The search for finding the best email marketing service for YOU is definitely not easy as there are a multitude of options for every budget and every feature set. Here’s a quick round up of email marketing services in the market, after having gone through the process myself.
A broad look at the kind of people who can benefit from a cloud based email marketing tool:
- Savvy Entrepreneurs who would like to build a profitable relationship with the existing base of customers, looking at leaving no opportunity to delight the consumers.
- Marketers at medium and large companies trying to do the same, exploring more efficient options than hiring an agency and paying 5-15 times lesser. More savings is equal to more earnings.
- Digital marketers and agencies looking at acquiring new leads/customers for themselves and their clients.
I’ll be comparing ActiveCampaign, Aweber, Infusionsoft, MailChimp and Madmimi with a summary here These are the most actively used and successful players while there are a dozen more smaller players not worth mentioning here.
For those wanting to get into the basics of email marketing may see this, or a good email design strategy for an email blast here. Now coming down to the best email marketing services review:
1. AWeber
Features
AWeber has more than 150 email marketing templates to choose from. It integrates with WordPress, PayPal, Eventbrite and a few others. AWeber also allows you to quickly segment your lists by subscriber opens or clicks, location, and even what pages subscribers visited on your website.
The Good
Known to handle big volumes easily, good for professional digital marketers who would be able to create great email marketing solutions out of this . This provider has an option for custom HTML and also allows you to add attachments to your email. Ideal for bulk email marketing campaigns.
The Bad
No free trial (although $1 won’t hurt). No image hosting (Edit: now free unlimited hosting). No ability to forward a message to a friend. Not integrated with Google Analytics. (Edit: Since this posts, almost all the negatives are converted to positive or neutral)
Pricing
AWeber offers a variety of pricing options, but their monthly plans range from $19/month for up to 500 subscribers to $149/month for up to 25,000 subscribers. If you want to send an email blast to more users than that, just ask for a custom quote.
One Line Verdict
Best service for individual digital marketers into as well email marketing agencies handling multiple accounts and mass email marketing. Try here
2. Active Campaign
- Active Campaign
Active Campaign is the surprise guy in the market, it literally has everything that is needed and is probably providing best email marketing services in the market.
The Good
Fantastic integration with CRM services like Salesforce.com and many others. Customer service and support is quick and useful. They can even custom design templates for your business at a nominal price. Reporting is comprehensive from the open rates, link opens, email client and the best part is geographical reporting of the campaign opens.
They also have a feature Erja at an additional with which the entire database’s social media profiling and segmentation can be done for creating razor sharp targeted campaigns.
The Bad
Doesn’t offer a direct copying of the campaign from a zip file. But that’s hardly a deterrent.
One Line Verdict
A must try for small business owners as well those looking at doing b2b email marketing, who would want to get into the depth of their customer’s digital behavior and try sharp segmented campaigns!
3. InfusionSoft
Features
InfusionSoft combines CRM, email and social marketing, and e-commerce services. It is most known for it’s easy ability to segment subscribers by activity to help you send very targeted emails. They also provide detailed customer records so you can see what emails were sent to who and which actions your subscribers took. I can cover this not just under my email marketing blog but even in later posts under marketing automation.
The Good
A total solution, not limited to email marketing only but a good way to automate the sales and marketing departments of SME’s and statups. One can create email marketing best practices by using this services. Must try this before making the final decision.
The Bad
Not as user-friendly as its competitors, expect a learning curve, but that’s there with everything great (like wordpress). But it will surely grow on you.
Pricing
InfusionSoft has three tiers of pricing starting at $199/month for 5,000 contacts/500,000 emails. Their premier pricing is $499/month for 100,000 contacts/500,000 emails.
One line verdict
If you are startup, and looking to scale up soon with a scalable marketing automation with full seriousness, this is the tool to go ahead with, at least a must try
4. MadMimi
Mad Mimi is a good piece of software, tastefully developed with a lot of personal effort by a really talented silicon valley couple. Useful for creating email marketing campaigns and creating a pool of loyal customers. Must Try the interface
The Good
Mad Mimi is integrates with many other applications that will further propel your brand. Surprisingly affordable.
The Bad
Complete creative control can be daunting and is not for everyone
Pricing
Starts at$10 a month for up to 500 contacts.
One line verdict
One of the best players around, slick interface, fantastic customer support, great price, my personal favorite. Must try now. Highly recommended.
5. MailChimp
Features
MailChimp again has more than 500 templates to choose from. They recently implemented a drag and drop editor for quick, easy email layouts. Many of their templates are optimized to display on mobile devices. You also have the option of coding your email directly with HTML and inline CSS.
MailChimp uses an advanced open API and encourages other applications to integrate with it. SurveyMonkey, PayPal, FreshBooks, Google Analytics, Shopify and many more currently integrate with Mail Chimp.
They also lend performance advice by comparing your open rate with your industry average and your lists average, which is a plus. If you are looking for a free email marketing software for simply using it as a email newsletter services, this may fit the bill, but not for advanced stuff and scaling up.
The Bad
MailChimp does not allow you to send one campaign to multiple subscriber lists. Also, a big drawback is the inability to send auto-responder campaigns which is the present and future of email marketing services.
Pricing
They score high if you are beginner looking for a free version, which offers up to 2k subscribers and 12 k mails. MailChimp has a number of monthly plans to choose from ranging from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers to $240/month for up to 50,000 subscribers. All paid plans have an unlimited number of sends.
One line verdict
Nice clean interface, known brand, but may not be the best value for money as it is slightly expensive, the interface can get sucky at times due to forced sense of humour of the developers (it’s pretty good at times, but not always), auto responders missing in the system yet.
Not in my top 3!. Go try amongst these basis your fitment ActiveCampaign, Aweber or Madmimi
In a Nutshell, to find the best email marketing services for you, I suggest choose 2 or items from the list, register and try for it yourself right away. And then make a decision for yourself within a week.
Happy Decision making 
, just remember that the faster you start the better, there are people out there waiting to be your customers, and there are your customers out there waiting to be your loyal customers forever.
So which email marketing service is your favorite? You may also check out a detailed comparison of 9 best email marketing software here. Know of another good one that’s not listed here? Give us the details in the comments!
Ciao!
Karanpreet Bindra
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Thanks Karanpreet, great article and useful reviews. I have just started using trial versions of Madmimi, Aweber and iContact, and I
‘ll hopefully decide to go ahead with one of them. Cheers
Hi Karanpreet,
Very useful review. Thanks !
I used to use mailchimp but I’ve found Madmimi to be much cheaper. Personally I prefer their system as well – their editor just seems more intuitive.
Wonderful post. Thank you for great information.
Hi! I loved the article – this is extremely useful. I was wondering where the review for icontact was? I can’t seem to find it.
Also, my company is looking to maximize our email delivery rate. Do you have any specific recommendations for services that are get good at keeping emails out of people’s spam folders?
Thanks!
Lauren
Hi Lauren,
I have added the iContact review to the list as requested. And I agree, it was a service worth reviewing.
You’ve asked a very valid question as delivery rate should be one of the top considerations for choosing the service. For deliverability, I recommend Aweber and Mad Mimi to be the best of the lot, reaching up to almost 98-99% levels. iContact would be the 3rd best in terms of deliverability.
Also, for deliverability, I will be writing a separate post to help all the followers, but key things to keep in mind apart from having a good service are:
1. A non spammy subject line
2. A decent text to image ratio. Always HTML code campaigns and not use jpegs.
3. Size (image optimization)
4. Optimized number of links in the content.
5. Permission based emailing and easily visible unsubscribe options
Good luck. Pls do share with me how it goes 🙂
Cheers
Great review, Karanpreet -Glen
Excellent post!
The success of email marketing depends upon the strategy you have applied. You are always required to understand the behavior of your customers and prepare a solid strategy. The above mentioned points will lead you to make an effective campaign and gain success. Here is a big thank to you for this outstanding work.
Keep it up…..
Best regards
Margarida Fonseca
I’ve used both Vertical Response and Benchmark.
True, Benchmark has lightening fast customer service, they do not seem to be able to answer all their questions.
Currently, I have an email campaign with image quality issues. I’m hosting my images, using my html, have no scaling issues, yet whenever I test it with Benchmark, my email is blurry, very blurry. BUT, when I test the same exact code through Vertical Response, the images are nice and sharp. Benchmark still swears they are doing nothing to my code. I still beg to differ–and I even sent them the actual tests from VR and Benchmark. They came back with the same reasoning.
Hi Roxie,
Thanks for your response and this interesting piece of information. I understand that fast customer service is of no point if it’s not useful 😀
I’ll check this issue out myself. I also recommend you try hosting images on their server instead.
Till then I recommend trying Mad Mimi as they seem to be most stable and cost effective service around.
Dear Karanpreet,
Many thanks for the article.
Can you expand on the internal issues at iContact as they have been rated as No1 in at least 2 other reviews I have read.
Whilst I like the look of Mad Mimi, as I only need to send email newsletters to clients (perhaps I would like to survey/poll at a later date), based on your reviews I would be best to choose Benchmark, right? What is their deliverability rated at?
How is deliverability accurately predicted because I would think this depends on the filters used at a recipient’s servers?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Jonny,
Thanks for writing in and you are welcome for the article. iContact issues are resolved and I have added the review for the service.
Deliverability rate is a mixture of service providers expertise and sender’s carefulness and relevance of content. The use of multiple dedicated IP’s, detailed checks and segregation of campaigns through different servers/IP’s to achieve better deliverability and many more factors are used at the service providers end.
Yes, Benchmark email seems good as per your requirements and has a decent deliverability since you are not sending too many campaigns. Take the final call between Mad Mimi and Benchmark by trialing both would be my recommendation.
Fantastic info! Wish I had this info starting out – I jumped in with the advice to go with Aweber. But not knowing exactly what I was doing, it did become an “expenseâ€. Fiddled around with it, trying different things, but still too new at it to get a decent list… Got so frustrated – your article would have saved me time, trouble and MONEY.
Great Site.
Hello,
It is very useful article to beginners, Thanks a lot.
I have 2.5 Lakhs Indian and 3 Lakhs US/Canada opt-in email database and I want to make some money (for bread butter)
Please let me know it possible with affiliate?
Which software is suitable for me?
Hi Kuldeep,
Thanks. That’s a very good number of opt-in email ID’s giving you the opportunity to connect with them profitably if you do the right segmentation and need gap understanding, pitching them products and services which will genuinely solve their problems. Check out cj.com for US/Canada based affiliate products and services.
I suggest Aweber or iContact for such a large database.
Good luck.
i had before problem in gmail, all my email campaign were in spam in gmail, them i chosee mailchimp, the problem was overcome in mailchimp, my mailchimp campaign were in inbox delivery for all gmail IDs, but mailchimp was very costly, them i try out Active campaign, it is good platform ,few email goes in spam for my gmail IDs but cost wise i feel active campaign is good one……
Hi John,
The emails going to the spam depends upon a lot of other factors apart from the service provider. The text:image ratio being too low, certain very spammy keywords being used in the subject line and the content, suspicious links etc. I’ll shortly write a small piece on this.
Excellent post! I was just wondering where’s GetResponse 🙂
Hi Kate,
Thanks for your kind words. Will be adding that soon.