Best Email Marketing Services | 6 Best Marketing Tools

You can send an unlimited number of emails per month with GetResponse, so you won’t need to worry about running out of storage. The smallest contact list size is 0 to 1,000 contacts, and the biggest goes up to 100,000 so there’s plenty of room to grow.

We would’ve liked to see some analytics apps, such as Google Analytics, but on the whole there’s a wide range of integrations to build out your plan, including form builders, live chat, and payment services.

In terms of in-house social integrations, GetResponse is set up to integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. However, it doesn’t have Social In-text blocks, which allow you to insert a social feed directly in your emails – this is a key feature we would’ve liked to see.

It’s worth noting that, while GetResponse does support transactional emails, this is only available on its advanced Max plan – while we can’t provide a price for this custom plan, you can bet it won’t be cheap.

You can easily personalize and schedule your emails, and set up automations based on behavior, date, and events. Automation makes your life easier, and allows you to engage your audience at crucial moments, so this is a great perk.

Automations are somewhat restricted on the cheapest $15 per month plan, though – you can only set up one sales funnel automation unless you upgrade.

When it comes to A/B testing, GetResponse ticks all the boxes bar one – it doesn’t support send time variations. Instead, you can test different content and subject line variations.

Although we wanted to see some analytics apps, there are plenty of built-in reporting tools to keep track of how your campaigns are performing. These tools include:

• Campaign analytics
• Subscriber data
• Platform tracking
• Engagement segmentation

The only thing missing from this list is an email click map, which shows you how your contacts are interacting with your emails. This would be a nice feature to have, but it’s not the end of the world that GetResponse doesn’t include it.

On top of this, GetResponse lets you:

• Send test emails to preview your design
• Create a landing page
• Build surveys
• Create a dedicated domain for landing pages

GetResponse has the best designs of any email marketing platform we tested. Our users were impressed by the choice and quality of the designs:

“The templates provided were really clear, and provide users with a wider variety compared to that of their competitors. These templates are also well populated with relevant campaign features, which was perfect and made the entire process of creating a well designed campaign really stress free.”

There are 220 pre-built templates for you to choose from. This makes creating your emails a lot quicker and easier because you don’t have to start from scratch.

We like how sleek and modern GetResponse’s designs are compared to some other platforms we tested – it means you spend less time trying to change the design and more time working with it to create an attractive email.

There are different templates for different types of emails, to give your design a head start. These categories include:

• Commercial campaign
• Newsletter
• Promotion
• Survey

There are also blank templates in case you want a fresh canvas to design your own unique emails.

Customization is nice and simple, meaning you can easily make the template your own without headaches!

You can include GIFs, build surveys, and add forms – and we especially like the 5,000 free images that GetResponse provides. In fact, it’s the only email marketing service we tested that has a free image library!

Alongside design, ease of use is where GetResponse really shines. If you’re new to email marketing and want an easy-to-use platform, GetResponse is the perfect choice. It was the easiest email marketing software that we tested!

The high quality of the template designs sets you up for a very stress-free building experience, as a lot of the features you need are automatically built-in from the start.

The platform itself is also very beginner-friendly – for example, when you create a campaign the steps and tools are all laid out exactly where you’d expect, making it quick and easy for novices and pros alike. We think this user put it best:

“Overall I really liked using GetResponse. I found the dashboard very easy to use, especially when it came to creating a campaign.”

This is super important – time is precious, especially when you’re running a business, a website, or a side-hustle.

This is where GetResponse’s intuitive dashboard, templates, and tools all come into their own to create a seamless and stress-free experience. No wonder our users gave it the highest “likely to recommend” score!

GetResponse has four plans, all of which allow an unlimited number of email sends:

• Basic: $15/month
• Plus: $49/month
• Professional: $99/month
• Max: Custom pricing

For each plan you can select your list size, and this affects the price. The cheapest prices (shown above) are for the smallest list size of 1,000 contacts. As you increase your list size, the price of each plan also goes up. For example, the Basic plan costs $45 per month for 5,000 contacts.

This gives you total flexibility to tailor your plan to your contact list. If you’re just starting out, we recommend choosing the Basic plan with a list size of 1,000.

The Basic plan has tons to offer new users. For just $15 per month your plan includes:

• Email marketing tools (includes newsletters, A/B testing, and autoresponders)
• Landing pages (includes split tests and custom domains)
• 1 sales funnel
• Web forms
• Surveys
• List builder apps (exit popups, for example)
• Basic automations (welcome and thank you emails, for example)
• Ecommerce tools (includes payment gateway integration and e-product delivery)
• Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads
• Full range of templates
• Tracking and reporting tools

Sure, some key features are missing – you need to upgrade to the Plus plan to unlock abandoned order recovery and the full range of automation tools. But for the price you pay, the Basic plan offers great value for money (especially if you pay annually).

The downside of GetResponse is its help and support.

While GetResponse provides email support and 24/7 live chat support on all its plans, it only provides phone, Slack, and dedicated support on its custom-priced Max plan – we would’ve liked to see phone support available at a much lower price point.

The good news is that GetResponse is so easy to use that you shouldn’t need support to get started, and there’s still live chat and email support available on the cheapest plan.

Content and functionality tools is the area where ActiveCampaign really fell down in our testing – in fact, its 3.4 out of 5 star rating put it in last place for this category!

It performed excellently when we looked into its apps, security, and social media integrations. Its storage raised no cause for concern, with an unlimited number of email sends available per month and plans designed to support up to 100,000 contacts.

Where it stumbled was transactional emails. ActiveCampaign doesn’t support direct email transactions – the only email marketing platform not to provide this feature. If you want to sell directly through your emails, you’re better off with a different platform such as Mailchimp.

ActiveCampaign’s marketing features performed much better than its content and functionality tools.

You can fully personalize your emails for your recipients, which is great for boosting engagement, and it also comes with a full list of automation and segmentation features. This means you can manage your campaigns much more effectively.

Just like GetResponse, however, you can’t perform A/B testing using varied send times – you can only test content and subject line variations.

More serious marketers – those working as part of a business, perhaps – will appreciate the range of analytics tools, and the in-house CRM system feature. This in-house contact database was the best we tested, and includes:

• List and subscriber management
• Contact profiles
• Task tracking
• Task automation
• Lead scoring
• Interaction history

Despite its generally advanced features, ActiveCampaign doesn’t include a survey builder, and custom domains are only available on its most expensive plan.

We’ll be blunt – ActiveCampaign’s email template designs could be better. There’s only 36 in total, and they’re pretty basic. Our users found customization easy and enjoyable, but agreed that the templates were uninspiring and left them with a lot of work to do:

“The templates were either too barebones, where it’d take a lot of work to get them to a professional standard, or they’re on the other side of the spectrum – where they’ve been designed for a very specific purpose and business, where it’ll take a lot of time to customize them to your own needs.”

Because of this, we recommend choosing a blank template and creating your own design, rather than relying on ActiveCampaign’s premade template selection.

We recommend you take some time to learn your way around ActiveCampaign – it’s not the easiest email marketing platform to use, but it’s enjoyable once you get to grips with it. As long as you’re not in a rush to create campaigns quickly, you’ll find ActiveCampaign easy enough to use.

Our users enjoyed its clean, easy interface, but sometimes found the labels confusing and agreed that the more advanced parts of ActiveCampaign made it a better fit for more experienced marketers rather than beginners.

ActiveCampaign is the best value email marketing software we tested. Its cheapest plan only costs $9 per month when you pay annually, making it the cheapest option in this list. Every single one of its price plans let you send an unlimited number of emails per month.

Here’s a quick look at ActiveCampaigns’ four price plans:

• Lite: $15/month (or $9/month, billed annually)
• Plus: $70/month (or $49/month, billed annually)
• Professional: $159/month (or $129/month, billed annually)
• Enterprise: $279/month (or $229/month, billed annually)

These prices reflect a 500 contact list – the more contacts you have, the most expensive your plan will be.

You get a huge number of features on the cheapest $9 per month plan, including unlimited email sends. You’d need to upgrade to remove watermarks from forms and unlock landing pages.

Live chat and email support are available on all plans. There’s also a knowledge center and community forum to look to if you have more generic questions.

Phone support is only available on the most expensive Enterprise plan, which is a shame.

Consultations, custom email designs, and one-on-one training are also available from the Plus plan and up.

Mailchimp received the highest score for its content and functionality tools, so if it’s powerful features you’re after look no further.

One thing that really stood out to us was Mailchimp’s awesome transactional email feature. You get specific email templates, analytics, and order notifications. Mailchimp outperforms every other email marketing service in this list – if you need to support an ecommerce business, Mailchimp is your go to choice.

This transactional feature comes as an add-on to your Mailchimp plan in the form of “blocks” – one block costs $20 and is worth 25,000 emails.

Mailchimp has more website integrations than any other email marketing platform we tested, including big names such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. This is perfect if you’re running an ecommerce website and need a seamless integration between your business and your email marketing.

Seamless, easy integration is also a key feature of Mailchimp’s social media features. You can create social media posts within the Mailchimp dashboard and send them directly to the relevant social platform. Consistency is key when promoting a brand online, and Mailchimp gives you the tools to easily align all aspects of your branding.

One area we did have to mark Mailchimp down was its storage limits. It has the lowest monthly email send limit and its free plan especially comes with restrictive contact list limits. It’s fairly clear that Mailchimp wants to encourage upgrades where possible.

Mailchimp also received the highest score for its marketing tools, firmly securing its place as the best email marketing service for features.

Unlike a lot of other platforms we tested, Mailchimp offers A/B testing for send time variations as well as content and subject line variations, setting it apart from the crowd.

Another standout feature is its awesome analytics tools. It even provides an email click map, which shows you where users are interacting with your emails – this sort of data is invaluable for taking emails from good to great.

Mailchimp’s contact database tools are solid. Although it’s not quite as good as ActiveCampaign, it does come with contact profiles and interaction history features built in.

Top all that off with a survey builder, landing page creation, and a full range of automation and scheduling tools, and it’s easy to see why Mailchimp is so popular!

Mailchimp is pretty middle of the road when it comes to design. There are 89 premade designs to choose from – they’re nice enough, and our users generally enjoyed customizing their emails. They especially liked the in-house support that Mailchimp provided:

“Mailchimp’s stand out features would be its design emphasis and content support. It provides examples of what type of content you should be composing in set sections, which is really helpful for both a novice email composer and content writer.”

However, we also received feedback that our users found the templates restrictive at times, and that the editor could be both overwhelming and disjointed. Because of this, we recommend Mailchimp to those wanting to stick closely to a design (or upload their own custom one) rather than those after total creative freedom.

Mailchimp has a sleek, attractive interface. It autosaves every 20 seconds, and supports you while you build your campaigns from start to finish. However, it’s not quite as beginner-friendly as it sounds.

The consistent feedback from our research participants was: it’s overwhelming. You need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with this platform to get the most out of it. If you take your time and don’t rush, you’ll find it much easier to use than if you jump in feet first.

To Mailchimp’s credit, it does try to make your life easier with continuous support, hints, and user-friendly dashboard. Initial tasks are very easy, but as you delve deeper into its features you may need to turn to Mailchimp’s help resources to get the most out of its tools.

Value for money is where Mailchimp struggled the most in our testing – it’s the worst value email marketing service on this list.

Here’s a quick look at Mailchimp’s four price plans (for a contact list of 500):

• Free plan: $0/month
• Essentials: $9.99/month
• Standard: $14.99/month
• Premium: $299/month

The reason Mailchimp scored poorly for value for money is that its price plans are pretty restrictive. Features that are available on other platforms’ cheap plans are reserved for much more expensive plans on Mailchimp.

For example, you don’t get automations or A/B testing unless you upgrade to a paid plan. You don’t get social scheduling or customer journey builder unless you choose the Standard plan.

Contact limits are also more limited with Mailchimp, and if you exceed your limits you’ll receive overage charges.

Mailchimp may not be the easiest email marketing service out there, but it makes up for this by having the best help and support that we’ve tested.

Mailchimp goes the extra mile to support you while you create your campaigns, providing useful prompts along the way. This was a huge bonus for our users who tested out Mailchimp:

“The support element of Mailchimp is a real winner. It’s like having a mentor guiding you through your campaign, providing you with relevant nudges as and when you need them regarding areas you’ve missed or where you could improve.”

For example, Mailchimp will tell you if you’ve left any demo copy in your email template and stop you moving onto the next stage until you’ve removed it. This is a nice touch that ensures busy marketers avoid any embarrassing “sample text goes here” errors in their emails.

MailerLite’s features are superb – in our research, it came second only to Mailchimp in both feature categories. First up, MailerLite lets you send an unlimited number of emails until your contact list hits 50,000 – even on its free plan!

We especially liked the extensive social sharing features that come built into MailerLite’s platform. In our interviews with businesses, they quoted omnichannel capabilities such as social media integration as being super important in order to streamline all their communications.

MailerLite supports integrations with more social media platforms than any other email marketing tool we tested. Its integrations include Spotify, Snapchat, and Strava alongside the usual names such as Facebook.

MailerLite is also the only platform to support a social intext block, meaning you can add a Facebook post or event directly into your email.

If you want to send transactional emails, MailerLite provides everything you could need for $25 per month, including order notifications, automed customer emails, and key analytics.

MailerLite was right behind Mailchimp in terms of its marketing features. Personalization and scheduling are easy, although you need a Zapier integration to unlock calendar management for your campaigns.

Technically MailerLite scored full marks for its automations because of its wide range of automation features. However, it’s worth noting that our users found MailerLite’s automations pretty daunting for beginners, and restricted when it came to ecommerce triggers:

“On the whole I was less impressed with the automation service and the triggers MailerLite has supported, specifically those when it comes to website interaction.”

If you run an ecommerce site, we recommend Mailchimp instead.

MailerLite once again claims second place, this time just losing to GetResponse in the design round. Our users enjoyed MailerLite’s block-based email editor, describing it as intuitive and easy to use:

“One feature I really liked with MailerLite were the blocks on the email editor, so every part of the email was broken down; it just made creating a campaign a much more straightforward process.”

Despite this glowing review, there are a few issues, such as the fact your template selection is severely limited on the free plan. For example, you don’t get access to any newsletter templates on the free plan, which seems a huge drawback for most email marketers.

Our users were clear that they enjoyed MailerLite’s block-based, intuitive editor. However, that wasn’t enough to raise its overall ease of use score – at 3.8 out of 5 stars, MailerLite is the most difficult to use platform on this list.

Why isn’t MailerLite more beginner-friendly? Well, a big issue lies in its dashboard – our users found the layout confusing and tedious, with a lot of clicking back and forth trying to complete simple tasks.

Automation was described as “daunting” and “restricted” by our users, and MailerLite’s lengthy sign up process was openly criticized:

“The signup process left a sour taste in my mouth. You’re required to complete around 15 mandatory questions about you and your business, which feels invasive…”

MailerLite uses the information gathered during signup to autofill your information in campaigns – providing a personalized footer in your emails, for example – but this is not transparent from the start.

MailerLite isn’t the sort of platform you can jump straight into and begin sending campaigns instantly – its slow-going signup process rather sets the tone, and you’ll need time and patience to get the most out of its email marketing tools.

MailerLite has a free plan, which is a great way to get started. However, it’s restrictive – you don’t get access to newsletter templates, HTML editing, or live chat support, for example.

Price is based on the number of subscribers you have:

• 1 – 1,000: $10/month
• 1,001 – 2,500: $15/month
• 2,501 – 5,000: $30/month
• 5,001 – 10,000: $50/month

The maximum number of subscribers listed is 600,000 which costs $1,915 per month. For more subscribers than that, you’ll need a custom quote. You can send an unlimited number of emails per month on every plan.

MailerLite doesn’t provide phone support, but does offer email, live chat, video tutorials, and a knowledge center. It’s worth noting that its live chat support isn’t available on the free plan.

Constant Contact isn’t the most powerful email marketing software around. Its features cover the basics pretty well, but when you get into the finer details you’ll find some tools missing or lacking depth.

For example, you’ll find no payment service apps in its app market, making it an unwise choice for ecommerce sites. Every other email marketing platform we tested had at least two payment apps available, such as Stripe and PayPal.

On the upside, Constant Contact does provide transactional emails, and integrates with website platforms BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify.

We particularly liked the fact you can create social posts within your Constant Contact dashboard and post them to the relevant social media sites, effectively aligning your brand across multiple platforms.

If you’re after a great range of marketing tools – if you’re growing your business or are planning an ambitious email marketing strategy – then Constant Contact isn’t the right choice for you.

While other platforms breezed through our personalization features checklist, Constant Contact is much more reliant on third party apps. Only Shopify users who have integrated their store can access post purchase emails and abandoned cart emails – features which other platforms include automatically.

There’s no user segmentation, and no behavior-based automation either, and the only A/B testing available is subject line variations. While you get great analytics tools such as an email click map, Constant Contact’s features simply aren’t advanced enough to support a large or long-term marketing campaign.

Constant Contact provides the most amount of templates to choose from – over 200 in fact!

However, they’re not very attractive – our users described them as “outdated” and “low-quality” in their appearance. Because of this, we highly recommend choosing a blank template and building your own email design from scratch.

That said, Constant Contact’s sheer number of designs is impressive, and supports a wide range of different email types, including commercial, newsletter, and promotional campaigns – hence its very respectable 4.2 star rating.

Constant Contact is a straightforward email marketing tool. Beginners shouldn’t struggle to find their way around, as our users found the navigation easy to follow and generally didn’t struggle to complete tasks – they found uploading contacts especially easy.

However, our users simply didn’t enjoy using Constant Contact:

“Templates were outdated and parts of the email creation process seemed illogical and confusing, as well as some features being quite restrictive (e.g. automation, email scheduling).”

The interface was described by multiple users as outdated, and key features such as automation as confusing and lacking power.

Our favorite feature is Constant Contact’s “check for errors” tool, which checks your content for mistakes such as missing links and alerts you. This is an awesome feature to help marketers send the best quality emails possible.

Constant Contact is a basic, straightforward email marketing platform, and if that’s all you need then you can get great value for money.

You get a one-month free trial to test out its features, although you will need to enter your card details to start your trial, which can be off-putting. After that there’s two price plans to choose from:

• Email: $20/month
• Email Plus: $45/month

These prices reflect a contact list of 0 to 500 subscribers – as always, the price is determined by the number of contacts you have. The maximum number of contacts you can have is 50,000, which is a pretty small number compared to the other platforms we tested.

That said, if you have a small contact list that you need to send occasional emails to then this is a platform made with your needs in mind.

Before signing up, bear in mind that the cheapest plan does not provide access to surveys or advanced ecommerce integrations – integrating your Shopify store, for example.

You get access to Constant Contact’s chat support and phone support no matter which plan you choose. It also has learning resources in its help center. The only support channel not provided is email support.

Sendinblue’s features are well designed to support growing businesses. What really caught our attention during testing was its great transactional emails, which include automated emails to notify customers of order confirmation, shipping notifications, and cancellation confirmation.

You can integrate with a number of websites, including Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, and Prestashop – these integrations are perfect if you’re running your business website on one of these platforms.

You’ll find a great range of A/B testing options – you can test different send times, content changes, and subject lines to see which is most effective. There are also no automation limits on the cheapest plan – you can set up behavior-based and date-based automations as well as event trigger emails.

Sendinblue’s organized contact database is a real game-changer for business owners who are short on time. Its built-in CRM functionality incorporates strong customer analytics to help you grow engagement.

Sendinblue’s designs let it down. They’re clunky and outdated, and only provide promotion and newsletter templates. There are around 60 templates to choose from, and while it’s easy to customize your design, it may not be enough to create something truly on-brand:

“It was really easy to make an email, but I don’t love the email that I made. I don’t think it looks amazing.”

If you’re after beautiful email designs, GetResponse is a much better choice.

The good news is that Sendinblue is nice and easy to use. You don’t need to spend time learning your way around like you do with other platforms such as ActiveCampaign. If you need something quick and stress-free to start sending out campaigns with, you’ll enjoy Sendinblue.

It’s not perfect – our users ran into trouble with Sendinblue’s clunky interface – but it shouldn’t cause any major headaches either.

One thing we want to highlight is how slow Sendinblue’s servers are. This can cause frustration no matter how easy to use the rest of the platform is, as one user commented:

“It was nice and user friendly, I liked how it led me through seamlessly but became frustrated with the slowness of the servers.”

Sendinblue has a free plan and three paid plans:

• Free: $0/month – unlimited contacts, up to 300 emails per day
• Lite:$25/month
• Premium:$65/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Every plan supports an unlimited number of contacts, including the free plan. The free plan has a 300 email per day limit, while the paid plans vary in price depending on how many emails you want to send per month.

Sendinblue provides email support alongside a forum and help center, but doesn’t provide any phone or live chat support.