When you start running an online shop, the greatest thing you want is to generate leads and conversions from your visitors and beat off your competitors. However, it isn't that easy especially if you just started a new business online also known as an ecommerce shop where you sell your products online.
Many business entities use paid traffic but it isn't sure that the paid traffic will return you more than the amount you spent because not everyone will be interested in what you have to offer.
It has been proven in digital marketing that a business with 10 engaged daily visitors that buy an item on your online store is better than an ecommerce site that pays for traffic which might not in most cases, generate conversions on lead.
Why that? Well this is because the 10 visitors which purchase items daily from the site aren't gotten from paid traffic meaning they are unique and they will always return to your store if ever they want to purchase another item that you offer.
How do these guys return everyday to purchase an item? Well this is because they love your shop and also because you got their email registered in their mail list and they receive updates from your site everyday. In most cases, buyers tend to recommend many online stores to their relatives and friends and I'm sure you've done such a practice before.
From here, you will know that just from 10 daily engagement, you can get up to hundreds of thousand engagements and leads as time goes on.
The main tool that plays a role here is the email marketing. Email marketing is used not only by small businesses but by bigger ones equally to encourage their frequent buyers that subscribed to the email updates to return with an assurance that they will buy something new from your shop.
There are many business marketing software or tools out there but in this article, I will share with you 8 of the best email marketing services or software out there for small business entities that you can use to generate more conversions and sales from your ecommerce shop. You can also use the these email marketing tools to run your email campaigns for your already established business.
Table of Contents
What is Email Marketing and How Does it Works?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that can make the customers on your email list aware of new products, discounts, and other services. It can also be a softer sell to educate your audience on the value of your brand or keep them engaged between purchases.
Email marketing is possible with an already available email list of engaged customers that are interested in the products on your online shop. If you just bought the email list, then your chances of driving sales from these email are minimal to success.
That is why it is important you know how to build email list from customers that already purchased items from your website.
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Advantages/Benefits of Email Marketing
- It is low cost and doesn't require a lot of money. However, the rates depends on the platform you choose.
- Easily reach an already engaged Audience. Obviously those found on your email list are those that are interested in what you have to offer. So sending them mails increases their chances of returning to your site to discover new items.
- Deliver targeted messages to the engaged audience that will increase probability of returning to your site.
- Drive more sales and revenue.
- Easily get multiple double of your investment in email marketing.
What to Lookout in a Good Email Marketing Software?
A good email marketing service should offer possibilities for you to create highly engaging email newsletters with a user-friendly interface (ideally drag-and-drop editor) and also with customizable templates.
You should be able to easily send bulk emails that are actually personalized and targeted without a lot of work. This is also known as marketing automation.
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A good email marketing service should offer tools that can let you segment users into different groups, manage your email list and easily track all what's on the move with your running campaigns.
Another important factor is your email marketing services should have tough security features to avoid all your mails to be filtered as spam and sent to spam folder.
If you don't know what spam is, this is what we call spam email and how you can stop them.
Having all this stock in your mind, the best choice for the best email marketing software for small business will be even a cup of tea.
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8 Best Email Marketing Software for Business Entities
Below are the 8 Best Email marketing software for small business. However, if you run a business and want to start email marketing, then checkout these 8 email marketing services because they can also be used in larger business.
1. Constant Contact
There are many reasons behind the primary place for this email marketing tool or service.
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
With Constant Contact, you can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and more.
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Each account you create with them lets you send unlimited emails, easily track and report report for your campaigns, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.
Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
In addition, no credit card is required for the 60days free trial method but afterwards, you will need to subscribe to their services at a rate of $20 if you wish to continue using their services.
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2. SendinBlue
It is an extremely easy to use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners who don't have experience in email marketing.
They have beginner-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and easily segment users into groups. They also have an interesting feature which detects the best time to send bulk emails thanks to their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
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SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which allows you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice functionality to have if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.
Their paid plans start from $25 per month for Lite. However, you can add SMS to your account, but the pricing will differ depending on the requirements to send messages.
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3. Drip
Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
This email marketing software offers integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.
What sets Drip apart from all competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual automation workflow builder. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.
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You can send bulk emails and communicate with all your customers in a live sessions during the campaign thanks to their smart eCommerce marketing automation.
Now you can easily interact with your customers through email and SMS since they have introduced the SMS notifications to all the plans they offer.
Their only downside here is the price. However, I think the price is worth the quality services they offer. Drip offers a free trial, and their plans starts from $49 / month which includes all their features.
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4. HubSpot
In terms of CRM and email marketing space, we definitely must call HubSpot on.
For a start their services are free with the possibility to send up to 2,000 email for free.
They also have a drag-and-drop email builder and a selection of templates to create a completely custom newsletter that matches your brand’s personality and colors.
Thanks to HubSpot CRM native integration, you can personalize your emails for each subscriber based on device type, country, list membership, or any other custom information you might have on the individual subscriber.
HubSpot comes with all the powerful feature you’d expect from an enterprise level email marketing software such as send time optimization, high email deliverability, A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.
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If you ask many businesses out there that why did they choose HubSpot as email marketing software, they will reply, "small, medium, and enterprise customers choose HubSpot because they offer an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builder, operation hub, and more". Not all email marketing services offer same out there.
HubSpot free plan allows you to send up to 2,000 mails and also includes the CRM and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools.
However;, if you need more features and tools from them, then you will need to any of their paid plans starting as from $45/month.
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5. ConvertKit
Yet another Robust email marketing software is ConvertKit. ConvertKit is mostly used out there by professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful.
Content Upgrade is its unique feature over its competitors. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service.
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Segmentation is an important aspect for all email marketing platforms and again, ConvertKit allows its users to segment email list in to subscribed users and those that might be interested. This is an ideal tool for bloggers that built an email list and are looking for ways to manage it.
This helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing.
A lot of ConvertKit features such as paid newsletters are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers which is the main reason why this email marketing service is ideal for content creators.
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6. AWeber
Though Aweber is the most old email market platform, it remains one of the most popular email platform known world wide with quality services.
Ideal for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing thanks to a wide range of email marketing tools.
It is quite easy to get started with them. AWeber connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress.
You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and email tracking with detailed insights.
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Other powerful email marketing features allow you to send powerful emails such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag based subscriber segmentation.
They offer a free plan for up to 500 subscribers. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. You can also signup for quarterly or annual plans to save even more.
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7. MailChimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world right now.
Without doubts, this is primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.
Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s time zones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.
Integration with popular site builders such as WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms is possible and easy to do.
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However, MailChimp is limited in features such as marketing automation features which is not the case for its other competitors listed on this list.
Improvements from MailChimp has been made on these advanced features over the past years but there's no remarkable and significant change noticed.
Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc.
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You are also required to display their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but as a serious business, you need reliable support that you can count on.
Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases in the increment of 500 subscribers.
If your needs are higher and you want unlimited audiences, advanced audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and comparative reporting, then you’d have to move to their $299 per month plan.
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8. Zoho Campaigns
Zoho has a lot of similar features to MailChimp. As you would expect, Campaigns offers tight integration with Zoho's other business products, especially Zoho CRM, but when viewed as a standalone email marketing tool for creating email campaigns and newsletters it does very well on its own.
Campaigns has a nice amount of pre-set templates and can help novices create attractive emails in minutes. Since we last tested it, Zoho gave Campaigns a facelift and added a host of new features, which we will get into below. The chief downside of Campaigns is its price.
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Compared to our Editors' Choice winners in this category, Mailchimp and Campaigner, Campaigns can get expensive fast. If the money works for you, though, Zoho Campaigns has a lot going for it on the feature front and is well worth considering.
Zoho Campaigns starts its pricing in a pay-as-you-go plan. That means you're buying email credits and then marking those against the emails you send, an approach similar to competitors like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp.
That can get tricky if you're marketing needs change quickly or you're not blessed with a hard and fast email list.
For smaller companies just looking to dip their toes into the email marketing pond for the first time, it should work well, but it's not your only option.
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Just as MailChimp, Zoho has a free plan that includes up to 2,000 subscribers. This free Zoho Campaigns version lets you send 12,000 emails per month. If you need more than 100,000 subscribers, then you can get a quote on a custom high-volume plan.
As per PCMag Review...
Best Effective Ways to Easily Get Email Subscribers Fast
When you have an email marketing software, you will always love to see your email subscribers grow. As of NeilPatel, you can follow the below effective tips to get more email subscribers.
- Craft a more compelling offer
- Make it as easy as possible to enter an email address
- Encourage people to forward your newsletter
- Minimize the clicks it takes to subscribe
- Consider using QR codes
- Engage new subscribers immediately with your thank-you page
- Give the user more control over the content
- Invite subscribers through your social networks
- Craft your subject lines like Tweets
- Maximize the email preview
Aside from that, if you are a WordPress user, then things will be even simple for you to deal with thanks to plugins. The below plugins can help you drive more visitors to your site and turn them into email subscribers.
8 Proven Tips to Improve Email Deliverability
Getting a the best email marketing software for your business is done, creating and improving your email subscriber list is also done. But now the only thing left to do is to optimize your email deliverability for it not to be ignore by the subscriber. It needs to be attractive to improve its click-through-rate (CTR) in the email box.
Below are 8 proven practices to ensure a good email deliverability
- Authenticate your email domain.
- Maintain proper IP allocation.
- Perfect the opt-in process.
- Write non-spammy subject lines.
- Provide a preference center.
- Keep clean lists.
- Avoid spam traps.
- Send email that people love.
Can I do bulk email marketing from my Gmail or Outlook?
To be direct with this, No it ain't possible. Outlook and Gmail are not set up to distribute bulk emails, and in fact actively work against allowing their users to do so – because they don't want their platforms being used for spammy purposes.
Both Gmail and Outlook set a maximum number of emails you can send in a single hour or day.
Which is the Best Free Email Marketing Software?
We count a total number of 5 free email marketing software on this list and obviously without doubt, if I was asked to choose the best free amongst them, then I will pickup SendinBlue because they have a forever free plan in-terms of subscriber limits.
How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?
The price here isn't fix for everyone since everyone has his/her own taste for email marketing. As a result, many will choose different plans and the cost of the email marketing will differ based on the provider and plan you chose.
Does Email Marketing Help SEO?
Email marketing doesn't have a direct impact on SEO but, SEO relies on many terms to rank a website. If your email marketing can reach social media, and paying attention to the fact that Google uses social media to rank websites, we can say that email marketing has an indirect impact on SEO.
The more leads you get the more Google will know the page has something interesting that people keep on visiting and then boom, they will rank the site. Email marketing equally helps reduce bounce rate by driving significant traffic from interested subscriber and a reduced bounce rate can be easily advantageous for SEO.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best email marketing service for small businesses?
Sendinblue, Mailchimp, GetResponse, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign are some of the best email marketing services for small businesses and startups.
How do I choose the best email marketing software?
To make sure you choose the right email marketing softward: Know what type of emails you want to send, Determine your must-have features, Build your testing team, Create a shortlist of apps, Test each app with your team, Start with a free plan.
What is the most professional email platform?
G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, and Zoho Workplace are the most professional email platforms out there.
Final Thoughts on Best Email Marketing Software and Services for Business and WooCommerce Websites
The showcase of the best email marketing software to run your email campaigns is as listed above. it doesn't matter if you have a small business or already establish business. The most important thing is you are out for the same reason. That is, to generate more leads from your email campaigns.
And for that to be possible, you will need good email marketing services that will get the job done with or without spending money. However, the best services you can get are those with paid plans.
If I was to be asked which of them is best for me. Then I will say it is ConvertKit since it is mostly for content creators, professional bloggers as me though marketers can still use it.
When making a choice of an email marketing software, make sure you choose the one that is ideal for your business and your needs.