The 9 Best Email Marketing Platforms 2021 | Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business
Updated: Jul 24, 2021
Today's blog is on the 9 Best Email Marketing Platforms 2021. These are the best email marketing services for small businesses.
Email marketing is an old and very popular online marketing strategy that is still working in terms of Return on Investment (ROI).
According to analysis, it’s floating around 3,800%. So every $1 you invest in email marketing with the help of these best email marketing services, you should anticipate a return of $38.
Increasingly, around 3.9 billion people extensively used email in 2019. This number is estimated to grow to 4.48 billion by the year 2024, according to a study by Statista.
But what does it mean?
It means you’re missing out on returning website visitors if your website, online shop, or blog doesn’t have a working email marketing solution.
Email marketing services assist small business owners (and startups) build a faithful customer base, wider broader brand recognition, trust, and an increase in sales.
This is where email marketing software comes to support. It automatizes the procedures and frees up time for the companies to focus on more difficult tasks.
How to Select a Best Email Marketing Services 2021
There are lots of email marketing tool choices to select from with various features, payment plans, and the level of user-friendliness.
Hence, you want to select an excellent email marketing software that has all the important attributes involving sending out email newsletters.
A few of the important things you should be searching for are adding email contacts in bulk, email automation features (auto-responding), SMS sending, detailed reporting, high deliverability rates, customer sectionalization options for targeted emails, and campaign management tools.
What about the pricing?
Some of the best email marketing services permit you to store subscribers and send emails for free up to a point. After that, the standard pricing model is the price per subscriber. Generally, the pricing goes higher as the number of subscribers grows.
9 Best Email Marketing Services in 2021
1. Constant Contact
You have lots of choices for importing your email contacts. You can apply copy-paste, upload emails in bulk from a file, and import contacts from Gmail, Outlook, and other 3rd party apps. The complete procedure itself is quite simple and easy to follow.
Continual contact’s email design tool uses drag and drops serviceability together with element blocks. When creating your email, you can select from many templates as a base for your email, or begin building it from scratch. Several handy toolbars assist you with adding elements or editing a chosen one. However, when adding an image, you can read three separate windows, which we think is a little bit more.
While you’re structuring your email, you can always use the preview function to see how the current version would seem in someone’s inbox.
After you’ve generated your email, you select the email recipients, add a subject line, and dictate when your email is sent. Once you’re done with that, you can go back to your dashboard and see some simple statistics about your email’s performance.
Mobile Editor
Continual contact has a separate mobile app available on the App Store and Google Play. You can use it to generate and send emails, receive notifications, and see the statistics of your sent emails. The app itself is comparatively dense and useful for marketers on the go who still want to be fruitful with their Best Email Marketing Services in 2021.
Features
Continue Contact’s service has all the modern attributes required to create an effective email marketing campaign in today’s world. Some of the more advanced features are only obtainable with the higher-tier plan. So, make sure you pick the right plan with your desired features.
On top of the inexhaustible emails, you can send with Constant Contact, the main features are drag and drop design tools, mobile-responsive emails, list segmentation for targeted emails, customized emails, and email automation capabilities.
Their customer support is available over the phone and lives chat support, and they have a huge knowledge base with additional marketing articles you can search.
If you don’t have a website still now, then Constant Contact’s plans also involve web hosting. You can build a whole website, landing pages, or even eCommerce sites. Check out our website builders review where you can search for further information about Constant Contact Builder as well, among other best website builder providers.
Pricing & Plans
Constant Contact provides two subscription plans, and the cost of both is linked with how many contacts you are adding to your account.
The lowest-plan starts at $20/month with 500 contacts ($0.04/contact).
Constant Contact provides a 60-day free trial with no need for a credit card. You’re limited to 100 contacts during the trial period, but it, however, gives you a safe opportunity to test their service.
2. Sendinblue
You have three ways to add contacts: copy-pasting, import email contact from a file, and adding contacts separately. All of these are simple and instinctive to use. However, during this process, Sendinblue’s data mapping purpose asks you to match the extra details to an email address, which is optional but isn’t stated clearly during the process.
Sendinblue’s email design tool is where they beam the most. You start by creating a campaign and insert some basic information. The design of the editor is dense and doesn’t make sure of many popup windows to clog the view. You have three options for creating your email: drag & drop, “Rich Text Editor”, and custom HTML code. All of these choices are smooth and user-friendly. You can also preview your created email with desktop, tablet, and mobile views.
Before sending an email to your contacts, you will go through a summary page that showcases the setup, design, and contact information. This is an amazing feature to double-check if everything is correct before you strike that Send button.
Mobile Editor
Sendinblue doesn’t have a self-sustaining mobile application. However, their editor is completely functional in the mobile browser.
Features
Sendinblue’s email marketing tools are loaded with modern features. These features authorize you to take advantage of the latest trends in email marketing. Although some of the more advanced properties are locked beyond higher-tier plans, the free plan’s base foundation provides enough to get started with your email campaigns.
The main features that we want to highlight are an unlimited number of contacts and details, instinctual drag & drop-based design tools, email personalization, mobile-friendliness, customer segmentation options, and custom email automation rules. You also get a complete-functional CRM for building a sales channel, a live chat plugin, and access to edit Facebook ads directly in Sendinblue’s campaign management tool.
Sendinblue’s customer support is reachable over email by default. You can also reach them by phone and live chat, but only starting from the Premium plan. They do have a large-scale knowledge base with useful articles you can browse for information.
Pricing & Plans
Sendinblue conventionally provides four various plans: Free, Lite, Premium, and Enterprise. However, there’s another plan named Lite+, which adds some accessibility for an additional monthly fee. Together with the free plan, all plans have the mandatory functionality to design and start an email campaign.
To one side from the free plan, Sendinblue’s cheapest plan starts at $25/month with 10,000 emails ($0.0025/email).
Sendinblue provides both free and paid plans.
Go with the next best email marketing services.
3. GetResponse
You can add your contacts simply through the quick-action buttons from the dashboard. You can select to upload your contacts separately or import them from a file. Depending on your contact list’s size, the importing may take a couple of seconds up to a few hours.
Building your email is proportionately straightforward, and you can pick a pre-designed template, start from a blank template, or insert your HTML code in the editor. Working with a template gives you access to drag and drop tools and the building blocks toolbar. We mainly enjoyed the block’s name display when hovering over an inserted building block. You can also preview your created emails in the desktop or mobile view making sure the content seems great on all devices.
GetResponse also gives you access to thousands of free stock photos and a desegregated Shutterstock gallery. However, the hindmost doesn’t come free, but you can purchase the crave image after previewing it in the editor. Unfortunately, they lack an internal image editor, so when you upload your image, make sure you’ve already edited it.
Once you create your email, you are directed to the brief page. Here you can name your campaign, write the subject line, and add your email recipients. Most of these choices open a popup window and don’t redirect you to various pages, except when you want to redo the editing phase.
Mobile Editor
GetResponse has a mobile application that you can apply to retrieve data, create emails, and manage your contacts. However, the email editor in the app is disappointing. The specially made and personalization options choices are minimal, and you can only create text-based messages (minus some emotions).
Features
GetResponse centers steadily on webinars and eCommerce sites. Actually, you get tools for both with even the starter plan. Certainly, that doesn’t mean that this service isn’t working with other businesses - entirely the opposite.
Since the pricing model is situated on the subscriber count, you can send out an unlimited number of emails to your list. The other main attributes are a drag and drop email design tool, mobile-friendly emails, dynamic content based on customer segmentation, and automated email choices for bloggers.
GetResponse’s customer support is present 24/7 over the live chat and email, which is reassuring, mainly if you’re new to email marketing. Once you opt for a custom plan, you also get supplementary phone support, a loose channel option, and an exclusive support person.
Pricing & Plans
GetResponse’s pricing model is situated on the number of contacts you have on your list. You can get the best prices with a 2-year commitment.
The cheapest plan starts at $10.50/month with 1,000 contacts ($0.0105/contact).
GetResponse doesn’t have a refund policy with their paid plans, but you can go with their 30-days trial service. Here is one good thing: the trial period doesn’t require your credit card details, either.
4. ConvertKit
You can create your email list in three ways: add separated contacts, upload emails in bulk from a CSV file, or import your email contacts from another service. Even so, there isn’t an option to Copy-paste your data, you can simply build a CSV file to bypass this. ConvertKit only supports one list of contacts, and you can manage them by using tags.
Creating your email is where things get a little unwieldy. ConvertKit doesn’t have a modern drag and drops creator you can use, and the only choices are plain text and custom HTML code. There’s also a bewildering procedure for choosing a template, and there are only three options. However, we like that the plain text editor is sturdy and not littered with endless possibilities that can baffle beginners. You can still access many editing options by highlighting a line of text.
The next step takes you to the preview area, where you can see the full message and double-check if it’s ready to go. You then have the choice to send the email right away or schedule it to a later date.
Mobile Editor
ConvertKit doesn’t have a committed mobile application. But, their email editor and dashboard are easy to retrieve from the mobile browser with full functionality.
Features
ConvertKit’s attributes list is fully typical for a modern email marketing service. They considerably emphasize supporting your growth and even have a sensibly crafted course for building and launching your email marketing campaigns.
ConvertKit lets you send out numerous emails to your contacts. The other main features are email automation options, customized content, sign-up form builder, tag-based customer segmentation, and 70+ combinations with various 3rd party applications.
Their customer support is obtainable over live chat during business hours. However, you can build an email ticket to contact support outside of this time. You get upgraded support features with the paid plans, namely Premium and Priority support. ConvertKit also has a wide array of useful marketing articles and a comprehension base that you can use for advanced information about the service and email marketing is extensive.
Pricing & Plans
ConvertKit provides both free and paid plans. The paid plans are subscriber-based, and they also offer you a free emigration option if you require to move your data from another best email marketing service.
The cheapest paid plan starts at $25/month (annual payment) with 1,000 contacts ($0.025/contact).
ConvertKit provides a 14-day free trial paid plan with up to 35,000 contacts. If you have more than that, you are certified for a personalized demo from the company.
5. Mailchimp
After you have your account set up, Mailchimp’s dashboard prompts you to import email contacts each and either from a file or by copy-pasting it. You then manage your contacts’ statuses, add tags, insert additional information, and review the outcome. When you require to add or remove information or contacts, you can easily do that from the Audience Dashboard.
Before you can begin creating your email, you are required to set up a campaign. Again, the whole procedure is so smooth and trained all the way.
You can create your email in plain text, custom HTML code, or select a template or pre-built layouts. The latter opens up Mailchimp's drag and drop design tool. The design and structure are quite solid; however, we found that obtaining a block’s additional options covers the full toolbar, which is a little irritating. One of the best attributes of Mailchimp’s email builder is the united image editor. You can create your full email without ever leaving the site.
At the email building phase, you can always preview the message in desktop, mobile, or inbox view. However, the latter didn’t look to work for us when we reviewed this tool.
Once you’re done, you are admitted to the summary page to double-check everything, and then you can send your campaign out. Since you’ve already designed an email list and added details of your campaign, there are no additional steps at this point.
Mobile Editor
Mailchimp has an exclusive mobile application. You can access performance data, add email contacts, and build landing pages and emails. The mobile email editor itself is completely functional and seems great. We especially like that the main screen is focused on the email itself and isn’t littered with editing options.
Features
Mailchimp has all the recent features that are necessary for running a successful email campaign.
The main features of Mailchimp’s email marketing tools are the drag and drop design tools, customer sectionalisation options, dynamic content, email automation, sign-up forms, and 200+integrations with social media and other applications.
Mailchimp’s 24/7 email and live chat support is accessible with the paid plans, and you get additional phone support with the highest-tier plan. Although, when signing up with either the free plan or any paid plans, you get a 30-days email support revival. They also have a fundamental knowledge base with useful articles and guides.
Pricing & Plans
Mailchimp’s pricing is based on the number of contacts you are planning to have. Separately from the monthly subscription plans, they also provide a pliable payment option called Pay As You Go. This plan offers you the Essential plan’s features, but you only pre-pay for Mailchimp Credits, which you can then use to send your messages.
The cheapest paid plan begins at $9.99/month with 500 contacts ($0.01998/contact)
Mailchimp doesn’t provide a free trial for any of their paid plans. There also isn’t any money-back guarantee.
6. AWeber
You have three options for adding contacts to your list: adding them one at a time, copy-pasting several contacts at once, and bringing in contacts from a file. The last two options activate a five-step procedure. There you add additional data about your contacts, opt for sending a verification email to your subscribers, add tags, and confirm the starting of your contacts. The procedure feels a bit clunky but doesn’t take long to go through.
We didn’t search for a suitable way of adding or removing contacts from a list, which was a notable drawback. We lead to do it by exporting the list, making changes, and importing it again to a dissimilar list, but that took a lot of attempts.
You can build your email using the built-in drag and drop email builder, plain text, or custom HTML code. When using the creator, you can acquire pre-made templates from the editor, so don’t get dispirited by the blank slate. Selecting a template only adds the blank blocks and structure of your selected template, which isn’t very crystal clear.
There’s also no next step for forwarding the email right after you’ve generated the email. Rather then, you have to save and exit from the editor and steer to scheduling your message. From a new user’s outlook, we feel that this procedure isn’t very smooth and effortless, as some of the other easier ones we’ve seen.
Sending your email to your contact list is a simple procedure and takes just a minimal minute. You pick the email you want to organize, select the pre-built email list, and choose when you want your campaign to go out.
Mobile Editor
AWeber has two mobile applications: AWeber Stats and AWeber Atom. Unfortunately, you’re unable to generate or edit emails with them. You can see your campaign’s ongoing statistics with the AWeber Stats app, and you can add subscribers to your list from the AWeber Atom app.
However, AWeber’s email editor is completely functional in the mobile browser.
Features
The distinctive feature of AWeber is its AI-powered email template designer. If you’re a starter, this makes the full procedure of generating your email a lot easier.
The other key attributes are the drag and drop email builder tool, email automation options, customized emails, tag-based contact targeting, sign-up forms, and a free image library. On top of that, you can also build video-based landing pages.
AWeber provides tremendous 24/7 customer support over the phone, email, or lives chat. They also have a huge knowledge base where you can search for answers to typical questions that might come about.
Pricing & Plans
AWeber provides a free and a paid plan. The paid choices are based on the subscriber count, and you can select to pay monthly, quarterly, or annually. Choosing the latter provides you the lowest prices.
Apart from the free plan, AWeber’s plans start at $16.15/month with 500 contacts ($0.0323/contact)
AWeber also provides a 30-day money-back guarantee with no questions asked.
7. Drip
You can add contacts in three standard methods: separately, importing emails in bulk from a file, copy-pasting. There’s also a tag system so you can classify your email list. Once you start choosing your audience, the existing tags and segment system get unwieldy for new users. However, once you use it a couple of times, it makes email targeting simpler.
Now, to build an email, you require to either create a campaign or a broadcast. Both of these have individual choices and fields you require to fill out with information before beginning. You can then build your email using plain text, customer HTML code, or the built-in email builder.
When selecting the builder, you begin by choosing a pre-made template or beginning from scratch. You can also pre-create custom templates that you can then choose. The email design tool itself is simple and robust. You have your intimate drag and drop blocks, but at first, peek, it all seems a bit stripped. However, there are some extra options when you select a block that you want to insert into your email. At any time, you can preview your email on a desktop, tablet, or mobile view.
After you produce your email, you can opt for adding subject line and content dissimilarities to make a split test. Then you can select to send your email out straight away or schedule it for a later date. There aren’t many steps here as you already inserted all of the needed information before.
Mobile Editor
Dribble doesn’t have a different mobile application. Still, their dashboard and email editor is attainable through a mobile browser. All the obligatory capabilities for creating an email are there, but the whole interaction with the editor feels off and slow.
Features
Dribble doesn’t provide different tier plans. This means that the attributes you get are the same across the board.
You can send numerous emails with Drip. Their other main features are drag and drop tools, customer segmentation options, contact tags, personalized content in emails, opt-in forms, and 100+social media and 3rd party tool integrations. They also have a skillful visual builder for the customer channel flow, which you can also break tests to determine the best one.
Drip provides 24/7 email support with their plan. However, you get an additional live chat support choice when you surpass 5,000 contacts.
Pricing & Plans
One of the most considerable perks of Drip is that they don’t have any plan tiers. Instead, they retain it easy and only charge you based on the number of contacts you have.
Drip’s inexpensive plan starts at $19/month with 500 contacts ($0.038/contact).
Drip provides a 14-day free trial with no credit card needed so that you can test out their service. Since they don’t lock features behind layers of various plans, you get to test the whole feature base.
8. ActiveCampaign
Adding your contacts to an email list is a quality procedure with choices to insert them separately, importing email contacts in bulk from a file, or copy-pasting. If you have a list with another best email marketing service, you can join it, and your contacts get conveyed automatically. You can manage the contacts by adding tags to each of them.
Before you can start building your email, you have to create a campaign. There are many particular options for the type of campaign: standard campaign, automation, RSS triggered, date-based, and A/B testing. The next procedure is adding a list to your campaign; but, you can’t add contacts separately or involve all of your available subscribers.
You can build your email from abroad using the editor tool, select a template, or insert custom HTML code. You can select from 21 accessible templates and a posy of layout options. The design tool itself is based on a drag and drop functional with predefined elements that you can add to your email. There are also some additional design options for each component. ActiveCampaign also attributes an image editing tool in the email editor, which is a time saver.
Once you’re done with your email, you get to the brief page. Here you can turn on different tracking features, add a date for scheduling your email, and run a Spam check. The latter shows you how probably your message is thinking about spam by the email software - something individual we haven’t experienced with other service providers. You can now send the message quickly, schedule it, or generally save and exit the editor.
Mobile Editor
ActiveCampaign has an individual mobile app where you can see your reports, track customer activity, and retrieve your CRM. Sadly, there isn’t an editor featured there, so the app acts more as an information tool.
You can use the email editor in a mobile browser with all the editing attributes as another option.
Features
ActiveCampaign’s features are alike to what you’ve already come to await from a modern email marketing service. Although, they add a machine learning feature for sending emails and creating a bit different content.
There’s no limit to the number of emails you can send with any of their plans. The other main features are drag and drop design tools, email and marketing automation tools, dynamic content choices, opt-in forms, and social media combinations.
ActiveCampaign provides chat email support during business hours. The additional phone support choice becomes obtainable with a higher-tier plan.
Pricing & Plans
ActiveCampaign’s plan succession is somewhat strange. As you increment the number of contacts, the higher-tier plans become unavailable. So, the more subscribers you have, the minimal attributes you have with your email marketing. You can pay for the service with monthly or annual payments, where the yearly costs are much cheaper over the board. They also hurl in a free data relocation option from other email marketing services.
Their lowest plan starts at $9/month with 500 contacts ($0.018/contact).
ActiveCampaign provides a 14-day free trial with some finite features. Unfortunately, they don’t provide a money-back guarantee.
9. MailerLite
Standard options for adding contacts with MailerLite are separate, uploading a list from a file, or copy-pasting. You can also import your email contacts from Mailchimp, which is an odd choice on its own. After the import, you can either add them to an existing group or create a new one in the same flow.
To begin building your email, you first require to set up a campaign with some additional details about it. You have numerous choices to create your email: drag and drop editor, plain text, and custom HTML code. Moreover, you can also use the MailerLite’s Legacy rich-text editor”, which is almost like a combination between the plain text and block-based editor, minus the all-inclusive smoothness of a drag and drop tool.
You can also select a template among 62 choices. There are preview choices available for the templates and during the email creation procedure. A word of attention, once you select a template for the campaign, you can’t change it unless you build a new campaign from engraving.
The design tool as such is based on drag and drop functionality. We also like that you can immediately understand the nature of various blocks because they have example content in them. It’s mainly useful for beginners who don’t have much knowledge about email design and structure. Although, there’s also a snag with the editor - you’re impotent to edit a text block inside the email. Rather than, a toolbar slides out where you can insert your content, which is a little bit unknown in design.
Once you’ve designed your email, you can select the recipients; either a particular group or all available contacts. Then, you can review the email and all the choices you’ve made on the brief page, and make final changes if required. You can now send your campaign out suddenly or schedule it for a later date.
Mobile Editor
MailerLite has an individual app only available on iPhones. You can see your campaign’s results, email previews, schedule messages, and run your subscriber list. The app is missing email editing compatibility.
Fortunately, the editor is reachable and fully functional in the mobile browser. You may be required to turn your device horizontally to see and edit the content column. Although, it’s still quite a litter and isn’t pretty.
Features
MailerLite’s attribute set is simple and common in the email marketing industry, but they don’t have various tiers for their paid plans. Still, there are differences between the free and paid plan’s attributes. Incidentally, you can’t add your custom HTML code in the free version.
The key features are drag and drop editing tools, customer segmentation choices for targeted emails, contact tags, email automation, sign-up forms, and dynamic content. They also have 110+ combination choices with different applications and social media accounts.
MailerLite provides 24/7 customer support over email and a live chat. The latter is only with Premium plans even so. They also have a decent knowledge base where you can search for answers and additional knowledge about email marketing.
Pricing & Plans
MailerLite provides a free and a paid plan. A great thing about the paid plan is that there are no tiers. Once you choose a paid plan, all the attributes remain the same no matter how many contacts you have. You can select to pay a monthly or an annual fee. The latter costs 30% less if pre-paid up to 100,000 contacts. You also get a free website with five landing pages upon signing up.
The cheapest paid plan begins at $7/month (annual payment) with 1,000 contacts ($0.01/contacts). The price is $10/month if you select to pay monthly.
MailerLite provides a 14-day free trial with premium attributes, and then you can decide if you stay on the free plan or select to buy the paid version. Remaining on the former loses the premium perks from your account.
I hope this blog will be helpful to you in finding Best Email Marketing Services 2021.
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