Best Email Marketing Software for Small Business in 2024

Sending emails remains one of the most effective ways to reach your customers and market your products. Regardless of the size of your business, you can use emails to offer your customers new products, discounts, and other services from the company. Email marketing can also help you acquire new customers, increase your campaign’s click-through rates, and drive sales.

With email marketing software in place, you can do so much more than simply send emails to your customers. Small business owners like you, as well as marketing teams, often use email marketing software for a variety of different purposes, from managing a growing list of email subscribers to creating segmented lists for more targeted, relevant emails and creating customized email templates. Also, an email marketing solution comes in handy in tracking the status of the emails you have sent, allowing you to see whether they have been received and read by the recipients.

To help you choose the best email marketing software for small business, we prepared this buyer’s guide where we discuss in detail the product’s key features, benefits, and other important factors that you should consider before buying one.

Before picking an email marketing software for your small business, signing up for a free trial can help you get to know what each solution has to offer. This will also give you the opportunity to run a test drive of your chosen software product and see how it fits well with your business. Also, trying out a few solutions can give you a better understanding of how business email marketing software works.

Based on our SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating, here are some of the top email marketing platforms in the market today: Freshmarketer, HubSpot Marketing, Maropost Marketing Cloud, MailerLite, vcita, Omnisend and Wix ShoutOut.

For small businesses that don’t have enough budget and resources to run large-scale marketing campaigns,  email marketing software for small business alone can drive impressive results when it comes to improving ROI and appealing to different segments of your target audience. Regardless of the type of business that you have, this piece of technology provides a cost-effective way of broadening the reach of your marketing campaigns. Here are some specific scenarios where email marketing software is most needed:

• Startups looking to save costs on marketing campaigns. For startup businesses, the first thing to consider is attracting customers and finding a way to retain them for a long time. By sending targeted email campaigns, startup businesses can easily turn prospects into buyers. An email marketing software makes this a possibility, enabling businesses to send meaningful emails and build a loyal customer base.
• Small businesses looking to improve relationships with customers. Small businesses use email marketing solutions to form a stronger bond and relationship with their customers. Through these systems, you can create relevant and engaging content that can capture the attention of your customers. In turn, you can build your credibility with your audience and make them look forward to hearing from you on a regular basis. An email marketing software allows you to create a variety of email content, from promotions to discounts and other informative posts that can drive traffic to your site.
• Retail businesses that need to increase their sales. Increasing sales is the primary goal of retail businesses using email marketing solutions. By creating strategic marketing campaigns, retail owners can effortlessly convert their subscriber list into buying customers. This is made possible by email marketing software, which allows retailers to create personalized and targeted offers to their customers.
• Ecommerce businesses and freelancers who need to grow their followers and subscribers. Ecommerce businesses and freelancers find email marketing solutions valuable for their wide range of marketing functions, especially their ability to build and provide a list of customers that can be the target of their marketing campaigns. With a list of customers at your disposal any time, you can easily reach your audience even if you lose access to other marketing channels.

• Freshmarketer. Freshmarketer is a marketing automation platform with a range of email marketing capabilities. It allows you to deliver professional-looking and targeted email campaigns to your customers.
• HubSpot Marketing. HubSpot marketing offers plenty of email marketing tools, including bulk emails, a drag-and-drop email editor, and an extensive template library that you can use to create marketing content. The software also provides up-to-date contact list and subscriber preferences.
• Maropost Marketing Cloud. Maropost Marketing Cloud is an email marketing platform that allows you to send personalized emails to your customers. It also has email segmentation and scheduling features that you can use to deliver relevant marketing content based on unified customer data.
• MailerLite. MailerLite offers email marketing tools to help you reach and grow your audience faster. It also lets you track the performance of your campaigns across multiple marketing channels.
• vCita. vCita is another email marketing solution that helps you create appealing and engaging marketing content using a variety of customizable email templates. The solution also comes with automation tools that prompt recipients of your emails to perform strategic and revenue-generating actions for your business.

You can also check out our top 20 email marketing software to see a more detailed list of products. To help you pick the solution that best suits your business, we included an in-depth analysis and comparison of products in our email marketing software list.

Email marketing software for small business come in different types, varying from free and basic solutions to advanced and enterprise-grade platforms. You can also sort these software products according to the features that they offer, from basic tools like providing contact lists to more robust capabilities, such as personalizing emails and performance tracking. More importantly, you can categorize email marketing solutions based on their deployment type.

• Cloud-hosted email marketing software. The most common type of email marketing solutions you’ll find are cloud-hosted, which means they require Internet connection before you gain access to your data. With a cloud-hosted email marketing software, you can use the application and its features anytime and anywhere via web browser.
• On-premise email marketing software. Basically, an on-premise email marketing software is installed on your own devices, such as laptops, desktops, and mobile phones. Unlike cloud-based applications, on-premise programs allow you to host all your business and customer data from your own servers. This offers more flexibility, reliability, and security for your data.

Before you pick an email marketing software for your small business, there are a few essential features that you should look out for. These features are important for you to maximize the potential of your email marketing campaigns.

• Email editor. This feature allows you to create personalized email content. Most email marketing software comes with a drag-and-drop email editor, allowing you to customize every aspect of your email, from its layout and color to adding your own company logo or using a font style that best suits your brand. Some solutions also offer customizable email templates that accelerate the process of your email content creation.
• Automation. Email automation takes repetitive tasks off your day-to-day workflow, such as responding to customer queries and sending promotional content to bulk recipients. This allows you to save time and focus on more productive tasks. Some specific uses of email automation include sending welcome emails, recommending similar products to your customers, and reminder emails for customers who seem to have placed something in their cart but never finished checking out.
• Send time optimization. Finding out the best time to send emails can help improve your click-through rates and ensure that all your email marketing content are getting enough attention from your customers. With this feature, you can launch your email marketing campaign at the most optimal time, which is usually around the time when your customers have opened your previous emails.
• Social media integration. As email platforms are not the only channels you are using for your marketing campaigns, social media integration comes in extremely useful when you want to improve your customer engagement. By integrating social media in your email marketing campaigns, not only can you gain a new stream of followers but you can also make your content available to your existing customers via multiple social media platforms. This allows you to broaden your social reach and give your customers a chance to visit your other social media profiles.
• Real-time analytics. Having this feature can help you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns. Using real-time analytics, you can easily monitor your website activity, conversions, and sales. This also allows you to understand customer preferences more, enabling you to come up with better marketing content in the future.

Email marketing solutions provide small businesses with a cost-effective way of promoting their brand and staying connected to their customers. Given its wide array of features and capabilities, an email marketing software can deliver magnificent results, from increasing your list of subscribers to retaining customers for the long term. Here are some of the benefits you can reap when you use an email marketing software for your business:

• Improve customer relationships. Sending emails remains one of the best ways to reach out to your customers. In doing so, you can update your customers regarding the latest products that you have or the newest developments in your organization. This allows you to give your customers a sense of being included in your plans, which in turn makes them more loyal to your brand.
• Make your brand stand out among competitors. One of the key features of an email marketing software is building personalized emails. This gives you the freedom to create your own email marketing content from scratch, allowing you to develop your own unique brand via the emails that you send out to your audience. Through an email editor tool, you can build your own email content according to the style and look of your brand.
• Save time and costs. When running a small company, you are likely to encounter time and budget constraints when it comes to the marketing aspect of your business. Luckily, an email marketing software offers an efficient use of your time and budget. This is by providing you with cost-effective forms of email marketing, such as sending emails to a large number of subscribers at the same time, tracking the status of the emails you sent out, and getting direct access to the purchase history of potential customers.
• Build credibility around your business. By constantly sending updates and promotional content to your customers, you can easily build credibility for your brand. The more your customers hear from your business, the more they trust your brand and are more likely to become repeat customers. Also, staying in contact with your customers and keeping them updated on your business make it easier for you to launch new products and drive more sales.

When choosing an email marketing software for your small business, one of the most important factors to consider is its price. Depending on the specific requirements of your business, you can either go for an affordable solution that has enough features to cover your basic needs, or you can take it up a notch by purchasing a more advanced platform that offers extended email marketing capabilities. As long as you stay within your budget, an email marketing software can help you bring more profit to your company and improve your ROI.

The first step to deciding which email marketing software best suits your company’s budget is understanding the most common payment schemes of these products. Below is a more detailed explanation of the pricing plans of most email marketing solutions.

• Free. Having a limited budget does not always have to be a problem if you want to equip your business with a powerful tech stack. There are a number of business solutions that are available at no cost all, like some email marketing software products. These platforms usually offer basic and limited features but are often good enough to kick start your email marketing processes.
• Monthly subscription. One of the most common payment schemes for email marketing platforms is the monthly subscription, where plans are billed per month. This makes for a practical option for businesses that are still undecided on which solution is best for them in the long run. A monthly subscription plan does not require a long-term commitment, which makes it easier for you to switch software products as needed.
• Annual subscription. Email marketing solutions with this payment scheme offer pricing plans that are billed yearly. This is perfect for businesses that are already set on using a software product for the long haul. Also, annual subscriptions are often priced lower than monthly subscriptions.

To come up with better email marketing strategies, it is crucial for you to know the latest trends and technological developments that can help you formulate and execute your email campaigns. Here are some email marketing for small business trends that you should look out for in 2022.

• Use of AI. An AI-powered email marketing software allows you to get more valuable data about your customers, including their purchase behavior and preferences. This helps you in personalizing your email content and targeting a specific set of audience for your products. AI also allows you to restructure your email campaigns so they reach maximum effectiveness.
• Interactive emails. Interactive emails significantly increase email interaction and boost customer engagement. As such, more businesses today are using interactive elements in their email marketing content, such as animated buttons, CTAs, and rollover effects to showcase product offerings. Adding surveys and polls to email also generates more email interaction from customers.