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Finding the right email marketing service for your business can be tough.
You want a service that lets you segment contacts, deliver bulk emails, and send automated sequences — but you don’t want to break the bank paying for a tool with features you might not ever need.
Two things further complicate the situation:
Don’t worry — we've got you covered.
We've curated the best email marketing services for small businesses. These tools have all the features you need to get started and grow without too many overwhelming and unnecessary extras (or a high price tag).
Ready to find your perfect fit?
Based on our observation and analysis from review sites like G2 and Capterra, here are the seven excellent email marketing services for small businesses to consider.
Capterra rating4.7
Getsitecontrol is an email marketing service with an easy-to-navigate interface. It lets you create professional-looking emails, build automations, segment your audience, and monitor the performance of your campaigns.
In addition to email marketing, you can use Getsitecontrol to run on-site campaigns: promote coupon codes and sales via popups, conduct surveys, and prevent cart abandonment. It works on all website platforms and offers a dedicated Shopify app for stores running on Shopify.
Signup form gallery
Grow your email list with professionally designed signup form templates. Choose among pop-up and embedded forms.
Email broadcasts
Send bulk emails to promote special offers, sales, new products, restock alerts, and any other updates about your brand.
Email marketing automations
Tag contacts and send emails automatically, under the conditions of your choice.
Audience segmentation
Segment your contacts manually or automatically, based on their tags, interests, and actions.
Getsitecontrol offers a Free plan with all the essential features for email list building and 1000 emails you can send for free. Pro plans start at $19 per month and include audience targeting for on-site campaigns, advanced email marketing features, branding removal, AI smart email timing, and more.
Capterra rating4.7
Mailerlite is an easy-to-navigate and affordable email marketing service with extensive features (even on their free plan). It lets you create newsletters and transactional emails, build marketing workflows, segment your subscribers, and clean your email lists.
You can also create a landing page or even an entire website and sell digital products thanks to Mailerlite’s in-built Sites feature.
Form builder
Create different form types — embedded or popups — with a gallery of customizable, pre-made templates.
Email automation templates
Get email automation templates for different use cases — welcome emails, lead nurturing, promotions, events, and ecommerce.
Transactional emails
Send automated email notifications, such as account activation emails, password reset confirmation emails, or email reminders.
Landing page builder
Create landing pages with interactive elements such as popups, quizzes, limited coupons, countdown timers, and features like trigger automation, payment integration, and signup forms.
Mailerlite offers a 30-day free trial. From there you can choose between two plans: For marketing and For transactional email service. The former starts at $9 per month/ 3 seats for up to 500 subscribers; the latter starts at $24 per month/ 20 seats for up to 50,000 emails. Both options have limited free plans.
Capterra rating4.5
HubSpot’s email marketing tools are part of the platform’s Marketing Hub, which is designed with scalability in mind.
You can get started with the platform’s free toolset and gradually move up through HubSpot’s paid packages as your business grows. This applies to products throughout HubSpot’s offering, like the Sales, Service, and Marketing Hub, for example.
Some of the platform’s free features include a drag-and-drop email and form builder, email reply tracking, and basic automation.
Ample template library
Access a broad selection of ready-made use-case specific email templates — from product newsletters to promotional emails, and more.
Native CRM integration
Integrate the platform’s email marketing tools with HubSpot or Salesforce CRMs to develop personalized email campaigns.
Email automation
Use the platform’s rule-based workflow builder to set up trigger-based campaigns to various audience segments — automatically show different content based on lead lifecycle stage, and send over follow-ups after email clicks or link clicks.
Built-in A/B testing
Deploy email testing variants and view their open and click-through rates at a glance — or get into the details to see exactly how many recipients skimmed, glanced over, or read through your emails in their entirety.
You can get started with the platform’s email marketing tools completely for free. Paid Marketing Hub plans start at $15 per user per month, with up to 1,000 contacts and 2,000 email sends per month.
Capterra rating4.6
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is an all-in-one email marketing platform that offers email campaigns, SMS marketing, and a built-in CRM. It’s an excellent choice for growing brands looking for a wide range of tools for maintaining customer relationships – all housed under one roof.
Although for this article we’re focusing on email marketing, you can also use Brevo for building landing pages, providing customer service, and creating loyalty programs for your business.
Brevo’s pricing is based on the number of emails sent, rather than the number of contacts. The Starter plan starts at $9 per month for 5,000 emails/month. The Business plan starts at $18 per month and includes marketing automation and A/B testing.
Capterra rating4.5
Flodesk is an email marketing service for small businesses who value simplicity and aesthetics. It allows you to grow your email list with landing pages and signup forms, send email newsletters, and build checkout pages.
Flodesk is an excellent solution for creators and solopreneurs. It stands out due to its “radically minimalistic”, modern template designs that you can fine-tune and align with your branding.
Forms for list building
Create pop-up and inline website forms or put together landing pages, similarly to Linktree, if you don’t have a website yet.
Versatile email editor
Use ready-made templates or design your emails from scratch, using custom fonts and branded graphics.
Email automations
Build simple automation workflows, such as welcome sequences, post-purchase emails, click-triggered promos, and so on.
Checkout feature set
Craft custom sales and checkout pages, accept online payments, and set up digital product delivery and upsells.
Flodesk operates on a straightforward pricing model based on two plans only. Email plan is available at $38 per month; it includes all the email marketing functionality, unlimited emails and subscribers. Checkout plan is available at additional $24 per month; it includes all the features for selling digital products. The “Link in Bio” tool for list building is available for free.
Capterra rating4.5
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing services for small businesses. In the past two decades, it has evolved from an EMS to an all-in-one marketing and commerce platform for growing brands.
As well as creating and automating email workflows, Mailchimp lets you build a standalone landing page or a website, send surveys, and retarget customers on social media to increase your reach and boost e-commerce sales.
Drag and drop email template builder
Create responsive emails from scratch or choose from Mailchimp’s 100+ pre-made templates.
AI Assistant
Leverage AI tools like content optimization, subject line generator, personalized product recommendations, predictive segmentation, creative assistant, and send day and time optimization.
Campaign manager
Build marketing campaigns across multiple email and SMS platforms and get data-backed insights.
Reporting and analytics
Get real-time stats of your marketing campaigns and analyze your open, click, and unsubscribe rates.
A/B testing
Test different email subject lines, images, layouts, and the best send times.
Pre-built customer journey maps
Build automated workflows with customizable, pre-made templates and send relevant emails based on how the subscribers interact with your brand.
Website builder
Create a customizable, mobile-optimized website, and add a website tracking option to monitor website traffic and new signups.
Mailchimp offers a 30-day free trial. Paid tiers start at $27.59 per month for up to 2500 contacts. There’s also a free forever plan for up to 500 contacts.
Capterra rating4.7
Kit (formerly, Convertkit) is a user-friendly email marketing service for small businesses. It lets you create landing pages with pre-built templates, set up no-code email automations, and simplify subscription management with a comprehensive tagging system.
Kit is especially popular among content creators including writers, bloggers, course creators, and artists. The app’s built-in features are tailored to help you sell digital products and monetize your audience.
Landing page and opt-in form builder
Whether you have a website or not, you can use Kit to generate leads. Add opt-in forms to your website or landing page as a modal or inline embed.
Template library
Use email templates as a starting point and customize them to better align with your brand’s style.
Easy-to-use email builder
Create engaging emails by embedding e-commerce or digital products and other elements like countdown timers and recommendations.
Visual automation builder
Automate your email workflow with up to five trigger options for the same or different emails.
List management
Organize your lists by tagging subscribers and building segments. Then, send personalized emails based on what your audience is interested in.
A/B testing
Test your subject lines to see how you can improve your open rates and optimize campaign performance.
Kit offers a 14-day free trial and a limited free plan for new creators with under 1000 subscribers.
The two paid plans are called Creator and Creator Pro. Creator costs $15 per month and allows you to use most of the app features, apart from advanced reporting, subscriber scoring, and newsletter referral system. Creator Pro allows you to use all the features available in the platform, for $29 per month.
Capterra rating4.7
Moosend is another low-cost email marketing service for small businesses that offers advanced functionality such as multi-step automation, tracking, spam testing, and detailed reporting.
Moosend’s functionality works especially well for established e-commerce brands that want to create hyper-personalized promo email campaigns and product recommendations.
Form builder
Create a subscription form with ready-made designs, using different formats like inline forms, pop-ups, floating buttons, and wheels of fortune.
Email newsletter editor
Craft professional newsletters with zero HTML coding knowledge, using a drag-and-drop editor for placing text blocks, images, and videos.
Integration with social media
Connect your brand’s social media accounts and fetch visuals for your emails directly from there.
Moosend’s AI
Let built-in AI assistants generate subject lines, give intelligent recommendations, optimize CTAs, and make editing emails easier.
Unsubscribe page builder
Build an unsubscribe page and use double opt-out to prevent accidental customer unsubscriptions.
Automation workflow templates
Automate and set up your email campaigns with premade marketing automation templates.
Reporting and analytics
Get a detailed analysis of your marketing campaigns such as tracking the recipient activity, link clicks, email clients, devices, and location.
Moosend offers a 30-day free trial that includes all the features, except for transactional emails. From there, the price of a subscription starts at $9 per month for up to 500 subscribers – plus, you’ll need to purchase email credits for bulk promo campaigns.
Before you deep-dive into free trials, let’s run through the key features you should be looking for in an email marketing service.
Robust list management means you can easily add and organize new contacts. Each new contact should have basic fields such as the first and last name, and email address. Ideally, it should also have custom fields where you can add extra information about the contact.
Make sure the email marketing service lets you build segments based on demographics and a customer’s past behavior. Even if you’re just starting to grow your list, you want to be able to segment your audience into groups to craft relevant and hyper-personalized emails.
Look for a tool that lets you send campaigns on autopilot without needing to get your head around complex code. For example, does it let you set up triggered emails like abandoned cart emails for shoppers who left products in their carts?
The email marketing service you choose should make it easy to send automated email alerts to notify customers about their account or purchase activity, including payment and order confirmations, shipping updates, and password resets.
You need to grow your list — which means you need a way to grow your list. A perfect email marketing service for small business should have the toolset to capture leads using customizable email signup forms.
A/B testing allows you to experiment with different parts of your email such as the subject line, email copy, CTAs, and sender name to find out what works best. When choosing your EMS, check out what you can and can’t test.
Measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns with metrics such as open rates, click-to-open rates, and bounce rates.
Make sure the email marketing service you choose offers fast and responsive customer support. Also, check the different types of customer support on offer — phone, email, live chat, or a mixture?
Make sure your email marketing service offers a library of email templates to choose from. Pre-made templates simplify the manual work of designing emails from scratch and are easily customizable.
Know the different apps and tools the email marketing service integrates with. Make sure it integrates with CRMs, e-commerce platforms, payment apps (like Stripe), form builders, SMS marketing apps, or any other tools you regularly use in your business.
Pro tip
Take a look at your tech stack and identify the tools you’ll need to integrate with your email marketing service.
Know that choosing the (right) and best email marketing service boils down to your business needs and budget.
So, ask yourself:
Jot down the answers — and then come back to this article to start your research to find the best email marketing service for your business.
Good luck!
Lizzie Davey is a freelance content writer and strategist for ecommerce and marketing software brands. Over the past 10 years, she's helped hundreds of companies deliver excellent experiences and increase conversions with engaging customer-centric content.
You're reading Getsitecontrol blog where marketing experts share proven tactics to grow your online business. This article is a part of Email marketing section.
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