Today there are 445 different email marketing services to send email with. We spent 120 hours comparing the top 50 to find the five best you can use to increase your email marketing sales.
BEST OF THE BEST
ActiveCampaign
"The Most Ninja-Level Email Automation A Man Can Get"
The big dog. Alpha papa. This is the tool marketing pros (that teach other marketing pros) use to make money sending emails while they sleep. ‘Nuff said.
SendFox
"The Most Affordable Email Marketing Tool On The Planet"
At $49 lifetime for 5,000 contacts, “The Fantastic Mr. SendFox” is the most affordable way to send emails on the planet. It’s what I tell my Mom to use cuz it’s sooo easy to learn.
BEST FREE ALTERNATIVE
ConvertKit
"Totally Free For Your First 1,000 Email Subscribers"
No credit card is required for a ConvertKit Free account. So no nasty surprises on your next credit card statement. Boo yah!
What is the Best Email Marketing Software?
Here are our top picks for the best email marketing software and services to try this year:
- ActiveCampaign — best of the best
- SendFox — best bang for the buck
- ConvertKit — best free alternative
- Constant Contact — best for beginners
- Rejoiner — best done-for-you email marketing
- MailChimp — best for low volume sending
- HubSpot — best enterprise solution
Our Verdict — Best Of The Best
Price: Starts at $15/month
ActiveCampaign is enterprise-level marketing automation at a price point affordable for startups. It’s perfect for anyone from beginners to pro marketers.
The Best Part:
Highest email deliverability rates in the industry from email deliverability tests done every six months across the most widely used email marketing services.
The Worst Part:
Best features are on the premium plans which means you’re going to have to pay at least $70/mo for the Plus plan to get the automation features that really ROI like contact scoring and sms followup.
Get it if you want the best email deliverability and are willing to spend some time to learn how to set up some simple behavior-based automations.
If you plan on only sending weekly broadcast emails and setting up one autoresponder, get something simpler like SendFox.
I recommend you get started for $15/month on the Lite plan, then upgrade to the Plus plan (with contact scoring) for $70/month.
(14-day free trial)
Best For
ActiveCampaign is best for anyone from beginners to pro marketers who want the highest email deliverability rates in the industry.
Top Features
- Your own army of robots. ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is the star. You can create automations for pretty much anything your lead does, or doesn’t do, then watch your email results compound over time.
- Get a hand from ActiveCampaign. They’ll migrate all of your email funnels from your old email marketing platform at no charge.
- Deals. ActiveCampaign has a simple but effective CRM called Deals. It helps you automate follow ups and remove a ton of the manual work involved in closing sales.
- Make your Facebook Ads sing. Add and remove people from your custom audiences, based on their behavior. Now, you can show them messages based on where they are in your funnel. Powerful!
- Powered by machine learning. There are a few ways ActiveCampaign leverages machine learning to get you better results, including predictive sending, predictive content creation, and predictive win-probability scoring. Use the power of huge sets of data and powerful machines to get even better results.
Pricing
ActiveCampaign offers three pricing plans:
- Lite: starts at $39/month for basic email features.
- Plus: starts at $70/month for more advanced features.
- Professional: starts at $187/month for advanced machine learning and AI features.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, for custom functionality.
All paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Annual subscriptions provide up to 30% discount.
Try ActiveCampaign today with a free 14-day trial.
High Email Deliverability
If your emails don’t hit the inbox, nothing else matters. ActiveCampaign has the highest email deliverability rates in the industry.
Since August, 2017 EmailToolTester has done email deliverability tests every six months across the most widely used email marketing services.
On average, ActiveCampaign consistently outperforms all other tools on email deliverability (aka emails hitting the inbox):
Contact Scoring
Do ninja-level shit like contact score email opens with 1 point, then put everyone with 7 points on an email automation to sell your product.
The “Rule of Seven” says it takes seven touches before someone will buy your product. With some simple email automation in ActiveCampaign you can set it up so only people who have opened 7 emails see your offer.
For example, here I’ve set up a basic contact scoring automation that adds one point to my contacts who open an email:
After a contact’s score hits 7 points, I then automate an email sequence to be sent about my sales offer (excluding contact’s who already bought):
Free Migration
Free migration from your old email marketing platform.
Migrating all your contacts, tags, email automations, opt-in forms, etc to a new email platform sucks! Big time.
With ActiveCampaign you don’t have to worry, because their team will migrate you for free (the only thing the migration team doesn’t do is custom coding).
ActiveCampaign has a dedicated migration page that will tell you exactly what they will migrate for you, based on your number of contacts and plan type.
Best Features Are On The Premium Plans
Ninja-level shit like contact scoring and sms follow up are only available on higher priced plans.
At a minimum you’re going to have to pay $70/mo for the Plus plan to get the automation features that really ROI like contact scoring and sms followup:
Steep Learning Curve
A bit of a steeper learning curve to learn how all the marketing automation features work.
For example, in my ActiveCampaign account I use one of the automation recipes to tag all my contacts with the tag “Inactive” if they haven’t opened or clicked an email in 90 days.
Then I trigger an email automation to send a “Breakup Email” to those contacts telling them we’re breaking up and I won’t be sending them emails anymore unless they click (so my email deliverability stays high).
This stuff isn’t hard, but it takes time to learn.
Trial Isn’t Long Enough
The trial period of 14-days isn’t really long enough to fully test a full-blown email marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign.
The good news? If you contact ActiveCampaign support, they will let you extend your trial for another 14 days:
When I signed up I got an email after 14 days (pictured below) with the subject line “Need more time?” with an offer to extend my trial (so it is actually true!).
ActiveCampaign Reviews From Experts
Roberta Phillips
EmailToolTester
ActiveCampaign really are one of the best choices you could make if you’re looking for an all-in-one newsletter marketing tool. Their automation is the real deal, and makes other tool’s versions of this pale in comparison.
David Kadavy
Kadavy.net
ActiveCampaign is an incredibly versatile email marketing platform, and I’m so glad I took the time to do the research and make the switch from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign.
Lewis Parrott
Authority Hacker
As someone who’s been using ActiveCampaign for over a year now, I can honestly say that even after reviewing 7 of the most popular email marketing tools, I’ll be staying right where I am for now.
2. SendFox
Our Verdict — Best Bang For The Buck
Price: Starts at $49 one time
At $49 lifetime for 5,000 contacts, “The Fantastic Mr. SendFox” is the most affordable way to send emails on the planet. It’s what I tell my Mom to use cuz it’s soooo easy to learn.
The Best Part:
Brought to you by an internet mogul. SendFox belongs to AppSumo, Noah Kagan’s 8-figure software selling company. This solid background means this solution will likely stick around for a looong time.
The Worst Part:
Lacks behavior-based automations. SendFox doesn’t do contact scoring or automations based on someone clicking a link, or visiting a page, for example. If you need those, go with ActiveCampaign instead.
Get it if you’re on a tight budget and want a simple, straightforward tool with an easy-to-use interface you don’t have to pay a monthly subscription for. It’s perfect for content creators (like bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters).
If you plan on doing advanced email automation like contact scoring, get something more advanced like ActiveCampaign.
I recommend you get the $49 lifetime deal that comes with 5,000 contacts, then pay $10 for every extra 1,000 contacts as you grow.
($49 lifetime)
Best For
SendFox is best for content creators (like bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters) who want a simple, straightforward email autoresponder tool without having to pay a monthly subscription fee.
Top Features
- Straightforward pricing. For every $49 you pay, you can manage and message a list of up to 5,000 contacts. List grew past that? Just buy one more “ticket”, for $49, now your list goes up to 10,000 people, and so on.
- Paste your emails from Word and Google docs with formatting and images. You can create your message just the way you want it to look, and CTRL+C, CTRL+V your way into SendFox. No need to upload every single image, nor to bold the right words all over again.
- It’s as simple as it is affordable. Just want to send emails and skip the hassle? SendFox is the way to go.
- Setup multiple domains/businesses under the same account. No need to get a new account for every new sending domain, like some other email service providers do.
- Smart campaigns. Got writer’s block? Use Smart Campaigns and repurpose existing content into new emails, in a single click. Best part, the output is actually good.
Pricing
Sendfox offers three pricing plans:
- Free: For up to 1,000 contacts
- Lifetime Plan: $49 for every 5,000 contacts
- Empire Add-On: $18/month for extra, more advanced features
Try SendFox today with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Newsletter Referral System
Give your subscribers prizes for sharing your email newsletter in the email footer.
Morning Brew is an 8-figure media company that makes all of its money from email sponsorships inside it’s daily newsletter.
Morning Brew’s referral program at the bottom of every email (pictured below) is it’s most powerful growth tool. Over 30% of Morning Brew’s 1.5M+ email subscriber base comes from it’s referral program.
The Fantastic Mr. SendFox has taken this one feature and built it into SendFox so you can make your own growth flywheel spin faster too.
Send To 90 Day Actives
With other email marketing tools you need to figure out how to create audience segments so you’re only sending emails to your most active subscribers (for high open rates and email deliverability).
SendFox makes it easy with one simple checkbox you can tick on every email. This way you’re only sending to your active audience (peeps who opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days).
Built By An Email Marketing Legend
In March, 2010 serial online entrepreneur Noah Kagan founded AppSumo. Now, AppSumo makes 8-figure revenues per year selling software deals over email.
Fun fact: I travelled to Austin, Texas and did a growth study on AppSumo. From interviewing Noah and the team I found out they make more revenue per employee than tech giants Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Slack.
Noah is taking all the most effective email marketing best practices he’s learnt over the years and building it into SendFox.
No Behavior-Based Automations
There are no advanced features like contact scoring to give your subscribers points for opens/clicks so you can automate the sending of sales offers to your most engaged leads.
You will be able to see basic stats per contact like total number of opens, clicks and referrals. But you won’t be able to trigger email automations based on that behavior/engagement.
Limited Customization
It’s hard to customize the look of your email capture forms. All you can customize is the button copy and whether you’d like to collect the first and last name of a contact.
As a result, you need to be happy with your email capture form fields and buttons looking like this:
No Free Migration Service
If you’re already using another email service, you’ll need to import all your contacts and manually recreate all of your email automations.
Also, you can only trigger an email automation to start after a contact is added to a list. So if you’re used to triggering automations based on a tag your contact has, that won’t work in SendFox.
SendFox Reviews From Experts
Sandeep Mallya
99signals
SendFox offers the perfect blend of simplicity and affordability. If you’re looking for an affordable email marketing solution that lets you build simple, branded emails without much hassle, then SendFox may be for you.
Giles Thomas
AcquireConvert
Content creators like bloggers and vloggers looking to create new sales funnels for their products and services can benefit from the simplicity and uncluttered feel of SendFox.
Katie Holmes
OutwitTrade
SendFox is great if you need something simple and you’re just getting started in email marketing. The focus with SendFox is making everything dead easy to do — and it is.
3. ConvertKit
Our Verdict — Best Free Alternative
Price: Starts at $15/month
ConvertKit is like a step between affordable, minimalist tools like SendFox and really robust tools like ActiveCampaign.
It gives you a way to start your email list for free (without a credit card) for up to 1,000 email subscribers. Plus when you sign up you get two free courses. One to help you find your first 100 subscribers and one to make your first dollar online.
The Best Part:
It gets you inboxed. ConvertKit has been beating most, if not all competitors when it comes to deliverability. If you compare its free plan with other free plans, then it comes even further ahead.
The Worst Part:
Can’t do automated sequences on the free plan. If you want to use your autoresponder to deliver automated sequences to people opting in to your list, then you’ll need to go with a paid plan.
Get it if you’re just starting out and want a free tool and free education to launch your online business.
Once you reach your first 1,000 subscribers, upgrade to the Creator Pro plan to get access to “subscriber scoring.” This will score your contacts 1-5 stars based on their engagement. You can then send to your contacts with 4-5 stars (i.e. those who have engaged with your content in the past 90 days).
I recommend you get started for $0/month on the Free plan, then upgrade to the Creator Pro plan (with subscriber scoring) for $79/month.
(free for 1,000 subscribers)
Best For
ConvertKit is best for people who want to get started with their email marketing efforts for free.
Top Features
- Build a new income stream. With ConvertKit, you can offer paid newsletters. Micro continuity at its best.
- Free migration. Buy a paid plan, and they’ll migrate all your lists into their system. No extra cost.
- It gets your emails to the inbox. Every email address that hard bounces is flagged so no more emails get sent to them. Soft bounces will eventually be classified as hard bounces if the email address can’t be reached after several attempts.
- Sell your digital products right out of your ConvertKit account, or integrate third-party ecommerce tools so you can sell using your ecommerce tool of choice.
- Fine tune your emails with Deliverability Reporting. You can see how your opens and clicks behave over time, find insights into particular platforms (Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, for example), and figure out how different segments of your users behave.
Pricing
ConvertKit offers three pricing plans:
- Free: For up to 300 subscribers.
- Creator: Starts at $15/month with automations and free migration.
- Creator Pro: Starts at $29/month for advanced features.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, for custom functionality.
All paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Annual subscriptions provide up to 40% discount.
Try ConvertKit today with a free 14-day trial.
Higher Email Deliverability
ConvertKit’s email deliverability is consistently higher than other tools with free plans (like MailChimp). Deliverability rates over time prove it.
Two Free Courses
One on how to get your first 100 subscribers and one called on how to make your first dollar online (both are included on the free plan).
No Credit Card Required
You’ll have no nasty surprises on your next credit card statement (as long as you’re managing less than 1,000 subscribers). Boo yah!
$49 Recurring Fee
After you go over 1,000 email subscribers, it will cost $49/mo for up to 3,000 subscribers. This is quite pricey considering you can get 5,000 subscribers for $49 lifetime on SendFox (with similar features).
No Email Sequences
You can only send broadcast emails on the free plan. No email sequences.
That means you won’t be able to do things like automate a new subscriber question with three different answer options after someone opts-in, then drip out relevant content based on what they click.
No Free Migration
If you’re bringing over 5,000+ subscribers ConvertKit will migrate everything for you (including integrations you have with other tools). However on the free plan, there is no free migration service.
ConvertKit Reviews From Experts
Our Verdict — Best For Beginners
Price: Starts at $9.99/month
Constant Contact was founded in 1995 (6 years BEFORE MailChimp). Today, not only can you use it to send emails, but you can also use it to build a website, create an online store and run Facebook and Instagram ads (all within the one tool).
The Best Part:
It’s an email marketing dinosaur. Constant contact has been around for almost 30 years, which is like 1,000 years in internet years. No one can stick around for so long with a crappy service.
The Worst Part:
Automations could be more powerful. Even though Constant Contact has a lot of automation features, they fall a little short when compared to more modern, robust tools like ActiveCampaign.
Get it if you’re a complete beginner with no website and want one tool you can use to run all the online marketing for your small business.
If you prefer a simple email marketing tool without all the bells and whistles (i.e. something that you can just send emails with), get SendFox instead.
I recommend you get started for $20/month on the Email plan, then upgrade to the Email Plus plan (with automations) for $45/month.
(30-day free trial)
Best For
Constant Contact is best for small businesses and total beginners who want an email marketing tool, website builder, and online store “all-in-one”.
Top Features
- Generous 30-day free trial. You get a pretty long time to decide if it’s for you. Pretty awesome.
- Run your own events. Constant Contact allows you to manage event invitations, registrations, and even tickets… Right out of your email service provider.
- Keep your lists clean. Constant Contact Soft bounces are placed on temporary hold for 15 days, and then resent. If it happens again, they are moved into a suspended bounce category. They have a ‘recommended for removal’ filter available to view these, but don’t remove them automatically.
- Press “send” with confidence. An email error checker searches your email for default content, missing URLs in buttons, social media icons, placeholder link text, and more.
- Your campaigns, on the run. Install their mobile app, and you'll never be left in the dark wondering how that campaign is doing.
Pricing
ConstantContact offers two pricing plans:
- Core: Starts at $9.99/month for basic email features.
- Plus: Starts at $45/month for advanced email features.
All paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Try ConstantContact today with a 30-day free trial.
Customizable Pop-up Forms
To send emails you need to collect emails. Sadly most email marketing software makes it really hard to show the forms in strategic locations on your site (e.g. on exit intent).
Constant Contact makes it easy with customizable in-line forms and exit intent popups so you don’t need to buy a separate email capture software.
A.I.-Powered Website Builder
Answer a few questions and the A.I.-powered Website Builder will create a professional-looking, mobile-optimized website for you with images and logo. Constant Contact will also host your site so you don’t need to setup and pay for a 3rd party web hosting service.
For a 1.5% transaction fee, you can also accept payments on your site via PayPal and Stripe, and sell unlimited products with the online store that comes with all Constant Contact plans.
Resend To Non-Openers
With each email you send you’re going to have 50-90% of contacts who do not open it. The best way to get more of your contacts to see your emails is to resend it to non-openers 24 hours later with a new subject line.
Constant Contact makes this process easy with a checkbox you can tick on any email to “Resend to Non-Openers.”
Pricing Adds Up
Once you have 1,000s of contacts the price starts jumping up (i.e. 501-2,500: $45/mo, 2,501-5,000: $65/mo, 5,001-10,000: $95/mo). This is a great price if you’re using one or more of the major features (website builder, popup forms or online store). If not, there are cheaper options like SendFox.
Cookie Cutter Email Templates
Although Constant Contact email templates are highly customizable and there are over 240 custom designs to choose from, the customization options can be limiting for creative designers (e.g. bullet formatting between sentences being too close together).
Limited Automation
While Constant Contact does offer automated email campaigns, birthday emails, anniversary emails, and abandoned cart campaigns (for Shopify), you’ll find that other tools like ActiveCampaign offer more advanced “if, then” automation rules.
Constant Contact Reviews From Experts
5. Rejoiner
Our Verdict — Best Done-For-You Email Marketing
Price: Starts at $25/month
Rejoiner is the best email marketing service AND service provider (they do both!) you’ve never heard of. Their pricing is off the charts, yet they have countless glowing reviews from customers (4.9/5 stars across 50+ reviews).
For $4,000-$6,000/mo (typical client), Rejoiner will become your outsourced email marketing department. They will take care of everything - email marketing strategy, copywriting, design, and deliverability.
The Best Part:
Rejoiner will be your email babysitter. Rejoiner will do all the work to come up with the campaigns and do all the baby-sitting your email marketing efforts need.
The Worst Part:
“Babysitting” services come with a hefty price tag. You’ll need to shell out at least 4k/mo, so your ecommerce better be making some serious dough before you decide to hire their DFY services.
Hire Rejoiner if you’re an ecommerce company with a budget of $4,000+ per month to spend on email marketing, and are open to collaboration (Rejoiner do biweekly sessions with their clients to bounce email marketing ideas back and forth).
I recommend you book a call from Rejoiner’s homepage to go over what email marketing services you need and get a quote.
(book a call)
Best For
Rejoiner is best for ecommerce companies, or companies with a decent-sized list (10,000+ email subscribers) who have a big budget for their email marketing efforts.
Top Features
- Explode your profits. Rejoiner’s team is known for increasing their last-click revenue from email by 30% or more.
- Data consolidation. With Rejoiner, you’ll have a single source of truth for every single subscriber. They say, and I quote, “we work to marry historical purchases from your ecommerce platform and email engagement data from your legacy ESPs.” With such a complete profile for every lead, you can make better decisions and deliver laser-targeted emails.
- An entire email department with no one to manage. If the thought of marketing automation sounds nice, but you get the sweats when you think of implementation… You can let Rejoiner do all the heavy lifting for you.
- An entire playbook, full of strategies. List cleaning, reactivation, segmentation, growth hacking, newsletters, lifecycle… They’ll help you tackle your business issues with full force.
- Personalization blocks. You can populate email blocks with personalized recommendations, customer data, abandoned carts, and so much more.
Pricing
Rejoiner offers two different pricing plans:
- ESP only: Starts at $25/month for their email provider software only.
- Plus: Starts at $1,500/month for their ESP plus services.
Try Rejoiner today with 5,000 free emails per month.
30% Typical Revenue Increase
Rejoiner’s hybrid software/agency routinely increases last-click revenue from email marketing for their clients by 30% or more by running up to nine automated email campaigns they know work across the entire customer lifecycle.
Team Of Email Marketing Experts
What sets Rejoiner apart, is you're not left with a tool you need to learn what to do with.
Rejoiner actually work with you to come up with the campaigns, do the creative, and set the campaigns up for you. All you have to do is approve the campaign and you're rolling. It’s like having a team of full-time email marketing experts, but at a 97% lower cost.
Agency Partner Program
Resell Rejoiner’s done-for-you email marketing to your digital marketing clients and add a new stream of passive income to your business (without having to hire or train new team members).
Price
Most of Rejoiner’s clients tend to be ecommerce brands in the $5M – $50M revenue range who are already growing their email list daily, and can afford to spend $4k/mo+. For 99% of businesses, this puts Rejoiner’s hands-on service and strategic consulting out of reach due to budget.
Proactive Strategic Guidance
While Rejoiner’s small team always provides great advice when asked, they could do a better job at proactively identifying opportunities for improvement.
However, this is feedback coming from one of Rejoiner’s biggest clients who attributed a $1M-$2M direct sales lift from their services, so it’s not a biggie.
Offer Moarrr Marketing Services
CEOs that partner with Rejoiner have been quoted saying “I want Rejoiner to offer more services. That way, I can outsource more of my marketing process to their team. They’re that good.”
Rejoiner Reviews From Experts
Our Top Three Picks
Here’s a quick summary of our top three picks:
- ActiveCampaign — best of the best email marketing software
- SendFox — best bang for the buck
- ConvertKit — best for content creators
Here’s a quick comparison of our top seven picks:
Tool | Entry Offer | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
ActiveCampaign | 7-day trial for $1 | Starts at $19.99/mo |
Sendfox | None | Starts at $49 one time |
ConvertKit | Free plan | Starts at $15/mo |
Constant Contact | 30-day free trial | Starts at $9.99/mo |
Rejoiner | Free plan | Starts at $25/mo |
MailChimp | Free plan | Starts at $10.35/mo |
HubSpot | None | Starts at $50/mo |
Top 50 Email Marketing Services We Considered
The Content Mavericks editorial team researched 445 different email marketing tools based on customer reviews, expert reviews, ease of use, affordability, and features. We then chose a shorter list for in-depth research and testing before finalizing our top picks. These are the products we considered that ultimately didn't make our top 5.
1. MailChimp
2. HubSpot
3. Sendinblue
4. Campaign Monitor
5. AWeber
6. Drip
7. Klaviyo
8. Moosend
9. Benchmark
10. MailerLite
11. iContact
12. Autopilot
13. Zoho Campaigns
14. Salesforce Email Studio
15. Amazon Simple Email Service
16. Litmus
17. GMass
18. Robly
19. Emma
20. MadMimi
21. Marketo Engage
22. Pardot
23. Twilio SendGrid
24. Mailjet
25. Mailgen
26. Sendlane
27. Automizy
28. Campaigner
29. Vero
30. EngageBay
31. SendX
32. EmailOctopus
33. Bluecore
34. OpenMoves OM3
35. Second Street
36. Pure360
37. SendPulse
38. Wishpond
39. Wunderkind
40. Pinpointe
41. Square Marketing
42. Ongage
43. Gist
44. Elastic Email
45. Sendy
46. EasySendy
47. Emercury
48. Campayn
49. GetResponse
50. Flodesk
Top 10 Email Marketing Software Questions
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software is what you use to send emails to people who have opted in on your website to get email communication from you. Emails sent are usually informational (e.g. new blog posts, videos, podcasts) or promotional (e.g. new product offers, sales, discounts).
What Is The Best Email Marketing Service?
The best email marketing service is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign gives you the most email marketing automation features for the lowest price point. Pricing starts from $15 USD per month.
What Is The Cheapest Email Marketing Service?
The cheapest email marketing service is SendFox for a single payment of $49 USD. SendFox’s $49 lifetime plan includes 5,000 contacts and 50,000 email sends per month.
What Is The Best Free Email Marketing Service?
The best free email marketing service is ConvertKit. ConvertKit is totally free for your first 1,000 contacts with no credit card required. You can send unlimited email broadcasts.
How Do I Choose The Best Email Marketing Software?
The five most important factors you should consider when choosing the best email marketing service are:
How Does Email Marketing Software Work?
Email marketing software works by composing an email (with text and images) in an email editor, then sending it to a list of contacts you’ve collected from email capture forms on your website.
Is Constant Contact Better Than MailChimp?
The short answer: Yes. Constant Contact has better email deliverability, a better email editor and overall better ease of use than MailChimp. MailChimp has better automations, reporting, and a free plan for 2,000 contacts.
We believe email deliverability is the most important factor for any email service, so we rate Constant Contact as better.
What’s Better Than MailChimp?
The best MailChimp alternatives are:
- ActiveCampaign — best alternative
- SendFox — cheapest alternative
- ConvertKit — free alternative
- Constant Contact — beginners alternative
- Rejoiner — done-for-you alternative
Is Email Marketing Still Effective?
Email marketing is still incredibly effective because you own the list and have a direct line of communication to your audience (i.e. you’re not dependent on a 3rd party algorithm like Google, Facebook, or Amazon to reach your customers). A good open rate is ~20%. A good click rate is ~3%. A good unsubscribe rate is ~0.2%.
Fun Fact: In 1978, the first email blast was sent by a man named Gary Thuerk to 400 recipients with the only email marketing tool available on the planet, ARPAnet. It resulted in $13 million sales (and a few complaints!).
How Can I Send 10,000 Emails For Free?
ConvertKit will let you send unlimited email broadcasts to 1,000 contacts. For example, if you have 500 contacts and send 20 emails you could send 10,000 emails for free.
If you want to send 10,000 emails at once for free your best option is to get the SendFox lifetime plan for $49 with 5,000 contacts. Then pay an extra $50 (+$10 per extra 1k contacts) so you can send to 10,000 contacts at once for free (after paying the single payment of $99 total).
The Bottom Line
Here are my top picks for the best email marketing services:
- ActiveCampaign — best of the best
- SendFox — best bang for the buck
- ConvertKit — best free alternative
- Constant Contact — best for beginners
- Rejoiner — best done-for-you email marketing
- MailChimp — best for low volume sending
- HubSpot — best enterprise solution
