Top 5 Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Growing your email list and utilizing smart email marketing tactics is a great way to gain new customers and ultimately increase your bottom line.

In this post, we review the top 5 email marketing services for small businesses. Our email marketing review criteria includes sending emails, tracking results, and building sign-up forms. These were selected based on most popular by consumers and well-known service providers. From our own professional experience, we purposefully chose to exclude email marketing reviews for other popular service providers due to quality issues related to deliverability, usability or performance.

In the coming weeks, we will also breakdown the top services with more advanced features best for medium to large businesses. But for now, let’s get into the basics.

MailChimp

Great for beginners, MailChimp offers easy to use features that help you email the right people at the right time. Subscriber profiles help you gain insight about the people on your list while keeping your list neatly organized. This is a dream come true for those of you who are still trying to run your email marketing manually with excel files and the like. http://mailchimp.com/

Main features:

• Subscriber profiles
• Built-in segmentation and targeting options
• Automated trigger emails
• Social media targeting
• Analytics
• Flexible design options
• Available as a mobile app so you can send emails on the go
• API integration

Pricing:

1. Entrepreneur — Up to 2,000 subscribers. Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free. No contracts, and no credit card required.
2. Growing business – Up to 50,000 subscribers. Send an unlimited number of emails with a monthly account, or purchase email credits that never expire. This option runs between $10 and $20 per month depending on how many subscribers you have.
3. High volume sender – More than 50,000 subscribers. Includes the full suite of features for professional senders. This option runs between $425 and $525 depending on subscribers.

iContact

iContact is a great platform for businesses looking to take their email marketing to the next level. If you don’t have a design team, iContact offers templates as well as a drag and drop builder so you can easily create unique designs for your emails. iContact is easy to use and offers full support if you need any help along the way. http://www.icontact.com/

Main features:

• Email Templates
• Drag and Drop message creation tool
• Email delivery
• Social Media publishing
• Contact management
• Reports
• Customer Support

Pricing:

1. Up to 500 Subscribers: $14.00 Monthly.
2. Up to 2,500 subscribers: $29.00 Monthly.
3. Up to 5,000 subscribers: $47.00 Monthly.

iContact also offers a free trial if you want to try before you buy. Also, if you buy annually rather than monthly, they offer a 15% discount.

ONTRAPORT

Formerly known as Office AutoPilot, this email service provider is best for entrepreneurs who are just starting out in the email marketing world. Customers mainly choose Ontraport for their ease of use and customer service support. Ontraport is particularly good with eCommerce businesses. http://ontraport.com/

Main Features:

• CRM: Customer records, web forms, task management, lead scoring
• Marketing: Automated trigger emails, Facebook integration, event management, delivery, split-tests, tracking
• Payments: Order forms, recurring billing plans, Automate expiring card updates, abandoned cart follow up, upsells
• Publishing: Landing page creator, membership sites, WordPress hosting
• Support services
• API integration

Pricing:

ONTRAPORT offers two price plans.

1. The PRO option runs $297/month for up to 25,000 contacts and up to 100,000 emails/month. Maximum 2 users allowed.
2. The TEAM option runs at $597/month for up to 100,000 contacts and up to 100,000 emails/month. Maximum 10 users allowed.

All accounts include all features and a 90-day no risk, money back guarantee.

Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi offers businesses an easy way to create, send, share and track email newsletters online. Mad Mimi is for people who want email marketing to be simple. They provide easy integrations, CRMs, design, webforms, and superb deliverability. https://madmimi.com/

Main Features:

• Create, send, and connect
• List management
• Reports and tracking
• Delivery & Security
• Additional add-ons

Pricing:

Mad Mimi offers 5 pricing plans.

1. FREE — Lets you store 2,500 contacts and send 12,500 emails per month. No support available.
2. $10/month – Let’s you store 500 contacts and send unlimited email per month. Also get access to full support team.
3. $42/month – Let’s you store 10,000 contacts and send unlimited emails per month. It also sends emails twice as fast as the basic plans and comes with Support.
4. $199/month — Let’s you store 50,000 contacts and send unlimited emails per month. It send emails 3x faster than normal and comes with full support.
5. $1,049/month — Let’s you store 350,000 contacts and send unlimited emails per month. It send emails 4x faster than normal and comes with ultra-premium support.

Finally, Mad Mimi offers a custom pricing option. For example, you can specify that you only want 1,000 contacts with full support and features, and they will charge you $12/month. This custom pricing is great for businesses that fall somewhere in between the main pricing plans.

AWeber

Aweber is the OG of email marketing service providers. It’s reliable and very well-known since it’s been around for so long. If you’re looking for consistent deliverability and support, Aweber is for you. You can get more information at www.Aweber.com

Features:

• Automatically triggered emails
• Email deliverability rate
• Email newsletters
• Drag-and-Drop editor
• Connect with other apps
• Subscriber segmenting
• API integration
• Customer support
• Sign up forms
• RSS to email
• HTML email templates
• Manage subscribers
• Tracking and Analytics

Pricing:

AWeber starts their pricing at $19/month. However, they offer a promotional discount where you only pay $1 for your first trial month. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee and discounts if you purchase quarterly or yearly.

For $19/month, you get up to 500 subscribers and the ability to send unlimited emails. If you want to know how much you pay for more than 500 subscribers, good luck finding it on their website. They make this info a little bit hard to find as they want you to contact them directly regarding upgrades.

Summary

In summary, these email marketing services all offer fairly similar features across the board. So it’s up to you to research each one on your own and choose the best for your individual needs.