10 Best Email Marketing Software in 2023

As you can imagine, email marketing software companies are no strangers to advertising. One strategy used by many is claiming to be the "best" in their field. But by definition, there can only be one or a few truly best solutions. This leaves many consumers wondering who they can trust and which software is truly top-notch.

Sure, there are plenty of blog posts dedicated to the topic, but these are often influenced by affiliate commissions, meaning they don't provide an unbiased opinion. That's why we created this study that evaluates the top email marketing software based on objective criteria that miss no detail.

Instead of taking a shot in the dark and hoping that you get the best software for your business, make an informed decision with the help of our detailed analysis. From pricing to features, we help new and experienced email marketers find the ideal software for their needs.

What is Email Marketing Software?

Before there was social media and AI chatbots, email was among the first forms of communication businesses had to cultivate online relationships with their customers. Even in today's age of instant messaging, email remains a preferred form of communication for many. In fact, the revenue generated from email marketing is estimated to reach $11 billion by the end of 2023.

However, every company faces the same problems as its customer base grows: how can you keep track of all the emails, create a personalized experience for each customer, and build long-term relationships? The answer lies in email marketing software.

Email marketing software helps companies manage their list of subscribers through various features such as segmentation, automation, and personalization. It allows marketers to create automated email campaigns, informing customers about deals, and new products or educating them on specific topics. In short, the software helps you stay connected with your audience, even as your customer base expands.

What Makes the Best Email Marketing Software?

The above definition is the bare minimum a good email marketing software should provide. There are many more features to consider, such as email designing capabilities, deliverability rates, customer service support, and reporting tools. At the same time, there is no "one size fits all" solution for email marketing needs.

Different companies have different budgets, needs, and preferences. That's why our team set out to find the best email marketing software by taking into account a variety of criteria. Through market research, testing, interviews with industry experts and customers, and extensive research, we narrowed down our selection of what we consider to be the creme de la creme of email marketing software.

Our process is fairly complex and requires a lot of data. If you're interested in learning more about our process, feel free to read on here.

In short, we create criteria with different weights, which then together make up the overall score for the best email marketing software tools. Each criterion is again divided in itself into individual attributes, which we evaluate independently.

The criteria we looked at are represented in the following graph, along with their percentage contribution to the overall score. Below that, you'll find more information about each particular criterion and what it entails.

Pricing

As far as marketing goes, email marketing is one of those tactics used by businesses of all sizes. Other strategies, such as PPC and influencer campaigns, aren't always available to smaller businesses with budget constraints, yet 64% of small businesses use email marketing. Therefore, pricing is an important factor for us to consider when selecting the best email marketing software.

We look at each software's cost, considering all plans and their recurring charges on a monthly and annual basis. That way, you can find something within your budget without sacrificing quality. Generally speaking, the difference in price between the top-priced and lowest-priced plans will affect things like the number of contacts you can keep on your list and the features you have access to. Click here for a more detailed breakdown of our pricing criterion.

There are also free options available for those on a limited budget. Naturally, these are usually more basic and come with fewer features. We've covered the best free email marketing software in a separate section, which you can find here.

Features

If you're spending money on email marketing software, you expect to get something in return. That's why we look at the core features that each product should have – such as a drag-and-drop email builder, subscriber segmentation, personalization options, and more. These features help you maximize your campaigns' performance and ensure that each email reaches the right person at the right time.

The features criterion also incorporates things like A/B testing, which allows you to test different versions of an email to determine which one gives you the best results. This feature is essential for any serious marketer who wants to maximize the ROI of their campaigns.

You'll find a more detailed breakdown of our features criterion here. Who knows? You may even discover features you didn't even know existed.

Marketing automation

Manually sending emails works fine when you have a few subscribers on your list. But if you want to reach larger groups of people, marketing automation is the way to go. Specific tasks – such as sending emails at predetermined intervals and segmenting your customers into different lists based on their behavior – can be handled automatically. This can save you a ton of time and energy in the long run.

Automation also allows you to send personalized emails instead of the same generic message to everyone. You can customize things like the subject line, content, and even images based on each customer's profile.

There are many facets to marketing automation, which is why we've devoted an entire criterion for this aspect. Check it out to learn more about how we evaluated each software.

Integrations

In today's digital world, everything is connected in some way or another. For example, you may have an online store and want to send emails whenever someone makes a purchase. You'll need to integrate your email marketing software with the platform where you sell your goods – such as Shopify or WooCommerce.

The same goes for other services you may use in conjunction with your email campaigns, like CRM systems or web analytics tools. This criterion covers the number of services each software supports and their functionality. Keep in mind that some software may offer more app integrations than others, so if you plan on using lots of them, you should pick one that offers the widest variety of choices.

To learn more about our criteria for integrations, click here.

Support

Any Software as a Service (SaaS) product – including email marketing software – comes with some level of customer support. After all, your entire purchase hinges on the product working correctly. And while most of the time everything goes smoothly, it's nice to know that there's someone you can count on when something goes wrong.

That's why we also consider customer support when evaluating software. We analyze each platform's customer service quality, which includes response times and the range of support options offered (such as live chat, phone, and email). The quality of support is also rated, which considers the staff's helpfulness and how capable they are to resolve issues.

Visit our page on customer support to learn more.

Ease of use

Finally, there's the ease of use criterion. It covers how intuitive the platform is and how easy it is to learn the basics. At the end of the day, you want a solution that's simple enough for everyone in your team to quickly pick up and use (even if they don't have any technical knowledge).

The layout of the platform's interface also plays a role here. For instance, some software may be feature-packed but crammed with too many menus and buttons, making navigating confusing. Other platforms may look clean at first glance but lack certain features you may need.

Even if somewhat subjective, ease of use is a relevant factor for any software and one that we give a small but fair amount of weight when scoring. To find out more about this criterion, click here.

The 10 Best Email Marketing Software

How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Software for Your Needs

One thing to remember is that our parameters are made to be applicable to all companies regardless of their size, budget, or industry. As such, not all of them will be relevant to your business. We recommend that you reflect on which parameters are the most critical for your specific needs and base your decision on those. The rest can be considered nice-to-haves.

For instance, a solo entrepreneur might not care about the number of users a specific platform supports, as their team will be tiny. On the other hand, an enterprise-level company might find integrations more important than customer support if they have a lot of services to link together.

Besides the size and complexity of your business, there are other features you should consider. These include your budget, the type of messages you plan on sending (e.g., newsletters, transactional emails, etc.), and whether or not you need advanced features like automation or segmentation. Some advanced features require a certain level of understanding, rendering them useless if you don't know how to configure them properly.

We hope our best picks help you find suitable email marketing software for your business by providing a comprehensive overview across the plans that providers offer. If you still have doubts or are stuck between two options, feel free to use our Comparison Tool and let the numbers do the talking. For a more specific recommendation, use our Finder Tool to pinpoint the best platform for your specific use case.