There are many email marketing automation tools that you can choose for your organization. To ensure that you’re adding the most efficient and easy-to-use tool into your marketing stack, we’re going to evaluate three of the best email marketing automation tools for SMBs, to make your search much easier.
When you think about setting your business up for success, email marketing is probably at the top of your list. No matter the stage of your company, you need to be able to communicate with your prospects, customers, and subscribers. One key piece of your marketing tech stack is an email marketing automation tool —one place where you can manage, build, and analyze your email marketing campaigns. We’re going to take a look at three platforms, ActiveCampaign, SendinBlue, and MailerLite.
Why is Email Automation Important?
When it comes to scaling your business, you want to effectively communicate your company updates, services, features, and in-product messaging. Not only is it time-consuming, but very likely impossible to do all of those campaigns manually. Every time a blog goes out, a product feature is available, or a new support ticket is answered – you don’t want to be responsible for doing that manually.
Even beyond that, you want to be able to segment your lists, conduct A/B tests, optimize, and analyze your emails for ultimate email marketing success. That’s why implementing an email marketing automation tool can help you simplify your process. Plus, the tools in this article are all easy-to-use, have many critical capabilities, and even some that will transform your traditional lead capture process to get you even more contacts to include in your email campaigns.
If automation is more of a “nice-to-have” than a “need-to-have” for you and your team, we encourage you to read through the highlights of these tools and imagine doing all of it manually. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you have gained better insight into which email marketing automation tool will be the most beneficial for you.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is designed to give your customers (and potential customers) positive experiences with your product/service. A successful business needs to have multiple types of email campaigns, which is why ActiveCampaign has built its platform with many types of emails in mind. Their capabilities include broadcast emails, triggered emails, targeted emails, email autoresponders, email funnels, and scheduled emails. Based on customer data, ActiveCampaign can help you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. Like many of these types of tools, ActiveCampaign’s services extend beyond email marketing, so if you’re looking to do even more marketing automation, ActiveCampaign is a great solution.
Their email designer is easy-to-use so that you can design on-brand emails. Additionally, the analytics that the tool provides will allow you to test what works best when you communicate with your market so that you can perfect your email marketing strategy.
ActiveCampaign Pricing: ActiveCampaign has pricing for every sized business. They have four tiers of offerings – Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. Their pricing is based on the number of contacts you have, plus the solution level. The more features you want and the more contacts you have, the higher the price. Pricing starts at as little as $9/month and up to $229+/month.
SendinBlue
If you’re just getting started with email marketing and don’t have a lot of coding experience, SendinBlue is a great tool for you. The user experience (UX) is great with SendinBlue’s drag and drop editor. Additionally, SendinBlue has a number of integrations with the tools you’ve already got in your stack, including WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Zapier, OptinMonster, and more. So, integrating SendinBlue into your existing tech stack will be as seamless as possible. In addition to their excellent email automation, they offer additional ways for you to communicate with your market via SMS marketing and chat.
SendinBlue Pricing: SendinBlue starts with a free tier (with limited email capabilities) and goes up to $65+/month. One unique piece of SendinBlue that not all email marketing automation tools allow, is that they allow you to have unlimited contacts, which is a definite standout feature if you’ve got a lot of contacts in your database. You can group lists however you wish, and it doesn’t impact your pricing.
MailerLite
Last but not least on this list is MailerLite. MailerLite is packed with key features to help you grow your small business, including an easy-to-use email editor (drag & drop), customizable templates, and lead capture tools for your website, such as pop-ups and landing pages. Additionally, MailerLite has robust automation and segmentation capabilities to ensure you’re getting your message across in the most impactful way. MailerLite also has email optimization and analytics functionalities so that you can learn what works and improve your strategy for your next campaign. If you’re looking for an all in one tool that will scale as your business grows, MailerLite is one of our top choices.
MailerLite Pricing: MailerLite has the option for free use for up to 1,000 contacts and 12,000 emails per month. The price increases depending on how many contacts/subscribers you have and how many emails you plan to send. The first level of a paid plan started at $10/month and goes up to $1,900+, but that higher scale of pricing is more for enterprise businesses.
Setting up a well-oiled marketing automation machine can improve your team’s efficiency. Implementing an email marketing automation tool early on in your business plan allows you to build strong connections with your prospects, subscribers, and customers to help scale your company. The capabilities across these tools extend beyond traditional email marketing and will help you automate your entire email marketing strategy, from creation to optimization to analysis.