17 of the Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses and How They Can Equip You for Growth

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We all know and love them: emails. On a global scale, over 290 billion emails are sent and received each day. What can we say? Consumers love getting newsletters. They want to hear from their favorite brands instantly. It’s simple: People love email.

Why is email marketing so important? It is a simple, direct, and effective way of connecting with your leads and is very cost-effective. In fact, marketers claim that email marketing can give them an ROI as high as 44x. You can get creative with catchy email subject lines, experiment with eye-catching email templates, and sell additional products and services.

One of the reasons why email marketing is one of the most popular and effective advertising methods is that you can target your existing and future customers in a simple way and without spending hundreds (even thousands) of dollars. There are many email marketing software options out there, most providing scalable email marketing tools to suit almost any market.

What makes an email marketing service great one? The best characteristics to look out for when choosing one that is efficient and budget-friendly include: 

  • Budget
  • Costs
  • Size of the database
  • Level of automation
  • Special additions such as analytics

This is all good to know, but how do you know which email marketing platform is the best for your business needs? We can help you out with a handful of nifty suggestions. Here are the 17 leading email marketing platforms for startups and small businesses.

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Amazon SES
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Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses:

Top
email marketing services for small businesses
2024

1. Campaigner

Campaigner

If you want to increase sales and revenue, influence your audience’s customer journeys, and expand your marketing channels while protecting your business’s reputation, you should give Campaigner a try. 

Campaigner makes it easier for you to create stunning emails using fully-customizable templates and also lets you craft personalized messages that offer real value to your customers. Plus, its powerful email automation feature lets you create unique customer journeys that drive conversions. 

Its Reputation Defender feature ensures you have optimal list health, flags mistakes before sending emails, and helps you identify risky contacts that can jeopardize your sending reputation.

And if you’re thinking of venturing into other marketing platforms, Campaigner also offers a solution for that with Campaigner SMS, a marketing automation service that lets you create workflows. 

Best of all, Campaigner offers a month-long (30 days) free trial period. With this, you’re able to test drive all of its over 60 advanced features to experience how Campaigner can propel your marketing strategy forward.

4.5 out of 5 stars
Campaigner helps you drive sales and revenue using advanced marketing automation, intuitive reporting, and powerful personalization through email and SMS. It even offers a version for eCommerce firms that features Shopify and Magento integration.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.4
Ease of Use
4.4
Support
4.6
Overall Score
4.5
Features & Pricing
Dynamic Content
Segmentation
Landing Pages
Email Templates
Automation Workflows
Conversion Tracking
Drag & Drop Builder
Reusable Content Blocks
Advanced Segmentation
Forms
Reputation Defender
Content Blocks
Geolocation
Conditional Content
Preference Management
Price starting at:$59
Pros and Cons
Lengthy free review period
Intuitive interface and user-friendly
Wide range of features
No forever-free plan for small users
Accessing the free trial isn't always as simple as you'd expect
Template navigation can be challenging
Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), although also viable for larger companies
4.5 out of 5 stars
Campaigner helps you drive sales and revenue using advanced marketing automation, intuitive reporting, and powerful personalization through email and SMS. It even offers a version for eCommerce firms that features Shopify and Magento integration.

2. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo offers a good compromise between the expense it requires and the service that is simple to use and complete in the functions it offers (like the more famous ActiveCampaign).

Brevo also has a well-developed CRM section and offers excellent possibilities for automation, integration, and segmentation, representing the real competitive advantage over other platforms. The interface, however, can be more complicated than other services like Mailchimp).

It is also an excellent tool for SMS marketing. There is a range of templates for creating your emails.

Brevo allows you to create custom workflows that send emails automatically. You can even use your contact’s behavior on your website to trigger emails. For example, you could send an automated email if a customer adds an item to their cart but fails to check it.

Brevo offers an entirely free account for up to 300 emails per day and receive unlimited contacts. If you do want to send more emails than that, paid plans start at $ 25/month.

4.4 out of 5 stars
Brevo helps businesses grow and build relationships through their marketing tools. Scale faster with marketing automation, email campaigns, and more.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.0
Ease of Use
4.6
Support
4.6
Overall Score
4.4
Features & Pricing
Segmentation
Email Marketing
SMS Marketing
Chat
Shared Inbox
CRM
Marketing Automation
Landing Pages
Signup Forms
Facebook Ads
Transaction Email
Price starting at:$25
Pros and Cons
Deliver time-sensitive information quickly
Advanced Automation included in freemium
Track all customer interactions on one platform
Support can be slow
Bad deliverability rate.
Limited freemium and lite plan.
Bad Drag and drop options.
Best for: Email marketing and marketing automation tools
4.4 out of 5 stars
Brevo helps businesses grow and build relationships through their marketing tools. Scale faster with marketing automation, email campaigns, and more.

3. SMTP

SMTP

When it comes to email deliverability, very few service providers achieve consistently amazing results like that of SMTP’s. Its high delivery rates have propelled it to the top, among the ranks of industry leaders. So it comes as no surprise that over 100,000 businesses worldwide have entrusted their email delivery to SMTP in the past two decades.

SMTP is an email marketing software agency under the MarTech umbrella of digital media giant Ziff Davis, Inc. Over the years, it has earned a stellar reputation for its solid and scalable infrastructure that ensures servers stay off blacklists and emails are delivered successfully into subscriber inboxes.

All clients of SMTP receive detailed reporting, email relay API, and reliable support from an in-house team of experts. Add-on services include the Reputation Defender, dedicated IP, and on-demand statistics aggregation. Satisfied clients have reported significant improvements in deliverability, brand engagement, and customer retention.

SMTP has a wide range of plans that cater to virtually all business sizes and types, from small startups to large enterprises. Plans start at $25 per month for 50,000 emails and all essential features. Scaling businesses can send up to 500,000 emails per month for a monthly fee of $300.

SMTP
4.5 out of 5 stars
SMTP.com claims ISPs believe them to be one of the internet's most reliable and trusted senders. They maintain an impeccable reputation among mailbox providers by proactively vetting out spam and maintaining high delivery rates. Their highly responsive infrastructure ensures virtually no latency and over 99% system uptime.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.3
Ease of Use
4.5
Support
4.6
Overall Score
4.5
Features & Pricing
Segmentation
List Management
Reputation Defender
SMTP Email API
Transactional emails
Managed email delivery
SMTP for developers
Geolocation
API Integrations
Activity Tracking
Email Management
Migration
Reporting & Analytics
Price starting at:$25
Pros and Cons
Ensures your emails aren't mixed up with spam
Easy to set up
Helpful customer service
No free (or very cheap) plan for those with modest needs
Reporting not as in-depth as some competitors
Email-only – no recognition of SMS
Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), although also viable for larger companies
SMTP
4.5 out of 5 stars
SMTP.com claims ISPs believe them to be one of the internet's most reliable and trusted senders. They maintain an impeccable reputation among mailbox providers by proactively vetting out spam and maintaining high delivery rates. Their highly responsive infrastructure ensures virtually no latency and over 99% system uptime.

4. Omnisend

Omnisend

If you’re a small business in the eCommerce niche, you can check out Omnisend. Trusted and loved by over 70,000 eCommerce brands, it offers various user-friendly eCommerce marketing tools that include robust email marketing features.   

All in all, they’re best for visual-heavy email campaigns and offer a great template library. Each template can be customized using their easy-to-use, drag-and-drop content editor. 

To make sure that your beautifully crafted email generates the open rate that it deserves, you can use segmentation and optimization features like A/B testing. Using the profile data of your customers and their shopping history, you can create audience segments that can increase your conversion rates by as much as 60%. 

Then, to measure the performance of your email campaigns, it offers accurate sales tracking and attribution. With the help of their advanced reporting, you can get a much better idea of exactly how subscribers are engaging with your emails and identify best practices for future campaigns. 

4.4 out of 5 stars
This all-in-one email marketing automation platform is focused around helping ecommerce companies grow. Omnisend makes it easy to create personalized emails and automate your email marketing to focus on converting visitors to customers.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
3.8
Ease of Use
4.7
Support
4.7
Overall Score
4.4
Features & Pricing
A/B Testing
Analytics/ROI Tracking
Customizable CTAs
Drip Campaigns
Dynamic Content
Landing Pages/Web Forms
Sales Intelligence
Segmentation
Social Marketing
Website Visitor Tracking
Email Marketing
Marketing Automation
SMS
Web push notifications
Popups & Forms
Reports
Audience sync for ads
Price starting at:$16
Pros and Cons
SMS marketing integration
Contact sync for ads
eCommerce integrations
No RSS feature limits blog connectivity in campaigns
Support can be slow
Unlimited email sends only offered in Pro plan
Best for: E-commerce marketers
4.4 out of 5 stars
This all-in-one email marketing automation platform is focused around helping ecommerce companies grow. Omnisend makes it easy to create personalized emails and automate your email marketing to focus on converting visitors to customers.

5. Convertkit

Convertkit

Free Plans: Allow you to start building your audience with useful features like unlimited landing page templates and forms to choose from and managing up to 1,000 subscribers. 

Paid Plans: Paid plans range from $9 to upwards of $25 depending on how many subscribers you have 

Convertkit gives you the fluidity and flexibility desired in email campaign creation and execution. You get great performance and increased productivity, you can use its automation to save time, in addition to creating a customer funnel, it is easy to use, powerful and functional, the cost is more affordable compared to other software, Instead of traditional email marketing platforms, where you have to know coding and HTML, ConvertKit provides a seamless, drag-and-drop-capable experience to create professional emails that convert. There’s also an automation feature to view the whole layout of your funnel.

4.5 out of 5 stars
Convertkit helps online creators manage their email marketing with simple, straightforward marketing tools to help turn readers into subscribers. Use their visual automation builder and customizable forms to build targeted, well-timed content optimized to grow your business.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.8
Ease of Use
4.3
Support
4.4
Overall Score
4.5
Features & Pricing
Analytics/ROI Tracking
Customizable CTAs
Drip Campaigns
Dynamic Content
Landing Pages/Web Forms
Segmentation
CAN SPAM Compliance
List Management
Marketing Automation
Event Triggered Actions
AB Testing
Price starting at:$9
Pros and Cons
Comprehensive forms with advanced features
Flexible list management with tags
Paid newsletter feature
Email editor has limited design options with no preview
Only three customizable, simple templates
Basic analytics
Best for: Creators
4.5 out of 5 stars
Convertkit helps online creators manage their email marketing with simple, straightforward marketing tools to help turn readers into subscribers. Use their visual automation builder and customizable forms to build targeted, well-timed content optimized to grow your business.

6. GetResponse

GetResponse

GetResponse is an email marketing platform that can be used by small and medium-sized businesses and, more generally, by those who have just started a new business. But even big corporations including Ikea and Unicef use GetResponse to create powerful, simplified emails in one easy-to-use tool. 

It is a particularly economical and easy to use service. The service offers various functions and integrations, as well as detailed statistics. The weak point is linked to the automation processes, not mainly developed.

What makes GetResponse a fantastic email marketing service to invest in is the additional option to use the service for other marketing needs you may want to fulfill. This includes, but is not limited to, landing page creation and optimization, conversion funnels, and marketing automation. 

Still not convinced? Explore more of the amazing features GetResponse offers to businesses and brands of all sizes. 

4 out of 5 stars
GetResponse helps users create automated marketing workflows based on their customers and their customers' behavor. Their easy-to-use system helps deliver a more personalized experience to better engage customers and grow sales.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.0
Ease of Use
3.9
Support
4.0
Overall Score
4
Features & Pricing
A/B Testing
Analytics/ROI Tracking
Drip Campaigns
Dynamic Content
Landing Pages/Web Forms
Lead Scoring
Segmentation
Website Visitor Tracking
Email Marketing
SMS Marketing
Marketing Automation
Signup Forms
Web push notifications
Lead funnels
Price starting at:$13.12
Pros and Cons
Comprehensive conversion funnels to build leads
Excellent list management and segmentation
Advanced automation features
Host webinars through the platform
Poor deliverability rates
Limited pricing points; no free plan
Emails from GetResponse go to "Promotions" in user's inbox
Lack of campaign visualization
Best for: Small and large companies
4 out of 5 stars
GetResponse helps users create automated marketing workflows based on their customers and their customers' behavor. Their easy-to-use system helps deliver a more personalized experience to better engage customers and grow sales.

7. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign

Small businesses and startups can opt for ActiveCampaign, an inexpensive Email Marketing platform that is easy to use and has several specific functions for SMEs.

This platform has its CRM system to manage leads and, therefore, automatically organize sales and marketing. Process automation is a point in favor of Active Campaign which presents ground-breaking, informative reports that tell users what is working in their email marketing efforts and what isn’t. 

What makes ActiveCampaign a great email marketing service to look into is how it filters the customer experience acquisition process. The platform’s official website filters potential users by industry, product, and role. This allows the platform to completely customize your email marketing service needs depending on who you are and what you are looking for. 


8. AWeber

AWeber

AWeber is suitable for those who based their businesses in the web marketing industry and are looking for a reliable tool while having a limited budget. 

In fact, according to their official website, AWeber’s mission statement is to “deliver powerfully-simple email marketing for small businesses that does 90% of the work for you. We leave 10% for you to have fun!” And who doesn’t want to have fun?! 

Beginners can benefit from AWeber’s detailed and intuitive reports. The more experienced power users can take advantage of split-tests. 

 Want to grow your email list? Here are 10 different ways to do it.

Features of AWeber include unique features like a prebuilt template library, an AI-powered design assistant, a drag-and-drop email and landing page designer, campaign marketplace, and automated campaign features. 


9. Drip

Drip

Drip is a powerful email marketing platform, with high WooCommerce integration. It’s a particularly good option if you run an e-commerce website. It has smart marketing automation tools and intelligent email segmentation.

Drip also provides a ton of support through live chat, as well as with webinars, complete online courses, and excellent documentation. 

It may not be the cheapest option depending on what your email marketing outreach needs are, but it’s worth the money to maximize your marketing efforts. Look at their pricing more here. 


10. OptinMonster

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is one of the best conversion optimization software platforms on the market. It allows you to convert website visitors into email subscribers and customers easily.

It comes with easy-to-integrating lightbox popups, slide-in modules, welcome mats, coupon wheels, and more.

OptinMonster works with all popular email marketing services and quickly gets more subscribers for your email list.

Sometimes, you can’t find templates that match your brand’s voice or design aesthetics. Then, it makes sense to craft your own email campaigns. Here are 10 email marketing campaign examples to give you some thought-provoking ideas.

It is packed with many features that help you automatically target users and show them personalized campaigns. For example, you can show targeted messages for different pages on your site. You can also show campaigns based on user activity and geographic location.


11. Intercom

Intercom

Intercom is a live chat tool, but it does so much more. It allows you to use chatbots and integrate your chats with other elements of your marketing workflow.

Intercom allows you to send automatic in-app messages that go far beyond just text. You can use images, videos, emojis, and even apps to help you with your marketing. It’s easy to choose from many different massage styles, without the need to involve a developer.

Intercom also has several optional add-ons available. These include product tours, advanced lead generation, and sophisticated customer engagement.


12. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon offers four different WordPress plugins that allow you to add social feeds to your website; this concerns Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. 

These WordPress plugins are a great way to make the most of the time you spend on social media while conveniently monitoring your email marketing. You can automatically include posts from your account or even posts with a specific hashtag, where applicable.

You can customize your social feeds in multiple ways. For example, you can create a shoppable Instagram feed, so clickable Instagram photos of your products are automatically added to your site.


13. RafflePress

RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress Contest and a free plugin that allows you to encourage user interactions.

These could include visiting a page on your site, signing up for your email list, participating in polls or surveys, watching a video, and more. You can even create your actions, like asking readers to leave a comment.

Finding new ideas for your email marketing campaigns is not easy, even for seasoned marketers. Here are 17 unique email marketing ideas to build business.

By creating competition for your readers, you can dramatically increase how engaged they are with your content. You can also set up actions that prompt readers to share your content on social media


14. Mailchimp

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most recognized and celebrated email marketing service platforms. This top-rated email service is suitable for freelancers, those who manage small-to-medium businesses and brands, and budget-conscious startups.  

The interface is straightforward. The service (at least in its basic version) is free and offers a wide variety of integrations with other platforms including Facebook and WordPress.

Mailchimp does require users to double-confirm their registration (on the website and via email), This can be annoying to many users, resulting in inevitably reducing email lists. This can turn down many potential subscribers, but it dramatically lowers the percentage of rejected emails and prevents email delivery servers from potentially being blacklisted. 

Mailchimp
4.8 out of 5 stars
Mailchimp has been doing email marketing since the beginning of email marketing, and you’d better believe they know a thing or two about how to do it right.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
5.0
Ease of Use
4.5
Reporting
5.0
Overall Score
4.8
Features & Pricing
CRM
Email Marketing
Price starting at:$13
Pros and Cons
Free plan that’s actually useful
Tons of automations; you can even automate some of the automations
Creative Assistant enables even the most artless users to send good-looking emails
Several ways to target mailings to the right people
No onboarding or configuration services available
Limited support at the lower end of the subscriptions
Workflow is unclear
Best for: Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
Mailchimp
4.8 out of 5 stars
Mailchimp has been doing email marketing since the beginning of email marketing, and you’d better believe they know a thing or two about how to do it right.

15. MailerLite

MailerLite

Not only is MailerLite one of the best free landing page creators that you can try, but (as their name suggests) they’re also a great tool for email marketing. From collecting email subscribers to automating workflows, it offers a wide range of sophisticated email marketing features. 

One of the features that deserve special mention is the fact that it has three editors for creating campaigns. There’s a drag-and-drop editor with interactive content blocks (no coding skills needed) and a rich-text editor if you want to get more adventurous with your text formatting. Alternatively, if you prefer to build your own custom campaigns, you can check out their HTML editor.

It also offers monetization features that you can use to integrate eCommerce platforms or sell digital products. So, you can build, market, and sell all within the same platform.


16. Moosend

Moosend

If you’re serious about leveraging email personalization, be sure to check out Moosend. It offers advanced personalization and automation features to improve the overall customer experience and make your email content more valuable to your list. 

Included are the essential personalization features, but Moosend also takes it one step further with powerful cart abandonment emails and personalized product recommendations. It even has weather-based recommendations which can be very useful for cross-selling or upselling specific items. 

As you would expect of any solid email marketing platform, it also has the more “boring” features like A/B testing and data analytics. Using their analytics, you can identify which elements performed the best and create strategies around these to improve engagement.


17. Constant Contact

Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers a number of features that can help you with email marketing and social media campaigns. Their tools include hundreds of branded email templates, website sign-up forms to grow your subscriber list, and real-time reporting.  

For features like the ability to send automated emails such as abandoned cart reminders, you’ll need to sign up for its more expensive Pro plan, though. Another useful feature included in this plan is auto-generated segments. This way, you can segment your email list based on their level of engagement. 

All in all, Constant Contact is quite basic. However, if you’re a small business, sometimes all you need is a basic tool to help you get started (hence, the reason why they made this list). 


Final Word

More and more people are reading emails on the go. That’s one of the biggest reasons why businesses need to invest in email marketing and a reliable service that gets the job done.

Check the prices and features of email marketing service providers. Choose the most convenient without compromising reliability, security, and single-use, regardless of whether your business needs are large or small and the industry.

Don't forget to put these best email marketing practices into place once you pick an email service that works for you. Better yet, here are some free email marketing tools to help you spread your business and brand message.

Happy e-mailing!

About the Author
Jacinda Santora is a copywriter, marketing consultant, and owner of JMS Copy. She enjoys using her SEO expertise combined with experience in and a deep love for all things marketing to create high-quality marketing-related content