Imagine sending a “Buy one get one free” offer to a customer who indicated an interest in a product. That sale will be super easy to close. 

This is the same with sending relevant and timely emails to individuals who indicated an interest in your brand by subscribing to your mailing list — getting them to take the required action will be much easier than targeting them on another platform. This is the power of email marketing!

However, no successful email campaign happens without an email marketing tool. From building landing pages to segmenting the audience to sending relevant messages, and getting actionable insights on how your campaigns perform, an email marketing tool makes your life easy when setting up your email marketing campaigns, from the beginning to the end. 

In this article, we will examine 7 top email marketing tools you can adopt as a small business, their best use case; key features, pros, cons, and pricing to help you make informed decision. Let’s get started. 

What to look out for when choosing an email marketing tool 

There are many email marketing tools to choose from in the market, each with its best use case. However, to get the best out of an email marketing tool, you must decide what is of more priority to you for email marketing, then go for a tool that best suits that use. 

The following are key factors to consider when choosing an email tool for your business marketing efforts:

• The type of email you want to send
• Email volume
• Availability of A/B Testing feature 
• Templates volume and uniqueness
• Automation 
• Segmentation and personalization options 
• Analytics and Reporting 
• Pricing 
• The efficiency of customer support 

7 Email Marketing tools for small businesses

To get the best out of your email marketing efforts, especially as a small business with limited resources, you must choose a tool that suits your needs without breaking the bank. Here, we’ll examine these tools and give a best use case to help you decide the best fit. 

• Constant Contact- Best for generating AI email content
• Intuit Mailchimp – Best for creating your customized email layout 
• Mailerlite – Best for managing paid newsletters
• Moosend – Best for sending automated emails 
• Instantly – Best for lead generation with cold email outreaches
• Sendpulse -Best for cross-channel brand communication
• Getresponse – Best for auto-responding email communication

1. Constant Contact – Best for generating AI email content

With Constant Contact, sending promotional, transactional, and educational emails is a breeze. With its intuitive features and templates, you can easily schedule and send emails to your contact list and get detailed feedback on performance for future improvement. 

It contains an SMS feature, enabling you to send bulk SMS to your contacts, and an AI content generator feature to craft email content by inputting relevant keywords, etc. 

Standout Features 

• It has an AI Content generator to help you come up with content for your newsletter.
• It has hundreds of drag-and-drop templates to adopt for your email campaigns.
• Has automation features to send the right message at the right time.
• Contains SMS features, sign-up forms, surveys, and polls. 
• Contains A/B Testing and engagement heat maps feature

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Has a mobile application version for easy use on the go.	Limited integration with other apps
Easy to use and integrate	Gets pricier as your contacts grow
Provides detailed analytics to track email opens, clicks, and shares, to aid improvement
Integrates with your social media pages
Enables sending re-targeted emails to people who click a specific link

Pricing:

• Has a 14-day free trial
• Lite – $12/month 
• Standard – $35/month
• Premium – $80/month

2. Intuit Mailchimp – Best for creating your customized email layout 

Intuit Mailchimp is one of the easy-to-use email marketing tools that has stood the test of time in the market. With exciting templates and the ability to customize yours, sending personalized and well-segmented emails has never been easier. 

It enables you to design a custom-made layout which helps to add a touch of your brand in the emails you send, to ensure consistency in brand communication across all messaging platforms. 

Standout Features 

• Automation features to schedule emails in advance.
• User-friendly interface with drag-and-drop features.
• It contains premade layouts and enables you to design custom-made layouts.
• Contains sign-up forms and lead-generation tools for subscriber list growth 
• Provides analytics and reporting features to get feedback on email campaigns

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Enables segmentation and personalization of emails to the relevant customer group	Limited features in the free plan, which requires you to pay more to access more features
Easy integration with other apps
Super easy to use and set up

Pricing:

• Free
• Essentials – $6.50/month 
• Standard – $10/month 
• Premium – $175/month 

3. Mailerlite – Best for managing paid newsletters

With Mailerlite, you can do a lot even on the free plan starting from sending emails, A/B testing, receiving analytics on emails sent, and best of all — solid customer support always ready to attend to your needs without hassle. 

Its user-friendly interface enables you to set up and send emails with no hassle. 

Standout Features 

• Easy to use and set up
• User-friendly dashboard 
• Availability of landing pages, sign-up forms, and pop-ups
• Enables the sending of automated email sequences 
• Gives reports and analytics on email performance 

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Great features available on the free plan	Issues are encountered when migrating to the newer version
Great customer service support
Helps you easily manage your paid newsletter and helps to collect leads and payments.

Pricing: 

• Free
• Growing Business – $9/month
• Advanced – $18/month
• Enterprise – Custom-made 

4. Moosend – Best for sending automated emails 

Moosend’s intuitive interface and drag-and-drop features are some of the exciting features that make it a delight to adopt. With an easy-to-navigate and user interface, a newbie can set it up and use it on the go with no hassle. 

Its automation features ensure that automated messages like welcome emails, birthday wishes, abandoned carts reminders, etc are sent as when due. 

Standout Features 

• Helps with segmentation and personalization of content to the right contacts
• Details resorts on email statistics and user behaviour 
• User-friendly interface 
• Drag and drop features 
• Provides analytics to evaluate email performance 

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Easy to use with automation features	Inability to create customized layouts without any starting layout
Continuous improvement which adds more features	Limited templates available
Great customer care support	Presence of bugs and glitches from multiple users

Pricing:

• Free trial – 30 days
• Pro – $9/month 
• Enterprise – Custom made

5. Instantly – Best for lead generation with cold email outreaches

Instantly AI is a great fit for individuals and agencies trying to get customers or clients through cold email campaigns. It is an intuitive tool with exciting features that enable you to generate leads and nurture them from cold prospects to paying clients. 

It is integrated with AI technology to generate email content to send to your prospects. Their latest lead finder feature enables you to find new leads to target in your email outreaches. 

Standout Features 

• Helps you acquire customers through cold email outreaches. 
• Integrated with AI technology to enable email message creation 
• Contains multiple templates and automation features for email success 
• User-friendly interface 
• New lead finder feature 

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Integrated with other tools for more efficiency	Lack of omnichannel capabilities
Top-notch customer service	Limit on the number of leads on the basic plan
Enables you to send up to 20,000 emails at scale in a day.
Effective customer care support

Pricing:

• Growth- $30/month 
• Hypergrowth – $77.6
• Light Speed – $286.3

6. Sendpulse– Best for cross-channel brand communication

Sendpulse is one of the delightful email marketing tools used by small businesses — with a limited budget — who seek to grow fast. With its intuitive features, such as automation, audience segmentation, and personalization, Sendpulse is one of the best email marketing tools you should consider for your business. 

Aside from sending emails, Sendpulse enables you to send bulk SMS and push notifications to your audience, ensuring timely and consistent communication. 

Standout Features 

• Audience segmentation and automation of emails
• Enables you to send emails, SMS, and push notifications 
• Live chat, IG chatbots, Whatsapp chatbots, Whatsapp Business API, bio link page, etc
• Availability of A/B Testing

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Responsive customer support team	Limited integration with other tools
Budget-friendly pricing for small businesses	Email verification limits
Straightforward onboarding process
Free plan available with up to 15,000 emails monthly

Pricing:

• Free
• Standard – $6.40/month 
• Pro – $7.68/month 
• Enterprise – $10.75/month 

7. GetResponse– Best for auto-responding email communication 

GetResponse is a tool with email marketing, marketing automation, and e-commerce marketing features. The email marketing feature allows you to communicate with your audience, as well as set up an autoresponder system to respond to replies in time. 

With the openAI-powered email generator, you can create engaging emails faster, with pre-designed templates to make your life easier. 

Standout Features 

• Landing pages, drag-and-drop features
• Easy-to-use interface 
• Funnel builder and visual campaign builder 
• It contains an analytics feature to understand email performance like open rate, click rate, etc. 
• Marketing automation to improve efficiency 
• Autoresponder feature for instant communication 

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Impressive customer support system	Limited integration with other tools
Powerful automation tools	Limited reporting capabilities
A wide array of templates to choose from

Pricing:

• Getresponse Free -$0
• Email Marketing – $15.6/month 

Getting the most out of your email marketing efforts 

When starting with email marketing, it is fine to experiment with various tools until you get what suits your needs. Even when you’ve been in the game for a long time and feel the need to pivot to another tool that meets your present and evolving needs, you can achieve it with ease, since many tools allow for easy data importation from one tool to another. 

Now, various email tools can cater to some specific needs better than others. For example, Instantly is widely used by individuals for cold email outreaches, showing that it caters to that need. So, based on your unique needs, you can determine the email tool that will best serve you, without having to break the bank. 

I hope you found this post helpful. You can leave a comment below and share this with others.

Editor: Olamide Odutolu