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Does email marketing seem like an ancient method of communicating with your followers? Think the opposite, because it’s definitely far from outdated. In fact, the ROI is $54.33 for every $1.43 spent on email marketing (up from $35.64 the previous year)1, despite the proliferation of promising new digital channels.
There are hundreds of email marketing companies out there (we review over 20 here!), so how do you weed them out and find the best one for your business? We give our recommendations for the best email marketing service provider as well as some other need-to-know information.
Article Overview
Is Email Marketing Still Effective?
With the proliferation of social media, chat, targeted online ads and other digital channels, you might wonder, “Is email marketing dead?” The simple answer is: far from it! Email marketing remains the top method for attracting and retaining customers.
Why Is Email Marketing So Effective?
Email use continues to grow among consumers and in the business world, and it remains the best way to grab your customers’ attention for online sales and other notifications. Email marketing effectiveness is all about the popularity of the channel.
The Radicati Group estimated that the total number of business and consumer emails circulated per day would reach 269 billion in 2017. They also predicted that email use would grow at an average annual rate of 4.4%, reaching 319.6 billion by the end of 2021.
How Effective Is Email Marketing?
The statistics speak for themselves. Here are some of the most compelling statistics and email marketing facts we’ve uncovered.
Email Marketing ROI Statistics
Is email marketing worth it? Some key stats:
- The ROI is $54.33 for every $1.43 spent on email marketing.1
- Nearly 1 in 5 companies reported an ROI of more than $76 in 2014.1
- 75% of companies agree that email provides “excellent” to “good” ROI.2
Consumer Email Marketing Statistics
- Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.3
- Email has the highest conversion rate (66%) compared to social media, direct mail and other channels regarding purchases made as a result of receiving a marketing message.4
- 72% people would rather receive promotional content via email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.5
- Consumers who purchase products through email promos spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers.6
B2B Email Marketing Statistics
- 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective avenue for revenue generation.7
- CTRs are 47% higher for B2B email campaigns than for B2C email campaigns.8
- B2B marketers say email is the third most influential source of information for their audiences (behind colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders).9
What Features Should Email Marketing Services Have In Common?
It’s important to know what email marketing companies have in common, so we can leave these criteria out of our pro and con lists below.
In order to even stay in business, an email marketing service provider (EMSP) needs to have relationships with the major ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) such as Comcast, Verizon, Juno, etc. If they didn’t, emails would get blacklisted and clients, unable to reach their customers, would not be happy.
They all advertise as having the best “whitelisting” relationships with ISP’s, but the truth is — the arrangements are more or less the same. The important thing is that the email marketing provider has the support and staff necessary to maintain the relationships, analyze the SMTP send logs, etc.
Anti-Spam Policies
Along the same lines, an email marketing brand must have an anti-spam policy in place to keep many users from being blacklisted in the event that one user misbehaves. Constant Contact, Vertical Response, StreamSend and iContact (and the rest of the lot typically) take the same anti-spam measures.
Common anti-spam measures, in accordance with CAN-SPAM (an official anti-spam policy), are the requirements to include a postal address, unsubscribe option, information on how the recipient joined the list in each email newsletter, and not using false or misleading headers and subject lines.
A Note On Newsletter Archiving And SEO
Many service providers, such as Constant Contact, offer a free or paid service that will archive your organization’s old email newsletters on its website. This is not always ideal for you, from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view.
Your email newsletter contains valuable content relevant to your business that could be indexed by search engines. If the content is archived/hosted on the EMSP’s servers, however, you won’t get credit for it, and may miss out on valuable website traffic. Look to either archive your old newsletters on your own website, or find a way to copy/paste the archive from the service over to yours.
Best Entry Level EMSP’s
From our research, Benchmark, GetResponse, Campaigner, MailChimp, StreamSend, Vertical Response, Constant Contact, iContact and Active Campaign provide the best entry-level opportunities for small businesses.
These services offer a good balance of pricing (low-cost per month per subscriber and email send count), reliability, flexibility (email template design and management) and reporting (bounce, unsubscribe, spam reports, etc.). In addition, they all provide online support communities where users can interact with other users, share their opinions on the service, as well as get support from administrators and extensive knowledge bases.
GetResponse Review
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GetResponse is our winner for best email marketing service. Its user-friendly interface and email intelligence makes GetResponse one of the easiest programs to jump into and get emailing in no time, and it has more than 350,000 customers to prove it.
GetResponse actively helps you improve your campaigns to better reach and connect with your audience every step of the way. Other no cost perks include: online surveys, inbox preview, autoresponder and social networking integration. It gets high marks for customer service, which goes a long way in our book.
Monthly pricing starts at $15/month for 1,000 subscribers (our readers have access to a 10% discount if you use the link above). You get a lot of bang for your buck with its monthly accounts — more than most other email marketing service providers.
What are its limitations? Advanced list segmentation and html-based email customization.
Get Response offers a 30-Day Free Trial, no credit card required.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review of GetResponse
Price
GetResponse’s fees are on a per-month, per-contact pricing scale and there is no contract to sign or cancellation penalty. All include an unlimited number of emails. If you’re looking for longer-term use, you can save some substantial money with its annual 18% discount or 30% discount for two-years (prices below don’t reflect this discount, and you must pay ahead of time).
GetResponse gives nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organizations a 50% off “forever” discount on all of its pricing.
| Pro | Max | Enterprise | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| List Size: 1,000 | $15/month | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| List Size: 2,500 | $25/month | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| List Size: 5,000 | $45/month | $49/month | N/A | N/A |
| List Size: 10,000 | $65/month | $75/month | $165/month | N/A |
| List Size: 25,000 | $145/month | $165/month | $255/month | N/A |
| List Size: 50,000 | $250/month | $280/month | $370/month | N/A |
| List Size: 100,000 | $450/month | $490/month | $580/month | N/A |
| List Size: 100,000+ | N/A | N/A | N/A | starting at $1,199/month |
Coupon Code
Our readers have exclusive access to 10% off of GetResponse (you must use the link to the left to get this offer)! You can discuss this discount and others on our dedicated GetResponse coupon page.Campaigner Review
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Campaigner is our #2 choice for best email marketing service. Campaigner has an entry price at $19.95 for up to 1,000 subscribers. This paired with a 30-day free trial will likely be just what most small businesses need to get rolling. It also has one of the best reputations for customer service, offering around the clock, 24/7 support.
Boasting more than 900 email templates, it has one of the largest libraries of creatives to help you make a unique impact on your customers. Lastly, it includes 50mb CDN media/image hosting, A/B testing, social media integration and autoresponder at no additional cost.
A unique feature offered by Campaigner is the Template Builder, which is easy to use. If you don’t like the editor you can upload your own design.
The only real negatives would be if you plan to do any online surveys, this will cost you more with Campaigner than some which include it in the monthly email cost but the tradeoffs may still make it worth your while.
Campaigner also acquired StreamSend in 2017.
Try a 30-day free trial of Campaigner.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review of Campaigner
Price
Pricing for Campaigner is on a per month basis, based on your number of contacts. All of these plans allow for an unlimited number of emails sent. Campaigner offers a 30-day free trial.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month |
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| 0-1,000 | $19.95 |
| 1,001-3,500 | $29.95 |
| 3,501-5,000 | $49.95 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $79.95 |
| 10,001-15,000 | $99.95 |
| 15,001-25,000 | $149.95** |
| 25,001-50,000 | $299.95** |
| 50,001-100,000 | $549.95† |
| Over 100,000 | Call or request a quote online |
** With the purchase of these higher end plans, you get some of Campaigner’s more advanced features included in the price: Custom footer, 1GB CDN media hosting, suppressor list, projects and more.
† And with the purchase of the “Up to 100,000” monthly plan you get even more features: Workflows, APIs, static segment sampling, dynamic content, 3rd party Ad content, delivery support and more.
Coupon Code
Campaigner occassionally has seasonal coupon codes, visit our dedicated Campaigner coupon page.iContact Review
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iContact remains our third choice for best email marketing service provider this year. iContact offers very competitive pricing plans for its basic services (starting at $14/month for 500 subscribers) with a wide array of features.
Its premier services, however, seem to be its best-selling point. With iContact premier you get a dedicated account manager to focus on your email design, campaign and analytics, but it’s unclear how much this will cost you — you have to contact the company for pricing.
iContact also offers a 30-day free trial.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review of iContact
Price
iContact fees are very competitive compared to other providers. Its pricing is based on the number of contacts per month, and you can pay monthly — no long-term contract is required. You receive a 15% discount on monthly pricing if you purchase the annual plan. It also provides a 20% discount for nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organizations (free account for North Carolina based nonprofits).
iContact has a 30-day free trial.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month for Essential | Price Per Month for Professional |
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| 0-500 | $14 | $99 |
| 501-2,500 | $32 | $99 |
| 2,501-4,999 | $52 | $129 |
| 5,000-10,000 | $79 | $189 |
| 10,001-15,000 | $117 | $249 |
| 15,000-25,000 | $149 | Call or request a quote online |
| 25,001+ | Call or request a quote online | Call or request a quote online |
Coupon Code
iContact occassionally has seasonal coupon codes, visit our dedicated iContact coupon page.Our “Best For” Email Marketing Reviews
Now that you have an idea of what EMSP’s can offer you and our picks for the overall best three EMSPs, we’re going to dig a little more deeply into this industry so you can find the email marketing provider that fits the unique needs of your business or organization. Here are our winners that are “best for” the following categories:
Best For:
- Small Businesses & Nonprofits: Benchmark
- Large Companies: Pinpointe
- Ecommerce: SendinBlue
- Overall Value: Mailigen
- Free Plan: MailChimp
Email Marketing Service Comparison Table
To help you sort through the email marketing madness, we’ve created an email marketing comparison table that highlights the main features of each EMSP. Use it to help you make an informed decision when selecting an email newsletter provider for yourself or your company.
If you click on any of the Review links, you will be taken to an in-depth review of that email marketing service provider on this page. If you are confused by the terminology we use, you can get definitions of our industry terms at the bottom of this article.
To see the full table, make sure you *use the scrollbar at the bottom* of the table. Alternatively, click in the table and use your arrow keys to scroll across.
| Company | Winner: GetResponse | 2nd Place: Campaigner | 3rd Place: iContact | Benchmark | Pinpointe | SendinBlue | Best for Overall Value: Mailigen | Best Free Plan: MailChimp | ActiveCampaign | AWeber | Campaign Monitor | Constant Contact | ConvertKit | Emma | FireDrum | FreshMail | INinbox | JangoMail | Mad Mimi | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | SharpSpring | VerticalResponse |
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| Company | Winner: Get Response | 2nd Place: Campaigner | 3rd Place: iContact | Benchmark | Pinpointe | SendinBlue | Best for Overall Value: Mailigen | Best Free Plan: MailChimp | ActiveCampaign | AWeber | Campaign Monitor | Constant Contact | ConvertKit | Emma | FireDrum | FreshMail | INinbox | JangoMail | Mad Mimi | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | SharpSpring | VerticalResponse |
| Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review |
| Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website |
| Free Plan | None | None | None | 2,000 subscribers, 14,000 emails per month | None | 600 emails/day | None | Up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails/ month | None | None | None | None | None | None | Up to 100 contacts & 500 emails/month | None | Unavailable | None | Up to 100 subscribers, unlimited sends | Unavailable | None | Up to 300 subscribers and 4,000 emails/month |
| Lowest Price (Monthly) | $10.50 (1,000 subscribers and a 24-month contract) | $19.95 (1,000 subscribers) | $11.90 (500 subscribers and a 12-month contract) | $13.99 (600 subscribers) | $49 (5,000 subscribers, 40,000 emails) | $25 (up to 40,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $8 (500 contacts) | $10 (500 subscribers) | $9 (500 contacts) | $19 (500 subscribers) | $9 (500 subscribers) | $20 (500 subscribers) | $24 (1,000 subscribers) | $89 (10,000 contacts) | $5 (up to 500 subscribers) | $14 (up to 1,000 subscribers) | Unavailable | $90 (18,000 emails) | $10 (500 subscribers) | Unavailable | $450 (1,500 subscribers) | $11 (500 subscribers) |
| Up to 2,500 Subscribers | $17.50 (24-month contract) | $29.95 (up to 3,500 subscribers) | $27.20 (12-month contract) | $31.99 | Unlisted | $25 (up to 40,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $20 | $30 | $39 | $29 | $29 | $45 | $41 (up to 3,000 subscribers) | $89 (10,000 contacts) | $20 | $23 | Unavailable | $90 (18,000 emails) | $16 | Unavailable | $650 (10,000 subscribers) | $33 |
| Up to 5,000 Subscribers | $31.50 (24-month contract) | $49.95 | $67.15 (12-month contract) | $51.99 | $49 | $39 (up to 60,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $32 | $50 | $69 | $49 | $49 | $65 | $64 | $89 (10,000 contacts) | $35 | $41 | Unavailable | $90 (18,000 emails) | $27 | Unavailable | $650 (10,000 subscribers) | $55 |
| Up to 25,000 Subscribers | $101.50 (24-month contract) | $149.95 | $126.65 (12-month contract) | $164.99 | $150 | $66 (up to 120,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $96 | $150 | $179 | $149 | $199 | $225 | $166 | $369 | $125 | $131 | Unavailable | $144 (for 100,000 emails) | $89 | Unavailable | Contact Sales | $160 |
| Free Trial | 30 Days | 30 Days | 30 Days | Free Plan | 15 Days | Free Plan | 30 Days | Free Plan | 14 Days | 30 Days | 5 or less people | 60 Days | 14 Days | None | Free Plan | None | Unavailable | 30 Days | Free Plan | Free Demo | 15 Days | Free Plan |
| Customer Service | M-F 9am-5pm EST Phone, Live Chat 24/7; Email | 24/7 | M-F 8am-8pm EST via Phone & Live Chat; Email for Pro | Live Chat, Email, Phone | M-F: 9am-6pm EST for Phone, Live Chat, Email | M-F: 9am-4pm EST Live Chat, Email, Phone | M-F: 9am-5pm EST | Phone, Email, Live Chat | Phone, Live Chat: M-F 4am-8pm & Wknds 9am-5pm EST | 24/7: Email; Phone Support Only with Top Plans | M-Th: 8am-10pm; F: 8am-9pm EST | Open a Support Ticket | Phone, Email | M-F 2-10am Phone; M-F 7am-11pm & Wknds 8am-8pm GMT Email | Email Only | M-F 7am-5pm EST Phone, Email, Live Chat | Live Chat & Email | Live Chat, Phone & Email | Phone, Email M-F: 8:30am-8pm EST | Phone, Live Chat & Email | ||
| Template Selection | 500+ | 900+ | Hundreds | 400+ | 1,000+ | 200+ | 100+ | Hundreds | Hundreds | 700+ | Hundreds | 400+ | N/A | Hundreds | Hundreds | 100+ | Hundred | Hundreds | Few | 20+ | Dozens | Hundreds |
| Template Editor | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | N/A | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML | WYSIWYG & HTML |
| Responsive Design |  | | | | | | | | Mobile-ready templates | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | |
| Image Hosting | 1GB | 50MB | 5MB (free) | 10MB | Unlimited | Yes, but unlisted | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1GB or 2GB | N/A | Unlimited | | | 1KB | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1-100GB | | 25MB (free) |
| Contact Manager/Import | | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | |
| Newsletter Archiving | | DIY | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | DIY | DIY | | | ||
| Social Media Marketing | | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | ||
| RSS Feed Integration | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | ||||||
| Autoresponder | | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | |
| SMS (Text) Messaging | | | | Integration with Gather | | Integration Only | N/A | | | | ||||||||||||
| Surveys | | Integration Only | | | | Via HTML Link | | | Integration Only | Integration Only | Integration Only | | N/A | Through Survey Monkey Integration Only | Integration Only | Integration Only | | Integration with Survey Monkey Only | Through 123 Contact integration | Integration Only | | |
| List Segmentation | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Allows Attachments | | | Up to 5mb | | Yes, One Attachment (1mb Limit) Per Campaign | Up to 1mb | N/A | | | | Using AMPScript | Up to 5MB | ||||||||||
| Google Analytics Integration | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | Via Zapier Only | | | | | | |
| Spam Score (Checking) | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | ||
| Reporting/Stats | | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | |
| Private (Dedicated) IP Address | | | $28.95/month | $50/month | | | | | N/A | | | |||||||||||
| Split (A/B) Testing | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | ||
| Trigger-Based Messaging | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | | |
| Developer API | | | | | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | | | | |
| Opt-In Required | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Double Opt-In Required | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | N/A | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional | |
| Sign Up | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website | Visit Website |
| Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review | Review |
Best For Small Businesses & Nonprofits: Benchmark Review
A solid and progressive email marketing provider, Benchmark has stepped up its competitive edge with its Free Plan for Life, which gives you up to 2,000 contacts and 14,000 sends per month with many standard and advanced features that other service providers don’t offer for free.
On top of that, Benchmark offers free surveys, polls and event marketing, as well as the option of having a private IP address ($28.95 per month) and a dedicated server ($199 one-time set up fee) for large volume senders. The majority of providers don’t even offer these extended features.
What we really like is that it genuinely cares about its customers’ concerns, and this is showcased by its in-dash feedback forum where you can voice your concerns without ever navigating away from the page. Benchmark pricing starts at $13.99 per month for 600 emails, and it gives nonprofit 501(3)(c) organizations a 25% discount on all services. Click here to get started with its Free Plan for Life.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review of Benchmark
Price
Below is some of the Benchmark Email pricing. Visit Benchmark’s website for a full pricing list.
| Number of Contacts | Sends Per Month | Price Per Month |
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| 2,000 | 14,000 | Free |
| 1,000 | Unlimited | $21.99 |
| 5,000 | Unlimited | $51.99 |
| 15,000 | Unlimited | $106.99 |
| 25,000 | Unlimited | $164.99 |
| 50,000 | Unlimited | $254.99 |
| 75,000 | 1,050,000 | $387.99 |
| 100,000 | 1,400,000 | $494.99 |
| 250,000 | 3,500,000 | $1,264.99 |
| 500,000 | 7,000,000 | $2,254.99 |
| 1,000,000 | 14,000,000 | $4,273.99 |
Best For Large Companies: Pinpointe Review
Pinpointe is a cloud-based, advanced service geared toward B2B (business to business) email marketers and larger volume senders. It delivers all the features advanced email marketers want and its automation is one of the best we’ve seen.
It includes sub-accounts for universities and larger companies (in the Enterprise version), surveys, advanced reports including click heat maps, easy to use campaign builders and trigger and drip campaigns with flexible and dynamic segmentation. While some of the more sophisticated services can get overwhelming, Pinpointe offers a surprisingly easy, intuitive interface, and users rave about the knowledgeable and responsive customer service.
Pinpointe’s pricing scale is clearly geared toward power users. Its lowest monthly plan listed online starts at $49 per month for 5,000 contacts and 40,000 emails, but you do get a 10% discount if you pre-pay for 6 months or more. It also offers pay as you go pricing and a 15-day free trial period (no credit card required).
Try Pinpointe’s 15-day free trial.
Pros | Cons |
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Price
Below is the pricing for Pinpointe.| Number of Contacts | Monthly Number of Emails Send Limit | Price Per Month |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 40,000 | $49 |
| 10,000 | 80,000 | $74 |
| 25,000 | 200,000 | $150 |
| 50,000 | 300,000 | $245 |
| 75,000 | 450,000 | $365 |
| 100,000 | 600,000 | $480 |
| 200,000 | Call | $898 |
| 200,000+ | Call | Call |
Best For Ecommerce: SendinBlue Review
Originally designed for online merchants, SendinBlue is a relative newcomer to the email marketing software world. But it’s made great strides (50,000 global customers), considering it’s only been in business since September of 2012. Its approach combines email marketing campaigns, transactional emails and SMS (text) mobile messaging to best meet its users’ needs, and many of its best features are geared to the customer sales process.
There are some substantial missing features, but there’s been a lot of buzz about SendinBlue recently, so we think it’s worth trying out. Plus, you can do so for free! One of its most attractive features is the free forever plan that includes 600 emails per day. Pricing starts at $25 for 40,000 emails per month, and it also offers a pay as you go plan, which starts at $27 for 5,000 email credits.
Learn more in our interview with CMO, Amalia Bercot.
Pros | Cons |
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Price
SendinBlue has a free plan that allows up to 300 emails per day and includes unlimited contacts.| Email Plan Name | Lite | Essential | Premium Silver | Premium Gold | Premium Platinum | Premium Diamond | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emails Per Month | 40,000 | 60,000 | 120,000 | 350,000 | 750,000 | 3 million | Tailored Volume |
| Price Per Month | $25 | $39 | $66 | $173 | $334 | $603 | Custom |
Best Overall Value: Mailigen Review
Mailigen is a great option for beginners and experts alike due to its effortless customizations and wide array of features that make crafting a unique marketing strategy fun and effective. There are a few shortcomings, however, like limited stock images and template selections.
All things considered, Mailigen is a fantastic option loaded with features that make for a solid product. Pricing starts at $10/month for up to 500 subscribers and $40 for 2,500 email credits (used like postage stamps). It offers discounts for 12 month pre-pay accounts and 25% off for nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations.
Try Mailigen’s 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
Pros | Cons |
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Price
Below are some sample prices for Mailigen. If you need something in between what is displayed in the table below, we encourage you to check out Mailigen's pricing slider on its website so you can manually select the number of subscribers you need to pay for.| Subscribers | Price Per Month |
|---|---|
| 500 | $10 |
| 2,500 | $25 |
| 5,000 | $40 |
| 10,000 | $60 |
| 15,000 | $84 |
| 20,000 | $104 |
| 25,000 | $120 |
| 50,000 | $200 |
| 100,000 | $400 |
| 150,000 | $555 |
| 200,000 | $704 |
| 500,000 | $1,500 |
| 850,000 | $2,295 |
| 1,000,000 | Contact Sales |
Best Free Plan: MailChimp Review
MailChimp is one of the more popular choices for email marketing software, largely because it offers the best free plan compared to all other services. With the free plan you get 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month, free forever.
MailChimp has a simple and fun interface and a lot of features for beginners and budget conscious users. The mid-sized business plan starts at $10 per month and there’s an enterprise-level Pro plan that has some sophisticated advanced features, but you’ll pay for these features (starting at $199 per month).
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review of MailChimp
Price
MailChimp offers the best free plan for the number of subscribers/emails sent and variety of features than any other email marketing service. It also provides monthly pricing and pay as you go fees for those who need more than what you can do with the free plan.
Monthly Subscriptions
With MailChimp’s monthly subscriptions you pay per number of contacts, but you get an unlimited number of emails you can send each month.
| Number of Contacts | Price per Month |
|---|---|
| 0-2,000 | Free |
| 1,001-1,500 | $20 |
| 1,501-2,000 | $25 |
| 2,001-2,500 | $30 |
| 2,501-2,600 | $35 |
| 2,601-2,700 | $40 |
| 2,700+ | Use its online calculator |
Pay As You Go Plan
MailChimp gives you the option of buying packages of email credits, which you use like postage stamps. These can be a great option if you’re on the free plan but occasionally need to send more emails than the 12,000 limit.
| Number of Credits | Price per Month |
|---|---|
| 300 | $9 |
| 1,000 | $30 |
| 2,000 | $60 |
| 5,000 | $100 |
| 7,500 | $150 |
| 10,000 | $200 |
| 25,000 | $250 |
| 50,000 | $500 |
| 50,000+ | Use its online calculator |
Pro
You can add Pro to your plan for $199 per month. Pro provides analytics tools to help grow your business.
Other Email Marketing Services Reviews
To jump straight to an in-depth review of an email marketing provider you’re interested in, click on one below.
Active Campaign | AWeber | Campaign Monitor | Constant Contact | Contactology | ConvertKit | Emma | FireDrum | FreshMail | Google Groups | INinbox | JangoMail | Mad Mimi | Omnistar Mailer | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | SharpSpring | VerticalResponse
ActiveCampaign Review
Although not widely considered one of the big players in the email marketing service provider world, ActiveCampaign is certainly giving competitors a run for their money. ActiveCampaign has one of the slickest and most intuitive interfaces out there, and all the features you’ll need, whether you’re a novice or a pro.
In addition, it has fully built-in CRM sales and automation, a ton of apps and integrations and full API. However, there are a few drawbacks that keep it from rising to the top — if you need to do affiliate marketing, for example, look elsewhere. It’s strictly not allowed with ActiveCampaign.
Still, this service brings a wow factor with its ease of use and affordable pricing, which starts at just $9 per month for 500 contacts and unlimited sends (paid annually). It does offer 15% off all annual pre-pay accounts and 20% off for nonprofit organizations 501(c)(3).
ActiveCampaign has a 14-day free trial (no credit card required).
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AWeber Review
What began as an autoresponder service is now a full-fledged email marketing provider — one of the more popular ones out there. AWeber recently acquired Omnistar, another popular email marketing provider, so it continues its growth as one of the major players in this space.
AWeber prices itself competitively, and is a strong contender in the email marketing battle. Its basic plan starts at $19 per month or $194 annually for up to 500 subscribers and an unlimited number of emails — and you get a lot of standard features with that price.
What’s missing? AWeber isn’t as up to date on social media integrations and tracking as other top services, and its lack of assimilation with Google Analytics and other standard complimentary products could turn some away.
One cool feature is its broadcast archive, which optimizes the newsletter archiving process by turning newsletters into easy to use web pages for your visitors.
Check out AWeber’s 30-day free trial.
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Read Our Full Review of AWeber
Price
AWeber pricing is per contact, per month, with no contracts or cancellation fees. Try it out with the AWeber free trial for 30 days.
| Number of Contacts | AWeber Cost Per Month |
|---|---|
| 0-500 | $19 |
| 501-2,500 | $29 |
| 2,501-5,000 | $49 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $69 |
| 10,001-25,000 | $149 |
| 25,000+ | Contact AWeber |
Coupon Code
AWeber offers three months free to non-profits and 25% off after that. Students get 20% off. Click here to take advantage of AWeber coupons!Campaign Monitor Review
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing software built specifically with graphic designers in mind, but its drag and drop editor is easy to use for beginners. This interface is very pleasing to the eye and allows for multiple account management.
Campaign Monitor has most of the basics you’ll need to run successful email marketing campaigns, but if you’re looking for seriously advanced features, you may need to look elsewhere. Prices start at $9 for 2,500 emails or $29 for unlimited emails — both rates are for up to 500 subscribers. It also offers a 15% discount for nonprofits.
Campaign Monitor has a free trial if you’re sending to five people or less.
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Read Our Full Review of Campaign Monitor
Price
With Campaign Monitor, you have the option of paying per month or by campaign. The pay-by-campaign option is 1¢ per subscriber, plus $5 per campaign. So, if you send to 1,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $15 for the one-time send.
The pay-per-month option is based on your number of contacts, and for the Basic plan also the number of emails you send each month. The Unlimited plan is true to its name, allowing you unlimited number of emails sent each month, based on your number of contacts.
| Subscribers | Basic | Unlimited** | Premier* | Advanced*** |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0-500 Send Limit | $9 2,500 | $29 Unlimited | $149 Unlimited | $349 Unlimited |
| 501-2,500 Send Limit | $29 12,500 | $59 Unlimited | $149 Unlimited | $349 Unlimited |
| 2,501-5,000 Send Limit | $49 25,000 | $99 Unlimited | $149 Unlimited | $349 Unlimited |
| 5,001-10,000 Send Limit | $89 50,000 | $149 Unlimited | $249 Unlimited | $349 Unlimited |
| 10,001-15,000 Send Limit | $129 75,000 | $249 Unlimited | $399 Unlimited | $749 Unlimited |
| 15,001-25,000 Send Limit | $199 125,000 | $399 Unlimited | $499 Unlimited | Call or request quote online |
| 25,001-50,000 Send Limit | $299 250,000 | $699 Unlimited | $989 Unlimited | Call or request quote online |
| Over 50,000 Send Limit | Call or request quote online | Call or request quote online | Call or request quote online | Call or request quote online |
*Premier plan features
- Unlimited plan features
- Advanced link tracking
- Template management for teams
- Email design consultant
- Customer Success Manager
**Unlimited plan features
- Unlimited number of emails you can send
- Unlimited spam testing
- Unlimited inbox previews
- Advanced marketing automation
***Advanced plan features
- Advanced segmentation
- Activity-triggered journeys
- 1:1 email content
- Behavioral customer data
Constant Contact Review
Constant Contact is one of the oldest email marketing companies around – it’s been in business since 1996. Although perhaps the most well-known EMSP, Constant Contact has some pretty substantial limitations compared to many other services, depending on what you’re looking for.
Constant Contact covers the basics, but more advanced features like trigger-based messaging are absent. Pricing starts at $20 per month for 500 subscribers and unlimited sends. However, it charges for additional services that many other EMSPs include in the monthly pricing.
Follow this link to receive 60 days free.
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Read Our Full Review of Constant Contact
Price
Pricing for Constant Contact is on a per month basis. You can pay for 6 months or 12 months at a time to receive a discount.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month |
|---|---|
| 0-500 | $20 |
| 501-2,500 | $45 |
| 2,501-5,000 | $65 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $95 |
| 10,001-15,000 | $195 |
| 15,001-25,000 | $225 |
| 25,001-30,000 | $295 |
| 30,001-35,000 | $315 |
| 35,001-50,000 | $335 |
| 50,000+ | Call 855-783-2308 |
Constant Contact also offers an email marketing service called Email Plus. It includes email automation, online surveys, events management, online donations and more.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month |
|---|---|
| 0-500 | $45 |
| 501-2,500 | $70 |
| 2,501-5,000 | $95 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $125 |
| 10,001-15,000 | $195 |
| 15,001-25,000 | $225 |
| 25,001-30,000 | $295 |
| 30,001-35,000 | $315 |
| 35,001-50,000 | $335 |
| 50,000+ | Call 855-783-2308 |
Contactology Review
j2 Global, Inc., a global provider of Internet services which owns Campaigner email marketing service provider, acquired Contactology in July 2014. Contactology’s website is still functional but leads you to Campaigner’s services. For more details, read our full review of Campaigner.
ConvertKit Review
It’s difficult for us to review ConvertKit because unlike other companies, this one doesn’t display all of its features. What do we know? ConvertKit was built for bloggers, podcasters, service-based business owners and YouTubers.
We’re unsure if ConvertKit offers surveys, autoresponders, image hosting and other common features customers have come to want. If you’ve had experience with ConvertKit, please share with us what you liked and disliked in the comments below.
Emma Review
Emma boasts helping big name organizations like NPR, DISH, Tito’s Serta, Girl Scouts and more with their email marketing needs. Emma emphasizes the service end of email marketing and it shows in rave reviews of its customer service.
Its drag and drop email editor is easy to use and it offers full image integration from Facebook and Flickr, which could mean the world to a small business looking for free image hosting. With prices starting at $89 per month for 10,000 subscribers, Emma is significantly more expensive than some other services, but as you work up the pricing scale the prices become much more competitive.
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FireDrum Review
FireDrum offers a multitude of email marketing and automation services, from DIY (best for freelance to small businesses) to plans for marketing agencies and large companies. When you search its website, it can be overwhelming, because it has a wide variety of plans and services it offers for each plan.
The DIY plan starts at a free forever level, but it’s limited (only 100 subscribers and 500 emails per month), but the paid pricing levels are very competitive and include all the basic features you’ll need to get your email marketing up and running.
What’s great about FireDrum is the a la carte services offered if you don’t have time to take on the details, i.e. list assistance, HTML programming, campaign management, etc. All charge a fee, of course, but it’s a great option to have.
FreshMail Review
FreshMail’s paid plan is extremely affordable compared to similar EMSPs. You get a number of advanced features with an intuitive interface that makes the process simple and fun.
The downside of FreshMail? Since it’s based in the UK, its phone support hours are extremely limited. We’ve seen some excellent reviews about the high quality of its customer service.
FreshMail offers a 10% discount on its monthly paid plan if you pre-pay for 6 months and 15% for 12 months. Pay-as-you-go rates start at $30 for 5,000 emails.
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Google Groups Review
In 2013, Google rolled out a new Google Groups for Business platform but the focus is no longer email marketing. Today, this is a tool for improving online collaboration between team members, groups and communities who frequently interact in digital discussions. This product been removed from this article to make room for true competitors in this space.
INinbox Review
INinbox doesn’t let you do anything on its website without signing up for an account. We’re not impressed by this. We couldn’t even look at pricing without being asked to create a login account.
In the past, we’ve been impressed with INinbox’s free forever plan and low monthly prices. However, we’re unable to confirm these features now since it wants us to create a new account. We’ve also been disappointed with the lack of features provided by INinbox in the past. At this time, we can’t recommend this company.
JangoMail Review
JangoMail began in 1998 as an elegant solution to a complicated problem. How to pull data from multiple servers (some local, some halfway around the world) and assemble it into a single mass email? That feature is JangoMail’s unique claim to fame, although it incorporates many other features, including foreign language support, in-depth personalization options and fully customizable RSS to email conversion.
For all of JangoMail’s incredible feature options, it comes with a price. It is one of the more pricey services out there and probably better for larger businesses or marketing agencies (it offers pretty extensive agency features, including multiple-users).
Price is based on number of emails sent per month, rather than the standard number of contacts per month, so depending on your business needs you can end up spending a lot more than you would with its competitors. Pricing starts at $90 per month for up to 18,000 emails.
JangoMail has a 30-day free trial.
Mad Mimi Review
Mad Mimi doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the top guns when it comes to email marketing providers, but we think that’s okay. Sometimes less is more if you don’t want to wade through features you won’t use.
Geared toward a simpler approach, Mad Mimi offers what most small businesses need with a very affordable price tag. Its standard features are solid, with the exception of split A/B testing and template selection variety.
Yet it also provides a decent selection of apps/integrations, social sharing and a robust API, so it isn’t falling behind the technology times. MadMimi offers a modest free plan of 100 subscribers and unlimited emails sent, and its pricing starts at $10 for 500 subscribers.
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Omnistar Mailer Review
Omnistar Mailer has been acquired by AWeber, a competing email marketing service provider that’s growing in popularity and becoming a contender as one of the top services. Omnistar got its start in 1999 in the real estate industry and became popular for its excellent autoresponder features.
You can still access Omnistar Mailer through its original website for the time being, but all the links on that site drive you directly to AWeber. Check out AWeber to see how it compares to other services.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Review
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been around since 2000 and tags themselves as the future of marketing. While claiming to be from “humble” beginnings, this company now operates one of the more dominant email marketing and comprehensive marketing solutions on the market today.
Unfortunately, this growth into big business has created somewhat of an intimidating appearance for many smaller businesses seeking these services. But, if you are looking for a comprehensive marketing integration tool to put everything in one place and makes it easy to analyze all of your online marketing efforts, Salesforce Marketing Cloud may be perfect for you.
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Read Our Full Review of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Price
Call or complete its online email form. Unlike other email marketing service providers, Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides no pricing information online. It offers a number of different packages beginning with its Basic plan, and each step-up plan includes all of the features of lower tiered plans.
It indicates on its website that you can customize bundles based on your business needs, but it’s not clear how many specific features can be purchased a la carte.
SharpSpring Review
SharpSpring offers email marketing previously known as GraphicMail. SharpSpring is a young but popular marketing automation software solution that has received excellent reviews from its users so far.
What’s exciting is its behavior-driven features, which bring together personalized emails, autoresponders, analytics and more so you can drill down to each customer’s specific activities (translation: you can target them in the areas in which they engage the most).
Other EMSPs offer this feature as well, but customer behavior seems to be SharpSpring’s main area of focus. Still, it is so new that we haven’t been able to find much consumer feedback online, so check back with us for future updates!
SharpSpring offers a 15-day free trial.
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VerticalResponse Review
VerticalResponse has been in business since 2001, and it’s come a long way — especially with some excellent new features launched in the last couple of years: a free plan that has a surprising bang (for no bucks!), the addition of an autoresponder (free for a limited time) and a new API and developer program that gives small businesses even more marketing tools to expand their reach. If you are a not-for-profit 501(c)(3), you can apply for a free credit program.
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Read Our Full Review of VerticalResponse
Price
Below is the pricing for email marketing through VerticalResponse.
Free Plan
VerticalResponse now offers a pretty impressive free plan available to anyone with no limited time offer. You can have up to 300 subscribers and send 4,000 emails per month at no charge.
Monthly Subscriptions
For those looking to send emails more frequently or for those with larger email lists, you can purchase monthly plans, which include an unlimited number of emails sent. Monthly prices increase as you add more subscribers, but paying a bit more gives you some added perks.
| Number of Contacts | Basic* | Pro** | Pro+*** |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-500 | $11 | $16 | $196 |
| 501-1,000 | $22 | $32 | $212 |
| 1,001-2,500 | $33 | $48 | $228 |
| 2,501-5,000 | $55 | $80 | $260 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $83 | $120 | $300 |
| 10,001-25,000 | $160 | $232 | $412 |
| 25,001-40,000 | $250 | $363 | $500 |
*Basic Plan:
- Send unlimited emails
- Send automated follow-up emails to contact
- Award-winning phone and live chat customer support
- Remove VerticalResponse logo from your emails
- Create & publish multiple Landing Pages
**Pro Plan:
- Analyze campaigns by engagement, device, browser, domain & geography
- See heat maps of where your contacts are clicking
- Automate campaigns with autoresponders and email series
- Optimize campaigns with subject line testing
- Get 10 Test Kit credits per month
***Pro+ Plan:
- Work with an expert campaign strategist who will create and send emails for you
- Receive 1 expert-created promotional email per month
- Receive 1 expert-created newsletter email per month
- Receive 8 expert-created social posts per month
- Receive tailored reports and suggestions for optimization
How To Change Email Marketing Service Providers?
Let’s say you’ve decided you want to switch to another provider, such as from iContact to Constant Contact, or the other way around. How painful will the transition process be?
Export Your Subscriber List
Fortunately, any good email marketing provider should allow you to export your subscriber list. You can then import the subscriber list into your new email marketing provider. That’s the easy part.
Transfer Your Archives
You should also consider how you will move your newsletter archives so you do not lose this valuable content you have created over the years. The more difficult part, depending on how your website is set up, will be replacing all the sign-up boxes you have scattered over the web to gather sign-ups for your newsletter.
Setup Your Email Sign-Up Box
If you’re using a back-end driven, dynamically generated site such as a CMS (Content Management System — i.e. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) and you have a “block” or “snippet” for your newsletter sign-up box, you should be able to make one update and have it update across your website instantaneously. If you have more than one website, you’ll need to make this update for each website.
Design Your Newsletter
The last thing you’ll want to copy over is the design templates you use for your enewsletters. Typically you’ll have access to the HTML for these, so copying these over shouldn’t be all too difficult in most services, as most email marketing service providers provide flexible template editing options.
Email Marketing Terminology
As with any new topic, over time, these terms will quickly become second nature to you as you begin using and applying them. To help you out, we have prepared a comprehensive list of definitions that will equip you with the knowledge and expertise to implement successful email marketing campaigns.
- A/B (Split) Testing
- Application Programming Interface (API)
- Attachments
- Autoresponder
- Bounce and Bounce Rate
- CAN-SPAM
- Click-through Rate
- Email Marketing Service Providers (EMSPs)
- List Segmentation
- Opt-In/Opt-Out
- Open Rate
- Newsletter Archiving
- Responsive Design Templates
- Spam Score/Checking
- Subject Line
- Survey
- Text Version
- Trigger-based Messaging
- WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
If you have an email marketing term that you’re confused about or we didn’t capture in our list, leave us a comment below.
A/B Testing (Split Testing)
An Internet marketing technique that lets you test and see which elements of your email newsletter: subject line, text, graphics, design or layout, can be improved to increase your newsletter’s success rate. Some email marketing service providers include this feature to help you split test and give you results to find out which performs better.
Application Programming Interface (API)
Most popular Email Marketing Service Providers (EMSPs) now offer what’s called an API (or Application Programming Interface), which allows you to connect/integrate other existing software to the EMSP. Benefits include data sharing, better contact importing, better contact list management and analytic reporting capability and more. The options are numerous, depending on your needs and what type of API the EMSP offers. An example of an API would be Salesforce, a popular customer relationship manager (CRM) used for tracking leads. EMSP’s can use the Salesforce API to automatically send out campaigns to segments of your existing database, without having to import or export lists from other programs.
Attachments
Almost all EMSP’s do not allow attachments for a simple reason – they increase the probability of a given message being viewed as spam (as a result, the EMSP’s (and your) delivery rates may be affected). Attachments can also be flagged as computer virus files. For that reason, you’re better off using inline links in your newsletter email, which you can then link to a hosted file. When the user clicks the link, they are given the option to download the file. Not as streamlined as an email attachment, but much more likely to allow the email to reach its full audience.
Autoresponder
An autoresponder fires off an email to a subscriber automatically. A single autoresponder is most common – this typically just replies to a subscriber when they sign up. A sequential autoresponder is a little more advanced and allows you to schedule a series of predefined emails to be sent out on a schedule.
Bounce & Bounce Rate
A bounce is when an email is rejected by the recipient’s mail server. There are two types of bounces. A soft bounce is when an email is temporarily un-receivable due to a full mailbox or email size, and a hard bounce is a permanent fail to deliver. Emails that have hard bounces should be removed from your email database because they do not exist. Soft bounces, on the other hand, are okay to keep in your database, but you should keep an eye on them over time. Some EMSP’s will continue to try to send to soft bounce emails several times to attempt success (but not guaranteed). The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that bounce back on your email list. For example, if you have one email out of 10 that bounces back, you would have a 10% bounce rate. If your bounce rate is high, then your account could be flagged for having a large number of undeliverable emails.
CAN-SPAM
A term you might often hear thrown around is “CAN-SPAM” which stands for the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act – or “Canning spam” email. Signed into law in 2003 the law contains a series of email marketing guidelines enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to protect U.S. consumers. Most of these compliances are standard in EMSPs including having a mailing address in email campaigns and requiring subscribers to opt in so you shouldn’t have to worry about adhering to them (but you should be aware of CAN-SPAM to make sure you are not breaking the law).
Click-Through Rate
Just as the term states, the click-through rate is the percentage of how many people click on your email campaign. The click rate is used primarily in campaigns with a call to actions that encourage a subscriber to click on a link to buy, read more or sign up (it may be less important in general awareness campaigns). Some EMSPs like Mailchimp show you the industry average click-through rate so you can see how your campaigns compare to others.
Email Marketing Service Providers (EMSPs)
These are companies that provide email marketing services for companies to create, deploy and track marketing emails. There are a wide-range of services that offer a variety of different bells and whistles, so it’s important to get to know which is the best service for you and what you are trying to achieve. Read our full review of the best email marketing services.
List Segmentation
List segmentation is targeting messages to subsets of your subscriber base. Customer segmentation can be done using a variety of factors based on data you have captured from your newsletter subscribers when they sign up (like interests, location, etc.). If you have the time and resources, segmenting your lists is a great way to help establish a stronger connection via more relevant newsletters. A great use of segmentation is to resend messages to subscribers who didn’t open or click the first time.
Opt-In/Opt-Out
The term used for when a subscriber joins your email newsletter. The subscriber must be aware of joining your list before adding them by agreeing to receive email communications from you. Conversely, if someone wishes to remove themselves from your newsletter, you must legally have the option for them to “opt out” within the emails you send.
Open Rate
Similar to click rate, the open rate is much like the name states and is the percentage of opens from a single email campaign. Open rates are often used as a benchmark for success with higher open rates translating to better emails. Catchy subject lines (see below), frequency and timing of campaign can all affect the open rate, so it’s good to test out each to get the highest open rate possible.
Newsletter Archiving
This is the ability to save, or archive, your old newsletters. EMSPs differ in the way they handle this feature. Some offer to back up a certain quantity or volume of newsletters on their servers. Others offer export options that convert your newsletters into PDF or HTML files so you can download them and/or store them on your website. You need to keep in mind that there is an SEO advantage to archiving your own newsletters (DIY).
Responsive Design Templates
Given the popularity of smartphones, most email templates are now designed to adjust automatically for viewing on mobile, tablets and PC screens. There are also mobile-aware designs that are more basic in their design than their responsive counterparts. Ideally, mobile-aware designs render on all screens, but they are geared toward smartphone screens so they can get glitchy. Responsive design templates are the optimal choice these days as statistics show that consumers are increasingly opening their emails on the go through their smartphones and tablets. If you don’t have a good design that you know will render well on all screens, you’re risking losing a great opportunity to build and keep your customers. Use your EMSP to preview your email in smartphone mode or send a test and check it on your own device.
Spam Score/Checking
Finding out whether your subscribers actually got your email is important. If they didn’t, why not? Some EMSPs offer spam score utilities that help you determine the likelihood of your newsletter ending up in a spam box before you hit send. Spam tests help you optimize and clean up your email campaign before sending it.
Subject Line
The subject line is the string of text in the subject field of the email. It gives the reader an idea of what to expect and is one of the most important parts of your message. Think of the subject line as a “hook” to get a subscriber to open the email. While the subject line in traditional email is more informational, the subject line for email marketing should be catchy and engaging so it catches your audience’s attention. Subject lines should not contain any words that could be flagged as spam like “FREE” or over-use punctuation marks!!! As emojis become more popular, you are likely to see them used more frequently by marketers. However, emoji use may trigger a message to get caught in the spam filter. We have not decided yet whether these should be included in your email marketing best practices.
Here are some tips from our friend Amy Schmittauer of Savvy Sexy Social on how to get better performing subject lines.
Survey
Email marketing surveys help you capture visitor data. Typically, surveys will let you:
- Create public (anyone can answer) or private (only a specified subset of your subscribers can answer) surveys.
- Choose different answer formats – text boxes, radio buttons, drop-downs, etc.
- Redirect visitors to a custom thank you page upon completion of your survey.
- Export survey results to a file or spreadsheet for analysis (i.e. by sorting columns you can gauge responses based on different variables).
Text Version
There are some people who might choose to receive a text-only version of email because they have a device that does not support HTML. This is not as common as it used to be, as HTML is now the standard email format.
Trigger-Based Messaging
This lets you send messages based on your subscriber’s actions. It creates a more personalized interaction with your audience. Examples of trigger-based messages include a welcome email, a “happy birthday” message, a reminder to renew a subscription, a note that a new version of a product is available, a “we miss you ” note to a subscriber that hasn’t opened a newsletter in a while, etc.
WYSIWYG
Aka What You See Is What You Get. This is used to describe a web editor interface that lets you design newsletter templates using buttons similar to those found in a word processor such as Microsoft Word. Examples of buttons include bold, italic, using headings, a button to insert images, and more.
Which Will You Select?
Now that you are informed about many popular email marketing companies and all they have to offer, you can select one that will meet your business’ needs. Email marketing is a great way to drive sales and stay top of mind with your consumers, so it’s a worthwhile service to invest the time and resources (learn more in our Introduction to Email Marketing article).
We reviewed quite a few companies, but if for some reason the email marketing brand you’re looking for wasn’t reviewed, check the comments below where you’ll find that many of our visitors are posting their own reviews and opinions.
We also do regular audits to ensure all info provided is as up to date as possible.
Who do you use for your email marketing needs? What do you like/dislike about them?
Sources: [1] DMA, [2] HubSpot, [3] McKinsey, [4] DMA, [5] MarketingSherpa, [6] Campaign Monitor, [7] MyEmma, [8] emfluence marketing platform, [9] imagination
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393 Comments on "Email Marketing Services Reviews 2018: GetResponse vs AWeber vs MailChimp vs Constant Contact vs ConvertKit"
Thanks!
Thanks
May I ask – the 10 % discount we get by using your link… Does that allow us for a 1 month free trial period first? How long is the discount? For the first month? A full year? Or as long as we are customers at GetResponse. If I sign up for a 500-plan and then move to a 2500-plan, will the 10% discount follow along?
Would appreciate your answer ASAP, Thank you!
Constant Contact has changed their program and pricing structure as of about 1 year ago. The email service, including an unlimited library storage and stock images, is $20/month. It includes inbox preview (and always has). Instead of charging separately for every added software, they now have a package that includes online surveys, Facebook promotions and events management beginning at $45/month. The autoresponder feature has improved dramatically in more ways than I can outline here.
There are several more things inaccurate in your article. I recommend you do the research yourself. Since every review I have read recently is outdated, I wonder if some people’s research is just reading others’ reviews.
As a side note, I’m very aware of the use segments, however, have found that for most email marketing platforms, people cannot choose (or subscribe to) a specific segment, which is a function I need. For this reason I like to have multiple lists with the same contact subscribed to several of those lists.
If you are looking to expand it there are some nice solutions you have missed like: https://www.sendinblue.com, http://campayn.com and http://getdrip.com.
When you’re approaching customers for their email address, there needs to be an incentive to get customers to sign up. Otherwise, why would they? After all, we all get tons of spam. Why would someone willingly sign up for spam? Whether it’s a discount code, informative series of emails, or other special perks, you will attract more flies with honey.
This is one reason ebooks came about. Businesses were looking for ways to attract new customers through email marketing and began offering ebooks that the target audience would find useful. For example, a company that revolved around cleaning products might have offered a free ebook on keeping your home organized and tidy. Not only did it give them a chance to promote their products within the book, but also attract more customers to their email list.
My goal was to get people more involved in the newsletter and email campaign in general. I have found that surveys are a great way to get the audience involved. While I do already have limited surveys on some of my sites, the idea that an email marketing service provider would provide that with the email service makes a lot more sense to me. The surveys on the sites do great, but using surveys in emails seems like it would a lot more effective since it goes directly to the audience rather than trying to get them to do it on the site. I also like some of the other services GetResponse provides, but the surveys tend to stand out the most for me at this moment.
To me, it says a lot about a company if they offer the first month for free. You get to try the service and play around with your email marketing campaign a bit before you make any decisions that are going to cost you any money. That tells me the company has faith in their product. They think you will like it enough to stick around and keep using it once the free service period is over. I realize this is a marketing tactic too, but at least the company is letting the product speak for itself.
I have to say that I was overwhelmed by all the information. There was just so much I didn’t know about, such as being able to view how a newsletter will look across different email clients. There was just so much I hadn’t considered. However, I do feel that I have a better idea of what I do and do not need from such a service.
I look forward to viewing the email marketing comparison table to get a better idea of which company will work best for me. The information I share on my website is extremely time-sensitive so I will need a company that can handle a quick turnaround and get my newsletter to readers before the information is no longer useful.
What I mean is, we tend to forget that not everyone is tech savvy and I think that many email marketing services tend to forget that as well. I personally am not all that tech savvy, so what is going to be easy for you to use is not going to be easy for me to use. I offer a great service, but I may not always know how to use the tools that I need to in order to market it.
For me, ease of use is the big deal. I want to be able to get my information out there without having an IT degree. I also need to have the option to use surveys. My service is very interactive and I value the opinions of my customers (as any business should). Other than that, I want to pay for what I am using, not what I might use.
Over the course of my research, Constant Contact has been a name that has appeared over and over with good reviews and somewhat decent pricing. I haven’t quite settled on a choice yet, but I have to give them some consideration in light of their popularity. But then, I also have to make sure that they have earned a solid reputation, so my opinion can’t be based just on the frequency of mention. I don’t want to get caught up in a successful promotional campaign that promotes a company that my not be worthy of the mentions they get.
If you are creating a completely new document every single time, it isn’t so bad. But if you have regular, recurring messages that you send to your customers, expect trouble and hair-pulling, curse-laden tirades. For instance, you can’t copy last year’s notice of your annual Labor Day party and update the date to use again this year. I mean, you can try, but the type and graphics will jump all over the place and the fonts will change color, size and alignment without warning or explanation. With the huge amount of time it takes to update an old notice with new information, you might as well start from scratch.
So I’m here shopping for another email service, but this website says that the Constant Contact templates and interface are easy to use, I’m here to say that from my personal experience, the templates and interface for Constant Contact are not easy to use.
I’m hoping someone here can tell me if the interface and graphic controls are better with any of the other services. And I’m secretly hoping that I’m not the only one having this problem with Constant Contact.
I use around 6 social networking sites. For my social networking to be as effective as I need it be, I need to use those sites every day. That means I have to visit 6 sites a day and that’s before I ever even do any work. I’m not even social enough to appreciate the interaction. So, for me, being able to integrate my social networking with my email provider is something that is a must. If I’m going to pay for an email service rather than use a free one I don’t want to have to do everything manually. I want as much integration as possible and I don’t want to have to have a degree in technology to be able to use the service.
When we talk about these kinds of providers, are we talking about a service that just regularly sends emails like newsletters to people who already subscribe? Or is this service supposed to build you a library of subscribers? If it does, how does it do that without spamming people? I can’t imagine that anyone just puts their name on a list to be sent tons of random emails.
I’m sure I’m missing something here. Maybe I just don’t get it. I’m totally willing to put money into my business, but I’m not willing to risk my reputation to take a slim chance that this kind of service will actually benefit my business in some way.
It looks like I have the analysis tools I want without the hell my buddy went through with ConfusionSoft.
If anyone has good/bad experiences, I’m all ears.
TIA – Tcat
PS thanks for the great overview here on so many email service provider options.
1) Vertical Response (Table) – Newsletter Archiving = No
2) Vertical Response (Review) – Newsletter Archiving = Yes
Sorry for the confusion. Our bad. The table has been updated to reflect the correct information which is that yes, Vertical Response does offer an email newsletter service.
Thanks for your help and keep on rockin!
———–
MailChimp – Con’s
* It’s not quite as feature packed as some of its competitors.
Actually, we have more features than most in our segment:
http://www.mailchimp.com/features/
not to mention more integrations than most:
http://www.mailchimp.com/extras/
and an extremely thorough, well-documented and well-supported API:
http://www.mailchimp.com/api/
* For one, it doesn’t have the comprehensive reporting options some other email newsletter providers do.
We have a *lot* more reporting options than most.
our A/B testing reports (mailchimp.com/ab/) are patent-pending-yet-often-copied, we were the first to launch the one-click-inbox-inspector, we offer click heatmaps, worldmaps for opens, domain/ISP performance charts, and we even track tweets and re-tweets about your campaigns (mailchimp.com/twitter).
We were given beta access to the Google Analytics API, and are the only ESP listed at –
what reporting feature were you looking for?
* Importing of contact lists could be easier – the columns have to match up perfectly for the import to work.
Database columns really do need to match in order for data to be correct. I’m not aware of any email marketing service that would allow you to *not* perfectly match columns. If you’re importing columns that you don’t plan to use in MailChimp, you can skip them in our importing tool.
Additionally, you can just use other dB systems and import to MailChimp: Salesforce, Highrise, Batchbook, WuFoo, Formspring, Pearl CRM, and on and on.
* Importing templates based on existing website layouts would be a great add-on.
Actually, import-email-by-URL (and a ton of other email import options) are covered in this post:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/guide-to-all-the-email-template-options-in-mailchimp/
Grandma can even use Outlook to send a message to MailChimp, and we’ll convert it into a proper HTML email with inlined CSS and host her images (free) on our CDN.
* It takes some work to get your email template looking like you want it to.
If you’re not a coder, then yes, it’s going to take a little work. Unless you want to just use our template gallery, and plop in your content.
You can also try our automagic email designer, where we import design and content from your website:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/tag/automagic-email-designer/
or, if you’re a web developer, just code your own template then import it to MailChimp.
* Lack of campaign segmentation –
We have unbelievable segmentation options!
Because we integrate with so many e-commerce carts, you can segment by purchase activity:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/target-emails-by-purchase-activity/
Segment by ZIP code proximity:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/segment-your-list-by-zip-code/
You can even segment by subscriber activity and engagement level:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/segmenting-your-email-campaign-based-on-subscriber-engagement/
* …each time you mail a different campaign to the same list you need to start over. At the time of this writing campaign segmentations were not saved.
Mailing a different campaign to the same list is actually easy. Just replicate your last campaign. It’s true that we don’t store your list segments under the “Lists” tab like others might, but when you replicate campaigns, the segments are replicated too.
A comprehensive, unbiased ESP review is sorely needed, and if you guys can post a review that’s accurate and thorough, it would be extremely useful. You’re off to a great start here, but I think you should go back and revise some of the information on MailChimp.
Regards,
Ben C.
One of the reasons you seem to end up near the bottom is no phone support and chat and email are only available during certain hours. Maybe you should consider a pay per phone call service for emergencies. It seems to be hurting your rankings. I also have a question. We want to get moving quickly. and don’t have time to testdrive every single service we are considering.
If we have an outside agency — perhaps one of your experts — design a custom html template using your service, and say we decide MailChimp isn’t for us later, can we reuse that template in another service or is it sunk work/cost? I know you wouldn’t want us to switch, but being able to easily switch is one of our business requirements. Hopefully MailChimp would be so great we wouldn’t want to.
I have 7,000 subscribers and use Constant Contact. They are a little expensive but compare very well when you start getting bigger numbers of subscribers.
That said, I think the entire email marketing landscape will change once UserFox comes out. They are going to use smart triggers to send out emails.
Cheetahmail = 9
Responys = 10
Exacttarget = 7
Vertical Response = 3
Mail Chimp = 5
Silverpop = 8
E-dialog = 6
As someone who has been using ezines, as a subscriber and then created my own back in 1998, of course, there is no such thing as a perfect service. Especially for the price that most small business owners are seeking.
I remember using one-group and egroup, the predecessors to YahooGroups as well as Topica. You had very few options — discussion group or broadcast, and everyone marveled about their abilities. 🙂
There are also hosting companies that offer an ecommerce solution that some of my clients have used. And if your hosting company offers either Fantastico or QuickInstall (they’d be in your online control pannel), you can quickly add very basic programs (a good way to start) like DADA, PHPList, and a few others.
The problem with ESPs (email service providers) is that as soon as you start using them, you realize that you’d like to do “x” or “y”. You can suggest those changes to the company of course, but some are quicker to add features than others.
And as one of your commentors mentioned, getting your list from the company may be a difficult thing. However, you need to research and make sure that YOU can download your list, and all the information you’re compiling weekly so that you don’t lose such valuable real estate. Why weekly? In some cases (read the fine print) if someone complains that you are a spammer, even though you are of course not, they will close your account and YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING you spent your time building.
Customer service is a big key to using the program you use. There is nothing worse than having a problem and NOT getting an answer on time, or getting an answer at all.
For most, ease of use is very important, too.
Besides the online systems mentioned, there are many other oldies and goodies out there that people may want to try — simpler programs. And there are program you may want to purchase (own) if your hosting company allows you to do that. (Some do, some don’t, and some have very specific rules on how many emails can go out an hour, or at all in one time)
We’ve come very far with the options offered, and I’m sure things will look different 5 years from now. I look forward to watching the changes.
One thing they had done a really good job of was collecting email addresses. Small businesses often overlook the possibilities that having direct contact with their customers present. It is understandable, often small business owners are focused on a million other things at once and this seemingly small task is backburnered pretty easily. These people did a much better job and it was simply by making it easy for people to sign up. They had paper slips in the lobby of their store and a computer at the front desk where people could enter their information to win prizes and so forth.
The emails they had been sending were a little rough looking though. I took over the design and list organization duties of making the system go. I found Constant Contact to be a pretty capable program, with its strengths and weaknesses of course, and we had some great success in putting together very professional looking and productive email campaigns.
On the positive side for Constant Contact, I found the overall interface pretty simple and easy to understand. Moving from function to function and preparing the layout of the resulting email was not terribly difficult and the simplistic design of the Constant Contact website meant that you were not waiting for the pages to load too long in between refreshes.
Subscribing to the Constant Contact web service was also relatively inexpensive considering the volume of exposure you can achieve. We would set certain goals for all of the marketing investments we made in terms of return on investment and overall traffic generated. Constant Contact was one of the only things we did that never, ever did not return its cost and then some in revenue.
It also provided some great data in the form of feedback about individual campaigns. You could track how many emails were sent, how many were sent to spam folders, how many were actually opened, and even where people clicked on the email indicating interest in certain products and services. It was extremely valuable data to have so that we could tweak future emails to work more efficiently. One thing we found was that the timing of campaigns and when people get the email was crucial to getting the email opened. We never would have known that without the feedback.
All in all, I had a positive experience with it and I would recommend it to somebody else for their business.
The article actually provides both rankings and fairly detailed profiles on each individual provider. This makes it real easy to determine which are the most important factors and features for your situation and then simply choose the best options.
Of course, there are a number of other sites that give some good information and a few details. One of the things which really separate this from the pack is the fact that they actually give some solid pros and cons for each of the companies. In some cases, knowing the limitations of a provider are even more important, and that is definitely something you will get here.
This would be an excellent review to recommend for anyone looking. If you are truly serious about finding an email marketing service provider, than this is the place to look.
So, first things first, Constant Contact had some pretty limited style options. You had the option of starting from scratch or building off of a pre fabricated template. The templates had some nice design elements to them and were very serviceable, but there just were not very many of them. I feared that other Constant Contact users would have similar looking emails and our brand’s value would be lessened. I would have liked to see more variety to the templates, they really were time savers and they did look quite professional for the most part.
The other issue I had was with the interface itself. It was simplistic and relatively intuitive to work with, but in working with other programs, such as Photoshop and other types of applications, it would have a hard time communicating with them and made relatively simple tasks take longer than they really should have. I frequently would use the most basic program, MS Paint, to do simple image editing tasks, and moving images from Paint to the clipboard and then to the browser where I had Constant Contact open was a total nightmare sometimes.
Those two things were tough to deal with at times, but they were also largely workable. The thing that bothered me the most though, was trying to make changes to an almost finalized email design and having very minor adjustments result in large-scale disaster to the entire lay out. I have had this problem with my resume’ on Microsoft Word as well, but you make things so finely tuned, that even the slightest adjustment can send things completely out of whack and it can take hours if not days to figure out what really went wrong. With the timing of emails so important, it could lead to some pretty tight deadlines coming up and having a finicky program messing you up.
So, like I said, it is completely possible that these things have improved dramatically since I last worked with Constant Contact, but I think that a significant part of their target market are people who are looking for the lowest price they can find for that type of service, their budgets dictate it. So they purposely offer a stripped down email service program that can do what it needs to and work respectably.
They did not answer my emails with bugs for a long period. I canceled my subscription and requested that they send me my email list. They didn’t. Now, 4 months after canceling my subscription, they bill me, for nothing! My account is closed and canceled after all. This is outrageous!
Stay away from this site! You will lose a lot of money with them as I did, and unfortunately until my bank solves this problem, I am still loosing money (doing nothing!)!!!
We are a tech community who reviews Email Service Providers (ESPs) but we do not represent iContact directly so we cannot reply to this complaint. If you or any of our readers have feedback that can help us form better reviews and opinions for the community, please submit them. In fact, we welcome them! But, if you wish for a response from the service provider company, you should contact them directly for resolution. We wish you well and keep us posted on your tech software ventures.
For all of you needing an easy & uncomplicated email marketing software, I suggest you try RedCappi. I started using RedCappi about 2 months ago and it’s very easy to use. Interface is as simple as you can get, and the email creator is Drag & Drop and always in preview mode, so you see exactly what you are creating while doing it.
I have been super patient with the terrible templates and once a day email spam from CC for several years, but this is just crappy customer service taken to a whole new level.
* Don’t use iContact or Constant Contact.
* Use Mailchimp if you need free and have less than 2,000 active subscribers.
* Use Aweber or GetResponse if you want really minimalist, text-only emails, in a cheap and unremarkable but usable interface.
* Use Bronto or Contactology if you want specific integrations with CRM or your own software.
* Contactology or CakeMail if you are white-labeling email service.
* Use MailChimp or Contactology for API integrations, MailChimp on the Free <2000 subscriber end, Contactology on the Paying for Enterprise Edition (lots of email).
* MyEmma if you are a cat or require a picture of a woman’s face on your interface. Actually, just get a free CakeMail account, and upload the myemma graphic or your own woman’s face.
I’ve been using iContact for almost three years now with nary a complaint. Oh there have been rare instances of delayed sending. But I have never once contacted their customer service department and not gotten immediate and satisfactory help. Takes some time to navigate – don’t they all?
Thanks for putting all the pros and cons out there in detail.
So please do not use Vertical Response unless you want to get ripped off. Also a sales person named Christopher Li is not helpful and has no idea what customer service is about.
So in essence we are losing about 25% of our customer base if we continue to use them. If you don’t want to have the same problems. DON’T use Constant Contact – I have learned my lesson – also there templates are not very user friendly. Thanks to this website I will be looking at iContact or one of the other services. Hopefully, all of their marketing efforts will be for naught as people begin moving away from them to other better options.
It seems like there hasn’t been much chatter about Vertical Response recently, but from what I’ve read elsewhere they’re still a pretty solid choice overall.
I have sent email to my Yahoo clients, like iContact asked me to and I verified what happened: few answered and some emails I have tested went straight to spam (iContact said this was because my newsletters contained limited text).
After that – anything I have asked iContact about I receive no support for! But the money I’ve paid them has been entered in their accounts for many months and still there’s no answer to my request to let me use my Yahoo emails.
I have sent an email to iContact asking them to send me at least my database saved in their platform and they haven’t yet answered! This is no way to treat a client who puts thousands of USD ($) in your pocket!
I will post this non-stop until iContact understands that this is not a way to treat a client who is trying to resolve his needs calmly when they simply don’t care!
Just something to think about – would sure make some of our lives easier. Thanks web rockers!
WHEN MOMENTS COUNT, CONSTANT CONTACT SENDS YOU TO VOICE MAIL!!! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORK DAY NO LESS!!!
AAAGGGHHHH! This has happened to me far too many times. I am currently waiting as I write this review for them to call me, so I can get back into my account that I was kicked out of for no reason!!!
My client is waiting, and I’m stuck writing this review because I chose to use Constant Contact. Thanks a lot CC! You could qualify for government work!!!!
BKS
I also liked the fact that they provided a good explanation for the way they choose to organize this information. By explaining the fact that they have left off most of the common features that each provider offers make things a lot clearer. It also goes a long way towards adding to their credibility and honesty. For example, when the author says that all of these providers basically have the same types of relationships with the major ISP’s this shows that they care more for you. It also helps to clear up some confusion, since many providers advertise the fact that they have the best relationships.
The advice about archiving and SEO is also really good. I would imagine most folks have never thought about the implications of archiving their old newsletters and emails on the provider site.
The various categories are also very helpful. The author has taken the time to actually review each company on the basis of whether they would be a good entry level provider. It seems that they certainly really understand their audience and want to answer their common questions.
Yet, they do not stop there. If you are already using a provider, then you may be interested in switching to someone else. They include a number of helpful tips to make this transition easier and less painful. For example, using a content management system can help. They also point out that many users have added comments and other information about providers which have not been specifically reviewed.
Darren Spencer, CEO at HonestMail.net
Worth a look, if you are a small business and need good pricing without compromising or skimping. Plus I’d say it’s the easiest one I’ve tried… although MailChimp was very quick to learn as well.
From your review:
No image hosting – AWeber does not host your images for you. That means you’ll either need access to a hosting provider (such as the one powering your website), or an image hosting service such as Photobucket or Imageshack, in order to host (upload and save) your newsletter images.
No Social Media Integration with any of the networks. Not even Facebook.
No HTML editor – while you can’t import your website look and feel into your email newsletter template directly, you can copy and paste the source into the editor as a workaround.
At time of writing, you can’t auto-remove duplicates from your email lists, you’ll need to do this manually.
Every company on this list was carefully audited and reviewed in preparation for updating this article earlier this month, so it is indeed accurate as of April 2013. You are correct that aWeber does not offer limited social media integration with Facebook and Twitter which we have updated in our article. Thanks for the heads up. However, the other items that you mentioned are still true so far as we can tell from everything we read on aWeber’s website and conversations we have had with user. For example, while they do have more than 100 HTML email template designs, they do not allow for you to edit the html to more customize the look (with the exception of a simple color change or addition of logo). Further, we see no reference to any image hosting or ability to auto-remove duplicates in list management.
If you know otherwise please advise – we would be happy to update with any corrections that you or anyone provides. As you know, technology sometimes moves faster than we possibly can but we do our best to stay on top of things. It might take us a little time, but I promise we’re working on it.
Thanks for reading and providing feedback. We welcome reader feedback to keep us honest and current but also appreciate your understanding that we are only human 😉 Thanks!
Excellent question. I believe some of the providers we’ve reviewed do offer multiple list management within one account, the question is can you search all of them as well as each list individually. We’re currently researching this to get you details on who offers this and to what extent.
Customer Service and connection is important.
You might consider SnapRetail. It’s an email marketing solution that provides you with a dedicated marketing consultant with your subscription. Customer service and support is a top priority.
I’ve also been looking at VistaPrint, as the company uses them for business cards and VistaPrint has an e-mail marketing resource. I am looking for working with what I know/very simple integration of brand image across website, e-mail campaigns and working with ACT.
Anyone help on this?
I am looking at their payment chart right now and you can purchase as few as 300 credits or as many as 500,000 (the price per e-mail goes down the more you buy.) So I’m not sure what you mean by needing your list to be a certain size.
As for support, have you tried the online chat? I’ve never had to wait more than a minute or so for a response using chat. I recently has an issue escalated to the developers, and then I agree the support was slow.
So there’s room for improvement, but the pay-as-you-go price plan, in my opinion, is awesome.
I found the interface to be pretty simplistic, almost too much so, but it did allow for all the editing and manipulation of the content that I needed to make things both functional and aesthetically pleasing. There were some limitations in what we could do design-wise, but ultimately the value of the program came in the data we were able to retrieve from it in terms of measuring our success and finding out more about our core group of customers.
If you are not already, sign up for a free trial of one of these services and start communicating with your customers right away!
I love your comparison chart and reviews of the email marketing systems/products. I am considering EasyWebAutomation.com. I’ve heard that it is great for auto responders and having the shopping cart (which I eventually will need)all in one. Have you reviewed it or compared it to MailChimp and the other products? I’m new to all of this and would like to set myself up with the system/program that will serve me best without having to migrate my list in a year.
Thanks,
Rebecca