In 2022, about 4.03 billion people around the world use email. The number of email users is set to grow to 4.48 billion by 2025. https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-users-worldwide[/efn_note]

According to the Data & Marketing Association, the ROI (return on investment) for email marketing is about 3,400% https://dma.org.uk/research/investigating-email-getting-returns-on-email[/efn_note], that means for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect a return of $34.

What does this all mean?

It means email marketing through emailing platforms is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to grow your business, get website visitors, and ultimately, paying customers.

Every business likes to make money, and email marketing is just one way you can make more of it.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing or bulk email marketing services means using email as part of your marketing strategy to promote your products, services, as well as expand your brand reach, and customer loyalty.

When customers or subscribers sign up to your email list, you can send them emails and newsletters on a consistent basis to make them aware of discounts on your products and services, or make them aware of new ones.

Email marketing can also be used to make your customers aware of changes to your brand, keep them engaged, and returning to your website for new purchases.

Does email marketing work?

Email marketing is well and alive, it tends to form a core component of any successful digital marketing strategy.

Email marketing is effective because email is confidential and personal, you can customize the message and it will sit in a person’s inbox until it is read, actioned, or archived.

Our internal tests showed email had a 7x higher clickthrough rate than social media. Ideally, your marketing strategy should take a multichannel approach, which includes outreach through social media and email.

On social media, new posts disappear from your feed quickly, especially on Facebook and Twitter, where news, posts, and opinions rotate quickly. New information pops up faster than you can read it. When you send an email to someone, it reaches them (as long as their email address is active) without the distraction of a newsfeed.

Email marketing also lets you connect and build stronger relationships with your audience to drive traffic to your website or blog. It also allows you to understand your audience and target them with adapted email campaigns to drive better engagement.

What is email marketing software?

Email marketing software helps you manage your email subscriber lists, create and send designer level emails, and provides analytics on clickthrough and read rates.

The availability of email marketing services has grown in the past few years to suit different business requirements.

Some businesses require heavily customized email designs while others want pre-made templates, with email marketing software existing for both. Naturally, some email marketing softwares have even integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) and inventory management systems.

Given the range of services, email marketing can be quite affordable, which makes it great for all business types, especially startups. Many email marketing services offer free plans or generous discounts, so it’s easy to get started.

What to look for in email marketing software

When picking an email marketing service, there are a few factors to consider, and it all depends on your requirements and goals.

There are certain key features that you should look for when choosing email marketing software:

Ease

The email marketing interface should be intuitive and easy to use. It’s always helpful to have drag and drop features built in. The email marketing software should also make it easy to manage your email contact lists.

Automation

A good email marketing service should give you the ability to personalize emails, send emails in bulk, schedule your sending times (across timezones), and target your emails to specific users.

Analytics

You need to know how well your email marketing campaigns perform, who reads (or doesn’t read) them, when they’re read, actioned, and clickthrough rates back to your online channels (website, blog, social media, etc.)

Deliverability

Perhaps one of the most important points, email deliverability! A good email marketing software delivers email to your email contact lists. It can also tell you which times are best to send emails. After all of the work you put in, you definitely don’t want your emails ending up in spam folders.

Best email marketing services

All of the email marketing services covered on our list deliver on ease, automation, analytics, and deliverability. They also offer free plans or generous discounts.

With that in mind, let’s get to the best email marketing services in 2022!

If you already have an email marketing service in mind, click on it below to jump straight to its section.

SendinBlue

SendinBlue is an email marketing platform geared toward small and medium sized businesses. It provides a complete email and SMS marketing solution. It even has a live chat service. The company aims to empower businesses to build unique connections with customers.

SendinBlue is easy to use and perfect for any beginner building their first email marketing campaigns. It comes with a drag and drop email editor to build, customize, and add personal touches to emails.

SendinBlue has advanced email marketing automation that lets you set rules and triggers for recurring actions you’d like to automate. Automated actions can include triggers to send off emails, SMS, organize email lists, or even updating email contact list information.

You can also send transactional emails (great for Ecommerce online stores), welcome emails, or schedule special discount codes on special occasions like birthdays or holidays. Their automation also allows you to organize and segment out your contact lists, to better tailor your email content and flow to the behaviors and interests of each email list.

You can also run A/B tests with the SendinBlue marketing automation tools, test different email automation flows, and gives you the ability to see which does better to drive results in sales and engagement. Their automation can also indicate the best times to send emails to ensure solid email deliverability across your contact lists.

You can integrate your SendinBlue account with different external apps, like Google Analytics for your analytics dashboard, WooCommerce and Shopify for Ecommerce tracking, and even your Facebook Ads account.

SendInBlue has a free plan that lets you send up to 300 per day across unlimited contacts. Although you won’t be able to brand your emails, it’s a good way to get started.

As you grow, their Lite and Premium are a better fit and the monthly price depends your email sending volume.

On the SendinBlue Lite plan, for $25 per month, you get unlimited daily sending (capped at 10K emails per month), A/B testing, your own customized branding and email-based support from the SendInBlue team.

The SendInBlue Premium plan is the best value on price vs features, for $65 per month, you get unlimited daily sending (capped at 20K emails per month), marketing automation tools, Facebook Ads integration, landing pages, multiuser access, and telephone based support from the SendInBlue team.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an intuitive and beginner-friendly email marketing service geared toward small businesses. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, startup, or scaling your business, Constant Contact provides a solid all-in-one email marketing platform.

Its interface comes equipped with a drag and drop builder so you can easily customize fully-responsive email templates. Constant Contact provides access to 240+ professional email template designs.

Constant Contact has solid marketing automation tools to better drive engagement and sales including welcome emails, triggered email series, email contact list segmentation, list building tools, and even a cool feature that resends emails to non-openers.

They also provide email marketing tools for Ecommerce to target new audiences with ads, landing pages, and website sign-up forms. Their AI lets you send transactional emails for new purchases and follow-up drip campaigns. There are integrations built for both Shopify and WooCommerce based online stores.

Constant Contact can also integrate with your social media strategy to automate social media post scheduling and pull engagement analytics. You can also link it up with your Facebook and Instagram Ads accounts to better optimize your ads to your target markets.

Their email contact list management is robust and allows you to upload your existing lists from Excel, Outlook or Salesforce and collect new lists from your website or blog to directly upload onto your Constant Contact account.

We found the tracking tools to be really solid as well, especially their intuitive real-time tracking tool that lets you see who is opening, clicking, and sharing your emails.

They also have customized email types for surveys and polls, donations, sign-up forms, and to promote events. Email deliverability is solid and in our own tests, every email we sent recipients across timezones using Constant Contact ended up in their inbox at the scheduled time.

Constant Contact doesn’t have a free tier, however they do have a 60-day trial period which lets you send unlimited emails and use the full suite of email marketing automation tools and integrations.

The Constant Contact “Email” plan is $20 per month, comes with unlimited email templates, automation re-sending tools, A/B testing, and Ecommerce integrations.

The “Email Plus” plan is $45 per month and provides everything on “Email” in addition to dynamic content, surveys, polls, coupons, pop-up forms, and advanced email marketing automation tools.

The monthly price tiers on all of their plans depends on the size of your email contact list and scales pretty fairly.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the more well-known email marketing softwares out there. They are an industry veteran and most well-known for providing an always free email marketing plan.

The MailChimp email marketing platform comes with a drag and drop editor with visually stunning pre-made email templates and blocks.

If you’d rather build your own template, you can build it using HTML. The MailChimp Content Studio lets you store all of your brand assets, including images and files directly within your MailChimp account so you can easily access them for your email campaigns.

MailChimp comes with robust email marketing automation tools that let you build customer journey paths and also logic trees using branching point “if” scenarios. They claim their email automations can increase email clickthrough rates by 174% compared to traditional bulk email sending.

They also provide real-time “smart” analytics that shows you how well email campaigns perform live so that you can adapt them in real-time to drive better engagement.

Similar to other email marketing software, they also provide transactional emails and integrate well with a whole range of Ecommerce platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and many more.

MailChimp provides an always free plan, it lets you send 12,000 emails per month to a maximum of 2,000 contacts. It does come with certain limitations, including no access to contact list segmenting, send-time optimization, and A/B testing. Custom branding is also locked on the free plan, which means your list will see MailChimp’s logo instead of yours. You also get no support after 30 days.

Opting for a paid plan is best if you’re serious about your email marketing strategy. The MailChimp Essentials plan is $9.99 per month and includes email templates, multi-step customer journeys, custom branding and A/B testing. You also get access to 24/7 support.

Drip

Drip is an email and SMS marketing platform. It is geared to independent bloggers, Ecommerce shop owners, and digital marketing experts.

Its integration with popular Ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce makes it a great option for entrepreneurs operating online stores.

Drip has excellent email marketing automation tools including AI-driven email contact segmentation, A/B split testing, and visual workflow automation builder. These tools save you time and allow you to better target and tailor email content to your various contact list email segments to drive more traffic and sales.

It also includes a bulk email sender and provides a visually intuitive builder to put together your email campaigns along with track click and open rates. Their revenue tracking feature allows you to see how much attributed revenue your email campaigns generate, pretty handy when calculating ROI and future campaign goals.

Drip has 100+ integrations. This is where they shine against competitors. Integrations range from CRM, email verification, forms & surveys, payment processing, membership platforms, and more. One of the best integrations is Facebook custom audiences, which can really boost the ROI on your Facebook Ads strategy.

The Drip email marketing plans start at $19 per month for 500 contacts and unlimited email sending. If you have more contacts, the price scales up quite fairly. Although there is no free plan on Drip, it does provide 14-day free trial.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is less known compared to other email marketing softwares, however, it offers an easy platform to build your emails and bulk sending. It’s geared to artists, bloggers, and creators who want to build up their fan base and audiences.

The ConvertKit email marketing platform comes with dozens of designer level email templates you can easily customize to your own brand. Their 98% deliverability makes sure your emails get into inboxes.

There are also email marketing automation flows that let you build out customer flows and email triggers, an email content series, and automatic emails based on customer actions to further incentivize engagement.

Their interface is great for organizing and segmenting your contact lists, including tags and the ability to compile subscriber lists from several different sources. Their tagging and segmenting tools let you better identify your lists to tailor content and campaigns to their interests.

ConvertKit also comes with an easy to understand analytics dashboard that tracks new subscribers, total amount of subscribers, attributed revenue through purchases, and even A/B testing results.

A lot of solopreneuers and creators use ConvertKit to drive their email marketing and newsletter strategies. For bloggers and content creators, driving engagement means income and ConvertKit really delivers on simplicity of use to get results.

ConvertKit has a free plan for up to 1,000 subscribers, which lets you send bulk emails and sell digital products & service subscriptions. They also provide email based support on their free plan.

On their $29 per month plan, you get access to advanced automation tools, integrations, and priority support. In addition, there is a free migration from any other email marketing software.

Build an email list

We hope our list of the best email marketing platforms in 2022 helps you make the right choice. One thing you may be wondering is how to build an email list on your website.

You need contacts before you start marketing, here are just a few pointers from our team to show you how to build an email list.

These are just a few ideas, there are more targeted approaches depending on your industry and goals. Building an email list is the first step in crafting a success email marketing strategy to grow your multi-channel engagement and sales.