The Best Email Marketing Services and Survey Software of 2024

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that delivers a range of content directly to leads’ and customers’ inboxes. This content includes promotional content, information about sales and discounts, and behaviorally triggered emails like reminders to check out when a user leaves products in their e-commerce cart.

To conduct email marketing most effectively, we recommend using email marketing software. These platforms allow you to import your email contact list and create audience segments to ensure you’re delivering relevant content to the right users. They also include tools for creating email marketing messages, often with a simple drag-and-drop interface that anyone can learn quickly. If you plan on repeatedly sending similar content, such as a monthly newsletter, you can save templates so that future content is delivered in a consistent format and style.

The best email marketing software also includes compliance tools to help ensure your email contacts have all opted-in to receive marketing materials from your brand. Some even include artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can support you as you create email marketing content, optimizing it to drive even more conversions and personalizing it to individual recipients to boost engagement.

Email marketing is an effective, low-cost method of communicating with your customers and building loyalty to your company when executed correctly.  “Give compelling content and a valid reason for the customer to open your email and act the way you want them to,” Cross said. “If you provide valuable and relevant content that addresses the customer’s needs and interests, you’ll attract and retain customers.”

Here are just a few of the benefits of investing in a software solution for email marketing.

1. Easily manage your campaigns and contacts.

An email marketing service provides a centralized place to create, manage and analyze your email campaigns. The software manages the entire process of creating and sending your email campaigns. It also gives you feedback on how your campaigns are performing.

2. Improve click-throughs and engagements on your website.

A professional-looking email campaign will entice customers to click on the links you include in the email, which means higher click-through rates and increased traffic to your website.

3. Provide personalized, one-to-one communications with your customers.

Today’s customers expect content that is personally tailored to them, rather than a rote email going out to a company’s entire customer base. Email marketing services allow you to segment your customers by qualifiers such as age, gender, location and interests to help you customize your messages.

4. Integrate email with your other digital marketing channels.

Many email marketing services allow you to embed or link to your social media platforms in your emails, which creates the opportunity for your business to advertise through multiple channels. This helps increase brand awareness and the likelihood of return customers.

5. Be environmentally friendly.

According to a recent analysis from Sendinblue, one email produces 0.174 grams of carbon dioxide. In contrast, a paper letter sent by mail produces an average of 19.5 grams of carbon dioxide. Though email has a much smaller footprint than snail mail, email marketing campaigns often send hundreds or thousands of emails at a time, which means the impact can add up.

Most email marketing service providers charge a monthly subscription fee based on the number of contacts you want to engage with and the number of emails you plan to send. Plans then vary further based on specific features. Some providers offer free versions of their software with limited features, subscribers and sends, which are a great way for businesses to try out email marketing risk-free.

On average, plans range in price from $10 per month for 500 contacts to $4,000 per month for 1 million contacts. For businesses that only occasionally need an email marketing service, some providers offer per-email or pay-as-you-go pricing. This is a flexible option, as you pay only for what you use rather than paying the same amount each month for a subscription that may largely go to waste.

Email marketing services that do not offer a free version often allow you to sign up for a free trial so you can test out the software and see how it works for you. The services we examined offer trials ranging from 14 to 60 days.

When choosing email marketing software, you should keep some key factors in mind, regardless of the type of business you run. We talked to email marketing experts and business owners who have gone through the process to learn more about the most important criteria to examine before making a purchase. 

Determine your needs

Before you begin investigating the email marketing solutions on the market, take some time to consider what your business needs in a platform. Sit down and make a list of the most important things for your purposes. This may include the ability to import an existing email contact list from a spreadsheet, audience segmentation tools for organizing contacts into buckets like “leads” or “repeat customers,” and a low-code drag-and-drop content creation tool

“Our research was directed by the identification of our unique needs in email marketing at the outset of the journey,” said Jake Munday, co-founder and CEO of Custom Neon. “We were able to determine real-world application and satisfaction levels by reading through many customer reviews and case studies.”

Many business owners we spoke with considered aspects like available features and ease of use, balancing advanced functionality with complexity, customization and scalability; ensuring platforms were flexible enough to adapt to their needs and grow with their business over time; customer support responsiveness and quality; and pricing. 

Start building a list of email marketing platforms to explore

Take time to research the leading vendors on the market and consider which might have the right offerings for your business. Start putting together a shortlist based on this research — you’ll dig deeper into many of these vendors later on. 

For now, consider your most important criteria and add names to the list based on those. For example, if you’re primarily concerned about your budget, add only options that have all the most important features you need at a cost-effective price.

“We initially carried out an exercise to look at as many different options as possible and compare costs for different numbers of subscribers and to check if specific automation functionality we needed was available,” said Laura Grant, marketing manager at Bluesky Solutions. “This then gave us a small shortlist of potential software which we looked at in more detail.”

Examine functionality to determine which platforms suit your needs

To narrow down your list, check out the available features each email marketing software offers. The absence of some tools or functionality may be a dealbreaker, helping you cross some names off your list. 

“To support targeted campaigns, we searched for strong analytics, extensive segmentation tools and customization choices,” Munday said. “Ease of integration with our existing CRM and e-commerce platforms was crucial to streamline our workflows.”

These tools were common requirements among the entrepreneurs and professionals we spoke with. However, it’s equally important to balance the slate of features with overall usability. If advanced functionality comes at the expense of user experience, you may find a platform to be more disruptive than it is helpful. 

“I needed robust automation, list segmentation capabilities and integration with other tools like my CRM and analytics platform,” said Bassem Mostafa, market analyst and owner of GlobeMonitor Market Research Agency. “Some tools were feature-rich but overly complex, so it was essential to strike the right balance.”

Similar to considering balance between functionality and usability is to consider overall value, not just the total price. The cheapest platform may not provide value if it doesn’t have all the tools you need for example. Finding a solution that combines cost-effective pricing with a strong slate of features is key. 

“I personally recommend that while considering tools, think about long-term value, not just the initial price,” said Tom Jauncey, CEO of Nautilus Marketing. “A more expensive option may save you time and ramp up your results in the longer term.”

Schedule product demos and conduct free trials

Once you’ve established a list and refined it with feedback from other professionals and entrepreneurs, begin scheduling live demonstrations and signing up for free trials. We recommend doing both whenever possible; live demonstrations give you a chance to ask questions of sales representatives and see how they use the software, while free trials offer you the freedom to test the software out in real-world situations. 

“There is no replacement for a good free trial,” said Brandon Rollins, founder and CEO of Pangea Marketing Agency. “Blog posts, reviews, and even videos are all helpful, but there’s no replacement for using the tool directly and seeing if [it] does exactly what you need it to do.”

Consider onboarding and implementation support

Email marketing software is often fairly easy to set up, but it’s still helpful to have onboarding support. Dedicated account managers and onboarding specialists are especially helpful if it’s your first time setting up email marketing software or if you’re importing an email contact list from a spreadsheet. And, if anything goes wrong, a good onboarding team can help you troubleshoot and resolve your issues quickly.

“For some platforms, the onboarding process was included in the demo, which gave me a good sense of how much support and training was available,” Mostafa said. 

Some platforms may not offer an onboarding team but do maintain a library of self-guided resources and how-to video tutorials. Many of these libraries are comprehensive, so if you’re confident they’re sufficient to get you started on the right foot, you may choose to forgo working with onboarding specialists. 

Review metrics after setup and implementation

Consider the first month (or however long your contractual obligation is) an extended trial. After getting your email marketing program off the ground with your new tool, review key metrics to determine whether it’s working. You should see improvement in most of them, especially if you’re moving from a manual spreadsheet approach or just beginning email marketing for the first time. 

“When it came to user engagement, conversion rates, and deliverability, the platform [we chose] not only met but surpassed our expectations,” Munday said. “Customer satisfaction and retention have significantly improved as a result of the capacity to produce tailored content depending on user behavior and preferences.”

If you see flat or negative trends in your metrics, take a look at how you’re using the tool. Did you segment your audience correctly? Are you using engaging email subject lines? Is your content actually being delivered to user inboxes? If you’re certain you’re abiding by all the best practices and your metrics are still down, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

As you compare email marketing services, look for these core features:

A/B Testing

Many services offer A/B testing, which is the ability to test out various components of an email message to see what will resonate more with your audience. Before you do, it is important to understand how A/B testing works. A specific example is to try out two different subject lines. You can send a portion of your email list one subject line and another section of your list a different subject line. Whichever gets more engagement can be used for the majority of your audience.

Test different iterations of email campaigns with A/B testing. Above is multivariant testing on the iContact platform. Source: iContact

Drag-and-Drop Email Design Tools

Most services provide a user-friendly drag-and-drop tool that allows you to customize your emails or customizable premade templates. Some providers have templates that show you how your email will look on multiple devices (laptops, tablets and mobile phones), which can help you design a flexible and responsive email.

Analytics and Reporting

The ability to measure your campaigns’ performance is critical to understanding your ROI. Email marketing services typically include a detailed analytics platform that provides information such as your open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, audience geolocation, conversions and customer behavior trends. Some integrate with Google Analytics, while others provide their own analytics platforms that present the info in easy-to-read charts and graphs.

Marketing Automation

With marketing automation features, you can configure your email marketing software to automatically send targeted emails to certain customers when they take a specific action. For example, if a visitor to your website signs up to receive emails from you, a marketing automation workflow triggers a welcome email to go to that customer’s inbox.

Segmentation

Segmentation is another helpful way to improve email deliverability to your audience by grouping or tagging them by factors like age, location, gender, industry or interests. Email segmentation allows you to target different groups rather than sending one mass email that may not be relevant to your entire customer base.

Most platforms, like Campaigner above, allow you to segment your data allowing you to send campaigns with different offers to different audiences based on their interests. Source: Campaigner

Contact Management

A contact management tool helps you acquire, sort and manage email contacts. It also provides features like automatic deletion of dead or duplicate contacts, importing, exporting, grouping, and integrating with other management tools, like a CRM or CMS.

Social Media Integration

Integrating your social media with email marketing helps make the most of multichannel marketing by providing more information about your customers as well as more opportunities for them to see messages from you. You’ll be able to grow your contact list, schedule posts and track your followers’ engagement to determine what’s popular.

AI-Driven Technology

Some email marketing experts also advise looking for AI-powered features. “AI can definitely help with efficiencies like automation, writing content, optimizing send times, subject lines and other content,” said Jon Cross, CEO of All In One Email.

 Dave Charest, director of small business success for Constant Contact, agreed. “AI makes digital marketing easier for small businesses to create, design and send their campaigns. Spending less time on marketing minutiae helps you get back to running other aspects of your business,” he said. Charest pointed out that his platform’s AI technology “lets our customers use our almost 30 years of marketing experience to create campaigns and reach the right customers with the right messages … It’s certainly enabled some new outcomes we’re able to offer our customers.”

However, Cross cautioned such tools are “still fairly new” and said “not to rely on it too much” if your experience with using AI is limited. Users need to “know what they’re doing enough to know when [or] if AI steers them in the wrong direction.”

Email marketing is worth the investment when done properly. Almost half of all users buy from a marketing email at least once per month, meaning this channel is effective for generating revenue through direct sales — and thanks to email marketing reports, you can track these sales. An additional 60 percent of users have said that marketing emails have influenced their purchases, so even if you don’t drive direct sales from your email marketing campaigns, you may still be nurturing leads in a meaningful way that leads to a sale later on. 

Of course, email marketing is only worth it if you do it correctly. That means understanding the best practices surrounding email marketing and sticking to them from day one.

To make the most of your email marketing campaigns, make sure you’re adhering to email best practices. These include meeting basic compliance requirements and setting your email content up for success.

• Use the double opt-in method: The double opt-in method requests that subscribers not only check a box saying they’d like to receive email content from you, but also asks them to confirm their subscription with a second step. This leaves no doubt that they have agreed to receive marketing messages from your brand, an increasingly important element in the era of data privacy laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
• Create a triggered welcome email: Welcome emails don’t only let subscribers know they’ve successfully signed up — they’re also one of the most engaging types of emails. Roughly 80 percent of users will click on a welcome email, generating four times as many opens and 10 times as many clicks as other types of email marketing content.
• Segment your audience: Your email contact list likely contains several types of users, so you should segment them accordingly to better target them with relevant content. Some may be leads that have never purchased your products or services before, while others may be repeat customers. Others still might be lost subscribers that you’re trying to win back. By segmenting your audiences, you can direct the most relevant content their way and boost opens and clicks.
• Cull inactive subscribers: If you’ve been sending email marketing content to subscribers who haven’t opened a single message in a year, it may be time to remove them from your list. These inactive subscribers drag down your metrics and provide no value to your email marketing campaigns, so frequently revisit your list and identify opportunities to cull inactive subscribers or dead email addresses.
• Create engaging subject lines: Engaging subject lines that make users want to open an email are critical. If they don’t open your email, there’s no chance they’ll convert by clicking through to your website or making a purchase — so try to hook their attention with a grabby email subject line.
• Personalize email content: By personalizing email content to include a user’s name and surface products they were browsing in your store, for example, you can boost open and engagement rates. Many email marketing platforms include tools that support content personalization, so consider these when making a buying decision.
  

If our best picks above don’t suit your business, these fine alternatives might. 

Active Campaign

Many e-commerce businesses find email marketing challenging because they can’t base their campaigns on live customer data like order history or pages visited. So, instead of offering products their customers are most likely to want, they’re forced to rely on generic or outdated information. Active Campaign solves this through its smart integration with 850 ecommerce platforms, including major vendors like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

This eliminates guesswork for marketing teams as they get data on campaign performance and customer behavior. Active Campaign’s e-commerce dashboard helps them to create personalized and highly targeted email campaigns quickly from the platform’s selection of 125 customizable templates. We were impressed by the volume of emails you can send to – an unlimited number up to 250,000 contacts. We loved the automation tools, especially ‘goal actions’ and ‘go actions,’ which take email recipients to the next sales stage if they choose an action like making a purchase before, for example, a drip campaign ends. Marketing teams can also score contacts based on factors like location and email opens as well as build specific landing pages for campaigns to generate better responses.

iContact

The steps between plans offered by many email marketing platforms can be steep. For example, moving from paying for 2,000 emails and contacts up to the next plan with 10,000 emails or contacts pushes the price, denting campaign profitability until subscriber numbers increase.

We love iContact’s approach to this. You can start with a free plan and scale up gradually (750, 1,500, 2,500, 5,000 contacts) with small and manageable increases in price ($8.50, $27, $41, $73). We also appreciate how iContact makes every feature available to subscribers at all levels.

There was a lot else we really liked about this platform when we reviewed it. The drag-and-drop email designer was one of the easiest we’ve used. Their library of customizable and professional templates is also very generous. Sending out campaigns takes no time. We also thought the real-time reporting on live campaigns was excellent, which gives marketing teams instant insights into engagement and revenue.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

When creating campaigns for use across different media like email, SMS, and social media, marketing teams face a major challenge. They need consistent data to build coherent marketing campaigns across all touch points. This is often difficult because they use different platforms to run campaigns on different media – for example, one for email, one for WhatsApp, one for SEO, and so on. When reviewing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we were impressed at how well that platform solved these issues. Underlying the system is the core CRM product and its powerful and constantly-updated customer and prospect database. This becomes the central source of truth for all your sales, marketing, and customer service data, helping them to inform, direct and unify their marketing efforts.

We love how easy Marketing Cloud makes creating, launching and reviewing data-driven campaigns across multiple channels from one dashboard. For the purposes of this review however, we’re focusing on the app’s excellent Email Studio. It excels at personalizing messages with live customer data – this level of customization strengthens customer relationships and keeps conversations ongoing. We appreciate how easy it is to build powerful, effective pieces with Marketing Cloud’s stylish drag-and-drop content blocks. Creating segmented lists for more targeted campaigns is a breeze on the platform too.

The reporting and analytics features are excellent – you can track campaigns in real-time or run reports to monitor your progress over time. For businesses with more complex marketing and operational needs, Salesforce Marketing Cloud should be a candidate for adoption by your company for all of the reasons set out.

Click here for our up-to-date review of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

To determine the best email marketing services and survey software on the market, our team of marketing experts and software analysts evaluated an initial list of 25 platforms. 

We narrowed this list down by examining key criteria such as pricing plans, available features, onboarding support and customer service. We also took a look at customer reviews to see what real entrepreneurs had to say about their experiences with each platform. We used these insights to narrow our initial list down and select the email marketing software we wanted to put through more in-depth testing.

After narrowing our list down to 14, we participated in live demonstrations and signed up for free trials with each company to test out their offerings firsthand. We asked pointed questions of company representatives and put their platforms to the test in real-world situations. Ultimately, we chose six email marketing platforms as our top recommendations. Our experts and analysts studied each solution’s functionality and evaluated the products on nearly 30 factors.

These factors were weighted differently in our overall conclusion. The weights were determined based on how much business owners prioritize these criteria when shopping for business software and services and making purchasing decisions.

• Pricing (30%): Our experts and analysts compared and contrasted each vendor’s plans, judging which packages offered the best bang for your buck. They took into account monthly subscription fees, the number of contacts and email sends allowed, pay-as-you-go options, and the quality of free versions and free trials.
• Features (25%): We looked for standard email marketing functions like email builders, contact management tools, A/B testing abilities, workflow automations and analytics. We also assessed the available integrations and awarded extra points for advanced services, like AI tools for generating email content, customizing campaigns and analyzing metrics.
  
• Ease of Use (20%): We tested the software ourselves, gauging each solution’s learning curve, user-friendliness and customization options. We also considered whether the platform included easy-to-use survey tools and if the vendor offered a fully featured mobile app for executing email marketing tasks on the go.
  
• Customer Service (15%): We evaluated the range of customer service options, including whether phone assistance was provided with all package tiers. We also examined each vendor’s online resources for businesses interested in self-guided help.
  
• Integrations (10%): Email marketing software can tie in with your tech stack’s other marketing tools and business software. We gave extra points to platforms that offered extensive pre-built integrations with some of the most popular business software on the market.

Based on these criteria, we not only determined which email marketing services and survey software our readers could trust but also the ways in which each solution could best serve different business needs. Some platforms were better at certain tasks than others or more suited to a particular type of company. These takeaways informed the “Best for” use cases you see on this page.

To learn more about our methodology, see our full editorial process.