Email marketing software can be difficult to choose from. Just researching to find all the options can be a week’s worth of work in itself. To help save you some time on what software is worth checking out, we’ve put this list of 6 email marketing solutions together for you with a brief description of how they can help you.
MailChimp
SendPress
Aweber
InfusionSoft
Hubspot
Act-On
When you are getting started and looking for your first email marketing software, some level of frugality can come into play. Although there are very affordable paid options, free is always nice to get your feet wet.
MailChimp is my favorite free/beginner email marketing option. Prebuilt templates and drag and drop design makes putting together a quality looking email for your subscribers a breeze. Setting up RSS newsletters is a great tool that I love for our clients just getting started with content marketing.
You can also tie in MailChimp to your ecommerce site to improve your sales right off the bat.
Click here to see 9 must have ecommerce email marketing campaigns >>
This email marketing software has far too much to offer for me to put into a quick description.
Learn more about how MailChimp can help your business grow here >>
If you are using WordPress, then having an email marketing option built into your WordPress dashboard is extremely convenient. That’s what this WordPress email marketing plugin allows you to do. With SendPress, you can “easily create, send, manage and track your newsletters and emails right from WordPress.”
“Sending great emails and newsletters is something that should be easy and not require a third party system. This plugin aims to fix that and allow you to manage newsletters and emails with easy within WordPress. Instead of focusing on providing every single feature under the sun, SendPress tries to provide only the ones that you really need. It aims to make email marketing through WordPress easy, complete and extensible.”
Read more and download SendPress for free here >>
Now that you’re ready to play for real, it’s time to look at the more robust email marketing software options for your company.
Yes, there is a limit to the free MailChimp account, and that is the amount of subscribers you have and the amount of emails that you can send. I also believe there are a few limitations on some of the more advanced features such as autoresponder sequences. Getting started with a free MailChimp account is a great way to familiarize yourself with the software as well as with email marketing in general. When you get those 2,000 subscribers that force you to upgrade to a $30/month paid MailChimp account, I think you’ll be feeling the cost is well worth it!
*Check the MailChimp website for exact pricing at the time of reading >>
Aweber is a very popular email marketing solution in the blogging community. It’s prices are very competitive ($19/month up to 500 subscribers) and from what I understand they have a very similar feature offering to MailChimp.
*Check the Aweber website for exact pricing at the time of reading
Click here to learn more about Aweber email marketing software >>
InfusionSoft is one of the best options for SMBs looking for an all-in-one CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation solution. Infusionsoft is what we use here at Tresnic Media and I absolutely love it. Organizing all of your contacts is amazing with their tags and categories system. The better you can organize and segment your email lists, the better you can speak to your specific buyer personas and reach success.
The Infusionsoft campaign builder is really the bread and butter though. It allows you to create a drag and drop mindmap that is triggered by different criteria that you enter and then performs actions automatically. For example, if someone signs up for your email subscriber list, they’ll automatically get a Welcome email, 3 days later get an ebook offer, then if they download it, their lead score will go up, eventually notifying your sales team when this becomes a hot lead for business. This is an extremely simple example, as these campaigns can be built very strategically to incorporate any different outcome that you can predict in your customer’s decision making process.
There is a price tag and a learning curve, but honestly for something that is going to have a real impact on your business, that’s going to always be the case. Making the investment in technology, if you are going to actually use it, is one that all growing businesses must go through.
Click here to see a demo of Infusionsoft >>
Hubspot is another top recommendation for growing SMBs. They combine their COS (Content Optimization System) along with marketing automation similar to Infusionsoft. We here at Tresnic Media are also Hubspot enthusiasts, as all of our marketers are Inbound Certified from Hubspot’s program. Not only is their software great, but they have an amazing support and training staff that are terrific to work with.
Hubspot is a great solution that can also help with the content marketing technology that helps generate leads for your business (technology, not strategy or implementation).
Like Infusionsoft, there is a higher price tag than just the simple email marketing software options and a larger learning curve, but it’s also worth it for the impact it will have on your company.
Act-On is the third full marketing software suite that we recommend. Similar to Infusionsoft and Hubspot, it has far more to offer than just email marketing. Act-On excels in different areas of marketing technology than the previous two. You can read an interview that we did with one of the Act-On team members and their marketing strategy here.
While far from email marketing, the part of the Act-On solution that I found most beneficial for our project-specific purposes were the ability to manage social media, specifically LinkedIn Groups, within their tool (though Hubspot does also offer social media marketing tools).
Click here to learn more about Act-On >>
Leave your questions and thoughts in the comments below for the email marketing software that you’ve used before and why you loved or hated it.
Schedule a call with one of our marketing consultants today to learn more about email marketing’s role in growing your business.