 5,000 contacts at $19.90. And, the Super Hero plan can be had for $39.90 for up to 10,000 contacts.

Drip

Drip is a versatile email marketing platform which encompasses a number of useful features, including message personalization, integrat

It supports a pair of distinct tools for building emails; one visual, the other text-based. This helps create impactful image-driven marketing, alongside follow-up messages that are more targeted and personal to individual users.

Customising content is straightforward, so emails will always feel relevant to those that receive them. There’s even a bespoke conversion tracking feature that puts businesses in control of how the performance and effectiveness of an email marketing campaign is assessed.

Pricing:

Package	Subscribers	Cost
Drip Starter	Up to 100	Free
Basic	Up to 2500	$41
Pro	5000	$83
Enterprise	Over 5000	Variable

Mad Mimi

Create professional-grade emails with Mad Mimi’s straightforward WYSIWG editor. Choose from 39 social networking buttons like share, like, pin and retweet and easily customize your emails to add links.

Aside from creating fresh email marketing campaigns, you can copy campaigns using the clone tool – adjust the original document without making changes to prior versions of your work. For the accident-prone among us, there’s no need to worry about deleting your email campaigns as you can always undo the deletion. Phew!

The detailed reporting features allow you to see how many emails were opened, number of embedded links, how many shares there were on social media and a lot more. You can also find out about the links any particular user clicks on.

Mad Mimi integrates with Google Analytics to provide in-depth statistics and click tracking. Get “forward to friend” reports and export them to Excel if you wish. View real-time responses on your social networking activity with regard to email campaigns.

Pricing:

Mad Mimi pricing starts from $10 per month basic account for 500 contacts and the pro package costs $42 for 10,000 contacts.

Cake Mail

CakeMail’s tools have your email campaign covered. One great feature is split A/B testing for example, to help determine the most ideal mailing list or Spam Assassin to make sure your emails don’t end up in spam. There’s Google Integration as well to let you view detailed stats on how each campaign is faring.

Sending out emails is a seamless process. Just give your campaign a title, set your recipients, design your email and choose the time to send. Pick from twenty default templates with fully customizable options or upload your own. HTML-savvy users are going to be pleased with the advanced editing option. The editor also lets you add, delete, and rearrange sections of your email like text boxes, images, QR codes, social media elements, and Google Maps.

The Campaign Analysis Tools use Google Analytics to give detailed reports on open, click, bounce and unsubscribe rates for your contacts. Use this information to group contacts into lists depending on email patterns and user interests.

Pricing:

The free Starter plan allows 500 contacts along with 500 emails. The basic package starts from $8 per month.

Mailjet

Use Mailjet to conveniently combine template-based marketing and transactional email sending in one online app. Add to that a consultation service to boot, and you’re all set.

The SMTP server and RESTful API integrate smoothly with the rest of your apps. Libraries let you add Mailjet support to your app in several languages, including Python, Ruby and PHP, and integrations with Magento, WordPress and much more. You never have to worry about getting stuck either, as there’s a 24-hour support line.

Take advantage of the email template designer or upload your own. There are also tools to segments lists and personalize emails with all your contact data. The A/X testing feature allows you to test up to ten different versions of your email before you decide which one stands out as the best. A campaign comparison tool pits your previous campaigns against the current one to give a complete picture.

Manage email lists, stats and templates all inside Mailjet’s interface, but eventually, you get to decide how you want them sent. For example, you can use the app’s UUI to create a campaign or you could use the API integration and use a few lines of code to launch a formatted email campaign to your contacts.

Pricing:

The free plan bags you 100,000 contacts and you get to send 6,000 emails a month. The bronze package costs you around $7.49/month.

Flashissue

Flashissue is one of the best tools for emailing newsletters. A simple interface combines email marketing with content curation. Sign in through Google or Facebook and have newsletters emailed to your contacts in just five minutes.

No matter what the focus of your newsletter is, you can pull down content from blog posts or search the web to pull content from a variety of sources – Flashissue automatically summarizes this content for you. After populating the editor with a certain number of story summaries, you can change the headline and article descriptions in order to better personalize it for your readers. This allows a more tailored emailer, rather than just generic news.

After this, you need to upload a banner and decide on the best way of delivering it. Even the free version boasts plenty of functionality – you can send your newsletter either through Flashissue itself or Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and a variety of other platforms as well.

Get a premium account which ranges between $20 and $50, and Flashissue integrates with Constant Contact and MailChimp to unlock a host of extra features.

Pricing:

The free Solo plan gives you 25 contacts a month with unlimited emails and group plan starts from $5 per month with 250 contacts.

Constant Contact

Scroll through several hundred design templates or custom design your own. Insert a wide assortment of extra features if you wish – documents, images, polls, links to surveys, videos etc.

Images and text can also be imported directly into the WYSIWYG editor. Create comprehensive reports on your email campaigns to show number of opt-outs, complaints, bounces, forwards and click-throughs. The social-share toolbar and social media buttons – Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – will work wonders to boost traffic to your web page.

Pricing:

They offer two plans; the email plan starts at $20 per month and the email plus plan starts at $45 per month.

AWeber

AWeber’s autoresponder tool is a great way to engage your customers. You get access to over 150 email templates to make the email design process hiccup-free.

Improve various business functions by integrating your email marketing account with other online services. If you happen to be using a service like Salesforce, you can customize your account to automatically display which customers are subscribed to AWeber emails, and the emails they’ve gotten from you.

Your AWeber account can also integrate with the most well-known shopping cart tools, letting you add new customers each time they make a purchase on your website. If you want to take your marketing efforts to the next level, you can visit AWeber Labs to build your own apps and time-saving tools through the AWeber API. With this kind of flexibility at your fingertips, you can really take advantage of customer data in order to better optimize marketing strategies.

Pricing:

AWeber’s monthly plan goes for $19 and provides 500 subscribers, unlimited emails and a 30-day money back guarantee.

iContact

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GetResponse

Effectively maintain your contacts list and create professional-grade marketing campaigns.

The contacts section lets you add custom fields to contact lists and allows you to copy contacts as well as conduct searches.

GetResponse will track how many subscribers view your emails, complain, unsubscribe or click on links. You will also know how many emails failed to arrive at their destination due to any given reason. You can also find out why people unsubscribed.

Feature	iContact	GetResponse
Pricing	Starts from $14 to $117 monthly	Starts from $15 per month with 1,000 subscribers
Social Media Integration	Integrates Twitter and Facebook-friendly features	Not specified
Autoresponder	Sends automatic messages at preset intervals	Not specified

Clearly labeled data is displayed in pie charts and bar graphs. You can view a summary of results after sending out surveys.

Help and support comes in the form of FAQS, webinars, PDFs, video tutorials, a glossary and learning center articles. There’s email and chat support.

Pricing:

They offer various packages depends on the number of subscribers, the basic starts from $15 per month with 1,000 subscribers.Pricing Comparison:

Platform	Starting Price	Features
Campaign Monitor	$9/month	Basic package
Crystal	$29/month	Premium tools
Omnisend	$16/month	Standard plan for automation and advanced features
YesWare	$12/user/month	Enterprise trial available
ActiveCampaign	$7.65/month	Full package available

Crystal

Crystal is a communication tool that enhances your emails by telling you anyone’s personality. Using Personality AI, a new technology that employs machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict personality based on someone’s online footprint, Crystal can help you better understand your audience, increase your open and response rates, and see higher conversion.

Using Crystal’s AI email guidance, you can see the most effective writing style, subject line, greeting and call to action to make each message most impactful for the recipient. The best part is you can predict personalities in bulk so you can send hyper-personalized emails en masse, giving your recipients the information they need in the style they want, which will benefit engagement rates, in return. It’s like having a coach for every campaign.

Omnisend

Omnisend is the tool you go for when you want to go further than basic email marketing. This platform allows you to create sophisticated automation workflows in minutes using pre-built customizable templates.

But what really sets Omnisend apart from the others is that you can add several channels to the same workflow. Supporting channels such as email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, WhatsApp and more, you can reach your perfect customer at the perfect time on the perfect channel.

Omnisend also offers smart segmentation that allows you to layer targeting rules so you can really personalize the message you send to your customers. This means that you can go further than using their first name as personalization, and actually define what kind of message they’ll get at each moment of their customer journey.

YesWare

Similar to ToutApp, YesWare is focused at sales teams who need to send mass personalized messages to people while also keeping track of follow ups and behavior (opens, clicks, etc).

YesWare excels at campaign and messaging tests on a smaller level than ToutApp. If your sales team needs to run a 20 – 50 person campaign with personalization and wants to save time, YesWare is a great fit. It will give them visibility into what happened after they pressed the send buttons.

Through YesWare’s dashboard you’ll be able to see who opened, clicked, forwarded or replied to the emails sent out. In addition YesWare offers template-based analytics to understand what is working and what isn’t.

Similar to ToutApp, YesWare integrates to most popular CRM solutions in order to give you transparency into what your sales team is doing without having to go into YesWare at all.

They also offer desktop notifications with a built-in dialer for those times when an immediate call after open is necessary to close the deal.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has been called one of the key InfusionSoft alternatives. For those who want the robust sales and marketing automation power of InfusionSoft, but easier to use and setup, there’s ActiveCampaign.

Despite the lower cost and ease of use compared to InfusionSoft, you aren’t losing a lot in terms of functionality. ActiveCampaign still allows you to run very behaviorally driven marketing and sales campaigns, but with a setup that most somewhat tech-savvy business owners can actually understand.

The full-blown version of ActiveCampaign offers an all-in-one solution for a business to house it’s CRM, email marketing, deal flow, sales automation and more. With the offer of one-on-one training and onboarding, without the 4-figure fee that InfusionSoft requires, it’s a great alternative if you want to automate the way you keep in touch with your customers both new and old.

Voila Norbert: