14 Best CRM Email Marketing Automation Platforms

 

Why CRM email marketing automation software?

Email marketing is the perfect tool to improve the sales graph and profit as well for all businesses. It is estimated that email marketing is more effective than social media shares and generates three times better traffic as compared to social media sharing.  

In digital marketing, marketers have to do more in limited time and resources as well. They have to approach a wide range of audiences to get more and more customers. Usually, email marketing uses a targeted approach. Therefore, visitors generated through this medium are relevant and helps to generate better ROI.  

54% of marketing influencers cite increasing email engagement rate as a top priority.
* Courtesy of Backlinko undefined

What Is Email Automation?

Email automation is a process of sending emails automatically at a specified time and date to a particular group of people. It could be based on location or for a specific age group or anything prescribed by the marketers.  

Usually, email automation is used to send emails to subscribers about new products, current promotions offered, or many other things related to products. Email automation helps to boost up the workflow. Email automation helps to get a more personalized, effective, and relevant audience.

Why Email Marketing is Important?

Nowadays, email is an essential part of our lives, and almost everyone uses it for different purposes. Some people use email as a communication medium with their colleagues, while some use it to operate their android phones. In short, everyone needs an email id in routine matters.  

It is assumed that more than half of people around the world use email in 2019. Furthermore, it is expected that more than 90% of the world’s population could have email until 2023. And a significant number of people use it to send and receive emails regularly.  

Therefore, email marketers take advantage of this excellent business opportunity to reach their targeted audience. Email marketing helps small businesses to improve their visibility by reaching and converting more people into their potential customers consistently.  

Email marketing not only helps to reach a wide range of audiences but also helps to send customized messages based on the needs, location, and customer actions on the website.   

Over the next two years, an additional 21% of Marketing Leaders plan to use a Marketing Automation Platform. – Salesforce “State of Marketing” (2017).

SalesForce in their customer service trends report indicated: “The average customer uses a whopping 10 different channels to communicate ..” and email still remains #1 on the list.

* Courtesy of SalesForce

 

What to Look For in Email Services?

Using Yahoo or Gmail address for businesses is normal, but it doesn’t create a sense of professionalism. Therefore, setting up a professional email system not only provides a positive impact on the customers. But it is also beneficial to generate separate emails for different departments with the growth in business activities.  

For selecting the best email services, there are different things that you must have to consider.  

Let’s take a brief look at them.   

1. A right marketing email service must provide built-in email templates that are easy to use with drag and drop options for images and texts. The opportunity to create your email by using HTML design helps to create eye-catching emails for attracting and engaging the customers.  
2. Responsive programming is another important feature that allows visitors to open it on any device they used. Usually, most of the people like to use desktops or tablets for reading emails. In contrast, many people use their mobile phones all the time. Therefore, the email service must be responsive to all types of devices.  
3. In-depth matrices is another vital feature. By using this feature, users can get information about clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, and many other things. This information helps to plan or modify the marketing strategies for getting better output.  
4. Quick customer support is beneficial to resolve the issues if any, timely to avoid any inconvenience while communicating with the customers.  
5. Many email service providers don’t allow users to send emails to people who are not opted for receiving emails from your company. Therefore, if you buy a list of emails for lead generation, then you must ensure that ESP doesn’t put any restriction on sending emails to these addresses.  

Many small businesses don’t want to spend more on marketing automation. Therefore, before selecting the email service provider, must ensure that it provides the following services:    

• Email workflow and scheduling  
• Autoresponders and simple trigger messages  
• Segmentation and personalization  
• Basic forms   

Selection of perfect email service provider that offers efficient results in email automation and marketing is tricky. Therefore, by performing extensive research, we select the top and most popular email service providers for our readers. Let’s take a comprehensive look at them.  

Must have features

Many small businesses trying to spend as least as possible on marketing automation. However, if you are trying to save some money, few things can not be overlooked before selecting the email service provider. You must ensure that it provides the following services:

• Email workflow and scheduling
• Autoresponders and simple trigger messages
• Segmentation and personalization
• Basic forms

Selection of perfect email service provider that offers efficient results in email automation and marketing is tricky. Therefore, by performing extensive research, we select the top and most popular email service providers for our readers. Let’s take a comprehensive look at them.

 

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an American based marketing automation platform and the most popular service provider for email marketing. It operates in the market for about the past two decades.  

This email service is famous among small businesses due to its user-friendly nature. It is easy to create the email id by just providing your name and email address that you want to create using this platform. However, it requires a few more information at the time of initial integration in your business, like address, business name, website URL, etc.  

Email automation is one of the most attractive features of Mailchimp that enable users to approach the right group of people at the right time. It allows the users to create automated campaigns with the help of built-in workflows or can create their custom rules based on the preferences and behaviors of users.  

The automation series of this platform includes a welcome email, happy birthday email, and notifications for the latest blog updates. However, there are many other series that users can use as per their needs.  

Analytics of Mailchimp provides you the information about links that visitors use to reach the website and the most effective emails that generate more traffic. The analytics section also includes useful information about successful deliveries, number of clicks for every opened link, spam complaints, number of forwards.  

Pros:   

• Mobile-friendly landing pages  
• Social media ads creation  
• Easy to integrate  
• Email editor  
• A/B testing   

Cons:   

• Emails from Mailchimp received under the promotion tab in Gmail   

Pricing  

The essential plan of Mailchimp starts at $9.99 per month. However, two advance plans are also available with more useful features.   

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue creates a lot of attraction for digital marketers who want all marketing tools in the same place. Sendinblue offers SMS marketing, email automation marketing, CRM, and many more features at the same time. All these features are beneficial for the growth of the business by building a strong relationship with customers.  

Sendinblue offers more than 200 responsive email templates or its users. Pre-built templates are useful for quickly creating campaigns as well as allow the users to customize the content as per their needs and requirements. It also offers drag and drops feature for designing of email that is perfect to create the email design from scratch.  

Sendiblue’s CRM is a unique feature that is not offered by many known email service providers. It helps the users in searching, categorizing, segmenting, and creating the lists as well as updates them automatically depending on the criteria selected by users.  

Users can get real-time reporting about their marketing campaigns by using Sendinblue email services. Users can get reports based on:   

• Geographical location  
• Heat maps  
• Devices used by visitors  
• Open and click reports   

The email automation system of Sendinblue is equipped with many advance features. For example, provide information about previous customers and force them to make a second purchase by sending a discount voucher.  

Pros:   

• Support transactional messaging  
• Landing page editor  
• SMS marketing tool   
• Deliverability feature   

Cons:   

• Limited features in the free plan   

Pricing  

Sendinblue offers four paid plans other than a free plan, and the starter plan starts at $25 per month.   

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a popular email service provider widely used by podcasters, bloggers, and small businesses for building a strong relationship with a wide range of audiences.  

Visual automation editor is one of the most attractive features of this email service. It allows users to edit and preview the email customization on the same page. It helps to work in a continuous flow without switching the pages and helps to save time.  

Email segmentation is another cool feature of ConvertKit that allows the users to send email using conditional tags. For example, if you want to send a specific email to all subscribers on your list but want to include a discount coupon for your past customers only. You can do this by applying conditional tags.  

People are not opening broadcast emails for different reasons. This email service provider helps the users to resend the same email to people who didn’t open it yet or visit it. It is easy to do with the help of the “resend to unopened” button on the stats page. Most probably, upon receiving the same mail again, they visit it.  

Forms play an essential role in getting a massive number of subscribers. CovertKit allows the users to integrate the forms along with landing pages easily.  

Pros:   

• Intuitive interface  
• Tag-based  
• Automatic double opt-in  
• Solid reporting system   

Cons:   

• Limited form customization   

Pricing  

ConvertKit price starts from $29 per month if you have a list of 1000 subscribers. 

4. Drip

Drip is another email marketing tool widely used by eCommerce platforms as well as famous among small businesses and publishers. It is easy to integrate this email service along with many other third-party tools. It helps to import the customer data easily for sending emails.  

It is the first E-CRM designed to build profitable and personal relationships with customers on a massive scale. It offers many advance and unique features like hyper-segmentation, comprehensive marketing, and robust email marketing automation. These features help to monitor the customer needs and requirements for providing improved service and better products.  

Tags are essential to segregate the customers based on pages of the website they visited in the past. Drip makes it easy to identify the needs and relationships with customers by providing the information of customer’s previous purchases or visits on the website.  

For example, if a customer buys a product from a specific category, you will get a notification if there is any update in that category for sending emails to customers.  

Unlike many other email service providers, Drip allows its users to use custom fields for registration of visitors. It is the easiest way to improve the number of subscribers and a list of emails. 

For example, it is easy to get data about the visitor’s location, business type, source of visit, and many more. You can also get information about which blog posts they use to reach on your website.  

Pros:   

• Compatible with third-party tools  
• Behavior-based automation  
• Advanced reporting dashboards  
• Filtering options   

Cons:  

• Lack of form builder  

Pricing  

Drip offers its starter plan at $49 per month but supports up to 2500 people in your email. If you want to manage more people, you can customize your plan as per your needs.   

5. Aweber

Aweber is one of the fastest-growing email service providers and offers easy to integrate the feature. Aweber provides a vast range of email templates for its users with responsive and attractive design.  

Moreover, the templates are featured with AI design that is perfect for getting efficient results for use on different devices. These templates are capable of resizing
automatically as per the size of the device.  

The unique feature of Aweber is that it uses the RSS feed of the website to create the newsletter of the latest blog posts. And send it to visitors by using automated email feature. This feature creates a lot of attraction for bloggers. It provides them the opportunity to get massive traffic without spending additional time on sharing or sending emails.  

Autoresponders are another feature that helps to save the time of visitors by sending emails to visitors or customers based on time intervals. For example, it automatically sends emails to subscribers upon joining the subscription offer and send a promo code after two days as follow up. It also forces users to follow on different social media platforms.  

Email automation feature helps the users to keep in contact with its customers and visitors by sending automatic emails based on tags and different actions they performed on the website. Aweber recently introduces a new feature of email automation that enables the users to use tags in a more flexible way to get better results.  

Pros: 

• AMP for email  
• Easy to integrate  
• Opt-in processes   

Split testing  

Cons:   

• Expensive as compared to features   

Pricing  

The basic plan of AWeber starts at $19 per month, but it can handle only 500 subscribers.   

6. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is another awesome email marketing that not only performs extraordinarily for email automation bit also provides CRM tools to enhance the customer experience. It helps to turn visitors into repeat customers. Activecampaign is beneficial to manage the sales data stepwise in a well-mannered order rather than in a complicated and messy format. It is helpful to improve the ROI by providing information in a better way to lead customers.  

It is easy to create emails for customers, and users can use either the built-in email formats with easy to edit options using the visual editor. Users can also create their desired format from scratch to provide better information to customers in the desired form. Users can include images, videos, HTML coding, and many more features to attract customers.  

Activecampaign activates the autoresponders based on subscribes, unsubscribes, clicks on links, email opens, and different events like anniversaries and birthdays.  

For setting up the autoresponders, it requires the email address that is somehow irritating because users already provide this information for setting up the email service. But to use various options, like if and then to create a logic for sending an email, it is necessary again.  

Pros:   

• Excellent online support  
• Easy to understand  
• Efficient visual effects   

Cons:  

• Clunky email editing  

Pricing  

The basic plan of the active campaign starts at $9 per month but allows the users to manage only 500 subscribers in this plan.   

7. MailerLite

MailerLite is specially designed for people who want a quick creation of personalized email campaigns. It provides in-app tips and suggestions that let the users understand the customization and automation process easily. Tips are available for all the features included in email service that is beneficial to saves a lot of time for users.  

The unique feature of these email services is that it offers support for eight different languages. So that users can create custom emails for customers from different regions of the world and communicate with them easily.  

Furthermore, it offers to resend feature that is fantastic to automatically resend the email to people who didn’t open the email yet. It points out the users about unopened emails. It also suggests resending it with little modifications in the title and content of the email. It increases the chances of acquiring the customer in the second attempt.  

It is easy to edit the email by using drag and drop features and also can add various content blocks like buttons, net promoter score, countdowns, videos, and many more. But users have to spend a lot of time making their email more attractive and cool.  

Pros:   

• Landing page editor  
• Easy to integrate newsletter feature  
• Multiple subscription options   

Cons:  

• Tricky to integrate  

Pricing  

The basic plan of this email service is available at $10 per month to manage 1000 subscribers only. But allow the users to send an unlimited number of emails.   

8. BombBomb

BombBomb is widely supporting the small businesses irrespective of category. The unique feature of video emails helps the business owners to communicate business services and offers just like B2B meetings. This feature helps to gain a massive number of visitors with high chances to convert them into potential customers.  

Moreover, this email service provides a great tracking system with a real-time notification system. Users can get notifications through emails or in the shape of desktop notifications as the visitor opens the mail. Users can also get a notification when the customers view videos.  

This feature also allows the users to delete the videos from an email sent to customers if you don’t want to float the videos forever in the inboxes of customers. Furthermore, it also offers to record the video on a real-time basis or also can upload the prerecorded videos.  

Besides video features, it also offers a wide range of other features like autoresponders, landing page editing, subscriber management, dynamic content, and many more.  

Pros:   

• Easy to use  
• Make communication simple and effective  
• Responsive  
• Support HTML editing   

Cons:   

• Limited template customization   

Pricing  

The starter plan of BombBomb starts at $29.99 per month with many advance features.   

9. GetResponse

GetResponse is another email marketing platform widely used by businesses for creating a list of emails of partners and clients. It helps to build a profitable and responsive relationship with customers. It offers a high deliverability rate of 99.5% that is fantastic to ensure that the emails receive directly in the inbox instead of a spam folder. This email service provider allows the users to create a new list of contacts in the database as well as allow importing the contacts from third-party tools.  

It is easy to integrate third-party tools that are beneficial to grow the contact list. Users can easily keep their contacts updated with the help of different forms, landing pages, and surveys. The inclusion of various social media tools helps to build a list of social referrals.  

This email marketing offers different advanced features that are beneficial for managing sales and planning marketing campaigns as well. For example, the inclusion of drag and drop feature helps to modify the built-in templates as well as allow the users to create a new one from scratch. Furthermore, it also offers users to create custom emails by using an HTML editor.  

The autoresponder helps to follow up the customers automatically. It provides different information about offers by using a friendly communication medium. Additionally, the automation feature sends emails to customers based on their actions.  

Pros:   

• A/B testing newsletters  
• Built-in CRM  
• Autofunnel to enhance sales  
• Great customer support   

Cons:   

• Lack of security features   

Pricing  

The basic plan of GetResponse starts at $15 per month and supports the list of 1000 customers.  

10. EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus is an effective and efficient email marketing platform that lets users send an email by using Amazon’s Simple Email Service at a low cost. It provides the best and effective results without compromising on quantity and quality as well. It offers easy to use interface and enable the marketers to create emails by using HTML and send it to subscribers easily by pressing a few clicks.  

This email service provider offers reliable automation tools that allow users to send time-based emails. Moreover, it provides many responsive and attractive email templates that help to boost up the marketing campaigns. It offers a comprehensive compatibility feature and allows the users to integrate more than 500 products and services by using proprietary Zapier.  

Some other notable features of this email service provider are real-time analytics to manage and plan the marketing strategies. It also offers compliance with GDPR rules and regulations.  

EMailOctopus offers custom form generation that is useful to collect specific and valuable data from customers or visitors. This type of data is helpful to create a better email list as well as to send a custom email based on the needs and requirements of
customers.  

Additionally, this email service provider also offers a WordPress bplugin to integrate the email marketing system directly on the website. It automatically manages the visitor’s information on the site directly. Users can do this without writing a single line of coding.  

Pros:   

• Easy to create campaigns  
• Full GDPR compliance  
• Unlimited emails  
• Mobile optimized emails   

Cons:   

• Lacks of list segmentation    

11. MailPoet

MailPoet is specifically designed to integrate into WordPress based websites and uses WordPress plugin for integration. This platform is mostly used by busy website owners to send newsletters automatically to its subscribers.  

It is easy to set up a newsletter feature. It offers two types of newsletters, i.e., a standard newsletter that users send manually and an automatic newsletter that sends a newsletter as per specified date and time. Users can adjust as on a weekly, monthly, and daily basis.  

It also offers plenty of attractive and beautiful templates with many advanced features like a live preview that is beneficial for creating engaging emails. This marketing email platform is capable of delivering the emails directly in the inbox. As a result, it offers a high conversion rate that is the core purpose of email marketing.  

This email marketing service offers integration of forms on the website by using different shortcodes and widgets. Therefore, users can place the way in the desired format and design easily.  

Pros:   

• Low spam score  
• Unlimited emails sending  
• Multiple fonts and styles  
• Different alignment options   

Cons:   

• Expensive as compared to features offered   

Pricing  

Users can get the premium services of this email marketing platform at €15 per month and use it to manage 1,000 subscribers.   

12. Sendpulse

Sendpulse is an email marketing platform and comes with many advanced and useful features like Facebook chatbots, web push notifications and SMS marketing as well. It attracts many small business owners for the promotion of their products and services.  

It also offers many advance features like drag and drop builder, comprehensive reporting, various email templates with easy to use options, and many more. Many people like this platform due to easy to use the feature, and it provides a user-friendly dashboard.  

This platform offers integration with many other tools to import customer data, and users can also do it through copy and paste options. The uniqueness of Sendpulse is that it offers API for the automation of all marketing features like web push notification, email automation, SMS marketing, etc.  

It also informs the users with a comprehensive statistic report that enables the users to plan or modify the email sending strategy.  

Pros:   

• User-friendly interface  
• Control over spam protection  
• Compatible with third-party tools  
• Multi-channel marketing   

Cons:   

• Limited feature in free version   

Pricing  

It offers a basic plant at $6.4 per month, and users can manage up to 500 subscribers with this plan. If you have more subscribers, you can go for the advance plan.   

13. Moonmail

Moonmail is another email marketing platform and offers all the essential features that are necessary for marketing. It seems from its features that it is specially designed for beginners. It provides a visible checklist that informs the users about the progress of email automation and also provides tips on step by step.  

It offers autoresponders that are activated based on the behavior of customers like pages they visited in the past and history of previous purchases. MoonMail offers many pre-designed templates for easy creation of emails or can create your own by using an HTML builder.  

Users can enjoy segmentation features but with limited options. However, it offers a comprehensive analytics report for delivered emails, spam reporting, opened email, and many more.  

Although all the features are at its basic, therefore it is easy to use this email marketing platform.  

Pros:   

• Live chat customer support  
• Visual reporting and analytics  
• Organized user interface   

Cons:  

• For beginners only  

Pricing  

Moonmail offers its basic plan at $21.00 per month. But it allows integrating into the single domain only, and users can send 5000 emails.   

14. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a comprehensive email marketing platform. It offers all the advanced features that an email marketer can expect from any email marketing software. This platform is designed to keep in mind the needs and requirements of the e-commerce platform.  

List segmentation is the most attractive and powerful tool offered by Klaviyo, and every online store needs this type of integration option. It enables the users to segregate the subscribers into two categories. For example, users can categorize subscribers who never open the email sent to them. In the second category, users can find the list of subscribers who like your newsletter.  

Like many other email marketing services, it offers various templates for emails. Besides, it provides a template editor with advanced drag and drops feature. It is easy to understand and use the builder. That is beneficial to create the email as per your needs and type of brand.  

It also has many other features like autoresponder, an image library for uploading images, and the most exciting feature of social media marketing integration. Social media marketing helps to promote the business on different social media platforms that generate more effective and useful results.  

Pros:   

• Impressive automation  
• Fantastic visual builder   
• Easy integration  
• Impressive analytics   

Cons:   

• Costly for small business   

Pricing  

Klaviyo doesn’t offer a pre-defined premium plan; instead, users can make their plan depends on the number of subscribers on their list.   

Conclusion

Email marketing is the most crucial marketing tactic, but selecting the right email services is somehow tricky. Almost all email marketing services provide similar features but with minor differences that are worthwhile.  

Therefore, in the above article, we compile a list of top email marketing services that surely helps you to select the best one for your business.   

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