The Best Email Marketing Services and Survey Software of 2024

For businesses just starting to explore the world of email marketing, Mailchimp is a solid option. Even if you’ve never used an email marketing platform before, this platform is very easy to learn and use. It’s simple to find all the features you need to start creating and running email campaigns from the dashboard.

You can start risk-free with Mailchimp’s free plan, which allows 10,000 monthly sends and up to 2,000 contacts. We were impressed that it has everything you need to run an effective email marketing campaign, including a drag-and-drop email editor, customizable templates, detailed tag-based audience segmentation, and some automation tools.

In case your business outgrows the free plan, Mailchimp offers multiple paid plans to fit nearly any budget. Paid plans offer multi-user accounts, an extensive knowledge base, marketing automation, A/B testing and analytics tools. You can also create and publish email campaigns, landing pages, pop-up forms, Google remarketing ads, and Facebook and Instagram ads on any Mailchimp plan. Mailchimp offers 75 templates, custom analytic and data reporting options via the audience analytics dashboard, advanced segmentation options, SMS marketing and additional e-commerce automation capabilities.

Mailchimp also incorporates artificial intelligence into its platform. The Email Content Generator uses GPT AI technology to allow customers to create marketing campaigns based on their audience members’ industry and the marketing intent of the campaign. It can also infuse brand voice. In addition, users can take advantage of Intuit Assist, a generative AI assistant that utilizes knowledgeable insights to help users create content and develop marketing strategies using natural language prompts. Through an understanding of your brand and its history, target audience and existing customers, Intuit Assist offers users guidance, provides personalized recommendations and assists in content creation, including improving writer tone, lengthening or shortening content and more. With this seamless integration, users don’t have to waste time learning a new tool — Intuit Assist is built into the program to naturally work with users’ existing workflows.

We like how Mailchimp has partnered with Wix.com to enhance its marketing capabilities during the busy holiday season. The collaboration integrates Buy with Prime, advanced generative AI and SMS features into Mailchimp’s offerings, giving its users more tools to target, personalize and automate campaigns. The partnership allows seamless syncing of customer data, aiding in personalized campaign creation based on real-time behavior.

One of a marketing department’s most difficult tasks is managing all steps of every campaign idea that its members present, from gathering data, tracking and executing each campaign to analyzing each one’s performance. We were impressed with how monday’s workflow management capabilities help your team track email marketing campaigns through their entire lifecycle, from brainstorming to execution.

As a monday user, you can leverage the platform’s many template options, workflow automations and views to process incoming requests and monitor progress. You can track and filter email marketing campaigns by account, priority, goal, audience, send date, reviewer and request status. We like how the automation functions, such as notification and update triggers, reduce the manual work of handling requests and updating campaign progress. This will help you easily manage each campaign, no matter what stage it’s in.

You can also take advantage of WorkForms, which lets you create personalized business forms and visualize campaign progress in columns. This tool can be particularly useful for collecting, tracking and analyzing data from your email subscribers. WorkForms offers the ability to create automated columns that connect existing documents to its boards, which means teams can access all their email campaign materials in one place.

Recently,  monday introduced WorkCanvas, a new online feature designed to enhance workflow management for tasks like email campaigns. With WorkCanvas, businesses can share ideas across departments in one collaborative space, using the virtual whiteboard to design visuals from mood boards to employee charts to brainstorming mind maps. Users can create custom canvases or select a predesigned template from the library, offering teams a wide range of flexibility and options for creativity.

Be aware that monday is project management and CRM software, not dedicated email marketing software. This tool does integrate with products like Mailchimp for overall campaign tracking and syncs with Gmail and Outlook accounts to send and receive emails, but may not natively offer all the features you might look for in a traditional email marketing software. However, it’s still a great tool for managing a campaign, from planning to measuring its performance.

HubSpot offers a robust marketing product suite that includes its Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub and Operations Hub. Each of these tools is built upon HubSpot’s popular CRM platform and included in its Starter CRM Suite. This bundled option is the same price as the Starter Marketing Hub ($45 per month when you pay for a year upfront), making it an excellent and affordable solution for a growing business’s marketing needs.

When purchased as part of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, the company’s email marketing software allows you to plan campaigns in tandem with your blog efforts, landing pages, lead management, social media, ads, marketing automation and more. We found that this combination of services makes it easier for your business to create a campaign and promote it all at once. If you’re not interested in bundling, email marketing is also available as a stand-alone free tool, which includes limited versions of the paid features in Marketing Hub.

HubSpot’s professionally designed drag-and-drop email templates allow you to create effective email campaigns easily. We like how you can automatically personalize your emails based on a subscriber’s stage in the customer journey, their list membership or any information in their contact record. HubSpot’s powerful reporting tools also give you deep insights into your campaign performance and subscriber data, helping you craft campaigns that convert.

HubSpot has entered the AI arena with its ChatSpot.ai and Content Assistant. While these tools can be used for a variety of projects, they were specifically designed to help marketing and sales teams curate more personalized content and expedite processes. Content Assistant can quickly produce accurate content in the form of blog posts, landing pages, and sales and marketing emails with simple prompted commands. ChatSpot.ai works hand-in-hand with ChatGPT in that it pulls from ChatGPT’s wide range of data. However, ChatSpot.ai also pulls response data from the HubSpot CRM and other internal data sources, giving HubSpot users extremely personalized internal organizational data that ChatGPT cannot access. Having this extensive internal data at the touch of a button will save marketing teams time and make it easier to provide customers with curated, personalized outreach.

Small businesses that want an affordable email marketing service with user-friendly features should consider Benchmark. Paid plans start at $13 per month, with unlimited sends to 500 contacts. This provider also has a free plan that maxes out at 250 emails per month.

All Benchmark plans include features that make the service easy to use, including automation, lead generation and reporting features. We found these functions to be somewhat limited and simplistic in the free version, though, which is missing some key features that businesses may find useful. Fortunately, the lowest-priced Pro plan ($13 per month) is still very affordable for businesses on a budget and gives you access to more advanced automation features like behavior-based email follow-up, list management and website engagement automation, automated customer journey templates, and A/B testing. These more advanced features plus the access to premium support services – including phone, email, live chat, blogs, newsletters and videos – makes Benchmark even easier to navigate, something that businesses new to email marketing will appreciate.

Benchmark’s drag-and-drop email editor is exceptionally easy to use, and it offers an HTML code editor for more complex customizations. The multitude of email templates made for every occasion provides an easier solution than having to design your own. In addition, Benchmark offers improved image editing within text blocks. You can adjust-in-place an image width adjustment for any inserted image and better wrap text around images.

Benchmark also offers its AI-powered Smart Content. This copywriting tool writes content from scratch or can rewrite existing content from simple inputs. It has the ability to write for any marketing audience, including B2B, B2C, and e-commerce. With this feature, marketers will be able to save time by turning out compelling content at a quicker rate.

The platform also includes a ton of valuable help resources. Benchmark’s help center includes easy-to-find help articles and videos, goal-oriented categories and options that make it easy to connect with the support team via chat and email. The help center also supports users in all languages.

Constant Contact is our choice as the best email marketing service for small businesses. We were impressed with how this software comes with everything you need to easily create effective email campaigns at an affordable price. Constant Contact’s plans, which are priced based on the number of subscribers you have, allow you to send a nearly unlimited number of emails, whereas many of its competitors impose lower send limits.

The company is well known for its top-tier email marketing services. In the past year, it has improved its marketing automation, campaign design and e-commerce features. When it comes to marketing automation specifically, there are new behavioral triggers and automated email campaign flows that create hyper-relevant experiences for customers based on real-time data, as well as new methods for users to manage personal data and account privacy. Constant Contact has also added a new AI Content Generator, which drafts SMS messages, emails, and landing page copy using just a few keywords, making content creation a breeze.

Constant Contact offers two email marketing plans starting at $9.99 per month, which should fit into most small businesses’ budgets. Both the Core and Plus plans include customizable email templates with an image library, contact management and list-building tools, detailed tracking and reporting features, a mobile app, and comprehensive self-service and direct customer support resources. We were impressed with its easy-to-use email editor, which automatically pulls your logo, brand colors and social profile links from your business’s website to help you customize the available templates.

We like how Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial, the longest trial period of all the providers we researched. The trial is limited to 100 contacts but gives you access to all of Constant Contact’s features. We also were impressed by the new support services offered. Users can expect to have easier, more direct access to customer service professionals experienced in their specific industries.

If you’re looking for the best solution for your midsize or large business, Campaigner is an excellent choice. This email marketing service has a little bit of everything your team may need to launch a successful campaign, including a plan that caters specifically to e-commerce.

The Starter plan begins at $59 per month. It allows up to 5,000 contacts and provides A/B testing, a library of more than 900 prebuilt, customizable templates, and HTML-ready landing pages. However, businesses will have to upgrade to the Advanced plan at $649 per month to get up to 100,000 contacts and other exclusive features, like automation workflows, purchase behavior data and static segment sampling. The higher price point and advanced capabilities make Campaigner more suited for large businesses.

The real standout feature at Campaigner is the email automation workflow available in the Advanced plan. The email automation workflow allows users to “design and guide leads and customers through highly personalized buyer journeys.” Campaigner notes that customers “typically see up to six times more conversion and sales” using these workflows. This feature is great for large businesses that want to increase conversion and drive customers toward a sale.

If you want to automate and integrate your marketing processes at a small business-friendly price, Freshworks’ Freshmarketer platform may be the right choice for you. Freshmarketer offers businesses the opportunity to increase conversions through multichannel engagement with Shopify, email, SMS, WhatsApp and Freshmarketer’s chat.

Freshmarketer also allows you to deliver messages across these channels at scale. We like how users can build out campaigns tailored to a specific target audience and customize them with personalized messages. The Growth Plan starts at $19 per month with 2,000 marketing contacts billed annually and includes all of the important integrations you’ll need.

Freshworks makes it easier for marketing teams to communicate with customers using its newly enhanced AI-powered assistant, Freddy. The enhancements add new GPT-based conversational enhancements that will save email marketers time and money. Freddy integrates with the Freshmarketer employee suite of products, meaning marketers will have optimized email content that maximizes campaign efficiency. The service also assists in creating compelling, original copy in half the time it would take a human marketer to craft it. By providing intelligent, tone-sensitive and creative copy, Freddy allows email marketing professionals more time to focus on other creative projects that will add to the business’s bottom line.

In addition to Freshmarketer’s email marketing software, you can also upgrade your plan to include Freshworks’ CRM platform, Freshsales Suite (learn more in our full review of Freshsales), to bridge the gap between marketing and sales. We like how this provider offers Freshmarketer as an all-in-one marketing solution that integrates seamlessly with Freshworks’ CRM platform. This enables your business to easily and effectively communicate with prospects using custom email marketing campaigns. A nice option we like is the free trial, letting you test out the software for several weeks before you commit to a plan.

Larger companies that want to improve their overall marketing strategy with effective email campaigns should consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a suite of marketing tools designed to streamline and enhance data-driven email marketing campaigns.

The feature-rich Marketing Cloud is built on Salesforce’s core customer relationship management (CRM) offering, which seamlessly integrates with your sales, marketing and customer service data. The included Email Studio tool is excellent at personalizing messages using customer data, which strengthens relationships between your business and its customers. We like that it offers a variety of useful features, with countless options for customizing your campaigns and workflow. With all its capabilities, Email Studio lets you easily create and scale campaigns for audiences of any size.

Salesforce offers an array of automation features for its marketing service. This includes a new API enhancement that is designed to automate personalization and engagement via the use of new integrations for the company’s CDP and external segmentation tools. Knowing how critical personalization is, this is a nice value add.

Recently, Salesforce moved it’s Marketing Cloud servie to the newly-built Einstein 1 platform, an AI platform that helps companies connect their data to build out AI-powered apps and workflows. With Einstein 1, organizations can create bespoke customer experiences through various low-code platform services, such as Einstein, Flow and Lightning. The latest generation of Einstein includes the support of a conversational AI assistant, Einstein Copilot. Salesforce users can ask Einstein Copilot questions and receive answers rooted in data, as well as additional steps and suggestions that go beyond the initial query.

With a starting price of $400 per month, Salesforce Marketing Cloud may be out of reach for small businesses with a limited budget. However, we think larger businesses that can afford Salesforce will find its features incredibly useful.

ActiveCampaign is an excellent choice for e-commerce businesses that need to send frequent customer communications, such as transactional notifications, product updates and sale announcements. It has a multitude of marketing features and tools for online sellers, like custom order management, revenue reporting, customer service management, product landing pages and contact scoring. Recently, ActiveCampiagn made  platform speed enhancements to help email marketers get work done faster and reconstructed its email designer. Both updates help ensure that emails are created efficiently and appeal to customers.

We were impressed with ActiveCampaign’s integration options. ActiveCampaign integrates with hundreds of customer engagement solutions, including popular options like Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Sales and customer data from your integrated platform automatically go to your ActiveCampaign e-commerce dashboard so you can create targeted, personalized email campaigns from the tool’s 125-plus templates. This email software also includes unlimited sends up to 250,000 contacts, so it’s easy to scale and send numerous email campaigns to your customer base.

Other standout features and tools include multi-factor authentication for logging into its apps, Chrome extension and Outlook add-in, a personalization tag that allows you to add titles and descriptions in automated task name actions, and a “goal action” feature that provides greater segmentation capabilities.

The best e-commerce marketing features ActiveCampaign has to offer are available only with the Plus plan or higher, starting at $49 per month for up to 1,000 contacts. This may not be enough for e-commerce businesses that want to scale quickly on a limited budget, but if you have only basic email needs right now, ActiveCampaign still provides many useful tools for you to build relationships with your customers as an online seller.

If you want to start with a free email marketing plan and scale up as your audience grows, iContact is an ideal solution. The free version of this software allows 500 contacts and up to 2,000 sends per month. We like that it includes all the features you need to get started with email campaigns as you build up your subscriber base.

iContact includes a drag-and-drop email designer and a comprehensive, professionally designed template library. You can access iContact’s template and stock image library, landing page creation and hosting option, A/B testing capabilities, real-time campaign reporting, API integrations, and automation features on either plan.

iContact recently unveiled a new tool that allows users to extend their email marketing to popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. The new release offers AI-powered tools for creating and posting engaging social media content directly from within iContact. Users can take advantage of pre-designed templates and stock images to customize their content to suit their brand. 

iContact recently rolled out a new feature to make the email writing process easier. With iContact’s AI Subject Line Assistant, businesses can use AI and machine learning to suggest subject lines that grab recipients’ attention. We like how iContact’s new technology leverages your brand’s custom voice and messaging to better target your audience. The subject line generation process asks users to input the desired tone of the email and a brief description of the email’s content. AI Subject Line Assistant then provides a list of engaging subject line options based on that information so your marketing team can save time and resources on creative campaigns.

One potential downside is that there aren’t many automations in the free plan. You can upgrade to the Advanced plan (starting at $23 per month for 1,500 contacts) for full access to features and tools like automatically optimized send times (“smart sending”), audience segmentation, engagement follow-ups and multiple event series campaigns.