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10+ Best Business Email Marketing Software on The Market

Written and researched by experts at AvadaLearn more about our methodology

By Sam Nguyen

CEO Avada Commerce

Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
avada email marketing

Email marketing is an essential component of any digital marketing campaign. For eCommerce companies, it is one of the least expensive and most effective ways to reach consumers with your message. However, not many people can completely understand how to run email marketing efficiently in a few days.

Building an emailing list is just one small aspect of the process. A smart combination of email campaigns, informative newsletters, and relevant landing pages can give email marketers a big arsenal of engagement tools without breaking the bank. Modern marketers should use the omni-channel approach and email marketing remains a key part of the strategy.

Multiple channels means that your company can launch a marketing campaign not only over emails but also using channels like social media, chat, direct mail, and SMS marketing on smartphones.

All these activities, however, require a thoughtful and consistent email marketing strategy. Having the right software and capabilities that most closely match your business’ needs is essential. This article takes a closer look at the best email marketing tools on the market and puts some important considerations for you to purchase or not.

These best business email marketing software will offer you a wide variety of additional features to engage with customers and subscribers at different points in an email campaign. Without further ado, let’s dive in and see them.

What is business email marketing software?

Business Email marketing software can help manage the contact lists, design and send compelling emails, while tracking whether emails were opened and read. At the essence, email marketing software lets you streamline all of the email marketing effort.

An business email marketing software has a wide range of features depending on the type of service you choose - they often have features related to: Email automation, general email communication, notifications, subscription, monitoring, campaign modification, integration with other channels, sales, service software, and also analytics.

Another notable side of an email marketing software is scalability. If you are just a small business, you can store contacts and email addresses on a spreadsheet. But as the company grows, an email marketing software helps you manage a sophisticated database with a large number of subscribers, while learning insights to segment by engagement levels and demographic slices.

With that in mind, let’s see the top business email marketing software on the market.

10+ best business email marketing software on the market

Thousands of providers offer email marketing software. But you should really consider these top software for your business. Whether you are new to email marketing or want to upgrade the approach, these software have the features and scalability that any size of company can use.

Below, I’ll highlight the best features, price, benefits, and potential drawbacks of these business email marketing software for you to consider. Let’s begin.

#1. AVADA Email Marketing - The best business email marketing software

AVADA Email Marketing
AVADA Email Marketing

AVADA Email Marketing is a business email marketing software that is designed specifically for eCommerce businesses that want to get the most out of email marketing. Our software provides a powerful automation workflow and users can easily get started with many beautiful pre-made templates for email or SMS.

With AVADA Email Marketing, you can connect email and SMS for workflow automation to reach your customers across multiple channels. This is extremely powerful as most of the eCommerce companies are taking an omnichannel approach with marketing these days.

AVADA Email Marketing
AVADA Email Marketing

Of course, we offer a user-friendly drag and drop email builder with templates so you can simply create workflows for your email campaigns. You also have access to the website’s forms and pop-ups to collect email addresses. Last but not least, the software also has built-in analytics features so you can track how your email or SMS campaigns are performing.

In the picture above, you can see a snippet of the email automation workflow created inside AVADA Email Marketing. The business email marketing software lets you edit wait time between emails, email content, create split control, and update contact information in the middle of the workflow.

AVADA Email Marketing
AVADA Email Marketing

For the pricing, AVADA Email Marketing has a free plan for users to start using and two paid plans for scaling with different features. The pro plan starts at $9/month and increases based on the number of subscribers, making the software suitable for even small businesses who want to automate email and SMS marketing campaigns.

Here is the detailed pricing plans:

  • Free - 1,000 contacts, 15,000 emails, basic features, basic automation flows

  • Pro - From $9/month - Up to 200,000 contacts, unlimited emails, advanced features, chat support,

  • Enterprise - Custom pricing - More than 200,000 contacts, unlimited emails, more advanced features, priority live chat support

With more than 48,000 companies trusting AVADA and our stellar customer support, you can afford the app to enhance your email marketing campaigns. With the unique combination of email and SMS marketing in one software, your business can have a better omni channel approach to connect with customers and increase sales.

For the vast majority of companies looking for a fantastic business email marketing software that’s easy to use and affordable, AVADA Email Marketing is likely the best balance of ease of use, power, and affordability.

#2. Active Campaign

Active Campaign
Active Campaign

Once a lousy tool, ActiveCampaign is now one of the most popular email marketing software with over 150,000 small business customers.

ActiveCampaign provides a collection of customer experience automation tools - from SMS and email marketing to website messaging and CRM functionality. At the center of the ActiveCampaign platform is the automation generator - a visual framework for building automated email marketing sequences across channels.

Unlike software that requires expert advice and expensive training to use, ActiveCampaign’s intuitive design allows users to create powerful email automation sequences from scratch or by using one of their more than 500 automation recipes.

While email A/B testing is offered by most of the tools in the top 10, ActiveCampaign also allows users to run A/B split tests of the entire automation chain. This means you can test everything - from number of touchpoints to latency between emails and more. All of this ensures that your email marketing improves over time - on autopilot.

As an all-in-one sales and marketing tool for small businesses, ActiveCampaign comes with a built-in CRM system to manage sales, live chat and email automation in one place.

ActiveCampaign’s Key Features?

  • 500+ Automation recipes

  • 125+ Email templates

  • 800+ Integrations

  • SMS messaging

  • Landing pages

  • Custom reporting

  • CRM

  • Split actions and A/B Testing

  • Web personalisation

  • Goal tracking and attribution

Amazingly, Active Campaign also starts at only $9/month like AVADA Email Marketing, just that they don’t have a free plan. The price also goes up based on the number of contacts you have. The detailed pricing are:

  • Lite plan - $9/month

  • Plus plan - $49/month

  • Professional - $129/month

  • Enterprise - $229/month

#3. Omnisend

Omnisend
Omnisend

Omnisend is becoming one of the leading email marketing software for eCommerce stores, and for a good reason.

Designed to help eCommerce brands take control of their email marketing across multiple channels, Omnisend offers automated email, push notifications, SMS, and more impressively, integration with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp - which they claim to have a 10x higher click-through rate than solo email campaigns.

By focusing exclusively on eCommerce, Omnisend has created innovative email templates designed to drive repeat buyers and reduce cart abandonment. From virtual scratch cards and birthday discounts to ‘wheel of fortune’ offers, it’s clear that Omnisend was built with a deep understanding of what works in eCommerce.

As you would expect of an email marketing tool for eCommerce, Omnisend can connect to most eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento. Omnisend also takes it a step further by integrating the software with review, loyalty, and help desk platforms, such as Smile.io, ReCharge, and Yotpo.

This not only allows Omnisend to report on how your email campaigns are impacting sales, but it also allows you to trigger email, SMS, and social media campaigns based on customer behavior to increase return buyers, reduce cart abandonment, drive more product reviews, etc.

If you want to have the features that make Omnisend stand out, I recommend you to have a PRO account starting at $99/month for up to unlimited contacts. You will also have $99 free SMS credit to send text messages with the account too. While this business email marketing software is not the cheapest nor the easiest to use, Omnisend is a good choice for eCommerce companies that want to have one omnichannel platform to rule them all.

Omnisend’s key features:

  • Email, SMS and Push notifications

  • Visual email builder

  • eCommerce Segmentation

  • Transactional and marketing emails

  • Dynamic discount codes

  • Retargeting

  • Surveys and Polls

  • Popups and forms – wheel of fortune, scratch cards etc.

  • Reporting

  • A/B Testing

#4. Benchmark

Benchmark
Benchmark

Benchmark is an interesting choice for any online business looking for an easy-to-use and well-designed email marketing software.

While not as well known as other software in this list, Benchmark is increasingly becoming a popular answer to “Which email marketing software are you switching to?” for business owners.

Benchmark does email marketing pretty well and is reasonably priced, but there’s one thing that can set them apart from other email marketing software - and that’s design.

Everything from their email templates to the design platform is beautifully designed - and not only visually appealing, it also has a great user experience. While that may seem trivial to some other software developers, it makes all the difference when users need to understand email marketing data and make the right impression on contacts.

Benchmark is a good email marketing choice for any small business that needs an easy-to-use and simple email marketing automation software. This can also be a good choice for small agencies and consulting firms, where design matters both from an employee training standpoint - and also delivering a good experience for clients.

Benchmark’s key features

  • Marketing automation

  • Visual email builder

  • 1,500+ Integrations

  • Surveys and Polls

  • Landing pages

  • Signup forms

  • A/B Testing

  • Reporting

For Benchmark’s pricing, it also raises based on the number of contacts you have. But you can already send unlimited emails per month starting at only $13/month. Here is the detailed pricing:

  • Free - $0/month - 250 emails/month, basic email marketing, lite marketing automation, simple lead generation.

  • Pro - From $13/month for 500 - 200,000 contacts - Advanced email marketing, advanced lead generation, pro marketing automation.

  • Enterprise - Custom pricing - All pro features, email whitelabeling, dedicated IP, priority support.

#5. Drip

Drip
Drip

I think it’s fair to say that Drip is more focused on small and medium eCommerce businesses, while an email marketing software like AVADA Email Marketing seems more suited to many sizes of Commerce stores.

As you’d expect, Drip integrates with all mainstream eCommerce platforms such á Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce - as well as customizable and lesser-known platforms.

With revenue analytics and built-in tools for customer acquisition across multiple channels (from SMS to social channels) Drip is ideally created as a powerful email marketing software for growing eCommerce stores.

Their pricing is also quite pleasant, starting at only $19/month to send unlimited emails for small list sizes (1 - 500 contacts). You also get a 14-day free trial with no fee attached. If you want to add SMS features, you need to pay at least $15 more to send 1,000 text messages.

That said, for about 10,000 contacts, Drip would cost you $154 monthly, while AVADA Email Marketing would only cost you $100 with SMS features already available.

Drip’s key features:

  • Unlimited emails

  • Email builder

  • Forms

  • Built-in SMSs

  • Facebook custom audiences

  • Behavior tracking

  • A/B split testing

#6. Get Response

Get Response
Get Response

GetResponse is an email marketing automation software available in more than 20 languages. In addition to email marketing and automation, GetResponse also offers a complete CRM, landing page, and webinar solution.

The software has over 500 templates to help you get started with email marketing and integrates with Shutterstock, letting you access a creative library of high quality pictures at your fingertips. Plus, their drip email campaign tool is managed with a calendar interface, allowing users to know exactly when your campaigns will reach the potential customers.

There are four GetResponse pricing plans that you can choose from at prices starting from $15 to $99 per month for 1,000 contacts (plus a custom enterprise-level option that requires you to contact them for a quote). Pricing plans vary based on the size of your email list, and you can pay annually or monthly. Each plan has a free trial planso you can try out the software before you invest.

For GetResponse pricing plans, here is a closer look:

  • Basic - From $15 per month - Unlimited landing pages, 1 sales funnel, Unlimited lead funnels, Autoresponder emails.

  • Plus - From $49 per month - Automation builder with 5 workflows, CRM software, Webinars with up to 100 attendees, 5 sales funnels.

  • Professional - From $99 per month - Automation builder and unlimited workflows, Unlimited sales funnels, Unlimited webinar funnels, Paid webinars with up to 300 attendees

  • Max(for enterprises) - Customized pricing - Consulting services for email campaigns, Dedicated IP, Transactional emails, Dedicated account manager, Webinars with up to 500 attendees.

GetResponse’s key features include:

  • Autoresponders

  • Newsletters

  • A/B Testing

  • AI website creator

  • Unlimited free images from Unsplash

  • Custom domains

  • Landing pages

  • Lead funnels

  • Sales funnels

  • Webinars

  • Forms & surveys

  • Email automation

  • Email support

#7. Autopilot

Autopilot
Autopilot

Gone are the days when email marketing was all about sending out mass newsletters.

In today’s digital landscape, it’s crucial for email marketing to be smart - sending the right messages to the right customers at the right time, on autopilot.

That’s why all of my top ten business email marketing software offer marketing automation. As the name suggests, Autopilot aims to perfect email marketing automation. Their software has one of the best designed email canvases for building automation chains.

Any marketer who’s ever built an email automation workflow knows how quickly they can get confusing. Autopilot can solve this in a rather odd way, allowing users to annotate the automation sequences with emojis, stickers, and explanation notes, making it easy for the team to collaborate on building email workflows.

Yes, like any other team-working app, things can get messy - but if you want the ability to understand what’s going on for all members rather than just letting one person create beautiful automation workflows that take an hour to interpret for the rest.

Another awesome feature of Autopilot is the ability to trigger actions in other tools right inside Autopilot. This saves you time configuring integrations using a tool like Zapier and helps your email automation workflows much easier to understand.

The Autopilot reporting system is also a mentionable feature, which can help users identify actions for customer groups and email campaigns.

Autopilot
Autopilot

Starting at $29/month for 2,000 contacts and 8,000 monthly email sends, Autopilot is obviously not the cheapest option, especially considering Autopilot not having a built-in CRM. However, Autopilot is still extremely intuitive and fantastic for teams that need to collaborate on building powerful email automation chains.

If I had to move from AVADA Email Marketing, this might be where I would be since I always prefer team working on a project. That said, for small and medium eCommerce companies, Autopilot can be quite an expensive business email marketing software.

#8. MailerLite

MailerLite
MailerLite

On the opposite end of the price range, we have MailerLite, one of the best business email marketing software for the money value (free to send up to 12,000 emails/month with a list of under 1,000 contacts).

Unlike other beginner email marketing software, MailerLite is a globally good email tool no matter the industry. Whether you want to grow a side business, a small charity, or just starting out as a freelancer, MailerLite provides everything you need to send mass email marketing campaigns.

If you’re a small business, I’d recommend a software like AVADA Email Marketing which might be a better fit as we offer built-in CRM and more advanced email marketing features for almost the same price ($9).

For starters and personal projects where you just want to start sending beautiful email campaigns to engage with your audience right away, MailerLite is ideal.

If you’d like to start using MailerLite, the folks there kindly offer an extended 30-day trial to use all premium features, while the free plan will stay free forever.

MailerLite’s key features:

  • Drag & drop editor

  • Built-in photo editing

  • Mobile-friendly email newsletters

  • Newsletter templates

  • Landing pages

  • Pop-up subscribe forms

  • Email automation

  • Email campaign reports

  • 25+ customizable landing page templates

#9. Hubspot Email Marketing Software

Hubspot Email Marketing Software
Hubspot Email Marketing Software

HubSpot’s email marketing software is easy to use with an incredibly high delivery rate, plus all the features you’d expect to see in an email marketing tool.

When creating an email campaign, you can choose from one of many drag and drop templates, or you can create a custom email template that fits your brand. Once you have your template in place, combining content is simple and intuitive.

Users can also personalize and preview email campaigns for different recipients based on type of device, country or list - or use a simple personalization token to make sure that each email includes content specific to each customer.

By using HubSpot Email Marketing Software as the backbone of your email marketing and sales, you can easily allocate revenue back to the email marketing campaign, newsletter, or blog post that impacted each sale. In this sense, Hubspot acts more like a CRM that offers email marketing automation, rather than vice versa.

While much loved, HubSpot software has a problem with the price. Their platform can become exponentially expensive as your number of contacts on the list or email feature requirements grow. The software’s cost can easily reach thousands of dollars per month when combined with other services in the same platform.

On the one hand, you can get the same functionality for one-eighth of the price using AVADA Email Marketing or any other software in this list. On the other hand, if the value of understanding what influenced each sale is a feature worth paying a five-figure cost to solve, then Hubspot is definitely a strong contender.

This is why I suggest Hubspot as an ideal choice for B2B service businesses, who can easily cover the cost of Hubspot by the value of earning an extra one or two clients in the year. This extends to bigger and more sophisticated agencies that have to provide clients with in-depth email marketing reports for their marketing funnel.

If you just need a business email marketing software, Hubspot is probably a bit overkill. But if you want an email marketing software as a part of a wider plan to raise the marketing game and improve performance across the entire sales and marketing funnel, then you should strongly consider Hubspot – but don’t expect it to be cheap.

#10. EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus

There has long been a perception in email marketing that the most affordable way to use email marketing is by using Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES). However, the user interface is not created for marketing teams to build email campaigns.

Many email marketing services have attempted to close this gap - from Sendy to Moonmail, but they often end up being feature-deficient or more developer-focused.

EmailOctopus has nailed this balance. Built on top of Amazon SES, EmailOctopus gives you the benefits of AWS infrastructure and lets you build email campaigns using a user-friendly interface.

The main downside of EmailOctopus is, ironically, the simplicity. If you’re just sending email campaigns to your list that’s fine, but don’t expect to have an intuitive email automation builder or multi-touch attribution you find in a tool like AVADA Email Marketing.

EmailOctopus would be the perfect option for a small tech startup with someone on the team who is fluent in AWS and needs the power and flexibility of SES without having to code the emails themselves.

For pricing, EmailOctopus has a free plan with up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month. They only have one advanced pricing plan called the Pro plan, starting at $20 per month for 50,000 emails and from 5,000 subscribers. The number of emails go up with the number of subscribers so you won’t have unlimited emails like other business email marketing software on the list.

EmailOctopus’ key features:

  • Email design

  • Reports available

  • Simple drip campaigns

  • Contacts tags

  • Integration with Shopify

  • Developer API

#11. Mailtrap

Mailtrap

Mailtrap is an Email Delivery Platform for businesses and individuals to Test, Send, Control their email infrastructure in one place.

Email Testing: Mailtrap Email Testing gives you a chance to inspect and debug emails in staging, development, and QA environments without spamming recipients. Check the support for a template’s HTML and CSS with the most popular mailbox providers. Analyze emails’ Spam Scores and see if your IP appears in any blacklist reports. Then, automate testing flows with Mailtrap’s Email Testing API.

Email Sending: Send emails with Mailtrap’s Email API or SMTP service. The platform offers a smooth and secure setup where you don’t need to fill out lengthy forms or provide a lot of validation credentials. Mailtrap email delivery time averages about ~1 second.

In-depth Deliverability Tracking: Mailtrap has actionable in-depth analytics. With these, you get unique monitoring capabilities to control how your email infrastructure works and troubleshoot unexpected issues fast and easily.

Some of the most outstanding features include a helicopter-view dashboard, drill-down reports, up to 60 days of email logs with email body preview, and deliverability alerts — weekly reports on Mondays and critical alerts for sudden metrics drops. All platform customers can rely on fast and quality support from deliverability experts.

Mailtrap’s Key Features:

  • End-to-end sending solution
  • Highly responsive customer support
  • Email infrastructure that ensures high deliverability rates by default
  • ≈ 1 sec email delivery time
  • Smooth and Secure setup
  • Mailtrap Email Sending has both solutions: Email API and SMTP Service
  • Actionable In-depth Analytics with helicopter view dashboard and drill-down reports
  • 60-days of email logs
  • Email body preview
  • Deliverability alerts: weekly reports and critical alerts

Final words

It’s always important for you to take action and make progress, rather than spend an indefinite amount of time trying to have the perfect result. If you’ve read this far, you have eliminated hours of research on finding the perfect business email marketing software, which means you’re probably ready to make your decision and choose a tool for your company.

Which will you choose? I hope the guide helped you find the answer. My top recommendation is, of course, AVADA Marketing Automation since it is built for business and will stay free to try out forever. If you need any assistance, our support team at AVADA is always here to help.


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.