As a small business, your main aim should be to connect with customers, build relationships, and drive growth. Email marketing remains a powerful and cost-effective tool for this purpose. However, managing email campaigns efficiently can be time-consuming, especially when juggling various other aspects of your business. Fortunately, a range of user-friendly tools are available to streamline your email marketing efforts, automate tasks, and ultimately boost your business’s reach. When choosing the best one for you, you need to look at key features, ease of use, and suitability. So, here are some of the top options for you to explore.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a widely recognized platform that can help your small business get started with email marketing, offering a user-friendly interface and a decent range of features. It provides an intuitive drag-and-drop email builder, making it easy to create visually appealing newsletters and promotional emails relevant to your customer base. It also offers basic automation like welcome emails and allows for list segmentation to target different customer groups.
However, Mailchimp also has some limitations as an email marketing tool for small businesses. A major limitation is the inclusion of Mailchimp branding on free and lower-tier paid emails, which can detract from your brand’s professionalism. More advanced automation workflows, crucial for personalized customer journeys and efficient follow-ups are often locked behind higher-priced plans. In addition, the lower tiers do not offer full segmentation capabilities, limiting your ability to precisely target specific customer segments based on their behavior or preferences. If you want to integrate with other marketing and CRM tools commonly used by small businesses, you’ll have to opt for higher-tier subscriptions.
As your contact list grows, Mailchimp’s pricing can become relatively expensive compared to other options. Furthermore, the reporting and analytics in the lower tiers might not provide the in-depth insights needed to truly optimize your email marketing strategy. If you really want access to all the email marketing tools and also send out large amounts of emails, your Mailchimp plan can go as high as $385 per month, just for the email capabilities. This can be prohibitive for small businesses just starting out.
Hubspot
HubSpot offers a robust free CRM that can be a valuable asset for your small business by helping you manage contacts and track deals. The free CRM allows you to build contact lists and integrate them with basic email marketing features. You can also design simple emails using their drag-and-drop builder and send a limited number of emails per month to your contacts.
However, HubSpot’s free plan has significant drawbacks. A major limitation is the prominent HubSpot branding on all free emails, which can impact your brand’s professional image. Crucially, marketing automation workflows are not available in the free plan, severely restricting your ability to set up automated welcome emails, follow-up sequences, or personalized email journeys for your customers. The free tier has very basic segmentation capabilities, making it difficult to target specific customer groups with tailored content. While it integrates with other tools, more advanced integrations often require paid plans. The email sending limit of 2,000 per month in the free plan might be restrictive as your customer base grows.
Furthermore, A/B testing to optimize your email campaigns fis not available in the free version. While the free CRM is a good starting point for contact management, the limitations of the free email marketing tools mean your small business will likely need to upgrade to a paid plan for effective streamlining and growth. If you truly want to enjoy Hubspot’s marketing and email capabilities, you’ll have to pay $1,450 per month, and even that will get you only 5 seats and up to 2,000 contacts. If you want to grow further, the pricing goes much higher.
Brevo
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, offers a platform with more than just email marketing, potentially providing a somewhat integrated approach for your small business. It offers a free plan with a generous allowance of unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails per day, which could be beneficial for a small business with a growing list and basic needs. It also includes a drag-and-drop email builder and customizable templates to create visually appealing emails for your audience. In addition, basic automation features are available even in the free plan.
However, if you want to really run some great email campaigns, Brevo has some drawbacks. The free plan includes Brevo branding on your emails, which can impact your professional image. While it offers email marketing automation, more advanced and behavioral-based automation workflows are typically reserved for higher-tier paid plans. Although it allows for contact segmentation, more granular and sophisticated segmentation options to target specific customer groups often require a paid subscription.
Furthermore, reporting and analytics in the free and lower-tier plans might lack the depth needed to truly optimize your email strategy for your market. Also, while its pricing structure can be appealing for low-volume senders, costs can increase as your email volume grows. If you want a fully streamlined email marketing solution without prominent branding and with robust automation and in-depth analytics, you need to carefully evaluate the paid plans and compare them to alternatives. The business plans start from $18 per month, and can go higher depending on the features you opt for as your business grows.
Sendx
While SendX offers a platform focused on email marketing and automation, potentially catering to the needs of your small business, its limitations might outweigh the benefits for comprehensive streamlining. On the pro side, it provides a user-friendly interface for creating email campaigns targeted at your customer base. It offers automation features to set up welcome sequences and drip campaigns relevant to various preferences. SendX also boasts features like list segmentation to help you personalize your communication with different customer groups.
However, if you really want to streamline your email marketing, SendX has some limitations. Compared to some competitors, SendX might have fewer pre-designed email templates, potentially requiring more effort to create visually appealing emails that resonate with your audience’s aesthetic. While it offers automation, the complexity and sophistication of these workflows might be less advanced than those available on other platforms. Integration options with other CRM and marketing tools commonly used by small businesses might also be limited compared to more established players.
The reporting and analytics, while present, do not offer the same level of granular detail and actionable insights into your campaign performance as some alternative platforms. Furthermore, while their pricing can be competitive, it’s essential to carefully evaluate the features offered at each tier to ensure it meets the specific streamlining needs of your small business. These tiers go up in price with every few thousand emails. For example, the 5,001 – 10,000 contacts tier costs $59.99 per month, and with even one more contact, would jump up to $79.99 per month. So, if you really want to target a large audience, then the cost can be quite prohibitive.
PosterMyWall
PosterMyWall is primarily recognized for its user-friendly graphic design capabilities, but its in-built email marketing tools truly deserve some credit. It excels at creating visually appealing email headers, promotional graphics for your email body content, and even eye-catching call-to-action buttons that can significantly enhance the engagement of your emails sent to your customer base. Its vast library of customizable templates, including many suitable for marketing purposes, can save you valuable time in designing visually compelling emails. You can easily incorporate your brand logo, colors, and specific promotional messaging. The platform’s ease of use allows you to quickly create different visual assets. Collaboration features enable team members to work together on email visuals seamlessly. These are just the design aspects.
When it comes to running email campaigns, you just have to take the emails you designed and send them out directly from the platform. You can compile email lists on the platform, schedule your emails for automated campaigns, and also track their performance. Furthermore, the platform also adapts your emails for multiple devices, making them look good on both mobile and desktop devices without you having to create completely separate designs. You can even get quick captions and subject lines by using the AI writer tool on the platform.
Therefore, PosterMyWall is a valuable tool for creating and sending visually engaging email content that can improve the effectiveness of your email marketing. You can design and send your emails out with one platform. In addition, the pricing is quite competitive, with the Premium plan at $9.95 per month, giving you access to not only email marketing, but a vast array of other marketing and design tools. This works well for small businesses which don’t want to spend too much on multiple tools to grow their customer base.
So, there are numerous email marketing tools available for small businesses. You should weigh your options by comparing features, ease-of-use, and your budget. Also determine whether you’ll need just one dedicated marketing tool with in-built email capabilities, or want to use a suite of different tools.