15 Comments

January 17, 2016 ,

 Updated October 15, 2021

As marketers we’re competing with some of the biggest companies in the world. Sometimes having access to the right tool may be more useful than a dozen employees.

I’m not here to chant about how the money is in the list. If you’re reading this, you already know that. Here’s everything you’ll ever need to take your email marketing campaigns to the next level.

Best Email Marketing Software

Choosing the best email marketing software for your business is something you’ll have to do on your own, but we’re here to help. Everyone has different needs and not all businesses are equal. Some companies send out more email than others, some prefer plain-text, some need fancy templates and some want CRM integrations.

Here’s an overview of each of the top-rated tools out there for sending your emails out.

1. Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft review

InfusionSoft is one of the most famous email marketing tools of all time – use it right and you’ll make your money back ten-fold. It’s not just an email marketing tool, but a full-blown marketing automation assistant with hundreds if not thousands of features and unlimited possibilities.

Here’s just some of it’s amazing features:

  • Easy to create web forms
  • Traditional email marketing capabilities w/ advanced list segmentation
  • Advanced autoresponders
  • One of the best CRMs (customer relationship managers)
  • Their own shopping cart system
  • Brandable reports
  • Integrates with hundreds of tools through their API
  • Affiliate management system
  • Create landing pages with ease

Price: $199/mo

2. MailChimp

MailChimp Review

MailChimp is the most popular email marketing software and there’s a lot of reasons for that. It’s free to get started with, has amazing deliverability rates, features autoresponders and opt-in forms, integrates with just about anything and has super flexible pricing.

Price: Free up to 2,000 subscribers & starting from $10/mo afterwards

3. EngageBay

EngageBay

EngageBay are the new kids on the block but fast becoming the preferred email marketing service for many startups and small businesses out there. They offer a wide array of email marketing templates powered by a simple drag and drop interface. Moreover, the segmentation and targeting functionalities are great.

The ability to personalize your emails, rich formatting options and an easy option to track your campaign performance makes EngageBay a great marketing automation software to go for.

 

But it’s the pricing that really stands out:

Pricing per contact

  • Up to 1,000: $0/mo
  • Up to 3,000: $8.99/mo
  • Up to 25,000: $29.99/mo
  • Up to 50,000: $47.99/mo 

What we like about EngageBay: The amount of features it offers at a competitively low price point. Their flexible, customizable plans are good too. The user interface is simple and user-friendly and their support is commendable. It is a modern platform for small businesses that cannot afford higher-priced solutions.

 

What they should improve: Emails are branded so if you’d like to send emails without the EngageBay brand, you’d have to pay extra. 

Who is this for: those who are looking for a powerful yet affordable tool to reach customers via different channels (emails, SMS, push notifications, etc). Also, in case you are looking for a free tool, they offer a decent deal for $0 a month.

4. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign Review

More and more marketers are switching from traditional tools like Aweber, GetResponse and MailChimp to ActiveCampaign. Why? It’s one of the best email services that has a CRM attached to it as well. It helps you gather a lot more information about your leads and start segmenting them based on that. It’s time to personalise your automated campaigns.

Price: Starting at $9/mo

5. Aweber

Aweber review

Aweber is known for having some of the best email marketing templates in the industry. It’s not as flexible as MailChimp for example, but it’s definitely better for a less tech-savvy users. You don’t need to be a designer and a developer anymore, to create amazing autoresponders and opt-in forms. They’ve also got much better analytics than most providers.

Price: Free trial & starting from $19/mo

6. Wisestamp

Wisestamp

Use Wisestamps drag and drop editor to create beautiful email signatures. These are fully customizable and allow you to add features such as banners, videos, buttons, and much more. WiseStamp Office 365 signature manager now also works with Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, Yahoo and more.  

Price: Free ut has a $5.95 plan with increased options and works within organizations.

7. Campaign Monitor

Campaign monitor review

With a super straightforward and pleasing user interface, responsive email templates and split-testing features, it’s a pretty good tool. It’s a lot pricier than most of their competitors but extremely suitable for companies that rarely use email marketing – they’re the only provider that will let you “pay per campaign”.

Price: Starting at $9/mo

8. Constant Contact

Constant contact review

Constant Contact has the second highest deliverability rates in the industry, right after MailChimp. They have systems in place that’ll flag your email before you send it out, if it has a chance of ending up in the spam folder. This feature alone could save you a lot of time and make you a LOT more money.

Price: Free 60-day trial & starting from $20/mo

9. iContact

iContact review

A great WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) email composer, great segmentation capabilities, social media integrations, autoresponders, split-testing, Google Analytics integration and ROI reporting – what else could you want? How about super competitive pricing? They have that too.

Price: Free trial & starting from $14/mo

10. Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi review

Mad Mimi, as cheesy as it sounds, is one of the top tools out there. Possibly the best MailChimp alternative and the cheapest email marketing software on the web. It’s made for beginners and is thus super simple to use. Advanced users will want to steer away from this, but if you’re just getting started, Mad Mimi is perfect.

Price: Free up to 100 subscribers & starting at $10/mo

11. SendinBlueSendinBlue Review

SendinBlue is one of the cheaper tools and can be super helpful for, yet again, companies that send messages out rarely. They charge you per email sent, not per subscriber. They’ve also replaced autoresponders with “trigger marketing” – something I definitely urge you to check out. One of our favorite parts about SendinBlue is the “statistics” aka analytics. Crisp, clear, practical.

Price: Free up to 9,000 emails/month & starting from $7.37/mo

12. DotMailer

dotmailer review

DotMailer is an amazing replacement for InfusionSoft. Great CRM and automation capabilities and even the design is similar at times. It’s definitely the go-to tool for anyone doing mailing for an eCommerce business.

Price: Individual

Best List Building Tools

What’s the point of having the best email marketing services if you don’t have permission to send anyone an email? This section is dedicated to helping you grow your email list by any means necessary.

All-Inclusive

13. OptinMonster

OptinMonster review
We use OptinMonster, too!

This tool will let you create amazing-looking forms within a few minutes. Integrate these high-converting forms with their exit-intent technologies, customer segmentation features, target based on visitor behaviour. It won’t be long until you’ve tripled your current email list and hopefully revenue as well.

Other features include:

  • Popups
  • A/B testing
  • Useful analytics
  • Conversion boosting 2-step optin technology
  • Mobile specific popups
  • In-content forms
  • MonsterEffects™

Price: $9/m or $49/year

14. Opt In Architect

OptinArchitect Review

Very similar to Optin Monster, this tool has popups, sitewide optins, 2-step optins and they’re all super simple to create. It integrates with just about any email marketing service and comes at a fair price. Not a fan of Optin Monster? Check this one out.

Price: $27/mo or $297 lifetime

15. Thrive Leads

ThriveLeads review

Thrive Leads promises to turn your website into a lead-generation machine. It has the same features as the previous two solutions, but is way easier to use, for better results. It has a super powerful A/B testing system built into it that will even pick the winner for you automatically. One of the most impressive list-building tools I’ve seen!

Price: $67

16. SumoMe

SumoMe Welcome Mat Review

A huge suite of tools that you get from installing one plugin on WordPress. Log in, choose the features you want and they’ll be enabled on your site. Great A/B testing, easy to design opt-ins, a plethora of different options and they have both free and paid versions. This is what we’ve been using at MonetizePros for a while now.

Price: Free & premium versions available

Exit-Intent

Exit-Intent tools will recognise when your visitor is about to leave and will let you present them with extra incentive to stay. This is one of the main ways online businesses are leaving money on the table.

17. Exit MonitorExit Monitor Review

 

Build your email list, reduce cart abandonment, increase your social media following, redirect your leaving traffic – all of this translates into more revenue for your business. Exit Monitor has some of the most advanced exit-intent technologies on the market and it comes at a bargain.

Price: 14-day free trial & starting at $39/mo

18. Rooster

Rooster logo

Have a SaaS or eCommerce business? Rooster’s exit-intent technology is probably for you. It’s already been a huge success on it’s own, but has now been acquired by Unbounce which means that it can only get better. Start your trial today!

Price: Free 30-day trial & starting at $49/mo

Pop-ups

Pop-ups used to have a horrible image to them due to the ads that spammy websites have been running for decades. Popups are making a return, by providing your users value, instead of annoying them with advertising. Here are some of the best tools for you to use.

19. Pippity

Pippity review

See your pop-up in real-time as you edit and customize one of their 18 designs. Elegantly bulleted lists, your own product images, dozens of triggers to use for your popup and split-test your results – all within 5 minutes.

Price: $49/year

20. NinjaPopups

Ninjapopups example

Exit intent popups, scrolling triggers, time-based triggers, Google Analytics integration, A/B testing and much more. Sounds like a simple popup tool at first but is full of conversion-boosting technology to help you get the most out of your websites’ visitors.

Price: $25

21. PopUp Domination

PopupDomination Review

Great pop-up plugin that doesn’t have a “spammy feel” to it. Includes A/B testing, force-subscribe features, page specific popups, entry and exit popups and much much more.

Pricing: Starting at $47

Opt-ins

22. Snip.ly

Snip.ly is an amazing way for you to get extra visitors and potential optins. It lets you put your own message on any website. This allows you to drive traffic to your own landing page, while promoting other experts’ content on social media. Here’s an example from Quicksprout and MonetizePros:

Sniply review

Price: Free & premium versions available

23. PadiAct

PadiAct Review

PadiAct is an easy-to-install way to show customized messages to your audience, based on their behaviour on your site. Collect leads, offer extra incentives – MONETIZE!

Price: Free version & premium starting at $25/mo

24. OptIn Content Locker

Optin Content Locker review
A super basic demo of the optin content locker.

Put some of your best content out there and offer bonuses, but implement them IN your content. Let’s say your talking about measuring Facebook Ads results, you probably have your own Excel sheet with the proper formulas already set up. Offer that as a bonus to your readers and lock it with the OptIn Content Locker.

Price: $15

26. Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box

Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box Review

Super customizeable popups that get triggered when your visitor scrolls down the page a certain amount. You can use opt-in boxes, social share buttons, article suggestions, have a lead gen form and much more. Triggers are now not only limited to scrolling but also based on clicks, mouse-overs, time and even reaching the end of a post.

Price: Free

27. FeatureBox

Optin Feature Box Review

The Optin Feature Box is probably the easiest way for you to double your email optin rates. Popularized by Derek Halpern, the FeatureBox is a box that goes below your menu, above your content and lets your readers optin. Derek Halpern said the feature box has a 33.6% conversion rate on his website!

Price: $37 & above

BONUS! The folks over at Plugmatter gave our readers a special discount for all of their plugins!

[deals companyid=”91″]

28. HelloBar

HelloBar Review

It seems like every site in the internet marketing niche now has a HelloBar attached to it. It’s a powerful way to get your visitors attention and:

  • Direct them to a page of your choice
  • Collect emails
  • Increase your social following
  • A/B test everything

Price: Free & Premium versions available

29. Comment redirect

Redirect everyone who leaves their first comment on your website to a landing page of your choice. When someone’s leaving a comment, they’re already in “action taking mode” – make use of that and give them another action to do. This could be opting in to your newsletter, joining your Mastermind group on Facebook or whatever is most valuable to you.

Price: Free

Improving open rates and deliverability

30. Return Path’s Inbox Insight

Email marketing competitor analysis

See which of your subscribers are being messaged by your competitors, how their engagement rates compare to yours, what you should put in the headline of your emails, when you should start sending emails to your following and much much more. If James Bond was an email marketer, this would be his #1 tool!

Price: Individual

31. Lyris ContentChecker

About to send out an email newsletter? Run it through Lyris ContentChecker and see if you have a chance of ending up in the spam folder of your subscribers. If yes, adapt your content based on their suggestions and maximize your deliverability!

Price: Free

32. Sendforensics email deliverability test

Sendforensics email deliverability review
Testing the last MonetizePros newsletter

You send your newsletter to a test e-mail they give you at Sendforensics and they analyze the deliverability of your email based on the content, infrastructure and other factors. With the pro version, they’ll show you exactly how to maximize your deliverability.

Price: Free trial & starting from $49

33. Litmus

Litmus spam test report

Litmus will let you build your newsletter in their own system and send it out with your ESP. You benefit by seeing real-time how your newsletter will look across 40+ different email clients. It also helps you make sure that all links, images and tracking codes work properly. Not only that, but they have spam filter testing, too.

Price: Free trial & starting from $79/mo

34. SenderScore

MonetizePros SenderScore

SenderScore is one of the many criteria for whether your email gets delivered or ends up in spam. Sign up on their website and find out what your senderscore is and what you can do to improve it. This is probably the easiest way to maximize email delivery rates.

Price: Free!

35. BriteVerify

BriteVerify Review

As nice as it is to be able to say that you have an email list of XX,XXX people, what it really comes down to is how much revenue you make from those emails and how many people open it. BriteVerify helps you get rid of all of your dead emails, emails with typos etc – it’s basically a list cleaner. This is your chance to see REAL data from your email marketing, after clearing out the rubbish.

Price: $0.01/email, less for bigger lists

36. Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

This little tool scans your headline based on several criteria and gives you advice on how to improve it. This ranges from the use of power words to the keywords present and even shows you previews in Google results and your customers inbox. More often than not, using this tool you’ll realize that you can come up with a better headline.

Price: Free

37. Touchstone Subject Line Gold

Touchstone Subject Line Gold Review

Subject Line Gold lets you input your email subject line and will compare and analyze against your previous campaigns as well as 40+ million email campaigns sent by your competitors. It will predict your open rate and delivery rate, give you advice on what to change in the subject line and much more.

Price: Free & extra credits available

CRO

If we had one takeaway for you at MonetizePros, it would be that increasing the amount of traffic you have isn’t always the best solution for making money. We’re all about working with what you already have and improving upon that.

Conversion rate optimization is one of the easiest ways to increase your bottom line and start making more money. These tools will make your CRO a million times easier!

38. Bounce Exchange

BounceExchange review

Bounce Exchange is a service based on advanced behavioural technology. They run 50,000+ A/B tests across their network and will automatically optimize your website for the most conversions. Supposedly one of the most efficient tools/services out there for improving your CR, but definitely comes at a hefty price.

Price: Individual

39. Optimizely

Optimizely review

Optimizely let’s you visually make changes to your website by clicking on any element and changing it from their dashboard. It automatically turns your two variations into an A/B test and displays it on your website. All you need to do is copy one line of code into the header of your website and you’re done!

Price: Free & Paid versions available

40. Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer Review

Visual Website Optimizer is another amazing tool for, surprise surprise, optimizing your conversion rates by making visual changes. This means no coding experience is necessary, no design knowledge. In my opinion, it has a slightly nicer and friendlier interface than Optimizely but also has a higher price tag.

Price: Free trial & starting at $49/mo

Generating Content Ideas

41. BuzzSumo

Email marketing tools

BuzzSumo is one of the most powerful tools for analyzing content. Enter a keyword and quickly see what’s been successful and why. You’ll get an idea of the best performing content (and their headlines) in your industry. Use this as inspiration.

As a bonus, you’ll see the backlinks to that article as well as the share counts across all major social networks. With the pro version, you can also see who precisely shared it and reach out to the same people for your new and improved piece of content (see Skyscraper technique).

Price: Free & Pro versions available from $99/mo

42. EduBirdie

EduBirdie Grmmar

Most bloggers find grammar and spelling challenging when producing content. You do not want to spend too long on an article, or do not want many too many spelling and grammar mistakes like my content. Luckily Edubirdie has  a free grammar and punctuation check that helps with language rectification, paraphrasing, and wordiness. Pasting full paragraphs or grammar check sentences, students also receive such helpful tools as word count tool, word to page converter, case converter, plagiarism checker, alphabetizer and many others. 

Price: Free

43. The Hemingway App

The Hemingway App
See? This piece is perfect!

The Hemingway App is not for generating content ideas. It will help you make your headlines and content much better. All your hard to read sentences get highlighted, allowing you to edit them. This will make certain that your content is easy to understand.

Complex phrases are highlighted and simpler alternatives given to you. If you’re using passive voice, that’ll turn into another colour. Edit that and stop being boring.

Price: Free

Best Email Outreach Tool

44. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach UI

Ninja Outreach deserves a post of it’s own and we’re working on that. This is THE tool when you’re looking to take your content marketing to the next level.

Search for a keyword and you’ll be presented with relevant influencers, authors, companies. You can filter them based on dozens of factors, ranging from backlinks, twitter followers and even the types of pages on their site.

Compile them all into one list, write a template outreach email and personalise it with the data Ninja Outreach fetched. A few clicks and you’ve just let dozens of relevant influencers know about your latest, amazing piece.

It’s a powerful tool, but don’t abuse it. Put thought into your templates and only reach out when you have actual value to provide.

Price: Free trial & starting from $29/mo

Giveaways

Giveaways can be an amazing way to get thousands of emails in a short amount of time, with little investment. Meanwhile, you’ll be making your audience happier! Buy some sick tools or services that your audience might like and run a giveaway. We’ve done this in the past and ended up getting thousands of emails. Extreme cases have shown email list growth of over 200K people.

45. UpViral

upViral Sample stats
Here’s just some data of how efficient giveaways can be.

UpViral lets you create a sophisticated giveaway with no technical knowledge required. Viral giveaways, contests, product launches, locking your content virally – anything you can think of. They have dozens of pre-made landing pages designed for you, that you can modify with ease. It integrates with almost all email marketing services, too!

Price: $47/mo

46. KingSumo Giveaways

MonetizePros giveaway
Our latest giveaway was done with KingSumo

KingSumo giveaways lets you do super simple giveaways in as little as 10 minutes. This is what we used last year for our $14K marketing giveaway. It integrates with your favorite ESP, picks the winner for you, has a nice viral system built in and is a super cheap solution.

Price: $198 for a lifetime

Best Landing Page Software

Landing pages are one of the most important parts of your email marketing campaigns. This is where you actually get access to your (potential) customers email address. A good landing page will make or break your campaign.

47. LeadPages

LeadPages template gallery

LeadPages is probably the most popular solution when it comes to creating high-converting landing pages. They’re excellent at marketing themselves and have become a well-known name in the landing page industry. They’ve got hundreds of templates pre-made for you. Sort these based on conversion rates and modify according to your needs.

Other than the traditional landing pages, you’ll also be able to create LeadLinks, LeadBoxes, LeadDigits and many other revolutionary things they’ve invented.

Price: $25/mo

48. Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels example

Although one of the more pricier services, it’s much more than a simple landing page tool. It will not only make you perfect, measured landing pages, but entire sales funnels that you can use for your marketing campaigns. They’ve got templates for just about everything, ranging from webinars to upsell pages.

Price: Starts at $97/mo

49. Instapage

Instapage review

Instapage promotes themself as being super easy to use. It’s true – in fact, you can set up your first landing page within just 3 minutes. There’s a 45-day free trial so go ahead and give it a shot! They’ve got a huge library of templates and they’re actually one of my favorites out of all the landing page software providers.

Price: Free trial & starting at $29/mo

50. OptimizePress

OptimizePress Landing Page Templates

OptimizePress is great for making landing pages but in reality, it’s a lot more than that. I’d say the majority of membership sites that I’ve worked on, have been made with OptimizePress. Other than those two, you’ll also be able to make product launch funnels, webinar registration pages and whatnot – and it’s all responsive!

I’d say the key benefit is that it’s yours for a lifetime, there’s no monthly fees.

Price: $97/lifetime

51. Unbounce

Unbounce review

With Unbounce you can create high-converting landing pages that are responsive within just five minutes. Countless of templates for you to use and customize and more being created all the time. They’ve also got an A/B testing system built in for you to get the most out of your landing pages.

Price: $49/mo

Regular Email Hacks

As much as I love automation and efficiency, not all of our email marketing is automated. There’s still dozens if not hundreds of emails a day that need my answer, follow-up or input. Here are some tools to help you get to inbox zero easier, clean up your mailbox and make the whole process smoother in general.

52. Unroll.Me

Unroll.me example

We’re all a part of at least some newsletters that we want to receive. Unfortunately, we also get a lot of mail we didn’t really intend to sign up for and that clutters our inboxes. With Unroll.Me, you simply log in and it fetches the information on everything you’re subscribed for and let’s you unsubscribe from the unnecessary ones with just one click.

Price: FREE!

53. FollowUpThen

A lot of my email require a response another day, sometimes even weeks or months later. How do you keep track of all of that? I haven’t thought of a good way, but these guys did. Instead of flagging the email or marking it as unread for months.. Use FollowUpThen.

Simply forward your desired email to [some time]@followupthen.com and they’ll automatically remind you.

Examples:

Price: Free & premium versions available

54. Boomerang

Boomerang for gmail

Unless you’re living in a cave, you’ve probably heard of Boomerang already. Similar to FollowUpThen, Boomerang allows you to send email at a later date or have them remind you to send something at a later date. Don’t like forwarding email? No worries, Boomerang is a gmail plugin!

Price: Free

55. BuzzStream Email Research Tool

Not everyone is easy to reach by e-mail. A lot of influencers and other important people don’t want their e-mail to be found by just anyone. BuzzStreams tool asks you to input a persons name, company and website and then generates potential Google searches that may help you find the persons email.

Price: Free

57. Canned Responses

Canned responses is actually a tool built into Gmail, that’s disabled by default. You can easily enable it though. Why?

I don’t know about you, but a lot of the e-mails I have to respond to, ask the same questions. That means they also get the same answers. Why waste time writing the same things over and over again?

Canned Responses lets you save messages you have to send out all the time and choose the one you need by clicking one button, when the time comes. A huge time-saver in the long run!

Head to your gmail settings, click on labs and enable canned responses!

Canned Responses tutorial

 

58. Rapportive

Remember how we used BuzzStreams tool to find someone’s email? Rapportive helps you validate that email (or any other email address). When you start composing a new email in Gmail, Rapportive will show their information in the right-hand sidebar. If you’ve got a correct e-mail address, you’ll probably see their profile picture and other information. If it shows nothing, you’ve probably got the wrong email.

Here’s an example:

Rapportive Demo
Hey, it works!

Price: Free

59. Checker Plus

Checker Plus is a gmail extension that makes managing multiple accounts super easy. It also lets you enable desktop notifications for new email, has the ability to read your emails to you (if you’re busy with something else) and has many other features to help you with email.

Price: Free

60. The Email Game

Email is pretty boring and overwhelming, we can all admit that. This gamifies your email and helps you be more efficient. You get points for making decisions and answering your email. You’ve got five seconds to decide whether you want to reply, archive, Boomerang it or whatever. Do it quickly and you get points for it.

Need to answer? You’ve got three minutes to do so.

Need more than three minutes? No problem, you just don’t get any points!

This makes email fun and efficient!

Price: Free

  • I tend to hate list posts like this, but it’s perfect to get an overview of things. Found some hidden gems, i.e. the senderscore thing and followupthen. Also giving optimizely a shot.

  • Thrive Leads sounds amazing and I’d never heard of it before. Giving it a shot and will report back.

  • Amazing list! I didn’t realize how much time I was wasting on email — and how much time I could actually save with these tools! Thank you.

  • I have used a lot of these tools, but, Benchmark Email definitely stands out as the best, and by far the easiest tool for email marketing. Their customer support (24*7) is just the icing on the cake.

  • Thanks for sharing the list. I missed one tool/platform that was not listed here, Mandrill. Even if it is a transactional email service (from MailChimp) it is ver powerful, robust and cost-effective to handle all the email communications (even newsletters).

    If you are using a website powered by WordPress, then you can install plugins such as MyMail and integrate them with Mandrill to handle all your newsletter needs. The cost to handle newsletters will be significantly lower than using any of the other alternatives listed here. Especially considering a large number of subscribers. Actually, we are using this integration in our own website.

  • Savvy suggestions . I was enlightened by the facts , Does anyone know if I could grab a sample a form example to edit ?

  • well…to say-AWESOME-is to say nothing!
    thank you for sharing this with us!
    really great stuff

  • Nice list. But I found my business requirements fully satisfy in Apptivo. So I completely switched on it, this marketing tool investment is affordable, customize based on necessity and ease of use.

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