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Published: Oct 17, 2023, 3:38pm
Reviewed By
Reviewed By
Email is alive and well in 2023. Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for any company to reach engaged customers – but so long as you do it well. That’s why we have no shortage of email marketing software to choose from. To help you sort through the noise, our team evaluated some of the most popular platforms to bring you this list of the 10 best email marketing services available.
The Forbes Advisor Small Business team is committed to bringing you unbiased rankings and information with full editorial independence. We use product data, strategic methodologies and expert insights to inform all of our content and guide you in making the best decisions for your business journey.
We reviewed several software companies using a detailed process to help you find the seven best email marketing software providers for small businesses. Pricing, general features, customer reviews and analysis by our panel of experts served as the basis for our process of rating these providers. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.
Free; £10.66 per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Beginner-friendly email builder, segmentation, automation
Websites, landing pages, social ads, postcards
Free; £10.66 per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Beginner-friendly email builder, segmentation, automation
Websites, landing pages, social ads, postcards
Mailchimp is one of the most well-known marketing platforms. It’s known best for its flagship email marketing service, which pioneered the forever free plan for users with up to 500 contacts.
Mailchimp offers a standard-setting drag-and-drop editor and email templates designed to meet a variety of business goals for publishers, e-commerce businesses, coaches, service providers and more. The platform’s modern design makes it easy to use, from creation to analytics.
Along with email marketing, Mailchimp offers a suite of products to help you build and market your business online, all in one platform, including a free website builder, online stores, appointment scheduling, domains, landing pages, social media ads and even a full mailing service for postcards.
Who should use it:
Mailchimp is a go-to platform for brand-new businesses and digital creators because of its robust free offerings. If you want to experiment with email marketing techniques, such as segmentation, landing pages and autoresponders, while you have a small audience, this platform is a good place to start and grow.
Free; £2.40 per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Unlimited emails, dynamic content, A/B testing
All-in-one business platform
Free; £2.40 per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Unlimited emails, dynamic content, A/B testing
All-in-one business platform
Zoho Campaigns is one sliver of the comprehensive suite of cloud software Zoho offers. From team email, CRM and bookkeeping to docs, spreadsheets and HR management, Zoho powers small businesses from the ground up – at competitive prices.
Campaigns offers a drag-and-drop email editor with personalised, dynamic designs. You can create workflows to automate communications with customers and track information directly into an integrated Zoho or third-party CRM.
Zoho falls a bit flat in its design – both on the back end and customer-facing sides – compared with competitors. Its style is sufficient but lacks some of the clean, modern feel you’ll find with Mailchimp or Moosend.
Who should use it:
Zoho is headquartered in Chennai, India, with offices in nine countries around the world. It’s popular with India-based companies and others outside the United Kingdom, but it’s been expanding rapidly into the U.K. in recent years and could make a viable competitor for Google Workspace and other mainstays here.
£32.02 ($39)* per month
(for up to 2500 contacts)
Email and SMS marketing
Pre-built series for e-commerce behaviours and Facebook Custom Audiences integration
£32.02 ($39)* per month
(for up to 2500 contacts)
Email and SMS marketing
Pre-built series for e-commerce behaviours and Facebook Custom Audiences integration
Drip offers email and SMS marketing for e-commerce brands. It includes pre-built automated series optimised for driving purchases through abandoned cart reminders, post-purchase campaigns, product discounts and more.
Drip integrates with major e-commerce platforms including WooCommerce, Shopify and BigCommerce, so you can target your marketing campaigns to customers based on what they buy and where they browse on your site.
There’s no free version, but you can start with a 14-day free trial to try out the service. After that, Drip’s pricing is refreshingly straightforward – you’ll get all features in an email-only or email and SMS account for a flat monthly price based on how many contacts you have.
Who should use it:
Drip is designed specifically for independent e-commerce businesses. It lacks some of the features bigger brands or publishers would want, but its narrow focus means it offers all the integrations and features an e-commerce store needs.
Free; £7.39 ($9)* per month
(for up to 1,000 contacts)
Email, website and landing page builders
Paid newsletter subscriptions, e-commerce integrations
Free; £7.39 ($9)* per month
(for up to 1,000 contacts)
Email, website and landing page builders
Paid newsletter subscriptions, e-commerce integrations
MailerLite offers an email solution for just about any kind of business. You can set up automations to engage B2B prospects, integrate with an e-commerce store, sell digital downloads and even set up a paid newsletter subscription.
The platform also offers a website and blog builder, so you can manage your online presence all in one place.
MailerLite offers a free version for businesses with up to 1,000 subscribers, with a 12,000 monthly limit for how many emails you can send as a free user. Its templates aren’t available with a free account, but you can design your own emails in a drag-and-drop editor.
Who should use it:
MailerLite offers features that will appeal to most types of businesses, but it stands out from others in this list for features that’ll appeal to digital creators, especially bloggers. Its free version is for small audiences and support for paid subscriptions could make this a good platform for bloggers and small media companies looking to monetise their content directly.
Free, £16 per month
(with unlimited contacts)
Email marketing, SMS, segmentation
Landing page builder, workflow editor, custom forms
Free, £16 per month
(with unlimited contacts)
Email marketing, SMS, segmentation
Landing page builder, workflow editor, custom forms
Brevo (formerly known as Sendinblue) provides multiple plans that can work well for any size business. Brevo stands out for offering unlimited contacts on all plans. The free plan limits you to 300 emails per day, but that’s generous for a free plan. Building email campaigns on Brevo’s platform is easy with its drag-and-drop editor.
Along with most email marketing tools, Brevo gives you features to help you create the best email and SMS campaigns possible. Set up split testing for subject lines and content, use automation to send emails at the best time for your recipients and use the workflow editor to create journeys.
Who should use it:
Businesses that have large contact lists can make excellent use of Brevo’s plans, which offer unlimited contacts at no extra cost.
£42 per month
(for up to 5,000 contacts)
Email and SMS marketing, full code editor
Geolocation and other customisation options
£42 per month
(for up to 5,000 contacts)
Email and SMS marketing, full code editor
Geolocation and other customisation options
Campaigner is a classic brand management software built by a team based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It offers advanced marketing features for complex campaigns for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and transactional businesses.
Through the platform, you get access to automation, segmentation, conversion tracking and a drag-and-drop builder with templates. You can also build landing pages and pop-up forms for lead collection.
Campaigner emails offer advanced personalisation through audience segments and purchase behaviour, so you can create dynamic emails to meet the reader where they are in your customer journey.
Who should use it:
Campaigner’s advanced features are best for experienced and robust marketing teams within small or enterprise businesses. The platform would be overwhelming for individual creators or new marketers, who wouldn’t need the complex features it offers.
Free; £10.7 per month
(for up to 1,000 contacts)
Email, SMS marketing, segmentation
Website and landing page builders
Free; £10.7 per month
(for up to 1,000 contacts)
Email, SMS marketing, segmentation
Website and landing page builders
GetResponse is an email marketing solution for small, medium and large businesses, with plans ranging from very basic and free, to custom pricing with full marketing automation for enterprise organisations.
The platform helps you create email newsletters, a free website, landing pages, webinars, transactional emails, SMS and social media ads.
Its free version is available for an audience of up to 500, but it limits key features. You’ll likely use this version more as a free trial and need to upgrade to a paid version quickly to achieve substantial business goals.
Who should use it:
GetResponse could be a fit for any size company. Its interface and free plan make it a more attractive option compared to other robust platforms, so this is a good fit if usability is a high priority for your team. The platform offers an unintimidating way to access advanced marketing features.
£7.39 ($9)* per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Email marketing, landing pages, advanced tracking
CRM, e-commerce AI product recommendation
£7.39 ($9)* per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Email marketing, landing pages, advanced tracking
CRM, e-commerce AI product recommendation
Moosend is the delightful email service provider behind major brands, such as TEDx, Vogue and Domino’s. Users love the value – lots of features at much lower price points than traditional competitors.
Moosend doesn’t offer a website builder, SMS or advertising support, so you’ll have to go elsewhere for all of your marketing needs. But it offers everything you need for email marketing: transactional emails, a drag-and-drop newsletter editor, landing pages, countdown timers, automation workflows, shopper behaviour tracking and much more.
Plus, Moosend integrates with more than 100 other apps, so you can make sure all your marketing data and strategies are on the same page.
Who should use it:
Moosend is popular with larger companies and offers unlimited email sends at any subscription level. The only variable you pay for is the size of your audience. Its user-friendly interface makes marketing feel friendly and uncomplicated, so it could be a good choice if your team is just diving into email marketing for the first time.
£23.81 ($29)* per month
(for one user)
Yes
Email, SMS, landing pages, segmentation
£23.81 ($29)* per month
(for one user)
Yes
Email, SMS, landing pages, segmentation
ActiveCampaign offers several plan options that can work for a solo marketer, small business or large enterprise. It even segments its tools for your needs, whether you’re looking for a simplified email marketing tool or a full-fledged marketing automation solution with CRM features, SMS communications and predictive analytics.
Depending on the plan you choose, you can set up split testing for up to five emails at once, so you can figure out which subject line, body text, images and CTAs work best for your audiences. All of ActiveCampaign’s plans get access to advanced reports, so you can determine whether you’re hitting the sweet spot for links and CTRs, for example.
All of the automation for your email and SMS campaigns comes at a cost, though. ActiveCampaign starts at £23.81 ($29)* per month (paid annually) for one user, and it’s a lean plan. The Plus and Professional plans cost £40.23 ($49)* per month and £122.32 ($149)* per month, respectively, paid annually.
Who should use it:
ActiveCampaign is a great choice for you if you’re ready to put money into automation and predictive analytics for your marketing efforts.
£10 per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Email marketing, landing pages, surveys
AI-generated content, social media marketing, ad management
£10 per month
(for up to 500 contacts)
Email marketing, landing pages, surveys
AI-generated content, social media marketing, ad management
Constant Contact is best known as a light customer relationship management tool with a focus just on contact management. However, it has grown over the years into an email marketing suite with ad management, lead generation and automation features. The biggest difference between it and other email marketing software is that Constant Contact gives far more support options.
In addition to traditional email or ticket support, Constant Contact provides live chat and phone support, which is uncommon among email marketing tools. Plus, all of those support options are available for all tiers. Higher-tier users get onboarding calls to help with setup and training.
Who should use it:
Constant Contact is great for contact management and new users who aren’t familiar with email marketing programs, as they may feel more comfortable learning it with a safety net of live chat and phone support available.
Email marketing software are platforms designed to enable you to easily create and send marketing emails to leads and customers. They provide features to help you manage your contacts, segment audiences and track interactions with your emails.
They can also help you stay compliant with your email marketing efforts by ensuring you only send marketing emails to those who have subscribed and agreed to receive communications from you.
Many email marketing programs include tools, such as drag-and-drop email editors, landing page builders, custom forms for your sites for lead generation and workflow automation. All of these tools help you create digital marketing campaigns. Then run various reports to help you see what you need to tweak to better interact with your audiences, such as click-through rates and open rates.
Choosing the best email marketing software comes down to what your team needs. The most basic email marketing tool will help you create, send and track emails. For more advanced features, consider an email marketing platform that offers more than email sends. Look for all-in-one solutions that let you create landing pages, set up web intake forms and include automation to make your job easier.
Consider these factors to choose the right tool for you:
As stated above, basic features of an email marketing platform should be present in all options. At the very least, you should expect email creation tools and contact management. You should be able to segment your audiences into two or more categories; for example, you can create a non-marketing contact list (vendors, business partners, etc.) that stands apart from your subscribers.
You should also expect basic reports, so you can see what your open rate is on an email campaign and click-through rate, so you know whether your CTAs are effective. Among other essential features of email marketing software are integrations and automation. Integrations help you share data to and from your email marketing platform and other tools you may use, such as CRM or project management software.
On the more advanced spectrum of email marketing features are automation and AI. Some of the best email marketing platforms include workflow automation for campaigns. So, you should be able to set up a series of emails for a segmented audience and set a schedule for each email to send based on conditions (opened email, clicked a link, didn’t open email, etc.). This makes each campaign more effective and requires less hands-on effort for the marketing team.
As far as AI goes, you may find machine learning features, including predictive analytics, to help you gauge which leads are hotter than others and could benefit from an email or time-based predictions, such as optimising the best time to send an email for higher open rates. There are also tools that will give you AI-generated content, including subject lines, images or body text.
To find the best email marketing platform for your business, consider how each one handles design. Drag-and-drop editors make it much easier to create emails that look great without requiring much design experience or talent. You can also benefit from pre-made templates, so you don’t have to create a newsletter design from scratch. Some templates are even made for the best CTR possible.
Some free and low-priced plans for email marketing tools are great to use when you’re just getting started, but keep in mind that you’re likely to have little to no customisation options. Part of the reason they may have such a low cost is because the companies may include their branding on your emails you send and forms you create and host on your website.
Consider choosing an email marketing platform that costs a little extra to give you more control over how your emails, landing pages, forms and surveys look. You’ll look more professional if you can add your own branding to your content and not give away what is essentially ad space to your email marketing service.
Email marketing software varies wildly in price, depending on the level of plan you choose. There are free plans that limit your sends per day or month and low-cost plans that could run you around £3 to £11 per month with similar limitations on sends or on the size of your contact list. The average cost of email marketing platforms for up to 500 contacts is around £15 per month (based on Forbes Advisor’s top 10 list).
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing and digital marketing that is highly effective for several reasons. Whether you use email marketing as your main marketing tool or as a supplement to other forms of direct marketing, it remains a cost-effective strategy that can drive sales.
More than 4 billion people in the world use email, so it’s an ideal place to meet customers with sales, marketing and information. In fact, email marketing seems to be improving over the years.
In 2022, nearly 67% of email marketers reported an increase in open rates. And email marketing is designed to open lines of communication between consumers and businesses, unlike traditional direct marketing strategies. Perhaps this is why unsubscribe rates are low: GetResponse’s 2023 email marketing benchmarks report shows an average unsubscribe rate of 0.12% for Great Britain.
Whether you trust Omnisend’s 2022 data report that shows £32.84 ($40)* return on investment (ROI) of £0.82 ($1)* in email marketing spend or Litmus’ report of £29.55 ($36)* average ROI for every 82 pence spent, it’s clear that email marketing works. It has one of the highest ROIs of most digital marketing methods for small businesses.
The key to running successful email marketing campaigns boils down to the methods you use. It starts with the tools you use, how you build and segment your email list and studying the results of your campaigns. Here are a handful of tips to help you improve your email marketing strategy:
Standard email services, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail aren’t meant to be used for email marketing. When you use email marketing software, you can easily manage a contact list, generate leads and send and track bulk and blast emails. Many of the tools made for email marketing include features or integrations with other types of software to help with marketing, such as CRM and landing page builders.
You may already collect email addresses from customers after an interaction with them, but there’s more you can do to build your email list. Whether you sell a physical product, digital item or a service, you should have some information that’s valuable to offer for free – or for an email address. Offer e-books, free trials, coupons or a webinar to leads and all they have to do is provide an email address.
These free offers you create can live on your website and you can promote them on social media or through digital advertising. As you grow your email list, you can then start segmenting, which helps you market to each group with better intent.
Segmentation is one of the key factors of effective email marketing. When you divide your audience into groups that separate user interests, you can create more personalised campaigns. At the very least, you can segment your audiences by purchase history (customers vs. leads), but you can go granular. Try segmenting by geographical location, types of purchases and website interactions.
You can even send surveys or set up sign-up forms to let your customers and leads tell you what they’re interested in, which makes it easier to segment them. Some of the best email marketing services include automated segmentation, which creates lists based on sales history or how a user has interacted with your site.
Crafting an effective marketing email is about more than just the body of your email. You can increase your open rates and CTR by tweaking many elements of your emails, starting with the from and subject lines.
Also, make sure to optimise the send time. The best time to send an email varies, but the consensus is that 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays is the optimal window. To hedge your bet even more, send on a Monday; data from HubSpot shows that 22% of marketers say Monday is the best day for high open rates.
One of the best ways to find out if your email marketing campaigns are working is to check the reports. Most email marketing software include at least the basic reports, such as open rate, bounce rate and CTR.
If you’re using split testing, or A/B testing, for subject lines, body text and CTAs, you’ll be able to see what worked best and what didn’t. Use the data you gather to hone your email marketing strategy so you can increase your open rate and CTR.
You’re going to have bounced emails. It’s only a cause for concern if it happens too often or you don’t scrub the bad emails. A high bounce rate can affect where your email ends up for your readers; that is, your emails could end up in spam folders and not the inbox as you want.
Just ensure you scrub those email addresses that weren’t delivered for whatever reason (fake email address or blocked email, for example). You should be able to easily remove the bounced email addresses and carry on with your campaigns (with a bit of fine-tuning for better results the next round).
We evaluated some of the most popular email marketing services according to the pricing and features they offer for small and medium businesses (SMBs).
We also factor in third-party ratings and reviews from G2, Trustpilot and Capterra to include expert and customer feedback in our rankings. We then scored these contenders across four categories of features with 14 different metrics that were weighted to favour features that small business owners find valuable in a provider.
Here is an expanded look at some of the factors that we used for our rankings.
For pricing, we considered the starting price for software and the highest price that a provider charges for its plan, then ranked them as far as what we considered to be cheap, moderate and expensive options. Those providers that offered lower starting prices or plans at higher tiers that offered more beneficial features for the price fared the best in our rankings. Pricing accounted for 15% of our weighted scoring.
We wanted to know how a software’s available features compared with its competitors. Some of the features we compared included email send volume, image libraries, social media integrations, marketing automations and A/B testing. We weighted features at 40% of our total score.
We turned to reviews from real users to gauge their opinion of each software. To gain the fullest picture of reality and reduce bias, we gave higher ratings to providers who had received positive reviews―scoring at least 3.5 out of 5 on each third-party website. These reviews accounted for 10% of the total score.
Our team of experts also ranked additional criteria from customer reviews that included standout features as well as value for the money, popularity and ease of use. For value for the money, we wanted to know if a provider’s paid plan pricing aligned well with the additional features it offered.
For popularity, we looked at how widely it was being used. For ease of use, we considered how much of a learning curve the platform required to get customers operational. Altogether, these criteria make up 35% of the total score.
* conversion correct as of 13 October 2023
Which email marketing platform is best for your business depends on your goals and needs. Most platforms offer basic features including newsletters, landing pages, automations, audience segmentation and reporting. To find one that stands out for you, look for differences in pricing, integrations and additional features such as website builders and social media ads.
Email marketing software makes it easy for you to create email campaigns and journeys and then automate the sending process. It’s an affordable way to create customer loyalty and thereby customer retention, and you get measurable results of your marketing efforts.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular free email marketing services. You can use the service for free with up to 500 contacts, and automations and segmentation are available on the free plan. Its price isn’t competitive once you have more than 2,000 subscribers, though, so you may need to migrate to a new service as you grow.
Mailchimp is our highest-rated email marketing platform for small businesses. Its free plan is robust, which makes it a great place to start when your audience is small. Depending on the type of business you run, you might want to consider Drip for e-commerce campaigns or MailerLite for selling paid subscriptions.
There are several types of email marketing strategies that go beyond promotional emails and newsletters. You can send surveys to collect your own data, welcome emails, lead nurturing emails, milestone emails, re-engagement emails and transactional emails. One of the most common marketing emails is the abandoned cart recovery email, which helps you win back sales.
The most obvious way you can make money using email marketing is by sending transactional emails to sell specific products. You can also use historical purchase data to send timely reminder emails for customers to stock up on a product they bought before.
Promotional emails can encourage customers to save money with a promo code. You can even use your emails or newsletters to promote other businesses’ products or services, use the space for upselling or include sponsored content.
Some of the best free email marketing platforms make it possible for you to run an email marketing campaign at no cost to you. You may have to make concessions for the free account, such as having the email marketing service’s branding on your own emails and forms. There are likely to be limits to your daily or monthly sends, as well.
Both email and social media marketing strategies can be highly effective for small businesses, but usually, email marketing has a high ROI. With that said, the two marketing methods can be used simultaneously for different purposes.
Social media marketing is better for building brand recognition and attracting new customers, while email marketing is better for building and maintaining relationships with current customers.
Amy Nichol Smith is an award-winning journalist and newspaper editor who transitioned to the tech industry in 2008. She has been featured in Tom’s Guide, L.A. Times, Reader’s Digest and Investopedia. She spends most of her free time gaming, writing novels or playing with her dog MacKenzie Fetchington.
Kelly is an SMB Editor specializing in starting and marketing new ventures. Before joining the team, she was a Content Producer at Fit Small Business where she served as an editor and strategist covering small business marketing content. She is a former Google Tech Entrepreneur and she holds an MSc in International Marketing from Edinburgh Napier University. Additionally, she manages a column at Inc. Magazine.