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Email remains a critical component of digital marketing strategies, one that effectively drives customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. However, an effective email marketing campaign goes beyond a simple mailing list; it demands robust tools for automated delivery, compelling content creation, and comprehensive metric tracking. PCMag has been testing leading email marketing platforms for a decade, evaluating their capabilities, ease of use, effectiveness, and other features. Our Editors’ Choice winners—including Brevo, Campaigner, HubSpot, and Mailchimp—represent your current best bets. Read on for all our top picks, links to our in-depth reviews of each service, and buying advice to help you choose the right email marketing solution for your business.
More than just an email marketing tool, HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive marketing technology (martech) platform that integrates many features that small to mid-size businesses need. In that sense, it’s competitive with enterprise-grade products like Salesforce. Due to its integrated nature, its focus is shifting increasingly to tracking and optimizing the entire customer journey, rather than just the email experience.
SMBs looking to combine email and customer relationship management: If you’re looking for a single app that integrates CRM, email, marketing automation, and other features, HubSpot has nearly everything you could need. However, the stacked suite comes at a cost, with the robust Professional tier starting at $890 per month (or $800 per month, billed annually). Lower-cost versions are available if you’re willing to sacrifice functionality.
Campaigner is a highly customizable email marketing tool that offers a wide range of features at a competitive price. It integrates with an impressive array of third-party software and features a powerful workflow designer. It’s also easier to use than HubSpot Marketing Hub and some other competing services. 
Companies with huge email lists: Campaigner may be your best bet if you need an email marketing system that can scale to mass-marketing campaigns, as its packages support an unlimited number of contacts. In addition, the service’s robust email automation, multi-channel features, and segmentation capabilities make it a good choice for large businesses that need to efficiently manage expansive customer bases.
(Editors’ Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)
A longtime player in the email marketing space, Mailchimp has steadily improved its service to meet the demands of its large customer base. While its core focus remains email, it has integrated CRM and even website-building features into recent releases, all without compromising its consistent, comfortable UI.
Marketing newcomers and small businesses: Mailchimp’s strength lies in email campaigns, despite its expansion into all-in-one marketing solutions. A user-friendly interface, convenient templates, useful reports, and a respectable free tier make it a worthwhile service for beginners and SMBs.
Businesses needing e-commerce integration: With Mailchimp, you can track plain-text clicks, Google Analytics numbers, and, in a nice touch, e-commerce links to stay on top of sales. Additionally, Mailchimp seamlessly integrates with popular e-commerce platforms, such as BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce, making it easy to manage marketing efforts.
Since ditching its former Sendinblue branding, Brevo has evolved from a basic email marketing package to a more comprehensive marketing hub. It includes built-in CRM features and advanced automation capabilities, as well as a broad portfolio of integrations with third-party software. It also features an attractive price that’s sure to turn heads.
SMBs on tight budgets: Brevo’s free plan lets you send 300 emails per day and apply automations to 2,000 contacts. Want more flexibility? For $17 per month, you can send up to 5,000 emails per month and enjoy basic analytics. You won’t get the same feature set as some of the more costly entries in our roundup, but you’ll save money.
Growing SMBs: Brevo offers generous contact storage with all plans (the free plan supports up to 100,000 contacts!), advanced automation, CRM, and multichannel marketing. Cost-effective, volume-based pricing and an all-in-one suite of integrated marketing and sales tools mean companies can scale their operations without stumbling over technical and budgetary hurdles.
Klaviyo is a well-rounded platform designed for email marketers focused on driving sales. In addition to its robust e-commerce features, the company offers targeted solutions for the retail, wellness, and restaurant industries. Klaviyo provides a strong feature set out of the box, and it supports a wide range of integrations with third-party software to enhance your campaigns. Moreover, it has some of the best reporting and analytics capabilities of any email marketing tool we’ve tested.
Experienced e-commerce marketers: If your company is familiar with email marketing, it’ll benefit from Klaviyo’s rich feature set. The service offers e-commerce-specific automations, dynamic product feeds, and seamlessly integrates with major online stores, including BigCommerce, Magento, Presta Online, Shopify, Square Online, and WooCommerce.
Data-driven analysts: Klaviyo gives your business extensive analytics, predictive insights, and real-time tracking, enabling you to make informed decisions and develop more effective marketing strategies.
iContact is an email marketing system designed for newcomers. AI-powered content and subject-line generation features complement a friendly, drag-and-drop email creation tool. iContact has a strong anti-spam policy and uses filters to help customers avoid any pitfalls. Additionally, an open API, a library of prebuilt integrations, and Zapier support make connecting the software with other business systems a snap.
Novices: iContact’s AI-powered content generation tools help kick off your campaigns with the language and tone that will best connect with your prospects, while other tools help you avoid issues with spam filters. Just keep in mind that iContact lacks many built-in CRM functionalities, but you can find a third-party integration that does the job.
Companies needing strong support: iContact places a great emphasis on help channels, including access to dedicated support via phone, live chat, and email. They’re excellent for small businesses or teams lacking an in-house marketing expert.
Omnisend is an affordable, full-featured email marketing system that even inexperienced marketers will find simple to use. It has a clean, uncomplicated UI and offers a strong collection of pre-built templates for email messages (plus step-by-step automations to help you get started). It also integrates with SMS messaging, allowing you to run multi-channel campaigns.
Beginners and SMBs on a budget: Omnisend offers a feature-rich free tier, providing 500 email sends per month, automation, segmentation, and limited web push notifications. However, you can increase the email sends to 6,000 per month and leverage unlimited web push notifications for just $16 per month. It’s also a good choice if you plan to make heavy use of SMS marketing.
Zoho offers a robust portfolio of business software, with its various elements tightly integrated. In the case of Campaigns, its integration with Zoho CRM is especially attractive. This integrated approach also makes Zoho a good choice for businesses seeking to replace a disparate collection of legacy software, and for early-stage companies looking to quickly get up and running. In addition, Zoho provides a wealth of educational and help resources.
New and Existing Zoho customers: If the concept of an integrated business suite with a consistent, well-designed UI appeals to you, Zoho should definitely be on your radar. For example, Zoho Mail offers free, professional, custom-domain email hosting, from which you can send marketing emails. You also have the additional benefit of a single source of support across multiple teams.
Campaign Monitor is a no-frills email marketing system with an attractive UI. It doesn’t attempt to be a comprehensive marketing automation solution or integrate CRM capabilities, unlike rival software in this roundup. You can compose emails, set up campaigns, and track your progress—and that’s about it. That said, Campaign Monitor gets the job done, even if you don’t have previous experience with email marketing.
Companies with basic email marketing needs: Need to send newsletters, product announcements, or simple transactional emails? Campaign Monitor gets you up and running quickly. It offers an intuitive user interface and user-friendly functionality for basic automation and analytics.
Design-focused marketers: Campaign Monitor offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder and an extensive library of visually attractive, customizable templates. For companies that prioritize presentation and newsletter design, Campaign Monitor offers the tools you need to make great-looking content.
With its focus squarely on email marketing for small businesses, including SMS and social media pushes, Constant Contact is a platform worth checking out. It’s easy to use, features basic marketing automation tools, and offers added integrations with third-party software, including CRMs and e-commerce systems. Another useful tool is its Spaminator, which helps ensure your emails don’t land in recipients’ spam boxes.
Event organizers: Constant Contact offers specific tools and integrations that are ideal for community engagement, event management, and fundraising. It integrates with tools like Eventbrite and Eventzilla, for example, letting you manage registrations, ticketing, and event emails.
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether the recipients opened and read them. The options range from text-based templates that marketers can quickly customize to more complex HTML or JavaScript ones. The good news is that it doesn’t cost much to get started, and it’s not an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup offer free trials and affordable starter plans, and some even provide onboarding services for new customers. 
Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide that their most effective marketing tactic is a newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others may want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, allowing them to provide special offers and deals to recipients.
Each approach requires different tools for creating and distributing the source email. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographics and engagement levels. You’ll probably want to integrate them with other back-end accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and inventory management systems.
There’s some perception in the market that email is outdated due to web chat, SMS, social media, web landing pages, and even the metaverse. That’s true to some extent—and modern, multi-channel marketing campaigns should undoubtedly take advantage of as many of these channels as possible—but that’s no reason to ignore email.
According to the market research firm Statista, email usage remains virtually ubiquitous. According to the company’s estimates, around 376.4 billion emails will be sent and received daily throughout 2024. It expects that figure to grow to more than 400 billion by 2027.
The good news is that the cost to reach prospective customers via email is generally low, while the profit potential is high.
Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails per month and bill you based on the number of subscribers. If you have a small list, consider a free plan, a low-cost plan that supports several hundred subscribers, or a pay-as-you-go plan. On the flip side, many of these services also offer high-volume plans with 100,000 or more contacts.
As a result, the prices of email marketing contenders we review here vary widely. They start at about $3 per month (paid annually) to send out 500 emails per month in Zoho Campaigns and can increase significantly from there. Occasionally, it might even make sense to negotiate a custom plan directly with a sales rep.
Getting up and running with email marketing software isn’t difficult. Generally, you’ll know right away whether you like a product’s user interface (UI) or not. Most of the services we reviewed offer free trials, letting you explore them before committing any money. The majority have modern graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not the complex business software UIs of yesterday.
Be sure to consider how a vendor provides tech support, since several companies don’t make support as readily available as we prefer. Some offer 24/7 phone support, email help, and live chat, while others leave you to rely on online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-serve help resources (such as FAQs and articles) and live support via chat or phone when you can’t solve an issue yourself. 
Finally, consider any regulatory compliance issues. For example, if you plan to market to customers in the European Union, ensure that your software supports GDPR compliance. In the US, on the other hand, HIPAA mandates how you can use certain protected health information in your campaigns, while other laws govern how you can market to minors. Consult with your potential vendor to ensure they can assist you with the regulations applicable to your organization.
One significant change in email marketing has been increased engagement on mobile devices rather than PCs. Mobile users access email throughout the day and wherever they are. Thanks to mobile payment services like Apple Pay and Google Pay, smartphones have also evolved as e-commerce tools. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop that enables customers to transition seamlessly from marketing to purchasing within a single session. 
The growing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should be able to preview how your email looks in a responsive format, meaning the HTML correctly sizes images and other elements depending on the viewing device.
You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may require you to create custom reports to view this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.
Another modern trend in email marketing tools is integration with other systems, most notably CRM and e-commerce tools. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. It makes sense because both types of software are involved in managing and communicating with customers. 
One tactic marketers increasingly use to build trust in their email messages is incorporating user-generated content (UGC). For example, an email might include a customer review of a product, similar to those found on e-commerce sites such as Amazon and its competitors. UGC can also draw from other channels, including online forums and social media.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant component of many digital marketing efforts, and email marketing is no exception. AI enhances email marketing mechanics, including A/B testing and audience segmentation. Depending on how much information you can feed from your CRM and sales systems, it can also help personalize email content to individual customers.
With the correct data, AI can select content, modify customer experiences in real-time, and even interact directly with customers via a natural language chatbot. If any of that sounds attractive, you must look closely at how a prospective email marketing service implements AI and what kinds of features it offers.
Another area where AI can be beneficial is in the marketing automation capabilities that most email suites offer. Automation technology is most suitable for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. An important aspect of this is tracking the customer’s journey and the various touchpoints they encounter from initial contact to closing the sale.
The best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These help you stay in touch with your contacts by automatically generating emails based on special occasions (such as a customer’s anniversary, birthday, or past purchases), welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank-you emails for recent purchases, among other examples.
The most advanced email marketing services offer custom workflows that allow you to specify triggers based on actions (such as opening an email or making a purchase) or inaction (such as ignoring emails). With these services, you can also set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to segments of users, and you can pause or stop a campaign at any time. You can also move contacts into new segments once they complete their tutorials.
This level of customization can become complex, so it’s essential not to get overwhelmed at the outset. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with what you want to tell customers, when you want to say it, and why. Follow that plan, and you’ll quickly build a journey that might start with a welcome email post-purchase and gradually drill down to more targeted offers as your relationship with that customer grows.
Sending out campaigns isn’t much help unless you can track your successes and failures and quickly make adjustments. All the services in this roundup offer some level of tracking, whether it’s simple open and click-rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, or even integration with Google Analytics. Once you’ve got some data on your campaign, you can tweak your content to see what works using features like A/B testing, in which one part of your audience receives an email built one way while another gets a different version.
In addition to A/B testing, many services now offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of an entire campaign to test which one performs best. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important factor for content and landing pages. The right keywords can directly lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website.
Neil MacAllister contributed to this article.
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In 2014, I began my career at PCMag as a freelancer. That blossomed into a full-time position in 2021, and I now review email marketing apps, mobile operating systems, web hosting services, streaming music platforms, and video games as a senior writer. I’m a graduate of Hunter College, a hard-core gamer, and an Apple enthusiast.
I play many video games in my spare time, especially on my gaming rig, which is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, and 16GB of RAM. The Nintendo Switch 2 also sees a lot of action thanks to its backward compatibility, but I’ll also occasionally hop on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. 
I’m currently using an iPhone 15 Pro Max, coupled with the Apple AirPods Max that my brother gifted me for Christmas, to listen to music or podcasts on the go. That said, I always carry my iPad Mini with me. The tablet line has served as my faithful drawing canvas for years, and is the one piece of tech I upgrade whenever I can. Paired with an inexpensive Wacom Bamboo Duo stylus, I have a compact, reliable, and convenient doodling set to keep me busy during long commutes across the Big Apple.
Cooking is my dearest passion next to gaming, and I embrace any tech that makes modern cookery a little easier. I discovered the Paprika Recipe Manager during my stint as a chef at Google HQ and fell in love with its simple yet feature-packed toolset. It makes saving and editing online recipes a cinch, and having easy access to them on my phone is a tremendous convenience.
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