Hey guys! It’s 2024, gone are the days when email marketing is all about sending bulk emails if newsletters or a list of irrelevant products. Now, in a customer-centric and data-driven digital marketing environment, it’s important for email marketing campaigns to be smart that sending the right messages to the right receivers at the right time. That’s when email marketing services replace traditional/manual email marketing procedures.
In this article, we are going to share with you a run-down of the best email marketing services for e-commerce, small-to-medium businesses, organizations that need tools for connecting with prospects and customers more effectively.
What is an email marketing service?
Email marketing service is provided by a tool that helps you to get your email straight to your customer’s inbox with expected engagement and conversions. These services let you set up automation for sending emails and record all the results for reporting and optimization.
Look at some intriguing statistics about email marketing:
- In 2023, it’s estimated that there are 4.3 billion email user worldwide (Statíta, 2020)
- For every $1 spent in email marketing, you can expect to gain back $42 (DMA, 2019)
- Sending 3 abandoned cart emails to result in 69% more orders than a single email (Omnisend, 2018)
- 49% of customers say that they want to receive promotional emails from their favorite brand on a weekly basis (Orbelo)
Therefore, 2024 is definitely the year for investing in email marketing with more smart and advanced tools that assist you in every step of the way.
Why do you need email marketing services?
While we have to agree that email marketing has good performance mostly when it is carried out based on customer-data, good scheduling, and the right workflows. We know that these data workflows can only be collected and applied effectively with tools. Therefore, using email marketing software will be a must for making sure your campaign produces a better result.
With email marketing tools, you can perform your automation marketing efficiently :
- Grow email subscribers list
- Design and custom email templates more easily
- Segment and target customers more effectively
- Follow up customers before and after their ordering for up-sell/ cross-sell
- Keep track of the performances and optimize the right elements
- Help your team to work collaboratively around sending emails and nurturing leads
Top 9 best email marketing services
Here are our selected effective email marketing tools with the run-down.
AVADA Email Marketing
Focusing on simplicity and user-friendly, AVADA Email Marketing is one of the best email marketing tools that help you recover sales, collect leads and promote seasonal campaigns. For non-tech users or solo entrepreneurs, who need a quick and easy tool to perform essential email marketing tasks, this could be a smart choice.
Email marketing automation:
- Automation workflow: set up email workflows for essential target audiences of your store with a drag-and-drop creator. Welcome series, abandoned cart email series, order follow up emails, and cross-sell/ up-sell automated email. You can apply their pre-made templates or even well-written emails to quicken your process and do more things
- Email personalization: auto-fill in the customer detailed information in automated emails
- Other advanced features: update real-time customer data for email, add social buttons to email, import and add coupon to email, track customer carts in realtime to send emails accurately, advanced automated pop-up creation, spin-to-win
Segmentation. AVADA provides an intuitive segmentation setting interface. It allows you to segment your customers based on contact attributes (tag, email name, last check out date, etc.) and behaviors (bought product collection or order value).
Report and analytics. AVADA instantly shows the most informative and truly important metrics on the dashboard, which will make you keep track of the emailing performance conveniently. Next, it enables you to dig deeper into each campaign with real-time updates and line charts for automation and newsletter campaigns. Besides, you can easily filter campaigns through certain criteria (sent, opened, revenue, etc.)
Easy of use. The tool has a frictionless design that ensures you can log in to the backend, create, adjust and control your email marketing system seamlessly.
Deliverability. AVADA uses DKIM, SFP, Bounce, and DMARC to verify the sender domain to consolidate the deliverability. You can sit down and rest assured that your emails will arrive in the recipient’s inbox.
Integration. The platform can run smoothly on Shopify, Shopify Plus, and Magento – the two most significant e-commerce platforms. Besides, it supports third-party integrations with REST API.
Pricing plan:
- Free plan
- Paid plan (pro): from $ 9/mo
Recommend when:
- You are non-tech users with little experience in email marketing
- You need a go-to email marketing tool
- You want to use a Pro plan at a significantly affordable price
Don’t recommend when:
- You need a mixed CRM-email marketing solution
- You need sophisticated or customizable reports
ActiveCampaign
Amongst hundreds of names in the email marketing field, it’s not hard to rank ActiveCampaign at one of the top positions. Nominated as the 2024 leader of winter on G2 with a 4.6/5 score, the tool receives a lot of positive reviews from users, especially small to medium enterprises.
Email marketing automation:
- Workflows: ActiveCampaign offers a totally intuitive workflow builder with a drag-and-drop design interface. You can quickly create a sophisticated workflow which consists of tags, conditions, sending options, notes, etc… almost anything that you need
- Email designer/ template: there is a drag-and-drop email designer where you can craft your email campaign, step by step, from choosing from the 25+ popular and engaging pre-made layout to customizing each title, text and image. If you don’t have time to design piece by piece, you can pick one template from their library and use it right away
- Sequence A/B testing: the tool allows users to test the email sequences with A/B testing. Conveniently, you just have to sit back and let the system optimize the workflow for your campaigns
- Other advanced features: ActiveCampaign also provides out-of-the-box predictive features – sending and content. With these highlights, you can send highly-engaging content at the optimum moment to your customers
Segmentation. The segmentation features of ActiveCampaign are versatile with a wide range of criteria. To name a few, visiting your website, customer lifetime value, quiz result, location, the information in the custom field, product purchase, etc.
Report and analytics. Of course, any successful campaign must include good reporting. ActiveCampaign has a fairly informative report with its attribution reports which shows how marketing campaigns impact sales. Besides basic reporting such as click, open, or inscribe rate, you will be wowed by versatile reports that assist you in figuring out which are the effective channels or messages.
Easy of use. The tool has an easy-to-use interface which is totally suitable for even starters.
Integration. The integration capabilities of Active Campaign is massive with almost all marketing platforms, tools (landing pages, CRMs, etc.). There shouldn’t be a problem with finding what you need.
Deliverability. The rate is at the top performance of email marketing tools, with an average number of around 90%. Active Campaign supports SPF, DKIM, and other features to make sure your emails land on the recipients’ inbox
Pricing plan:
- Lite plan: from $9/mo
- Plus: from $49/mo
- Pro: from $129/mo
- Enterprise: from $229/mo
Recommended when:
- Email marketing is one of your top priority for generating sales
- You need an all-in-integrated CRM & email marketing solution
Don’t recommend when: You just need a simple email marketing tool with a well-made premade workflow within
- Your budget is limited
Omnisend
Once a new kid on the block, Omnisend has gradually become one of the most well-known email tools in the marketing space. With more than 50,000 users all around the globe, mostly SMBs, Omnisend has a solid position in the options for omnichannel-focused email marketing software.
Email marketing:
- Ecommerce-focused workflow creator: create automated email workflows with well-crafted templates designed for eCommerce. You will have pre-made templates – abandoned cart, welcome, order confirmation, and more. You can custom the workflows in a drag-and-drop builder, with a myriad of conditions, filters, and even the small details such as “showing the description of the abandoned product or not in the email”
- Split testing: split test subject lines and sender names. Two of the most important elements which catch customer attention for the first time
- Other features: use wheel of fortunes to get more leads
In sum, when it comes to the strongest point of Omnisend, it’s convenient pre-made templates and the ability to customize for almost any kind of e-commerce workflow.
Segmentation. While creating email campaigns, you can apply the segment to make sure the campaign targets the right audience. Based on customer behaviors ( e.g. product clicked, the product ordered, etc.) and other customers’ criteria.
Report and analytics. For reporting, Omnisend allows you to keep track of the performance of each email campaign with a click and open rates, campaign/ workflow with the most total sales/ highest conversion rates/ etc., and segment performances.
Also, it shows you click maps for emails that let you know where to put the largest efforts into the email. So, as you can see, the report part lacks some figures that you might need if you want to go further on how each campaign of workflow impacts the sales and conversion. Hope that they will add these calculations soon.
Easy of use. The backend working space of the tool is clean, easy to navigate, and user-friendly.
Integration. If you are running Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce or Woocommerce, Omnisend serves you all the way. For other CRM or marketing, sales optimization tools, you might need to install 3rd-party solutions.
Deliverability. The rate is around 98%, which is quite impressive.
Pricing plan:
- Free plan $0
- Standard: from $16/mo
- Pro: from $99/mo
Recommend when:
- Your marketing activities spread on multiple channels
- You like some unique features of Omnisend
Don’t recommend when:
- Your budget is under the standard plan, the automation features are limited
Moosend
Founded in 2013, until now Moosend has been regarded as a potential and different email marketing service for SMBs, with a simple operation but a full package of essential features for business to grow and scale-up.
Email marketing:
- Emai template builder: you will have a versatile email editor with hundreds of up-to-date layouts that support you in creating professional and beautiful emails in a short amount of time. The templates are separated into categories with business purposes for easy selection.
- Automation workflow: build multiple workflows that streamline the customer journey whenever they are. Let’s say abandoned cart, user onboarding, welcome and more. These sequences are built with customer activities, lead scoring, yes/now statement condition.
- Advanced personalization: send emails based on customers’ activities (e.g. if John búy 5 apples twice a week, the system will send emails to remind him if he forgets to place orders any day).
- Other advanced features: AI-powered product recommendations or weather-based triggered emails
Segmentation. The tool offers a fairly comprehensive segmentation category. With significant conditions from date added, subscription method, opened any campaign, opened specific campaigns to a number of campaigns opened or product viewed, you can produce results. However, Moosend has not included the geographical location condition which is an important factor in segmenting.
Report and analytics. Because Moosend is designed for small businesses, it has a limited collection of performance tracking. We have the most basic figures such assent, clicked, opened, not opened, bounced, unsubscribed, and complained, for each campaign. Besides, the tool provides click maps, link performance, and a simple activity report by location.
Easy of use. Moosend has a clean and consolidated backend interface.
Integration. The tool supports direct connection to Magento, Woocomerce, and some other platforms. For CRMs, it can be well-connected to Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Agile, etc.
Deliverability. The rate of Moosend is in the acceptable range, with the number of around 64.7%, according to the Email Deliverability Report. Moosend
Pricing plan:
- Free plan
- Pro plan: from $8/mo
- Custom plan
Recommend when:
- You need a simple but interesting email marketing tool
- You are a small-to-medium business
Don’t recommend when:
- You are a large company and need to send millions of emails per month
- You need features like pop-up/form edit or gamification
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a major player in the email marketing area, we cannot deny it. Although there are some opinions that we can get better value for our money with some other email marketing tools, Mailchimp still receives a lot of compliments and gains a lot of trust from users for each period.
Email marketing:
- Customer journey builder: create customer paths with multiple actions and conditions with a drag-and-drop editor. Mailchimp offers a certain number of preset automation types (cart abandonment to first-time customers), you take advantage of them to quickly build and run a workflow.
- Email editor: apart from pre-built templates and layouts with a specific purpose, many of Mailchimp’s users might wait for a drag-and-drop email builder for a long time
- A/B testing: you can split test up to 4 elements – send time, content, sender name, and title
- Other advanced features: send emails at the recipients’ time zone, personalized recommended product email
Segmentation. Mailchimp is known for its advanced segmentation. The segmentation option is extensive. You can check here.
Report and analytics. Mailchimp provides essential reports which show clicks, opens, revenue from campaigns, activities by locations, devices. Besides, there are insightful numbers that gain you more understanding of the customer – forwarded, forwarded open, last opened, last clicked.
Integration. Mailchimp hooks into popular and widely-used eCommerce platforms: Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce, Bigcommerce, and more.
Easy of use. It can be said that Mailchimp is pretty easy and intuitive to use. However, some might find the navigation in the dashboard a little confusing.
Deliverability. The rate of deliverability of Mailchimp is high. The company runs with hundreds of unique IP addresses along with abuse-detection technology, to protect your deliverability from being affected by other users’ actions.
Pricing plan:
- Free plan
- Essentials: from $9.99/mo
- Standard: from $14.99/mo
- Premium: from $299/mo
Recommend when:
- You love trying out different marketing tactics or email series
- You can pay for a steep-priced tool when your subscribers grow
- You have a small subscriber list and need a go-to tool
Don’t recommend when:
- You have a large number of subscribers but don’t want to invest too much money in emailing
- You just need a few simple automation
GetResponse
Getresponse is another notable selection in the email marketing service category. Starting at $15/mon, this can be a friendly starting point for those who is new in digital marketing. You will find the automation process of GetResponse is quite intuitive and build your own workflows without much of the learning curve. It receives a 4.1 score on G2 and Capterra.
Email marketing:
- Automation workflow: you can create automated workflows from three familiar elements – actions, conditions, and filters. The design interface is drag and drop. You can also use tags to mark the contacts at certain stages or move contacts from workflow to the workflow. GetRespsonse does provide well-made templates for basic e-commerce or customer nurturing campaigns as well.
- A/B testing: the tool allows test the subject lines only
- Other advanced features: integrated webinar in emails
Segmentation. Besides essential conditions that almost all email marketing tools provide, GetResponse supports users to search contacts for adding to one segment with advanced search – subscription method, link clicks, or message opens, etc.
Report and analytics. The reporting of GetResponse is quite basic, however, it’s still informative. Along with click and open rates, you have email campaign conversion, ROI or side-by-side email campaign comparison.
Easy of use. The interface of the tool is relatively clean and neat, which is preferable for almost any new email marketing users. However, the user guide of GetResponse is bare-bone, which makes it a bit hard for users to discover its features.
Deliverability. The rate is quite high, which is claimed to be 99%. From our own experiences, the true rate is just strong as promised by applying advanced deliverability monitor tools.
Integration. There are built-in integrations to the most popular eCommerce platforms – Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce, and more.
Pricing plan:
- Basic: from $15/mo
- Plus: from $49/mo
- Pro: from $99/mo
Recommend when:
- You are a small-to-midsize business
- You are quite new to email marketing
- You want to use its extra features – webinar hosting, landing pages building
Don’t recommend when:
- You use multiple third-party solutions. Because the API of GetResponse is not so robust
- You need customizable reports
Sendinblue
Once being called a cheaper version of Mailchimp, Sendinblue has proved its brand name as an affordable email marketing solution with almost essential, useful features together with the support team for all versions. If you are running email marketing on a budget but still want to try some advanced and effective features, you can take a look at this tool.
Email marketing:
- Automation workflow: besides the essential conditions related to customer behaviors, customer information, the tool has included some beneficial conditions such as “the first-time buyer”. Also, it prepared a number of popular pre-made workflows which are used by almost all eCommerce store
- A/B testing: you can test the subject lines and email content. You can schedule the testing time and check the opens, clicks, and unsubscribe numbers of each campaign
- Other advanced features: sign-up form creator, chat, SMS marketing
Segmentation. With Sendinblue, you can create flexible workflows with multiple conditions related to costumes’ activities. Plus there are meaningful conditions that are important for e-commerce such as after purchase or abandonment cart series
Report and analytics. The tool allows you to integrate Google Analytics for optimum reporting of website traffic driven by email marketing campaigns. At the same time, it provides several generals detailed reports such as clicked link heatmap or openers and clickers report.
Easy of use. Sendinblue is a customer-centric company with its knowledge-based shown
Deliverability. Sendinblue comes with a range of valuable features to make sure your emails arrive in the recipient’s inbox such as automatically blacklisting email addresses having hard bounce. The deliverability rate of this tool is quite high.
Integration. You can find almost all integration of Sendinblue with popular e-commerce platforms. Additionally, other connections to CRM, landing page builders are well-included in the collection.
Pricing plan:
- Free: unlimited contacts
- Lite: from $25/mo
- Premium: from $65/mo
Recommend when
- You need an affordable complex email marketing tool
- Don’t recommend when:
- You need to assign multiple accounts in the system ( available in only Premium and Enterprise plan)
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the go-to names for email marketing, also a long-time player in the field. It provides powerful and solid email functionalities including essential automated series for every e-commerce business. The tool boasts a marketplace with more than 400 apps and integrations. There is one thing that you need to know about Constant Contact that you will not receive the most innovative features added to the tool, in comparison to other newer names.
Email marketing:
- Simple and basic automation: Constant Contact offers the most essential automated workflows for your online store. You can pick up the pre-made workflows, add litter customization and run the campaign right away.
- However, if you are looking for detailed conditions such as customer lifetime value or order value, the tool does not support
- Other advanced features: AI-driven email marketing (newsletters, product recommendation), text to join, collect contacts from app sign-up.
- A/B testing: you can test multiple elements: sign-up form, landing page, subject lines
Segmentation. You will find essential, basic, and useful segmenting criteria here – contact activity, contact details (personal info, birthday month, added date, etc). There is a handy criterion which is engagement level, you can select the level and the system will automatically know who to send the email to.
Report and analytics. Constant Contact shows users the performance of each email campaign sent, clicks, opens, unsubscribe, links that did not open and bounced click-tracking heatmap. The reports are quite unlimited compared to other tools.
Easy of use. The navigation and operation within the backend is clean and neat. It will take just a little effort to learn how to deal with the dashboard and other elements.
Deliverability. The brand claims it deliverability is 97%. In terms of methods, it equips users with key features such as automatically removing contacts that bounced, proactive monitoring, registration with major Internet Service Providers for collecting reports, DKIM, SPF, and more.
Integration. Users can be pleased with Constant Contact’ direct connection to Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce, etc. for fetching data from the store and craft personalized emails with A.I
Pricing plan:
- Email plan: from $20/mo
- Email plus plan: from $45/mo
Recommend if
- You are a newbie with little experiences
- You need a great deliverability
Don’t recommend if:
- The price is an important factor (the price soars when you subscriber reach (For over 2,500 subscribers, you have to pay $45/month on the basic plan.)
- You would like to use e-commerce sophisticated automation
MailerLite
As its name has been highlighted, MailerLite is truly a great tool for beginners, solo entrepreneurs, or small businesses. Instead of adding extra features, the tool focuses on the essentials and presents them as the easiest to use as possible for all users. MailerLite is a straightforward tool, you can see this aspect even on their official website, easy to navigate.
Email marketing automation:
- Automation workflow: create email sequences for each segment and customer groups. You will have a drag-and-drop builder with conditions including customers’ actions and information. MailerLite prepared certain workflows whether you are a solo entrepreneur (e.g. when a subscriber update a field when a subscriber complete a form) or a business (abandoned cart email, follow-up email after purchase)
- Email editor: you can insert social posts (Facebook, Twitter), embed forms, etc. in the email, design nice-looking ones with built-in templates or drag-and-drop blocks
- Other advanced features: landing page builder, pop-up subscribe form creator, RSS feed as email
Segmentation. MailerLite provides essential criteria for personalization – Assigning tags to character and interest that you collected from customers to divide them into different groups, location, and timezone, specific behavior, engaging time with your emails, etc.
Report and analytics. The reporting of MailerLite is still limited and simple. You have click maps, opened by location and devices, opens and clicks of receivers.
Easy of use. As mentioned above, you can work with the tool without friction as the interface is totally clear.
Deliverability. According to some reports, the deliverability of MailerLite has been decreasing since the surveyed number is around 76%. This might be a big minus point for the tool.
Integration. The tools have 120 integrations in their bank, in which there are important connections to major platforms – Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce. For landing pages, it hooks into popular providers – Squarespace, Clickfunnels.
Pricing plan:
- Free plan
- Paid plan (pro): from $10/mo
Recommend when:
- You are willing to spend some time customizing your own campaigns
- You want to include your social media post in emails
Don’t recommend when:
- You need a modern user interface design
- You need sophisticated or customizable reports
Choose the right email marketing services for your organization
There’s no secret about how COVID-19 has shaped the way people are shopping. With a number of new trends in email marketing, such as hyper-personalization or interactive emails, you guys definitely need to find your own mediums to win your potential customers. Once you have some ideas in your plan, find a solution that can help you to deliver your message to customers. That’s said, every tool has pros and cons. Hope that our in-depth reviews can help you narrow your options.
Amongst the multiple email marketing providers in the market, we highly recommend you try AVADA Email Marketing – a simple but effective solution to get more leads, turn engagement to conversion or win back sales, especially if you are a small-to-midsize business.
We are excited to see more innovations in 2024 from online stores and from email marketing service providers. We will update you more on future blog posts about new technologies and trends. Stay tuned!
