Email marketing is the best way to reach your target audience. Data is on your side when you’re running email campaigns. You know what prospects need, you capitalize and automate.
Statistics show a well-managed campaign can result in a 4400% return on investment (ROI). But success in email marketing requires the right sales tools and strategies.
Choosing the wrong email marketing service costs $$$. We’re here to help you find the perfect fit for your needs, whether for cold outreach, newsletter nurturing, or an introduction email.
Why Do Businesses Need an Email Marketing Service?
Manually sending emails to prospects or customers kills productivity. Scaling becomes a nightmare, and marketing and sales teams burn out.
These issues won’t be a problem if you use an email marketing service that fits your needs. Here’s what they bring to the table:
Email Outreach Automation
Most email marketing services or software only need you to upload a lead list. Then, you can bulk send emails to your target audience. However, email etiquette means staggering the sending process.
You don’t want to look spammy in front of email service providers. Sending 500 emails without the proper infrastructure is a surefire way to get blacklisted. You need deliverability.
Improved Deliverability
Deliverability is the percentage of emails landing in your prospects' primary inboxes. Email marketing services improve deliverability and reduce bounce rates with features like warmups.
Warmups are often an add-on service on top of the email software. Instantly understands the importance of warmups and offers free warmups for all your email accounts.
Automated Personalization
Automation and personalization sound like they shouldn’t fit together in a sentence. But thanks to advances in lead data, you can hyper-personalize emails at scale.
Tools like Instantly let you use custom variables or AI prompts to generate personalized emails based on company descriptions, pain points, and lead data.
Audience Segmentation
One of the best ways of improving email conversion rates is by segmenting your email list. This ensures that the right emails reach the right people.
To segment, many email marketing services offer integrations with CRMs. With Instantly CRM, you can segment the audience without switching between apps.
Sustainable Options for Scaling
Let’s say you want to scale a paid ads campaign on social media. The only way to do that is to throw more money into the campaign. That won’t be sustainable in the long run.
With an email marketing tool, all you need to scale is to add more domains and leads. This makes email marketing one of, if not, the most cost-effective lead generation tool.
12 Best Email Marketing Services
Some email marketing services focus on cold outreach features, others on delivering HTML emails for newsletters. Whatever the case, we curated a list of email marketing services that fit the essential business needs.
Instantly.ai: Best Cold Email Marketing Service
Cold email marketing is arguably the best alternative to hiring a lead generation specialist. And if Instantly knows one thing, it’s how to find success with it.
Instantly has all the tools to ensure sustainable, scalable, and effective cold email outreach. It’s built for small businesses looking to grow, medium-sized businesses looking to scale, and enterprise businesses looking to conquer their market.
New users can find features like the AI Sequence Generator to start campaigns with a few clicks. Professionals can use advanced A/B testing to find their best-performing emails fast.
Here’s a quick cold email tip: campaigns won’t be as effective if you’re only automating outreach. You need leads, and a tool to manage lead data.
That’s where Instantly CRM and B2B Lead Finder come in. Instantly CRM lets you manage all leads, sales tasks, and engagement in one place. No need to constantly switch between tools.
B2B Lead Finder lets you access over 280 million B2B leads, use advanced search filters to pinpoint buyer personas, and automate adding leads to any Instantly campaign.
Klaviyo: Email Marketing Service for E-commerce
Klaviyo seamlessly integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify. One of the main reasons why it became so popular is because of how it lays out its pricing plans.
Klaviyo only limits contact list size and sending volume. It doesn’t limit the features. That means you gain full access to all the bells and whistles.
And if you’re ready to scale, you only need to pay for the higher tier plan. This makes it perfect for small e-commerce shops that want to test the waters with all the tools needed to succeed.
Klaviyo lets you have seamless integrations with e-commerce platforms, a built-in CRM, automation triggers, and an extensive template library.
HubSpot: Make The Most Of Sales and Marketing
HubSpot has been the go-to sales and marketing platform for many businesses. Their email marketing service starts for free with limited features and more advanced tools for paid plans.
You get an intuitive drag-and-drop email builder or choose from a robust library of templates to create newsletters that fit your branding. But, HubSpot isn’t meant for cold outreach.
It’s a more fitting tool for nurturing leads that already subscribed to your email list until they’re ready for sales negotiations. You can personalize emails for each subscriber based on device type, demographic, or any other custom lead data.
One of the main concerns users have with HubSpot is scalability. The lower-tier plans are great for small and medium businesses. However, it gets expansive fast as you scale.
CleverReach: For GDPR Compliance In the EU Market
CleverReach is a great email marketing service for businesses with target audiences in the EU. Thanks to its data hosting in the EU, the platform is GDPR-friendly.
Their pro features include content segmentation, customizable content blocks, and AI content generators. CleverReach also tracks domains for outbound links.
Their current free plan lets you send 1,000 emails a month and add up to 250 subscribers. The good news is that their Essentials plans let you send unlimited emails for 15€ a month.
If you don’t want to send thousands of emails monthly, CleverReach also offers other flat rates and pay-as-you-go email sending options.
Brevo: For Transactional Emails and SMS
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is an email marketing service that focuses on transactional emails, such as invoices, subscriptions, and receipts. Now, they have added newsletter features to the platform.
Brevo charges per email volume, not email list size. This makes it a great tool for businesses that don’t need to rely on email marketing to sustain revenue.
It offers list management features, outreach automation, and advanced reporting. Since its rebrand to Brevo, it also offered free CRM features, live chats, and SMS marketing.
If you’re a small business on a budget that needs an email solution for customer transactions or newsletters, Brevo is a definite must-try.
EngageBay: Email Marketing Service for Customer Support
Active and responsive customer support is one of the best ways to reduce customer attrition and can even act as a way to generate leads.
EngageBay combines email outreach, sales, and customer support. It lets you create personalized email campaigns, design landing pages, and capture leads with forms.
You don’t even need coding experience to create multi-step automation tasks. EngageBay has triggers that launch workflows like drip campaigns, onboarding emails, and abandoned cart notifications.
EngageBay also has features for social listening. You get to keep track of retweets, mentions, posts, or trends that are related to your brand or specific keywords.
But because of the robust features, the pro plan starts at $101.99/mo. This includes unlimited contacts, advanced automation features, analytics, and account-based marketing tools.
Omnisend: For Omnichannel Outreach
Sales cadences don’t stop with a single email. A full sales cadence includes SMS, calls, and sometimes, in-person meetings. Omnisend makes all of this easier for you.
Omnisend is an outreach automation platform that syncs your email, SMS, and social media in one centralized dashboard. With its segmentation features, you can send the perfect email to the right leads, using the right channel.
If you’re new to outreach, Omnisend has dozens of templates for automation workflows, emails, lead capture forms, and much more. This makes it a great tool for e-commerce platforms.
For example, you can use Omnisend to create a landing page with a “Wheel of Fortune” that offers discounts or promos for new sign-ups.
TargetBay: Email and SMS Marketing Service for E-commerce
TargetBay provides you with several tools for engaging with your audience. For example, you can create coupons on key landing pages and use referral strategies.
You can also set up email automation workflows and sales cadences that include SMS. Let’s say a visitor enters your site. They receive a pop-up form for a coupon.
When they sign up, they’re added to your onboarding campaign and receive nurturing through email and text about promotions, discounts, or sales. You can then segment subscribers based on how they engage with your content, website, or emails.
Campaigner: Email Marketing Service for Sales Automation
Campaigner offers automation features for sales and marketing. You get intuitive visual builders, workflow automation, and multi-channel engagement via email and SMS.
Like many email builders, Campaigner also has drag-and-drop email editors. There are also several templates available for all e-commerce needs, like promos, cross-selling, or up-selling recommendations.
The only issue with Campaigner is that the advanced and extensive automation features might be overwhelming for beginners. Full SMS features are also locked behind higher-tier plans.
But if you have the budget for $179/month, you get all their powerful tools like A/B testing, email automation, dynamic personalization, and up to 25,000 contacts in your lead lists.
MailChimp: Actionable data insights
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing services for various industries. In addition to email automation, MailChimp offers landing page builders and several ad tools.
One of the highlights of MailChimp is its ability to collect lead data and create actionable insights through reports that enable the sales team to improve their outbound campaigns.
If you’re already using a couple of tools in your tech stack, MailChimp has over 300 integrations to help streamline workflows with email marketing.
You can try MailChimp for free and use limited features. And if you want to add more contacts to your list, the monthly fees also increase depending on the pricing options you choose.
Mailjet: Email Service for Transactional Emails
Like Brevo, Mailjet is another email marketing service that focuses on transactional emails. The difference is that it sends transactional emails via SMTP or API. It also has SMS, auto-reply features, A/B testing, and email automation.
Mailjet has drag-and-drop editors, segmentation features, and an intuitive learning curve. Tools are relatively simple to use. But, that means that the automation features aren’t that advanced.
If you want to have access to features like A/B testing, you’d have to upgrade to either a Premium or Custom plan, which starts at $27/month. Pricing Increases with sending volume.
It’s a decent tool for small businesses looking for simple automation features, affordable pricing, and scalability options.
Moosend
Moosend is another budget-friendly email marketing service with tools for email automation, list-building, landing page design, and newsletter template builders.
The best thing about Moosend is that all marketing automation features are included in every plan. You can also get in-depth email analytics, conversion optimization, and A/B testing.
Another concern some users have is a lack of customer support for basic plans and email deliverability issues. As a rule of thumb, you have to warm up new sending accounts first.
Instantly offers unlimited warmups for free for all your sending accounts to ensure the highest possible deliverability rates in every email marketing campaign.
Key Takeaways
If you want to grow your business, the best vehicle you can use is an email marketing service. To recap, here are the 12 best email marketing services we recommend:
- Instantly.ai: Best for cold email marketing at scale
- TargetBay and Klaviyo: Best for e-commerce email marketing
- Brevo and Mailjet: Best for transactional email marketing services
- Campaigner and HubSpot: Best for all-around marketing and sales outreach
- MailChimp and Moosend: Best for gathering actionable insights from lead data.
- CleverReach: Best for GDPR-compliant newsletters in the EU.
- EngageBay: Best for providing email marketing services for customer support.
Looking to leverage cold email marketing services to grow your business at scale? Instantly is the tool for you. Try Instantly for free today.
