Marcu Taylor's Blog

ActiveCampaign Review: 8 Pros & Cons in 2023

I first used ActiveCampaign, a Chicago-based marketing automation tool, back in 2012 when they quietly pioneered a radical rethink of how to send emails.

Ironically, with little marketing, ActiveCampaign’s relentless focus on building a great product led them to where they are today – serving 180,000 customers.

Across our portfolio of ventures, we’ve captured data on the experiences of ~2,000 customers. While the majority of ActiveCampaign reviews are glowing, I’ll also touch on why people leave ActiveCampaign and who ActiveCampaign is and isn’t suitable for in this review.

If you’re considering ActiveCampaign, this review has one goal: To help you make a decision whether it’s right for you based on real user experiences.

As a side-benefit, you’ll also fast-track your ActiveCampaign knowledge as I’ll be walking through features, example workflows, and some of the lesser-known ways to save money with them. Let’s dive in.

Review Summary

The reason ActiveCampaign makes most marketing team’s shortlist is down to its marketing automation offering, which is second-to-none.

If you’re looking to save time building automated email and SMS workflows, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an easier-to-use and more powerful tool out there. ActiveCampaign has its own CRM, enabling you to trigger emails based on where a deal is in your pipeline, setup appointments, tailor product recommendations and much more based on a deal or contact’s behaviour. I’ll unpack this in more detail later in the review.

ActiveCampaign also get the basics right. Everything from deliverability, compliance, integrations, security, email testing, to user support is industry-leading. Again, we’ll cover these in detail later.

But this does come at a cost. ActiveCampaign is slightly more expensive than the simpler email marketing tools. ActiveCampaign may also be too powerful for your needs. If you’re just looking to send email newsletters to your audience, there are more affordable options out there.

With that said, let’s take a closer look at ActiveCampaign’s platform.

Plans & Pricing

ActiveCampaign recently introduced bundles, allowing you to buy the sales and marketing features independently – or together as a bundle at a discount.

In addition, ActiveCampaign also has four tiers – you can work out which tier is best using this side-by-side comparison, but as a general overview:

Lite Plan – A limit of one user and includes features for unlimited email marketing and marketing automation. This plan starts at $29/month.Plus Plan – A limit of 3 users, and includes CRM, landing pages, eCommerce integrations and more advanced automation and reporting features. This plan starts at $49/month.Professional Plan – A limit of 5 users and includes machine learning optimization features (we’ll review these later in the article), a Salesforce integration, attribution reporting and other advanced features. This plan starts at $149/monthEnterprise Plan – A limit of 10 users and features enterprise-grade security and compliance features like SSO, HIPAA support, custom mail servers and more. This plan is priced on a customized basis. 

The best way to find out how much you’ll pay is using this calculator, but we’ve also broken down the pricing below for different list sizes for just the marketing automation features.

LitePlusProfessional1,000 contacts$29$49$149 2,500 contacts$49$99$1495,000 contacts$79$149$209 10,000 contacts$139$229$339 25,000 contacts$229$379$54950,000 contacts$339CustomCustom75,000 contacts$449CustomCustom

If you were looking to buy a bundle that also included the sales CRM, the following pricing would apply.

PlusProfessional2,500 contacts$92.83$385.585,000 contacts$185.58$445.58 10,000 contacts$266.42$575.17 25,000 contacts$416$784.8350,000 contacts$596$1,044.8375,000 contactsCustomCustom

ActiveCampaign’s pricing isn’t the cheapest for marketing automation, but given the range of features offered the pricing is fair and reasonable – especially when compared against similarly advanced tools.

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As part of our annual email marketing software research we survey thousands of email marketing software users every year. The pros and cons below summarise the five most commonly highlighted pros and three cons based on 2,000 ActiveCampaign user responses.

Of those, we also asked 56 former ActiveCampaign users for the main reason why they decided to leave the platform.

ProsPowerful automation – ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is one of the best we’ve used. It’s easy to use, has 135 triggers and actions, as well as 500 pre-built automation recipes to fast-track automating your marketing and sales.High deliverability – ActiveCampaign’s deliverability rates are among the highest in the industry, thanks to a wide range of list warming/cleansing and spam testing features.Flexible integrations – ActiveCampaign offers 900 integrations, including deep native integrations with most CRM and eCommerce platforms like Salesforce and Shopify.Easy to use – As you’ll see in the next section, ActiveCampaign is easy to use and takes very little time or training to use.Great testing features – ActiveCampaign’s split testing and predictive optimization tools mean you can ‘set and forget’ your email marketing to self-optimize over time.Free migration – As part of their 22 customer success guarantees ActiveCampaign offers free migration from any email marketing or CRM software. ConsBasic CRM – ActiveCampaign’s CRM is fine for small sales teams, but it is lacking in functionality for larger or more complex use cases.Complex pricing – Recent changes have made it harder to work out which plan to choose, which I’ll touch on in more detail in the next section.Short free trial – ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial, which is relatively short compared to similar tools.

Detailed Platform Review

We meticulously tested seven areas of ActiveCampaign’s product to help answer this and help you gain a feel for the product.

Marketing AutomationEmail MarketingCRMReportingLanding PagesFormsSupport

Marketing Automation

With 135 triggers and actions to build your automation sequences from, ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is leaps and bounds beyond those offered by competitors like HubSpot and Mailchimp. 

It’s also the easiest automation builder we’ve used. In fact, new staff have been able to use ActiveCampaign in their first week with no training or onboarding needed. This is largely down to the flowchart style automation builder that’s visually self-explanatory. 

If you’re just getting started, ActiveCampaign has over 500 pre-built automation recipes. These are particularly good for eCommerce businesses, as you can integrate your eCommerce platform (e.g. Shopify or WooCommerce) and use automation sequences that run when someone buys a product, abandons a checkout, or uses a discount code.

Triggers and actions

You can trigger an automation to start when almost anything changes to a contact or deal. While not exhaustive, these include when:

A contact submits a form, joins a list, visits a web page, opens/clicks an email, achieves a goal, has a tag added/removed, a field change or lead score updated. A deal in the CRM changes status, deal stage, value, owner or has a task added.A conversion occurs, or a person abandons a cart.A date arrives (useful for birthdays, contract renewals, and holiday promotions).

You can then build out your automation workflows with a combination of conditions and actions. Conditions tend to comprise mostly of “If/Else” rules, waits, and go-to’s, while actions broadly fall into three channels for communicating with your contacts – email, SMS, and site messages (notifications that appear on your website). 

Here’s an example of a SaaS onboarding sequence we built showing each of these steps. This sequence is triggered when a contact subscribes to a list. We then have a condition to wait until the time is 2pm on a weekday (when we have the highest open rates). We then send a series of educational emails on how to use the software.

Split testing

While email split testing is nothing new, few marketing automation tools allow you to split test paths of an automation sequence. ActiveCampaign was among the first to do this, and in my opinion it’s one of the best features in its platform.

This is because you can test hypotheses like “Does sending 10 emails vs. 5 emails, sending the emails over a week vs. a month, or combining SMS and email vs. just email improve your conversion rate?”

This also means that your automated email sequences can improve over time because you can set up unlimited split tests to refine your automation sequences while you focus elsewhere.

By running all of our emails as split tests, we’ve been able to increase the open rates of some of our key email campaigns by up to 300%.

Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign’s email builder is one of the few we’ve used that’s as good for beginners as it is for advanced marketers. It’s drag and drop, auto-saving, and it just works. 

But it’s not simplistic either. You can edit the HTML, insert content blocks that would usually require a developer (e.g. countdown timers, videos and eCommerce products), and split test almost anything you can think of.

One of my favourite things about ActiveCampaign is the ability to optimize your marketing with personalization and split testing.

For example, you can create conditional content to display different content to contacts based on any field (saving you from sending out lots of variations of the same email). For critical emails, you can even create variations of the content and let ActiveCampaign’s predictive content algorithm show the most-likely to convert content to each contact for you. 

When it comes to templates there are four options. You can choose from the 150 pre-designed templates, use a basic template (i.e. a layout with no design), a past campaign, or start from scratch. For those looking to send emails that look personal, you can also choose between plain text and HTML. 

To help you improve deliverability, ActiveCampaign has a handy range of checks for spam filters, email client compatibility and you can preview how your email appears on different devices. 

When it comes to sending emails, one feature I like about ActiveCampaign is that you can segment who your email is sent to based not only on a contact’s list but on any condition – from whether they’ve visited a certain page on your website, to their geography, or based on company information.

The segmentation options will of course depend on what information you collect about your contacts – which brings us onto the next part of ActiveCampaign’s platform.

CRM

Combining your email marketing software and CRM is one of the best decisions you can make when choosing a tool, as your CRM is generally the source of truth when it comes to information about your contacts. 

This provides invaluable opportunities to trigger emails when your leads change statuses, buy products, or take actions on your website. 

This is all achievable with ActiveCampaign’s CRM, which is built around an intuitive deal pipeline.

When you click into any deal on your pipeline you can see the information about that company and the associated contacts. If you’ve installed site tracking, you’ll see every action they’ve taken on your website, as well as a history of interactions made with your email campaigns and automation sequences.

Contacts (i.e. people) have a similar view, though with more emphasis on the specific information you’ve captured about that person. It’s here that you can also see which lists, automations, and tags are applied to that contact. 

It’s also here where you’ll find lead scoring. This is one of those features that can make or break your entire sales process. When it’s set up correctly, it creates clarity around which leads your people should focus on and how good a job your marketing team is doing at nurturing cold leads into warm leads.

For one of our ventures we use lead scoring to determine whether a lead is cold, marketing qualified, or sales qualified. We also use it to measure the health of existing customers.

Cold lead (has a lead score below 7 points)MQL (has a lead score between 7-14 points) – We apply points when people register for our webinars, visit key pages on our site, and engage with our emails. The purpose of this is to separate engaged leads from unengaged leads.SQL (has a lead score above 14 points) – We use the BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) methodology for this. Once we know all four of these criteria and they’ve above our agreed thresholds, the lead is considered sales qualified.

Setting up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign doesn’t take long and makes it much easier to set clear KPIs for marketing and sales. You can also identify whether the % of leads that you’re converting into marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads is increasing or decreasing over time and more.

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s CRM

While the CRM is great for small teams, our experience with ActiveCampaign’s CRM has been that it tends to get a little bit cumbersome when you have a large number of deals and contacts. Where we’ve tried to collaborate with larger sales teams, they’ve often ended up using Salesforce instead and integrating this with ActiveCampaign to manage the automations in ActiveCampaign. 

On the whole though, this is more of a cautionary tale to set clear guidelines with your team on how to use tags, custom fields and other CRM data, rather than a specific critique of ActiveCampaign’s CRM. 

Reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reports have always been a little too reminiscent of a dull powerpoint presentation for my liking, and there’s a lot of room to improve the data organization and visualization.

With that said, reporting should be judged on whether or not it provides answers to questions, and how actionable the insights are. To be fair to ActiveCampaign, the data is actionable and insightful – thanks to Goals, integrations, and attribution. 

Goals

One action I didn’t cover in the section on marketing automation is goals.

In essence, you can trigger a goal being achieved in ActiveCampaign when a contact does something – whether that’s buying a product, completing an automation sequence, or opening an email. 

This enables the goal and conversion attribution report, which shows who’s achieved the goal, the conversion rate, touchpoints and, my favourite – time-to-completion. This means you can track how long, on average, it takes to get a lead to convert, buy a product, or anything else. This is a great metric to then try and reduce.

One habit I recommend is ensuring every automation sequence you build has a goal. This allows you to see how all of your automation sequences are performing at a glance.

eCommerce revenue reporting

For eCommerce users, ActiveCampaign is able to integrate with your store and work out how much revenue is generated from your campaigns and automation sequences, enabling you to assign a clear ROI to every email campaign and automation.

ActiveCampaign currently offers deep data integrations with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Square.

Campaign reporting

ActiveCampaign also offer all of the standard reports for tracking campaign performance including list growth tracking, open/click through rate tracking, as well as reports to identify when your open rates are highest and how they vary by different mail clients. 

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reporting can be summed up as function over form. You’ll find everything you need to optimize your email marketing, but just don’t expect them to look great. 

Landing Pages

If you’re after a simple landing page builder to webinar, event or simple one-page microsite landing pages, ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder will do the trick. But if your needs are more complex then you’ll likely be better off using dedicated landing page software. 

While the landing page builder itself is easy and intuitive to use, it lacks any kind of advanced functionality for personalizing your pages. I’d say this is a missed opportunity for ActiveCampaign given they have an in-built CRM, but I’m not convinced that ActiveCampaign users are likely using this feature to build dozens of PPC landing pages or run their websites from here (as is sometimes the case with HubSpot users).

Instead, this area of ActiveCampaign is little more than a lightweight page builder for publishing simple landing pages without the need of a developer. 

Forms

Forms play a crucial role in capturing leads to build your list. ActiveCampaign offers four types of forms – inline, floating bars, modals, and floating boxes. 

ActiveCampaign’s form builder is easy to use and offers a variety of ways to share and embed your forms – with the CSS and HTML fully editable to ensure it matches your website. 

One handy feature when designing forms is the ability to load a preview of the website URL the form is going to display on, so that you can match colours and ensure it looks good in situ.

Finally, If you use Zapier, you can also connect your ActiveCampaign forms to your other tools easily to ensure that your contact data gets piped to the right place. 

Customer Support

In ten years as a user, I’ve had to contact ActiveCampaign’s support a total of three times. Each time, someone based from the US has responded within 24 hours – with a solution. 

That is to say, while ActiveCampaign’s support is good – you probably won’t need to use it because they put so much emphasis on prevention and over cure. For example, you get access to:

ActiveCampaign University – a series of videos and guides to get startedFree 1-to-1 strategy sessionsA free migration serviceIn-person events and workshopsAn active community forum, Slack community and Facebook groupA help center with a huge range of how-to guides

But if you do run into an issue, they do have phone, email and live chat support.

Our Verdict

There are few tools that I wholeheartedly recommend – ActiveCampaign is one of them. If you’re still on the fence – they offer a 14-day free trial, which I’d recommend giving a try. If your experience is anything like ours, you won’t be disappointed.

After collecting 2,074 reviews of ActiveCampaign, the average rating was 4.6 out of 5 which firmly places ActiveCampaign in the top 0.1% of email marketing tools by user satisfaction.

Alternatives

When friends and family have asked which email automation platform I’d recommend, there are only three instances where I’ve recommend a different tool to ActiveCampaign:

If you’re an eCommerce business you may want to consider Omnisend, which is dedicated solely to eCommerce email marketing.If you’re a B2B service business with high-value leads (and a decent budget) you may want to consider HubSpot. If you’re a coach, trainer or educator looking to build out sales funnels with a membership site or gated content you may want to consider ClickFunnels.

As mentioned at the start of this review, ActiveCampaign is unique in that it’s easy-to-use, feature-rich and affordable. Most of ActiveCampaign’s competitors make a trade-off in at least one of these areas that make it difficult to whole-heartedly recommend. 

Getting Started

ActiveCampaign have recently removed the credit card barrier allowing you to try their platform free of charge to see whether or not it’s right for you. To do so, you can enter your email address below which will take you drop you straight into the platform after answering a few questions about your business.

If you have any questions about ActiveCampaign that we haven’t covered in this review feel free to drop them in the comments below.

FAQHow much does ActiveCampaign cost?

ActiveCampaign costs $29/month for email and marketing automation if you have a list of 1,000 contacts. This cost increases based on two factors – the size of your list and any additional features that would require upgrading to a higher plan.

What are ActiveCampaign’s main features?

ActiveCampaign’s main features are email, marketing automation, SMS and its CRM. However, what makes ActiveCampaign unique at its price point are the range of advanced features such as split testing, predictive content, and deep integrations with 900 third party tools.

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a sales and marketing automation platform used by 180,000 small businesses that enables them to automate the triggering of emails and SMS messages to their contacts.

What is ActiveCampaign good for?

ActiveCampaign is good for automated email and SMS marketing for small businesses. It is one of the highest-rated platforms among all of the automation software we’ve tested with 78% of users saying they are very satisfied. 

Who is ActiveCampaign best for?

ActiveCampaign is suitable for businesses of all sizes, but it may be particularly well-suited for small to medium-sized businesses that require advanced email marketing features such as split testing, segmentation and automation. It is also a good option for businesses that are looking for a platform that integrates with a CRM system.

Why is ActiveCampaign better than Mailchimp?

It’s difficult to say definitively whether ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp is better, as both platforms have their own strengths and are suitable for different types of businesses. ActiveCampaign offers more advanced features such as customer segmentation and automation, and it also has a CRM system built in. Mailchimp is a more affordable option and is better suited for businesses with basic email marketing needs. It’s important to consider your specific needs and budget when deciding which platform is best for you. You can compare ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp head-to-head here.

Is ActiveCampaign easy to learn?

ActiveCampaign is easy to learn thanks to its intuitive interface and wide range of educational resources. This includes video tutorials, in-person events, and detailed documentation. While ActiveCampaign’s advanced workflows may require some time to master, its platform is generally considered easy to learn.

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The post ActiveCampaign Review: 8 Pros & Cons in 2023 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

13 Tips For Improving Email Deliverability

Email deliverability can make or break your email marketing strategy. You could have the greatest campaigns ever created but they’ll count for nothing if your emails aren’t reaching customers.

In this article, we cover everything you need to know about email deliverability. We discuss the factors that cause ISPs to place your emails in the spam folder or block them entirely. We also explore the reasons email recipients open, read and engage with your emails – or don’t.

To help you maximise email deliverability, we’ve compiled our biggest tips for getting your emails in recipients’ inboxes.

What is email deliverability?

The phrase email deliverability can cause a bit of confusion so let’s take a moment to explain exactly what we’re talking about in this article.

“Email deliverability is the ability of an email message to arrive in the recipient’s main email inbox. Email deliverability is often measured as a percentage of emails accepted by the internet service provider (or ISP for short).”

ActiveCampaign – Email Deliverability

Now, there is a little confusion about the exact definitions of email delivery and email deliverability. So let’s clear up any confusion before we get into the specifics of deliverability:

Email delivery: The percentage of emails that reach intended recipients.Email deliverability: The percentage of emails that reach the intended recipients’ inboxes.

Email delivery measures the percentage of emails that reach intended recipients. This helps you identify technical issues preventing your messages from getting through – eg: hard bounces, ISP blocks, etc.

Email deliverability measures the percentage of emails that reach recipients’ inboxes. So, aside from excluding emails that fail to reach recipients due to hard bounces and other issues, this metric also excludes anything that lands in the spam folder.

Email delivery vs deliverability – why does it matter?

Both metrics are important but email deliverability is more reliable for measuring the potential visibility of emails. Recipients are more likely to see emails that land in their inboxes. In turn, they’re also more likely to engage with emails that make it into their inboxes.

Obviously, you want to know the majority of your emails are making it into inboxes.

Poor deliverability can mean legitimate emails end up in the spam folder.

However, email deliverability also helps you optimise campaigns more effectively. If a lot of your emails land in spam folders or fail to reach recipients altogether, then poor performance is expected. On the other hand, if deliverability is high but open rates, CTRs and other metrics are poor, you can start optimising subject lines, email content, CTAs and other elements.

If deliverability is low, you’ll want to start optimising deliverability rates – and see how this impacts performance first.

Factors that affect email deliverability

All kinds of factors can affect email deliverability – everything from email content to IP reputation and plenty more. Before we talk about specific factors, though, what actually happens when one of your emails fails to reach someone’s inbox?

Generally speaking, one of four things happens when an email doesn’t reach the intended inbox:

Soft bounce: Caused by a temporary issue on the recipient’s end – eg: their inbox is full or their email service is temporarily unavailable.Hard bounce: This happens when the email address provided doesn’t exist.Blocked: The delivery of your email is blocked by an internet service provider (ISP) or email service provider (ESP).Spam folder: Your email reaches the recipient but lands in their spam folder.

Now, let’s discuss the most common causes of these four events.

What causes a soft bounce?

A soft bounce refers to a temporary issue that prevents your email from reaching the recipient. In most cases, this issue occurs on the end of the recipient. For example, their email inbox may be full or their email service provider’s (ESP’s) server could be down.

Standard email accounts only give users so much storage space for incoming emails.

In these instances, you can’t fix technical issues on the receiver’s end. All you can really do is automatically resend these emails at a later date and hope this resolves the issue.

That being said, you don’t want to keep sending emails to recipients if they constantly bounce. This can happen for a variety of reasons – for example, someone’s inbox might be full and they don’t clear space.

So it helps to have a workflow in place that prevents the same email going out after three or four bounces.

What causes a hard bounce?

A hard bounce refers to a permanent issue that prevents your email from reaching the intended email address. The most common cause of this is invalid email addresses being provided. It could be that the email address simply doesn’t exist but people often mistype their email addresses.

This is why it’s so important to verify email addresses before you add new subscribers to email marketing lists.

Another reason your emails could hard bounce is they’ve been blocked by the recipient’s email service provider – commonly referred to as an ISP.

Why are some emails blocked?

Emails can be blocked for a variety of reasons. In most cases, this happens when an ISP considers your email domain or specific emails a potential threat. This means the recipient’s email provider (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) has blocked your email from reaching them.

Why does this happen? Well, it normally means the ISP considers your email to be a potential threat to their customer. To protect their customers, ISPs filter suspected spam emails to their spam folders and block potentially harmful emails altogether.

An ISP could block your emails for many reasons:

Spammy content: Most ISP email blocks target the content of emails themselves – this can include the subject lines, headers and main body of content.Images: Overusing images or using images previously reported as spam can result in ISP email blocks.Blacklists: If the URL of your email address is listed on a blacklist, ISPs will probably block your emails.Spam complaints: ISPs take spam complaints seriously and it only takes a few complaints to potentially end up on a backlist.IP reputation: If you’re sending emails from an IP address with a low reputation (including email marketing tools), ISPs will block your emails.User actions: In some cases, recipients might manually block your emails from reaching them.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of reasons an ISP might block your emails. However, it gives you an idea of how fragile your sender reputation is.

Even if you play by the book, you can potentially end up on a blacklist. Simple mistakes like using the wrong email software or using content similar to previously-reported emails are all it takes.

Why do emails end up in spam folders?

Again, your emails could end up in recipients’ spam folders for a variety of reasons. In fact, all of the reasons listed in the previous section could leave your emails in the spam folder. ISPs essentially look at the same signals and decide whether to direct your emails to the inbox, the spam folder or block them.

That being said, some additional signals can make the difference between inbox, spam and blocks:

Email authentication: If your email isn’t authenticated to protect against spammers, phishers and clones, you’re more likely to land in the spam folder.Recipient spam actions: If a recipient marks one of your emails as spam, future emails are likely to land in the spam folder.Poor engagement: If recipients aren’t opening your emails, ISPs are more likely to flag them as spam.Inactive email accounts: If you’re sending emails to a lot of inactive email accounts, you’re more likely to get flagged as spam.Link shorteners: Using link shorteners like bit.ly is a red flag for spam filters.Attachments: Sending attachments to recipients in your emails is another red flag.Spam trigger words: Using spam trigger words in your subject lines or email content can trigger spam flags.Spam tactics: If you use any obvious spam tactics like incorrect sender “from” info or misleading subject lines.

Again, this isn’t an exhaustive list but it helps illustrate how many factors ISPs consider when flagging emails as spam. If your emails are reaching recipients but landing in their spam folders, the list of factors to potentially optimise is pretty big.

Your sender reputation also affects deliverability

To protect their users, ISPs assign a score to the email domains attempting to send messages to them. This score is widely referred to as your sender reputation. ISPs calculate your sender reputation based on historical campaign performance so it takes time to build a positive score.

Campaign Monitor compares email sender reputations to credit scores:

“Your sender reputation is tied to your email domain and is built up over time. Think of it like a credit history, it’s a record of how well (or poorly) emails sent from your domain have performed. You could have a great sender history, and then just a few bad campaigns could do serious damage to your domain reputation.”

What is Email Sender Reputation? – Campaign Monitor

This is a pretty good comparison. All of the factors we’ve discussed in this article so far can impact your sender reputation. Some signals affect your score more than others – for example, getting flagged as spam multiple times is far more damaging than the occasional soft bounce.

Likewise, hard bounces are more damaging to your sender reputation than soft bounces. However, repeated soft bounces add up so it’s important to take reasonable steps to avoid all factors that negatively affect your sender reputation.

All of the steps we outline in this article will help with this.

The catch-22 of poor email deliverability

Low delivery rates limit the number of subscribers who see and interact with your emails. This has obvious implications for campaign performance but the problems don’t end here. Poor deliverability also affects your reputation with ISPs. This harms your deliverability rate even further and drags down the overall performance of your email marketing strategy.

The lower your delivery rate drops, the worse campaign performance becomes because people can’t interact with emails they never see. Likewise, as more of your emails land in spam folders, the more signals ISPs receive that future emails should also end up in spam.

Yes, email deliverability is a nasty catch-22 where poor performance leads to even worse performance. Worst of all, it only takes a few negative signals like spam reports to put your campaign in a negative spiral – one that might be difficult to reverse.

This is why it’s so important to achieve – and maintain – a high email deliverability rate.

Moosend‘s periodic table of email deliverability scores is an excellent reminder of the most important factors to consider.

What’s a good email delivery rate?

It’s generally accepted that a good email delivery rate is higher than 95%. However, keep in mind that the delivery rate metric includes emails that land in recipients’ spam folders. This metric is often confused with deliverability, which does not include emails that land in the spam folder.

What’s a good email deliverability rate?

This is harder to say because it depends on so many other factors – namely, how many of your emails land in the spam folder. That being said, anything around 90% or higher is considered a good email deliverability rate.

Depending on where you get your data, the average deliverability rate is somewhere between 83% and 89%.

So anything above 89% has to count as a good deliverability rate and rates above 95% would put you in the top category.

According to Omnisend, the average email bounce rate shouldn’t be higher than 3% (soft and hard combined). This only leaves room for 2% spam to hit a 95% deliverability rate or 7% if you want to reach the 90% benchmark.

This gives you an idea of the numbers to aim for.

How to improve email deliverability

Now that we’ve explained the ins and outs of email deliverability, let’s discuss some of the best tips for improving it. These tips will help you get more of your emails in recipients’ inboxes, avoid the spam folder more effectively and improve your sender reputation with ISPs.

In turn, this gets more eyes on your emails and leads to better all-round performance with your email campaigns.

1. Track email delivery & deliverability

You can’t optimise what you’re not measuring. So, the first thing you need is a system for tracking email delivery and deliverability rates.

I know the naming of these two metrics is a little confusing but it’s vital to understand the difference, especially for keeping your emails out of spam folders.

A quick reminder:

Email delivery: The percentage of emails that reach intended recipients.Email deliverability: The percentage of emails that reach the intended recipients’ inboxes (not the dreaded spam folder).

Email delivery rates are important for optimising against email bounces but they don’t help you optimise against the spam folder. Deliverability rates help you optimise against the spam folder so you need a reporting system that allows you to calculate both.

Deliverability rate isn’t an official metric that all tracking tools monitor – so you might need to calculate this yourself. As long as you’ve got the right data, this is easy enough.

Deliverability rate = Emails reaching inboxes / Total emails sent x 100

To calculate the number of emails reaching inboxes, you subtract bounce rates and spam rates from the total number of emails sent. So, if your email tracking tool doesn’t include a deliverability rate metric, make sure it reports bounces and spam rates.

Plenty of email reporting tools provide this data. Google Postmaster Tools is a good place to start, if you’re using Gmail for business (Workspace). It reports on a wide range of performance metrics, including bounce rates and spam rates.

It also calculates reputational insights (IP reputation and domain reputation) and reports delivery errors, encryption, authentication and plenty more.

To ensure you have access to the data you need, check whether your ISP provides postmaster tools. You can also look into third-party email reporting systems that integrate with your email service provider.

2. Choose quality email marketing software

Email marketing software adds another variable to your deliverability prospects. The deliverability of these platforms can vary quite a lot so this is something you’ll want to test when trying out new tools. It’s difficult to get objective deliverability scores for email marketing tools because your own deliverability has a far bigger impact.

Choosing the right tool can make a difference, though.

These results from EmailToolTester.com show how the company’s deliverability varied across major email marketing systems in its three previous tests.

Email marketing toolAvg. deliverability rateMailerLite95.2%CleverReach93.6%ActiveCampaign91.7%Constant Contact90.4%ConvertKit88.2Mailchimp87.9Moosend83.9%Mailjet82.7%GetResponse82.1%SendinBlue81.07%AWeber78.7Omnisend75.2%Drip73.7%HubSpot72.1%Benchmark43.4%

Don’t read too much into these figures. As I say, your performance is the biggest factor in deliverability rates. Just use this as an example of how deliverability rates can vary across different providers.

We’ve had excellent deliverability with ActiveCampaign and tools like MailerLite, which aligns with the numbers above. However, we’ve also had better numbers with tools like SendinBlue and worse deliverability with Constant Contact – so results can vary in either direction.

Also, you’ll find deliverability rates change one month to the next and, again, your performance is always the biggest influence.

3. Start small with new IPs

The IP address you’re using to send emails has a big impact on your sender reputation. Depending on which email marketing service provider you’re using and how many emails you send, you’ll have one of two types of IP addresses:

Dedicated IP: You’re assigned your own, unique IP address that nobody else can use.Shared IP: You’re assigned a shared IP address used by multiple companies.

The downside with a shared IP is the actions of other companies affect your sender reputation. Reputations are more likely to change with a shared IP, too, which affects everyone using them.

That being said, with a dedicated IP address, you’re starting with no reputational history. You have to build your reputation from scratch and this takes time. ISPs often place send limitations on new IP addresses so you’ll need to “warm” them up by starting small.

This article from Postmark does an excellent job of explaining the difference between dedicated and shared IP addresses for email marketing.

Keep in mind that you may end up with a new IP address when you switch email marketing providers.

If you’ve got more than 50,000 subscribers and a new IP address, you’ll definitely want to warm it up. Start by sending out small batches of emails and slowly build up as your reputation improves. Keep a close eye on bounce rates, especially instances where your emails are being blocked by ISPs.

Also, try to send emails to your most active recipients when you’re warming up an IP address. You want as many recipients as possible to open, read and interact with your emails during this time.

You definitely don’t want your emails getting flagged as spam while warming up an IP. So make sure you’re sending relevant campaigns to engaged recipients who know what they’re receiving – and why.

For more information on this, Omnisend has an excellent guide to warming new IP addresses.

4. Manage your sender reputation

Now that you’ve got all the elements in place to build a positive sender reputation, it’s time to implement a management strategy. It only takes a few spam reports to undo all of your hard work so you want a robust system in place for building, managing and protecting your sender reputation.

Here are some key steps to consider:

Quick tips for managing sender reputationsUse the right analytics tools: Use tools like Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS or Sender Score to monitor your sender reputation.Track email engagement: Track open rates, CTRs and other email engagement metrics that ISPs consider in your sender score.Monitor deliverability: Low deliverability can limit email engagement, which impacts your reputation.Build slowly: Warm up new IP addresses and gradually increase the volume of emails you send – sudden increases in send volumes are a red flag.Avoid cold emailing: Sending cold emails reduces engagement, increases spam reports and tanks your reputation.Don’t buy email lists: Avoid buying email lists – they tank relevance, engagement and all the good stuff while increasing spam reports and other reputation killers (they also violate privacy regulations like GDPR).Respond quickly: Take action on negative changes quickly to minimise damage – eg: revise your campaigns, segmented lists, personalisation, etc. if you get any spam complaints.Address bounces: Find out why emails are bouncing (hard and soft) and take measures to prevent high bounce rates.Manage your lists: Remove inactive recipients from your list to keep engagement high.Make it easy to unsubscribe: Make sure people can unsubscribe because stronger actions (spam complaints, hard blocks, etc.) will hurt you even more.Maximise relevance: Allow subscriptions but maximise relevance to keep subscription rates as low as possible.Switch tools the right way: If you’re switching email marketing software systems, make sure you understand the potential implications (eg: new IP addresses) and manage your sender reputation accordingly.Managing sender reputation risks

If you’ve got a strong email reputation, you’ll get away with a certain amount of cold emailing until negative signals seriously damage your reputation. A lot of companies still engage in this and you can strike a balance that works.

Staying on the right side of GDPR and other privacy regulations is another question entirely.

5. Earn your own subscribers

A lot of companies buy email marketing lists or use prospecting tools to find relevant email addresses. These strategies can work if you build an email list of highly-relevant contacts and achieve the right level and quality of engagement – no easy feat.

Fail to do this and you’ll get all the wrong signals for deliverability and sender reputation.

You’ll also run into problems if you suddenly start sending mass emails out to large lists. ISPs want to see companies naturally build their email lists over time. This means “earning” every subscription by convincing individuals to sign up to relevant email lists.

Automate your email lead generation strategy to build a natural following faster – without harming your sender reputation.

Relevance means recipients are interested in your email messages. As a result, they’re more likely to open them, read them and interact with your messages – as well as complete your conversion goals. They’re also less likely to unsubscribe or report your emails as spam. So earning your subscribers is one of the most important things you can do for deliverability and the overall performance of your strategy.

To maximise email subscriptions, you’ll need a solid lead generation strategy and we’ve got plenty of articles to help with this:

11 Lead Generation Ideas That’ll Triple Your Email Signups12 Ways to Generate 50% More Leads in One Week24+ Best B2B Lead Generation Strategies10 Lead Generation Trends to Watch35+ Lead Generation Tools To Boost Your Results6. Implement email authentication

Email authentication verifies that your emails are being sent by a legitimate company. This helps ISPs protect their customers from spam, online scams and security threats like phishing. Basically, it makes it harder for scammers to send fraudulent emails under the disguise of your brand.

No authentication system is 100% secure but every step helps protect recipients.

Email authentication helps email deliverability, too. This is one of the most important signals to ISPs that you’re a legitimate sender, sending legitimate emails.

The two most common types of email authentication are:

SPF: The Sender Policy Framework, an authentication protocol that allows you to specify the servers you’re using to send emails – ie: anything sent from another server isn’t really you.DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail, a more complex authentication protocol that uses cryptographic keys to authenticate and validate each email you send.

Use both of these authentication protocols to provide maximum protection – not only to recipients, but also to your sender reputation.

If scammers send fake emails on your behalf, they could trick people into any number of scams. If even this doesn’t happen, ISPs may blacklist you in order to protect your customers. This kind of blacklist action is one of the most difficult to overturn and it can bring your email marketing strategy to a standstill.

Some email marketing systems also include another protocol called DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance).

Essentially, DMARC allows you to create a policy telling ISPs what to do in any instance where an email fails SPF or DKIM checks. While SPF and DKIM are designed to enhance deliverability, DMARC is more suitable in cases where scammers are already spoofing your domain.

Take a look at this ActiveCampaign Help Center page for more info on SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication.

7. Optimise for email engagement

Email engagement is one of the most important signals for sender reputation – and a big influence on deliverability. ISPs want to see recipients open, read and interact with your emails as this is the strongest indication that you’re sending relevant, valuable messages.

Equally as important, email engagement is the first hurdle in terms of getting your message to people and convincing them to take action. Your campaigns will fall flat if recipients aren’t engaging with your email, in the first place.

To measure engagement, you have to track several metrics, including:

Open rate: The percentage of recipients opening your emails.Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click on links in your email.Conversion rate: The percentage of recipients who complete conversion goals after clicking through – eg: purchase.Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from your email list.Spam reports: The number of recipients who report an email as spam.

Now, let’s take a look at some quick tips for optimising email engagement.

Quick tips for improving email engagementSubject lines: Optimise your subject lines to increase your open rates and communicate value.Preview text: Place accurate, compelling information in your preview text to encourage more opens.Mobile-friendly: Make sure your emails are optimised for mobile experiences – as well as any pages users will click through to.Email copy: Optimise your email copy to capture attention, keep people reading and inspire action.Images: Use compelling images that add to the message of your email copy and increase incentive.CTAs: Test and optimise your CTAs to maximise clicks through and conversions on landing pages.Segment lists: Create and revise segmented lists for specific interests so every message is relevant and interesting to recipients.Personalisation: Personalise your emails to increase the relevance of every message and build long-term trust with recipients.Avoid using “no-reply” sender addresses: Don’t add engagement barriers between your emails and recipients – allow people to reply and welcome their responses.A/B testing: Run tests and analyse engagement to find out what works and what doesn’t.Pause what doesn’t work: Pause email campaigns with poor engagement and prioritise them in your optimisation efforts.Replicate what does work: Learn from successes and replicate engagement tactics across your email marketing strategy.

It all comes down to how well your email campaigns spark interest in your audiences. The more relevant your messaging is, the more interest recipients should inherently have in them. So, instead of sending generic emails out to everyone, you want to create highly relevant email lists with segmented audiences.

From here, you can craft messages that speak to audiences on a deeper level – messages they want to engage with.

8. Segment your email lists

Email segmentation spreads recipients across multiple lists, based on their interests and behaviours. For example, customers who show interest in specific products might be placed on one list while others with certain purchase histories are placed on another.

This boosts engagement, which improves deliverability, while greater relevance should also increase conversion rates:

14.3% increase in email open rates101% increase in click-through rates760% increase in email-driven revenueSources: HubSpot and Campaign Monitor

Practically speaking, segmentation might place customers who visit the same product page repeatedly on a list for that specific product. Meanwhile, customers that haven’t completed a purchase in a while are placed on a re-engagement list to tempt them back.

By segmenting your email lists, you can align your marketing goals with audience interests. So, instead of sending generic promotional messages to everyone, you can drive incentive with high-impact campaigns.

Here are some quick ideas for data points you can use to create segmented lists:

AgeGenderLocationPage visitsProduct viewsItems added to cartPurchase historyPurchase frequencyAvg. purchase valueCustomer lifetime valueContent engagement (topics, products, problems, etc.)Account preferences

For example, you might create an email list for customers who buy from you most frequently. Better yet, you can break this cohort down into multiple segments, based on the type of products they buy, similar products they’ve shown interest in and how much they typically spend.

Now, you’re in a position to send messages with relevant product recommendations they’ve already got an interest in. Better yet, you can tempt them with products within their usual price range and tailor special deals to their interests. And, to maximise impact, you can use purchase frequency data to send these emails out when customers are most likely to make the next purchase.

For more information, take a look at our guide to using marketing segmentation.

9. Personalise your email campaigns

Email personalisation has progressed a lot over the years. We’re long past the days of simply including recipients’ names with {$variables}, thanks to tools like AI product recommendations. Now, you can use all of your customer data to personalise your messages in meaningful ways.

Many email marketing tools like Zoho include built-in features for AI product recommendations.

The key is to increase incentive and add value with your personalisation strategy. Too much personalisation can creep people out; effective personalisation is subtle enough that people don’t even notice.

For example, a software company might send out automatic support emails for users having trouble with specific features in their products. By using session data, they could send helpful content to users for features they’re not using as often as they should.

You don’t have to say “Hey [name], we can see you’ve only used this feature X times this month”. That’s stalker-level personalisation. All you need to do is create an email template that recommends support documentation and dynamically insert the most relevant resources.

You can even mix this in with non-personalised recommendations by including a “popular resources” section below the fold.

Subtle, valuable, effective personalisation.

10. Keep your mailing list up-to-date

Don’t leave your email marketing lists to gather cobwebs. Over time, people will naturally stop engaging with emails and, eventually, they’ll unsubscribe. Many people will switch email accounts entirely so you’ll get zero engagement by sending them messages. All of this adds negative engagement signals, harms deliverability and increases the risk of getting flagged as spam.

The solution? Keep your email marketing list up-to-date by removing inactive subscribers.

Keep a keen eye on engagement data and automatically remove subscribers who stop interacting. This way, you’re taking action before users unsubscribe or low engagement hurts your sender reputation.

You don’t remove subscribers as soon as they stop engaging, though. Instead, you can create re-engagement campaigns that automatically trigger for recipients who haven’t interacted for a certain period – say 45 days. Then, you might send out a follow-up round of re-engagement messages with a stronger incentive.

After that, you can automatically remove subscribers who haven’t responded and protect your sender reputation.

11. Be consistent with sender names

Choose your sender name carefully so you can use the same, branded name across accounts. This helps recipients get to know your brand and recognise your emails as welcomed messages in their inboxs.

Using multiple sender names has the opposite effect. It can only confuse recipients and make it harder for them to recognise your emails. Keep this in mind if you’re testing different sender names. Instead of mixing sender names for the same recipient, test variations with different audiences so they all receive consistent names.

12. Avoid spammy phrases

Some words and phrases are more likely to trigger spam filters than others. After decades of email scams, ISPs have built up a library of words and phrases that set the spam alarm bells ringing. It helps to have a good understanding of what ISPs consider spammy phrasing so you can avoid using these terms too often.

Here are some example phrases that might trigger the dreaded spam filters:

Congratulations100% freeBillionEarn extra cashFree moneyPrizeAct nowClick hereDon’t deleteNotspamCheapInvestment

Context matters when it comes to using any of these phrases. If you’re genuinely running a competition and notifying winners by email, using the phrase “congratulations” isn’t necessarily a problem.

If you’ve got a solid sender reputation and recipients have engaged with your previous emails, ISPs will recognise this.

Examples of emails caught by Gmail’s spam filter – credit: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has this excellent article filled with almost 200 spammy phrases to avoid using in your subject lines and email content.

ActiveCampaign’s software also includes a spam check filter that analyses your email copy. It does this automatically on every campaign and automation workflow you run. So the system will flag up anything that looks suspicious so you can take action on anything that fails.

13. Let people unsubscribe

This may sound counterintuitive when unsubscribes harm your sender reputation, but it’s better than the alternative. Data, privacy and marketing regulations require you to provide a simple, easy opt-out process for people to unsubscribe from your email lists.

You don’t necessarily have to let people unsubscribe from every list at the push of a button, though. You can include a clear “unsubscribe” or “update email preferences” link in the footer of your emails. This can direct users to a page where they can opt in or out of the emails they want to receive.

An example of an unsubscribe page created in ActiveCampaign.

Making it unnecessarily difficult for recipients to unsubscribe forces them to take alternative actions. Most likely, they’ll report your emails as spam and this is a far more damaging signal than an unsubscribe.

Also, keep in mind that properly maintaining your email list, as we covered in tip #10, will keep unsubscribes to a minimum.

Key takeaways for email deliverability

To summarise the key points we’ve explored in this article, here’s a quick review of the tips we’ve covered today:

Track email delivery & deliverabilityChoose quality email marketing softwareStart small with new IPsManage your sender reputationEarn your own subscribersImplement email authenticationOptimise for email engagementSegment your email listsPersonalise your email campaignsKeep your mailing list up-to-dateBe consistent with sender namesAvoid spammy phrasesLet people unsubscribe

We’ve included plenty of other tips in this article so, hopefully, this will help you maximise email deliverability. Above all, make sure you’re capturing email subscribers with genuine interest and creating highly-relevant campaigns. This feeds into everything that follows in terms of engagement, sender reputation and protecting yourself from negative signals like unsubscribes and spam reports.

The post 13 Tips For Improving Email Deliverability appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Best Email Marketing Tools for Webflow in 2023

If you’re looking for the best Webflow email marketing tool, this is the article for you. Webflow is a popular website design and development tool but it doesn’t enjoy the same support for integrations as WordPress.

This makes it a little more difficult to find email marketing tools that include native integrations for Webflow. Luckily, we’ve done all the research for you and drawn up a shortlist of the best Webflow email marketing tools so you don’t have to check every provider yourself.

What are the best email marketing tools for Webflow?

Every year, we update our annual review of the best email platforms to check we’re still using the best tools for our needs. We test and analyse over 670 different platforms based on our own experience with each tool and feedback from other customers.

Email is the most important channel in our marketing strategy, which means relatively small gains can have a big impact on revenue. This analysis also means we can point other teams in the right direction for email marketing software, based on their needs.

As a Webflow user, your options are somewhat limited by the tools that provide native integrations with the website builder. Unlike WordPress, Webflow doesn’t have an endless list of plugins and integration options to consider.

In fact, once we remove the products that don’t include Webflow integrations or suitable features, we’re only left with these:

ActiveCampaign – HubSpot – GetResponse – AWeber – Mailchimp – SendPulse – Buttondown –

Before we take a closer look at these Webflow email marketing tools, let’s explain why you need a third-party tool to send emails.

Can I send emails in Webflow without software?

No. Webflow doesn’t include its own email system so you can’t create and send emails from the platform at all. The only thing you can do is connect to an email client like Gmail to receive form submissions from your Webflow site.

This allows you to receive emails from your Webflow forms and reply from your regular email clients.

That’s it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t giving you any of the tools you need to manage an email marketing strategy. Running email campaigns involves a lot of work. You can’t send every email manually so you need a system capable of automating campaigns for you.

You need an email marketing system that offers the following (at least):

Email builder: Visually build emails faster with a drag-and-drop editor.Email templates: Edit email templates instead of building every email from scratch.Email automation: Send emails automatically to run your strategy on autopilot.Reporting: Track the performance of email campaigns.A/B testing: Run experiments to test variations and improve results.Webflow integration: And, of course, you want a system that integrates with Webflow.

Depending on the type of website you’re running, you may also need more specialist features. For example, you might need to send transactional emails or you might want to add a chat widget to your website. You’ll also find the quality and depth of key features like email automation vary greatly between different providers.

This article will help you choose the perfect Webflow email marketing tool for your needs.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is the top-ranking tool in our annual email marketing platform review. We’re not the only ones who like the system, either. It’s also the top-rated marketing automation tool on G2 with an average score of 4.6/5 from 9,799 customer reviews. The platform also has an average score of 4.6/5 on Capterra, albeit from a smaller collection of 2,100 reviews.

Having used ActiveCampaign as our primary email marketing system for more than five years, we know its biggest strengths. To this day, it’s the best marketing automation system we’ve tested, offering powerful features you’ll normally only find on significantly more expensive tools.

The platform allows you to create intricate marketing campaigns on autopilot. You can create advanced automation workflows using multiple triggers, conditional logic and personalisation. The system allows you to deliver relevant messages at every step of the customer journey.

With ActiveCAmpaign’s drag-and-drop automation builder, you can create workflows to automate almost anything. The platform also includes one of the most extensive libraries of automation templates currently available. You can use these to quickly automate common interactions and edit or combine parts from different workflows to suit your own needs.

We’re yet to find another email marketing platform that gives you this much freedom to automate campaigns to almost every customer action imaginable.

With a native Webflow integration, you can connect form submissions on your website to your ActiveCampaign contact list. You can use these submissions to trigger automation workflows like email auto-responders or personalised campaigns, using the data submitted via your forms.

The integration makes it super easy to connect your Webflow website with ActiveCampaign and start making full use of the platform’s email marketing features.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign plans start from $29/month for its Marketing system, which includes the best of its email and marketing automation features. The Lite plan is designed for solopreneurs and micro-businesses but it’s also suitable for any company with one person managing email marketing.

You get the basic set of email marketing and marketing automation features, including access to 850+ automation recipes.

Upgrading to the Plus plan starts at $49/month for up to three users. This plan opens up advanced features like lead scoring and eCommerce-specific features like cart abandonment campaigns. You also get access to ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder, as well as the full version of its web form builder and popup tool.

If you really want to get the most out of ActiveCampaign, the Professional plan incorporates predictive sending and advanced attribution. You can also send messages to users on your website with this plan, optimise for conversions with A/B testing and experiment with split automation.

You can find more information about plans and features on ActiveCampaign’s pricing page.

What we like:Easy to use – ActiveCampaign is easy to learn for new users with minimal training, thanks to excellent usability and UX design. Email automation – You can automate advanced email campaigns across the whole customer journey using conditional logic, predictive content, intelligent insights, customer scores and plenty more features.Reasonable cost – While not the cheapest system we’re looking at today, ActiveCampaign is one the most advanced and significantly better for money than comparable email marketing platforms. Where they could improve:Reporting – ActiveCampaign has improved this aspect of its system over the years but the other tools in this article still do a better job of visualising reports for email campaign performance.Who should use ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is the most powerful email and marketing automation system we’re looking at today. If this is your priority, the choice is pretty simple. ActiveCampaign is also pretty aggressive with its pricing strategy, offering significantly better value for money than similar tools. This includes HubSpot – which we’re looking at next – and even pricier systems like Salesforce.

It’s not the cheapest tool in this article but it’s the only one that offers an enterprise-level system at affordable price points. The fact that you can get access to most of its automation features on two of its cheapest plans shows how much power you get in return for your monthly spend.

You can get started with a free trial of ActiveCampaign using the form below.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the more expensive alternatives to ActiveCampaign we’re talking about. It’s not as capable in terms of marketing automation but it incorporates a broader set of marketing tools. Aside from email marketing, you also get tools for SEO, content marketing, social media and other most common channels.

In this sense, HubSpot wants to be an all-in-one system for managing your entire marketing strategy.

Another key difference is HubSpot offers a free CRM that’s as good as any paid tool you’ll find. With ActiveCampaign, you have to buy into its Sales platform to access its CRM, which means you’re paying for two tools.

That being said, HubSpot is far more expensive than ActiveCampaign so you’re not saving any money here.

Simplicity is key to the HubSpot user experience. The platform incorporates a lot of different tools into one system, which can create usability issues. for the most part, you don’t have to worry about this with HubSpot because it keeps most of these tools simple and easy to use. The end result is a highly-usable platform that’s easy for new users to pick up and learn.

The downside is that some of the tools may lack the depth of features you’ll get from more specialised systems. For example, you’ll get better automation features from ActiveCampaign and better social media marketing features from tools like Hootsuite.

HubSpot is an excellent all-in-one system but it can’t excel at any one thing, as a result.

This is a design choice, not a flaw. HubSpot targets companies that want to manage a complete marketing strategy but might not have the in-house expertise for getting really deep with any particular channel.

Pricing

For most companies, pricing will be the biggest barrier to using HubSpot. Paid plans start from $800/month and you also have to pay a $3,000 onboarding fee. So that’s a $12,600 up-front fee you have to pay to start using HubSpot’s Marketing Hub.

That covers you for up to 2,000 marketing contacts and you’ll have to pay an extra $225/month for every additional 5,000 allowance. So you’ll be paying $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts on the Professional plan.

For 100,000 contacts, you’ll have to upgrade to the Enterprise plan and you’ll be looking at $4,450/month.

To find out how much HubSpot will cost you, you can get a quick estimate on the company’s interactive pricing page.

What we like:Usability – HubSpot’s ecosystem simplifies complex marketing actions, striking an impressive balance between power and usability.Free CRM – HubSpot’s basic CRM is 100% free on all plans – or as a standalone product.Documentation – HubSpot excels at documentation and content designed to help you get the best out of its software – and your email marketing strategy.Where they could improve:Expensive – You pay a big premium for minimal gains (if any) over the other tools in this article.A/B testing – A/B testing is only available on its Pro plan or higher, starting from $800/month.Who should use HubSpot?

If you want an all-in-one system for managing your whole inbound marketing strategy, HubSpot is one of the few options available. Unfortunately, you have to pay a big premium for this convenience and HubSpot can never compete with dedicated tools for each channel: email marketing, SEO, social media, etc.

Marketing specialists will find some aspects of the system too limiting. However, teams with a more general skill set will benefit from having a complete toolkit in one, easy-to-use system.

The platform aims to simplify the challenges of multichannel marketing and it largely succeeds at doing this. If you value having one tool that does a decent job of everything, HubSpot is designed with you in mind. If you’re happy to integrate multiple tools into a more powerful marketing tech stack, then you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.

3. GetResponse

GetResponse puts the focus back on email marketing although it brings some new features into the mix. The system includes its own AI email generator, plus tools for adding landing pages, popups, push notifications and chat widgets to your website. GetResponse also includes its own website builder but this isn’t much of a selling point for Webflow users.

Getting back to email marketing, GetResponse makes it easy to send newsletters to subscribers. You can also create auto-responders and automate email campaigns using triggers. The system also includes a dedicated tool for sending transactional emails through a paid add-on.

GetResponse has put more focus on eCommerce in recent years so this might be less attractive to other business types. However, the company has created a new eCommerce plan for online retailers. This keeps most of the eCommerce-specific features on one plan and saves other businesses paying for features they don’t need.

This is a smart approach that allows the company to specialise in a specific field without alienating other business types.

GetResponse also offers some of the best SMS marketing features we’re looking at today. This is important if you want to incorporate text messaging into the customer journey. The only problem is these features are reserved for its most expensive plan.

We wish GetResponse included some of these features on its cheaper plans, even if usage were restricted.

In terms of marketing automation, GetResponse is capable enough with the basics but it lacks the sophistication of a tool like ActiveCampaign. We also find the drag-and-drop builder tools in GetResponse lack some flexibility. The weirdest thing is that resources like emails and landing pages aren’t mobile optimised as standard – so you have to create mobile versions separately.

Hopefully, this will change soon in an update.

Pricing

GetResponse runs four main plans, starting with its Free plan that covers up to 500 contacts. This plan is designed for sending newsletters to subscribers, allowing you to send up to 2,500 newsletter emails per month.

The Free plan also allows you to create one landing page for capturing email contacts. You’re limited to 1,000 visitors per month on this landing page, though. You also get access to the form and popup builder but, once again, you’re limited to 1,000 views on the Free plan.

Paid plans start from $15.58/month for the Email Marketing plan, which lifts most of the limitations of the free plan. You can send unlimited emails, create unlimited landing pages and you don’t have to worry about monthly visits or view limits.

The $15.58/month starting price covers you for up to 1,000 contacts and pricing gradually increases as your list grows.

To unlock GetResponse’s best marketing automation features, you’ll need to sign up for the Marketing Automation plan. This starts from $48.38/month for up to 1,000 contacts, increasing to $93.48/month for 10,000 contacts and $491.18/month for 100,000 contacts.

You can get the full breakdown of plans, features and fees from GetResponse’s pricing page.

What we like:Multichannel features – Email marketing meets, SMS, chat, push notifications and more.Quality SMS features – Although they’re only available on the most expensive plan, GetResponse really delivers with its SMS features.Easy automation – The system implements basic automation actions as features, making them super easy to implement.Where they could improve:SMS availability – We wish GetResponse offered basic SMS features on its cheaper plans.Builders – The builders lack some flexibility and default mobile optimisation.Focus on eCommerce – GetResponse has shifted focus to eCommerce recently, which doesn’t suit everyone.Who should use GetResponse?

GetResponse is great if you want an affordable multichannel marketing system. It’s not the best standalone email marketing system but it incorporates a lot of features to help you grow your email list: landing pages, popups, forms, chat, etc. So, if you’re a new or small business looking to build your first email list, getResponse could be the ideal place to start.

Established companies looking to make the most of the email list they already have will get better results with something like ActiveCampaign. GetResponse is more like a starter kit that combines lead generation tools for capturing email leads and the core essentials of email marketing into one, affordable system.

4. AWeber

AWeber keeps things simple with its email marketing and marketing automation system. On the email marketing front, you get the core features you would expect from any platform like this. You get a visual email builder, email templates, marketing automation and email reporting tools.

You also get a landing page builder, signup forms and push notifications to help you capture email signups.

Aside from some eCommerce-specific features, that’s pretty much everything AWeber has to offer. The platform is very email-centric, which may appeal to companies that only want email marketing features. This also helps keep things simple without incorporating too many features and tools into the system.

We’d love to say that AWeber’s focus on email marketing makes it one of the most powerful tools for this specific use case. However, AWeber clearly isn’t trying to be the best email marketing system on the market. Instead, it offers an affordable alternative to more comprehensive platforms like ActiveCampaign.

We’ll take a closer look at pricing in the next section but AWeber’s entry prices are probably a bigger selling point than the system as a whole.

AWeber is a capable email marketing system but the platform feels a little dated. This is most evident in the UI design of its platform but it also creeps into resources like its email templates. They’re perfectly usable as a starting point but you’ll have to work a little harder to make them stand out (for the right reasons, anyway).

It’s a similar story with email automation. The automation builder (if you can even call it that) is basic but it’s quick and easy to use. You’re not creating advanced workflows with AWeber but, again, it’s an affordable option for covering the basics like auto-responders.

Strangely, AWeber’s best features are its email reporting and A/B testing tools. You get surprisingly detailed insights into email performance (open rates, clicks, subscribers, location insights, etc.) and split testing features on every paid plan.

Pricing

AWeber’s free plan covers you for up to 500 subscribers, one email list and allows you to run one email automation workflow. You can also create a single landing page on this plan with access to its basic email and landing page templates.

The Lite plan starts from $12.50/month for up to 500 subscribers with prices increasing as your contact list grows. This increases to $62.50/month for 10,000 contacts and $785.50/month for 100,000 contacts.

You’re still limited to one email list on this plan but you can create up to three landing pages and run three email automations.

The Pro plan starts from $20/month and allows you to have unlimited email lists, landing pages and email automations. You also get access to most of the platform’s automation features, templates and its full reporting capabilities.

Again, the $20/month starting price only covers you for up to 500 contacts. You’re looking at $70.00/month for 10,000 contacts and $793.00 for 100,000 contacts – a minimal increase from the Lite plan.

Then, you’ve got the unlimited plan, which starts from $899/month and should be the best-value option if you’ve got over 100,000 subscribers.

What we like:Entry price – AWeber offers affordable entry prices for smaller businesses.Reporting – AWeber’s email reporting system is pretty good – if you’re signed up to the right plan.Support – The company’s 24/7 support team is excellent.Where they could improve:Price creep – AWeber gets expensive if you have over 100,000 contacts.Templates – The email templates are dated so you have to work with them a lot or start from scratch.Segmentation – We can’t find a way to easily exclude audience segments – an important feature.Who should use AWeber?

AWeber is a solid option if you want a straightforward email marketing system for your Webflow website. Affordable entry prices make it a tempting choice but price creep makes the monthly fees harder to justify for larger email lists.

The focus on email marketing makes the system pretty easy to learn and use. However, the company seems to prioritise lower starting prices over email marketing power. It feels like a missed opportunity for AWeber to stand apart as one of the best email marketing tools available without trying to be anything else.

Instead, it’s a capable system that offers good value for money at its lowest price points. That being said, it’s quickly overtaken by more powerful tools like ActiveCampaign that start to offer better value for money.

5. Mailchimp

Mailchimp will be the first email marketing tool that comes to mind for a lot of business owners. The company has certainly done a good job of marketing itself in recent years. Like AWeber, it offers affordable entry prices (including a free plan) but the user experience couldn’t be more different.

While AWeber feels like an old tool trying to keep up with modern email marketing tools, Mailchimp is leading the way. Its email builder is one of the most intuitive tools of its kind and the system, as a whole, is similarly impressive.

Unfortunately, Mailchimp’s email templates don’t quite live up to the quality of its email builder. This is a shame but we hope the company will improve the quality of its templates in future updates.

Mailchimp isn’t as sophisticated as the likes of ActiveCampaign and HubSpot, especially when it comes to automation. However, it’s also designed with newer and smaller businesses in mind. The kind of companies that need a powerful but simple tool for managing email marketing strategies with a relatively small list of contacts.

Mailchimp partially makes up for this with some impressive audience insights and targeting features. The platform includes a built-in CRM, predictive insights and behavioural targeting. Again, the CRM isn’t as powerful as HubSpot’s and the targeting features can’t compete with ActiveCampaign.

However, this can make for a powerful combination if you have a small enough email list to take advantage of Mailchimp’s affordable entry prices.

Pricing

Mailchimp also offers a free plan for up to 500 contacts but you’re limited to sending 1,000 emails per month. You get the basic set of CRM features, targeting tools and email marketing features on this plan.

However, you can’t schedule emails, which is a big issue for email marketing.

The Essentials plan starts from $13/month for up to 500 contacts, increasing to $100/month for 10,000 contacts. For 100,000 contacts, you’ll have to upgrade to the Standard or Premium plan at a minimum of $700/month.

Again, price creep means the affordable entry prices disappear once your contact list exceeds four digits.

For more info on Mailchimp plans and features, take a look at the company’s pricing page.

What we like:Usability – Mailchimp is a simple but intuitive and super-easy platform to use.Entry prices – A free plan and low entry prices make this affordable for small contact lists.Email builder – Mailchimp’s email builder is one of the best we’ve used.Where they could improve:Price creep – Mailchimp prices increase too much for larger list sizes, considering how simple the platform is.Limited automation – Mailchimp can do more than the basics but fails to complete with the likes of ActiveCampaign.Email templates – It’s a shame Mailchimp’s email templates don’t match the quality of its builder.Who should use Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is most suitable for new and small companies that want a simple, ultra-usable email marketing tool for their Webflow website. The affordable entry prices lose their magic as your contact list grows and the monthly fees start to match other tools offering far more for the money.

By the time you have 10,000 or more contacts, you’re probably better off with a system like ActiveCampaign. Mailchimp is still the cheaper option but the gap tightens and ActiveCampaigns offers significantly better features for larger contact lists.

On the other hand, if your business isn’t going to reach 10,000 subscribers any time soon, then Mailchimp makes a stronger case for itself. No, it doesn’t match the likes of ActiveCampaign for features. However, it combines a powerful mix of email marketing, CRM and automation features into an affordable package for smaller email lists.

6. SendPulse

SendPulse is a multichannel marketing system that incorporates email marketing, chatbots, push notifications, SMS and plenty more.

In fact, it’s the most multichannel system we’re looking at today. The company breaks its system down into separate products for each channel, too. So you don’t have to pay for any features/channels you don’t need.

If you only want email marketing, you simply sign up for its email marketing product and forget about other channels like SMS.

The email marketing system includes a drag-and-drop builder, email templates and basic email automation features. You also get a landing page builder and A/B testing on all paid plans. Better yet, SendPulse includes a free, built-in CRM for housing all of your contact data.

It’s not as capable as HubSpot’s free CRM but it’s great to have the built-in option available.

The email builder also feels a little dated and it’s a similar story with SendPulse’s automation tool. Overall, the system is a little clunky and performance can be sluggish at times. Despite some minor UX issues, SendPulse’s automation features are surprisingly capable, considering its price tag.

You can create automation workflows using triggers and conditions, using contact data from the built-in CRM. This allows you to create responsive workflows that react to user actions, as they happen. Crucially, you can incorporate every channel into your automation (as long as you’re paying for them). So you can automate processes including email, SMS, push notifications, instant messaging, chatbots and plenty more.

Pricing

SendPulse divides its system across products for each marketing channel. So its email marketing product is priced separately from other channels like SMS and chatbots. To see how much SendPulse will cost for a combination of products, visit the company’s pricing page.

For its email marketing product, SendPulse offers a free plan for up to 500 subscribers with a limit of 15,000 emails per month. Paid plans start from $6.40/month but you’re still only covered for up to 500 contacts at this price.

That being said, the Standard plan costs $42.40/month for 10,000 contacts and the Enterprise plan still only costs $71.23/month. At 100,000 contacts, you’re looking at $257.60/month for the Standard plan and $432.77/month for the Enterprise plan.

These are some of the most affordable price tags available for equivalent list sizes. No, you’re not getting the most powerful email marketing features, but you’re not paying for them. Price creep isn’t an issue with SendPulse, even as your contact list passes the 100k mark.

What we like:Affordable email marketing – If you only pay for email marketing, SendPulse is one of the most affordable options across contact list sizes.Multichannel – You can get email marketing, chatbots, push notifications, popups and plenty more.Free plan – Send up to 15,000 emails per month with SendPulse’s free plan.Where they could improve:Feature depth – SendPulse can’t match the feature depth of more expensive options – and why should it?Channel pricing – The separate pricing of channel tools makes SendPulse a little pricey if you buy into all of them.Clunky UI – The software architecture and UI is a little cumbersome.Who should use SendPulse?

If you want an affordable email marketing system that stays affordable, SendPulse is one of the few options available. Unfortunately, you have to put up with some minor UX issues and you can’t expect the same feature depth available elsewhere.

All this aside, the platform offers an affordable – and truly multichannel – option for Webflow users that doesn’t let price creep become a factor. If you outgrow SendPulse because you’re ready to pay for bigger features, this is fair enough. At least you won’t be priced out of the system and forced to look for better value because you’ve outgrown its pricing model.

7. Buttondown

Buttondown is unlike any of the other email marketing tools we’ve looked at today. This isn’t a product developed by a software company or a big tech acquisition. Buttondown is an independent product developed and maintained by Justin Duke for small businesses.

It’s not a complete email marketing system like the tools we’ve looked at so far. Buttondown is a simple tool for creating and managing email newsletters. You can create and schedule newsletter emails and run subscriptions for paid content.

You can also create surveys and polls to collect feedback from subscribers and customise emails with HTML and CSS.

You’re not getting a drag-and-drop email builder or templates like we’ve seen with most tools today. Don’t expect the same kind of automation features, either. You can schedule emails with Buttondown but that’s about all you can do in terms of automation – this is about as simple as email marketing tools get.

In fact, it would be more accurate to call this an email newsletter management tool.

Buttondown’s most sophisticated feature is its email analytics system. You can see where subscribers are coming from, track open rates and clicks and view subscriber events (deliveries, opens, clicks, etc.). You can also compare performance across emails and newsletter campaigns and analyse subscribers’ technology choices (browser, OS, platforms, etc.).

Pricing

Buttondown is the simplest email tool we’re looking at today so you would hope it’s also the most affordable. Sadly, that’s not quite the case. It’s certainly one of the cheapest but it’s not as affordable as you might expect.

You’re also not getting a lot for your money compared to the other tools featured in this article.

The good news is, with Buttondown’s free plan, you can create, schedule and manage your email newsletter. You don’t get any email analytics, the ability to create surveys/polls and its more “advanced” features but you’re getting the basics for nothing.

Paid plans are priced on the number of subscribers you have. The Basic plan covers up to 1,000 subscribers and this costs $9/month. You get access to most of Buttondown’s features on this plan but the monthly fee is already comparable to several more powerful tools we’ve looked at in this article.

The Standard plan costs $29/month and covers you for up to 5,000 subscribers and the Professional plan takes you up to $79/month and 10,000 subscribers. That’s cheaper than most email marketing tools but not by much – and you’re getting a far less capable system.

To sum up, Buttondown probably isn’t the best option if you’re simply looking to save money.

You’ll find more info about plans, features and fees on its pricing page.

What we like:Newsletters – Buttondown is an affordable, flexible system for managing email newsletters – but not much else.Customisability – The tool gives you plenty of freedom to customise – as long as you’re comfortable with code.Simplicity – Buttondown is a simple tool built by an independent developer for very small businesses that don’t want a full ecosystem.Where they could improve:Limited features – Obviously, Buttondown lacks the features of other tools in this article but it’s not trying to compete with them.Pricing – Despite being one of the cheapest tools in this article, its pricier plans are quite expensive for the contact limits.Who should use Buttondown?

Buttondown is designed for small businesses that simply need a basic tool for managing email newsletters. It includes a native Webflow integration but it’s not a complete email marketing system like the other tools we’ve looked at today.

You’re not getting advanced features like email builders and marketing automation here. And, while Buttondown is one of the more affordable tools in this article, especially on its more expensive plans. You get far more features for your money from tools like SendPulse.

If you want a simple newsletter management tool without complex email marketing features getting in the way, Buttondown makes a case for itself. However, if you want the best features for your money, every other tool we’ve looked at today offers more for every $1 spent.

Choosing the right email marketing tool for Webflow

Choosing the best Webflow email marketing software may seem daunting but every tool we’ve looked at serves a different purpose. This article recommends tools for every business size and, whichever industry you’re in, one of these tools will have you covered.

To help you make the right choice, let’s quickly review the pricing for different email list sizes.

Compare pricing

The table below shows the minimum price you’ll pay for different contact list sizes: 2.5k, 10k and 100k contacts. With most tools, this is the price for the cheapest plan that covers each list size so you could pay more for higher plans and upgrades.

Simply use this as a rough comparison guide.

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contactsActiveCampaign$49$139$559HubSpot$1,025$1,250$4,450GetResponse$23.78$64.78$441.98AWeber$22.50$62.50$785.50Mailchimp$39.50$100$700SendPulse$20$42.40$257.60Buttondown$29$79$419

Considering ActiveCampaign is the most powerful email marketing tool we’ve looked at in this article. you can see how well it holds up with pricing. If you’re a rapidly-growing business or you already have a large email marketing list, it’s difficult to look past ActiveCampaign – not only for features, but also value for money.

Our verdict

Well, we kind of let the cat out of the bag in the previous section. ActiveCampaign is the best overall email marketing tool in this article and it offers the best value for money in terms of features per $1 spent. This becomes increasingly important as your contact list grows. Firstly, because a lot of providers sting you with price creep but larger lists are also more difficult to manage.

This means advanced features become more valuable as your contact list grows.

If you’re building your first email marketing list, you might want to start with something else. AWeber, Mailchimp and SendPulse all offer compelling options for this – and GetResponse deserves a mention, too. These tools may also offer everything you need if you expect your company to stay in the small business category for the immediate future.

Luckily, most of the tools offer free plans or free trials so you can test them all out to see which ones meet your needs. Just remember to look at all of the pricing information and upgrade costs to see how much they’ll cost in the future.

FAQCan Webflow do email marketing?

You need email marketing software to manage your email strategy as a Webflow user. As standard, you can link your Webflow site to an email client like Gmail to send emails but you have to do everything manually. You need email marketing software to design emails, create campaigns, automatically send emails and manage your strategy.

Can you design emails in Webflow?

Webflow doesn’t include any email design tools. To design emails for your Webflow site, you’ll need an email marketing tool that includes an email builder – ideally, a visual drag-and-drop editor with pre-built templates that you can use and edit.

How to set up Mailchimp in Webflow?

Mailchimp and all of the other email marketing tools in this article include Webflow integrations. This makes it easy to integrate each tool with your Webflow website without writing any code or using third-party tools.

The post Best Email Marketing Tools for Webflow in 2023 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Best Omnichannel SMS & Email Marketing Tools in 2023

If you’re looking for an omnichannel platform for SMS and email marketing, it’s not always easy to find one tool for both. There’s no shortage of email marketing tools but support for SMS is patchy. Most tools don’t provide SMS features at all and many that do only treat it as an afterthought.

In this article, we’re looking at the best omnichannel SMS and email marketing tools. With these platforms, you can integrate both channels and manage campaigns seamlessly from one place. So, instead of your SMS and email strategies working in isolation, they can pull together and enhance each other’s results.

What are the best omnichannel SMS & email marketing tools?

Every year we update our annual review of the best email platforms. We do this because email marketing is crucial to our business and we need to know we’re still using the best tools for us. An added bonus is this helps us advise others on the best tools for their needs.

We’ve analysed more than 670 email marketing tools in our analysis. Now, if you’re looking for an omnichannel SMS and email marketing system, you can forget about 662 of these. Only seven of the tools in our analysis offer sufficient SMS and email features to make our list of recommendations:

ActiveCampaign – Ontraport – Omnisend – SendinBlue – GetResponse – Sendlane – Klaviyo –

Before we take a look at each platform, let’s quickly run through some of the most important things to look for in SMS and email marketing software.

What to look for in SMS & email marketing software

If you’re looking for an omnichannel SMS and email marketing tool, finding the right mix of features can be difficult. Finding a good email marketing system is one thing but finding a platform that also provides the SMS features you need is something else.

In most cases, you’ll find the SMS features don’t live up to the email marketing tools.

Here are some key things to check when you’re looking at potential tools:

SMS marketing: Obviously, the first thing to check is that potential platforms include SMS marketing features.Messaging apps: Also, consider whether you want support for messaging apps like WhatsApp.Send limits: Next, take a look at the monthly email and SMS limits – you’ll often find the SMS limits are more restrictive.SMS pricing: Most platforms give you so many SMS messages on each plan and you’ll often have to upgrade or pay additional fees once you exceed this.CRM: A customer relationship management system keeps your email, phone and other customer data in one accessible place.Email marketing: Of course, you also need a system capable of creating and managing email campaigns with builders, templates and, ideally, A/B testing.Marketing automation: With the core features covered, the next thing to look out for is marketing automation for (at least) both channels: SMS and email.Automation templates: You want automation templates for both SMS and email workflows.Reporting: Finally, make sure the reporting features provide detailed insights for SMS and email campaign performance.

We’ll discuss all of these factors as we discuss each of the omnichannel SMS and email marketing tools recommended in this article.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is the best all-around tool for managing your SMS and email marketing strategies. Some of the other tools we’re looking at today may offer slightly better SMS features. However, you won’t find a platform that offers a better mix of SMS, email marketing, automation and personalisation features.

To access ActiveCampaign’s SMS features, you have to purchase an add-on. This includes 1,000 SMS monthly credits and you’ll have to pay for any additional credits. We’ll take a look at the pricing details in a moment.

ActiveCampaign also has its own CRM system. This isn’t included in its email marketing plan, though. To get email marketing, SMS and the CRM, you’ll have to sign up for the marketing and sales bundle, plus the SMS add-on.

This isn’t as complicated as it sounds. ActiveCampaign’s products include a lot of features so it separates marketing and sales to maintain usability. If you’re serious about running an integrated SMS and email marketing strategy, this setup is worth the initial effort.

Marketing automation is what sets ActiveCampagin apart from other email marketing systems. Crucially, the platform gives you equal power to automate SMS campaigns with personalised messaging.

You can create fully automated campaigns with seamless SMS and email messaging. For example, you can automate SMS follow-ups to important emails recipients haven’t opened. Likewise, you set up two-factor authentication systems with email and SMS verification.

ActiveCampaign includes an extensive library of automation workflows for SMS and email. This helps you quickly set up automation for common actions like welcome campaigns or onboarding sequences. You also get one of the best automation builders in the game, giving you full freedom to automate almost anything you can think of.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign plans start from $29/month for the Marketing Lite plan. As we mentioned earlier, though, this doesn’t include the CRM or allow you to purchase the SMS add-on.

You can buy the SMS add-on Marketing Pro plans or higher but you’ll also need ActiveCampaign’s sales product to access the CRM. If you want all three products (recommended) we suggest signing up for the marketing automation and sales CRM bundle.

Prices for the bundle start from $93/month but you’ll still need to buy the SMS add-on to complete your setup.

The add-on itself doesn’t cost anything but you need to buy a minimum of 1,000 credits to “purchase” it. This will cost you $21 and you find detailed pricing information on the company’s SMS pricing page.

The SMS pricing page also includes information on how many credits it takes to send text messages to other countries.

You’ll also find more information about the pricing of plans on ActiveCampaign’s pricing page.

What we like:Truly omnichannel – With the right setup, ActiveCampaign gives you a complete omnichannel system for SMS and email. Marketing automation – ActiveCampaign delivers some of the best SMS and email marketing automation features around.Reasonable cost – While not the cheapest system we’re looking at today, ActiveCampaign is one the most advanced and significantly better for money than comparable email marketing platforms. Where they could improve:Convoluted setup – You have to sign up for a bundle and buy the SMS plugin to get ActiveCampaign’s full omnichannel capabilities.Who should use ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is the most powerful SMS and email marketing system we’re looking at today. The only real downside is that you have to buy the SMS add-on and sign up for a bundle plan to get the CRM. Still, if you want the best omnichannel system for SMS and email, this is the way to go.

You won’t find better marketing automation for your SMS and email strategies anywhere else. With ActiveCampaign, you fully integrate both channels to get the best out of each other.

This isn’t the cheapest option we’re looking at today, either. However, ActiveCampaign is a much bigger system than the other tools in this article and it’s significantly cheaper than comparable alternatives like HubSpot.

2. Ontraport

Ontraport isn’t as powerful as ActiveCampagin but it includes email marketing and SMS automation on all of its plans. You don’t need to worry about any add-ons and you also get a CRM on all plans with upgrade options for more advanced features.

All in all, this is a simpler setup and Ontraport is also a more affordable option.

Of course, this comes with certain compromises. First of all, Ontraport simply isn’t as capable when it comes to email marketing. The templates aren’t too inspiring and the email builder is pretty basic. It covers all of the essentials but you quickly realise email isn’t Ontraport’s biggest strength.

On the other hand, SMS marketing is Ontraport’s biggest strength and this is the main area it beats ActiveCampaign. The platform gives you two-way text messaging capabilities. This means customers can text you back and respond to your messages.

You can also define a personal phone number using the system so customers can save you as a contact and always know it’s you getting in touch.

With Ontraport, you can automate SMS and email messages. You can use and edit automation templates or build your own workflows using the drag-and-drop builder. This is actually the platform’s worst builder but it’s fine for covering the basics. It’s a serious downgrade from ActiveCampaign but we’re talking about one of the best automation systems around.

Ontraport simply can’t keep up but it’s also not asking for the same monthly fees.

Pricing

Speaking of pricing, Ontraport runs four plans with email, SMS and the CRM available on every plan. Pricing is determined by the number of contacts you have on the system and how user seats you need.

The best thing about Ontraport’s pricing is that you can send unlimited emails and SMS messages. The first phone number on your system is free but you’ll have to pay for any additional phone numbers you want to send from.

You can get a complete breakdown of pricing and features on the company’s pricing page.

What we like:Email & SMS – Ontraport is great if you want one system for automating email and SMS campaigns.Built-in CRM – The platform includes a built-in CRM on every plan.Pricing – Ontraport offers affordable entry prices and remains good value as your email list grows.Where they could improve:Usability – With so many features crammed into one system, usability inevitably suffers.Email builder – The email builder is OK but it feels dated and a little awkward to use.B2B – Ontraport is better suited to eCommerce product-oriented businesses, not so much B2B and service providers.Who should use Ontraport?

Ontraport is great if you want an affordable SMS and email marketing tool that’s ready to use right out of the box. You don’t need to worry about any add-ons or bundled plans to get email, SMS and a CRM from the same system.

Unfortunately, the day-to-day usability of the platform isn’t as enjoyable as the initial setup. You’re also getting a far less capable system – admittedly for less money. Ontraport delivers some quality SMS features but it falls short when it comes to email marketing and automation.

3. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing platform designed for eCommerce businesses. If you’re running an online store with tools like Shopify or WooCommerce, this is a great way to integrate an omnichannel SMS and email strategy.

Everything about Omnisend is designed to make multichannel marketing easier for eCommerce companies.

It’s not the most powerful email marketing system and some features lack a little depth (eg: A/B testing). Even still, the eCommerce focus, excellent software design and affordable pricing make this a great all-round option for online retailers.

In addition to SMS and email marketing, you can also implement web push notifications, popups and forms on your website. Every feature is designed specifically for eCommerce, too. The reporting system includes insights on revenue, online sales and campaign performance – for SMS, email, notifications and more.

Omisend is pretty capable as a marketing automation system, too. You can’t create the same level of dynamic workflows as you’ll achieve with ActiveCampaign. However, Omnisend’s strengths lie in its eCommerce focus and balance between simplicity and powerful features.

Its library of automation workflows isn’t the most in-depth, but it doesn’t need to be. It includes templates for the most common interactions along the eCommerce customer journey – and this is all it needs.

Then, you’ve got its automation builder, which you can use to edit templates or build your own workflows. Again, it’s a relatively simple builder but it’s super intuitive and easy to use. This combination of templates and intuitive builders allows you to automate all of the essentials pretty quickly.

Yes, if you want to create complex, personalised automations, you might need to look elsewhere. However, if you want a simple, fast and relatively affordable way to cover the basics (and more), Omnisend is hard to beat.

Pricing

Omnisend offers one of the most generous free plans for eCommerce email marketing. This covers you for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month but you’re limited to 60 SMS messages.

However, you can buy SMS credits on any Omnisend plan, even if you’re signed up for the free plan. SMS messages are priced at $0.015 per message to the United States. So you can purchase 100 messages for $1.50, a thousand for $15 and so on.

Keep in mind that SMS messages are priced differently, depending on the country you send them to.

You can check how much it’ll cost you to buy SMS messages for your required countries on Omnisend’s pricing page.

Upgrading to the Standard plan starts from $16/month for up to 500 contacts. This allows you to send up to 6,000 emails every month but you’re limited to 60 SMS messages without buying additional credits.

If you’re serious about SMS marketing, you’ll want to consider Omnisend’s Pro plan. This is where pricing starts to get a little more complex. The plan starts from $59/month for up to 2,500 contacts with prices increasing as your list grows. You can send unlimited emails every month on this plan and the starting price covers you for up to 3,933 SMS messages per month, too.

Basically, whatever you’re paying per month for the Pro plan, you get the equivalent amount of SMS credits included for free. So, if you’re paying $59/month, you get $59 worth of SMS credits. If your contact list grows to 5,000, your monthly fee increases to $90/month and you get $90 worth of SMS credits (6,000).

Again, you can find all the information you need on the company’s pricing page.

What we like:SMS pricing – If you sign up for the Pro plan, you get a great deal on SMS pricing.Deliverability – Omnisend offers a range of features to maintain high deliverability, including email warm-up (sending emails gradually to improve your sender reputation) and insightful reports to monitor your deliverability and reputation.eCommerce content blocks – Omnisend offers lots of content blocks to integrate products and discounts directly into your email campaigns. Their form templates also include a range of creative ways to engage visitors – such as with a wheel of fortune.Where they could improve:A/B testing limitations – While you can add splits in automation sequences, we weren’t able to set a goal to run effective A/B tests within an automation sequence.Templates – The templates are visually underwhelming.The campaign builder – Performance is a little sluggish compared to the other tools we’ve tested.Who should use Omnisend?

Omnisend is ideal for eCommerce companies that want an affordable and truly omnichannel system for SMS and email marketing. The eCommerce focus allows this system to strike a real balance between power and simplicity. It’s never going to match the full capabilities of a platform like ActiveCampaign but it punches well above its asking prices.

The downside is you have to sign up for its most expensive plan to get the best value. That being said, Omnisend is more affordable than most systems at comparable list sizes. And, best of all, it matches your monthly spend with the equivalent amount of SMS credits – a huge saving over buying them separately.

4. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a more flexible alternative to Omnisend, suitable for all business types. On paper, it’s similarly affordable, too, but this changes once you get involved in SMS marketing. Unlike Omnisend, you have to pay for every SMS message you send. You don’t get any credits included with your plan so make sure you understand SendinBlue’s pricing model.

We’ll take a good look at this in a moment.

If you’re an eCommerce business, Omnisend is clearly better value for money but it’s only an option for online retailers. SendinBlue, on the other hand, is an option for all business types and it’s the more capable platform overall.

It’s got the better email marketing features, slightly better automation capabilities and it also supports online messaging via WhatsApp. SendinBlue also includes some of the best transactional email features around. In fact, we still use SendinBlue as our second email system because of its transactional emails.

SendinBlue is also more omnichannel than Omnisend. In addition to SMS, email and push notifications, the platform also supports live chat and chatbots. The platform includes its own CRM that’s completely free to use. This houses all of your customer data, allowing you to tie multichannel campaigns together and use insights to increase relevance with every interaction.

SendinBlue isn’t as intuitive as Omnisend (few tools are) and it’s a more expensive SMS solution. However, it’s also a more capable system overall that incorporates all of the modern marketing channels into one system.

Pricing

SendinBlue is one of the most affordable email marketing systems on the market. Its generous free plan is great for new and small businesses while the Start and Business plans both offer great value.

However, the platform gets more expensive once you start using it to manage your SMS strategy. On paper, SendinBlue gives you more credits for your money than Omnisend. With Omnisend, $90 gets you 6,000 SMS credits but SendinBlue gives you 10,000 credits for $109 (both to the US).

However, Omnisend’s pricing model matches your monthly and includes the equivalent number of credits on your plan. Overall, this makes SendinBlue the more expensive option but you are getting more features for your money elsewhere.

What we like:Omnichannel – SendinBlue brings web chat, chatbots and more into a truly omnichannel system.Transactional emails – Few tools at this price point offer transactional emails, let alone on a free plan.Free plan – SendinBlue offers one of the most generous free plans for email marketing – but you don’t get any SMS credits.Where they could improve:SMS pricing – With no SMS credits included in your plan, you have to pay for every SMS message you send.Basic automation – SendinBlue offers slightly better automation features than Omnisend but it can’t compete with the likes of ActiveCampaign.Email templates – The email templates are also quite basic and you can only do so much with the editor.Who should use SendinBlue?

SendinBlue is best suited for companies that want to manage the full set of marketing channels it supports with one system. This means email marketing, SMS, WhatsApp messaging, push notifications, web chat and more.

Overall, SendinBlue is very affordable but the SMS pricing does negate this to some extent. As a result, this is probably best suited to companies that use SMS marketing as a backup to other channels.

5. GetResponse

GetResponse is one of the most omnichannel tools we’re looking at in this article. In addition to SMS* and email, you also get push notifications, web chat, forms, popups, webinars and paid advertising tools.

That’s not all, either. The platform also gives you a website builder, landing pages, automation and a bunch of optional eCommerce features.

Unfortunately, there is a catch. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed the sneaky little asterisk hanging around the reference to SMS above. Well, that’s because you have to sign up for its most expensive plan to get its SMS marketing features.

On the plus side, GetResponse isn’t messing around with its SMS features. The platform helps you manage bulk campaigns with ease and fully integrate SMS messaging into your marketing strategy. You can personalise messages, optimise send times, shorten links to save characters and track delivery rates.

GetResponse SMS delivery rates are some of the best we’ve had, too. You can also track open rates, click-through rates and other insights with its extensive reporting features.

GetResponse’s automation features are pretty capable, too. You can easily create autoresponders, send messages for key events (like birthdays) and integrate SMS messages into other channels. For example, you can capture email signups on your website, send automatic email responses and follow up with a text message for users who visit specific URLs.

Pricing

Unfortunately, the pricing information on GetResponse’s website is of no use to you if you want its SMS marketing features. These are only available on its MAX2 plan and the company doesn’t publish pricing information for this plan.

This means you’ll have to get a quote from GetResponse’s sales team for pricing info. Your quote mostly depends on usage factors like the size of your contact lists and how many emails and SMS messages you need to send each month.

The MAX2 plan comes with 5000 monthly SMS credits as standard but you can increase this limit.

What we like:Multichannel features – Email marketing meets, SMS, chat, push notifications and more.Quality SMS features – Although they’re only available on the most expensive plan, GetResponse really delivers with its SMS features.Easy automation – The system implements basic automation actions as features, making them super easy to implement.Where they could improve:SMS availability – We wish GetResponse offered basic SMS features on its cheaper plans.Builders – The builders lack some flexibility and default mobile optimisation.Focus on eCommerce – GetResponse has shifted focus to eCommerce recently, which doesn’t suit everyone.Who should use GetResponse?

GetResponse delivers some excellent SMS features into one of the most omnichannel marketing platforms around. Unfortunately, you have to sign up for its most expensive plan to get any SMS features at all. We wish it offered basic or restricted features on its cheaper plans to create an upgrade path for companies on a budget.

That being said, if you’re ready to jump right into its MAX2 plan, this is a great option if SMS marketing is a priority for you. Also, keep in mind this isn’t the most powerful email marketing tool we’re looking at today. Its strength is being a solid omnichannel all-rounder and doing a pretty good job of many things.

6. Sendlane

Sendlane calls itself a unified email and SMS system for eCommerce companies. This puts it in direct competition with Omnisned but the platform squarely focuses on email and SMS. So, it’s less omnichannel as a platform but this gives it space to delve deeper into email and SMS features.

On the email marketing front, you can create campaigns using email templates or build your own with the drag-and-drop editor. You can schedule bulk emails, segment your audience and optimise send times for different audiences with Sendlane’s built-in toolkit.

Sendlane also includes its own intelligent popup system that helps you capture more email leads. You can create popups for lead gen campaigns and prevent exit actions like cart abandonment.

Sendlane’s SMS features give you the same freedom to implement SMS and MMS messaging into your campaigns. You can create your messages in the visual builder and preview them before you send anything.

The system supports two-way messaging so recipients can reply to your messages – and you to theirs. Chat histories are stored on the system for 30 days and you can schedule messages/replies for the most effective times.

With Sendlane’s automation tools, you can automate campaigns with email and SMS interactions. You can manage both channels separately, integrate them or use SMS to back up key messages. For example, if customers don’t respond to your retargeting emails, you can automatically send SMS follow-ups with the same offer to make sure they get the message.

Pricing

Sendlane’s pricing depends on the number of contacts you have and the amount of monthly SMS credits you need. The minimum thresholds cover you for up 5,000 contacts with 75,000 email credits included.

The SMS features are optional and 5,000 credits is the minimum threshold, once again. This gives you a starting price of $173/month for both email and SMS feature sets, if you pay annually. However, Sendlane recommends 25,000 SMS credits for 6,250 contacts and this would bump you up to $511/month.

So we’re not talking about the cheapest SMS and email marketing system, here. The entry prices alone are higher than most of the other tools we’re looking at today. Obviously, if you have far fewer than 5,000 contacts, this probably isn’t the system to start with.

For the complete breakdown of Sendlane’s pricing and features, you can visit its pricing page.

What we like:SMS features – Sendlane provides excellent SMS features with solid email marketing tools.Deliverability – Sendlane achieves really good deliverability rates for both email and SMS.Usability – The user interface and software architecture is excellent – a real pleasure to work with.Where they could improve:Entry prices – High entry prices will rule out Sendlane for new and smaller retailers.eCommerce integrations – Currently, Sendlane only supports full integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, Miva and ClickBank.Who should use Sendlane?

Sendlane is an excellent SMS and email marketing system if you want a concise, powerful and easy-to-use solution. Yes, it’s more expensive than many of the tools we’ve looked at. Not to mention, the high entry prices will rule this out for a lot of smaller eCommerce businesses. Then, you’ve got the limited integration options that will only rule it out for retailers using non-supported systems.

This is one for the small groups of eCommerce businesses willing to pay for a super-usable SMS and email system with excellent support. This is a system where everything just works. Excellent email and SMS delivery rates meet intuitive tools and you’ve got a dedicated support team always available if you run into any problems.

7. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is another eCommerce SMS and email marketing system. It’s a direct rival to Sendlane and, to a lesser extent, Omnisend. However, like Sendlane, Klaviyo focuses on email marketing and SMS messaging while Omniend incorporates more channels.

Klaviyo is one of the few platforms matching the quality of Sendlane’s SMS features, too.

You can create targeted, personalised SMS messages and automate campaigns. You can integrate them with email campaigns or incorporate both channels within campaigns. The system supports two-way messaging and Klaviyo excellent reporting features for both email and SMS insights.

All things considered, Klaviyo is the more capable system but Sendlane is more usable.

Klaviyo also includes more integration options for a wider variety of eCommerce platforms. So, if you’re not using Shopify or WooCommerce, this is the better option.

Klaviyo performs well with deliverability, too. We got slightly better rates with Sendlane but the difference is pretty minimal – not enough to influence your choice between the two.

When it comes to marketing automation, Klaviyo gives you slightly more to work with but the automation builder isn’t as easy to use. This is typical of the differences between these two platforms. Klaviyo just about edges it with feature depth but the added complexity widens the usability gap with Sendlane.

It’s not so much a case of one being better or worse than the other – simply which you prefer.

Pricing

Klaviyo also offers a free plan for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. It also allows you to send up to 150 SMS messages per month. Obviously, this isn’t much help if you’re serious about SMS marketing but it could be useful if you’re just starting out.

To get serious with SMS and email marketing, you’ll need to sign up for Klaviyo’s Email and SMS plan. This starts from $35/month for up to 500 contacts and 1,250 SMS/MMS credits. Pricing increases as your contact list grows and you send more SMS messages per month.

For example, by the time you have 1,001-1,500 contacts, you’ll be looking at $60/month with the same SMS allowance.

Klaviyo provides a significantly cheaper entry price than Sendlane. Remember, Sendlane plans start with allowances for 5,000 contacts and 5,000 SMS credits for $173/month. If we set allowances of 3,501-5,000 contacts and 5,000 SMS credits with Klaviyo’s Email and SMS plan, the monthly fee rises to $145/month.

So, the pricing isn’t too far apart once you start dealing with similar contact lists and SMS allowances.

What we like:SMS features – Like Sendlane, Klaviyo provides some of the best SMS features for eCommerce businesses.Reporting – Klaviyo’s reporting features are fantastic with predictive insight and benchmarks.Entry price – Klaviyo’s low entry prices make the platform accessible to companies of all sizes.Where they could improve:Email campaign editor – A tad basic and it offers only one eCommerce-specific content block (a list of products from a product feed).Automation – The range of automation actions are simplistic and lacking sophisticated automation actions such as split testing paths.Interface – The interface feels a little clunky, especially if you’ve come from trying out Sendlane.Who should use Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is best for larger eCommerce companies that will benefit the most from its predictive insights. It’s a more capable alternative to Sendlane but usability suffers a little, as a result.

Lower entry prices create a better upgrade path for new companies although prices are comparable to Sendlane. This puts Klaviyo among the more expensive solutions – so keep this in mind.

Choosing the right SMS & email marketing software

Choosing the right SMS and email marketing tool can be tricky. Support and pricing for SMS features can vary wildly between providers – more so than email marketing features, in most cases. So, to help you choose the right tools for your needs, let’s compare SMS and email marketing features separately.

Compare pricing

We’ve got two tables to look at in this section. The first one shows the lowest amount you’ll pay with each product for contact list sizes: 2.5k, 10k and 10k contacts. The second shows the minimum you’ll pay for the same number of SMS credits on each platform: 2.5k credits, 10k credits and 100k credits.

So, let’s start with contact list sizes. Now, we have to consider that many providers offer plans that don’t include SMS support. So the prices below show the minimum you’ll pay for each contact list size – on plans that include SMS messaging.

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contactsActiveCampaign$49$139$559Ontraport$83$208$583Omnisend$59$150$1,150SendinBlue*$0$16$181*GetResponseN/AN/AN/ASendlane$173$319$1,007Klaviyo$75$165$1,395

Unfortunately, GetResponse doesn’t publish any pricing information for its only plan that includes SMS messaging. All we can say is that it’s among the more expensive tools.

Also, unlike most email marketing software providers, SendinBlue doesn’t price its plans according to contact list size. Instead, it charges for the number of emails you send per month. So we’ve shown the prices that allow you to send an average of two emails per month to each contact.

When it comes to SMS pricing, this is what you can expect to pay for the equivalent number of SMS credits.

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 creditsMonthly price for 10,000 creditsMonthly price for 100,000 creditsActiveCampaign$50$160$1,200Ontraport$19.75$79$790Omnisend$37.50$150$1,500SendinBlueN/A$109$1,090GetResponseN/AN/AN/ASendlane$90$180$900Klaviyo$25$90$900

Keep in mind that sending SMS messages outside of the US normally costs more than one credit. You may also need to send more than one SMS message to each contact per month.

Also, different pricing strategies make it difficult to give precise numbers with some providers. So, use these figures as a rough guide, nothing more.

Our verdict

If you’re looking for the best all-round omnichannel SMS and email marketing system, ActiveCampaign is our top recommendation. It’s not the cheapest option for SMS messaging but it’s excellent value as an email marketing system and the best marketing automation tool around.

If budget is your priority, you’ll really need to crunch the numbers and pay close attention to SMS pricing. It really comes down to how many messages you need to send every month.

Overall, Ontarport and Klaviyo are probably the most affordable options if you need to send a lot of SMS messages.

FAQWhy use SMS and email marketing software?

SMS and email marketing play similar roles in your marketing strategy and complement each other’s pros and cons. It makes sense to integrate both strategies and manage them from one platform.

Does SMS have a 98% open rate?

Some studies have found SMS messages to have an average open rate of 98% – significantly higher than the average email open rate. This is one example of how SMS can complement your email marketing strategy – especially for important messages.

Is SMS marketing more effective than email?

Both channels are equally effective when used correctly. Yes, SMS messages typically have higher open rates and CTRs but recipients don’t want to receive a lot of text messages. Some interactions are perfect for SMS but email is more suitable for most – so it’s all about finding the right mix.

The post Best Omnichannel SMS & Email Marketing Tools in 2023 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Best Email Marketing Tools for WordPress in 2023

Email marketing is the most profitable channel for eCommerce businesses. Insights from Omnisend find email marketing generates an average of $40 in revenue for every $1 spent on campaigns. That adds up to a 3,900% ROI from email marketing and almost double the $22.24 SEO generates for every $1 of spend (the second most profitable channel for eCommerce).

Those are some impressive numbers but it takes a lot of work to run a high-ROI email marketing strategy.

If you’re using WordPress to make content management easier, you know the power of a tool that simplifies something complex. This article looks at the best email marketing software for WordPress so you can bring similar power to every email campaign you run.

What are the best email marketing tools for WordPress?

We’ve invested a lot of time into finding the perfect email marketing system for our needs at Venture Harbour. We’ve tested more than 670 different tools and we revisit them every year to update our findings and make sure we’re still using the best system for us.

You can access our analysis in the latest version of our annual review of the best email platforms.

As a WordPress user, you get pretty good support from email marketing providers that offer native integrations with the CMS. You’ll also find many providers have developed their own WordPress plugins that allow you to complete tasks within your WordPress dashboard.

If we narrow your list of options to the very best email marketing tools for WordPress, we end up with a shortlist of seven:

ActiveCampaign – HubSpot – Ontraport – Omnisend – SendinBlue – MailerLite – Moosend –

Before we take a closer look at each of these email marketing tools, let’s quickly explain why email marketing software is so important for WordPress websites.

Why do you need email marketing software for WordPress?

WordPress is capable of sending emails but the dashboard doesn’t include a UI for creating and sending emails, as standard. You have to use a plugin for this or set up an external system and send emails from another service like Gmail.

So you need some sort of email marketing software for your WordPress website, whichever way you look at it.

However, there’s a big difference between sending out the odd email to contacts and managing a complete email marketing strategy. The latter requires you to manage a fleet of email campaigns targeting different, build your email marketing lists and target different audience segments with multiple touch points throughout the customer journey.

That’s a hefty workload right there. Even if you’re only dealing with one customer, you have to capture their email, send confirmation emails, transactional emails, purchase confirmations and respond to any customer support tickets – among many other potential touch points.

You simply can’t do this manually for every customer and grow your business without overstretching resources.

This is why email marketing software is so important and automation is at the heart of every strategy.

With this in mind, let’s quickly look at some of the key features you need from WordPress email marketing software.

WordPress integration

WordPress integration is important for obvious reasons – you want your email marketing software to work seamlessly with your website. Luckily, WordPress’ extensive library of plugins is one of the platform’s biggest strengths and software providers can develop their own official plugins with dedicated support.

Many email marketing software companies clearly promote their WordPress plugins but not all of them make it so obvious. It’s often quicker to visit the WordPress plugin page and search for email marketing tools to see which plugins are available.

Check the developer names to make sure you’re getting official plugins from the same company – eg: ActiveCampaign, as shown above. Some email marketing software providers will have multiple WordPress plugins for different purposes so don’t panic if you see more than one plugin from the same company.

There are plenty of quality third-party plugins for many email marketing tools but it’s always preferable when the email provider itself develops its own plugin.

Email builder

Quality emails are the substance of every email marketing campaign and you want a capable builder that makes it as quick and easy as possible to design winning emails. Drag-and-drop email builders allow you to pull elements into the page and customise them visually – without writing any code.

The best email builders should include all of the elements you need to create compelling designs (images, video headings, CTA buttons, etc.) and you may also want the option to add custom HTML and CSS code.

Some email builders are more feature rich than others but you don’t always want the most complicated tool.

For example, if you’re an eCommerce company, you want an email builder that makes it easy to add product listings to your emails. However, if you don’t sell physical products to your customer, this feature will potentially get in the way and slow you down.

You also want an email marketing system with a solid library of email templates that you can select and customise to complete designs faster. Templates save you from creating every email from scratch and they provide a good example of what you can achieve with each platform’s email builder – so always take a look at these.

Email automation

Email automation is crucial for running campaigns on a large scale. You simply can’t manage an email marketing strategy for all of your leads and customers by doing everything manually. You want to create your campaigns and set them to run on autopilot, automatically sending emails to customers at the key moments.

Some email marketing platforms provide more advanced automation features than others. This is something we’ll reference in each review so you can choose a platform that maximises the impact of your email marketing strategy while minimising the manual workload.

Email reporting

As with any marketing strategy, you want to know your email campaigns are getting results and identify the ones that aren’t. So you need dedicated email reporting that tracks all of the most important metrics like open rates, CTRs, conversions, etc.

Again, the quality of email reporting varies a lot between different email marketing software tools. Of course, you can always integrate other analytics tools to enhance the reporting features of your email marketing system.

However, it’s always a bonus to get the reporting you need from one platform – so we’ll flag up the tools that do a particularly good/poor job with reporting.

A/B testing

No email marketer can get everything right on the first attempt. To maximise the performance of your campaigns, you need to test variations to identify opportunities for improvements. For this, you want email marketing software that allows you to run A/B tests or split tests on emails.

Ideally, you want a platform that also allows you to A/B test automation workflows to see which ones generate the best results. For example, you might want to test different sequences, delivery times or the times set between events and triggers.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

Email marketing is a data-driven strategy and you need somewhere to store and access all of your customer data. A customer relationship management (CRM) system puts all of your customer data into contact profiles, allowing you to use this data to trigger campaigns.

Some email marketing platforms include a full CRM system but many of them don’t. Again, you can always integrate with a dedicated CRM platform but it makes sense to have an all-in-one system for your CRM and email marketing software.

Now that we’ve covered the most important features to look for in WordPress email marketing software, let’s take a look at our first tool. We’re kicking things off with ActiveCampaign and this platform pretty much ticks all of the boxes for WordPress users.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is the winning tool in our annual email marketing review. It’s also the top-rated marketing automation software on G2 with an average score of 4.6/5 from 9,799 customer reviews. So we’re not the only ones who recommend ActiveCampaign as the best email marketing system for WordPress websites.

We’ve used ActiveCampaign as our email marketing system for more than five years now. Even after all this time, we’re yet to find a better all-in-one platform for email and marketing automation. The platform includes an extensive library of automation workflows for you to use and edit.

Alternatively, you can use the automation builder to create your own workflows from scratch.

Most email marketing platforms include automation features to some extent. Few of them give you as much freedom as ActiveCampaign, though. You can create intricate workflows with dynamic triggers that respond to almost any customer action and even predictive insights like customer health scores.

Crucially, ActiveCampaign is built around its own CRM system, which houses all of your customer data. This data powers predictive insights and allows you to create segmented email lists for every stage of the customer journey.

As customers complete different actions, they’re automatically moved across email lists and sent the most relevant campaign message for each action.

Aside from having one of the best automation builders available anywhere, ActiveCampaign also includes a drag-and-drop builder for creating emails. In fairness, we’ve used better email builders but we’re talking about tools like Mailchimp that don’t even feature in this article.

Among these advanced email marketing systems, ActiveCampaign’s email builder is one of the best. Only Omnisend offers something noticeably better but its builder is also much more complex. ActiveCampaign’s builder, on the other hand, is about as easy to use as it gets.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign plans start from $29/month for up to 500 email contacts. Pricing increases gradually as your contact list grows but ActiveCampaign is by far the most affordable system of its kind. Even on the Lite plan, you’re getting a powerful email marketing and marketing automation system.

If you’re running an eCommerce website, you’ll need to sign up for the Plus plan to get the official WooCommerce integration.

Keep in mind that you don’t get access to ActiveCampaign’s CRM on any of these plans. For this, your best approach is to sign up for the company’s marketing automation and sales CRM bundle.

Prices for this start from $93/month but, as you’ll see when we look at HubSpot’s pricing, ActiveCampaign is offering incredible value at this price point.

For more information on plans, pricing and features, you can take a look at ActiveCampaign’s pricing page.

What we like:Easy to use – ActiveCampaign is easy to learn for new users with minimal training, thanks to excellent usability and UX design. Email automation – You can automate advanced email campaigns across the whole customer journey using conditional logic, predictive content, intelligent insights, customer scores and plenty more features.Reasonable cost – While not the cheapest system we’re looking at today, ActiveCampaign is one the most advanced and significantly better for money than comparable email marketing platforms. Where they could improve:Reporting – ActiveCampaign has improved this aspect of its system over the years but the other tools in this article still do a better job of visualising reports for email campaign performance.Who should use ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is the best email marketing tool for WordPress if you want to maximise ROI with automation. No other platform gives you this much automation power, certainly not at the price points ActiveCampaign is operating at.

As you’ll see in our next review, HubSpot offers less automation power but costs significantly more – although it has its own strengths, of course.

Even still, it’s difficult to look past ActiveCampaign when you want the most powerful email marketing system for your money. The platform allows you to run more sophisticated campaigns on autopilot than any other email marketing platform in this article.

You can get started with a free trial of ActiveCampaign using the form below.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the biggest names in marketing and sales software. Its Marketing Hub aims to be an all-in-one system for managing your complete inbound marketing strategy, including content, social, search and – of course – email marketing.

In its email marketing toolkit, you get a drag-and-drop email builder with a small library of templates. The templates are pretty basic but you can create and save your own for future use. The builder itself is intuitive, even if it’s not the freshest looking (or feeling) tool you’ll ever use. Overall, it’s a relatively simple but effective email builder that almost anyone on the team could pick up and use.

HubSpot also makes email personalisation a breeze. You can personalise subject lines and email content to make them relevant to individual recipients. HubSpot’s automation system is as sophisticated as ActiveCampaign’s but it’s slightly easier to use.

So, this might appeal to teams that want to automate the most common touch points as quickly as possible.

All paid plans of the Marketing Hub include A/B testing features, allowing you to experiment with different campaign ideas. You can test email subject lines, CTAs, email copy, etc. to find out what works best for each audience.

Also, HubSpot’s free CRM integrates seamlessly with Marketing Hub so you can house all of your customer data in one place.

Pricing

Pricing for HubSpot’s Marketing Hub starts from $800/month and this covers you for up to 2,000 marketing contacts. From here, each additional 5,000 contacts adds another $225 to your monthly software fees.

You also have to pay a $3,000 onboarding fee upfront for the Professional plan. This means you’re looking at a $12,600 bill on the day you sign up for Marketing Hub’s cheapest plan.

Pricing for the Enterprise plan starts from $3,600/month, covering you for up to 10,000 marketing contacts. The onboarding fee jumps up to $6,000 for this plan so you’re paying almost $50,000 upfront as a starting price.

HubSpot is the most expensive tool we’re looking at today but it’s far more than an email marketing system. This is a complete inbound marketing management platform and it’s priced accordingly.

What we like:Usability – HubSpot’s ecosystem simplifies complex marketing actions, striking an impressive balance between power and usability.Free CRM – HubSpot’s basic CRM is 100% free on all plans – or as a standalone product.Documentation – HubSpot excels at documentation and content designed to help you get the best out of its software – and your email marketing strategy.Where they could improve:Expensive – You pay a big premium for minimal gains (if any) over the other tools in this article.A/B testing – A/B testing is only available on its Pro plan or higher, starting from $800/month.Who should use HubSpot?

HubSpot is an excellent all-in-one marketing and sales system. You’re not getting the best email marketing software or automation features – but it’s the complete system you’re buying into. Yes, it’s the most expensive tool we’re looking at today but it’s also the most capable if you’re looking for more than email marketing.

The issue for HubSpot is alternatives like ActiveCampaign have expanded over the years. Now, ActiveCampaign offers 90% of the tools HubSpot includes at a fraction of the price – and it’s the better marketing automation system, too.

So, it really comes down to how much you’re willing to pay for that extra 10%.

3. Ontraport

Ontarport is a more direct competitor for ActiveCampaign than HubSpot. At a glance, Ontrport looks like a very similar system with a built-in CRM, email marketing and marketing automation features. Ontraport’s pricing strategy is also similar to ActiveCampaign’s with comparable prices and scalable fees as your email list grows.

So how do you choose between these two systems as an email marketing solution for WordPress?

Well, the quick answer is ActiveCampaign is the better email marketing tool. Its automation features are more powerful, its automation and email builders are more intuitive and its intelligent insights allow you to do much more with customer data.

That being said, Ontarport’s built-in CRM is easier to use if you don’t have previous experience with customer relationship management. The platform also includes a handy membership feature that implements perfectly with WordPress websites. This is great for businesses selling information as a product.

For example, if you’re a consultant, you could set up memberships for people to access gated content for a monthly fee.

With Ontraport’s automation builder and templates, you can automate email campaigns, autoresponders, SM messages and multichannel interactions with customers. Ontraport can’t compete with ActiveCAmpaign when it comes to automation but its builder is easy to use for beginners.

Even if it doesn’t look particularly attractive.

Essentially, Ontraport is a less capable but easier-to-use alternative to ActiveCampaign. It also gives you access to more of its features on cheaper plans. So, while the plans are similarly priced for equivalent contact list sizes, Ontraport is more generous with its features – at least, on paper.

The big caveat that is most of ActiveCampaign’s features are more powerful.

Pricing

Omnisend’s pricing is pretty comparable to ActiveCampaign’s with the prices below covering you for 500 contacts. Omnisend’s prices don’t increase quite as much as ActiveCampaign’s as your contact list grows.

However, Omnisend charges for every user while ActiveCampaign sets user limits on each plan – so keep this in mind.

Omnisend also offers several add-ons that you can choose to include: a content management system, enhanced onboarding, a website builder and several more.

When you weigh up Ontraport’s prices and the quality of its features, it’s a more tempting offer at the cheaper end of the spectrum. You get more features overall but ActiveCampaign’s quality steps ahead when you need more advanced tools.

What we like:Email & SMS – Ontraport is great if you want one system for automating email and SMS campaigns.Built-in CRM – The platform includes a built-in CRM on every plan.Pricing – Ontraport offers affordable entry prices and remains good value as your email list grows.Where they could improve:Usability – With so many features crammed into one system, usability inevitably suffers.Email builder – The email builder is OK but it feels dated and a little awkward to use.B2B – Ontraport is better suited to eCommerce product-oriented businesses, not so much B2B and service providers.Who should use Ontraport?

Ontraport is best for professionals like consultants, single-person businesses or smaller companies. You get a powerful set of entry features at affordable prices and reasonable fees as your contact list grows. If you need multiple users on the system, Ontraport ends up being more expensive than ActiveCampaign without offering the same quality of features.

However, Ontraport has a lot to offer smaller businesses looking for a simple, effective email marketing tool with an affordable entry price.

4. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation system designed for eCommerce websites. With integrations for WooCommerce (WordPress), Shopify and BigCommerce, this is one of the first tools you should look at if you’re running an online store through WordPress.

Our favourite thing about Omnisend is its email reporting system. Unlike many tools, Omnisend tracks and reports on email deliverability – ie: the percentage of emails successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

This is a crucial metric for email marketing and we wish more tools provided these insights.

Aside from deliverability, Omnisend’s reports also show key interaction metrics like open rates, CTRs, engagement and conversions.

Omnisend is pretty good at email and marketing automation, too. It’s certainly a step up from Ontraport although it doesn’t match ActiveCampaign’s automation power.

Crucially, all of Omnisend’s automation workflows are designed for eCommerce. This makes it easy to set up workflows for key interactions across the whole customer journey. Within a few clicks, you can activate workflows for cart abandonment, purchase confirmations, order status updates and a bunch of other interactions.

You can’t automate full marketing campaigns with dynamic triggers in the same way as ActiveCampaign. However, you can cover the basic essentials almost instantly.

You can also edit automation templates or create them from scratch using Omnisned’s automation builder. It’s a relatively simple, but intuitive tool – not as capable as ActiveCampaign’s but an improvement over Ontraport’s.

If you’re willing to set up a more advanced eCommerce email marketing system, then ActiveCampaign is worth the added effort. However, if you want to tip the balance a little closer to speed and ease, Omnisend ticks a lot of the right boxes with a fraction of the setup required.

Pricing

Omnisend’s suitability for smaller eCommerce businesses makes even more sense when you look at its pricing strategy.

The company runs one of the most generous free plans currently available, specifically for eCommerce. It covers you for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month, as well as 60 SMS messages and 500 web push notifications.

True to its name, Omnisend offers up a truly omnichannel product, even on its free plan.

You get access to most of Omnisend’s features on its free plan, too. Pricing is almost entirely usage-based with fees increasing as your contact list grows and the volume of messages you send every month increases.

Paid plans start from $16/month for the Standard plan, covering you for up to 500 contacts and 6,000 emails per month, plus unlimited web push notifications and 60 SMS messages.

You can buy SMS credits to send more messages per month but this can get expensive if you’re sending a lot of messages.

Upgrading to the Pro plan starts from $59/month for up to 1,500 contacts and unlimited emails. It also allows you to send up to 3,933 SMS messages per month at its starting price. As with all plans, pricing increases as your contact list grows but you can also pay for higher SMS allowances on the Pro plan.

You can see how much Omnisend will cost you for different contact list sizes on the company’s pricing page.

What we like:Reporting – You get eCommerce focused reporting that’s ready to use from day one.Deliverability – Omnisend offers a range of features to maintain high deliverability, including email warm-up (sending emails gradually to improve your sender reputation) and insightful reports to monitor your deliverability and reputation.eCommerce content blocks – Omnisend offers lots of content blocks to integrate products and discounts directly into your email campaigns. Their form templates also include a range of creative ways to engage visitors – such as with a wheel of fortune.Where they could improve:A/B testing limitations – While you can add splits in automation sequences, we weren’t able to set a goal to run effective A/B tests within an automation sequence.Templates – The templates are visually underwhelming.The campaign builder – Performance is a little sluggish compared to the other tools we’ve tested.Who should use Omnisend?

Omnisend is one of the best email marketing solutions for new and small WordPress eCommerce websites. Affordable pricing also makes it a good option for larger online retailers with a lot of contacts. In fact, Omnisend’s more expensive plans actually deliver even better value for money than its cheaper ones.

The question is whether you’ll outgrow its features by the time you reach this point.

For most small eCommerce businesses using WordPress, Omnisend is the first email marketing system we’d recommend. It

5. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a simple but surprisingly powerful email marketing and automation platform. The company has expanded its software system over the years into four key products:

Marketing Platform – for email marketing and automation.Chat – for adding chat widgets to your website and managing conversations.Sales CRM – a free CRM for storing and managing customer data.Transactional emails – for sending secure transactional emails for bills, payment requests, etc.

SendinBlue also offers a generous free plan, making it a great option for new and very small businesses using WordPress.

Aside from pricing, simplicity is the biggest selling point of SendinBlue. This is one of the easiest email marketing platforms to pick up and use if you don’t have previous experience with this type of software.

The email builder is a perfect example of what to expect from SendinBlue as an email marketing system. It doesn’t give you the same design freedom as some other tools but it’s fast and easy to use. The company has improved its email templates a lot in recent years, too.

The templates are decent enough to start with and the builder makes it easy to customise basic email design.

Unsurprisingly, SendinBlue isn’t going to compete with platforms like ActiveCampaign when it comes to automation. That being said, it’s more capable than the price tag might suggest.

SendinBlue includes a library of “beginner” and “advanced” automation workflows. You can use and edit these templates using the platform’s automation builder or create your own. The builder isn’t quite as intuitive as the system’s email builder but it’s easy enough to figure out.

You can also split test automation workflows, which isn’t a feature you always get from products in this price category. You can test different messages, delays between triggers and events, multichannel combinations and plenty more.

Pricing

Earlier, I mentioned SendinBlue offers a generous free plan that makes it great for new and small businesses using WordPress. The free plan covers you for up to 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts, which is a great combination with SendinBlue’s free CRM.

You can also send transactional emails on this plan (they’re counted in your 300/day limit) on this plan. The free plan also allows you to send SMS texts and WhatsApp messages but you have to pay for credits.

Paid plans start from $25/month with the Starter plan allowing you to send up to 20,000 emails per month with no daily limit.

You get the best features from SendinBlue’s Business plan but the price jump is pretty big. The plan starts from $65/month for the same 20k emails/month as the Starter plan. However, you unlock the platform’s marketing automation features, A/B testing and its advanced reporting system.

It’s a big upgrade but affordability takes a serious hit.

At this price point, you have to consider SendinBlue’s unlimited contacts allowance and the monthly email limits. For relatively small email lists, you can get better value and features from elsewhere.

However, SendinBlue is one of the cheapest options overall for companies with big email lists. For example, you can send 1 million emails per month to any number of contacts for under $700/month.

SendinBlue includes detailed pricing information and customisable estimates on its pricing page.

What we like:Free plan – Send up to 300 emails per day with SendinBlue’s free plan.Transactional emails – Few tools at this price point offer transactional emails, let alone on a free plan.Easy to use – SendinBlue is very easy to learn and use, even if the UX feels a little dated.Where they could improve:Feature depth – SendinBlue combines most of the features you could want from an email marketing tool but they often lack the same depth as other tools in this article.Basic automation – SendinBlue makes basic automation easy but flexibility is limited.Email templates – The email templates are also quite basic and you can only do so much with the editor.Who should use SendinBlue?

SendinBlue is a great email marketing system for new and small businesses using WordPress. You can send up to 300 emails per day to an unlimited number of contacts on its free plan. The platform’s features can’t compete with the likes of ActiveCampaign and SendinBlue’s more expensive plans aren’t a good match for companies with smaller email lists.

You’ll get better features for your money elsewhere if you’ve got, say, fewer than 6,000 contacts.

However, if you’ve got a large list of contacts or want to send a lot of emails, SendinBlue starts to look very affordable again. Yes, you have to accept the platform’s feature limitations. Even still, few other tools allow you to send such high volumes of emails at a comparable price point.

6. MailerLite

MailerLite is a marketing toolkit for solo enterprises and small businesses. The platform includes a built-in email marketing system and several builders for creating emails, landing pages, signup forms and even websites.

Obviously, as a WordPress user, you’re not interested in the website builder. Regardless, MailerLite has put a lot of work into developing intuitive builders. You benefit from all of this work, even if you’re only using the platform to build emails and signup forms for your website.

MailerLite includes well over 1,000 email templates that you can use or edit for your campaigns. You’ve got dozens of options to choose from for most business categories. This includes eCommerce, fashion, food, travel, sport, photography and plenty more.

You can also build emails from scratch using the email builder.

MailerLite also makes basic campaign automation incredibly easy. You’re not going to create the most advanced automation workflows with MailerLite but the platform covers the basics pretty well. You can set up custom autoresponders and campaign triggers for key events.

You can automate responses to new subscribers, birthdays exact dates or actions like form completions and email CTRs. MailerLite also has a library of automation templates for cart abandonment, digital downloads, purchases and other customer actions.

With the MailerLite WordPress plugin, you can easily create and add MailerLite signup forms to your website. MailerLite also has a separate plugin for WooCommerce, which integrates the platform’s eCommerce features – eg: cart abandonment emails.

Pricing

MailerLite runs a free plan that covers 1,000 subscribers and allows you to send 12,000 emails per month. You get access to most of the platform’s builders. You can create as many emails and signup forms as you like, up to 10 landing pages and one website.

This plan also allows you to create basic automations on this plan with single triggers. To create automations with multiple triggers, you’ll have to upgrade to one of MailerLite’s Advanced plan.

Paid plans start from $9/month for the Growing Business plan and $19/month for the Advanced plan. These starting prices still only cover you for up to 1,000 subscribers with prices gradually increasing as your list grows.

By the time you get to 10k subscribers, you’ll be looking at $47/month for the Growing Business plan and $77/month for the Advanced plan.

To see exactly how much MailerLite will cost you, take a look at the company’s pricing page.

What we like:Free plan – Send up to 12,000 emails per month on MailerLite’s free plan.Affordable automation – While it can’t compete with the likes of ActiveCampaign, MailerLite gives you multi-tigger automations at affordable prices.Usability – MailerLite is a fresh, modern platform that’s easy to learn and use.Where they could improve:Limited email templates – The templates are pretty good but there just aren’t enough of them.Feature depth – You get plenty of features for your money but depth is inconsistent.Expensive add-ons – Add-ons for websites, account managers and priority support are great, but pricey.Who should use MailerLite?

MailerLite is designed with solo enterprises and smaller businesses in mind. It’s aimed at professionals like entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, digital creatives and others looking to promote their content or services to subscribers.

It’s also a good system for smaller businesses and the free plan is great if you’re just starting out. Coverage for up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails is pretty generous for a free plan. Affordable starting prices on paid plans make the upgrade path manageable for smaller companies. too. The question is whether MailerLite’s feature depth will keep up with your business as it continues to grow.

7. Moosend

Moosend is a simple, affordable email marketing platform that allows you to send unlimited emails. Pricing is determined by the size of your contact list but you can send as many emails as you want to subscribers.

This is helpful if you’re just starting out with email marketing and you want to run a lot of tests. The platform also includes basic A/B testing features on all plans – so you don’t need to worry about tests eating into any send limits.

The email builder is also quite simple but it’ll feel familiar if you’ve used a website builder plugin for WordPress. The tool is intuitive enough but performance is a little sluggish compared to other builders. The templates are similarly basic, too, so you have to work a little harder to create high-quality designs.

It’s perfectly suitable for creating basic email designs quickly, though.

Moosend’s full set of automation features is available on every plan. You can select workflows from its library for processes like email reminders, user onboarding, cart abandonment, lead scoring and special offers.

As things stand, you’ll find 18 automation “recipes” in Moosend’s library of automation workflows that you can use and edit.

You can edit these workflows or create your own using Moosend’s automation builder. Again, it’s a relatively simple tool but it gets the job done. You can set multiple triggers in your workflows, define “and”/?or” expressions, set precise time intervals and track the performance of your automation.

Considering all of these features are available on every Moosend plan, it’s an impressive offering at an affordable entry price.

Pricing

Mosend essentially runs two plans alongside a 30-day free trial for testing out the system. The Pro plan starts from $9/month for up to 500 subscribers. As with all plans, you can send unlimited emails and you get access to all of Moosend’s automation features.

In fact, you pretty much get all of Moosend’s features on the pro plan, except custom reporting, an account manager and a few other enterprise incentives.

You’re getting a lot of power for your money at this price point.

The monthly fees increase gradually as your email list grows. Once you pass 500 subscribers, you’ll be looking at $16/month for up to 1,000 contacts. By the time you reach 10,000 subscribers, you’ll still only be paying $160/month for sending unlimited emails to your contacts. However, this is where you’ll start to feel Moosend’s feature limitations potentially holding you back.

You can find out exactly how much Moosend will cost on its pricing page.

What we like:Affordable – Moosend is one of the most affordable email marketing tools for WordPress.Reporting – Moosend’s reports are super detailed with location data, heatmaps, device insights, engagement metrics and plenty more.Feature access – Most of Moosend’s features are available on every plan.Where they could improve:Deliverability – Moosend campaigns gave us the lowest deliverability rates of any tool in this article.No CRM – The lack of a built-in CRM and limited integration options makes data management difficult.Usability – Clunky interfaces make the user experience a little frustrating, especially with the email builder.Who should use Moosend?

Moosend is a great option if you’re just getting started with email marketing. As a WordPress user, the simplicity and similar experience mean you’ll quickly learn how to use the platform. If you’ve never used features like email automation before, this is one of the best tools for learning by doing.

These are some of the most affordable entry prices into email marketing but Moosend also packs some punch with its features. By making all of its features available on every plan, you’re getting a lot of power for your money at its cheapest rates.

A/B testing is also available on every plan and this combines with some decent tracking and analytics tools. Combine this with unlimited email sends every month and you’ve got a decent setup for testing your way to early success.

Choosing the right email marketing tool for WordPress

Choosing the right email marketing software helps you deliver messages at every stage of the customer journey. It turns your WordPress website into a lead generation machine and gives you a permanent channel for delivering relevant messages to the right audience, at the right time.

Most of the tools in this article include free trials or free plans so go ahead and try every option within your budget.

Compare pricing

The table below shows the lowest price of each platform we’ve looked at today for different contact list sizes. In other words, these are the starting prices of the cheapest plans that cover up to 2,500 contacts, 10,000 contacts and 100,000 contacts.

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contactsActiveCampaign$49$139$559HubSpot$1,025$1,250$4,450Ontraport$83$208$583Omnisend$35$115$720SendinBlue*$0$16$181*MailerLite$15$47$360Moosend$32$88$624

SendinBlue doesn’t price its product based on the number of contacts on your list. Instead, your fees depend on the number of emails you send every month. So, we’ve listed the lowest price it will cost to send an average of two emails to each volume of contacts, which is pretty low for most email marketing strategies.

Our verdict

If you’re looking for the best overall balance of power and long-term value for money, ActiveCampaign is the obvious choice. Not only is it the most capable system we’ve looked at today but its prices remain affordable, even as you reach its most expensive plans.

Many options offer lower entry prices but hit you with expensive upgrade fees as your business grows. This is an important consideration because email is very much a growth marketing channel.

That being said, if you’re a small business and don’t expect that to change any time soon, there are more affordable alternatives. Several of these tools offer free plans and SendinBlue is one of the most generous around. So, if you’re looking for ultimate affordability, give a few of them a test run.

FAQCan you do email marketing with WordPress?

Yes! But you need a plugin or dedicated email marketing tool to send emails and manage your strategy.

How do I start email marketing on WordPress?

Choose an email marketing tool that meets your budget, contact list and the number of emails you need to send every month. Take a look at all plans and calculate your upgrade path (including future expenses) as your email list grows.

Can you send mass emails with WordPress?

Not without a plugin or email marketing software. All of the tools in this article allow you to send bulk emails automatically so you can run your email strategy on autopilot – no more manually sending every round of mass email.

The post Best Email Marketing Tools for WordPress in 2023 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Best Email Marketing Tools for SaaS in 2023

Email is the most important marketing channel for SaaS companies. Nothing else covers the entire customer journey with one-to-one interactions. In fact, research carried out by Omnisend finds email marketing generates an average of $40 for every $1 spent – an ROI of 3,900%.

For SaaS companies, email marketing plays a key role in most conversion actions: signups, onboarding, payments, renewals, upgrades and more. When it comes to maximising revenue and every profitable KPI (retention, customer value, etc.), email marketing is at the heart of everything.

In this article, we look at the best SaaS email marketing tools for driving growth.

What are the best email marketing tools for SaaS?

As a company that builds ventures from the ground up, we know how important email marketing is for growth-driven SaaS companies. We also know how much difference having the right email marketing software makes. This is why, every year, we update our annual review of the best email marketing platforms – to make sure we’re still using the best tools for our needs.

This data-driven approach also helps us advise other businesses on what could be the best system for them.

For SaaS businesses, we can narrow down the list of recommendations into the following email marketing systems:

ActiveCampaign – HubSpot – SendinBlue – Benchmark Email – GetResponse – SendX – MailerLite –

These systems all include specialist features for SaaS companies that will help you overcome the challenges of marketing software products. With this in mind, let’s take a quick look at some of the features you need from SaaS email marketing software.

What to look for in SaaS email marketing software

With so many email marketing tools available these days, what makes the products in this article stand out? Well, as a SaaS company, you need certain features that you’re not going to get from every email marketing provider.

Features aren’t the only thing to look out for, either. You also want an email marketing platform that has the right characteristics in terms of pricing, plans, upgrade paths, etc.

Here’s a quick review of some key features and characteristics to look for in SaaS email marketing software.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is one of the most important features of any email marketing system. Running a complete email marketing strategy involves a lot of work and you can’t manage everything manually. You need to automate campaigns so messages are sent out as customers complete key actions: signups, purchases, upgrades, support tickets, etc.

The quality of automation features varies greatly between different email marketing tools. Some are great for automating basic workflows like welcome emails and purchase confirmations. Others can automate entire marketing campaigns with multiple triggers.

Some even incorporate intelligent insights – like customer health scores – so you can automatically fire off emails when customers drop below a certain score.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring uses a variety of signals to calculate the value of leads. Value can be determined by many different factors. For example, scoring may consider the likelihood of a lead converting, how well they match your customer profile and how much revenue they could generate.

As a SaaS company, you want a lead scoring system capable of tracking events along your customer journey. For example, free trial signups are somewhat unique to software products and they’re a crucial event. So you want a scoring system that can track events like this along the SaaS marketing funnel and consider them in calculations.

Customer health scores

You also want a scoring system in place for events along the customer journey, once leads convert. Once again, many of these events will be unique to the SaaS customer journey. You’ve got the onboarding process, product engagement, upgrades, renewals and a whole bunch of other events to consider.

Given how much of the customer experience takes place in your product, you’ll need to incorporate user data into health scores. For example, you want to identify customers who start using your product less often and re-engage them. You also want to identify customers who aren’t adopting your latest features – and many other in-app variables.

For this, you need an in-app tracking system which isn’t something you’ll normally get from email marketing software. However, one of the systems we’re looking at today does include in-app tracking so you can incorporate user data into your email marketing strategy.

CRM

Many email marketing tools include a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This is important for any business but SaaS companies have a lot of customer data to manage.

A CRM helps you segment audience lists based on customer data so you can deliver more relevant email marketing campaigns to different audience types. For example, you can create campaigns for users on different plans, audiences losing engagement, loyal customers and those coming towards the end of their current subscription.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are sent to users any time they complete a transaction: purchase, upgrade, renewal, etc. You can also send transactional emails prompting users to renew at the end of their subscription or complete missed payments.

Surprisingly, many email marketing tools don’t include dedicated features for sending transactional emails. This means you have to manually create these emails and it’s not always easy to separate or manage them from other campaign types.

Ideally, you want a system that includes dedicated features for transactional emails so you can manage them as a standalone strategy.

What else should you look for in SaaS email marketing software?

We’ve touched on a couple of other features you might want to look for in SaaS email marketing software. The first of these is onboarding tools. This could include email templates for the onboarding processes and automation workflow templates for onboarding that you can quickly edit and use.

The other feature we’ve touched on is in-app tracking. This allows you to track user actions in your software and incorporate this into customer health scores, sales actions and email marketing campaigns.

You can get these features from elsewhere, such as product optimisation tools. However, getting these from the same system you use for email marketing makes it easier to incorporate this data into your email campaigns.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign ranks #1 in our annual review of email marketing tools. We’re not the only ones who rate the platform, either. It’s also the top marketing automation tool on G2 with an average score of 4.6/5 from 9,799 customer reviews. Crucially, it’s the only platform in this list that provides every feature we discussed in the previous section – and more.

This is the most powerful automation system we’ve used over the past decade.

No other tool we’ve tested provides the same level of power when it comes to automating entire marketing campaigns. You can combine multiple triggers, events and “If/Else” conditions with any data point from ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM. This includes lead scores, customer health scores and upcoming events like renewals, feature rollouts, etc.

Better yet, ActiveCampaign is the only platform we’re looking at today that provides in-app tracking. This means you can pull user data from your products and use these insights to power your email marketing and sales strategies. For example, you can create automated email campaigns to send tutorial content to users having problems with your latest feature.

You can use the same setup to help new customers complete the onboarding process, too.

First, you can create fully automated campaigns to guide new users through the setup process. Next, you can set triggers to automatically send support content to anyone who fails to complete onboarding. Meanwhile, you can track onboarding completion rates as you optimise the experience to remove friction points.

Finally, you can automatically update completion statuses with every new customer to inform your next steps. You can send automatic email messages to users who fail to complete onboarding. Or, you can reach out to them directly and see if they need any help getting started with your product.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign plans start from $29/month for its email and marketing automation product. Its CRM and sales system is a separate product but the company also runs bundles starting from $93/month for both.

We recommend established SaaS companies go for the bundle option to make full use of the CRM. However, if you have a relatively small customer base, you could start with the Marketing Lite plan and upgrade as you grow.

Once you’ve selected your plan, pricing is determined by the number of contacts you have on the system. You can find more information on ActiveCampaign’s pricing page.

What we like:Easy to use – ActiveCampaign is easy to learn for new users with minimal training, thanks to excellent usability and UX design. Email automation – You can automate advanced email campaigns across the whole customer journey using conditional logic, predictive content, intelligent insights, customer scores and plenty more features.Reasonable cost – While not the cheapest system we’re looking at today, ActiveCampaign is one the most advanced and significantly better for money than comparable email marketing platforms. Where they could improve:Reporting – ActiveCampaign has improved this aspect of its system over the years but the other tools in this article still do a better job of visualising reports for email campaign performance.Who should use ActiveCampaign?

If you want a complete email marketing system for SaaS, ActiveCampaign is hard to beat. It’s the only system we’re looking at today that includes all the specialist SaaS features we want in one platform. Aside from industry-leading automation, you get a CRM, lead scoring, customer health scores and transactional emails.

You even get in-app tracking to inform your marketing and sales campaigns. This allows you to create fully automated campaigns for onboarding, feature rollouts, renewals, upgrades and every key stage of the SaaS customer journey.

You can get started with a free trial of ActiveCampaign using the form below.

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the biggest names in business software, offering a full suite of marketing, sales and operational tools. Its ecosystem is built around an excellent CRM system that houses all of your customer data. This is the HQ of your SaaS marketing strategy, allowing you to update statuses throughout the customer journey.

You can manage your email marketing campaign using the company’s Marketing Hub.

The platform includes tools for email marketing, SEO, content marketing, social media and plenty more. This includes an email builder and a small library of email templates but the templates aren’t up to much. The designs are basic and you don’t get anything specific to SaaS companies.

Luckily, you build and save your own templates for future use.

Marketing Hub also includes HubSpot’s marketing automation system. It’s not as powerful as ActiveCampaign but it’s a capable tool that allows you to use triggers, conditions and other actions. You can automate fairly comprehensive drip campaigns and set triggers as variables to respond to user actions.

With HubSpot’s free CRM, you can use your customer data to trigger automation and automatically update customer statuses. For example, you can automatically send emails to customers who drop below a certain score or when they submit a support ticket.

HubSpot has its own reporting system for email campaigns so you can keep track of performance. All paid Marketing Hub plans also include A/B testing so you can experiment and optimise. You can test email subject lines, CTAs, email copy, etc. to find out what works best for each audience.

Pricing

HubSpot offers free plans for most of its products and a starter plan for Marketing Hub, from $20/month. However, you need to sign up for the Professional plan to start getting the best out of the system and – be warned – there’s a bit of a price jump.

The Professional plan starts from $800/month (no typo) and it’s billed at $9,600 per year. You also have to pay a $3,000 onboarding fee for this plan so that’s a $12,600 upfront fee before you even start.

This starting price covers you for up to 2,000 marketing contacts with prices increasing a further $225/month for every additional 5,000 contacts. By the time you reach 10,000 contacts, you’ll be paying $1,250/month or an annual fee of $14,994 per year.

On the positive side, HubSpot doesn’t charge for user seats so it’s better value for larger teams.

You can find out how much HubSpot will cost you on its pricing page. Just make sure you consider how much the platform will cost you in the future, as your contact list grows.

What we like:Usability – HubSpot’s ecosystem simplifies complex marketing actions, striking an impressive balance between power and usability.Free CRM – HubSpot’s basic CRM is 100% free on all plans – or as a standalone product.Documentation – HubSpot excels at documentation and content designed to help you get the best out of its software – and your email marketing strategy.Where they could improve:Expensive – You pay a big premium for minimal gains (if any) over the other tools in this article.A/B testing – A/B testing is only available on its Pro plan or higher, starting from $800/month.Who should use HubSpot?

HubSpot is best suited for SaaS companies with larger marketing teams. It’s an expensive platform but it packs a lot of features into one system and it covers you for as many user seats as you need. So, if you’ve got 10 or more people on your marketing team, the monthly fees start to get more reasonable.

Smaller teams will be better off with ActiveCampaign’s significantly lower starting prices – and its more powerful automation features.

HubSpot also lacks a lot of the SaaS-specific features you get from ActiveCampaign. On the other hand, it incorporates a lot of inbound marketing tools for SEO, content marketing, social media, etc. So, it all comes down to where your priorities lie and (potentially) how much you’re willing to pay for them.

3. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a simpler tool than both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. It also has far cheaper starting prices and one of the most generous free plans for new and small SaaS companies. So, if you’re looking for affordability over sheer power, SendinBlue could be a good option for you.

Although it can’t match the likes of ActiveCampaign for features of power, SendinBlue has most of the essentials covered. Most importantly, it has a solid set of email marketing features with an email builder, templates, automation and personalisation features.

The automation and personalisation features are the most noticeable difference from ActiveCampaign. SendinBlue can’t automate complete, multichannel campaigns but you can automate email sequences with ease.

SendinBlue’s email and automation builders are intuitive but quite basic compared to more sophisticated tools. They’re great if you’re new to email marketing or your company is only worried about covering the essentials for now.

The tools are pretty easy to pick up and use with complex settings adding to the learning curve. If you don’t need the full power of something like ActiveCampaign’s automation builder, SendinBlue is a great alternative for simplicity and affordability.

In practical terms, you can create basic campaigns for sequences like onboarding but you can’t really incorporate other channels. SendinBlue doesn’t have any in-app tracking capabilities to measure onboarding completions or identify friction points.

If you’re running web apps, you can use web events like URL visits to set a marker for onboarding completions. So, you can automate the onboarding email sequence and send follow-up messages to users who don’t reach a specified URL.

Pricing

SendinBlue’s free plan covers you for up to 300 emails per day, which works out as 9,000 emails per month on 30-day months. You get access to a lot of features on this plan, too. You get the email builder, transactional emails, SMS messaging (you have to pay for credits), a web chat widget and basic CRM system.

The big feature missing from this plan is SendinBlue’s marketing automation toolkit.

Paid plans start from $25/month for the Starter plan but you still don’t get access to SendinBlue’s automation features. The Starter plan allows you to send up to 20k emails per month with no daily limit and removes the SendinBlue branding from your emails.

It also unlocks the platform’s basic reporting and analytics system.

To access SendinBlue’s automation features, you have to sign up for its Business plan with prices starting from $65/month. This price covers you for up to 20k emails per month with prices gradually increasing as you send out more emails.

For example, anything between 20k-40k emails per month costs $75/month and you’ll be looking at $129/month by the time you reach 100k emails. You can find out exactly how much SendinBlue will cost you from its interactive pricing page.

The Business plan not only unlocks SendinBlue’s marketing automation features but also its A/B testing tools and advanced reporting. It’s a big upgrade but we wish the company gave limited access to its automation features on cheaper plans.

What we like:Free plan – Send up to 300 emails per day with SendinBlue’s free plan.Transactional emails – Few tools at this price point offer transactional emails, let alone on a free plan.Easy to use – SendinBlue is very easy to learn and use, even if the UX feels a little dated.Where they could improve:Feature depth – SendinBlue combines most of the features you could want from an email marketing tool but they often lack the same depth as other tools in this article.Automation – SendinBlue’s automation features are only available on its most expensive plans.Email templates – The email templates are also quite basic and you can only do so much with the editor.Who should use SendinBlue?

SendinBlue is best suited for new and small SaaS companies that want an affordable entry into email marketing. The free plan is one of the most generous around but the big caveat is you don’t get any automation features at all. This isn’t so bad on the free plan but you have to upgrade to its most expensive plan to get these.

That being said, even SendinBlue’s Business plan is pretty affordable at every price point, especially with no contact limitations. So, if you’re ready to sign up for the Business plan right away or you can do without the automation features until you’re ready to upgrade, you won’t have any problems.

4. Benchmark

Benchmark is an affordable, easy-to-use email marketing alternative to the more established products we’ve looked at so far. The product is still relatively new so certain aspects lack a little maturity. Most importantly, email deliverability isn’t as reliable as the other products we’ve reviewed – something that takes time to build.

The poor deliverability rates are unfortunate but every company has to start somewhere. As long as Benchmark fulfils its responsibilities with spam, data protection and other essentials, it will earn a stronger reputation with ISPs.

Elsewhere, Benchmark comes in with an impressive mix of affordability, feature choice and usability.

The platform’s email marketing features are reinforced with marketing automation, a built-in CRM, landing pages and reporting. You also get a bunch of incentive features, including smart content and lead generation tools.

The email and landing page builders are pretty simple but easy to use for any skill level. The downside is you’re not getting the most inspiring collection of templates for emails or landing pages. You’ll probably have to put a little work into putting your own templates together – not a deal breaker, but worth keeping in mind.

On the plus side, you get a built-in CRM and this is a big win at Benchmark’s price point. Again, the CRM is quite basic but it fits the platform’s philosophy of combining simple, effective toolkits.

You’ll see the same philosophy in Benchmark’s marketing automation features. You can automate basic workflows for things like welcome sequences but nothing too complex. For example, you can’t track user activity in your app and trigger emails in response to feature adoption.

Benchmark does sneak in a couple of surprise features, though. Most impressively, the system includes a contact scoring system. This automatically scores the value of leads so you can target those most likely to buy with your marketing and sales campaigns.

Pricing

Benchmark offers four plans for companies at different growth stages. First, you’ve got the free plan that covers you for up to 500 contacts and 3,500 emails per month. This plan includes the basic set of email marketing features (drag-and-drop builder, templates, etc.), sign-up forms and basic automation features.

The Lite plan starts from $8/month for the same limit of 500 contacts and 3,500 emails per month. Prices increase as your contact list grows or you exceed monthly send limits. For example, a contact list of 2,500 bumps the Lite plan up to $25/month and allows you to send 17,500 emails per month. By the time you reach 10,000 contacts, you’re looking at $67/month for up to 70,000 emails.

In terms of features, the Lite plan removes the Benchmark branding from your emails, allows you to schedule emails and gives you access to the landing page builder.

The Pro plan starts from $13/month (500 contacts, 7,500 emails), giving you the platform’s full set of automation features. You also get A/B testing and feedback collection tools with surveys and polls – among other additions.

You can see exactly how much Benchmark will cost you and which features you’ll get on its pricing page.

What we like:Entry prices – Low entry prices on all plans make advanced features accessible.Email limits – Generous email limits per list size leave plenty of room for testing.Usability – The system is easy to use for all experience levels.Where they could improve:Delivery rates – As a new provider, Benchmark is still playing catch-up with email deliverability.Functionality – We found the email authentication and “Smart Sending” features unreliable.Feature limitations – Benchmark offers a great selection of features but they lack the same depth as tools like ActiveCampaign or HubSpot.Who should use Benchmark?

Benchmark is one of the most affordable email marketing systems currently on the market. With a free plan and low entry prices, the platform is accessible to new and small SaaS companies. The monthly fees remain highly competitive at every comparable list size, too.

The monthly email send limits are also quite high. This is great if you’re signed up for the Pro plan and you want to make full use of the platform’s A/B testing features.

The elephant in the room is Benchmark’s deliverability rate. As a relatively new email marketing software provider, it doesn’t have the same reputation with ISPs as companies that have been in the game longer.

5. GetResponse

GetResponse is a bit of a wildcard pick for this article. The company has shifted focus to eCommerce in recent years so it’s not the most obvious pick for SaaS businesses. That being said, GetResponse includes most of its eCommerce features on a dedicated eCommerce plan.

So, none of this gets in the way if you’re signed up for a different plan.

GetResponse provides a multichannel platform for email marketing, SMS, chat, popups and push notifications. The platform also includes a website builder, webinars and paid advertising tools.

In this sense, it wants to be an all-in-one marketing toolkit for online businesses.

For the most part, GetResponse is easy to use, especially if you’re new to email marketing and marketing automation. However, if you’ve used other email marketing systems in the past, you’ll find GetResponse is a little different.

For example, the system includes a calendar view for scheduling email sequences. This is a really intuitive approach, especially for people with no previous email marketing experience. GetResponse is filled with little tools like this that make email marketing easier.

The irony is that these tools and features can make the learning curve larger for experienced email marketers used to more traditional systems.

The learning curve is extended by the sheer volume of features GetResponse squeezes into its platform. In some ways, this is at odds with how beginner and user friendly GetResponse tries to be. Either way, it’s probably going to take some time to get used to this system.

The reward is an affordable, easy-to-use toolkit for managing multichannel interactions across the whole customer journey.

Pricing

GetResponse’s free plan covers you for up to 500 contacts and allows you to send 2,500 emails a month. This is less generous than Benchmark’s free plan and significantly less than SendinBlue’s. Crucially, you don’t get any automation features at all on GetResponse’s free plan, either.

Instead, you can build one website with the platform’s drag-and-drop builder, create one landing page and add popups to web pages. You can also create email campaigns, access email templates and or build your own emails from scratch.

The Email Marketing plan starts from $15.58/month for up to 1,000 contacts. You can send unlimited emails on this plan and you also get access to basic marketing automation. You can automate welcome and thank-you emails and birthday emails – and tap into GetRepsonse’s automation templates.

Unfortunately, you can’t create proper drip campaigns on this plan, though.

For this, you’ll have to upgrade to the Marketing Automation plan. Prices start from $48.38/month for up to 1,000 contacts and this opens most of the platform’s automation features. The only real email and automation features missing from this plan are the eCommerce-specific features.

You can get the full breakdown of GetResponse plans and fees from its pricing page.

What we like:Multichannel features – Email marketing meets, SMS, chat and push notifications.Easy automation – The system implements basic automation actions as features, making them super easy to implement.Free plan – It may not be the most powerful free plan we’re looking at today but it’s great for new or small SaaS companies that want to use GetResponse.Where they could improve:Learning curve – GetResponse isn’t quite like other email marketing tools, which can take some getting used to.Builders – The builders lack some flexibility and default mobile optimisation.Focus on eCommerce – GetResponse has shifted focus to eCommerce recently but it has a separate plan for most of these features.Who should use GetResponse?

GetResponse is most suitable for very small and new software ventures. If your priority is to handle the basics of email marketing as quickly and easily as possible, this could be the platform for you. For example, you might be an early-stage startup simply looking to build interest in your product.

For larger SaaS companies, GetResponse is harder to recommend – especially now that it’s targeting eCommerce. It remains a pretty affordable option as your email list grows but the lack of SaaS-specific features will catch up with you eventually.

6. SendX

SendX weighs in with an affordable email marketing system for SaaS and a unique pricing strategy. We’ll go through the numbers in a moment but we’ll start with the fact you get access to all of SendX’s features, no matter how much you pay.

The company runs one plan with pricing based on the size of your contact list. This means you get all of the platform’s features from day one without any upgrades or additional fees.

You can also send unlimited emails, regardless of how much you’re paying. Crucially, the platform also includes its own (basic) A/B testing features, which give you the freedom to experiment as much as you like.

Overall, SendX is a relatively basic email marketing system but it’s also one of the most affordable we’re looking at today.

The email builder is pretty simple but it’s more than good enough for building basic emails. Likewise, the templates aren’t the most inspiring so you may need to put a bit more time into customisation.

On the plus side, usability is pretty sold for the most part although we did run into some stability issues. For example, we’d sometimes have to reload the page for certain elements to show or reset some layout quirks.

Nothing serious enough to warrant investigation.

As you might expect, automation is also quite simple. You can set up autoresponders and create drip campaigns with ease. SendX also includes its own library of automation workflows with a drag-and-drop builder for editing or building your own.

The system only supports ~25 triggers so there’s a limit to how much you can automate. Still, you can automate a dozen or so of the most common interactions with ease.

Pricing

SendX doesn’t offer a free plan but we can forgive this, given how affordable the platform is. As mentioned earlier, the company only runs one plan with pricing determined by the size of your contact list. You can send unlimited emails per month and access all of the platform’s features, no matter how much you’re paying.

Pricing starts from $7.49/month for up to 1,000 subscribers. By the time you reach 5,000 subscribers, you’ll be paying $29.99/month and 10,0000 contacts will cost you $59.99/month.

You can have up to 120,000 contacts on the system and you’re still only paying $337.49/month. Any more than this and you’ll have to book a call to speak to the company’s sales team about a quote.

This is probably the simplest pricing strategy you’ll find for an email marketing system. If you want more information, you can visit the SendX pricing page to confirm how much it’ll cost you.

What we like:Unlimited emails – You can send unlimited emails on every SendX plan.One plan – You get access to all of the platform’s features – no upgrades or price jumps.Affordable – SendX is one of the most affordable email marketing tools (per list size).Where they could improve:Limited features – You get the most important features at an affordable rate but not much else.Reporting – Basic email reporting leaves you wanting deeper insights from elsewhere.Stability – We find the system a little buggy/glitchy at times – nothing serious, mostly cosmetic.Who should use SendX?

SendX is great for small companies that need a simple, affordable email marketing solution. It doesn’t include any SaaS-specific features but it’s a solid system for building your early email marketing strategy.

Affordable prices combine with unlimited emails and access to all of its features. Like most of its features, SendX’s A/B testing tools are pretty basic but you get full access to them, no matter how much you’re paying. This, combined with unlimited email sends gives you a lot of room to test your way to success.

7. MailerLite

MailerLite is geared more towards eCommerce than SaaS but it’s an interesting option for smaller software companies. The platform includes builders for everything: email campaigns, landing pages, automation, popups – even websites.

It also includes A/B testing for emails and pages with click maps and a bunch of optimisation tools. You can test email campaigns, landing pages, popups and almost every asset you create. You can even sell digital products with subscriptions and take payments with the platform’s Stripe integration.

Let’s be clear, the digital product selling capabilities are designed for selling digital assets, not software subscriptions.

MailerLite’s builders are intuitive and give you quite a lot of freedom to customise designs. You don’t get a huge amount of templates to work with and the ones you do get are pretty basic. So you’ll need to spend a bit of time working with the builders early on, especially if you’re creating landing pages, popups and other assets – as well as email campaigns.

You’ll appreciate MailerLite’s usability if this is the case.

The automation features in MailerLite are pretty basic. In fact, the company has only recently launched multi-trigger automation. It’s a welcome addition but it’s clear this isn’t one of MailerLite’s biggest strengths.

The good news is MailerLitre makes basic automation very affordable. Basic email automation features are available on every plan, including the free plan. Multi-trigger automations are only available on its most expensive plan but prices are still affordable – as we’ll see in the pricing section.

Pricing

MailerLite’s free plan includes up to 1,000 subscribers and allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month. You can create up to 10 landing pages on this plan and add signup forms and popups to web pages.

As mentioned earlier, you also get MailerLite’s basic email automation features on this plan.

Upgrading to the Growing Business plan allows you to send unlimited emails, sell digital products and create dynamic email content. The plan starts from $9/month for up to 1,000 contacts with moderate price increases as more subscribers join your list.

By the time you have 5,000 subscribers, you’ll be paying $29/month on the Growing Business plan and $125/month once you pass 20,000 contacts.

Pricing for the Advanced plan starts from $19/month, allowing you to use multiple triggers in your automation workflows. It’s worth taking a look at MailerLite’s pricing page to see how much you’ll pay for your list size and which features are available on each plan.

What we like:Free plan – Send up to 12,000 emails per month on MailerLite’s free plan.Affordable automation – While it can’t compete with the likes of ActiveCampaign, MailerLite gives you multi-trigger automations at affordable prices.Usability – MailerLite is a fresh, modern platform that’s easy to learn and use.Where they could improve:Limited email templates – The templates are pretty good but there just aren’t enough of them.Feature depth – You get plenty of features for your money but depth is inconsistent.Expensive add-ons – Add-ons for websites, account managers and priority support are great, but pricey.Who should use MailerLite?

MailerLite is great for companies that want a simple and affordable email marketing solution. It’s probably most suitable for very new or small SaaS companies that don’t need advanced features like in-app tracking or customer health scores.

The platform combines a valuable mix of multichannel asset builders with A/B testing and other analytics tools. It’s an interesting option for email and website optimisation, especially if you’re only just getting started.

At some point, most SaaS companies will want to upgrade to something more sophisticated. However, MailerLite is a great choice if you want an affordable but capable system for building your first email list and our first marketing campaigns.

Choosing the right email marketing tool for SaaS

Choosing the right email marketing solution is crucial for SaaS companies. This is the system you’re going to use to keep customers engaged, help them get the best out of your product and encourage them to upgrade/renew at the crucial moment.

We’ve looked at a lot of different systems in this article for a variety of company sizes. Some of these are great for early-stage ventures but don’t provide the depth of features for mature software companies. So take a good look at your current needs, your growth goals and what you’ll need from email marketing software over the next five years or so.

Most of the tools we’ve looked at today offer free plans or free trials so it’s worth trying out every option within your budget.

Compare pricing

This table shows the lowest price of each platform we’ve looked at today for different contact list sizes. So this is the minimum you’ll pay for up to 2,500 contacts, 10,000 contacts and 100,000 contacts on each system.

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contactsActiveCampaign$49$139$559HubSpot$1,025$1,250$4,450SendinBlue*$0$16$181*Benchmark$25$67$475GetResponse$23.78$64.78$441.98SendX$14.99$44.99$299.99MailerLite$15$47$360

Keep in mind that SendinBlue is the only platform that doesn’t price its software based on contact list size. Instead, you pay for the volume of emails you send each month and any other interactions – eg: SMS messages.

So the prices listed above cover enough emails to send an average of two emails to every contact at each list size. For example, $181/month is the minimum you’ll pay to send two emails to 100,000 contacts every month.

Our verdict

ActiveCampaign is the clear winner in our recommendations for SaaS email marketing software. It’s the only platform that offers enough SaaS-specific features like in-app tracking and customer health scores for managing a complete SaaS email marketing strategy.

With all of the other options, you’ll have to get certain features from other tools or you’ll simply outgrow them. If you’re a new or very small software company, you might get better value for money from some of the cheaper tools we’ve looked at today.

Just keep in mind that the goal is to drive growth with email marketing. If all goes well, you’ll need a platform like ActiveCampagin sooner or later – a system that will keep up with you as you grow and continue to drive more revenue.

FAQWhat is SaaS email marketing?

Software companies use SaaS email marketing to send strategic messages to leads and customers throughout the product cycle. It’s used to convert leads into paying customers, help new users complete the onboarding process and get the most value out of products. The aim is to maximise revenue-driving actions: signups, purchases, renewals, upgrades, etc.

How important is email marketing for SaaS?

Email marketing is the most important strategy for SaaS companies. It’s the only channel that gives you direct contact with leads and customers throughout the customer cycle. An effective email marketing strategy connects you with customers for every important SaaS event: signups, onboarding, engagement, feature rollouts, feedback, customer support and more.

Why use SaaS email marketing software?

Software companies can’t manage a complete email marketing strategy manually. You need software to automate email delivery and help you create campaigns faster. This way, you can develop a strategy that covers the whole customer cycle and run it on autopilot. From here, you can focus your efforts on analytics and experimentation, testing alternative creatives to get the best results.

The post Best Email Marketing Tools for SaaS in 2023 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

ActiveCampaign Review 2023: A Detailed, Data-Backed Review

ActiveCampaign were an underdog when we first reviewed them over ten years ago. Since then, they’ve become the most popular marketing automation platform with over 150,000 small business customers.

Still, no marketing automation software is perfect.

In this ActiveCampaign review we’ll uncover ActiveCampaign’s pros and cons from 11 years experience using ActiveCampaign across our ventures, as well as the experience of the ActiveCampaign users we interviewed as part of our annual email marketing guide research. 

You’ll see examples of automation sequences we use to scale our business, and learn the good and bad aspects of ActiveCampaign’s email builder, CRM, automations and more.  

What makes ActiveCampaign different?

With over 670 email marketing tools on the market, you might be wondering what makes ActiveCampaign different – and who it’s ideal for. 

Having tested many of these tools, my view is that ActiveCampaign is the most feature-rich and easy-to-use platform that’s also affordable. 

Of course, there are more feature-rich platforms out there (e.g. HubSpot) but they’re prohibitively expensive. There are easier-to-use and cheaper platforms (e.g. MailerLite and Benchmark) but their functionality is more limited. 

I’ve talked about this in more detail, as well as a visual walkthrough of ActiveCampaign’s platform in our latest setup tutorial video.

ActiveCampaign’s Pros & Cons

We’ll explore the main features of ActiveCampaign’s platform in detail in the next section, but at a glance these are the main strengths and weaknesses of ActiveCampaign in comparison to other marketing automation software.

ProsVisual automations – ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is one of the best we’ve used. It’s both easy to use, has 135 triggers and actions, as well as 500 pre-built automation recipes to fast-track automating your marketing and sales.Customer success guarantees – ActiveCampaign makes 22 guarantees around service and trust. These range from free migration and a 2-year price lock, to making guarantees around data privacy and deliverability. 900 Integrations – ActiveCampaign offers 900 integrations, including deep native integrations with most CRM and eCommerce platforms like Salesforce and Shopify.Easy to use – As you’ll see in the next section, ActiveCampaign is easy to use and takes very little time or training to use.Optimization features – ActiveCampaign’s split testing and predictive optimization tools mean you can ‘set and forget’ your email marketing to self-optimize over time.ConsThe CRM – ActiveCampaign’s CRM is okay for small sales teams, but it is lacking in functionality for larger or more complex use cases.Recent price changes – Until recently, you could start using ActiveCampaign from $9/month. In the last year, ActiveCampaign increased its pricing, removed this lower tier and introduced bundles. This has made their pricing more complex and expensive. This is a particular issue given the long-standing downside that ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan.Reporting – While ActiveCampaign’s reporting is powerful and robust (it essentially pulls data from Looker) the data visualisation is bland and uninspiring compared to other tools.

ActiveCampaign’s Pricing

ActiveCampaign’s pricing has changed a lot in recent months. The biggest change is that you can now buy just their CRM, marketing automation and email product – or a bundle containing both.

The pricing below is based on the marketing plan, though you can use the tool on ActiveCampaign’s pricing page to see which plan you’d likely need and to whether a bundle would be more cost-effective.

LitePlusProfessional1,000 contacts$29$49$149 2,500 contacts$49$99$1495,000 contacts$79$149$209 10,000 contacts$139$229$339 25,000 contacts$229$379$54950,000 contacts$339CustomCustom75,000 contacts$449CustomCustom

ActiveCampaign has four pricing tiers:

Lite – This plan has a limit of one user and includes features for unlimited email marketing and marketing automation. This plan starts at $29/month.Plus – This plan has a limit of 3 users, and includes CRM, landing pages, eCommerce integrations and more advanced automation and reporting features. This plan starts at $49/month.Professional – This plan has a limit of 5 users and includes machine learning optimization features (we’ll review these later in the article), a Salesforce integration, attribution reporting and other advanced features. This plan starts at $149/monthEnterprise – This plan has a limit of 10 users and features enterprise-grade security and compliance features like SSO, HIPAA support, custom mail servers and more. This plan is priced on a customized basis. 

A Detailed Look at ActiveCampaign’s Features

With these pros and cons covered, let’s take a deeper dive into ActiveCampaign’s platform. Feel free to jump ahead to one of the following sections if you’re interested in learning about a specific area:

Email MarketingCRMMarketing AutomationReportingLanding PagesFormsSupportEmail Marketing 

ActiveCampaign’s email builder is one of the few we’ve used that’s as good for beginners as it is for advanced marketers. It’s drag and drop, auto-saving, and it just works. 

But it’s not simplistic either. You can edit the HTML, insert content blocks that would usually require a developer (e.g. countdown timers, videos and eCommerce products), and split test almost anything you can think of.

One of my favourite things about ActiveCampaign is the ability to optimize your marketing with personalization and split testing.

For example, you can create conditional content to display different content to contacts based on any field (saving you from sending out lots of variations of the same email). For critical emails, you can even create variations of the content and let ActiveCampaign’s predictive content algorithm show the most-likely to convert content to each contact for you. 

When it comes to templates there are four options. You can choose from the 150 pre-designed templates, use a basic template (i.e. a layout with no design), a past campaign, or start from scratch. For those looking to send emails that look personal, you can also choose between plain text and HTML. 

To help you improve deliverability, ActiveCampaign has a handy range of checks for spam filters, email client compatibility and you can preview how your email appears on different devices. 

When it comes to sending emails, one feature I like about ActiveCampaign is that you can segment who your email is sent to based not only on a contact’s list but on any condition – from whether they’ve visited a certain page on your website, to their geography, or based on company information.

The segmentation options will of course depend on what information you collect about your contacts – which brings us onto the next part of ActiveCampaign’s platform.

CRM

Combining your email marketing software and CRM is one of the best decisions you can make when choosing a tool, as your CRM is generally the source of truth when it comes to information about your contacts. 

This provides invaluable opportunities to trigger emails when your leads change statuses, buy products, or take actions on your website. 

This is all achievable with ActiveCampaign’s CRM, which is built around an intuitive deal pipeline.

When you click into any deal on your pipeline you can see the information about that company and the associated contacts. If you’ve installed site tracking, you’ll see every action they’ve taken on your website, as well as a history of interactions made with your email campaigns and automation sequences.

Contacts (i.e. people) have a similar view, though with more emphasis on the specific information you’ve captured about that person. It’s here that you can also see which lists, automations, and tags are applied to that contact. 

It’s also here where you’ll find lead scoring. This is one of those features that can make or break your entire sales process. When it’s set up correctly, it creates clarity around which leads your people should focus on and how good a job your marketing team is doing at nurturing cold leads into warm leads.

For one of our ventures we use lead scoring to determine whether a lead is cold, marketing qualified, or sales qualified. We also use it to measure the health of existing customers.

Cold lead (has a lead score below 7 points)MQL (has a lead score between 7-14 points) – We apply points when people register for our webinars, visit key pages on our site, and engage with our emails. The purpose of this is to separate engaged leads from unengaged leads.SQL (has a lead score above 14 points) – We use the BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) methodology for this. Once we know all four of these criteria and they’ve above our agreed thresholds, the lead is considered sales qualified.

Setting up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign doesn’t take long and makes it much easier to set clear KPIs for marketing and sales. You can also identify whether the % of leads that you’re converting into marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads is increasing or decreasing over time and more.

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s CRM

While the CRM is great for small teams, our experience with ActiveCampaign’s CRM has been that it tends to get a little bit cumbersome when you have a large number of deals and contacts. Where we’ve tried to collaborate with larger sales teams, they’ve often ended up using Salesforce instead and integrating this with ActiveCampaign to manage the automations in ActiveCampaign. 

On the whole though, this is more of a cautionary tale to set clear guidelines with your team on how to use tags, custom fields and other CRM data, rather than a specific critique of ActiveCampaign’s CRM. 

Marketing Automation

With 135 triggers and actions to build your automation sequences from, ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is leaps and bounds beyond those offered by competitors like HubSpot and Mailchimp. 

It’s also the easiest automation builder we’ve used. In fact, new staff have been able to use ActiveCampaign in their first week with no training or onboarding needed. This is largely down to the flowchart style automation builder that’s visually self-explanatory. 

If you’re just getting started, ActiveCampaign has over 500 pre-built automation recipes. These are particularly good for eCommerce businesses, as you can integrate your eCommerce platform (e.g. Shopify or WooCommerce) and use automation sequences that run when someone buys a product, abandons a checkout, or uses a discount code.

Triggers and actions

You can trigger an automation to start when almost anything changes to a contact or deal. While not exhaustive, these include when:

A contact submits a form, joins a list, visits a web page, opens/clicks an email, achieves a goal, has a tag added/removed, a field change or lead score updated. A deal in the CRM changes status, deal stage, value, owner or has a task added.A conversion occurs, or a person abandons a cart.A date arrives (useful for birthdays, contract renewals, and holiday promotions).

You can then build out your automation workflows with a combination of conditions and actions. Conditions tend to comprise mostly of “If/Else” rules, waits, and go-to’s, while actions broadly fall into three channels for communicating with your contacts – email, SMS, and site messages (notifications that appear on your website). 

Here’s an example of a SaaS onboarding sequence we built showing each of these steps. This sequence is triggered when a contact subscribes to a list. We then have a condition to wait until the time is 2pm on a weekday (when we have the highest open rates). We then send a series of educational emails on how to use the software.

Split testing

While email split testing is nothing new, few marketing automation tools allow you to split test paths of an automation sequence. ActiveCampaign was among the first to do this, and in my opinion it’s one of the best features in its platform.

This is because you can test hypotheses like “Does sending 10 emails vs. 5 emails, sending the emails over a week vs. a month, or combining SMS and email vs. just email improve your conversion rate?”

This also means that your automated email sequences can improve over time because you can set up unlimited split tests to refine your automation sequences while you focus elsewhere.

By running all of our emails as split tests, we’ve been able to increase the open rates of some of our key email campaigns by up to 300%.

Reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reports have always been a little too reminiscent of a dull powerpoint presentation for my liking, and there’s a lot of room to improve the data organization and visualization.

With that said, reporting should be judged on whether or not it provides answers to questions, and how actionable the insights are. To be fair to ActiveCampaign, the data is actionable and insightful – thanks to Goals, integrations, and attribution. 

Goals

One action I didn’t cover in the section on marketing automation is goals.

In essence, you can trigger a goal being achieved in ActiveCampaign when a contact does something – whether that’s buying a product, completing an automation sequence, or opening an email. 

This enables the goal and conversion attribution report, which shows who’s achieved the goal, the conversion rate, touchpoints and, my favourite – time-to-completion. This means you can track how long, on average, it takes to get a lead to convert, buy a product, or anything else. This is a great metric to then try and reduce.

One habit I recommend is ensuring every automation sequence you build has a goal. This allows you to see how all of your automation sequences are performing at a glance.

eCommerce revenue reporting

For eCommerce users, ActiveCampaign is able to integrate with your store and work out how much revenue is generated from your campaigns and automation sequences, enabling you to assign a clear ROI to every email campaign and automation.

ActiveCampaign currently offers deep data integrations with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Square.

Campaign reporting

ActiveCampaign also offer all of the standard reports for tracking campaign performance including list growth tracking, open/click through rate tracking, as well as reports to identify when your open rates are highest and how they vary by different mail clients. 

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reporting can be summed up as function over form. You’ll find everything you need to optimize your email marketing, but just don’t expect them to look great. 

Landing Pages

If you’re after a simple landing page builder to webinar, event or simple one-page microsite landing pages, ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder will do the trick. But if your needs are more complex then you’ll likely be better off using dedicated landing page software. 

While the landing page builder itself is easy and intuitive to use, it lacks any kind of advanced functionality for personalizing your pages. I’d say this is a missed opportunity for ActiveCampaign given they have an in-built CRM, but I’m not convinced that ActiveCampaign users are likely using this feature to build dozens of PPC landing pages or run their websites from here (as is sometimes the case with HubSpot users).

Instead, this area of ActiveCampaign is little more than a lightweight page builder for publishing simple landing pages without the need of a developer. 

Forms

Forms play a crucial role in capturing leads to build your list. ActiveCampaign offers four types of forms – inline, floating bars, modals, and floating boxes. 

ActiveCampaign’s form builder is easy to use and offers a variety of ways to share and embed your forms – with the CSS and HTML fully editable to ensure it matches your website. 

One handy feature when designing forms is the ability to load a preview of the website URL the form is going to display on, so that you can match colours and ensure it looks good in situ.

Finally, If you use Zapier, you can also connect your ActiveCampaign forms to your other tools easily to ensure that your contact data gets piped to the right place. 

Customer Support

In ten years as a user, I’ve had to contact ActiveCampaign’s support a total of three times. Each time, someone based from the US has responded within 24 hours – with a solution. 

That is to say, while ActiveCampaign’s support is good – you probably won’t need to use it because they put so much emphasis on prevention and over cure. For example, you get access to:

ActiveCampaign University – a series of videos and guides to get startedFree 1-to-1 strategy sessionsA free migration serviceIn-person events and workshopsAn active community forum, Slack community and Facebook groupA help center with a huge range of how-to guides

But if you do run into an issue, they do have phone, email and live chat support.

Still on the fence?

There are few tools that I wholeheartedly recommend on a daily basis, but ActiveCampaign is one of them. If you’re still on the fence – they offer a 14-day free trial, which I’d recommend giving a try. If your experience is anything like ours, you won’t be disappointed. Otherwise, you might be interested in trying some of these alternatives.

ActiveCampaign alternatives

When friends and family have asked which email automation platform I’d recommend, there are only three instances where I’ve recommend a different tool to ActiveCampaign:

If you’re an eCommerce business you may want to consider Klaviyo, which is dedicated solely to eCommerce email marketing.If you’re a B2B service business with high-value leads (and a decent budget) you may want to consider HubSpot. If you’re a coach, trainer or educator looking to build out sales funnels with a membership site or gated content you may want to consider ClickFunnels.

As mentioned at the start of this review, ActiveCampaign is unique in that it’s easy-to-use, feature-rich and affordable. Most of ActiveCampaign’s competitors make a trade-off in at least one of these areas that make it difficult to whole-heartedly recommend. 

FAQWhat is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing and sales automation platform that combines a CRM, email marketing, automation, landing page builder and forms.

Is ActiveCampaign good?

Yes. ActiveCampaign is one of the highest-rated platforms among all of the automation software we’ve tested with 78% of users saying they are very satisfied. 

What is ActiveCampaign used for?

ActiveCampaign is used by marketing and sales teams to automatically communicate with their list of contacts via email, SMS and site messages.

Is ActiveCampaign compliant?

ActiveCampaign is compliant with some of the most stringent data protection and security regulations including GDPR, SOC 2, CCPA, and HIPAA. 

Is ActiveCampaign worth the cost?

Whether or not ActiveCampaign is worth the cost depends on your specific needs and budget. If you require advanced features such as customer segmentation, automation, and CRM integration, and are willing to pay for them, then ActiveCampaign may be worth the cost. If you have a smaller budget and only need basic email marketing capabilities, there may be more affordable options available.

Who is ActiveCampaign best for?

ActiveCampaign is suitable for businesses of all sizes, but it may be particularly well-suited for small to medium-sized businesses that require advanced email marketing features such as split testing, segmentation and automation. It is also a good option for businesses that are looking for a platform that integrates with a CRM system.

Why is ActiveCampaign better than Mailchimp?

It’s difficult to say definitively whether ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp is better, as both platforms have their own strengths and are suitable for different types of businesses. ActiveCampaign offers more advanced features such as customer segmentation and automation, and it also has a CRM system built in. Mailchimp is a more affordable option and is better suited for businesses with basic email marketing needs. It’s important to consider your specific needs and budget when deciding which platform is best for you. You can compare ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp head-to-head here.

Is ActiveCampaign easy to learn?

ActiveCampaign is a feature-rich email marketing platform, so there is a learning curve involved in getting the most out of the tool. However, the platform does offer a range of resources to help users get started, including documentation, video tutorials, and customer support. Many users find that ActiveCampaign is easy to learn once they have familiarised themselves with the platform’s features and workflows.

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The post ActiveCampaign Review 2023: A Detailed, Data-Backed Review appeared first on Venture Harbour.

ActiveCampaign Review 2023: An Honest Review of The Pros & Cons

Once an underdog, ActiveCampaign has grown into the most popular marketing automation platform with over 150,000 small business customers.

Still, no marketing automation software is perfect.

In this ActiveCampaign review we’ll uncover ActiveCampaign’s pros and cons from 11 years experience using ActiveCampaign across our ventures, as well as the experience of the ActiveCampaign users we interviewed as part of our annual email marketing guide research. 

You’ll see examples of automation sequences we use to scale our business, and learn the good and bad aspects of ActiveCampaign’s email builder, CRM, automations and more.  

What makes ActiveCampaign different?

With over 670 email marketing tools on the market, you might be wondering what makes ActiveCampaign different – and who it’s ideal for. 

Having tested many of these tools, ActiveCampaign is one of the most feature-rich and easy-to-use platforms that’s also affordable. 

Of course, there are more feature-rich platforms out there (e.g. HubSpot) but they’re prohibitively expensive. There are easier-to-use and cheaper platforms (e.g. MailerLite and Benchmark) but their functionality is more limited. 

I’ve talked about this in more detail, as well as a visual walkthrough of ActiveCampaign’s platform in our latest setup tutorial video.

ActiveCampaign’s Pros & Cons

We’ll explore the main features of ActiveCampaign’s platform in detail in the next section, but at a glance these are the main strengths and weaknesses of ActiveCampaign in comparison to other marketing automation software.

ProsVisual automations – ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is one of the best we’ve used. It’s both easy to use, has 135 triggers and actions, as well as 500 pre-built automation recipes to fast-track automating your marketing and sales.Customer success guarantees – ActiveCampaign makes 22 guarantees around service and trust. These range from free migration and a 2-year price lock, to making guarantees around data privacy and deliverability. 900 Integrations – ActiveCampaign offers 900 integrations, including deep native integrations with most CRM and eCommerce platforms like Salesforce and Shopify.Easy to use – As you’ll see in the next section, ActiveCampaign is easy to use and takes very little time or training to use.Optimization features – ActiveCampaign’s split testing and predictive optimization tools mean you can ‘set and forget’ your email marketing to self-optimize over time.ConsThe CRM – ActiveCampaign’s CRM is okay for small sales teams, but it is lacking in functionality for larger or more complex use cases.Recent price changes – Until recently, you could use ActiveCampaign from $9/month. ActiveCampaign recently increased its pricing, removed this lower tier and introduced bundles, making their pricing more complex and expensive. This is a particular issue given the long-standing downside that ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan.Reporting – While ActiveCampaign’s reporting is powerful and robust (it essentially pulls data from Looker) the data visualisation is bland and uninspiring compared to other tools.

ActiveCampaign’s Pricing

ActiveCampaign’s pricing has changed a lot in recent months. The biggest change is that you can now buy just their CRM, marketing automation and email product – or a bundle containing both.

The pricing below is based on the marketing plan, though you can use the tool on ActiveCampaign’s pricing page to see which plan you’d likely need and to whether a bundle would be more cost-effective.

LitePlusProfessional1,000 contacts$29$49$149 2,500 contacts$49$99$1495,000 contacts$79$149$209 10,000 contacts$139$229$339 25,000 contacts$229$379$54950,000 contacts$339CustomCustom75,000 contacts$449CustomCustom

ActiveCampaign has four pricing tiers:

Lite – This plan has a limit of one user and includes features for unlimited email marketing and marketing automation. This plan starts at $29/month.Plus – This plan has a limit of 3 users, and includes CRM, landing pages, eCommerce integrations and more advanced automation and reporting features. This plan starts at $49/month.Professional – This plan has a limit of 5 users and includes machine learning optimization features (we’ll review these later in the article), a Salesforce integration, attribution reporting and other advanced features. This plan starts at $149/monthEnterprise – This plan has a limit of 10 users and features enterprise-grade security and compliance features like SSO, HIPAA support, custom mail servers and more. This plan is priced on a customized basis. 

A Detailed Look at ActiveCampaign’s Features

With these pros and cons covered, let’s take a deeper dive into ActiveCampaign’s platform. Feel free to jump ahead to one of the following sections if you’re interested in learning about a specific area:

Email MarketingCRMMarketing AutomationReportingLanding PagesFormsSupportEmail Marketing 

ActiveCampaign’s email builder is one of the few we’ve used that’s as good for beginners as it is for advanced marketers. It’s drag and drop, auto-saving, and it just works. 

But it’s not simplistic either. You can edit the HTML, insert content blocks that would usually require a developer (e.g. countdown timers, videos and eCommerce products), and split test almost anything you can think of.

One of my favourite things about ActiveCampaign is the ability to optimize your marketing with personalization and split testing.

For example, you can create conditional content to display different content to contacts based on any field (saving you from sending out lots of variations of the same email). For critical emails, you can even create variations of the content and let ActiveCampaign’s predictive content algorithm show the most-likely to convert content to each contact for you. 

When it comes to templates there are four options. You can choose from the 150 pre-designed templates, use a basic template (i.e. a layout with no design), a past campaign, or start from scratch. For those looking to send emails that look personal, you can also choose between plain text and HTML. 

To help you improve deliverability, ActiveCampaign has a handy range of checks for spam filters, email client compatibility and you can preview how your email appears on different devices. 

When it comes to sending emails, one feature I like about ActiveCampaign is that you can segment who your email is sent to based not only on a contact’s list but on any condition – from whether they’ve visited a certain page on your website, to their geography, or based on company information.

The segmentation options will of course depend on what information you collect about your contacts – which brings us onto the next part of ActiveCampaign’s platform.

CRM

Combining your email marketing software and CRM is one of the best decisions you can make when choosing a tool, as your CRM is generally the source of truth when it comes to information about your contacts. 

This provides invaluable opportunities to trigger emails when your leads change statuses, buy products, or take actions on your website. 

This is all achievable with ActiveCampaign’s CRM, which is built around an intuitive deal pipeline.

When you click into any deal on your pipeline you can see the information about that company and the associated contacts. If you’ve installed site tracking, you’ll see every action they’ve taken on your website, as well as a history of interactions made with your email campaigns and automation sequences.

Contacts (i.e. people) have a similar view, though with more emphasis on the specific information you’ve captured about that person. It’s here that you can also see which lists, automations, and tags are applied to that contact. 

It’s also here where you’ll find lead scoring. This is one of those features that can make or break your entire sales process. When it’s set up correctly, it creates clarity around which leads your people should focus on and how good a job your marketing team is doing at nurturing cold leads into warm leads.

For one of our ventures we use lead scoring to determine whether a lead is cold, marketing qualified, or sales qualified. We also use it to measure the health of existing customers.

Cold lead (has a lead score below 7 points)MQL (has a lead score between 7-14 points) – We apply points when people register for our webinars, visit key pages on our site, and engage with our emails. The purpose of this is to separate engaged leads from unengaged leads.SQL (has a lead score above 14 points) – We use the BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) methodology for this. Once we know all four of these criteria and they’ve above our agreed thresholds, the lead is considered sales qualified.

Setting up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign doesn’t take long and makes it much easier to set clear KPIs for marketing and sales. You can also identify whether the % of leads that you’re converting into marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads is increasing or decreasing over time and more.

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s CRM

While the CRM is great for small teams, our experience with ActiveCampaign’s CRM has been that it tends to get a little bit cumbersome when you have a large number of deals and contacts. Where we’ve tried to collaborate with larger sales teams, they’ve often ended up using Salesforce instead and integrating this with ActiveCampaign to manage the automations in ActiveCampaign. 

On the whole though, this is more of a cautionary tale to set clear guidelines with your team on how to use tags, custom fields and other CRM data, rather than a specific critique of ActiveCampaign’s CRM. 

Marketing Automation

With 135 triggers and actions to build your automation sequences from, ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is leaps and bounds beyond those offered by competitors like HubSpot and Mailchimp. 

It’s also the easiest automation builder we’ve used. In fact, new staff have been able to use ActiveCampaign in their first week with no training or onboarding needed. This is largely down to the flowchart style automation builder that’s visually self-explanatory. 

If you’re just getting started, ActiveCampaign has over 500 pre-built automation recipes. These are particularly good for eCommerce businesses, as you can integrate your eCommerce platform (e.g. Shopify or WooCommerce) and use automation sequences that run when someone buys a product, abandons a checkout, or uses a discount code.

Triggers and actions

You can trigger an automation to start when almost anything changes to a contact or deal. While not exhaustive, these include when:

A contact submits a form, joins a list, visits a web page, opens/clicks an email, achieves a goal, has a tag added/removed, a field change or lead score updated. A deal in the CRM changes status, deal stage, value, owner or has a task added.A conversion occurs, or a person abandons a cart.A date arrives (useful for birthdays, contract renewals, and holiday promotions).

You can then build out your automation workflows with a combination of conditions and actions. Conditions tend to comprise mostly of “If/Else” rules, waits, and go-to’s, while actions broadly fall into three channels for communicating with your contacts – email, SMS, and site messages (notifications that appear on your website). 

Here’s an example of a SaaS onboarding sequence we built showing each of these steps. This sequence is triggered when a contact subscribes to a list. We then have a condition to wait until the time is 2pm on a weekday (when we have the highest open rates). We then send a series of educational emails on how to use the software.

Split testing

While email split testing is nothing new, few marketing automation tools allow you to split test paths of an automation sequence. ActiveCampaign was among the first to do this, and in my opinion it’s one of the best features in its platform.

This is because you can test hypotheses like “Does sending 10 emails vs. 5 emails, sending the emails over a week vs. a month, or combining SMS and email vs. just email improve your conversion rate?”

This also means that your automated email sequences can improve over time because you can set up unlimited split tests to refine your automation sequences while you focus elsewhere.

By running all of our emails as split tests, we’ve been able to increase the open rates of some of our key email campaigns by up to 300%.

Reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reports have always been a little too reminiscent of a dull powerpoint presentation for my liking, and there’s a lot of room to improve the data organization and visualization.

With that said, reporting should be judged on whether or not it provides answers to questions, and how actionable the insights are. To be fair to ActiveCampaign, the data is actionable and insightful – thanks to Goals, integrations, and attribution. 

Goals

One action I didn’t cover in the section on marketing automation is goals.

In essence, you can trigger a goal being achieved in ActiveCampaign when a contact does something – whether that’s buying a product, completing an automation sequence, or opening an email. 

This enables the goal and conversion attribution report, which shows who’s achieved the goal, the conversion rate, touchpoints and, my favourite – time-to-completion. This means you can track how long, on average, it takes to get a lead to convert, buy a product, or anything else. This is a great metric to then try and reduce.

One habit I recommend is ensuring every automation sequence you build has a goal. This allows you to see how all of your automation sequences are performing at a glance.

eCommerce revenue reporting

For eCommerce users, ActiveCampaign is able to integrate with your store and work out how much revenue is generated from your campaigns and automation sequences, enabling you to assign a clear ROI to every email campaign and automation.

ActiveCampaign currently offers deep data integrations with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Square.

Campaign reporting

ActiveCampaign also offer all of the standard reports for tracking campaign performance including list growth tracking, open/click through rate tracking, as well as reports to identify when your open rates are highest and how they vary by different mail clients. 

Our verdict on ActiveCampaign’s reporting

ActiveCampaign’s reporting can be summed up as function over form. You’ll find everything you need to optimize your email marketing, but just don’t expect them to look great. 

Landing Pages

If you’re after a simple landing page builder to webinar, event or simple one-page microsite landing pages, ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder will do the trick. But if your needs are more complex then you’ll likely be better off using dedicated landing page software. 

While the landing page builder itself is easy and intuitive to use, it lacks any kind of advanced functionality for personalizing your pages. I’d say this is a missed opportunity for ActiveCampaign given they have an in-built CRM, but I’m not convinced that ActiveCampaign users are likely using this feature to build dozens of PPC landing pages or run their websites from here (as is sometimes the case with HubSpot users).

Instead, this area of ActiveCampaign is little more than a lightweight page builder for publishing simple landing pages without the need of a developer. 

Forms

Forms play a crucial role in capturing leads to build your list. ActiveCampaign offers four types of forms – inline, floating bars, modals, and floating boxes. 

ActiveCampaign’s form builder is easy to use and offers a variety of ways to share and embed your forms – with the CSS and HTML fully editable to ensure it matches your website. 

One handy feature when designing forms is the ability to load a preview of the website URL the form is going to display on, so that you can match colours and ensure it looks good in situ.

Finally, If you use Zapier, you can also connect your ActiveCampaign forms to your other tools easily to ensure that your contact data gets piped to the right place. 

Customer Support

In ten years as a user, I’ve had to contact ActiveCampaign’s support a total of three times. Each time, someone based from the US has responded within 24 hours – with a solution. 

That is to say, while ActiveCampaign’s support is good – you probably won’t need to use it because they put so much emphasis on prevention and over cure. For example, you get access to:

ActiveCampaign University – a series of videos and guides to get startedFree 1-to-1 strategy sessionsA free migration serviceIn-person events and workshopsAn active community forum, Slack community and Facebook groupA help center with a huge range of how-to guides

But if you do run into an issue, they do have phone, email and live chat support.

Still on the fence?

There are few tools that I wholeheartedly recommend on a daily basis, but ActiveCampaign is one of them. If you’re still on the fence – they offer a 14-day free trial, which I’d recommend giving a try. If your experience is anything like ours, you won’t be disappointed. Otherwise, you might be interested in trying some of these alternatives.

ActiveCampaign alternatives

When friends and family have asked which email automation platform I’d recommend, there are only three instances where I’ve recommend a different tool to ActiveCampaign:

If you’re an eCommerce business you may want to consider Klaviyo, which is dedicated solely to eCommerce email marketing.If you’re a B2B service business with high-value leads (and a decent budget) you may want to consider HubSpot. If you’re a coach, trainer or educator looking to build out sales funnels with a membership site or gated content you may want to consider ClickFunnels.

As mentioned at the start of this review, ActiveCampaign is unique in that it’s easy-to-use, feature-rich and affordable. Most of ActiveCampaign’s competitors make a trade-off in at least one of these areas that make it difficult to whole-heartedly recommend. 

FAQWhat is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing and sales automation platform that combines a CRM, email marketing, automation, landing page builder and forms.

Is ActiveCampaign good?

Yes. ActiveCampaign is one of the highest-rated platforms among all of the automation software we’ve tested with 78% of users saying they are very satisfied. 

What is ActiveCampaign used for?

ActiveCampaign is used by marketing and sales teams to automatically communicate with their list of contacts via email, SMS and site messages.

Is ActiveCampaign compliant?

ActiveCampaign is compliant with some of the most stringent data protection and security regulations including GDPR, SOC 2, CCPA, and HIPAA. 

Is ActiveCampaign worth the cost?

Whether or not ActiveCampaign is worth the cost depends on your specific needs and budget. If you require advanced features such as customer segmentation, automation, and CRM integration, and are willing to pay for them, then ActiveCampaign may be worth the cost. If you have a smaller budget and only need basic email marketing capabilities, there may be more affordable options available.

Who is ActiveCampaign best for?

ActiveCampaign is suitable for businesses of all sizes, but it may be particularly well-suited for small to medium-sized businesses that require advanced email marketing features such as split testing, segmentation and automation. It is also a good option for businesses that are looking for a platform that integrates with a CRM system.

Why is ActiveCampaign better than Mailchimp?

It’s difficult to say definitively whether ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp is better, as both platforms have their own strengths and are suitable for different types of businesses. ActiveCampaign offers more advanced features such as customer segmentation and automation, and it also has a CRM system built in. Mailchimp is a more affordable option and is better suited for businesses with basic email marketing needs. It’s important to consider your specific needs and budget when deciding which platform is best for you. You can compare ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp head-to-head here.

Is ActiveCampaign easy to learn?

ActiveCampaign is a feature-rich email marketing platform, so there is a learning curve involved in getting the most out of the tool. However, the platform does offer a range of resources to help users get started, including documentation, video tutorials, and customer support. Many users find that ActiveCampaign is easy to learn once they have familiarised themselves with the platform’s features and workflows.

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The post ActiveCampaign Review 2023: An Honest Review of The Pros & Cons appeared first on Venture Harbour.

7 Best Marketing Automation Tools for 2023

The marketing automation industry has skyrocketed to an expected $6.4bn in 2024.

At the same time, the list of marketing automation platforms continues to grow with new tools hitting the scene every year, making it harder than ever to find the right platform for you.

Despite an endless variety of marketing automation services to choose from, I’m going to focus on seven that stood out after reviewing over 100+ email marketing & automation tools.

ActiveCampaignSendinblueOrttoHubSpotConvertKitOmnisendRejoiner

Unlike other comparisons of marketing automation tools, our recommendations are based on a comprehensive study that looked at over 100+ marketing automation products and included surveying over 10,000 marketers for their feedback on their marketing automation provider. I’ve also shared my personal experiences using these platforms where possible.

You can access the dataset we use to determine the top 10 marketing automation software providers at the end of this article.

Jump to:

The pros and cons of each marketing automation software providerA comparison of marketing automation software pricesThe conclusion: which solutions are best for different types of business?

First things first, though. With so much variation between services, what do you need to look out for when comparing software providers?

What to consider when comparing marketing automation software

Before we go into the pros and cons, or the pricing comparisons, it’s important to know what to look out for.

I know several friends who signed up for marketing automation software, only to realise one month down the line that it wasn’t compatible with their CRM. Ouch.

It’s also very easy to get burned by the sliding scale pricing structures and unexpected additional costs.

Ultimately, it pays to do your research. Below are a few important considerations and questions to have in mind when comparing the marketing automation software.

Let’s start off with the deal-breakers. These are the first things you should look out for when comparing marketing automation software providers.

Deal breakers:Pricing – Most marketing automation tools are priced on a sliding scale with additional costs for training and add-ons. They can become ludicrously expensive very quickly if you’re not careful. I’d recommend taking a 3-5 year perspective when weighing up your options.Usability – Marketing automation is inherently complex. As such, usability is extremely important as it’ll determine how much value your team extract from the tool. The less intuitive the software is, the more you will pay for training, and the more headaches your team will endure.Integrations with your existing software – This is extremely important, yet sometimes overlooked. Some marketing automation tools only allow integration with a small number of third-party apps / CRM systems.

Now let’s look at the preferences. Some of these may be deal breakers for you, but they’re mostly to do with what features the software providers.

Preferences:CRM / sales capabilities – Some marketing automation tools have an in-built CRM system with lead scoring, and advanced tagging capabilities. Others have no in-built CRM, as they expect you to connect the software with your existing CRM.Email capabilities – while all marketing automation tools enable email marketing in some capacity, some are better than others. Do you need drip campaigns? subject line A/B testing? Demographic segmentation?Content capabilities – Do you need to create landing pages, webinars, or other forms of content to send out to your contacts? While most marketing automation tools enable this, some are easier to use and more extensive than others.e-commerce capabilities – Do you sell products online? Some marketing automation tools, such as Rejoiner and Omnisend, integrate directly into your e-commerce platform.Social media capabilities – Some marketing automation tools integrate with Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to control social advertising or build social apps from within the service. Some also offer social media monitoring, to pull comments made on social media platforms into your CRM. These features are usually nice-to-haves, but it might be worth considering whether or not they would be useful for you or not.Training & set-up – Another consideration is how long will it take your company to implement the marketing automation software, and at what cost? This is not particularly well advertised on any of the software provider’s websites, so be sure to ask.The pros and cons of marketing automation software providers

In this section, I’ve written a quick summary of the main pros and cons of each of the marketing automation providers.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is used by over 150,000 small businesses and is one of the overall best marketing automation platforms. They were also the first to pioneer the visual automation sequence builder.

At Venture Harbour, we decided to move all of our ventures to ActiveCampaign back in 2016. As a team of six running nine ventures, you can imagine how important a role automation plays – and so our bar was quite high when reviewing marketing automation tools.

But ActiveCampaign has delivered – and then some.

As a result of being so intuitive, our team is able to build complex automation sequences with virtually no support or training required. Predictive sending, predictive content and automation split tests enable us to let our automation sequences optimise themselves using machine learning.

Impressively, ActiveCampaign’s pricing makes them one of the most affordable marketing automation tools on the market. And unlike tools like HubSpot, which start cheap and become eye-watering expensive, ActiveCampaign remains affordable as you grow.

The final point worth noting about ActiveCampaign is that they’re constantly releasing new features to stay in the lead. In the last year, ActiveCampaign’s released predictive content, attribution, site messages and more. Another recent feature that we’ve found to be a great time-saver is being able to import and share automation ‘recipes’ in a couple of clicks to build on sequences built by the ActiveCampaign community.

Frankly, I can’t really think of anything negative to say about ActiveCampaign without being too pernickety. The worst part of ActiveCampaign is probably their reporting, though it’s still better than most automation providers.

You can learn more about ActiveCampaign and try their platform for free here.

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue first became highly-regarded as an underdog in the world of transactional email tools before they began to make waves with their marketing automation product.

Granted, Sendinblue’s visual marketing automation builder may not be as visually attractive as ActiveCampaign’s, but it’s no less powerful. In fact, Sendinblue’s automation builder is so free of bells and whistles that it’s actually quite refreshing to use after using some of the tools that require contacting support or reading documentation just to complete basic tasks.

So, what are the main benefits?

1. Pricing – Sendinblue is one of the most affordable email marketing tools and offers marketing automation for free if you have fewer than 2,000 contacts. While most companies looking for marketing automation will have more than this, their pricing is still reasonable and based largely on email volumes.

2. Deliverability – Having used Sendinblue for one of our ventures, I can vouch for the fact that Sendinblue’s deliverability rates are very good – and recent research reports put them as having one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry.

The main downside we’ve faced using Sendinblue is their sending limits. While it’s likely a flipside of their deliverability rate being so good, Sendinblue limits how many emails you can send. While it appears to be a monthly limit, it’s actually a daily limit (the monthly limit is divided by 30). This has caused us several issues when going over our quota has meant emails end up being put on hold until the next day.

With that said, we still use Sendinblue to this day and consider it to be a good, stable, and relatively simple marketing automation tool. Being a French company, Sendinblue was one of the first marketing automation companies to declare GDPR compliance, and their history in transactional email has meant that they’ve been able to offer many marketing automation features that are difficult to find elsewhere, such as SMS messaging and real-time deliverability reporting.

3. Ortto

When I first tested Ortto, I had fairly low expectations. I expected it to be just another carbon-copy marketing automation tool with nothing new to add.

But that all changed when I saw the best-designed canvas for building email automation sequences that I’ve come across.

If you’ve ever built an email automation sequence, you know how quickly they can become confusing. Ortto solves this in a rather quirky way, by allowing you to annotate your automation sequences with emojis, stickers and explanations, making it easy for teams to collaborate on building sequences. 

While it can look a bit messy at first glance, this feature makes it possible to revisit an automation sequence a year after building it and quickly get up to speed with that’s going on.

Another feature I love about Ortto is its ability to trigger actions in your other tools inside Ortto. This saves having to configure integrations using a tool like Zapier and makes your sequences much easier to understand. 

Ortto’s reporting is also world-class. By default, Ortto encourages you to set a goal for each automation sequence, so that you can later view reports around how that automation sequence is hitting its goal.

For example, if I set a goal for my lead nurturing journey to convert 20% of contacts to buy my product, I can then produce a report like this. 

Starting at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, Ortto is far from the cheapest option, particularly considering that Ortto does not offer an in-built CRM. However, Ortto is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we had to move from ActiveCampaign, this is likely where we’d go. 

4. HubSpot

Let’s not kid ourselves, HubSpot is over-hyped.

Pretty much everything that HubSpot offers can be found elsewhere at a much lower cost. And yes, while it is true that HubSpot does offer a free version of their software, this doesn’t include any of their marketing automation features. If you’re looking to use HubSpot for marketing automation, you’ll need to cough up at least $800/month (paid annually), plus an additional $3,000 in onboarding fees. In other words, if your marketing automation budget is below $12,600/year, you may want to move on to our next suggestion.

But to give credit where its due, their software is really intuitive and easy to get the hang of, which for a non-technical small business can make all of the difference. The analytics are incredibly good, which makes it dead easy for business owners to know what’s working and what’s not.

I can see how many small businesses would be impressed with their offering, but it would be remiss not to point out the fact that HubSpot’s pricing can get expensive as you grow.

HubSpot charges onboarding fees in the $3,000 – $6,000 range for professional and enterprise customers (these are the only plans that include marketing automation), on top of a typical monthly cost between $800 – $2,500.

If it were me, I’d take this money and instead spend it on ActiveCampaign, which is a significantly more advanced marketing automation platform. With what’s left over, you could get a pro subscription to a good piece of SEO software like SEMrush or Deepcrawl, and do some training on Google Analytics.

I might be missing something, but based on demoing their software it does seem like an over-priced piece of software, but for many small businesses it does exactly what it should – enables them to grow faster.

5. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is the simplest marketing automation tool in this guide. Designed primarily for bloggers and content creators, it’s a great tool for beginners looking for basic marketing automation software.

Do not expect any bells and whistles – ConvertKit doesn’t even have email templates, as they encourage users to send plain-text emails to increase engagement.

If you’re just starting out, ConvertKit is a decent option that’s also quite affordable, but it’s really only a viable option for individual content-based businesses.

6. Omnisend

Founded in 2014, Omnisend is a relatively new tool on the marketing automation scene, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming a leading marketing automation tool for e-commerce companies.

While their platform is far from the best designed, they have a number of innovative features to help e-commerce marketers automate their marketing across numerous channels.

By only working with e-commerce companies, Omnisend’s email templates are all designed to solve specific challenges faced by e-commerce marketers, from reducing cart abandonment to driving product reviews.

But the main reason why Omnisend is the no-brainer marketing automation tool for e-commerce businesses is the fact that they natively integrate with your e-commerce platform.

Whether you use Shopify, BigCommerece, WooCommerce, or any other major platform, Omnisend will hook in, so that you can trigger your campaigns based on your customer’s behaviour and see reports on how your marketing automation impacts sales.

Besides their platform’s mediocre look and feel, the only remaining downside to address with Omnisend is cost.

To access the features that make Omnisend interesting, you’ll need a PRO account which starts at $150/month for 10,000 contacts. Unlike HubSpot, Omnisend’s pricing does remain quite reasonable as you grow, but nonetheless – it’s not cheap.

7. Rejoiner

Our final contender is for those wishing to delegate management of their marketing automation to a team of experts.

Rejoiner is a managed marketing automation platform. Unlike most tools where you pay your subscription fee and must then figure out how to use the tool to grow your business, Rejoiner shares this accountability.

Their platform is intuitive and is particularly well-tailored to e-commerce and SaaS businesses, where incremental improvements can result in major uplifts in revenue.

But it’s their à la carte services on everything from marketing automation strategy to the copywriting, design and deliverability testing, that separates them from every other marketing automation tool. 

I should probably also point out that it works. When we were analysing over 100+ marketing automation tools in our study, Rejoiner came out extremely high for one key reason: They had one of the highest satisfaction scores for customers.

As you’d expect, Rejoiner comes with a hefty price tag. I’m told that a typical client of theirs pays $4,000 – $6,000/month for their platform and services.

For the majority of readers, this isn’t going to be the right tool. But – if you’re looking for a marketing automation tool for a large SaaS or e-commerce platform, and don’t want building campaigns to take up precious internal resource, Rejoiner is the tool for the job.

Comparing the price of different marketing automation software providers

It’s quite a challenge to do a like for like comparison of marketing automation service prices, as some price tiers are based on the number of users, while others are on features or number of contacts in your database.

I’ve done my best to do an accurate comparison of the different services at three different contact list sizes:

ToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contactsActiveCampaign$39$111$299Omnisend$36$102$570Sendinblue$39$66$173ConvertKit$49$119$679Ortto$149$249Not PublicRejoiner$120$320$1,195HubSpot$150$420$3,100

Conclusion

No marketing automation tool is definitively the best. I’ve summarised which options I think are best for companies of different sizes, and sectors.

For small businesses

For small businesses, the best marketing automation software in 99% of cases is likely to be ActiveCampaign. This is particularly true if you need an all-in-one sales & marketing platform that includes a CRM.

However, if you already have a CRM, I’d add Ortto as a consideration if budget allows, as their automation journey builder is second-to-none.

Lastly, if you’re running an e-commerce business then Omnisend will blow both of the options above out of the water.

For medium-sized businesses

For medium-sized businesses, the best marketing automation software is likely to be either ActiveCampaign, Ortto or HubSpot.

As mentioned, HubSpot is a reasonably significant investment, so I would suggest that it’s a good option for agencies or B2B service companies, where the cost would likely be offset by winning one or two extra clients per year.

If you run an e-commerce business, then Omnisend (or Rejoiner if budget allows) are far better options than the three above.

For enterprise businesses

For larger businesses, it’s likely you’ll need that deliverability, security, support and training become more of a consideration.

Sadly, most other enterprise marketing automation tools (e.g. Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua) that tick these boxes are frankly pretty average, and their products are complex and difficult to use.

ActiveCampaign are one of the few exceptions. Their enterprise plan includes all of the dull, but necessary, features – from dedicated IPs and SLAs to SSO and account management, that you’d expect as an enterprise client.

And for large e-commerce brands, Rejoiner is likely the best tool for the job.

The post 7 Best Marketing Automation Tools for 2023 appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Best Email Marketing Tools for eCommerce in 2023

Email marketing is the most profitable channel for eCommerce brands. According to Omnisend, email marketing generates an average of $40 for every $1 spent – an impressive 3,900% ROI. That’s almost twice as much as SEO ($22.24), which is the second-most profitable digital channel for online stores.

But eCommerce email marketing involves a lot of work. To achieve the kind of ROI email marketing is capable of, you need the right tools to maximise returns while minimising the manual workload involved.

Whether you’ve just launched your online store or are looking to maximise growth through email marketing, we’ll help you find the right tool for you.

What are the best email marketing options for eCommerce?

At Venture Harbour we objectively review and test hundreds of email marketing tools as part of our annual review of the best email platforms.

As an eCommerce brand, your list of options quickly narrows down to five email marketing tools that have deep integrations with the main eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce etc.

Based on our extensive analysis, the five email marketing systems that provide the key features eCommerce brands need:

ActiveCampaign – Omnisend – Klaviyo – Drip – Privy –

These all have deep eCommerce integrations and specialist features for campaigns like cart abandonment and product recommendations.

Who needs eCommerce email marketing software?

If you’re using an eCommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, you should get some basic email marketing features included. For example, Shopify has its own Shopify Email app and WooCommerce includes a simple email system, which you can enhance with extensions.

How good is the Shopify Email app?

The Shopify Email app is fine for new eCommerce businesses just starting out. It allows you to create email campaigns visually and segment email lists to target specific audiences. The segmentation features are pretty powerful but the app is lacking in terms of automation features and A/B testing.

The email templates are pretty uninspiring, too, and the email builder is quite glitchy.

What we like:One-click automation templates – Because there’s no need to set up integrations, you can ‘turn on’ automation workflows without any backend setup. Any sales driven by email marketing are automatically attributed to the correct emails or automations. While other tools make this setup easy, it does feel like magic having this all working without any additional work.Segmentation – Shopify allows you to build segments by building logic-based queries. While this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, it’s extremely powerful and makes building highly-targeted audiences very easy. Where they could improve:More automation templates – Shopify offers six automation templates. Six! That’s 494 less than the next tool on our list.Email template designs – The Shopify email templates feel like they’ve been put together as an afterthought, and lack the design finesse of those offered by the other five tools. No A/B testing – Perhaps the biggest giveaway that Shopify’s email offering is a bit of an afterthought is the lack of one of the most important features for optimising email campaigns.It’s glitchy – The email designer can get glitchy with parts of the page jumping off the screen as you type and sometimes needing to refresh the page to unstick the editor. How good is WooCommerce for email marketing?

As standard, WooCommerce comes with a basic email system that you can access in the back end of WordPress. You’ll find it under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails.

You can create and send basic emails to customers and use triggers to automatically send emails at key events: purchases, cart abandonment, etc. You can also select customers and send emails to groups but you don’t get any real segmenting features.

This means you basically have to do everything manually.

Thankfully, you can add more functionality to WooCommerce’s email system with extensions. The AutomateWoo extension is a good place to start, costing $99 per year, which works out at $8.25 per month. It’s good value at this price point but it still lacks the advanced features of the tools we’re looking at in this article.

What we like:Triggers – You can set triggers to automatically send eCommerce emails to customers.WooCommerce extensions – You can enhance WooCommerce’s default email system with extensions (at a cost).Where they could improve:Features – Even with extensions like AutomateWoo, you’re not getting a complete email marketing system.Automation – A lack of automation features requires you put a lot of manual work into email marketing.No A/B testing – You’re not getting any analytics or testing features to optimise your campaigns.WordPress interface – Managing emails in WordPress’ dated back-end system is a pain.

The built-in email systems on platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce are fine for the newest eCommerce companies. However, if you want to generate real ROI from email marketing, you need a more advanced system. Above all, you want a platform that helps you create campaigns quickly and run them automatically across the whole customer cycle.

Otherwise, you’ll simply never find the time to manage a complete email marketing strategy.

Now, let’s take a look at our first eCommerce email marketing tool.

1. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign ranks #1 in our annual email marketing platform review. It’s also the top-rated marketing automation tool on G2 with an average score of 4.6/5 from 9,799 customer reviews. It’s a similar story on Capterra with an average score of 4.6/5 from a smaller collection of 2,100 reviews.

In other words, this is one of the most reputable email marketing systems currently available.

Crucially, ActiveCampaign’s platform is built around its customer relationship management (CRM) system. This is where you store all of your customer data. You can build in-depth profiles of contacts and use this information to power your email marketing campaigns.

For example, you can create campaigns for contacts that spend above a certain amount every year. Alternatively, you can target customers who usually spend a lot but haven’t made a purchase in a while. Taking this even further, you can personalise email campaigns based on customers’ purchase habits, frequency and any other data point you have stored in the CRM.

ActiveCampaign turns customer data into your most profitable asset.

ActiveCampaign is one of the most powerful marketing automation systems available. You create advanced automation workflows using multiple triggers, conditional logic and personalisation to deliver relevant messages at every step of the customer journey.

You don’t need to create all of the workflows yourself, though. ActiveCampaign comes with an extensive library of automation workflows that you can use and edit to suit your own needs.

The drag-and-drop automation builder makes it easy to visually create workflows and edit templates from the library. We’re yet to find another email marketing platform that gives you this much freedom to automate campaigns to almost every customer action imaginable.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign plans start from $29/month but you need to sign up for the Plus plan to start accessing its best eCommerce features. For the Plus plan, pricing starts at $49/month for up to 1,000 contacts. Pricing is determined by the number of contacts in the CRM and you can find more information on ActiveCampaign’s pricing page.

What we like:Easy to use – ActiveCampaign is easy to learn for new users with minimal training, thanks to excellent usability and UX design. Email automation – You can automate advanced email campaigns across the whole customer journey using conditional logic, predictive content, intelligent insights, customer scores and plenty more features.Reasonable cost – While not the cheapest system we’re looking at today, ActiveCampaign is one the most advanced and significantly better for money than comparable email marketing platforms. Where they could improve:Reporting – ActiveCampaign has improved this aspect of its system over the years but the other tools in this article still do a better job of visualising reports for email campaign performance.Who should use ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is the best eCommerce email marketing tool if you want to maximise ROI. If you’re serious about email marketing and you want to achieve the biggest results with minimal input, this is the platform for you.

ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation technology allows you to run entire campaigns on autopilot. Many email marketing platforms help you automate campaigns around single triggers or a basic set of combinations. However, ActiveCampaign gives you complete freedom to automate campaigns on almost any combination of trigger and target contacts on any data point.

You can get started with a free trial of ActiveCampaign using the form below.

2. Omnisend

Omnisend is the first email marketing platform we’re looking at that’s designed specifically for eCommerce companies. The key benefit of this is every aspect of the platform is designed for online stores. In this regard, the biggest advantage over ActiveCampaign is Omnisend’s reporting features.

Without needing to set anything up, you get eCommerce-focused reporting that’s ready to use from day one. This includes deliverability insights, showing how many of your emails make it into customers’ inboxes. Deliverability is such an important metric for email marketers that it’s frustrating more platforms don’t provide these insights.

Aside from deliverability, you can also view interaction metrics to track open rates, engagement, CTRs and conversions – all from the same dashboard.

Omnisend is a pretty good system for email automation, too, although it’s no match for ActiveCampaign (few tools are). Even still, Omnisend includes a library of workflow templates covering the most common eCommerce interactions. As a result, it’s fast and easy to set up automation for cart abandonment, purchase confirmations, order status updates and other interactions.

You can’t automate full campaigns like can with ActiveCampaign or personalise messages to the same extent.

If you try out both tools, you get a sense of how capable they are from their automation builders. ActiveCampaign allows you to create significantly more complex automation with multiple triggers, conditions and variables. With Omnisend, you’re going to create more basic automation but its relatively simple builder will help you do the basics faster.

If you want the most powerful eCommerce email marketing system, ActiveCampaign is the clear winner. However, if you want a slightly simpler system that helps you cover most of the customer cycle as quickly and easily as possible, Omnisend makes a strong case for itself.

Pricing

Omnissend’s free plan is one of the most generous currently available for eCommerce companies. It covers you for up to 250 contacts and allows you to send up to 500 emails per month. You can also send up to 500 web push notifications and 60 SMS messages to contacts.

You get access to most of Omnisend’s features on the free plan, too.

If you can deal with these limitations, you’re getting an impressively powerful multichannel system for free. Obviously, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan once you exceed these limitations but you’ll be ready to invest in more growth by this stage.

The Standard plan starts from $16/month for 251-500 contacts and the Pro plan from $59/month – also for 251-500 contacts. Pricing increases in increments of 500 contacts with the Standard plan jumping up to $20/month for 501-1,000 contacts, $25/month for 1,001-1,500 contacts and so on.

You can see how much Omnisend will cost you for different contact list sizes on the company’s pricing page.

What we like:Reporting – You get eCommerce focused reporting that’s ready to use from day one.Deliverability – Omnisend offers a range of features to maintain high deliverability, including email warm-up (sending emails gradually to improve your sender reputation) and insightful reports to monitor your deliverability and reputation.eCommerce content blocks – Omnisend offers lots of content blocks to integrate products and discounts directly into your email campaigns. Their form templates also include a range of creative ways to engage visitors – such as with a wheel of fortune.Where they could improve:A/B testing limitations – While you can add splits in automation sequences, we weren’t able to set a goal to run effective A/B tests within an automation sequence.Templates – The templates are visually underwhelming.The campaign builder – Performance is a little sluggish compared to the other tools we’ve tested.Who should use Omnisend?

Omnisend is great for new and small eCommerce companies looking for a free or affordable email marketing system. It’s also great for companies with larger email lists, too. Once you get into the more expensive Omnisend plans, it starts to offer great value for money.

In fact, it offers better value for money than both ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo (the next system we’re looking at) for equivalent list sizes

The downside is that Omnisend can’t match ActiveCampaign’s most advanced email marketing and automation features. Once you’ve automated everything you can with Omnisend, it’s difficult to increase your email marketing ROI with your existing resources. Let’s be clear, this is still one of the best email marketing systems available but ActiveCampaign’s automation features will take you further.

3. Klaviyo

Klaviyo was one of the first companies to provide an email marketing system specifically for eCommerce companies. Like Omnisend, the focus on eCommerce can make it easier to set up basic campaigns faster. Likewise, Klaviyo also does an excellent job with reporting – in fact, it does even better than Omnisend.

The platform uses predictive analytics to forecast revenue predictions. It also sets benchmarks for you to target, based on the performance of your eCommerce rivals. These provide meaningful targets for you to hit with your email marketing campaigns and make it easier to attribute revenue to them.

Klaviyo’s campaign builder is more intuitive than Omnisend’s, too. In terms of UX design, both builders are similarly impressive but Klaviyo’s provides smoother performance. The email templates are designed to an even higher standard, too.

The thing is, Onmisend would win this comparison against most competitors but Klaviyo really excels here. If an intuitive email builder and quality templates are priorities for you, Klaviyo will win a lot of bonus points.

At the same time, it loses some points when it comes to automating campaigns. Overall, Klaviyo comes pretty close to Omnisend, allowing you to automate the most common eCommerce interactions. However, its automation templates are a little simplistic and it certainly can’t compete with ActiveCampaign.

Pricing

Klaviyo also offers a free plan for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month. It also allows you to send up to 150 SMS messages per month, far more than the 60 messages Omnisend’s free plan gives you.

That being said, unlike Omnisend, Klaviyo doesn’t support web push notifications at all.

Also, keep in mind that Klaviyo is more expensive than both Omnisend and ActiveCampaign for comparable list sizes. This is the biggest drawback with Klaviyo’s paid plans, especially if you’re also considering Omnisend.

In fairness, Klaviyo offers the more usable system and its reporting features are a real step up from both Omnisend and ActiveCampaign.

It all comes down to how much you’re willing to pay for these. If you’re comparing this platform with Omnisend, Klaviyo makes a stronger case for itself. However, if you’re weighing it up against ActiveCampaign, it’s more difficult to recommend Klaviyo when, overall, you’re getting more from ActiveCampaign at a lower price point.

What we like:Email templates – These are some of the best eCommerce email templates we’ve seen.Benchmarks – Klaviyo sets tangible targets for you to hit, based on the performance of similar eCommerce companies.Predictive forecasts – Intelligent insights model when a customer is likely to buy from you, or how much you’re likely to make in a future month enabling you to better allocate your time and budget.Where they could improve:It’s expensive – Klaviyo brings some powerful features to the table but you have to for the privilege.Automation – The range of automation actions are simplistic and lacking sophisticated automation actions such as split testing paths.Email campaign editor – A tad basic and it offers only one eCommerce-specific content block (a list of products from a product feed).Who should use Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is best for larger eCommerce companies that will benefit the most from its predictive insights. At the same time, it could be a solid option for high-turnover retailers with smaller teams. If you don’t have in-house design expertise, Klaviyo’s campaign builder and templates could save you from hiring external designers.

4. Drip

Drip specialises in eCommerce email marketing and lead generation with email capture forms and popups. In many ways, it’s the simplest platform featured in this article so far but this may benefit newer and smaller eCommerce companies.

If you want a platform that will help you do the basics as quickly as possible, Drip could be ideal.

The campaign editor helps you create emails, web forms and popup designs from a single tool. You can use and edit Drip’s templates to create campaigns faster or build your own from scratch.

The editor is quite basic but the templates are pretty good and Drip has kept them updated over the years. This means you can create basic campaigns remarkably quickly, even if you don’t have much experience with email marketing.

Drip’s simplicity may be limiting for larger or more experienced eCommerce companies but the platform provides an excellent option for newcomers.

As expected, the biggest limitations reveal themselves once you start to automate campaigns. Again, the automation builder is pretty basic and you can only select from a limited number of actions. The platform includes 20 basic automation templates but many of these are duplicates for different eCommerce platforms.

For example, there are five templates for Shopify websites and the same five are available for WooCommerce. You can build your own workflows using the editor tool but, again, you’re limited to what you can automate.

If automation is a priority, you’ll probably want to look eslewhere.

Pricing

Drip runs a simple pricing model with one plan, starting from $39/month for up to 2,500 contacts. This increases to $49/month for up to 3,000 contacts, $69/month for up to 3,500 contacts and so on.

You can send unlimited emails every month and you get access to all of the platform’s features. The simple pricing model means you don’t have to worry about feature restrictions or upgrades – you only pay more for larger contact lists.

You can find out how much Drip will cost for your current email list on its interactive pricing page.

What we like:Simplicity – Everything about Drip is simple, possibly too simple for larger or experienced eCommerce users, but a great option for newcomers. Where they could improve:Templates – While the templates included are quality, we would like to see more of them and more eCommerce-specific options.Campaign builder – The workflow UX could improve with drag-and-drop editing and enhanced functionality.Content blocks – More eCommerce content blocks in the email campaign builder.Who should use Drip?

Drip is most suitable for new and small eCommerce websites. If you want a simple, affordable system that makes the basics as easy as possible, Drip is definitely worth trying. Likewise, if you’re new to email marketing and you want an easy entry point, this will get you off to a good start.

Just keep in mind that limited automation means you’ll only drive so much growth. The good news is that, if you do outgrow Drip, it’ll happen at a point where it’s still easy to switch to another system. You won’t be tied down by thousands of automation workflows or segmented lists that are a nightmare to migrate.

5. Privy

Privy isn’t a complete email marketing system in the same vein as the other tools we’ve looked at today. The product first launched as a conversion tool for capturing leads with popups, banners and coupons. However, the company has expanded its product over the years to include more email marketing features.

Now, it just about makes a case for being a standalone email marketing tool for the newest and smallest eCommerce stores.

That being said, most companies will be better off using Privy alongside a more comprehensive email marketing system. In fact, the company itself recommends doing this. So we suggest using Privy as an extension of your email marketing system for capturing more leads and building bigger email lists.

In terms of email marketing features, Privy now includes an email builder and its own library of templates. The templates aren’t particularly inspiring but perfectly usable for basic campaigns. The email builder isn’t too sophisticated, either, so you probably won’t be winning any awards for campaign design.

Realistically, Privy’s builder and templates are only an upgrade if you’re coming from the built-in email features of WooCommerce. Even the Shopify Email app gives you a better builder and audience segmentation than Privy.

However, Privy’s strengths lie in its conversion and email capture tools (popups, banners and coupons).

Unsurprisingly, automation isn’t much of a strong point with Privy, either. There’s no automation builder at all and, instead of true workflows, the platform’s version of “automations” are simply autoresponders.

In most regards, this is the weakest email marketing system we’ve looked at today. However, Privy is an excellent tool for building email lists and you can’t do anything in email marketing without contacts on your list.

It’s particularly effective for new and smaller eCommerce companies looking to capture their first email leads. For obvious reasons, these are the companies least likely to need advanced email marketing features.

Pricing

Privy offers a free plan for up to 100 email contacts – ideal for building your first email list. You get full access to the platform’s popup features on this plan but you don’t get any of its email marketing features. This is no loss on a free plan designed for companies building their first list of contacts, though.

Pricing for the Starter Plan starts from $30/month for up to 1,500 contacts. You can send unlimited emails on this plan and you also get full access to Privy’s email marketing features.

The Growth Plan starts from $45/month for up to 2,000 email contacts and 75 SMS contacts.

You can visit Privy’s pricing page to find out how much it will cost you for your current list.

What we like:Conversion tools – Pre-built popup templates improve conversion rates for key eCommerce actions (cart abandonment, cross-selling, etc.).Reporting – Privy tracks the revenue generated from each campaign or popup built in the platform.Where they could improve:The overall email marketing offering – Privy isn’t far from being a full eCommerce marketing platform but it’s let down by a basic email and automation platform.Template designs – They’re visually lacking and require external design support.Lack of automation templates – While Privy doesn’t offer workflow-style automations, the lack of templates means you have to build from scratch. Who should use Privy?

Privy is best for new eCommerce businesses building their first email marketing list. The platform’s conversion tools will help you capture email leads, build your first list and convert more website visitors into customers.

Once you’ve got your first email marketing list, you’ve got a decision to make. You can either try out Privy’s email marketing features to see how much of an impact you make. Or, you can integrate it with a more complete email marketing system and use Privy to grow your contact list.

Choosing the right email marketing tool for your eCommerce store

Choosing an email marketing system is always a commitment. Selecting the right platform for your needs depends on multiple factors. You have to consider your budget, email marketing goals and the growth stage of your business. If you’re a relatively new eCommerce business, don’t be afraid to try out different systems early on, though.

It’s easier to change systems early in the growth journey than it is once you’ve got a more sophisticated email marketing strategy. As a newer or smaller company, you’ll need to change systems at some point anyway.

For larger or growing eCommerce companies, it’s a question of finding a system that will keep driving growth and increasing ROI.

Compare pricingToolMonthly price for 2,500 contactsMonthly price for 10,000 contactsMonthly price for 100,000 contactsActiveCampaign$49$139$559Omnisend$35$115$720Klaviyo$60$150$1,380Drip$39$154$1,199Privy$45$150$780Our verdict

For new and small eCommerce companies, we recommend starting out with a simple, affordable solution like Drip or Privi’s free plan – or both. These will help you build a list of contacts and get your email marketing strategy off the ground. By the time you outgrow this setup, you’ll be ready to upgrade to a more capable system and your email marketing strategy won’t be advanced enough to make the upgrade painful.

Once you’re ready to get more serious with email marketing, we recommend moving over to something like ActiveCampaign or Omnisend. Omnisend is the more affordable option but it’s also less capable with marketing automation so you’ll outgrow the platform faster.

Keep in mind that upgrading from Omnisend to ActiveCampaign will be more challenging. So, if you want to invest in an email marketing system for life, ActiveCampaign is probably worth the extra initial cost.

FAQIs email marketing good for eCommerce?

Yes. Email marketing is the highest-RIO channel for eCommerce companies. The problem is, email marketing involves a lot of work so eCommerce companies need an email marketing platform capable of automating as much of their strategy as possible.

What is the best email marketing platform for eCommerce?

ActiveCampaign is the best overall email marketing platform for eCommerce companies. Its advanced marketing automation system can run full campaigns on autopilot, allowing you to run high-volume strategies without the manual workload.

What are the main types of email marketing for eCommerce?

For eCommerce companies, the most important email marketing strategies include: transactional emails, cart abandonment, cross-selling and customer retention. However, a complete email marketing strategy incorporated a much wider combination of campaign types, powered by data insights, testing and personalisation.

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