Looking to spend less time (and more creativity) on your email marketing campaigns?
The best email automation software can help you do just that.
In this article, I’m listing my 10 top email automation software tools to help you streamline your marketing efforts and grow your business.
What You’ll Learn:
- Benefits of having email automation software
- Email marketing statistics
- 10 Top Email Automation Software Tools:
Believe it or not—email is nearly five decades old.
Once a novelty feature of the internet, it has quickly evolved into one of the best-converting marketing channels for businesses big and small.
But, since technology is a continually moving target, email has had to adapt to compete with social media platforms and smartphones.
That’s where email automation software comes in handy.
What is Email Automation Software?
Email automation software can be a godsend for marketers, eliminating much of the redundancies they encounter with day-to-day busywork.
And contrary to how it may sound, these tools can also help you build better relationships with your customers. Through the automation process, there’s no need to perform the tedious task of manually sending emails to each customer with preconfigured workflows.
Marketers can automate the delivery of emails based on a variety of factors, such as time and day (e.g. 10 am on Tuesday), actions taken by their customers (e.g. when a contact visits a specific landing page) and predetermined guidelines in workflows (e.g lead nurturing and drip email campaigns).
Once you’ve configured a business rule, the email automation software will adhere to the workflow no matter how large or small your audience. It goes without saying that this offers incredible advantages for marketers.
Benefits of Email Automation
Of course, crafting the perfect email that encourages customers to engage with your brand takes time. Thankfully, with the help of email automation tools, you can start reaping benefits like:
Reach out to your customers. The reach on platforms like Facebook and Twitter is getting lower and lower every year. But with email, you are in full control of your reach frequency and can rest assured that it’s going to land directly into the inboxes of your customers.
Create personalized, hyper-targeted content. Armed with a wealth of data on your buyer persona, you can let your email automation software make the best use of it. Only target the customers who you want to target with the appropriate content.
Save time. Email automation takes a lot off your plate. It gives you the ability to set key trigger actions and handles the timing and sending an aspect of email campaigns, allowing you to focus on other tasks like nurturing leads and segmenting contacts.
Save money. The cost of your email automation software varies and often depends on the complexity of your campaigns and the number of leads you have. But, if you conduct a cost/benefit analysis, you’ll find that the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Track progress and measure results. Email marketing metrics give you critical insight into how your email campaigns are performing. Easily track results for KPIs such as delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate to help you improve your digital strategy.
Email Marketing by the Numbers
With email being the most effective way to reach your audience, it’s no wonder that email automation has become a staple in digital marketing. Let’s let the data do the talking:
- The number of email users is expected to reach 3 billion users by 2022.
- Email is the preferred marketing channel for 60 percent of consumers.
- More than 80 percent of businesses use email marketing services to engage customers.
- Companies can receive a 4,400 percent return on investment (ROI) from their email automation campaigns.
- Emails that include personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened.
- Automated email messages yield a 5 percent increase in open rates.
- Across industries, the average email open rate is 81 percent.
Best Email Automation Software Tools
After conducting an extensive email automation software comparison, here are 10 tools (in no particular order) that can help you actively engage your prospective customers at the right time, with the right message:
1. Contactually
Contactually is a cloud-based CRM software that enables you to identify key relationships across your email and social media accounts, follow up on them, and track business results.
Easily categorize your key contacts into buckets, and your Contactually account will do the rest.
In addition to offering tons of templates and mobile apps, this tool also integrates easily with many of the apps you’re already using.
While it’s one of the pricier options on this list, it’s worth it if you favor an intuitive interface and user-friendly navigation.
The Contactually pricing plan has three subscription options. When billed monthly, the Basic plan costs $45, the Professional plan costs $69, and the Accelerator plan costs $119.
2. HubSpot
With nearly 70,000 customers worldwide, it’s no wonder HubSpot is considered one of the best email automation software solutions on the market, especially for content marketers.
With an easy drag-and-drop email builder, there’s no need to enlist the help of IT.
An inbound marketing tool, Hubspot can effortlessly automate all your marketing and sales activities, allowing users to create automated workflows and trigger emails to nurture leads and convert them into loyal customers.
Using the CRM, you can also include elements like first name and company name, to ensure your contacts feel like your content is being personally tailored to them, all while monitoring email activity on the backend.
You can enjoy HubSpot for free with limited functionality. Pricing ranges from $50 – $4,400+ per month depending on features and scale.
3. LeadSquared
LeadSquared was designed to manage thousands of users, millions of leads, and countless marketing activities.
In addition to creating standout drip campaigns, you can easily track your lead’s activities across various touchpoints spanning website, blogs, emails, ads, and emails.
From there, you can segment your list according to lead scores, location, behavior, or any other variable you think is relevant.
While LeadSquared doesn’t offer a free trial, pricing starts at $25 per month per user.
4. GetNotify
A simple tool on the surface, GetNotify includes a ton of great features for email tracking, including tracking multiple leads at once.
One of its most appealing features is the ability to track the date and time that your email was opened and reopened by the recipient, as well as the general geographic location it was opened in.
The best part? The customer won’t know that you are tracking all of this.
To increase the odds that it will be clicked on by users, GetNotify even gives you the option to use your own image file as a tracking image.
This tool is free, but you can unlock additional features depending on your donation.
5. Sendinblue
Designed for simplicity and accessibility, Sendinblue is the platform of choice for nearly 80,000 companies worldwide, combining both email marketing services and SMS messages to create a powerful comprehensive email automation solution.
With drag-and-drop email functionality, you can create engaging newsletters and email campaigns and measure their effectiveness with analytics.
All of SendinBlue’s plans include unlimited contacts, with tiered pricing based on the number of emails being sent per month.
The Free plan includes 300 emails per day. The Lite plan costs $25 for up to 40,000 emails per month, the Essential plan costs $39 for up to 60,000 emails per month, and the all-access Premium plan starts at $66 per month for 120,000 emails.
6. Mailchimp
You’d be hard-pressed to find a marketer who hasn’t heard of MailChimp.
A leading automated email follow-up software solution, MailChimp has been around since 2001 and currently boasts nearly 15 million users worldwide.
In addition to its rather charming design aesthetic, the software itself is pretty easy to use.
Features include A/B testing capabilities, personalized emails, automated welcome emails, behavioral targeting, engagement monitoring, and advanced reporting tools.
The cost is free for up to 2,000 contacts, and upwards of $299 or more per month for its Premium option.
7. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign has cultivated a reputation for having sky-high email deliverability rates.
This software allows you to create unique drip emails that are driven by factors like subscriber interaction, behavior, interests, and location.
With ActiveCampaign’s drag-and-drop automation builder, users can build automated workflows in minutes—no coding experience necessary.
Plus, these workflows can all be viewed on a single dashboard, making it easy to see what’s working well and what needs to be modified.
Paid plans range from $9 – $479 per month depending on the number of contacts you have.
8. Mailjet
Mailjet is an all-in-one email service provider used by more than 150,000 companies all over the world to build, send, and monitor their marketing emails.
In fact, its flexible infrastructure can auto-scale to deliver up to 15 million emails per hour per user.
Aside from being lightning fast, Mailjet also offers one-to-one optimization, A/B testing, email segmentation, automated workflows, real-time email tracking, and campaign comparison, just to name a few.
Mailjet offers a free trial in which you can send up to 6,000 emails daily. Other prices include the Basic package that starts from $8.69 per month for 30,000 emails. Larger companies need to inquire for custom pricing.
9. Drip
As the name implies, Drip is a tool designed specifically for e-commerce businesses to streamline their drip campaigns.
Drip equips you with all the data you need to see what your customers are clicking on so you can create targeted content to convert one-time browsers into long-time customers.
New to the process? No problem. Drip offers numerous pre-made templates that can easily carry you through the design process from start to finish.
Companies that have 100 subscribers or less can join Drip for free and access most of the same features as its paid plans. The Basic plan starts at $49 per month for 2,500 contacts.
10. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the more well-rounded, beginner-friendly software options on this list that offers a quick and easy setup.
It comes with a variety of mobile-optimized templates and integrates with popular tools like WordPress, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and Shopify.
Features like trigger-based messages, audience segmentation, and robust list-building capabilities are what make Constant Contact the second biggest email marketing platform after MailChimp.
You can test the waters with a no-risk free trial. Paid options begin at $20 per month based on the number of contacts.
Get Started with Email Automation
Marketing can be chaotic. As a marketer, you’re expected to get your brand’s message across several times a day across different channels to generate new leads and stay on the top of customer’s minds.
But, with the adoption of email automation solutions like the ones we covered above, you can let the software do all the heavy lifting for you.
If you’re looking to scale your business with fewer resources and free up your time for more strategic marketing work, then it’s time to make email automation a priority for your business.
