Our top recommendation for most people is Constant Contact because it offers the most value of any email marketing provider. Try Constant Contact free for 60 days, no credit card is required.
Email is one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal. It can drive engagement, build relationships, and deliver a higher ROI than every other type of marketing campaign.
Success with your email strategy starts with finding the right email marketing service. Whether you’re starting a new list from scratch or just need an easier way to reach your audience, this guide has a solution for you.
Top 7 Best Email Marketing Services
I’m confident recommending all of my top picks to different businesses in different situations. However, our research team found a handful of providers that quickly rose to the top of the list.
Out of many, our favorite email marketing platforms are:
- Constant Contact — Best overall
- MailerLite — Best for the essentials at an affordable price
- HubSpot – Best for automated email marketing
- AWeber – Best for low subscriber count
- Omnisend —Best email and SMS marketing combo
- Moosend — Best for Ecommerce
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) — Best for growing your customer base
Whether you’re looking to streamline multiple marketing channels, start a new email list, sink your teeth into automation, or nurture and grow an existing list, you’ll likely find everything you need and more in one of the seven platforms above.
Keep reading to learn more about our favorite platforms as well as other top contenders for different situations.
Email Marketing Service Reviews
Constant Contact – Best Overall
Constant Contact is our recommendation for most users. Beginners will find a complete toolkit that’s easy to use, and veteran email marketers will recognize immediately how much time Constant Contact can save their team, especially when it comes to marketing automation.
Don’t take my word for it. Constant Contact lets you try the full email marketing platform risk-free for 60 days, with no credit card required.
And forget about needing to be good at designing emails. The intuitive drag-and-drop email builder allows you to easily create new emails that look good and on-brand—no coding knowledge is needed. Adding text, images, videos, coupons, polls, and events to any message is simple and straightforward.
It’s a really welcoming platform to work with. People who aren’t “techy” will quickly find themselves producing much more polished newsletters. There are more than 100 pre-built, mobile-optimized templates.
Constant Contact delivers more than 100 mobile-friendly templates that are easy to customize with its intuitive drag-and-drop email builder.
Automation is another key benefit of Constant Contact. A lot of the legwork can be set on autopilot. For example, you can trigger welcome messages for new subscribers and set up drip campaigns based on their actions.
How much time can you save list building with beautiful templates and simple marketing automation? Constant Contact excels as an email list service, but it’s so much more.
And as soon as you hit send, Constant Contact is recording results in real-time. You’ll see everything from open rates to click-through rates, as well as data for each individual subscriber.
This is so important–how else are you going to know which strategies are working and which need to be put on pause?
Real-time analytics quickly give you all the information you need to understand your email campaign performance.
Pricing for Constant Contact’s email software is straightforward. There are three plans for you to choose from—Lite, Standard, and Premium.
Like most email marketing platforms, your rate will be based on the number of subscribers on your list. Both plans allow you to send unlimited emails.
Here’s what some of the prices look like for each plan:
Lite
- 0 – 500 Subscribers — Starting at $12 per month
- 501 – 1,000 Subscribers — Starting at $30 per month
- 1,001 – 2,500 Subscribers — Starting at $50 per month
- 2,501 – 5,000 Subscribers — Starting at $80 per month
Standard
- 0 – 500 Subscribers — Starting at $35 per month
- 501 – 1,000 Subscribers — Starting at $55 per month
- 1,001 – 2,500 Subscribers — Starting at $75 per month
- 2,501 – 5,000 Subscribers — Starting at $110 per month
Premium
- 0 – 500 Subscribers — Starting at $80 per month
- 501 – 1,000 Subscribers — Starting at $110 per month
- 1,001 – 2,500 Subscribers — Starting at $150 per month
- 2,501 – 5,000 Subscribers — Starting at $200 per month
Both plans offer pricing tiers for up to 50,000 subscribers.
For basic and professional emails, the cheaper plan will be fine. But for those of you who want to get the most out of your email campaigns, I highly recommend the Standard plan.
This plan comes with more advanced features like subject line A/B testing, dynamic content, and automated behavioral campaigns. You’ll also get access to personalized demographic data, coupons, polls, and surveys.
Learn more and sign up for a free 60-day trial at Constant Contact.
MailerLite – Best For the Essentials at an Affordable Price
MailerLite offers all of the essentials with none of the frills. It’s free to use for up to 1,000 subscribers, so there’s no commitment if you’re looking to test it out.
It’s a great option for anyone who wants a straightforward email marketing service. You’re a creator who doesn’t need a ton of bells and whistles. You just need the tools to start your newsletter or manage a simple campaign.
It’s also nice for teams. Nobody is going to be intimidated by this platform, which means everyone is going to use the core features at their disposal.
The platform still offers tools for automation, landing pages, pop-ups, and surveys, so it’s not like you’re extremely limited. But even the UI for each one is fairly spartan and straightforward.
MailerLite has a drag-and-drop editor, which makes it easy for anyone to design a high-quality message. Segment your subscribers to enhance personalization and optimize your campaigns with features like A/B testing.
MailerLite delivers a very simplified interface with a drag-and-drop editor and the ability to segment subscribers and optimize campaigns with A/B testing.
I’d recommend MailerLite for those of you who want simple email software at an affordable rate.
MailerLite offers four pricing plans:
Free — $0 per month
- up to 1,000 subscribers
- 12,000 monthly emails
- 1 user
- Monday-Friday email support
- ten landing pages
- email automation builder
- signup forms & pop-ups
Growing Business — $10 per month
- up to 1,000 subscribers
- unlimited monthly emails
- three users
- 24/7 email support
- unlimited templates
- dynamic emails
- unlimited websites & blogs
Advanced — $21 per month
- up to 1,000 subscribers
- unlimited monthly emails
- unlimited users
- Facebook integration
- custom HTML editor
- promotion pop-ups
- multiple automation trigggers
There is also an Enterprise plan for businesses with over 100,000 subscribers. Pricing is by quote only.
MailerLite offers a 15% discount if you sign up for annual billing, making it one of the most affordable options on our list. Start sending emails with MailerLite for free.
HubSpot – Best for Automated Email Marketing
HubSpot is the king of marketing automation–so it’s no surprise they offer a fantastic email marketing solution for any size business.
HubSpot’s tool allows you to quickly and easily create, personalize, and optimize your emails without the need for designers or IT.
Where the software really shines is in the automated workflows. This allows you to easily set triggers for your email subscribers and nurture the leads into customers (or whatever else you want them to do).
Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure journey that you set for your subscribers. Depending on the specific actions they take, you can have them branch off to experience different, targeted things via email.
The email marketing service is just one tool in the Swiss Army Knife that is HubSpot. It can stand alone or be used in tandem with other offerings such as Marketing Hub and their CRM. Your email marketing only becomes stronger when coupled with those products, too.
HubSpot also has plenty of pre-made email templates to help you get the results you want. With their drag-and-drop builder, you can create great emails with no coding or development knowledge needed.
HubSpot is simple to use and allows you to customize your layout, add calls-to-action and images, and modify your content and colors to match your brand.
Use their advanced personalization tools to personalize your emails in order to boost your open and clickthrough rates with ease. You can use any information in an email subscriber’s contact records to automatically serve up the most relevant subject lines, content, links, attachments, and calls to action.
Their A/B testing tool is top-notch. Use it and dive into the in-depth analytics after you send your emails to see which performed better—and why.
HubSpot is a behemoth in the marketing automation arena yet still makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to master email marketing.
Use this data to determine which subject lines get the most opens and the content and calls-to-action that will earn you more sales. You can also leverage this with landing pages and signup forms to accurately get a sense of the ROI of email campaigns.
The HubSpot email tool is free for up to 2,000 email sends per month, with paid plans starting at $50/month.
Join HubSpot for free to create and send email campaigns that look professionally designed and display perfectly across any device—all by yourself.
AWeber – Best Value For Low Subscriber Count
AWeber is a traditional email marketing service that’s reliable and very affordable.
Where AWeber really shines, though, is its simple pricing structure. Aweber Free is ideal for those with small lists (500 subscribers or less).
Unlike other platforms that add features and capabilities for plans at different price points, AWeber offers all of its features with every plan.
Pricing is based strictly on the number of subscribers on your list. So you’ll get the same features whether you have 20 contacts or 20,000 contacts.
Here’s an overview of the pricing tiers.
- 0 – 500 Subscribers — $19 per month
- 501 – 2,500 Subscribers — $29 per month
- 2,501 – 5,000 Subscribers — $49 per month
- 5,001 – 10,000 Subscribers — $69 per month
- 10,001 – 25,000 Subscribers — $149 per month
Even with its affordable price point, AWeber still provides the features you need to succeed.
With AWeber, you’ll get all of the basic features that you expect with an email marketing service:
- 700+ pre-built templates
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Email analytics
- A/B testing
- Sign up forms
- Automation
- Third-party integrations
- Subscriber segmentation
AWeber is an industry leader in email deliverability rates. They make sure that your content is optimized to reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
You can try AWeber for free.
Omnisend – Best Email and SMS Marketing Combo
Omnisend is a simple yet powerful marketing solution that’s perfect for ecommerce shops. The platform comes with a wide range of features for automated email and SMS messaging designed to convert leads into customers.
Conversions are achieved by going one step further than most solutions. Omnisend combines text messages, web browser push notifications, email marketing, Google Customer Match, and Facebook ad retargeting to ensure you connect with as many customers as possible.
Omnisend lets you target customers in detail with numerous segmentation options.
All of these channels allow for campaign segmentation. This means you’ll be able to target the exact customers you need for specific products and services.
Omnisend also offers pre-built automations based on actions a customer might take. For example, let’s say you send them a cart abandonment email. If they don’t open that message, Omnisend can automatically send them a cart abandonment text message.
Take your marketing efforts to the next level by combining email and SMS campaigns with custom triggers and flows.
Omnisend has a vast library of drag-and-drop templates to choose from. You can browse by theme as well—simplifying the process of creating gorgeous, on-brand emails.
Here’s a closer look at Omnisend’s plans and pricing. Prices are based on the number of contacts you need:
Free — $0
- Up to 500 emails per month and reach up to 250 contacts
- Up to 60 SMS messages per month
- Omnisend-branded email campaigns
- Signup forms, boxes, and pop-ups
- Sales and performance reports
Standard — Starts at $16 per month for 500 contacts
- Up to 6000 emails per month
- Up to 60 SMS messages per month
- Email campaigns
- Signup forms, boxes, and pop-ups
- Sales and performance reports
- SMS campaigns and automation
- Unlimited audience segmentation
- 24/7 email and chat support
Pro — Starts at $59 per month for 500 contacts
- Unlimited emails per month
- Up to 3,933 SMS messages per month
- Email campaigns
- Signup forms, boxes, and pop-ups
- Advanced reporting
- SMS campaigns and automation
- Unlimited audience segmentation
- 24/7 priority email and chat support
- Unlimited web push notifications
- Facebook custom audiences
- Google Customer Match
Like most email marketing platforms, the cost per month increases as your contact list scales. So all the rates above are month-to-month, and Omnisend does not offer annual contracts.
The Free plan isn’t really viable for most businesses, so most of you will be evaluating the Standard and Pro options. For low-volume SMS needs, the Standard plan will be fine. But the Pro plan is definitely better for larger contact lists and businesses that want to use SMS marketing combined with email campaigns.
Standard and Pro plans both come with a customer success manager, and the Pro plan gives you access to 24/7 priority support. Sign up now to get started for free.
Moosend – Best for Ecommerce
Moosend offers an email marketing solution no matter if you’re a complete beginner or if you’re a seasoned pro. If you have an online store, this is the perfect tool.
From their easy drag-and-drop email builder to their easy segmentation tool to their accurate real-time analytics, they have all the features you need to nail your email marketing campaigns.
Our favorite thing about Moosend is their ecommerce AI. It leverages machine learning and collaborative filtering to target customers with products they might like based on the shopping habits of similar customers.
Moosend’s Ecommerce AI tool lets you target customers with products they might like based on the behavior of similar customers.
You’ll also be able to easily cross-sell based on customer shopping habits and keep track of how often they buy certain products (e.g., perishables), so you can regularly promote the products they need when they need them.
A lot of otherwise great email list services really struggle to give you this insight, if they can do it at all. Moosend makes it easy with a simple interface that lets any ecommerce business looking to level up its targeting and segmentation game.
Moosend makes it easy to cross-sell based on detailed customer data displayed in a simple user interface.
Moosend also does the basics of email marketing very well. Their advanced personalization features allow you to create unique emails for your target customer. Their segmentation tool allows you to spit your audience by purchasing behavior, cart abandoned products, and more.
They don’t offer that many themes, with just 40 responsive themes to choose from. However, they’re all highly customizable and eye-catching.
Pricing starts free for a 30-day trial, with their premium plans starting at $9 per month. More detailed information is below:
Free — $0/first month
- Unlimited emails
- Signup and subscription forms
- Reporting and analytics
- No credit card required
Pro — $9/month
- Landing pages
- Transactional emails
- Phone support
- SMTP server
- 5 team members
Enterprise — Custom pricing
- Custom reporting
- Dedicated account manager
- SSO & SAML
- On-boarding and migration
- 10 team members
- Service-level agreement
Try Moosend for free for 30 days.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) – Best for Growing Your Customer Base
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) offers everything you need to launch and track an email campaign. Add your content to their machine and watch your outreach take flight.
This is a mature platform–it’s got all of the features you expect and more. You can add live chat to your site and grab new email addresses from folks browsing your store or learning about your company.
Give customers a personalized experience with real-time chat options on their preferred channels and manage these conversations all in one place.
There’s a lot to like. More than 40 customizable templates, simple tools to build workflows, and a built-in CRM with room for as many contacts as you like.
You can use the free forever version of Brevo and send up to 300 emails per day without paying a cent. Once you see how it drives, you’ll understand why it’s so popular.
In terms of reaching more people, Brevo has everything you need. They provide a host of lead nurturing tools to help you grow your contact list:
- Landing pages. Create actionable and engaging web pages to collect leads for you.
- Sign-up forms. Place forms anywhere on your website to get user information.
- Facebook ads. Leverage the power of Facebook marketing to nurture more leads.
- Retargeted ads. Powerful ads based on a user’s previous online interactions.
Make it as simple as possible to build that list with eye-catching forms that turn website traffic into subscribers. Brevo’s intuitive interface makes embedding a form no harder than a few clicks.
Brevo is a powerful platform with intuitive marketing automations, a built-in CRM, and more than 40 customizable templates.
It’s easy to see how these tools help you cultivate an audience, leads, and customer growth. And, unlike other email marketing services, Brevo can support chat and SMS if you want to drive leads on your site or by text.
The platform is available via a fantastic free plan that gives you unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails per day. That’s a pretty great deal—especially if you’re running a bootstrap startup or solo operation.
Their email builder has a beginner-friendly editor that allows you to easily create the look and feel of your email.
They currently offer four different pricing tiers:
Free — $0 per month
- Up to 300 emails per day
- Unlimited contacts
- Chat
- SMS marketing
- Email template library
Starter — $25 per month
- Up to 100k emails
- No daily sending limit
- A/B testing
- Remove the Brevo logo
Business — $65 per month
- Up to 1MM emails
- Marketing automation
- Facebook ads
- Retargeted ads
- Landing pages
- Telephone support
Brevo+ — Customized pricing
- Customized email volume
- 20+ landing pages
- Customer success manager
- Access for 10+ users
- Dedicated IP
The Starter plan should be more than enough for most small businesses and startups.
However, as your business scales, the Business plan is always a great option. That comes with even more marketing features, such as Facebook and retargeted ads, along with telephone support.
Try Brevo today. Start out for free, and upgrade when it’s time to grow.
How to Find the Best Email Marketing Service for You
The best available email marketing service is going to be unique to you. After all, the multi-million dollar info product business is going to have very different needs than the humble blogger.
But there are specific factors that we took into consideration because we believe that they tend to be the most important ones for most businesses.
I’ll break down the details of our process for making this list and explain what matters, what doesn’t, and what you need to know to find the best option for you.
Use our methodology to help guide your ultimate decision.
And while we don’t recommend using price as a deciding factor, if you’re just starting out and need to watch every penny, there are some solid free email marketing tools to consider, too.
Plenty of Email Templates
There are a lot of reasons to want an email marketing service. You might want to create your first sales funnel and incorporate email into your marketing strategy. Or maybe you just want to send the occasional newsletter out to subscribers.
Whatever your reason, you want your emails to look good while you do it.
That’s why you should find an email marketing service that takes the stress out of things like formatting and typesetting by giving you a list of great email templates for any of your needs.
Many of the offerings above offer drag-and-drop email templates to help take the headache out of designing a great-looking email. With tools like MailChimp’s email builder, you’re filling out the basic info, and a stunning email takes shape on its own.
Look for a solution with a variety of templates that are easy to customize.
They’ll also offer a variety of different email template types to fit specific purposes.
For example, HubSpot comes with a library of pre-built sales email templates ready for you and your business to use. If you want, they’ll even allow you to create your own templates unique to your business. You can customize them to your exact needs and save them for use whenever you need them.
MailChimp is another great service with tons of different email templates for different needs, such as selling a product or promoting a blog post. It’s also highly customizable, allowing you to create specific ones for your brand’s goals.
Simple Segmentation
As your business grows, you’re going to want to target different parts of your audience for different products. After all, if you offer a variety of different services and products, not everyone on your list will want the same thing.
A good email marketing service gives you easy but powerful ways to segment your audience.
For example, a service like MailChimp allows you to tag segments of your audience depending on how they subscribed to your email list. That way, you can put those segments into specifically targeted funnels easily and automatically.
Make sure you can segment your subscribers and that it is easy to do, like you can in Omnisend.
A service like Omnisend (pictured above) allows you to send segmented campaigns based on things like your subscriber’s interests, demographics, email open rates, and the products they’ve purchased.
It’s important to note: If you want segmentation features (and if you’re serious about email marketing, you should), you’re going to have to pay for it. This often doesn’t come with a service’s free plan. However, it’s well worth it, especially if you’re focused on growth and conversions.
Seriously–all the marketing automations, striking templates, and great writing in your campaigns depend on your ability to understand your audience. The perfect message is still an airball if it’s sent at the wrong time or to the wrong person.
Segmentation and other aspects of an email list service aren’t as flashy as some of the other features, but they are absolutely critical.
In-Depth Analytics
As the old business adage goes: “If you can measure it, you can improve it.”
To that end, a good email marketing service will give you all the reporting tools you need to provide you with in-depth metrics and KPIs.
Knowing this information will give you vital data about where your subscribers live, who they are, and what they want from your business.
It’ll also help you create better services and marketing strategies in the future. For example, you’ll be able to better segment your audiences with the right analytics.
HubSpot has some of the best traffic and conversion analytic tools available. Along with their A/B testing feature, their analytics tools will let you know exactly how each of your emails performs and why.
Data is key to understanding email campaign performance, so be sure the solution you select makes it easy to find and understand the analytics.
Easy Automation
There’s nothing quite like the “set it and forget it” approach to business.
When an email marketing service is automated, you don’t have to worry about making sure that each and every one of your new subscribers is in the right sales funnel. Once you’ve set it up, they’ll receive the emails they should receive automatically.
That’s why you want to find an email marketing service that will let you easily set up automated emails without a lot of fuss and complex tagging schemes.
Automation makes your life easier, so choose a solution that makes it easy to do.
Constant Contact (pictured above) is a standout when it comes to automating emails. It lets you trigger welcome messages for any new subscribers and put them into specific drip campaigns depending on their actions. The simple design allows you to do this easily, too, with no headaches involved.
Top Email Marketing Providers for 2023 in Summary
What’s the best email marketing service? I wish I could point you to just one, but your strategy, goals, audience, and budget are going to determine the right solution.
Use the reviews and methodology in this article to hone in on the perfect one for you. Here’s a recap of our top seven picks:
- Constant Contact — Best overall
- MailerLite — Best for the essentials at an affordable price
- HubSpot – Best for automated email marketing
- AWeber – Best for low subscriber count
- Omnisend —Best email and SMS marketing combo
- Moosend — Best for Ecommerce
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) — Best for growing your customer base
Whether you’re starting a new list from scratch, switching providers, or looking for a full-service CRM, there’s an option for you above.
