Top 8 Email Marketing Services
Top 8 #email #marketing services. Features and differences. Read for input on which email marketing service to choose for your online #business.
An email list can dramatically boost the revenue and exposure of most online businesses. They often say that “The money is in the list”, and so it is majorly important that you start building a list of email subscribers as soon as possible in your business. This can be accomplished through these top 8 email marketing services. Communicating directly to an established audience when you publish a new blogpost, launch a new product, or just want to recommend a product you love as an affiliate, is very powerful.
With autoresponders you can set up automatic sequences that send out emails to your subscribers when you schedule them to. For instance, when someone signs up to your list you may schedule a welcome email to go out immediately that delivers something they get for free, and maybe tell them a little bit about yourself and what you do. It is also possible to send out “Broadcasts” which are individual emails that are used to communicate or recommend products and services on an ad-hoc basis.
Related: How to build a solid email follow up sequenceHere are 8 of the best email marketing services, also called autoresponders or email automation platforms I’ve tried so far:
ActiveCampaign is a powerful email marketing service that lets you set up automations to schedule your email sequences. These can be customized to react in relevancy against the behaviour of your audience.
I made a quick automation just to show you how it looks like:
features Of ActiveCampaign
1. Email Designer
Lets you design your emails in an easy to use editor with a neat drag and drop solution. You use content blocks
2. Automations recipes
The service offers Automation recipes which you can get started with right away. Just choose an automation recipe and customize it to your branding and business, and you’re all set. All you have to do once you have customized the recipe and told the service which email to send from you’re all set.
3. Goals
Goals are great for segmenting contacts after the behaviour you want them to do. They help you to send the most relevant content to the right contacts if you use it right. Contacts that are on their way through automation can be said to do something else once they execute a certain behaviour.
For instance, if they click a certain link in one of your emails, they are sent to the location of the goal in the automation. This makes it possible to send them through a different set of emails, or just move them to another automation or list.
4. Split testing in automations
ActiveCampaign also lets you split test automations by setting up a condition that for example sends half of the contact base through one path, and the other through another path of emails. This is great for optimizing the email sequence you should use. Split testing of automations and email sequences should be done regularly.
5. Lead Scoring
You may assign scores to your contacts as they engage with you over time. This lets you prioritize your time against the most active people in your follower base, and spend less time working towards people that have less of a chance engaging with you, and/or convert.
6. Site tracking
See what pages a contact has visited. What's great about this is that you can set a trigger that a contact will receive certain emails, or go through a certain automation after visiting a specific page on your website. This can be very powerful as the contact that receives emails based on this are highly relevant, making them a hot lead and thus easier to convert into a potential sale.
These are just some of the features that ActiveCampaign offers. There are many more, and I highly recommend that you check them out.
7. Pricing
ActiveCampaign is quite affordable to get started with too. For only $9/mo. you can get started with your first 500 subscribers. Once you have an email list that exceeds 500 subscribers the monthly fees are increased to $25/mo up to 2.500 subscribers.
As you can see, they offer several different plans. You can upgrade the service too include a CRM service as well. Go to their site and check out what's included in the different plans
Note that you are not allowed to send emails from ActiveCampaign that have the sole purpose of promoting affiliate offers. It can be smart to familiarize yourself with their policy before using their service.
Aweber is a highly popular autoresponder used by many marketers. It has a very good delivery rate, something that really is one of Awebers strengths. This service is perfect for marketers just starting out.
Pricing
The platform offers a free plan for your first 500 subscribers, which is probably enough when starting out. However, not all features are included in the free plan. A reason why I would recommend the paid plan is that you get the complete service with all the features they offer.
Behavioural automations are included in the paid plan, which is in my opinion worth the money. Keep in mind that if you sign up for the free plan of aweber, they brand your sign-up forms. This means that when creating sign up forms within the service which are later going to be placed on your website to collect email addresses, the Aweber brand will show it’s presence.
If you upgrade, Aweber has a dynamic pricing plan where you get discounts if you pay more up front. The monthly fee is $19 when paid monthly, and 16,15/mo. when paid annually.
If you want to check out Aweber for yourself you can do so here
The video below will get you more familiar with the aWeber platform.
GetResponse is another great autoresponder which is excellent when collecting email leads for your business. Also a great fit for beginners, as well as more established marketers. I often use GetResponse for my email campaigns and marketing, and I really love the service. It has a lot of great services integrated.
The service has a really nice dashboard which gives you a neat and organized overview of your stats. You can drag and drop the frames and set your dashboard up just the way you want it.
It has a very nice email editor in a drag and drop interface. You can choose between several different email templates which are nicely designed. Just choose a template that fits your industry, brand and audience and customize the text to fit the message you want to send out.
You can create entire landing pages inside GetResponse, making it a great service that will solve a lot of obstacles you might have in your business, especially when just starting out.
MooSend automates your email marketing, and completely free up to 1.000 subscribers. It’s a great choice for new marketers, but of course also for those of you who already have a running setup. After 1.000 subscribers it's only $10 bucks for your next 1.000 subscribers, or $8 if paid annually.
This is one of few email marketing platforms out there that includes the automation service inside the free plan.
features of MooSend
Drip is another email marketing service that offers a very intuitive and powerful automation feature in its free trial. An easy choice for the top 8 email marketing services list.
The dashboard provides a clean and slick overview of your email marketing stats and performance, which are really cool.
The service has a great solution for tagging and segmentation of your contacts and are very user friendly.
Features of Drip
A feature that is really cool is their site tracking. You can paste a code provided from the Drip platform into your webpage, and the service can track those who subscribed to your list. This will show you what pages on your website they visited before subscribing.
As you probably can see, that is extremely powerful because it makes it possible to send even more targeted emails to your leads, and will boost your contacts engagement tremendously because your emails become more relevant. In combination with the automation and “Rules” feature of Drip you are quite frankly unstoppable.
Lead Scoring
With drip, as with ActiveCampaign, you can score your leads. As mentioned earlier in this post, lead scoring really helps you get the most out of your email marketing because you filter out the most engaged leads, and prioritize your actions towards them.
You can even set up an automatic email that goes out to those who has a score of less than x, trying to engage them a little more by offering a free gift or something similar.
Great Integration with other services
Drip integrates with a lot of cool services which can really give you a lot of valuable data about your subscribers. Check out all of the integrations herePricing
They offer a 14-day free trial, and then you pay $19/month with today's pricing plan. You can try it out for 14 days and see if you like it. If you do, it’s well worth the money.
ConvertKit is often mentioned as the best autoresponder service for affiliates. They offer a lot of great features such as an easy to use automation service which is crucial to be the most relevant as possible to your subscribers.
Features of ConvertKit
1. Done for you email templates
Just edit them in the easy to use email editor and you’re good to go. You can even make your own email templates.
2. Landing page templates
The templates are designed to convert visitors into leads, and leads into customers. Comes with integration with Unsplash, making a lot of beautiful stock photos available when designing your landing page.
3. Sign-up forms
Inside the platform you’re able to create different types of signup forms, including regular forms for delivering freebies and pop-up forms that offer a freebie to the visitor when trying to leave your page. This is great if you don’t want a sign-up form taking up space in your blog post for example.
4. Paid newsletters
The service makes you able to charge your subscribers for being a member of your newsletter.
5. Email automation
Fortunately, you are able to set up automations inside of ConvertKit. As mentioned earlier in the post this is very powerful for staying as relevant as possible in your marketing, and makes you able to meet your subscribers needs in a much better way. ConvertKit themselves summarizes the benefits in a great way:
6. Powerful third party integrations
The service integrates with a lot of powerful services that you’re probably already using in your business, or at least will end up using as you grow your business. I highly recommend you check out the integration possibilities.
Pricing
ConvertKit offers a free plan for up to 1.000 subscribers. They’re pricing plan is also subscriber based so if you have 1 subscriber that has subscribed to 2 or more of your email lists, you still only get charged for 1 subscriber.
In the free plan of ConvertKit you get access to broadcasts, which lets you broadcast emails to all of your subscribers at once. They also give you access to their landing page templates and forms. This makes it easy to set up the pages and forms you need to get going with your list building.
Sendinblue can be a great fit for new marketers as they offer a free solution for up to 300 emails each day, with unlimited contacts. This should be sufficient to keep the free plan until you at least are making your money back to pay for the Lite plan, since you’ll be able to send a lot of email every month. You can scale up from there as you build your list and as business further. Therefore, SendInBlue made the list of the top 8 email marketing services.
Features of SendInBlue
There are a lot of great features inside of SendinBlue that come in very handy when running your email marketing campaigns.
1. Automation
As you can see, SendInblue offers an automation service for the free plan, which is pretty powerful when collecting leads and communicating with your subscribers. This is something that very few autoresponders offer in their free plan, so this should really be taken into consideration when choosing which autoresponder service you want to use for your business.
2. Preview text
Inside the SendInBlue service you are able to define a “Preview text”. This is the text the receivers of your email are seeing before they open the email. Instead of just using the first sentence or words in your email body text, which most email clients and autoresponders do by the way, SendInBlue makes you define this text yourself - a very powerful feature which can make a lot of difference in open rates, and thereby click through rates as well. It can make a huge impact on how your emails perform. Also worth considering!
3. Drag and drop editor
Drag and drop editors are really useful when designing your emails and newsletter. It makes it a lot easier and faster for you to create your emails inside the service. SendInBlue solution for this is great, and makes it really simple to create your emails. They even offer several done for you templates which you can import into your own email with just one click, and edit that as you please to fit your message and brand. Highly recommended to at least check out and see if you like it.
4. Integrations
Integrations such as Google Analytics are available, along with API integrations if you want to connect it to other services as well.
Mailchimp is another great choice for marketers just starting out. It’s free up to 2.000 subscribers, so you should be able to run with this service for quite some time from when you're starting out.
It provides you with the possibility to send broadcasts, set up email sequences that go out automatically when you set them up to do so. The automation feature within the service lets you customize emails based on your subscribers behaviour. This is of course very powerful, because the more relevant you can be to your subscribers demographics in marketing, the better.
The platform also lets you design your own opt-in forms in their intuitive form builder. They offer several different types of forms which come in handy when collecting leads from your visitors.
You can head over to MailChimp by clicking here if you want to check out the service yourself.
Be sure to read and familiarize yourself with the terms and conditions of every autoresponder service as there are particular niches and activities that are prohibited when using the services. Of the email marketing services listed in this post, not all of them allow direct affiliate marketing for example. The most important thing is that you choose an email marketing service that is a good fit for you in your business.
I hope this post gave you a valuable contribution to your decision on which autoresponder you’d like to go for. If it did, feel free to share!
Over at my recommended post I've summarized some of the email marketing services mentioned in this post, as well as several other useful tools and services that will be help you out tremendously.
Do you know of any other good email marketing services? Let me know in the comments.
Cheers!
