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There are tons of email marketing services, including free emailing software you can use to design and send bulk emails to engage your audience. But only a few are truly worth using.
The best email marketing platforms (the ones we recommend) are tried and tested service providers with exceptional services and reliable software tools to create and design email marketing campaigns that get results.
Want to know the best email marketing platform right now?
After countless hours of research, trials and comparison of a wide range of email marketing service providers, the best email marketing software in 2023 is GetResponse email marketing software & solutions. This is because it is suitable for all categories of users and use circumstances, has professional email campaign templates, easy design tools to build landing pages or sales funnel with one click integrations for ecommerce, and marketing automation tools to give you great ROI from your email campaigns.
The top-rated and trusted best email marketing platform in 2023 is:
- Getresponse email marketing software solutions if you want the best tools to design and automate your email campaigns.
- Sendinblue email marketing services for small business owners in need of an all-in-one digital marketing solution.
- Mailchimp for being the most popular marketing automation platform with free email marketing tools and services for beginners.
Our Top Email Marketing Software Ratings Of 2023
A quick look at the 3 best software platforms and tools to create email marketing campaigns.
#1 Getresponse – Best overall with automated email marketing tools
GetResponse is the best all-around email marketing platform for both new email marketers, small or big businesses with experienced marketers alike. It’s not the cheapest service provider in the market, but thousands of marketing specialists, users and business owners agree it’s more robust and is worth every penny.
| Best for | Email automation |
| Starting price | $15.58 per month* |
| Free plan availability | Yes |
#2 Sendinblue – Best services for small businesses
If you want the best email marketing services for your small business, Sendinblue smart all-in-one digital marketing platform has top notch services and tools for various business communications types including Email, SMS, social media, chat, as well as CRM tools to grow your small business.
| Best for | Small businesses |
| Starting price | $25 per month* |
| Free plan availability | Yes |
#3 Mailchimp – Most popular email platform
If you’re looking for a great place to start email marketing for free, Mailchimp has the best free email marketing service plans on the market right now.
| Best for | Reporting |
| Starting price | $17 per month* |
| Free plan availability | Yes |
Skip to: Top rated email marketing platforms | Detailed review and analysis of the best email marketing services and software platforms | How to choose the best email marketing software for your business
Know this: Any email platform with good emailing software can offer mass email services and send bulk emails, but the best email marketing platform give you the best email marketing software with top notch services and advanced tools for every stage of a campaign — from designing your email newsletters to execution and analysis — with simple interfaces and resources to help you get the most from your email marketing efforts.
Most email platforms offering bulk email marketing services claim to offer the best services. Our email marketing software analysis completely takes out the noise and reveals the platforms with the best email campaign software, tools and services to make sure your emails and newsletters get delivered with high conversion rates.
In this email marketing software review, you will know which email marketing platforms are best for various use cases, after rigorous testing, and learn how to choose the best email marketing services for your business (small, medium or big business with large lists).
The Best Email Marketing Services of 2023
- Getresponse: Best overall email marketing software
- Sendinblue: Best services for small business and beginners
- Mailchimp: Most popular email marketing platform with the best free service plan
When you’re communicating with customers (or potential ones), you want to be sure your service won’t let you down. We tested the most popular email marketing software on the market and considered price, ease of use, functionality, and more to give you the best options depending on what you need.
These are the top best email marketing services in 2023:
Best email marketing software and tools
GetResponse
GetResponse is the best overall email marketing software because it features powerful emailing software with professional email templates, easy design tools, and technology to make sure your emails get delivered correctly, right where they should be.
The free email marketing service lets you send one-time email broadcasts. Autoresponder feature makes it easy to create automated email sequences to engage your subscribers or sell a product. Auto funnel tool makes it easy to quickly create sales funnel, build websites or build landing pages to drive conversion and sales.
From designing your email newsletters, creating email campaigns and sending mass emails, GetResponse email marketing platform has one of the best email marketing software available on the internet. In our testing, we liked how Getresponse provided advanced automation, hands-on support, and all the tools needed to keep business owners and their customers connected.
Pros:
- A very easy to use visual, drag-and-drop automation workflow
- Easy to build and customize campaigns
- Efficient A/B testing for landing pages
- Outstanding customer support
Cons:
- A bit of a learning curve for beginners and first-time users
Why we picked Getresponse as the best email marketing service provider with the best software tools
There are many reasons Getresponse currently claims the top spot for the best email marketing services and software platform. First off, Getresponse has the most well-structured automation workflow built to turn your readers into buyers. The entire marketing platform is designed in such a way that you get everything you need to create a campaign that brings good ROI.
What sets GetResponse apart from the other email marketing platforms?
Let’s take a deep dive with careful examination into everything that makes GetResponse stand out from the other email platforms.
Powerful converting automation workflows.
Automation workflows, which send pre-designed emails to subscribers after completing certain actions (like clicking a link or purchasing something from your website), aren’t exactly difficult with other email marketing software, but after using GetResponse’s workflow tool it’s clear that the latter has found the superior way to automate.
Rather than relying on a series of commands listed one after another, GetResponse utilizes a more engaged and visual approach: Users drag and drop actions into the workflow, directly linking triggers and commands in a way that feels more like completing a connect-the-dots than setting up automated emails.
This simplifies what can be an otherwise complex process and makes for one element of the GetResponse user experience that beats out MailChimp in terms of convenience.
Efficient A/B testing for landing pages.
GetResponse adds another layer to the functionality of landing pages with A/B testing that can further increase the efficiency of your campaigns. Based on research statistics, “Customized landing pages – which send the user directly to the item or offer featured in the email – can increase conversion rates by more than 25 percent.”
While minor, this feature demonstrates just another way that GetResponse has taken standard email marketing features a step further.
Helpful customer support service
We were impressed by GetResponse’s customer service. After finding an error in our account registration, we called the support line and were helped immediately by a representative who was extremely polite, understanding, and who never tried to upsell us.
Maybe it was just compared to MailChimp’s lack of service options (email support is only available for the first 30 days of the Forever Free plan), but we found ourselves particularly grateful to have our concerns addressed promptly and personally.
Possible drawbacks: What you should know and points to consider
There’s a bit of a learning curve for beginners.
GetResponse isn’t nearly as easy to use out of the gate as the other top email marketing platforms such as Sendingblue, MailChimp or Mailerlite and requires a little learning to ensure you’re getting as much out of the platform as possible.
This can be especially frustrating for beginners who want to ramp up quickly. However, if you’re not a novice and more experienced, GetResponse should be easy to master thanks to extensive resources like a comprehensive article database, FAQs, research white papers, and courses on optimizing your experience.
And if you get stuck, the email platform offers both email support and live chat options to keep you out of the marketing weeds – for all of its customers.
Overall, GetResponse won our vote as the best email marketing platform because they provided the most robust tools for successful email marketing. It is an all-in-one platform and solution for digital marketing with email automation tools aimed at helping you grow your business. With every single tool aimed at helping you get high ROI and great customer support, Getresponse provides the best email marketing services for businesses that want to get the best ROI from their digital marketing.
Best services for small business
Sendinblue
Sendingblue is one of the most popular email marketing services for small businesses to build and grow their customer base through digital and email marketing. This platform is much more than just email marketing software for a lot of reasons. First off, it provides users with a complete sales and marketing toolkit to build your email marketing strategy right from start to finish.
Sendinblue is the best email marketing platform for small business because it offers multiple nurturing marketing tools and email campaign software to help you easily turn leads into customers.
Key features of Sendinblue that set it apart from the other email marketing services in the small business category of performance:
- Built-in CRM. As customer relations continue to play a major role for small businesses today, you will find Sendinblue’s integrated CRM tools very useful.
- Built-in SMS and Chat.
- A shared inbox so you never lose track of your customer email history.
- 60+ responsive email templates.
- Contact Segmentation: This makes your emails more relevant to specific groups of contacts you target with a tailored message.
- Facebook Ads for lead generation.
Why we picked Sendinblue as the best email marketing service for small business
The main reason Sendinblue takes the top spot for the best email marketing service provider in the small business category of performance is because of its long array of email marketing tools specifically tailored towards helping small business owners and new marketers grow their list, manage active subscribers, build good customer relationship and ultimately drive sales.
Let’s take a careful examination below at some of the things that sets Sendinblue apart from the other small business email marketing platform.
It’s an all-in-one email marketing solution for small and growing businesses.
As an email marketing service, Sendinblue offers powerful and (depending on your business needs) useful features such as laser-focused segmentation for targeting specific group interest and sending customized emails or personalized content. Similar to GetResponse, Sendinblue has A/B testing, and send time optimization for higher conversion rates.
Drag and drop email editor to build high quality and professional looking email campaigns.
On top of the intuitive drag and drop email editor you get access to a selection of fully responsive templates so you can easily create emails that makes you look professional before your customers.
In-depth Email analytics and heat maps.
Other email marketing platforms offer analytics as part of its service to measure engagement. However, Sendinblue does more than that.
The platform not only measures core email KPIs such as open rates and click rates, but also provides you with detailed heat maps of where people clicked in an email, when they engaged with the campaign and from what geography. The usefulness of this is that, with such information, you can fine-tune campaigns for optimal results.
Pricing:
Sendinblue is free for up to 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts. Paid plans pricing starts at $25/month for up to 10,000 emails.
How Sendinblue as an email marketing company has evolved over the years since we first tested and used it.
The first time we tried and used the Sendinblue email marketing services, it was just a simple email marketing platform. In our latest testing round, Sendinblue has evolved from a simple email marketing company to a more comprehensive marketing hub that delivers amazing automation, high quality template design, and a built-in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool well robust to satisfy many small businesses.
Most popular platform with free email marketing tools
Mailchimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing software and service providers. All thanks to its “Free forever” marketing tactics and robust analytics report. Mailchimp’s tools for email marketing are robust for both small and medium sized business owners.
Pros
- Free-forever plan for up to 2,000 contacts
- Great analytic tools for robust reporting and marketing analysis
- User-friendly design functions to build and customize campaigns
- Integrates with hundreds of software platforms
Cons
- Cost can quickly become very expensive for larger contact lists once you have over 15k
- Customer support is very limited
- Not designed for advanced marketing teams
What sets mailchimp apart from other email marketing tools
Free automation.
With the addition of automation, MailChimp’s Forever Free capabilities now surpass the service offerings from some of the industry’s top paid contenders. Automation is a huge plus and enables you to send emails for a variety of actions (like welcoming new subscribers or wishing old ones a happy birthday) without doing anything yourself.
More than half of the email marketing experts we interviewed said that automation was one of the key features to look for in an email marketing service, and its absence was one of our biggest knocks against MailChimp before.
User-friendly design functions.
Designing emails with MailChimp is easy at every level. For beginners with little-to-no design experience, MailChimp offers elegant and versatile templates that can be customized with a drag-and-drop editor, guaranteeing that you’ll find a preset layout or theme to fit your vision.
If you’ve already designed the email you want to send or have an in-house developer, MailChimp also allows you to paste in custom code or import HTML and zip files. For those users who are somewhere in between, all of MailChimp’s templates can be personalized by adding bits of custom HTML into the existing themes — it even includes links to an article on HTML email basics with best practices for design and development.
Robust report and analysis features.
Given the robust features at the planning and execution phases of email campaigns, we had high hopes for MailChimp’s analysis and reporting — and we weren’t disappointed. Reports include all the standard performance indicators, but it also includes analysis pulled from the millions of emails sent through MailChimp.
This enables you to see how your campaign stacks up against the industry average, a level of detail that’s rare among free services. Add to that an integration with Google Analytics and an interactive map that shows where in the world your emails are being opened, and you’ve got a service that seems impossibly comprehensive for a free plan.
Possible drawbacks: Things we dislike and points to consider
Biased customer service.
Forever Free is lacking when it comes to customer service. MailChimp provides customers with extremely comprehensive articles, videos, and other resources to make all the details of your email marketing easy. But for customers on the Forever Free plan, that’s where the buck stops.
There’s no phone number to call if you’re experiencing difficulties with your service, and email support is only available for the first 30 days of your subscription. After that, you’re on your own.
Contact list restrictions.
As with any free plan, there are limits to the size of your audience. MailChimp’s Forever Free plan allows up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month, which will likely be enough if you’re a small business owner or running your own website or blog.
But if you know your business will be expanding soon (or if you already have more than 2,000 subscribers), this may not be enough to serve your needs. Even without these features, MailChimp’s free service is far and away the best email marketing service for the least, and has the capabilities to compete with some of the best paid services as well.
What is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software (also known as “email campaign software” or “emailing software”) enables users to create, send, and track emails to their list of subscribers. Using email platforms makes it easier to create email campaigns with well-designed emails for mass emailing. With a good email platform, you can see key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and how users respond to your emails.
The best email platforms give you all the right tools and services to automate your email sends based on user behavior, which increases the likelihood of customer engagement since the email is more personalized to their interests.
Email marketing software vs Email marketing Platform vs Email marketing services: What’s the difference?
The main difference between email marketing software, services and platforms is the name and how it’s identified by various individuals and professionals. They all mean practically the same thing.
An Email marketing platform is a SaaS (Software as a Service) digital marketing platform providing software for email marketing with all the tools and services businesses need to collect or store email contacts (known as subscribers), be able to design newsletters and send mass emails to every single contact on their list.
The aim of email marketing is to help businesses connect on a personal level with their customers or followers and keep them updated by regularly sending out electronic mails to keep them informed of any product launch, deals, events and more.
How to choose an Email Marketing Software Platform for your business
The Key decision-making factors: What you should consider before choosing an email marketing service provider or software platform
Expert Advice: For the best email marketing practices, male sure your emails and newsletters are primarily delivered to the “Primary” email inbox of subscribers on your email lists.
Mobile responsiveness
According to a recent study, 55% of business emails are now opened on mobile devices, which means providing marketing experience that works on both desktop and mobile platforms is more essential than ever.
All of our top picks include the ability to automatically convert your desktop designs into mobile-friendly formats, and most other major companies do as well. Whichever service you choose, make sure it provides this function so that your emails will read the way you want them to, no matter what platform they’re being read from.
Reporting and deliverability analytics
It’s easy to assume that marketing success depends on the number of people you’re reaching, but an effective email marketing campaign also depends on the recipients themselves.
That means you should regularly evaluate the quality of the subscribers on your lists to make sure they’re still worth engaging. After all, sending repeated messages to someone who isn’t opening your emails will quickly turn you into more of a nuisance than an asset.
Both Sendiblue and GetResponse offer scoring tools to gauge the quality of your contacts, which makes it simple to determine who you should be contacting; used in tandem with automated workflows, you can easily set up segmented campaigns based on the quality of your subscribers, sending targeted messages to different recipients in order to increase engagement.
Conversion optimization
While open rates are an important metric to monitor (how else will subscribers read the message you’ve so painstakingly composed?), click-through rates provide a much better reference point for email success.
This data allows you to see the extent of your subscribers’ engagement beyond whether or not they opened your email, since we’re all familiar with opening emails just for the sake of marking them as ‘read.’
Different industries have different standards for email success, but According to MailChimp email marketing benchmark and statics by industry, the average click-through rate across all industries is 2.43%.
Methodology: How we researched and tested email marketing platforms to find the best services and software for email marketing
We first checked for popular email platforms for small businesses
We looked at the top 10 services based on market share and general popularity, collected after scouring through reviews in publications and consulting with nine digital marketing strategists.
We focused our search on email platforms that were geared toward small businesses and beginners — that means free plans and lower-tier paid options.
After building lists, designing emails, managing campaigns, and poring over results for nearly 40 hours, we found that nearly all email marketing services offer the same capabilities: tools to help you grow your contact list, execute marketing campaigns, and analyze the results of your efforts.
The differences are in the details, so we evaluated how easy it is for us to perform the same tasks on each service.
“80% of features in all email marketing platforms are similar, but it’s that 20% that makes a world of difference.”
Alexander Bekhterev, Program Manager at Emarsys
Contact growth and subscribers’ migration
We added individual contacts, copy and pasted groups, and imported files to find out how simple it is to build your email lists.
If you’re just getting started with email marketing, this may not seem important, but if you’re migrating large numbers of subscribers from one email service to another, the ease with which you can import contacts will save you significant amounts of time and energy.
Email list management
We created custom sign-up forms and segmented contacts into groups to evaluate each service’s ability to collect and manage subscribers. Unlike adding contacts by yourself, list management capabilities allow the email marketing service to do this for you based on subscribers who opt into your mailing lists from your website.
Email design templates
We tweaked templates and built emails from scratch, edited photos with in-service editors, and tested preview capabilities for both desktop and mobile platforms to ensure your emails are able to grab your subscribers’ attention at first glance.
While most services offer simple drag-and-drop editors for designing emails and sign-up forms, capabilities vary: Campaign Monitor, for example, provides a variety of templates for sign-up forms but restricts the amount that they can be personalized.
Email campaign management
After compiling our subscriber lists and designing our email, we executed a test campaign using A/B tests and automation workflows. These tools allow you to find the messaging that resonates best with your subscribers and enables the service to follow-up with customized emails that keep customer engagement going.
Reporting and Analytics
In the era of big data, KPIs are a major component in optimizing ongoing business strategies. We looked at each service’s ability to analyze our email campaign’s performance using metrics like open rates, click through rates, and unsubscribes.
Customer support services
Some of the services we tested were extremely intuitive; others were far from it. If you’re new to email marketing, you’ll probably need assistance at some point along the way. We evaluated each service’s customer support tools, including live chats, FAQs, and resource databases that will help you manage campaigns both simple and complex.
10 of the Best Email Marketing Services We Tested
In alphabetical order, these are the top 10 email marketing services and tools we tested and compared.
- AWeber
- Campaign Monitor
- Constant Contact
- ElasticEmail
- GetResponse
- iContact
- MailChimp
- MailerLite
- MailJet
- Privy
Email Marketing FAQ
