Nearly every email marketing platform promises the same thing: great deliverability, intuitive tools, designer-quality templates, and useful reporting so you can make the most of every email you send. We looked at the best email marketing services and found that yes, they do all reliably deliver email, make it easy to manage your massive lists, and make sending emails more intuitive. Editor's Pick Best Budget Workflow Best for Beginners Best for Collaboration Hands down the most intuitive way to edit emails and automation chains A nice visual flow builder that's half the price of ConvertKit The forever free plan includes beautiful templates that are easy to use The only email marketing service with real-time collaboration à la Google Docs Cost for 5,000 subscribers $79 / month $45 / month $40 / month $10 / month for 30,000 emails The 4 Top Email Marketing Platforms If you’re a more advanced user — maybe you’re already dreaming of your complex automated email workflows and your robust tagging system — check out ConvertKit. You’ll get up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month at that price. Our Top Pick: ConvertKit Editor’s pick for most impressive workflow Starting price: $29 / month Free trial: 14 days Tagline: We exist to help creators earn a living Sign up ConvertKit’s product is hands-down the best in its class. ConvertKit is not the best email marketing service for everyone. Other ConvertKit features to note Pricing: Monthly pricing is based on number of subscribers. Free Grow Pro Pay per use $0 $10+ / month based on list size $199 / month on top of subscriber fees $0.01–0.03 per email Up to 2,000 subscribers Up to 12,000 emails Per month No credit card needed to sign up Requires a MailChimp footer Unlimited emails to up to 500 subscribers: $10 5,000 subscribers $50 / mo Adds things like premium support, advanced segmentation, comparative reports, and multivariate testing Purchase credits in bulk: 5,000 credits for $150; 75,000 credits for $750 Automation triggers: Welcome, date-based, abandoned cart, order notifications, product retargeting, product recommendations, product follow-up, customer re-engagement, best customers, first purchase, promo codes Reporting: Automation, comparative, landing page, Facebook ads, Google ads Landing pages: Unlimited free landing pages Segmentation: We aren’t very impressed with Mailchimp’s ability to segment, tag, or build workflows. There’s nothing else super special about Mailjet on its Free and Basic plans: you get access to drag-and-drop email templates and 24/7 support. Other Mailjet Features to Note Pricing: Emails / month Free Basic Premium 6,000 $0 $10 $21 30,000 -- 60,000 -- $19 $42 150,000 -- $69 $97 450,000 -- $167 $230 900,000 -- $334 $399 Reporting: Real-time dashboard with opens and clicks, sorted by contact or by email provider A/B testing: Mailjet says, “You can test everything!” and it’s true in a way.
Nearly every email marketing platform promises the same thing: great deliverability, intuitive tools, designer-quality templates, and useful reporting so you can make the most of every email you send.
We looked at the best email marketing services and found that yes, they do all reliably deliver email, make it easy to manage your massive lists, and make sending emails more intuitive. But they’re not all the same. These are our four recommendations and how they stack up.
| Editor’s Pick | Best Budget Workflow | Best for Beginners | Best for Collaboration | |
| Hands down the most intuitive way to edit emails and automation chains | A nice visual flow builder that’s half the price of ConvertKit | The forever free plan includes beautiful templates that are easy to use | The only email marketing service with real-time collaboration à la Google Docs | |
| Cost for 5,000 subscribers | $79 / month | $45 / month | $40 / month | $10 / month for 30,000 emails |
The 4 Top Email Marketing Platforms
If you’re a more advanced user — maybe you’re already dreaming of your complex automated email workflows and your robust tagging system — check out ConvertKit. Its workflow builder is the easiest to use, not only letting you visually map out your emails sends, but also editing the emails in those flows seamlessly. Instead of clicking back and forth between editing your workflow and editing each email one-by-one, you can edit them all from one space: the workflow simply slides to the side when you edit an email and slides back out when you’re done. It’s our most expensive top pick, but if you’re living in this software, it’s very much worth it.
Don’t have a big budget, but love the idea of a visual workflow builder and a robust tagging system? Consider GetResponse. Its workflow tool is easy to use, just not as amazingly intuitive as ConvertKit’s. At half the price, though, it might be worth the tradeoff.
If you’re new to email marketing, Mailchimp is a great place to start. Its templates are knock-out gorgeous. There’s helpful just-in-time information at every step. And just about all of its reporting, testing, and tools are free on the Forever Free plan. You’ll get up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month at that price. When you grow too big to stay free, it won’t be painful: Mailchimp’s pricing is competitive.
Finally, Mailjet: the Google Docs of email marketing services. Astonishingly, it’s the only option we found with real-time collaboration. We’ve lived in a world where design and copy and merchandising and a dozen more people are sending feedback to one sole email marketer like it’s 1999. Get everyone in the same email builder and collaborate. You’ll need to sign up for the Premium plan to access to this feature. If you choose Mailjet, we recommend the upgrade.
Our Top Pick: ConvertKit
- Editor’s pick for most impressive workflow
- Starting price: $29 / month
- Free trial: 14 days
- Tagline: We exist to help creators earn a living
- Sign up
ConvertKit’s product is hands-down the best in its class. It’s intuitive in a way that we didn’t even know to ask for — like the game-changing way of the iPhone touchscreen. We won’t be surprised if more platforms start to copy ConvertKit.
How’s it so great? Updating the emails in a flow is phenomenally simple. You’re always working in the visual automator flow chart. Click into any email and the flow chart slides to the side. Edit the email, then click on any other email to edit that one. You can seamlessly move from one email to the next and save them all at once.
Imagine, for example, that you have an automated flow to sign up for a webinar and you’ve changed the price or the date of the webinar. You’d like to change it throughout the entire email sequence. This method makes it simple to move from email to email within the sequence without using a bunch of tabs, or trying to remember where you left off.
ConvertKit’s demo page has a good video walk-through of its best-in-class workflow.
If that alone wasn’t enough to win it our crown, ConvertKit’s tagging system is impressively robust and operates as its segmentation functionality. Instead of grouping your subscribers into multiple lists (where you’ll get double charged by most services), with ConvertKit, you have one list and many tags. You can manually tag subscribers with just about anything, and auto tag them based on source, link clinks, and purchases through integrations. Use those tags to target your emails to particular customers, or use conditional content tags to show or hide different pieces of information to subscribers within each email.
Here’s an example: You’re a skydiving instructor. You use your list to sell skydives with customers and potential customers, and run a Conquer Your Fears email course to get new leads. You also use your list to up-sell existing customers multi-packs of skydives, and you offer a six-week 40-skydive instructor training course.
As we discussed in The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation, your job is to long-term guide each of your customers through the different points of your conversion funnel. The people who’ve signed up for the Conquer Your Fears challenge are not the same as the ones interested in the training course. You need a more complex system of tagging and segmentation. You need ConvertKit (or GetResponse, depending on your budget). You’ll be able to tag each of your subscribers with the number of skydives they’ve done — based either on purchasing from your web-store, or by clicking a link in an intro email.
ConvertKit is not the best email marketing service for everyone.
We appreciate ConvertKit’s honesty in its blogpost 5 Reasons you should not switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit. Even though ConvertKit is our favorite email service provider, we totally agree! If you want beautiful, drag-and-drop email templates, you should stick with MailChimp. ConvertKit doesn’t have them.
ConvertKit highly encourages text emails that create the feeling that you just opened Gmail and sent a note. So, it only comes pre-loaded with three email templates: text-only, classic, and modern. The difference? Text-only has no pictures; classic and modern have pictures. Classic uses a serif font; modern uses a non-serif font. That’s it folks. There are no fancy email templates, no GIFs, no header images.
The best way to market online is to teach, to regularly deliver valuable content to your audience so that they will trust you and eventually want to purchase from you. So when you send an email, what part of the communication delivers the most value?
That’s right, the content. So we should be stripping away everything else that isn’t necessary in order to focus on the content. Multi-column layouts, background images, logos, and all the other nonsense that typically fills marketing emails doesn’t deliver value to the recipient. Instead it is all about you, the sender. Flip that around and start delivering value.
— ConvertKit Founder and CEO Nathan Barry
And,…
COMMENTS