Without having to spend hours personalising and tracking each email, email automation software enables you to send targeted email campaigns to your subscriber list. Discover which email marketing automation solution best suits your company’s demands by reading on.
The way every email marketing automation tool works is by sending emails in response to triggers, which are predetermined stages your leads will take along their customer journey.
Automated emails are delivered when client behaviour satisfies the requirements specified in an automated workflow, as opposed to conventional marketing emails that are sent to a contact list on a fixed schedule or at intervals (like in a drip campaign).
What to look for in software for email marketing automation
There are two basic price ranges for email marketing automation platforms:
- Pricing that places a cap on contacts (also known as subscribers)
- Limitations on pricing for email sends
Some email automation programmes increase in price as your subscriber base grows. Ecommerce companies sometimes have a sizable contact list, therefore from a pricing perspective, email service providers with limitless contacts are very appealing.
Agencies and other businesses with a smaller number of high-value clients typically have a smaller contact list and are therefore more inclined to favour ESPs that just set a limit on the number of emails that can be sent.
Additional features to watch for in an email automation software include:
- Management of contacts using list and tag sorting
- CMS integrations with website visitor tracking
- Messaging platforms for cross-promotion, such as SMS and Live Chat
- ready-made email templates that are completely editable
- Direct email communication and automatic responses
- Personalised landing pages with sign-up forms
- Workflow templates and an automated workflow builder
- immediately alter email HTML with a drag-and-drop editor
The top 10 email automation programmes
There are several different email marketing software vendors, and each offers unique advantages and cost structures.
We’ve whittled down our list to only include vendors who excel at providing excellent customer service, are really simple to use, and have open pricing structures in order to make it simpler for you to choose the ideal marketing solution for your company.
- Best Overall: Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
- The Best for Agencies Hubspot
- Most Effective for Event Marketing: Constant Contact
- Best MailerLite for Bloggers
- Best for SaaS (Integrations): ActiveCampaign
- The Best for Influencers: GetResponse (Webinars, Live Collaboration)
- The best for online storefronts is Drip
- Best for Ecommerce: Omnisend
- The Best Mailchimp for Creatives
- The Best EmailOctopus for Web Developers
1.Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
An email marketing automation tool that serves companies of all sizes is called Brevo (formerly Sendinblue).
Beginners in email marketing may quickly create their first campaign with Brevo thanks to the platform’s 40+ email templates and various process examples. In a single dashboard, more seasoned marketers can easily build landing pages and manage cross-promotions with Facebook advertisements.
Additionally, you can connect your website using one-click connectors for Shopify, Prestashop, and WordPress, or you can use Zapier to connect countless programmes (like HubSpot and Salesforce) to optimise your workflow.
Developers may design unique plugins for any use case using Brevo’s extensible API, including transactional emails that are sparked by in-app interactions and intelligent product recommendations for a custom shop.
Best Qualities
Brevo is distinguished for its high rate of email deliverability. Your email campaigns will only be successful if they reach your subscribers’ inboxes and are not flagged as spam.
Transactional and marketing emails can be divided into separate streams with different IP addresses using Brevo’s free feature of double opt-in. Brevo also offers the option to automatically eliminate inactive subscribers, which essentially ensures higher open rates.
Pricing
With a daily email sending cap of 300, Brevo’s Free plan offers audience segmentation, signup forms, a Sales Platform, page tracking, and marketing automation workflows for up to 2,000 contacts.
Paid services with no daily sending caps are available for $25 per month. Full functionality and unlimited automation are available for $65 per month.
2.HubSpot
The most popular email automation platform among marketing agencies is HubSpot. Contact management, email tracking, and lead scoring are three of its most used functions.
HubSpot has a tonne of other elements in its Marketing Hub toolkit that make it a fully-featured email marketing tool, despite the fact that it is more of a CRM tool and is frequently linked to its lead generation pipeline.
Best Qualities
It is the perfect tool for sales and marketing teams that wish to collaborate because it offers dynamic list generation, segmentation, lead routing, and internal notifications.
Pricing
A feature-limited free subscription from HubSpot offers fundamental contact management with up to one million free contacts.
The Basic plan for it is $50 per month. However, the expenses soar to $890/month coupled with a required $3000 (one-off) onboarding fee as soon as you can switch to the Professional plan of its Marketing Hub to benefit from automated features.
HubSpot is unquestionably a worthwhile investment if your marketing firm serves high-value clients. However, its expensive price tag and piecemeal approach to unlocking features might not feel justified for organisations with minimal needs.
3. Permanent Connection
With a history going all the way back to the middle of the 1990s, Constant Contact may be the only email marketing tool on this list that could be considered legacy software. Although its user interface may seem antiquated and uninspired, a non-technical audience will find it simpler to utilise.
It has all the capabilities you’d anticipate to find in tried-and-true email automation software, such as list management, process automations, website forms that can be embedded, and streamlined reporting.
Best Qualities
With specialised event marketing features that enable you handle registrations for seminars, workshops, fundraisers, product demos, and more, Constant Contact stands out from the competition.
Marketing professionals can quickly create a content calendar, reply to messages in real-time, and run social media ads on Facebook and Instagram when combined with its social media management features.
Pricing
There is no free plan offered by Constant Contact. Its Core Plan, with a cap of 500 subscribers, is priced at $9.99 per month.
Constant Contact is often more expensive than competing solutions with a comparable feature set because its fees scale with the total number of members.
4.MailerLite
As a relative newcomer to the email marketing field, MailerLite takes pride in being an email automation platform created from the ground up for novices.
The degree of detail needed for a sophisticated marketing workflow, such as timing mailings based on website visits or making product recommendations based on specific customers’ purchase histories, is missing from this approach, though.
Best Qualities
For those who are absolutely new to email marketers, setting up workflow triggers is simple and intuitive thanks to its user-friendly design.
Pricing
An email list management, landing pages, ecommerce integrations (such as Shopify, Woocommerce, Gumroad, etc.), and a pop-up builder are all included in MailerLite’s $10/month plan.
However, its base price climbs to $21/month on the Advanced Plan, which many would regard to be its true price tag, in order to take advantage of numerous triggers in a single workflow automation (a highly valuable feature).
5. Active Campaign
With the help of the potent email automation software ActiveCampaign, you may incredibly precisely tailor email marketing campaigns. A marketing strategy can be created in a variety of inventive ways thanks to the ability to filter contacts into categories and tags.
Additionally, ActiveCampaign includes a built-in CRM and the special capability to seamlessly switch from list-based campaigns to one-on-one dialogues as needed.
Best Qualities
ActiveCampaign is a favourite among sales teams looking to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns because of its direct emails, scripted responses, and customised email signatures.
Pricing
The Lite Plan’s pricing jumps sharply as the number of members rises, starting at $15/month for 500 contacts. It is one of the more expensive alternatives on this list because the majority of its cross-channel marketing tools, including SMS, landing pages, and customised forms, are only accessible on the Plus Plan or higher, which starts at $70/month.
6. GetResponse
A webinar hosting facility, live chat, and an AI-powered website generator are just a few of the cool features that distinguish GetResponse from more specialised email automation tools.
Similar to ActiveCampaign, it has versatile workflow automation builder and advanced contact management.
With GetResponse’s free plan, you can create a single landing page, sign-up forms, and pop-up ads while sending mailing campaigns to a maximum of 500 contacts.
Best Qualities
GetResponse is a fantastic resource for influencer marketing, especially for companies that regularly conduct webinars and other online forums for collaboration.
Pricing
The $19/month Email Marketing plan offers just rudimentary segmentation, and email automation is only allowed for autoresponders.
Email marketing and event-based automation are included in the Marketing Automation plan, which costs $59 per month.
7. Drip
Drip is a simple email marketing automation programme created especially for online shops. Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce are a few of its native e-commerce connectors. Additionally, its API can be expanded to function with unique shops.
Additionally, Drip offers a helpful collection of workflow templates, including as welcome, birthday, win-back, and abandoned cart emails.
Best Qualities
Retail companies adore Drip’s clever analytics because they provide tailored product recommendations. To generate thorough client profiles, Drip additionally syncs its segmentation functionality with Facebook Custom Audience information.
Pricing
The Drip pricing model is the most straightforward: $39/month for all capabilities, with a cap of 2,500 contacts and unlimited email sends.
However, sending restrictions are put in place when email senders reach 30,000 contacts, which makes this initially cheap service far more expensive in large quantities.
8. Omnisend
Similar to Drip’s more stylish cousin, Omnisend. It is aimed at bigger, multi-store online retailers.
The dynamic customer lifecycle function, which dynamically tags consumers based on where they are in their customer journey, saves the most time.
Best Qualities
To provide actionable client data, Omnisend cleverly blends social media interactions, shopping histories, and ad retargeting on Google and Facebook.
Pricing
If you have less than 250 subscribers and intend to send fewer than 500 emails each month, you can use all of its features with the free subscription.
The subscriber cap is increased to 500 contacts for $16/month, and the monthly email sending cap is increased to 6000 emails.
Omnisend’s Pro package, which starts at $59/month for up to 2500 contacts, combines unlimited email sends with a modest SMS capacity. The more active contacts you have, the more expensive it gets.
9.Mailchimp
A simple newsletter programme that anyone could use, Mailchimp was once. Over time, it transformed into a far more sophisticated email marketing automation tool.
Mailchimp offers website builders, signup forms, surveys, and distinct volume pricing for transactional emails.
The newest capabilities of Mailchimp, however, are exclusively intended for designers and creative firms.
Best Qualities
Mailchimp’s content studio tool to accommodate unconventional email design layouts. Marketers receive helpful real-time recommendations from an email subject line aid and a content optimizer. Even email designs automatically generated. Its new creative assistant AI using corporate branding materials.
Pricing
A marketing CRM, a website builder, forms, landing pages, and a monthly cap of 1,000 email sends (500 sends/day) and 500 contacts are all included in Mailchimp’s free account. Sound constrained? View the top Mailchimp substitutes.
Its $13/month Essential package has a constrained client journey map.
When you upgrade to Mailchimp’s Premium plan, which starts at $350/month and gives you access to its extensive segmentation, A/B testing, and comparative reporting tools, it truly transforms into a modern email automation platform.
10. Use email octopus
A simple email automation programme called EmailOctopus gives users the choice to send their emails through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
Developers that desire the advantages of a straightforward email marketing service to assist in acquiring new subscribers and automate transactional and promotional emails are the target audience for its email routing feature.
Best Qualities
Email Octopus is substantially less expensive than most email service providers because to its ability to route emails through Amazon SES, making it a good choice for companies with simple email marketing requirements and an internal development team.
Pricing
For up to 2,500 subscribers, the Connect Starter subscription is free and includes unlimited emails (delivered via the Amazon SES service). Starts at just $7/month for 500 subscribers.