As advertising costs will keep increasing over time, email marketing is one strategy you should never ignore. Research has shown that for every 1$ you spend on email marketing, you get an average return of $40. This impressive ROI makes email marketing one of the most efficient and cost-effective channels for any kind of business.
In this article, we will explore the top email marketing tools that can help you optimize your campaigns, grow your subscribers list and drive more conversions.
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Why you shouldn’t ignore email marketing
So, I was talking to a client who I was helping to run Facebook ads recently. I told him to include email marketing in his strategy but he said that’s an extra cost he wouldn’t like to incur on his business.
The problem is most business owners see email marketing as a burden and not as an investment.
Here, I will show you reasons why you should include email marketing in your business.
Rising Ads cost
In 2014, it cost about 12 cents per click on Facebook ads to drive customers to your website. Today, the average cost per click is around $1.2. Facebook and other advertising platforms use a bidding strategy to price ads on their platform.
Advertisement was cheaper in the past because a lot of businesses were not running ads then. Now, so many businesses are competing for a limited number of users’ attention. Thereby, driving the cost of adverts over the roof.
As more businesses come online, the cost of ad campaigns will keep going up.
With email marketing, you can simply pay for ads once and collect the customer’s email so that you can communicate with them whenever you have a new promotion. You won’t need to spend heavily on ads to reach the same person again.
Loyal Customers
Once someone joins your email list, they become a potential customer. You can send them offers, and discounts or you could keep communicating with them while urging them to buy in various instances.
You can send targeted messages like anniversary celebrations, niche-specific news, your brand news and lots more.
You own your list
On social media, you are paying to get access to an audience owned by the platform. There have been scenarios where Facebook bans a page with over 100k likes or followers. When bans like this happen, the page owner has to start afresh.
Social media channels also limit the number of people you can reach on their platforms by tweaking their algorithms.
With email marketing, your list belongs to you. Every email you send gets to the reader unless they unsubscribe. If the email marketing platform you use bans your account for any reason, you can simply export your list and move to another platform.
Integration
There are lots of other software that can be integrated into email marketing software. You can integrate email marketing into Facebook ADs for better campaign optimisation or Remarketing.
Email marketing can be integrated with any e-commerce platform to send out receipts via email, tag customers who have bought certain types of products or even track the pages a customer visits on your website.
Best Email Marketing Platforms
ActiveCampaign
Active Campaign is a cloud-based email marketing service provider that helps any kind of business manage an email list, automate sales processes and customer relationship manager features.
Active Campaign has one of the most versatile automation among our list of best email marketing platforms. It helps you track every activity of the customer from the pages they visit on your website, website activity and how they interact with your emails. These activities are then displayed in a CRM for each customer. This way, you get a bullseye overview of how each customer is interacting.
There’s also an omnichannel feature that lets you reach out to your customers on whatever platform they prefer to use; SMS, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp etc.
Brevo
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue is another email marketing software service provider based in France. Brevo also offers Omnichannel features which lets you reach out to customers on major channels. You can track visitors’ activities on your website and set up triggers.
When compared with ActiveCampaign in pricing, Brevo is cheaper but it comes with fewer integrations.
If you want an affordable email marketing service for your e-commerce, real estate business or NGO, you should go with Brevo.
Convertkit
Convertkit is an email marketing platform designed for bloggers, content creators, online tutors and influencers. It is not optimized for e-commerce businesses. If you own an e-commerce business, you should go with either ActiveCampaign, Brevo or MailChimp.
Convertkit shines in its simplicity. Amongst every email marketing service on our list, ConvertKit is the easiest to understand. For the rest, you might take up to two weeks to learn how the platform works.
With Convertkit, you can easily offer content upgrades, and tag users based on links they click in the emails you send. If you sell online courses and you plan to use an email marketing service majorly for promoting your online courses, then Convertkit is the best bet for you.
Due to the simplicity of its emails, Convertkit has one of the best open rates. It also recently launched an email referral system where readers or members of the Convertkit creator economy can refer your email newsletter to their readers.
MailChimp
MailChimp is another exceptional email marketing service provider that has been around for a while. It’s best for e-commerce businesses.
On MailChimp, you can build beautiful email templates, and integrate them with a gazillion other software.
New users are eligible to use the MailChimp email marketing platform for free at a limit of 2,000 subscribers and other limited features.
Due to its long time existence, MailChimp has more direct integrations than any other email marketing service provider on this list. However, MailChimp is more pricier than the rest.
Mailerlite
Mailerlite which started as a web design agency in 2005 before transitioning into the email marketing business mid 2010 is one of the most popular email marketing service providers on the market. Mailerlite is great for both e-commerce and content creators.
At a point, you needed to apply and get reviewed before getting accepted to use Mailerlite. I don’t know if that’s still the case as I had this issue with a client some years back. Mailerlite has a free plan of 1,000 subscribers so it’s possible that the review system was created to prevent abuse.
Mailerlite has some of the most beautiful email template libraries. If you have design skills, you can get creative and design your email template.
One thing to check out for when choosing an email marketing platform is its deliverability and Mailerlite has an overall good deliverability score.
FluentCrm
FluentCrm is a WordPress self-hosted email marketing software. Self-hosted in the sense that, you need to install and set up the software on your WordPress website.
If you are looking for the most affordable way of sending emails to your customers, then FluentCrm is the way to go. FluentCrm is a WordPress plugin that lets you configure an SMTP service to it. Once the SMTP service is configured correctly, you can send emails directly from your WordPress website at a quarter the price of using a proper email marketing software like ActiveCampaign.
FluentCrm works well with Woocommerce, it has a limited number of automation when compared to the other email marketing software on our list. FluentCrm has both the free and premium plugin, you can start with the free WordPress plugin to see how it works before upgrading.
On the free plugin, you can have unlimited contacts and send any number of emails you want, however, you won’t be able to automate your emails.
Apart from installing the FluentCrm plugin on your WordPress website, you also need to set it up with SMTP software. For clients, I use either Sendgrid or Brevo.
Best Email Marketing Tools
Now that you have seen the best email marketing software in the market, here are 3 software to help you get more out of your email marketing strategy;
Optin monster
Optinmonster is a cloud-based lead generation software that helps you build your email list with pop-up forms, coupon wheels, opt-in forms, and other more advanced technologies. Optinmonster is popular with WordPress users, however, it works with any type of content management system or shopping cart platform.
You can grow your leads with beautifully designed opt-in forms and set up advanced targeting. If you receive visitors from all over the world, you can use the Optinmonster geolocation feature to let visitors from different countries see different opt-in forms.
It also has an exit intent technology that captures visitors’ email when they are about to close the page.
Without using software like optinmonster with your email marketing efforts, you may not be able to grow your email list fast enough.
And what’s email marketing without leads? Nothing.
RafflePress
Have you thought of organising a giveaway contest to grow your email list? If you haven’t, then this is one strategy to explode your email list with an unbelievable amount of leads overnight.
RafflePress is a WordPress plugin that lets you build your email list through giveaways. You can set up various tasks for participants to complete to enter the contest or gain more contest points. By offering incentives to complete tasks such as subscribing to your email list, following your social media accounts, visiting a specific page or referring friends, you encourage more people to participate, complete the tasks and grow your email list.
RafflePress works only on WordPress. If you want an alternative that works on all platforms and has more features, you can check out Upviral.
Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that lets you integrate different apps. It can be used to automate repetitive tasks which would have been done manually, thereby wasting time or making errors.
Concerning email marketing, Zapier can be used to send a lead to your CRM software when they make a purchase on your website or send a new lead to your email marketing software and tagged properly when a customer fills a form. The list of possibilities with Zapier is endless.
It saves you time and makes your job easier. For our e-commerce clients, when a customer buys a product, Zapier sends the customer’s name and product details to accounting software. Sometimes, after a lead fills out a form, we send them a discount offer on WhatsApp; this is made possible through Zapier.
An alternative to Zapier is Integrately. Integrately does not have as many integrations as Zapier but it’s cheaper.
Thank you for reading our article on the top email marketing tools for 2024. You can also check out our article on the best Clickfunnels alternative.
