Is your blog or website ready to start email marketing? Are you looking for the right email marketing software that allows you to create web forms for WordPress, autorespond to new subscribers, and eventually hold your amazing newsletter to-be? Choosing the best email marketing platform is a crucial step we all take, because once you began to build a list you will store literally everything subscriber related within your provider of choice. In this post we’ll cover 5 great choices for your email marketing service to help you pick the right one.
Best Email Marketing Service Criteria: The Features to Look For!
Things you should look for in an email marketing service, for example the ability to create a wide variety of enticing forms. Here’s what we firmly believe your email marketing service should offer you in their base plan:
- Automated welcome email: Welcome emails are the first email that go out to your new readers turned subscribers, and are essential to creating a nice first impression.
- Email blast ease of use: We all want to easily send newsletters and announcements. Doing this should be super-duper easy, and we love seeing a big “Create” button as one of the first buttons on your dashboard.
- Subscriber tracking: You’ll want to track subscriber data like which form someone subscribed through, what emails people open, link clicks, and which emails of yours perform the best overall.
- Subscriber management: Can you easily add someone to your list? Add 10 people? Export them all to an Excel spreadsheet? Delete someone? You should have all these tools ready at your fingertips.
- Beautiful & versatile web forms: Can you easily create and insert a beautiful yet simple email subscriber form?
- Pricing: Free is great, but over time, you may find you are willing to pay a certain amount on a regular basis for quality and peace of mind, especially if you’ve monetized your list. We’ll include the price and introductory offers of 5 email service softwares below.
All the email marketing softwares listed below can help your business a a great deal, because building an email list is the first step to building customer loyalty around your brand. That said, we have ranked them in our preference of 1-5. Let us know if you agree or disagree based on your blog email marketing experience!
1. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the best known and fastest growing email marketing services in the world. Their name resonates with all of us from every medium from their active presence in the heart of many small businesses to mainstream television ads to neighborhood classes at local coffee shops.
We recently migrated to Constant Contact to take advantage of several of their services which we believe will form the future of email marketing. Here are just 4 such reasons:
- Fast delivery: Constant Contact let’s you send lightning fast newsletters to your subscriber base, including the first email which you can setup to go out automatically.
- Fast newsletter creation: Using Constant Contact’s newsletter creation tool is intuitive and just plain fast. We were able to import our old welcome email and make it look even classier in minutes.
- Spam avoidance: With their focus on security and attention to Google’s criteria, and international criteria, for how and where us Blogger’s should deliver our emails to readers, Constant Contact gives you the best chance of your hard written emails landing in the new subscribers inbox.
- Simplicity for both blogger and reader: Constant Contact provides you with easy to create, easy to read forms which can yield higher conversions than the rest of the pack.
UPDATE: The screenshots below can guide you on how to use Constant Contact for email marketing. However, we thought it’d be smart to make a complete Constant Contact beginner tutorial for WordPress. So in this video we create an email form, make a custom email address, get a free trial at Constant Contact, create a welcome email auto responder, then sync your email marketing software with wordpress so you can get all of this working easily today. This should make it all a bit easier:
They allow each customer to easily manage their email lists, email templates, new contacts, old contacts and more.
Their support system is vast as well, and you know we love good support and easy to understand answers. They can be reached through email and phone during business hours, and have a huge library of how to resources on their website.
Moreover, the give each account their own image library, complete with social sharing tools you can add to emails and the ability to easily produce reports if you’ve got a boss keen on email marketing.
We love Constant Contact especially because of their support for small businesses. Their form builder is highly simple and you can easily create fields like Name, Email, and various buttons. It is without a doubt a successful choice for the small business email marketer who just needs something simple, easy to use, that just plain works.
Overall, our migration to their services has been a massive success. We believe they hold the tools to the future of email marketing, and will keep you posted as things progress! 🙂
Pricing: Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial (no credit card required) which is a full 30 days longer than most providers. Their free trial includes great features like a branded template builder, next generation editor with action blocks like RSVP, polls, donation, read more etc. Most importantly, their free trial allows you to send automated welcome emails where you can deliver your email optin incentive, like an eBook! You can cancel or upgrade any time. We also offer a 20% discount for any DearBlogger readers who would like to purchase a premium plan before the free trial ends, please contact us for details. After a free trial, plans start as low as $20/month.
2. Aweber
Aweber is one of the earliest players in the email marketing space. When it comes to capturing subscribers on a blog or website, especially those powered by WordPress, Aweber is always a decent solution.
Their primary strength is the variety of email form templates they come with. As you can see here, if your blog needs seasonal solution, you can often find it at Aweber.
It’s not Halloween yet, but this form could make you want to hear more about it.
With a drag and drop builder, you can add image after image, change the width and height of forms, add links and text boxes, or just use the premade forms which come with natural and robust designs from their in-house design team.
When you edit the forms on Aweber’s end and save, they update on your website right away because they are dynamic subscription forms.
But above and beyond, it is the technology and resources Aweber has put into their drag and drop form builder that make them a member of our top 5 best email marketing services for bloggers.
The customer service as Aweber has been high quality as well over the years. Any time you call you’ll get a real person on the line to help you process your request within 24 hours.
Pricing: Aweber offers a 30-day free trial with full access to all their tools, after which plans begin at $19/month but can be discounted for quarterly or annual purchases.
3. MailChimp
MailChimp is a highly popular email marketing service for bloggers, social media professionals, event managers and many more small to large sized businesses. There are several reasons they’ve risen to the top 3 email marketing service providers, and it’s not just their cute mascot.
MailChimp has what’s called a Forever Free plan, which let’s you send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. That’s right, you won’t pay a dime until you pass the 2,000th subscriber mark, which in our case took well over 2 years (don’t listen to anyone who sells an eBook on how to get 10,000 subscribers easily, it’s not).
So the free option gets most people in the door, but what do they find inside? MailChimp has an easy email creator, a nice tag system, autoresponders and analytics all at your fingertips.
You can easily insert an email sign up form from MailChimp onto WordPress, Magento, Shopify and more so integration is no problem. To change the font or text and such, you can edit the copy paste CSS which MailChimp generates for you, or you can make life really easy and install a MailChimp for WordPress plugin.
The one problem we found with MailChimps email marketing service is the difficulty in navigating their free version to find where to create auto response emails. It can be a little tricky to figure out which list you’re in, and what tool you’re working on, though it is obviously doable with a little practice.
Just like the rest, support comes at your through email, live chat, phone and a knowledge base of easy to use tutorials, which we love!
So if your goal is to create a simple website, slap a form on it, and do it on the really, really cheap, MailChimp is ideal.
Pricing: Forever Free up to 2,000 subscribers, then plans start at $10/month.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit has many powerful tools for experienced email marketers and bloggers. It is a one stop marketing shop in many ways. It’s known to be the next step up from other email marketing providers, once you’ve scaled your business into the 50,000 to 100,000 email subscribers range.
They have a feature called Content Upgrades, which acts as it sounds and let’s people receive more or improved versions of your content if they are interested in taking it to the next level, and of course comes with autoresponders, aka drip emails, analytics, tag segmentation and all sorts of interesting tracking tools.
It really is an email marketers dream, which is no wonder smart minds like Pat Flynn have moved to ConvertKit.
Pricing: Plans start at $29/month and have a 30-day refund policy.
5. Get Response
GetResponse is a massively popular email marketing solution. It’s extremely beginner friendly and their easy of use has helped them really grow among small businesses and non profits.
It comes with some of the web’s best email marketing tools which let you send one-time email blasts and entire newsletters to your growing email list. Their most popular features might be their A/B testing portal. It’s here where you can split test different emails on groups of subscribers. Such testing can really maximize the impact your emails have and thus your conversions and profits.
Of course, like all the others in their best email marketing service review, it integrates well with WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Shopify, Blogger, Tumblr and even email marketing addons like Zen Desk and OptinMonster.
Pricing: Get Response has the 30 day free trial option, after which pricing begins at $15/month.
We hope this email marketing service review gave you a good idea of what’s out there and more importantly, what successful bloggers and online marketers are using! You may also want to see our article on how to create an eBook once you’ve made your pick.
Did this post give you the confidence to choose the best email marketing platform? Did we leave any stones unturned? Let me know in the comments what you’re looking for!
10 Best and Cheapest Bulk Email Marketing Solutions Of 2018
The following points can be worthwhile for your scheme.
1. Match your brand’s look and feel.
2. Keep track.
3. be versatile.
4. Follow the rules.
5. Make subscription easy.
6. Double check your content.
7. Increase sharing possibilities.
8. be sociable.
9. Send welcoming messages.
10. Inform your subscribers.
Hello There,
Great Article!
Based on the features have mentioned in the article, it will definitely help lot of online marketers in deciding that which service provider will be best for there requirement.
Being as an online business person I do use email marketing services of Benchmark Email for my own online business.
I would like to share my previous experience of MailChimp and the reason for switching from MailChimp to Benchmark Email is that conditional and limited support service provided by MailChimp during their working hours while Benchmark Email provide 24*7*365 call, chat and email support service in 9 different language. Apart from this support service MailChimp do charge extra amount in their paid plan also for adding extra features in paid plan where as Benchmark Email provide all the features in there paid plan only number of contact list will be different in their paid plan.
I agree with Marc and I’d suggest a great email marketing platform that I am using for some time now; it’s EasySendy Drip. For my startup, I used a number of marketing platforms to build an email list to store the subscriber’s list. I searched a lot for tools which can enable URL track but none of the tools were able to work effectively for me. I am really thankful to the EasySendy as it uses website or blog RSS in email template so that the automated email campaign can be done easily. It enabled URL tracking, xml feed, and json feed too in my email template.
I currently use ConvertKit and have used GetResponse, Aweber, and MailChimp in the past. In my opinion all are pretty good and can get the job done.
Nice article shared with information..
Thank you for sharing this useful information, I will regularly follow your blog.Excellent post, thanks for sharing, it’s indeed very helpful for new blogger like me.
nice blog with nice detailed review and thanks for info.