10 Best Email Marketing Platforms and Software

After researching the best email marketing services we found that Omnisend is the best software, thanks to a robust set of automation tools that can save your team a lot of time. HubSpot is our second choice, offering a lot of scalability for businesses that want to grow along with the platform.

• Omnisend is the best email marketing platform for ecommerce automation.
• HubSpot is the ideal platform for businesses that want to scale.
• Campaigner is a great email marketing platform for customizability.

In This Guide

• The Best Email Marketing Software
• Research Methodology
• Benefits of Email Marketing Software
• Verdict: What Is the Best Email Marketing Software?
• Frequently Asked Questions

Even now, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to keep your customers engaged with your brand or products. By having a strong email strategy, you’re able to stay fresh in your customers’ minds and encourage repeat purchasing. In fact, email marketing software can have a return on investment up to 4,400%, meaning for every $1 you spend, you can make $44.

An email marketing platform is the backbone of a good email marketing strategy, allowing you to optimize your online campaigns in terms of both customers and sales. Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of options for software that allows you to more effectively conduct your email marketing campaigns. We’ve analyzed and reviewed the best email marketing software platforms, looking at what they’re good at, and where they can improve.

The Best Email Marketing Software

Tech.co has put 80+ hours of research into finding the best email technology for your business, based on features, price and more.

The top ten email marketing software providers are:

1. Omnisend – Best for ecommerce automation
2. HubSpot – Best for scalability
3. Campaigner – Best for customization
4. Sendinblue – Best all-in-one marketing solution
5. Zoho – Best overall value for money
6. Moosend – Best pure email marketing platform
7. Mailchimp – Best for ecommerce
8. MailerLite – Best for analytical features
9. Constant Contact – best for small businesses
10. GetResponse – Best value for basic email marketing features

1. Omnisend

Best for: Ecommerce automation

Highlights: 

• Excellent automation features for ecommerce
• 24/7 customer support
• Comprehensive user interface

Omnisend is our top choice for email marketing platforms, largely due to its robust automation features for ecommerce business. From pre-built workflows to A/B split testing, you’ll find a wide range of tools that can save your business time will still allowing you the functionality you need to reach new customers.

Omnisend Features

Omnisend not only has a lot of features available to users, but they allow access to virtually all of them at every price point, even the free plan. That means you can utilize all the templates, product listings, sales reports, campaign clickmaps, and more without paying a dime. Yes, you will be limited to few emails per month, but the relatively affordable starter plan won’t break the bank.

Omnisend Automation

We’ve mentioned a few times now, but automation is why Omnisend is at the top of this list. Much like all the other features, automation is available with the free plan and beyond, unlocking features like custom workflows and events, automation splits, conditional content blocks, and personalized recommendations at no cost.

The best part, though, is that Omnisend offers some ecommerce automation features that are extremely helpful. The Product Picker is a prime example, allowing users to simply pick a product from their online store that will be automatically added to their newsletter. No downloading images, no complicated code, just simple click and forget functionality.

Omnisend Pricing

Omnisend offers two different pricing plans: Standard and Pro. The Standard plan costs $16 per month for 6,000 emails per month. The Pro plan costs $59 per month and allows for unlimited emails per month. Both plans allow for up to 500 contacts.

Omnisend also has a free forever plan that allows for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. This plan still allows for most important aspects of Omnisend, like 24/7 customer support and access to pre-built automations and workflows.

Want to secure customers for less? Check out our guide to the best free email marketing services.

2. HubSpot

Best for: Scalability

Highlights:

• High email limits
• Great social media integrations
• Great automation tools

HubSpot is a good platform for businesses of all sizes, offering a wide range of pricing options from free to $3,600 per month, so business can really scale with the platform as they grow. The limits on the number of emails and contacts are absolutely massive – breaching 1 million and 20 million, respectively.

HubSpot Features

It’s not just the software’s volume limits that excel, however. It does incredibly well in its other services too, like social media integration and analytics. However, some aspects of these functions – including social media posting and scheduling – are behind hefty paywalls.

HubSpot Automation

In fact, while you can use some of its services through the free plan, a lot of HubSpot’s features (such as list growth) are only accessible through paid plans. While it does offer automation options and transactional emails, these are again only accessible through the higher tiers.

HubSpot Pricing

As you’d expect from software with larger limits, the price point is a fair bit steeper than the other software we’re looking at, with the lowest option costing $18 per month, and the highest costing a massive $3,600 per month – plus an onboarding fee of $6,000. To offset this, the free forever plan has no time limit, but will still put caps on your amounts.

This is an obvious negative when taken at face value, but there aren’t many beyond that. HubSpot offers brilliant service in every department, with its weakest being CRM. It still offers decent CRM coverage – it could just use lead scoring or task automation, then it would be firing on all cylinders.

3. Campaigner

Best for: Customization

Highlights: 

• Plenty of customization options
• Lots of integrations available
• 24/7 customer support

Customization goes a long way when it comes to email marketing, and Campaigner has it in spades thanks to a massive library of third-party integrations that can allow you to do virtually anything you want. Shopify, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Eventbrite, and even HubSpot are just a few of the platforms that can be connected to Campaigner to reach new customers.

Campaigner features

Beyond Campaigners many third-party integrations, it also offers a lot of features, but many of them are locked in the email marketing platform’s very expensive pricing plans. Even to simply remove the Campaigner branding you need to be paying for the Essential plan, which costs $179 per month.

Features like recurring campaigns and basic segmentation are available in the more affordable plans, as well as landing pages and social integrations. Still, if you aren’t looking to spend too much, Campaigner might not be your best bet, as it’s a bit of a premium choice.

Campaigner automation

Again, Campaigner offers some solid automation features, but you’re going to have to pay up for them. Workflow automations, for example, are only available with the Advanced plan, which costs $649 per month, well beyond some businesses’ budgets.

Campaigner pricing

Campaigner is one of the more expensive email marketing software options on the list. The Starter plan costs $59 per month, the Essential plan costs $179 per month, and the Advanced plan costs a whopping $649 per month.

Campaigner also offers an eCommerce plans, with the Starter plan costing $79.95 per month, the Essential plan costing $99.95 per month, and $149.95 per month. All of these plans offer Shopify integration and unlimited contacts.

4. Sendinblue

Best for: Best all-in-one marketing solution

Highlights:

• Lead scoring
• Task tracking and automation
• Outstanding CRM

Sendinblue is an excellent all-in-one options for email marketing software. The platform comes loaded with a ton of useful features, along with with a wealth of CRM and automation tools, so you can run your entire business for a single hub, rather than a bunch of different platforms.

Sendinblue features

Sendinblue offers CRM features like task tracking and task automation, which are what they sound like – tools to keep track of your goals and your paths to reach them, while automating basic tasks so you can focus on more important and complex issues.

Sendinblue also comes with lead scoring, which is the process of ranking possible leads by their sales readiness, showing how ready they are to move on to the next step. All of these CRM options come in every plan – even the free one.

When it comes to what Sendinblue doesn’t do, it could benefit from implementing a survey builder into the software. It’s not a particularly common feature in competitors, but it could certainly round out their package quite well.

They could also stand to integrate more social media, as there is currently no way to draft or send out social media posts (like tweets or Instagram pictures) through the platform. If this is important to you, Sendinblue won’t be a good fit, so you might want to spring for HubSpot or Constant Contact, which offer a lot more social media functionality.

Finally, it could also use a mobile app, as it’s one of few platforms that doesn’t offer one.

Sendinblue automation

In terms of automation, its standout feature is its A/B testing, which allows you to gauge the effectiveness of two different emails, each sent to a different list of recipients. This can be crucial in experimenting with two different campaigns, but it’s pretty standard across most email marketing platforms.

Sendinblue pricing

When looking at cost, Sendinblue is around the same ballpark as most other software on this list, which actually means you get more value for money due to the amount it offers elsewhere. The cheapest paid plan is $25 per month, while the steepest is $1,000 per month.

However, Sendinblue also offers bespoke plans, where you can pick and choose how many contacts you want, and the price reflects your options. Finally, they do offer a very well-stocked free plan, so you can try it out for as long as you want without spending a dime.

5. Zoho Campaigns

Best for: Overall value for money

Highlights:

• Very affordable
• Great automation
• Click mapping

Zoho has one of the cheapest services on this list, but this doesn’t compromise the quality of their platform. They also offer some great automation options, as well as analytics that you can help you understand your email marketing strategy better.

Zoho Campaigns features

Zoho excels in analytics, too. It offers click mapping, which shows where users are most engaged with your email, and platform tracking, which shows you what email platforms are the most receptive to your emails. Combine this with A/B testing, and you’ll have actionable data to better inform your strategy.

If Zoho could improve anywhere, it would be with implementing social media and CRM options – but at such a low price point, it’s a good choice if you don’t need these more advanced features. Note that Zoho does offer a CRM software, but this is sold separately from its email marketing platform.

Zoho Campaigns automation

Zoho does very well when looking at automation. They offer A/B testing, which allows you to experiment with the effectiveness of two different emails; user segmentation, allowing you to compartmentalize your contact list; and workflow automation, which lets you create and manage work processes that might otherwise take up your time.

Zoho Campaigns Pricing

Starting with their pricing structure, Zoho has two plans, each with their own tiers – these are the “email-based plan” and the “subscriber-based plan”. The email-based plan is only $3 a month (less if you pay for the year), while the subscriber plan is still only $5 a month.

Compared to other providers’ top-end products, the highest tier of Zoho’s email-based plan is a relatively low monthly $375, while the top of the line subscriber plan is a monthly $350. There is also a free plan on offer with no time limit, which will obviously have lower limits on email volume and contact lists.

6. Moosend

Best for: Purely email marketing

Highlights:

• Easy email automation
• Free plan
• Click mapping

It’s possible you’ve read up to this point and have had no interest in any of the extra bells and whistles that we’ve been talking about, and you’re only after something that can simply send emails to your customers. If this is the case, Moosend is for you.

Moosend features

As far as analytics go, Moosend lets you dive into how your emails are received and see how they perform among various demographics, as well as where people clicked within your email, showing what they were most interested in.

If it isn’t obvious from how we’ve been talking about Moosend, the platform is very limited beyond sending emails. There is no social media or CRM integration whatsoever, but if you’re only interested in emails, this will be the platform for you.

One thing to note is that Moosend doesn’t have a mobile app. Even though the appeal of Moosend is its barebones nature, the lack of a mobile app can be frustrating for anyone looking to work on the go.

Moosend automation

You can send as many or as few emails as you want to up to 200,000 people. These emails can be easily automated, although Moosend doesn’t offer an A/B testing feature or much else in terms of specific automation features.

Moosend pricing

Since it’s more of a specialized experience, the cost of Moosend is a lot lower than a lot of our other platforms. There is a free plan on offer, with the paid tiers starting at $9 per month for up to 500 contacts, going up to $5,840 per month at the top level for up to a million contacts.

7. Mailchimp

Best for: ecommerce

Highlights:

• Loads of ecommerce integration
• Helpful social media integration
• Easy to attach transactional emails

Mailchimp is the best bet for anyone running an ecommerce business. It can be integrated with a whopping 41 ecommerce apps, which means you’ll be able to put things like discount links and customer reviews straight into your emails.

Mailchimp features

Mailchimp is an attractive option when looking at its social media options, as you’re able to use it to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as receive very comprehensive analytics.

Speaking of analytics, Mailchimp doesn’t just succeed in social media – its standard email analytics are also great. You can track click maps, platforms, and list growth, allowing you to optimize the rate at which you gain new customers.

As well as some great templates and dedicated IP options, which allow you to avoid being put on automatic blacklists, Mailchimp is the only software here that offers reputation monitoring, which lets you keep track of how your online prestige is faring as you send out your emails.

Mailchimp automation

The final jewel in its crown is transactional emails – emails that are intended for specific users rather than a large group, like receipts or welcome emails. You can pay to easily attach transactional email blocks to your plan, and then use them however you please.

While Mailchimp one of the few platforms to offer built in CRM, it is fairly limited. It would be nice to see some lead scoring, especially since this is such an important feature when it comes to foreseeing possible sale opportunities.

A more fleshed-out platform like Sendinblue or ActiveCampaign would be a better option if you’re looking for CRM.

Mailchimp Pricing

When looking at price, the lowest tier will only cost you $9.99 a month, while the top tier will run you $1,190, which is in line with MailChimp’s competitors. There is also a free plan, as well as options for higher priced bespoke plans.

8. MailerLite

Best for: Analytical features

Highlights:

• Great analytics
• Free plan
• Affordable paid tiers

If you’re someone who wants to get a good grip on the minute details behind your emails, MailerLite is the best software in terms of analytics, allowing you to dive into the numbers and analyze your emails’ impact.

MailerLite Features

MailerLite’s analytics offering is definitely the best on this list. It’s comprehensive, and features a click map, platform tracking, list growth, and engagement segmentation – none of which are locked behind paywalls, as they’re all part of the free version.

That’s not to say that analytics is the only trick up MailerLite’s sleeve. It comes loaded with over 100 templates, as well as some handy automation tools that can make your life easier, like date-based automation and workflow management resources.

MailerLite Automation

However, with such a focus on analytics, there were bound to be a few areas left lacking. For starters, there is absolutely no CRM or social media whatsoever, so if you’re looking for either of these in any capacity, MailerLite is not for you. You might want to look at ActiveCampaign or Constant Contact for those features.

MailerLite Pricing

As far as your wallet is concerned, at a minimum, you’ll be paying $10 per month. At the absolute peak, you’ll need to pay $1,915 per month. However, there is a free plan if you’re looking to experiment, or run a smaller scale campaign with no more than 1,000 contacts and 12,000 sends.

9. Constant Contact

Best for: Small businesses

Highlights:

• Great social media integration
• In-depth analytics
• List growth functionality

Constant Contact is our pick for small businesses. With a lower price point and great social media options, you’ll be able to reach loads of different people, and hopefully expand your customer base.

Constant Contact Features

If you had to pick one platform on this list for social media options, it would be Constant Contact. You can create and schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as make ads for Facebook and Instagram.

The software also affords you some great social media analytics, giving you feedback on impressions, reach, and overall engagement on both posts and ads. All of these social media options are also available on the cheapest tiers.

This feedback isn’t limited to social media, though – after all, Constant Constant is primarily email software.

There is one other area that Constant Contact excels in, and that’s email analytics – this is fitting for a small business, as you want to know the best way to grow, based on what’s working and what’s not.

The platform offers great email analytics, providing email click maps, platform tracking, and perhaps most importantly, list growth – allowing you to expand your business by attracting new customers.

Constant Contact Automation

If Constant Contact was to get a boost, it would want to be in CRM and automation, as it doesn’t currently offer much in that realm. After all, once you use social media and your analytics to lock down some more customers, you’ll want to be able to hold on to them!

Constant Contact Pricing

As can be expected for software suited to small businesses, the price point is pretty low. On Constant Contact’s lowest tier, you’ll only be paying a monthly fee of $20, while their highest will run you $335 ($261.02 if you pay on an annual basis). And while there is a free trial, this will only last so long.

10. GetResponse

Best for: Value for basic email marketing features

Highlights:

• Vanilla but functional
• Ad analytics
• 220 templates

If you’ve never been one for bells and whistles, and prefer to have a sandwich over foie gras, GetResponse is for you. It’s the most vanilla software here, very much serving as the jack of all trades.

It’s easy to view the fact that GetResponse doesn’t excel in any one area as a fault, but sometimes it pays to remember the extended saying: “Jack of all trades, master of none, oftentimes better than a master of one.”

GetResponse Features

A good example of this philosophy is the fact that you can use GetResponse to craft ads for Facebook and Instagram, as well as receive analytics on these ads – although you can’t create posts themselves.

Overall, while it has an acceptable range of add-ons, this software mainly focuses on its core purpose – creating and sending the emails themselves – and has 220 templates to help you craft your campaign.

While the lack of too many extended features hasn’t been cited as a fault here, we will mention that it would be nice to see any kind of CRM support, as the platform currently has nothing in that area.

GetResponse Automation

The platform offers good automation, allowing you to stay on top of your workflows and schedule emails, but doesn’t allow for A/B testing, which can be crucial in nailing a campaign.

GetResponse Pricing

GetResponse treats your wallet pretty well. The lowest tier is $15 a month, while the maximum price you could pay is $580. There is a free trial, but this isn’t a full plan, just something to let you get the lay of the land before you decide if you want to buy.

Get More Email Subscribers

Once you’ve set up your email marketing account, your next priority should be growing your email lists. While there are many ways to do this, what you should never do is buy lists of accumulated emails.

At best, the people receiving your emails will be frustrated to receive emails from businesses they don’t know and quickly unsubscribe, at worst, the legality of these lists is questionable.

What you should do is slowly accumulate willing email recipients over time. Every time a customer checks out or makes an account with you, make sure to ask if they want to be added to your emailing list. Anyone willing to accept this prompt will be more likely to convert through a future email, so these should be the people you’re targeting.

Research Methodology

We’ve based our top 10 ranking on the following aspects:

• Email templates: How creative can you get with your emails? A service with a lot of email templates can allow you to experiment with things like image placement, fonts, colors, and a number of other fun things
• Analytics options: How much data can you see about how your emails perform? This could be things like the open rate, average time spent reading an email, or the amount of time a link is clicked
• Automation: Can you automate emails based on customer behavior?
• List segmentation: Can you break your list of customers into sub-lists? For example, having one list for people interested in your newsletter, but another list for those only interested in any sales
• Advanced features: Some software will offer unique features that simply can’t be found in others. We’ll go into more detail when the time comes about what these features can actually be

Benefits of Email Marketing Software

Email marketing is one of the best ways to get return on investment (ROI) on digital marketing strategy. In fact, email marketing can have a return as high as 4,400%, meaning you can make $44 for every $1 you spend.

It doesn’t just save you money – using an email marketing platform will also save you time. Rather than having to stay on top of sending out your emails and posts throughout the weeks and months, you can spend a few hours scheduling them all ahead of time. They’ll then trickle out at their predetermined time, and you won’t have to worry about being there to press the send button.

Instead of one big feature, email marketing software provides a load of smaller services than can add up and save a lot of time and hassle, allowing you to focus on the larger and more important parts of your business.

Verdict: What’s the Best Email Marketing Software?

Overall, Sendinblue is the best email marketing platform. While there will always be some areas where other platforms exceed, Sendinblue is the best all-rounder – you won’t be disappointed, no matter what you’re looking for in a platform.

Every platform we’ve discussed has its own merits, and every business is going to need different features. Whether you’re focused on the data (MailerLite), looking for the best value for money (Zoho), need a platform that manages both your email and social media marketing (Constant Contact), or just looking for a great overall package (Sendinblue), there is going to be a platform for you.

Frequently Asked Questions