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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 Think the opposite, because it’s definitely far from outdated.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 of the top brands 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 providers as well as some other need-to-know information.
Article Overview
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.
To even stay in business, an email marketing service provider (EMSP) needs to have relationships with the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers) such as Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, etc. If they didn’t, emails would get blacklisted, and clients, unable to reach their customers, would not be happy.
EMSPs all advertise that they have the best “whitelisting” relationships with ISPs, but the truth is — the arrangements are more or less the same. The important thing is that the EMSP 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 if one user misbehaves. Constant Contact, Vertical Response, StreamSend and iContact (and typically the rest of the lot) take the same anti-spam measures.
Common anti-spam measures, in accordance with CAN-SPAM (an official anti-spam policy), 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.
These requirements got even stronger in May 2018 when the European Union introduced a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Compliance measures were put in place across the world to meet these requirements, strengthening data privacy for all consumers.
A Note On Newsletter Archiving And SEO
Many service providers, such as Constant Contact, offer a free or paid service that archives your old email newsletters on its website. This isn’t 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 EMSPs 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 EMSPs
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. Of these nine companies, we would recommend that you start with our top 3 overall winners to determine the best fit for your needs.
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.
Best Email Marketing Providers
We’ve chosen the top 3 picks for email marketing based on features, price, customer service, usability and more.
GetResponse Review
| #1 |  |
GetResponse’s user-friendly interface and email intelligence make it 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 perks include online surveys, inbox preview, autoresponders and social networking integration. It gets high marks for customer service, which goes a long way in our book.
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.
Best Email Marketing Service For Nonprofits
GetReresponse is our top pick for best for non-profits since they offer a significant (50% off) discount.
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 their annual 18% discount or 30% discount for two-years (prices below don’t reflect this discount, and you must pay ahead of time).
In addition to the plans below, GetResponse also offers an Enterprise-level plan for 100,000+ employees, but you must contact them for pricing.
GetResponse gives nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organizations a 50% off “forever” discount on all of its pricing.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month for Basic | Price Per Month for Plus | Price Per Month for Professional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up To 1,000 | $15 | $49 | $99 |
| Up To 2,500 | $25 | $59 | $119 |
| Up To 5,000 | $45 | $79 | $139 |
| Up To 10,000 | $65 | $95 | $165 |
| Up To 25,000 | $145 | $179 | $255 |
| Up To 50,000 | $250 | $299 | $370 |
| Up To 100,000 | $450 | $499 | $580 |
| 100,000+ | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
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.
iContact Review
| #2 |  |
iContact moves up to our second spot for the best email marketing service provider this year. iContact offers very competitive pricing plans for its basic services (starting at $12.75/month for 500 subscribers) with a wide array of features and a solid deliverability reputation.
Its premier offerings, however, seem to be its best selling point. With iContact’s marketing services 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 offers a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review Of iContact
Price
iContact offers two email marketing platforms — their basic services and XE services, which includes advanced marketing automation and email personalization as well as advanced ecommerce features.
Their 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.
iContact Basic
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month for Base | Price Per Month for Pro |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $12.75 | $23.80 |
| 2,500 | $30.60 | $54.40 |
| 5,000 | $50.15 | $88.40 |
| 10,000 | $75.65 | $134.30 |
| 15,000 | $109.65 | $198.90 |
| 25,000 | $143.65 | $253.30 |
| 35,000 | $220.15 | $406.30 |
| 50,000 | $279.65 | $508.30 |
| 1000,000 | $373.15 | $678.30 |
iContact XE
You can customize the following plans by contacting iContact.
- XE Essential Plan: $49.95/month for up to 5,000 contacts
- XE Premium Plan: $149.95/month for up to 25,000 contacts
- XE Enterprise Plan: $549.95/month for 100,000+ contacts
Coupon Code
iContact occasionally has seasonal coupon codes, visit our dedicated iContact coupon page
Constant Contact Review
| #3 |  |
Constant Contact is one of the oldest and best-known email marketing services around — it’s been in business since 1996. One of its biggest selling points is that it’s easy for beginners to get up and running in no time. The platform makes it easy to manage your contacts, segment mailing lists, use email templates, take advantage of reporting and analytics and much more.
However, to get advanced features, like trigger-based messaging and split A/B testing, you’re going to have to upgrade your pricing plan. These are features that many other services include in base plans — and the main reason Constant Contact doesn’t fall into our top 2 spots. It’s also expensive compared to our top 2 picks. But if you can fit it into your budget, it’s one of the easiest platforms to use.
Follow this link to receive 60 days free.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review Of Constant Contact
Price
Pricing for Constant Contact is on a per month basis. You get a 10% discount on the following prices if you pre-pay for 6 months or a 15% discount for 12 months. Constant Contact also offers an email marketing service called Email Plus which includes email automation, online surveys, events management, online donations and more.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month For Email | Price Per Month For Email Plus |
|---|---|---|
| 0-500 | $20 | $45 |
| 501-2,500 | $45 | $70 |
| 2,501-5,000 | $65 | $95 |
| 5,001-10,000 | $95 | $125 |
| 10,001-15,000 | $195 | $195 |
| 15,001-25,000 | $225 | $225 |
| 25,001-30,000 | $295 | $295 |
| 30,001-35,000 | $315 | $315 |
| 35,001-50,000 | $335 | $335 |
| 50,000+ | Call 855-783-2308 | Call 855-783-2308 |
Email Marketing Service Comparison Table
If you are confused by the terminology we use in the table below, 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 on the table and use your arrow keys to scroll across.
| Company | 1st: GetResponse | 2nd: iContact | 3rd: Constant Contact | Best For Small Businesses: Benchmark | Best For Large Companies: Pinpointe | Best For Ecommerce: SendinBlue | Best For Overall Value: Mailigen | Best Free Plan: MailChimp | ActiveCampaign | AWeber | Campaign Monitor | Campaigner | ConvertKit | Emma | FireDrum | FreshMail | JangoMail | Mad Mimi | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | SharpSpring | VerticalResponse |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company | 1st: GetResponse | 2nd: iContact | 3rd: Constant Contact | Best For Small Businesses: Benchmark | Best For Large Companies: Pinpointe | Best For Ecommerce: SendinBlue | Best For Overall Value: Mailigen | Best Free Plan: MailChimp | ActiveCampaign | AWeber | Campaign Monitor | Campaigner | ConvertKit | Emma | FireDrum | FreshMail | JangoMail | Mad Mimi | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | SharpSpring | VerticalResponse |
| Free Plan | None | None | None | Unlimited subscribers, 250 emails/month | None | Unlimited subscribers, 300 emails/day | None | 2,000 subscribers, 10,000 emails/ month | None | None | None | None | None | None | Up to 100 contacts & 500 emails/month | None | 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 24 months pre-paid) | $12.75 (500 subscribers and 12 months pre-paid) | $17 (500 subscribers and 12 months pre-paid) | $13.99 (600 subscribers) | $42 (5,000 subscribers, 75,000 emails and 6 months pre-paid) | $25 (up to 40,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $8 (500 subscribers and 12 months pre-paid) | $9.99 (500 subscribers) | $9 (500 contacts) | $19 (500 subscribers) | $9 (500 subscribers) | $19.95 (1,000 subscribers) | $24 (1,000 subscribers) | $89 (10,000 contacts) | $5 (up to 500 subscribers) | $14 (up to 1,000 subscribers) | $90 (18,000 emails) | $10 (500 subscribers) | Unavailable | $450 (1,500 subscribers) | $11 (500 subscribers) |
| Up to 2,500 Subscribers | $17.50 (24-month pre-paid) | $30.60 (12-month pre-paid) | $38.25 (12-month pre-paid) | $31.99 | Unlisted | $25 (up to 40,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $20 (12-month pre-paid) | $29.99 | $39 | $29 | $29 | $29.95 (up to 3,500 subscribers) | $41 (up to 3,000 subscribers) | $89 (10,000 contacts) | $20 | $23 | $90 (18,000 emails) | $16 | Unavailable | $650 (10,000 subscribers) | $33 |
| Up to 5,000 Subscribers | $31.50 (24-month contract) | $50.15 (12-month contract) | $55.25 (12-month pre-paid) | $51.99 | $42 (6-month pre-paid) | $39 (up to 60,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $32 (12-month pre-paid) | $49.99 | $69 | $49 | $49 | $49.95 | $64 | $89 (10,000 contacts) | $35 | $41 | $90 (18,000 emails) | $27 | Unavailable | $650 (10,000 subscribers) | $55 |
| Up to 25,000 Subscribers | $101.50 (24-month contract) | $143.65 (12-month contract) | $191.25 (12-month pre-paid) | $164.99 | $135 (6-month pre-paid) | $66 (up to 120,000 emails, unlimited subscribers) | $96 (12-month pre-paid) | $189 | $179 | $149 | $199 | $149.95 | $166 | $369 | $125 | $131 | $144 (for 100,000 emails) | $89 | Unavailable | Contact Sales | $160 |
| Free Trial | 30 Days | 30 Days | 60 Days | Free Plan | 15 Days | Free Plan | 30 Days | Free Plan | 14 Days | 30 Days | 5 or less people | 30 Days | 14 Days | None | Free Plan | None | 30 Days | Free Plan | Free Demo | 15 Days | Free Plan |
| Customer Service | Live Chat 24/7; Email | M-F 8am-8pm EST via Phone & Live Chat; Email | M-Th: 8am-10pm; F: 8am-9pm; Sa: 10am-8pm EST via Phone & Live Chat | 24/7 Live Chat, Email, Phone | M-F: 9am-6pm EST for Phone, Live Chat, Email | Phone, Email | 24/7 Live Chat, Email, Phone | Live Chat M-F: 9am-5pm EST; Email 24/7 | Phone, Email, Live Chat | Phone, Live Chat: M-F 4am-8pm & Wknds 9am-5pm EST | 24/7: Email; Phone Support Only with Top Plans | 24/7 | Open a Support Ticket | Phone, Email | M-F 2-10am Phone; M-F 7am-11pm & Wknds 8am-8pm GMT Email | 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 | |
| Image Hosting | 1GB | 5MB | 1GB or 2GB | 10MB (upgrade to unlimited for $5/mth) | Unlimited | Yes, but unlisted | 1GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 50MB | N/A | Unlimited |  | | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1-100GB | | 25MB (free) |
| RSS Feed Integration | | | Coming soon | | | | | | | | | N/A | | | | | | ||||
| Built-in SMS (Text) Messaging | Integration Only | Integration Only | Integration Only | Integration Only | | | | Integration Only | | N/A | | | | ||||||||
| Surveys | | | | | | Integration Only | | | Integration Only | Integration Only | Integration Only | Integration Only | N/A | Through Survey Monkey Integration Only | Integration Only | | Integration with Survey Monkey Only | Through 123 Contact integration | Integration Only | | |
| 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 | | | | | | | | | |
| Private (Dedicated) IP Address | | $28.95/month | $50/month | | | | | | N/A | | |
Our “Best For” Email Marketing Reviews
Now that you have an idea of what EMSPs can offer you and our picks for the overall best 3 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:
- Nonprofits: GetResponse
- Small Businesses: Benchmark
- Large Companies: Pinpointe
- Ecommerce: SendinBlue
- Overall Value: Mailigen
- Free Plan: MailChimp
Best For Small Businesses: 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 unlimited subscribers and 250 emails 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 setup 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. 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. Benchmark also gives you the option of upgrading image hosting from 10MB for free to unlimited for $5/month. Nonprofit 501(3)(c) organizations get a 25% discount on all services.
| Number of Contacts | Emails Per Month | Price Per Month |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited | 250 | Free |
| 600 | Unlimited | $13.99 |
| 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 an 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.
Try Pinpointe’s 15-day free trial (no credit card required).
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Price
Pinpointe offers 10% off the following prices if you pre-pay for 6 months.
| Number of Contacts | Monthly Number of Emails Send Limit | Price Per Month |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 75,000 | $49 |
| 10,000 | 150,000 | $74 |
| 25,000 | 375,000 | $150 |
| 50,000 | 750,000 | $245 |
| 75,000 | 1,112,000 | $365 |
| 100,000 | 1,500,000 | $480 |
| 200,000 | Call | $898 |
| 200,000+ | Call | Call |
Read Our Full Review Of Pinpointe
Best For Ecommerce: SendinBlue Review
Originally designed for online merchants, SendinBlue has made great strides (60,000 global customers) since launching in 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 toward the customer sales process. SendinBlue also stands out for its free plan with unlimited contacts and 300 emails per day.
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. Some big features for SendinBlue include marketing automation (send target emails based on contact’s activity), email heatmap (know where customers click most) and dynamic list (create lists that are updated every 24 hours based on filters).
Learn more in our interview with SendinBlue CMO, Amalia Bercot.
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Price
| Email Plan Name | Free | Lite | Essential | Premium Silver | Premium Gold | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emails Per Month | 300/day | 40,000 | 60,000 | 120,000 | 350,000 | Tailored Volume |
| Price Per Month | Free | $25 | $39 | $66 | $173 | Custom |
Read Our Full Review Of SendinBlue
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.
Try Mailigen’s 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
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Price
Mailigen offers significant discounts off of the following prices if you pre-pay for 12 months. Check out their website’s sliding price scale to see more pricing options. There is a 25% discount for nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations.
| 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 most popular choices for email marketing software, partly because it offers the best free plan compared to all other services. With the free plan, you get 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month, free forever.
MailChimp has a simple and fun interface and a lot of features for beginners and budget-conscious users. Some of MailChimp’s latest additions include shoppable landing pages, enhanced segmentation and tagging, postcards and native integrations through their tool “Connected Sites,” which includes WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and many other sites.
In 2019 MailChimp added new features that several of the big-timers offer, including behavior-based triggered automations, social post scheduling and organic social posting, marketing CRM and the ability to apply new contact tags in landing pages.
Pros | Cons |
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Read Our Full Review Of MailChimp
Price
MailChimp offers the best free plan for 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 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. You can add Pro to your plan for $199 per month. Pro provides analytics tools to help grow your business.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month for Essentials | Price Per Month for Standard | Price Per Month for Standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | $9.99 | $14.99 | n/a |
| 2,500 | $29.99 | $49.99 | n/a |
| 5,000 | $49.99 | $74.99 | n/a |
| 10,000 | $74.99 | $99 | $299 |
| 15,000 | $129.99 | $159 | $349 |
| 20,000 | $159 | $189 | $399 |
| 25,000 | $189 | $219 | $449 |
| 30,000 | $219 | $249 | $499 |
| 50,000 | $259 | $299 | $599 |
| 100,000 | n/a | $499 | $699 |
| 200,000 | n/a | n/a | $1,099 |
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 |
|---|---|
| 5,000 | $150 |
| 10,000 | $200 |
| 25,000 | $250 |
| 50,000 | $500 |
| 75,000 | $750 |
| 200,000 | $1,000 |
| 375,000 | $1,875 |
| 2,000,000 | $2,500 |
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 | Campaigner | ConvertKit | Emma | FireDrum | FreshMail | JangoMail | Mad Mimi | 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.
Also, 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.
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.
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.
Aweber acquired Omnistar Mailer, a previous competitor in this space.
Check out AWeber’s 30-day free trial.
Pros | Cons |
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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.
Campaign Monitor has a free trial if you’re sending to five people or less.
Pros | Cons |
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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.
It also offers a 15% discount for nonprofits.
| 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
Campaigner Review
Campaigner has reasonable pricing and includes 50mb CDN, media/image hosting, A/B testing, social media integration and autoresponders at no additional cost. And its award-winning customer service team is known for reliable tech support.
While Campaigner has been a top choice for small businesses for years, their user interface hasn’t kept up with their competitors, and customers report that the system has become too buggy and slow.
Campaigner acquired StreamSend in 2017. j2 Global, Inc. (owner of Campaigner) previously acquired Contactology in 2014.
Try a 30-day free trial of Campaigner.
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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.
| Number of Contacts | Price Per Month |
|---|---|
| Up to 1,000 | $19.95 |
| Up to 3,500 | $29.95 |
| Up to 5,000 | $49.95 |
| Up to 10,000 | $79.95 |
| Up to 15,000 | $99.95 |
| Up to 25,000 | $149.95** |
| Up to 50,000 | $299.95** |
| Up to 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 occasionally has seasonal coupon codes, visit our dedicated Campaigner coupon page.
ConvertKit Review
ConvertKit is specifically designed for bloggers, podcasters, service-based business owners and YouTubers to help grow your audience and customers.
With ConvertKit’s features and visual automation builder, you can organize your subscribers based on their interests and activity and send them personalized emails. They also have customizable forms, email and live chat support, and over 80 integrations, including Zapier, Shopify and WooCommerce.
ConvertKit offers a free 14-day trial (no credit card required), and their pricing starts at $29 per month for up to 1000 subscribers. They also offer a 30-day refund.
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. 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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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.
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, except 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.
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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.
Pros | Cons |
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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, previously known as GraphicMail, 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.
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. It has launched some excellent new features in the last couple of years including a free plan, 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.
Pros | Cons |
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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 EMSPs 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 it 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.
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 risk 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.
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
Some people 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, insert images and more.
Does Email Still Reign King? (Video)
Is email marketing still effective? Watch this video to summarize why you should be doing email marketing (if you’re not already) and some additional tips on what to look for in an EMSP.
Which Will You Select?
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.
Who do you use for your email marketing needs?
Sources: [1] DMA
Disclaimer: This website contains reviews, opinions and information regarding products and services manufactured or provided by third parties. We are not responsible in any way for such products and services, and nothing contained here should be construed as a guarantee of the functionality, utility, safety or reliability of any product or services reviewed or discussed. Please follow the directions provided by the manufacturer or service provider when using any product or service reviewed or discussed on this website.
I would like to know how good is it in comparission with all of these which are well known. Thanks.
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
Campaigner botched the sign up and their templates look quite different in the set up than they do when you actually mail them.
Two strikeouts out of the “Top 3 2012 Winners”
As for Get Response, this is the first we have heard of this incompatibility with IE and their templates so we have followed up with them directly and are conducting our own research through third parties for more information on this and will report back/update our article with any updates. Thanks for letting us know – our user feedback means a lot to us.
Thanks again for the info – really cut down my leg word…errr key strokes? 😉
Personally, I found the comparison table to be quite helpful. Anything like this that is large enough to require its own separate page means that there is a lot of information to be had if used properly. Not only does it include all of the pricing and features data which you would expect, but the author also clearly seems to be committed to regular updates.
Another thing which really makes this article a cut above the rest is the fact that much of the reasoning for what is included in the tables and the reviews are explained in very clear language. To me, this was very helpful. Knowing that all of the providers have certain things in common makes it that much easier to focus on the differences and helps make comparisons quicker and simpler.
It seems like GetResponse is a solid modern choice since it integrates social networking and such. The autoresponder is a given, but I think being able to conduct surveys is a really nice option.
I have to say that I never heard of iContact or Campaigner before now and they both even outranked Constant Contact. With icontact, the custom html and design features are a great plus. In fact, I kind of wondered why Constant Contact did not have it at the time I did their free trial. Campaigner is also worth a try at such a bargain. Whenever I see $10 for something, I always take a second look.
This article attempts to make this decision much easier for you. There are a number of individual company reviews that give you an excellent overview of the email marketing service provider climate. Lest you think that these will all be glowing reviews just aimed at driving you to their individual sales page, no! There are positives and negatives listed, as well as what types of services they offer.
The best way to use this article is to start with the terminology. Learning this will give you a better handle on things. You will then be more familiar with how powerful these services are. Then, identify which features are the most important for you and your business.
I guess you have not tried their email customization. It has a major flaw that other providers don’t have: in the email they correctly insert the first name of the recipient (e.g. “Dear Mary”), but when Mary clicks on the link that says “click here to view email as a web page” they can’t do the customization, they insert “John” for everyone, so Mary sees “Dear John”.
No matter how good the service is or how effective it can be, it will not make any difference whatsoever if the end user does not know how to make the most of it. This is where customer service and support comes in as perhaps the single most valuable component when measuring these providers against one another. A more simplistic service that provides a free manner of learning how to use it will be far more valuable in the short term to a small business owner that is just getting started. Spend the extra money on the people in the know, it just works.
I wanted a free option, but could not find one. Google Groups probably was not available at that time though, so this is great. I’m so glad that I stumbled onto this post because I am a small business. I only have a small opt in list. I hope it grows, but to be honest, that might take a few years. This is only my side business. I have a real world job, and not a lot of money to invest in my business, so this is going to just work so much better for me.
The only thing that is a little bit challenging is the fact that everyone must have a Google account. So many people do these days that it might be workable though.
Embedding the email archives on our website is one of the best features of the plan, since it allows our users to look up information that was sent out in earlier mailers, and we have a file of all the campaigns we sent out. Unlimited image hosting is another perk for our business, since we can upload everything we need right through the service.
The winning part of the service that helped us the most was the Google Analytics integration. Using this tool, we were able to see which campaigns were the most helpful and most popular as far as bringing in web traffic (and thus, ultimately, new customers). Through the work that we put into it, we now have a much larger network and business is growing. And although we now have to pay for email service because we have too many contacts, we still opted to stay with MailChimp.
When I amassed about three or four hundred emails, I decided to get more organized with my email marketing efforts. Constant Contact was one of the first service providers that I came across for doing what I wanted to do. I obtained a free trial and simply took off from there.
Almost overnight, my emails went from looking hokey and amateurish to very professional and it seemed to get better and better every week. It provided me all the tools I needed to develop a list of customers and see what they responded to in order to streamline my efforts and get more efficient with each email.
I mean she has literally built an empire on designing low calorie recipe swaps for the types of foods you enjoy at restaurants and comfort foods that you usually can’t eat on a diet. She has been sending out this stylish, well copy written newsletter for at least 7 years that I know of. That’s when I first signed up for it, and I still get it today.
I’ve taken some of her recommendations and tried some of her foods. I have always been in shape, but I want to maintain it my whole life. Now also, I want to also lose about 5 to 10 pounds of baby weight, or maybe just somewhere around 7 pounds. I made sure that the newsletter stopped going to my junk folder and that I started reading it again several months ago. She built a whole business on her website and newsletter.
I used to use mailchimp but I’ve found Market Mailer to be much much cheaper. Personally I prefer their email marketing system as well – their editor just seems more intuitive.
It turns out that they froze my account because of high rate of undelivered mail. I understand their need to fight spam, but I object to their method.
First of all, they should have sent an email, attempt a discussion, or seek some sort of resolution BEFORE freezing the account! I find their action extremely heavy-handed and unacceptable. (We provide seminars to regional trucking shows, which return once every 12-18 months, so it is quite normal that a mailing list from 2 shows ago, especially considering that truckers are not the most “stable” and computer-savvy people, would have a large number of undeliverable addresses!)
I was totally offended by the discussion with their “customer care” agent, who started to lecture me about how to run my business.
I found them arrogant, and useless. The agent made it sound that I had to be grateful for having a chance to try their product. As far as I am concerned, I have no use for callous providers like this…
100% useless!
Too bad though that there was no customer service over the weekend. I am sure it was irritating. I am pretty new to it myself but my customer care agent already kind of lectured me on the source of my list and its current value. Maybe you could try smaller batches next time first? Or maybe there are other ways of cleaning a list? Bet you could even outsource this process?
I wrote a long explanation and confirmed that their competitor still viewed all of these as valid emails without success. I gave up, canceled my CC account and returned to the competitor.
Customer service was friendly, but could not deviate from the script. I understand the need to control spam and fully support that, but cannot deal with a company that makes up the rules as they go.
33% of all email addresses change every year. That means that 1/3rd to 2/3rd of your list that has not been emailed to in 2 years, would be HARD bounces. It is imperative to send to customers/clients/addresses at least 1 time monthly, minimum, to engage in Best Practices.
Sometimes the ESP’s purposefully keep a dead email address in your list as a marker, so they know to block your WHOLE list because the HARD bounced email addresses were not taken out of the database.
ON a whole other level you can go to a company like mobileSTORM, that not only assists a company in sending to your opted-in email data base but also assists their clients in managing their messaging…not to mention the awesome ability to have a fully integrated platform that does mobile and email!
While putting together the email it was impossible to correct the line spacing and centering glitches without going into the HTML. Since I am an interior designer, not a website designer, HTML is not my area of expertise. Moreover, each of the 5 numbskulls I spoke to swore they had fixed the problem (“I don’t see any problem on my end”, doncha just love that?) and then the same issue was present in the preview.
In trying to reach customer service, I was on hold 3 days in a row for longer than 20 minutes. When the email finally went out, the fonts and colors had changed, it looked terrible, when it posted to FB it showed a LinkedIn thumbnail (“Duh, how did that happen?”) and their response was for me to delete the post from FB. Oh, and when it posted, it screamed “Constant contact” in the first line. I AM NOT PAYING TO ADVERTISE CONSTANT CONTACT. I AM PAYING TO ADVERTISE MY BUSINESS.
In every one of my previous emails with RatePoint, I had more than a hundred Likes and Comments on FB, after this one I had….ONE COMMENT and ONE LIKE (that was me), so effectively my rate of return dropped more than 100%.
I think CC sucks. Looking elsewhere. The most obvious downside for me on iContact was that they were only open M-F, so if there is a problem you are stuck waiting for them till Monday morning, when presumably their wait time is going to be lengthy. and who needs to lose 2 days? Never got any further than that with them, considering vertical response.
There’s a yellow bar that creates a header area in the e-mail, and it is apparently impossible to remove (tech support said so after three days, the first two people didn’t know whether it could be done).
What Constant Contact does not do at all – nada, zilch — is provide any facility for subscribers to Change their email address or any of the other contact information that Constant Contact can collect.
In a competitive ISP environment and an economy in which people move often, this comparison would have been much valuable if you had included the ability, or lack thereof, for the subscriber to change their own contact information.
Bottom line, if they can’t handle a simple thing like accommodating a new customer’s sign in…how can they be trusted with my company?
Geesh!
If an email was incompatible with Outlook’s default “email client/spam filter/ISP” settings that would obviously be bad. This is the same thing.
Anyone who doesn’t pay attention to things like this should stop clogging up junk email boxes with your unread email blasts.
Does anyone else have experience with this?
I spent a week designing a fancy email newsletter on their service. I thought the features and the price were great. I had been doing my own designs on software that allowed me to design a newsletter and do bulk mailing.
I thought that for the price & features that Vertical Response would be a better choice. Understand, I am not a computer illiterate. I design websites, work in Photoshop, etc. so I know my way around this arena.
I found their design templates to be bulky and non intuitive and although they have pretty good basic phone support , they rely heavily on web based tutorials and videos to get you up to speed. That’s all great if you have the time to spend watching web videos but I need to get my newsletter out on time and want to spend time designing and NOT watch their tutorials to get answers to simple questions that might take one minute of a tech support persons time.
There system allows you to preview your emails easily and even send test emails to yourself for no extra charge BUT….and this is HUGE…if you have customized your recipients salutation, like Hi Joe, you have to use a merge field code. No biggie. You just insert the proper merge field info in the design template….BUT when you send the test email you can’t see if the system picked up the code properly. You have to send out a real email to confirm this.
Big mistake on my part. I sent out my whole 3000+ list and the merge field custom salutation was not picked up. So each recipient received an email that said:
Hi {FIRST_NAME},
Very embarrassing I must say. Tech support told me that the merge field had been improperly formatted but I had used the one inserted from their design program. Thinking that it was fixed I sent out some more emails the next day but…nope…same problem.
I called tech support, asked to speak to a supervisor, and, you guessed it, he was in a meeting.
So overall bad service, email tech requests went unanswered, the interface is clunky and unintuitive, and basically I got the feeling that no one there really cared.
I guess that’s why people pay the big bucks for Constant Contact.
{{ whatever }}. You should be ashamed of yourself for cut and pasting their malarky and escalate the situation to your own supervisor.Asking for a supervisor is really lame too. The adult equivalent of lying to a teacher about someone else to deflect your inability to assume responsibility.
This comment posting makes me think a lot less of you.
Good day.
I am doing my marketing plan and project my email list to grow from 3000 to 36,000 over five years.
I would like to start with one service and stick with it. But this does not seem to be the right thing to do because since I am starting out the expensive services are too expensive for startups.
Vertical Response seems to have poor customer service. I don’t care if this thread has only one negative experience recorded. They still did not fix the problem.
ConstantContact is now to big to care about a small business like me, so I won’t try them.
Given the above input information, what path would you recommend for a small, caution startup with an extremely limited budget and a desire to work with one email marketing company in a long term relationship.
Thank you
Swiftpage is also fully integrated into ACT! by Sage, Sage Saleslogix and SageCRM.
I have a list of about 5000-6000 subscribers.
I want most a per subscriber/unlimited email service which has a great, intuitive interface, lots of templates, and the best deliverability. Also, since I’m moving from topica to this next service, I don’t want to have to have my list, which is 15 years old now, to have to re-subscribe. Lots of people neglect to do this, whether because their on vacation or just overwhelmed like many by the volume in their inbox.