The Top-Rated Email Marketing Software for Small to Medium-Size Businesses

Whether it’s generating brand awareness, increasing sales, or maintaining customer relations, these top email marketing providers offer the tools and resources to help you succeed.

My agency has been a regular user of Campaign Monitor for nearly a decade and have relied on their platform for countless email marketing campaigns. Campaign Monitor is great for those who are new to email marketing as it is very user-friendly with their drag and drop editors, smart templates, and automatic mobile optimization. Further, it offers more advanced features such as A/B testing, email automation, and a host of third-party integration options that seamlessly connect to many popular CRM and database platforms.

In addition to all these great features, every account comes with a highly-detailed dashboard and analytics to help measure campaign reach and success, and their customer service is very responsive if you have questions getting started or encounter any problems.

Campaign Monitor offers tiered plan options based on total number of email contacts or the anticipated volume of emails you’d like to send each month. For further flexibility, they also offer the ability to simply pay-per-campaign for those who might send emails less frequently.

I highly recommend Campaign Monitor for both small and enterprise level businesses as their plan options can accommodate everyone from beginners up to seasoned email marketing professionals.

ActiveCampaign is a valuable email marketing software program to help business owners connect and engage with contacts using impressive and user-friendly newsletter builders, marketing automation and customer relations tools. It is a popular choice for Ecommerce, Digital Businesses and B2B Companies to reach and engage their audience with precise targeting, nurture and educate with predictive content, convert and close with well-timed calls to action, and support and grow with event-triggered emails.

ActiveCampaign features a template library so you can create beautiful and engaging personalized email marketing campaigns in minutes. You also have the ability to create automated customer journeys to build relationships and drive sales at each stage and with each customer behavior.

ActiveCampaign is suited to small and medium sized businesses wanting to grow through better customer relations. While the software doesn’t have a free version, it does offer a free trial with free migration and memberships starting at affordable prices that increase with more in-depth functionality.

GetResponse is a powerful software for all of your inbound marketing needs. Along with its easy-to-use email marketing tools to build professional emails and newsletters, list management, autoresponders and analytics, you can also build landing pages and create paid ads right on the platform. This extra functionality is great for brand awareness and building relationships. Online businesses will be able to create automated sales funnels and lead magnet funnels to sell products and services, recover abandoned orders and convert more customers.

Like many other email marketing platforms, you have the ability to automate your marketing, however with GetResponse you can also track your website analytics, so you have an overview of the entire sales process in one place. If you are a large company, and subscribe to their Max offering, you will be provided with a dedicated account manager and tailored solution to help you grow your business.

GetResponse’s plans start with their Basic package which includes many of the beneficial features with the next Plus package only slightly more expensive and still very affordable for small businesses who are looking to scale.

EmailOctopus offers all the essential features of other popular email marketing software on their simple and cost-effective platform. You have the ability to create automatic email sequences to engage your subscribers, segment your audience for targeted messaging to keep them engaged, integration with hundreds of different apps including WordPress and Shopify, a large library of template emails or simply create your own with their drag-and-drop builder, a supportive team if you run into issues and in-depth analytics which track open rates, clicks, conversions and more to ensure your email marketing campaigns are effective.

EmailOctopus also has a clever calculator to calculate your savings compared to other providers and is considerably cheaper with a free starter plan for up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month, and a Pro plan that is economical with the ability to request a custom plan if you are a large business or have more than 500,000 subscribers.

EmailOctopus is best for micro- to medium-sized businesses for its cost-effectiveness and comparative functionality, however if you’re looking for more advanced capabilities, one of the other platforms might be better to meet your needs.

AWeber is a great tool for small businesses, entrepreneurs, non-profits, bloggers, podcasters and other online content creators to build customer relationships and brand awareness while growing their sales with email marketing. AWeber has a free plan for up to 500 subscribers for 3,000 emails per month. Their paid version, a professional plan, has unlimited subscribers and emails that is still low-cost with free migration, app integrations and 24/7 live support.

AWeber features a drag-and-drop builder, library of stock images great for new businesses that haven’t created original assets yet, email automation, landing pages, video landing pages, sign up forms, segmentation, detailed reporting including webpage tracking and much more, making the platform cost-effective and enticing for businesses of all sizes.

The only disadvantage compared to others might be the limited capabilities to manage lead qualification, scoring and management. If that’s an important aspect for your business, it may be worth considering one of the other options. However, if you are looking for a powerful email marketing software to build brand awareness and sales, create sales funnels and email automation, I would highly recommend AWeber.

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