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Email marketing continues to be the mainstay of most marketing programs across industries. This blog will help you understand the basic and advanced features you should look for in email marketing platforms. It also highlights the top 10 email marketing platforms that are most likely to meet your business needs.
As an email marketer, you need tools to automate your emails and make them interactive. Email marketing platforms simplify targeting the right audience at the right time with the right message. These tools efficiently track key performance metrics and even integrate with other marketing channels for a unified approach.
As such, it doesn’t come as a surprise that email marketing is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing functions. It is estimated to be worth $16.97 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $81.59 billion by 2034. To capitalize on this growth, the number of email marketing platforms available in the market today is also skyrocketing, making it exceptionally difficult to choose the right one.
Let’s look at the basic and advanced features you should consider while choosing the best email marketing platform for your business.
These basic features are must-haves regardless of the size of your business, industry, and target audience.
Your email list is the foundational element of your email marketing strategy. The email platform should help you store your subscribers’ names and email addresses, along with other key details such as date of birth, location, etc., in an organized and streamlined manner. Most tools allow adding these details manually and capture them automatically when a new person signs up.
It should be easy for you to create captivating and visually stunning emails without the need to depend on IT or designers. Email marketing platforms usually come with hundreds of ready-to-use and customizable email templates that help you create engaging emails in no time.
The drag-and-drop builder is an important functionality of email platforms that helps you customize your email to your liking. This includes choosing various elements of the email and where it should be placed, such as the header, CTA button, etc.
This is another basic feature that the email marketing platform should offer. It is important to be able to schedule emails in advance to ensure they reach recipients’ inboxes at the right time for maximum engagement.
Effectively segmenting your contact list is essential even for a nascent email marketing platform. Most email platforms today allow audience segmentation based on factors such as age, gender, income, and location, enabling you to send emails with some degree of personalization.
Most email marketing solutions support basic automation in their free or lower-price plans. The automated workflows are usually set off by specific user actions or triggers. For example, auto-sending welcome emails for new sign-ups.
It is essential to understand how your emails are performing and if any optimization is required. Best email marketing solutions provide insights into key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, etc.
Advanced email marketing platform features include innovative and sophisticated capabilities that help you stay relevant, effective, and competitive.
Personalization is one of the key elements of a successful email campaign.
Studies show that personalized emails increase open rates by 26%. From adding a subscriber’s first name to the subject line or in the email content to making personalized product recommendations and even creating tailored landing and website pages, the email platform should enable you to be as targeted as possible to ensure maximum engagement.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an important feature that helps you understand what’s resonating with your audience and further optimize your email for better conversions. Many email marketing platforms offer this functionality in their premium plans.
Relying on just one marketing channel for customer outreach is not prudent anymore. While email is a major part of the mix, you need to include other channels like SMS and push notifications for a more rounded approach. Omnichannel marketing helps you deliver a seamless experience across channels.
As your email marketing program matures, you’ll want to leverage advanced automation for maximum efficiency and engagement. Most email marketing platforms help you build automated email workflows by defining triggers for email drips and sequences in their premium packages. These workflows can be set up once and run forever. It helps you save a lot of time and effort.
Most tools today provide artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities, including predictive segmentation, content generation, optimal email send times, and more. It can help you significantly amp up your email marketing campaigns.
Here are the top email marketing platforms that you can consider for your business.
CleverTap is a leading all-in-one customer engagement platform that enables you to unify email marketing efforts with other marketing channels, such as push notifications, SMS, and in-app messages, for a holistic and cohesive approach.
Its simple and intuitive user interface helps you maximize email performance with key features such as versatile editor, easy-to-use and fully customizable templates, A/B and multivariate tests, ideal email send time recommendations, segmentation and personalization, high level of automation, and much more.
Let’s take a closer look at the features.
Using the no-code, drag-and-drop editor, you can create visually stunning and engaging emails easily and quickly. With CleverTap’s email platform, you can also use pre-built templates and add relevant content and rich media, including text, images, and buttons, to create captivating emails. Alternatively, you can leverage the HTML editor to create customized emails depending on your skills and business requirements.
CleverTap helps you enrich your static emails with interactive elements, such as forms, carousels, and responsive layouts, for a more engaging experience. Its AMP for Email can help you boost engagement by encouraging recipients to perform actions directly within the email without the need to switch to an app or website.
You can leverage CleverTap’s built-in preview tool to optimize the emails before sending them. It helps you test how your email would render in the recipient’s inbox and refine display features as required.
With CleverTap’s A/B testing feature, you can test different email versions – changing elements such as subject lines, content, and CTAs – to identify what’s resonating the most with the audience and drive better engagement and conversions.
CleverTap’s AI-powered IntelliNode enables you to experiment with different messages, channels, email frequency and sequences, and more – all within a single journey – to create email marketing workflows for optimal engagement. Based on the results, it automatically routes users in real time through the best-performing path that leads to conversion.
You can easily segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and geographical traits for more personalized and tailored email campaigns that can accelerate conversions.
CleverTap enables you to ensure relevance and amplify engagement with its dynamic email content that adapts and aligns with a recipient’s interests and behavior in real time.
You can achieve a high level of email automation by leveraging event-based triggers. These triggers are specific user actions such as app downloads, user signups, etc., that set off email workflows. This helps you ensure that users are engaged throughout their journey with relevant content at every stage.
You can seamlessly integrate all your email marketing efforts with the broader marketing strategy, including SMS, push, and in-app messaging, for a truly omnichannel experience. For example, a user journey can start with a welcome email, followed by an in-app message to explore key features, and then push notifications to remind users to make a purchase.
CleverTap helps you closely track and monitor key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to evaluate the performance of email campaigns. Its advanced analytics unlocks valuable insights into user behavior and helps identify areas for improvement.
Businesses across industries looking for an omnichannel experience
CleverTap pricing plans include:
HubSpot is a leading provider of marketing automation tools and email marketing is one of its major offerings. Its email marketing tool enables you to create visually stunning emails without the need to depend on designers or IT with features such as pre-built, customizable templates, drag-and-drop editing, and more. Importantly, HubSpot’s integrated martech platform allows you to leverage CRM data to personalize emails for every contact. In addition to the email scheduler, it also enables triggering specific follow-up actions based on contact engagement.
Small businesses, SaaS, E-commerce
HubSpot offers the following plans:
Price increases incrementally as the number of contacts increases.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular and widely used email marketing service providers. It’s simple and easy to use and a perfect choice for beginners.
Its drag-and-drop email templates make it easy to create engaging and visually stunning emails in minutes. Its segmentation tool helps you target the right audience with the right message easily and efficiently. Mailchimp helps automate email marketing workflows with pre-built customer journeys and seamless data integration with other apps and web services. Its automation, analytics, and AI-powered capabilities enable you to drive successful email campaigns for maximum customer engagement and conversions.
Small businesses with small email lists
Mailchimp offers the following plans:
Price increases incrementally as the number of contacts increases.
Constant Contact is a comprehensive email marketing platform that goes beyond email to help you drive social media and SMS marketing, create and promote events, and much more.
Key features include an automation builder that automates repeatable tasks and creates personalized customer journeys, and email tracking software that provides valuable insights into key metrics. Its dynamic content block capability helps you ensure that the right message is delivered to the right audience.
Small businesses and nonprofits
Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial. Its paid plans include:
With plans starting at $9 per month, Moosend is one of the most budget-friendly email marketing solutions available today. Its personalized email marketing and automation software comes with customizable templates, automation workflow builder, segmentation, and activity tracking capabilities, among others, that enable you to deliver visually stunning and personalized emails. It also helps you create landing pages in line with your brand guidelines.
A key feature offered by Moosend is dynamic content blocks that auto-populate emails with relevant details for each customer, such as items left in their cart, product recommendations, etc. – without the need to do it manually, saving you a lot of time and effort.
Small and medium enterprises, eCommerce, SaaS, bloggers
Moosend offers a 30-day free trial for two users. Its paid plans include:
Moosend also has credit-based pricing where it offers 1000 credits for $1, and one credit equals one email per recipient.
Kit is a popular email marketing tool for content creators such as YouTubers, authors, bloggers, podcasters, and artists. Key features include an email editor, customizable templates, and audience segmentation based on interest, demographics, behaviors, and other factors.
Automated subscriber journeys help you automatically deliver the right content to the right people at the right time, streamlining the process of welcoming, nurturing, and selling to your audience. Its drag-and-drop landing page builder and customizable templates simplify building attractive landing pages for driving conversions.
Content creators
Kit offers a 14-day free trial for its Creator and Creator Pro plans. Its plans include:
Price increases incrementally as the number of subscribers increases. Both Creator and Creator Pro plans can accommodate more than 500K subscribers.
ActiveCampaign is a provider of marketing automation and omnichannel marketing tools and solutions. Email marketing is a part of its entire suite of offerings.
Key features include pre-built automation workflows and email sequences or “recipes”, predictive and conditional content, segmentation and personalization, and more. Its email automation journey builder enables you to create new customer journeys and define triggers or user actions that will start the workflow. Furthermore, ActiveCampaign helps you track and record user activity and behaviors on your website and apps to trigger marketing automation at the most appropriate time.
Businesses across industries looking for high-level automation features
ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer any free plan; it offers a 14-day free trial. Paid plans include:
MailerLite is another email marketing platform that goes beyond just email to help you build landing pages, sign-up forms, and even websites. You can quickly get started with crafting engaging emails with its drag-and-drop editor that supports interactive content blocks. MailerLite’s intuitive automation builder helps you create advanced marketing workflows and launch these workflows automatically using trigger actions. It also enables personalizing email content based on subscriber’s interests, geography, behavior, and more. Other features like embedded email surveys, reporting and analytics, sales tracking, and A/B testing help you fine-tune your campaigns.
Small businesses that are getting started with email marketing
MailerLite offers a free plan for 1 user and up to 1,000 subscribers and 12K monthly email sends. The paid plans include:
Klaviyo is a leading marketing automation platform that provides email marketing, SMS marketing, mobile push, and other functionalities that help you seamlessly connect with your customers across channels. Its email marketing offering supports real-time personalization and segmentation, A/B testing, pre-built, customizable templates, advanced reporting capabilities, and more. You can also leverage its pre-build automated workflows or create new and unique workflows for welcome emails, cart reminders, shipping updates, and other emails.
E-commerce
Klaviyo offers a free plan that includes 500 monthly email sends and 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits for 250 contacts. Its paid plan includes:
Price increases incrementally as the number of contacts increases.
Omnisend is an email marketing solution focused primarily on the e-commerce industry. Its simple user interface makes it easy for even inexperienced marketers to get started with email marketing. Its key features include read-to-use, customizable email templates, drag-and-drop email builder for creating campaigns with dynamic content blocks, audience segmentation and targeting, A/B testing, and more. It helps you deliver an omnichannel experience to your customers by combining multiple highly engaging channels, including email, SMS, and push notifications, all on the same platform.
E-commerce
Omnisend offers a free plan for up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends per month. Its paid plans include:
Price increases incrementally as the number of contacts increases.
To have a competitive edge, adopting and implementing a technology-driven email marketing platform is a business imperative. While deciding which tool to go with, focus on finding the “right” fit instead of the “best” fit. Identify the features that are absolutely necessary for achieving your business goals and objectives and those that are good to have.
Remember, email marketing is not just about sending emails but it is a valuable channel that helps you forge a direct relationship with your customers.
