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BEST Email Marketing Software in 2021 (My TOP Recommendation) - read the full article about digital marketing tools, Digital Marketing and All digital inbound channels from Metics Media on Qualified.One
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- So in the past couple of months, Ive tried out pretty much every popular email marketing software out there.
And in this video, Im gonna share with you my thoughts on each of them and tell you exactly which one is best for you.
Whats up, this is Simon from Metics media providing you with the best tips, tools and tutorials to grow your online business.
So make sure you subscribe to the channel to not miss any upcoming videos.
So before we get into the video, I wanna make clear that this video is not sponsored by any of these email marketing providers that were gonna be talking about in this video.
Everything Im saying is based on my own experience and own opinion.
Im gonna be giving you the pros and cons between different email marketing softwares that I recommend, and specifically, were gonna be looking at eight different providers including both free and paid options.
So theres ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, GetResponse, Aweber, Convertit, Mailchimp, MailerLite and Sendinblue.
And Ive already created complete beginner tutorials for each of these eight providers that were gonna be talking about in this video.
So no matter what you choose these tutorials will show you step-by-step on how to start using them.
Ill leave a link to all of these tutorials down below in the video description.
Now Ill break this video down in five things that you should look for when deciding on your email marketing software.
And Im gonna be giving you my overall thoughts at the end on which platform I would choose for what.
So lets now dive in and talk about the five things that you should look for when deciding on an email marketing software.
Lets start off with the most obvious one, which is price.
Pretty much all email marketing providers are so-called SaaS companies, meaning they charge for their service on a monthly or yearly basis.
Kind of like a Netflix subscription.
If you stop paying the monthly fee, you will lose access to their software.
The amount youll have to pay normally depends on how many contacts you have on your email list.
So the larger email list is, the more you have to pay on a monthly or yearly basis.
The only exception to this pricing model is Sendinblue.
They charge based on how many emails you send out per month rather than how many contacts you have on your email list.
So this provider might be interesting to you if you already have a large email list but you send out relatively few emails.
Five of these eight providers also offer a completely free plan that you can use up to a certain amount of contacts on your email list.
When you go over that contact limit, you will have to choose one of their paid plans.
Next to that contact limit, most free plans also limit the amount of features that you can use so that eventually you will become a paying customer.
However, in my opinion, there are some very attractive and capable free plans that youll be able to use for a very long time, until you will have to upgrade and choose a paid plan.
In my opinion, MailerLite and Mailchimp have the most attractive free plan on the market right now.
You can use both of these free options to create signup forms, build landing pages, and send out email broadcasts.
Plus MailerLite is the only free option that you can use to build entire email automation sequences and MailChimp has the most attractive contact limit at 2000 email contacts.
ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact and GetResponse dont have a free plan.
What theyre offering is a free trial so that you can try out their software before choosing one of their paid plans.
Constant Contact has the longest free trial period at a 60-day free trial, followed by GetResponse with a 30-day free trial and ActiveCampaign with a 14-day free trial.
However, the 60-day free trial of Constant Contact is only available for people in the United States and in Canada, so for everybody else you will only get a 30-day free trial.
Now trying to compare the prices side by side of these email marketing softwares.
Its quite a difficult thing to do because most of these providers have multiple plan tiers that are just hard to compare to each other.
So for example, ActiveCampaigns cheapest plan comes with their powerful email automation builder but not with the landing page builder.
Whereas GetResponse cheapest plan doesnt include their automation builder but they do include the landing page builder.
So the attractiveness of each plan really depends on what features you actually need.
Nevertheless, heres a comparison of the prices for each provider with an email list size of up to 2,500 contacts on their lowest tier plan with a monthly payment option.
Again, Sendinblue has a different pricing model.
So I chose their Lite plan with a monthly sending limit of 10,000 emails.
So this comparison should give you a good idea about how expensive those providers are compared to each other.
But again, the features that come with these plans vary between these different providers.
So definitely check out the prices for yourself before making a decision.
Ill leave some links down below in the video description.
Now lets move on to the next important question that you should ask yourself before choosing your email marketing provider.
And that is what email marketing tools will you actually need in your business? Will you just send out simple email newsletters or will you be building complex email automation sequences and customer journeys.
Because theres no point in paying for a very powerful tool if youre not gonna use those features.
Out of all eight options, ActiveCampaign is definitely the best provider when it comes to email marketing automation they are known to be the leader when it comes to email automation allowing you to pretty much build anything you can think of.
You can also use it to send text messages, build landing pages, and split us different campaigns.
And they also have a very good CRM feature very in-depth reporting and tons of integration options.
Next to ActiveCampaign, GetResponse also offers a lot of pro features and customization options but its not quite as sophisticated as ActiveCampaign when it comes to email automation.
However, GetResponse response is more and more turning into an all-in-one marketing platform offering tools like sales funnels, webinars split testing landing pages, or customer relation management.
Definitely one of the best options If youre looking for a tool that goes beyond just email marketing.
All the other providers dont really stand out to me in terms of automation possibilities, all of them do the basic features like signup forms landing pages, basic automations, and email broadcasts.
Some of them offer some unique things like survey tools or logo makers all little things that I think are not that important when it comes to email marketing, but are good to have when you actually need them.
By the way, if youre already using other third party softwares like Shopify or a Salesforce and you wanna integrate those softwares with your email marketing provider then you wanna make sure that they offer this specific integration.
However, you shouldnt have any issues with those eight providers that Im talking about in this video, because all of them have a wide variety of integration options.
Another big difference you see between email marketing providers, is how many design templates and customization options they offer for creating nice-looking signup forms, landing pages, and emails.
They all do a pretty good job when it comes to templates and customization possibilities except maybe for ConverKit, they do have some good landing page design templates but when it comes to emails, they are very limited.
All you can basically do is create simple texts, emails and maybe add a couple of images.
But if all they wanna do is send out simple texts emails anyway, then thats not such a big deal.
Now, the next thing you might wanna look at when deciding on what email marketing provider to go for is how easy it is to use their software.
Like Ive already mentioned, Ive personally tested all of these eight providers on the list here.
And the, by far, the easiest tool for me to use was definitely MailerLite.
They have a very nice and clean looking interface that I find very intuitive to use, which makes the process of creating email campaigns extremely easy and efficient.
I usually recommend this provider to people who are looking for a low maintenance and beginner friendly tool, that gets the job done.
Obviously MailerLite doesnt come with as many possibilities as a tool like GetResponse or ActiveCampaign.
But if you dont need all of those tools and you just wanna have basic email marketing options, then Id definitely go for a tool like MailerLite because of how much quicker youll be able to learn and use it.
The other options on the list are not quite as intuitive as MailerLite, but youll definitely get your head around them if you watch my tutorials on YouTube.
Okay, so lets move on to the next thing to look for, which is deliverability.
This is something many people dont think about but its actually very important when it comes to email marketing.
When your email marketing provider has spared deliverability then your emails will end up in the spam folder and not in the actual inbox, which means that your email subscribers will not find your emails.
And thats something you would definitely wanna avoid by all means.
Because you can have the best converting emails.
It doesnt really matter when nobody actually finds your emails.
Theres a website called emailtooltester.com and they do a regular deliverability tests for each of these eight providers.
So what you see on the screen right now is the average deliverability rate over the last three years for each of these eight providers.
Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign seem to have the best deliverability overall followed by MailerLite and Mailchimp.
The results of these deliverability tests fluctuate a lot with each test.
So definitely take those numbers with a grain of salt.
I have all this data from emailtooltester.com.
So definitely check out their website.
If you wanna see the most recent deliverability tests that they have made.
Last but not least, I wanna talk about customer support.
Setting up your own email marketing system is not always easy.
And a lot of the time you wont be able to google the answer to your problems because each email marketing system is unique to their business.
So you really wanna have a good support that when you get stuck somewhere, you can just contact them and they will be able to help you quickly.
Personally, I hated when I have to open support tickets and then sometimes it will take days until someone will get back to me with a possible solution.
Maybe sometimes it wont even solve my problem right away.
And I also dont wanna talk to some kind of robot.
They will suggest some support articles to me.
What I wanna have is 24/7 live chat support that I can access with a click of a button but unfortunately not every provider offers this kind of support.
Here you see a short overview of the kind of support you can expect from each provider.
I included a quality rating based on my own experience and based on what I read from other people who have tested out these providers.
In my own experience, GetResponse easily has the best support out of all options.
Theyre available 24/7.
You can start a chat with them with a click of a button and their staff is very knowledgeable meaning they will be actually able to help you and solve your problem quickly.
That being said, ActiveCampaign and MailerLite also have very good support in my experience.
All your other options have solid support but to have room to improve in my experience when it comes to availability and quality.
So now what provider do I recommend for you specifically? Well, Ive actually created a cool little tool that you can use to find out for yourself.
If you go to the video description below this video youll find a link to a short survey that you can take.
And after you take that survey, its only like a couple of questions that you have to answer about your email marketing needs and then it will generate my personal recommendation based on the answer that you have given in that survey for you specifically.
So I highly recommend you take that short survey.
It will take like a minute or so and you also dont have to enter an email address at the end or something like that.
Just answer those five to seven questions and then it will generate my personal recommendation specifically for your business.
Youll find the link down below in the video description.
Now lets finish off this video with my top recommendations.
If youre looking for an affordable and easy-to-use tool to send out simple email broadcasts and maybe build some simple email automation sequences then I would definitely go for MailerLite.
Its not only the easiest tool use, but also the most affordable one and their free plan already has everything you need to get started.
And once you pass 1000 email contacts its still the cheapest option.
And if you do have some money to spend youre really serious about email marketing and you wanna build customized email automation, sequences then ActiveCampaign is definitely the best choice for you.
If you go with ActiveCampaign, you will most likely never have to operate and switch to another provider because theres really no other tool right now that can compare with ActiveCampaign.
They also outperform most other providers in terms of deliverability.
And theyre also a very good support.
And if ActiveCampaign is a bit out of your budget right now, but you dont wanna settle for a basic tool like MailerLite, then GetResponse is definitely a software that you should check out.
Ive been using GetResponse for about three years now and Im still very happy with it.
They have tons of design templates, automation possibilities and useful tools like spam testing and optimized email scheduling.
So those are my top recommendations.
When it comes to email marketing Im always trying to find some exclusive discounts and deals for you guys on the softwares.
So make sure you check out all the links down below in the video description to save some money on your email marketing software.
Youll also find links there to complete beginner tutorials to all providers that weve talked about in this video.
If you found this video helpful, let me know by giving this video a thumbs up that would really make my day.
And if you have any questions whatsoever just leave them down below in the comment section and Ill make sure to get back to you as soon as possible.
Also subscribe to the channel if you wanna see more videos, just like this one.
And with that being said, thanks very much for watching.
And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
Metics Media: BEST Email Marketing Software in 2021 (My TOP Recommendation) - Digital Marketing