14 Best Email Marketing Services in 2023 (Free & Paid)

Email is most businesses’ primary communication and marketing channel. Sending out offers, newsletters, and other client-facing communication is primarily done through email marketing platforms and tools. Picking an email marketing tool with a great product is the most tricky part of the email marketing puzzle.

Most email marketing services offer premium IPs and managed email marketing delivery servers, which promise great deliverability. However, there are huge differences once you compare them according to the price, features, automation capabilities, and user experience.

This blog post will give you a general overview of popular email marketing solutions and help you pick the best solution for email marketing success. Additionally, we will cover the pricing plans and most useful features for small businesses to find which is the best email marketing tool for you. 

Why Choosing Correct Email Marketing Service is Important?

You know email is an effective channel to capture potential leads, nurture and convert them into customers. But you need to spend a lot of time on the tasks such as campaign planning, email marketing strategy, and optimization to reap the benefits.

The right email marketing service helps you create, personalize, send, schedule, and measure your email campaigns without increasing your workload. Here are three deal-breakers when picking the best email marketing tool:

• Convenience 

When you sign up for an email marketing service, you get a full-stack toolkit to automate your email marketing. You don’t need more time to learn a new skill or waste resources on managing recurring tasks like scheduling emails. An email marketing platform handles all the heavy lifting, saving you time and money. 

• Automation 

A business owner wants to focus on building the business, not on email campaign setup and maintenance. So, when you choose an email marketing automation platform, you get more time to spend on things that matter, like finding new customers, nurturing them, and putting everything else on autopilot. 

• Security & Reliability 

Most email marketing services have a robust security policy, offering top-notch protection against hackers and data breaches. In the day and age of GDPR and stringent data policies, an email marketing service protects you from unwanted worries or penalties. 

How to Choose the Best Tools for Email Marketing? 

There are many tools to manage customer communication and enhance sales cycles via emails in the market, each with its unique features and capabilities. But which email newsletter service is the best? 

If you’ve been searching for the best tools for email marketing, here are five factors you must keep in mind while evaluating any solution: 

• Automation Features
  
  An email marketing solution can connect with different systems and channels, which makes it easy for you to send email marketing campaigns to drive more traffic and convert leads. So, you should look for a solution that can automate many tasks related to email marketing, including:
  
  • Scheduling email campaigns; 
  • Creating pop-up forms and landing pages; 
  • Segmenting and targeting the right audience;
  • Personalizing subject lines and sending targeted emails; 
  • Running omnichannel campaigns across SMS & emails;
  • Ecommerce emails ( abandoned cart, feedback, etc.) ;
  • Upselling & Cross-selling emails;
  • Lead nurturing emails ( e.g., follow-up emails).

Your email marketing solution should have the ability to automate your sales funnel. 

• Reporting and Analytics
  An email marketing solution should offer detailed performance reports to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns. This helps you analyze and optimize your email marketing strategy. 
  
  Make sure that the tool you use has all the tools to measure and improve the ROI of each email campaign. 

• Deliverability
  An email marketing platform should provide excellent email deliverability. This means it should promise low bounce rates and always land your campaigns in the inbox. Many email marketing solutions have dedicated dashboards to check email deliverability metrics. Pick the one that promises excellent deliverability. 

• Omnichannel Campaign Support
  An EMA platform should allow you to run omnichannel campaigns. This means it should be able to integrate with other platforms, tech stacks, and sales funnels. For example, you should be able to run email and SMS campaigns from a single dashboard to nurture leads. 
  
  Such an integrated system will give you a holistic view of your customers, allowing you to make informed decisions and improve ROI within an omnichannel marketing context. 

• Affordable Pricing
  Your email marketing platform shouldn’t make you feel like a bankrupt business owner. Basically, pick a solution that offers a pay-as-you-go or a tiered pricing model that increases your expenditure as you grow. 
  
  You would ideally want to pick a solution that you can afford to pay for a long time. But don’t just go for the cheapest one. Always look for a solution that offers the maximum number of features, great deliverability, unlimited emails, and unlimited contacts at an affordable monthly price. 

14 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Checking every email marketing platform and analyzing every small feature wastes a lot of time. Additionally, for over 90% of cases, an in-depth roundup isn’t helpful as most businesses need essential features and pick the most popular email marketing service. Thus, we decided to pick the 12 most popular email marketing service providers to help you save time. So, let’s look at these top email marketing services one by one:

Sender – Best Email & SMS Marketing Service for Small Businesses and eCommerce platforms 

Sender is an email & SMS marketing SaaS platform that simplifies email marketing. Sender believes that every other email marketing service is either too expensive or complicated. It helps you grow your audience and nurture long-term relationships with your subscriber by providing support for omnichannel campaigns and marketing automation. 

Sender is one of the few email marketing providers who successfully integrated the SMS marketing channel into an already thriving email marketing platform.

Sender gives you everything you need to create, run and optimize email campaigns from the start till the end. You can automate workflows, enjoy high deliverability, run SMS & email campaigns simultaneously, and much more.

Top Email Marketing Service Features

Sender’s omnichannel platform integrates various marketing features, from an email list management system to marketing automation. You’d surely love the following features: 

• Drag and drop editor for creating email campaigns; 
• Pre-built & customizable templates; 
• Advanced subscribers segmentation & analytics; 
• Email campaigns; 
• Text messaging;
• Marketing automation; 
• Lead capturing tools.

Sender Pricing

Sender doesn’t discriminate between the free and paid plan and believes that even free users should have access to so-called “premium” features. 

• Premium plan starts from $8 per month for up to 2600 subscribers and up to 30k emails per month. 

Email Marketing Free Services with Marketing Automation Capabilities 

With Sender, you can enjoy complete unrestricted access even with a free plan. Enjoy free access to top-tier email marketing features and get the maximum out of email marketing strategy.

Take Sender for a spin with zero financial commitment. The FREE Forever plan provides 15 000 monthly emails to up to 2,500 contacts absolutely free of cost!

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EmailOctopus – Essential Email Marketing Platform

EmailOctopus is a low-cost email marketing platform providing the essential features businesses and individual creators need to grow their mailing lists and engage their audiences. The easy-to-use email editor makes it possible to build HTML, rich, and simple plain text emails. While the automation and segmentation tools enable users to set up time-based autoresponders and drip campaigns and deliver tailored messages to specific groups of subscribers.

Key features

• Simple to use a drag-and-drop interface to build emails and automations
• Ability to create custom HTML emails on both Free and Pro plans.
• Condition-based automations to create custom onboarding sequences.

Regarding changes to our text, as it’s our No.1 source of traffic and brand recognition, we will always want to retain full editorial ownership over our blog. While we would consider edits – we would not necessarily accept them. Feel free to send any suggestions you have for our copy editors to review.

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GetResponse – Best Email Marketing Company for Building Email List

GetResponse is a multifunctional email marketing platform that offers email marketing, website builder, and webinar creation features on a single platform. 

GetResponse is useful for small businesses looking to solve different marketing problems from a single platform instead of getting multiple subscriptions.

It offers an easy way to make and send promotional, educational, and personalized email campaigns. You can create beautiful newsletters, autoresponders, and automated sequences. You can also set up live and on-demand webinars, create cart abandonment campaigns, and use marketing automation for lead gen, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, and more. 

Email Marketing Platform Features

GetResponse comes with all the essential email marketing features, including an autoresponder, drag-and-drop email builder, and more features such as: 

• Easy-to-use email builder; 
• Email marketing automation;  
• Drag and drop builder for forms and landing pages; 
• Advanced email list segmentation; 
• Reporting and analytics.

GetResponse Pricing

• Starts at $15 per month for up to 1000 subscribers (only email marketing features);
• Free plan is also available for up to 500 subscribers (limited use). 

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Omnisend – Best Email Marketing Platform for Online Stores

Omnisend is an eCommerce-focused email and SMS marketing platform that helps companies tap into the benefits of omnichannel marketing through email and SMS campaigns.

Instead of trying to create an all-in-one application for all industries and markets, Omnisend focuses only on eCommerce. They offer various features, including customer data analytics, email, and SMS automation, and a template builder. 

The multi-channel automated workflows feature is a godsend for stores looking to automate marketing campaigns. It’s also compatible with push notifications and SMS. These features may not be necessary for every user, though having them in one place is convenient for larger businesses.

Best Email Marketing Solution Features

Omnisend has all the basic and advanced features you need to plan, grow, and execute a successful email marketing strategy and unique eCommerce marketing campaigns. You will love the following features: 

• Email and popup builder;
• Web push notifications;
• Smart lead-capturing tools;
• eCommerce integrations;
• Marketing automation. 

Omnisend Pricing

• Paid plans start at $20 per month for up to 1000 subscribers; 
• Free plan available with restrictions of 250 subscribers and 500 emails per month. 

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ConvertKit – Best Bulk Email Marketing Service For Newsletters

ConvertKit is a multifunctional marketing platform designed for artists, creators, and businesses who believe in the power of community building. It’s a full-service platform with website building, email marketing, and deep monetization features. 

Unlike many other marketing platforms, ConvertKit is focused not on building an audience to send email campaigns but on fostering a long-term fan base that interacts with your business frequently. 

ConvertKit will allow you to create email designs or customize already available email templates to suit your brand and message. Plus, it has additional features, such as lead magnet tools, that let you build your opt-in list from your website.

Best Bulk Email Marketing Service Features

ConvertKit’s feature list has an interesting mix of creator-friendly features to build and grow your email list and sell your digital or eCommerce products. This includes: 

• Huge template library; 
• Audience segmentation and nurturing; 
• Auto-responder campaigns; 
• WYSIWYG email editor; 
• Sales funnels and marketing automation. 

ConvertKit Pricing

• Starts at $25 per month for up to 1000 subscribers, paid annually; 
• Free plan available for up to 1000 subscribers. 

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Benchmark Email – Best Email Campaign Services

Benchmark email is an email marketing, automation, and lead-generation platform. It’s designed to help businesses grow and nurture their audiences by providing simple, easy-to-use marketing and sales tools.

The platform is tailored toward those who don’t have the time and resources to go through dozens of pages of documentation to start sending emails. 

If you want a stunning emailer, you can design it from scratch using the software’s WYSIWYG email builder. However, Benchmark may not be the best email marketing service option for email automation beginners. The lack of adaptability could be a letdown.

Best Email Marketing Tools Features

Benchmark Email has all the essential email marketing features that you would need to succeed as a marketer, including: 

• WYSIWYG email editor; 
• Template management; 
• Image library; 
• Lead capturing tools; 
• Auto-responders. 

Benchmark Email Pricing

• Starts at $9.99 per month for 500 subscribers and 3500 email sends per month; 
• Free plan available with sending limits and feature restrictions. 

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SendX – Best Blast Email Marketing Provider With Automation

SendX is an intuitive and affordable email marketing tool with one of the simplest UIs in the industry. It offers unlimited email sends, powerful automation capabilities, and best-in-class email deliverability across all plans. 

SendX can put your marketing go into auto-pilot mode. Segment the customers based on demography, subscriber behavior, and more than 25+ other parameters and target them strategically. You can increase revenue with transactional emails and reach the target customers at the appropriate time through scheduling.

Plus, there are nearly 50 emailer templates inside SendX that can be used for various use cases like the holiday season, newsletter, product launch, promotions, eCommerce, online courses, etc. 

Best Blast Email Marketing Provider Features

Unlike some other software, SendX is specific and clear about what it delivers. It defines itself as being inexpensive and the best email marketing software with the following features: 

• Reporting/Analytics
• Dynamic Email Content
• Drip Campaigns
• A/B Testing

SendX Pricing

• Starts at $9.99 per month for up to 1000 subscribers; 
• Free trial plan is also available. 

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Constant Contact – Best Mass Email Marketing Service for Non-profits

Constant Contact is another platform that offers a wide variety of features intended to reduce your monthly subscription spending. The platform has many useful email marketing capabilities, in-built eCommerce & website builder, and social media marketing features. Overall, Constant Contact is a great solution for small businesses and non-profits.

Constant Contact has been in the market for 25 years and has been the first choice for many marketers and businesses. The platform is best for entrepreneurs, marketers, and companies looking to hustle, make their lives easier and bring all the data on a single platform. 

Best Mass Email Marketing Services Features

Constant Contact has all the important email marketing features you need, plus some advanced features useful for experienced folks, like: 

• Vast template library; 
• Marketing automation tools; 
• Advanced A/B testing and reporting; 
• Support for omnichannel campaigns across email, SMS & social media; 
• eCommerce & event marketing features; 

Constant Contact Pricing

• Starts at $9.99 per month for up to 1000 subscribers for email marketing; 
• Free trial plan is also available with limitations. 

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Mailmodo – Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Mailmodo is an AMP-powered email marketing tool known for interactive emails, surveys, quizzes, and more. You can create responsive and intuitive emails that customers can respond to without clicking an external link. 

Mailmodo is designed to offer an interactive email experience using AMP mails. Unlike traditional HTML emails, AMP emails allow users to interact with an email without leaving their window. For example, filling out a form via email, completing a survey, booking a meeting, etc. 

Mailmodo helps you provide a web browser experience within an email. So, if you’re looking for an interactive solution for bloggers to add interactivity to your email marketing, do give it a shot.

Best Email Marketing Services with AMP Features

Mailmodo has lots of exciting features that help you design interactive email campaigns. Some great features include the following: 

• AMP email support; 
• No-code drag and drop editor; 
• Advanced segmentation and filtering; 
• Marketing automation and email workflow builder. 

Mailmodo Pricing

• Starts at $99 per month for up to 40000 contacts;
• 21-day free trial plan available. 

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Retainful — Ecommerce Email Marketing Platform

Retainful is the best eCommerce email marketing software with all the features you need without being overly complicated or confusing.

Retainful helps businesses build customized automation with a built-in, ready-to-customize customer journey builder and an easy-to-use email editor to increase customer engagement. Without any coding knowledge, you can set up campaigns. The interface is easy to use, intuitive and includes resources for any questions during the process.

eCommerce Email Marketing Solution with Useful Features

You can use Retainful for scheduling campaigns, recovering abandoned carts, following up with customers, setting up referrals, and more. It comes with many useful features designed for eCommerce stores: 

• Email Marketing Automations;
• Customer Journey Builder;
• Referral programs;
• Next order coupons.

Retainful Pricing 

Retainful has a free forever plan. You can use the tool to the fullest, and features like referral marketing if you upgrade to the premium plan start at just $19/month.

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Hubspot — Email Marketing Solution for Enterprise & Large Businesses

HubSpot is an email automation powerhouse that takes care of your subscribers and potential customers across the entire customer lifecycle.

HubSpot has all the standard email marketing features like drag and drop builder, journey flows, and marketing automation. Apart from basic features, HubSpot has several advanced features like high-end segmentation, customer lifecycle synchronization across sales & marketing, 

The email marketing solution is best for large companies looking to keep absolute deal transparency across different stages of the buyer’s journey. 

Hubspot Email Marketing Solution Key Features

HubSpot has several advanced marketing automation, email marketing, inbound lead gen, and lead nurturing features, including: 

• Drag and drop email builder; 

• Complex personalization sequences and marketing automation features; 
• Free CRM solution to sync customer journey across sales and marketing; 
• A/B testing features. 

HubSpot Pricing

• Paid plan starts at $45 per month (up to 1000 contacts);
• 14-day free trial is also available. 

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SendinBlue — All-in-One Email Marketing Solution

SendInBlue is an omnichannel platform that offers the power to weave engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, various social media accounts, and chat. The platform also has a robust CRM to help you take charge of your lead pipeline.

SendInBlue’s simplicity, affordability, and omnichannel approach make it suitable for anyone beginning with email marketing. It has standard automation features you would expect from your email marketing suite, but don’t expect it to run the show on autopilot all the time. 

You can use it to manage your email list, design emails and landing pages, get in-depth reporting features, run A/B tests, and more. 

SendinBlue Key Features

SendInBlue is a simple yet powerful solution that gives you everything bundled in a single package, including: 

• Intuitive drag and drop builder; 
• Advanced CRM; 
• Support for SMS campaigns & transactional emails; 
• Dynamic personalization for targeted campaigns; 
• Advanced segmentation; 
• Smart A/B testing features. 

SendInBlue Pricing 

• Starts at $25 per month for up to 20,000 email sends per month; 
• Free plan is also available with a limit of 300 emails sent per day.

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SendGrid — Mass Email Marketing Solution

SendGrid is a powerful email marketing solution for companies looking for more advanced automation features, deep integration, and analytics. The platform is known for its responsive email templates and an email API that’s designed for promising impeccable deliverability.

SendGrid is an advanced-grade solution meant for scalability, automation, and dynamic integrations. It has all the standard email marketing features to help you plan, schedule, and run email marketing campaigns. 

Plus, it has some really good email templates and pre-designed automation flows that would speed up your operations. 

Sendgrid Key Features

Like all other tools on this list, SendGrid also has basic email marketing features. Some useful features that stand out include: 

• Pre-built autoresponder sequences; 
• Excellent analytics features; 
• Dedicated IP for great email deliverability; 
• Preference-based email campaign design.

SendGrid Pricing

• Starts at $19.95 per month for up to 50,000 emails sent; 
• Free plan available with a limit of 100 email sends per day. 

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Selzy – Best Email Marketing Platform For Small Businesses

Selzy is an email marketing platform that suits any business goal, but its main forte is helping small and medium-sized businesses boost sales with emails. It’s affordable, and all features are available even on the free plan.

Although Selzy is not specifically designed for sophisticated automation flows, it has all the necessary email marketing features and is especially perfect for content newsletters, info business, and automatic funnels.

Selzy Key Features

Selzy offers everything you want from an email marketing solution, including:

• 24/7 support;
• Intuitive email builder with 100+ free templates;
• Analytics;
• Website subscription forms;
• A/B testing;
• Segmentation;
• Email quality checker;
• Anti-spam email check;
• Email authentication check.

Selzy Pricing

• Free forever plan with up to 15,000 emails per month to up to 1000 contacts;
• Email volume-based pricing starts from $0.005 per email;
• Pricing is based on the contact list size and starts from $7 per month;
• Premium starts from $220 per month and includes full campaign management from marketing specialists.

Email Marketing Services Price Compared

Now that looked at all the popular email marketing solutions out there, let’s compare all email marketing services packages side by side. The table below will give you a quick snapshot of most email marketing tools and their pricing plans. 

	Cost	Try Now
Sender	Premium plan starts from $8.33 per month for up to 2500 subscribers and up to 30k emails per month.	Free plan with no restrictions for up to 2500 subscribers available.  Get Started For Free
GetResponse	Starts at $15.58 per month for up to 1000 subscribers (only email marketing features)	Free plan is available for up to 500 subscribers (limited use).
Omnisend	Paid plans start at $20 per month for up to 1000 subscribers	Free plan is available with restrictions of 250 subscribers and 500 emails per month.
ConvertKit	Starts at $25 per month for up to 1000 subscribers, paid annually	Free plan available for up to 1000 subscribers.
Benchmark Email	Starts at $9.99 per month for 500 subscribers and 3500 email sends per month;	Free plan is available with sending limits and feature restrictions.
SendX	Starts at $9.99 per month for up to 1000 subscribers	Limited free trial plan available.
Constant Contact	Starts at $9.99 per month for up to 1000 subscribers	Free trial plan also available with limitations.
MailModo	Starts at $99 per month for up to 40000 contacts	21-day free trial plan available.
HubSpot	Starts at $45 per month (up to 1000 contacts)	14-day free trial available.
SendInBlue	Starts at $25 per month for up to 20,000 email sends per month	Free plan available with a limit of 300 email sends per day.
SendGrid	Starts at $19.95 per month for up to 50,000 emails sent	Free plan is available with a limit of 100 emails sent per day.

Best Free Email Marketing Services Compared 

While most standard plans from email service providers don’t cost a fortune, any price is just a tad too high for some businesses. You need something simple for emailing your subscribers. Luckily, plenty of other email marketing tools and platforms provide their platforms free of charge for a smaller number of subscribers and, possibly, reduced features.

We decided to compare the plans of 3 of the most prominent free email marketing service providers to find out the best free email marketing software. If you keep searching for the best free email marketing services, here’s a detailed email marketing software comparison in the table below to help you make an informed decision.

Features	Sender	Mailchimp	Sendinblue
Contacts	Up to 2 500	Up to 500	Unlimited
Emails	Up to 15 000	Up to 2500	Up to 900
Daily limits	Unlimited	Up to 2 000	300
Support	24/7 Live Chat + Email	Help center only	Email only
WordPress Integration	+	+	+
Email Automation	+	–	–
Email Templates Library	+	–	+
Text messaging	+	–	–
Advanced Segmentation	+	Basic	Basic
Email Scheduling	+	–	+
Advanced Reporting	+	–	–
Geography & Device Reporting	+	–	–
Heat Map Reporting	+	–	–
Advanced Open & Click Stats	+	–	–
Multi-User Access	Unlimited	1	1

While the decision to pick one of these three service providers should be based on highly specific circumstances, businesses in nearly any sector or industry can find the perfect fit-out of the abovementioned ones.

Additionally, upgrading the above free email marketing software is hassle-free as they offer amazing standard plans too. 

Opt-in Email Marketing Services

Since GDPR was released, having consumers and customers opt-in to any marketing activity has become necessary. Any business that works with European citizens is required to uphold GDPR requirements. In practice, every digital business has to have an opt-in feature.

Email marketing is no different. Customers have to be able to both opt-in and opt-out. Sending unsolicited marketing emails can cause a host of legal issues. According to official sources, the fine for sending unsolicited emails or failing to uphold the GDPR laws can land a hefty fine – €20 million or 4% of yearly revenue, whichever is higher!

Failing to adhere to GDPR can cause significant harm to any company’s financials and reputation. However, some non-EU-based email marketing platforms and service providers have no opt-in features. Any email sent to an EU citizen could break GDPR laws if such a feature doesn’t exist.

Thus, there are email marketing service providers that we know for sure have opt-in features – Sender and Omnisend. These tools offer ways to collect visitor consent and opt-in contacts using embedded signup forms or popups. Thus, if any subscriber is (or potentially will be) from the EU, using the above tools is necessary.

Professional Email Marketing Service Providers

Finally, out of all businesses, the ones with the highest requirements will often be enterprises. Simply picking a provider based on price and basic features is no longer enough. 

As a change in enterprises, even agile ones is significantly slower than in smaller businesses, carefully weighing the options is necessary. Once a decision is made, changing the provider quickly is nearly impossible. Thus, we recommend looking out for several features for enterprise businesses:

• Dedicated account managers. The needs of enterprise-level companies are significantly higher. Any disruption or other issue needs to be taken care of as quickly as possible. Therefore, finding an email marketing service provider with a dedicated account manager should be one of the primary objectives.
• Dedicated support for migration & onboarding. As movement will be slow and many accounts will have to be migrated (and many people need to be trained), efficient onboarding and migration will be key.
• Unlimited user seats. One thing that will quickly grind everyone’s gears will be getting disconnected due to too many users. Limited user seats will greatly negatively impact efficiency and overall satisfaction.
• Full API documentation. Enterprise-level businesses will implement a lot of automation and integrate email marketing platforms into other tools. In-depth documentation will be something that developers need.
• Unlimited access to automation. Enterprises have no time to fiddle around with limited automation or failures to implement complex workflows.

These are the most essential features for any enterprise-level business. Of course, the regular email marketing platform benefits are a nice bonus. However, they will commonly have dedicated developers that can take care of any features that might be necessary for marketing departments.

Key Takeaways