7 Top-Rated Email Marketing Software

An effective email marketing campaign involves more than just hitting ‘send’. It requires targeting the right audience, sending the right email at the right time, and continuously evaluating performance to optimize results. Because it can be difficult for marketing managers to stay on top of all these tasks all at once, email marketing software can help streamline their efforts.

These tools offer features for email list management, campaign design, automation, segmentation, and analytics to optimize marketing campaign performance and increase audience engagement. But, with a multitude of email marketing options available in the market, choosing the right one that aligns with your marketing objectives can be confusing.

In this article, we’ve highlighted the top seven email marketing software solutions, in alphabetical order, based on verified software reviews. We’ve categorized these tools into standalone email marketing tools and all-in-one marketing software with email marketing functionality. Standalone solutions focus solely on email campaigns to promote products, services, or content, while all-in-one software offers a broader range of marketing features. Read how we selected these products at the bottom of the page.

Especially designed for Mac users, Direct Mail is a standalone email marketing solution that lets you compose personalized emails, grow mailing lists, track campaigns, and automate recurring emails. You can analyze key email campaign metrics, such as opens, clicks, bounce rates, subscribers, and unsubscribers, to gain actionable insights into interactions. These insights can help optimize future email campaigns for better engagement and conversion rates. With the ability to track the most popular links, top email clients, and their geographic locations, you can monitor subscriber activities and make necessary adjustments to the campaign to increase conversions.

Product features of interest*:

• Pre-installed templates: Customize pre-installed email templates by adding, removing, and rearranging text, videos, buttons, and fonts. This feature helps marketers create professional-looking emails using a range of design options optimized for various devices and email clients.

• Smart targeting: Specify rules (for example, subscribers from a particular location) to auto-segment your mailing list. With over 30 different segmentation options available, you can create highly targeted campaigns that resonate with your audience.

• Automated email campaigns: Set up automated campaigns with multiple triggers, including bulk emails, new subscriptions, subscriber birthdays, and upcoming events. This feature lets marketers plan their campaigns in advance, reducing manual effort and ensuring timely and relevant messaging to subscribers.

Customer support options: Live chat and email

Who should consider Direct Mail?

If you are a MacOS user looking for an email marketing platform, consider Direct Mail. This native app supports the latest Apple technologies while helping you prevent common email marketing mistakes. Direct Mail alerts you to broken links, spam filters, misspelled email addresses, and other issues that could hamper your campaign's effectiveness. You can fix the problems before sending your message, ensuring successful marketing.

Similar to Direct Mail, EmailOctopus is a standalone email marketing solution. It helps you boost email clicks and open rates by kindling subscribers’ interest with personalization. You can create drip campaigns to educate new subscribers about your products or services. By sending a series of emails over time, you can nurture these subscribers and guide them toward actions such as making a purchase or signing up for a service. EmailOctopus enables you to segment subscribers into target audiences based on their interests and preferences. This allows highly targeted and personalized email campaigns that improve engagement.

Product features of interest*:

• Personalized emails: Tailor your emails to subscribers by including their names, preferences, and other relevant information. Personalized emails lead to increased open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

• Campaign reporting: Leverage valuable data insights about email campaigns, such as bounce rates and unsubscribes, to evaluate the effectiveness of email campaigns and make data-driven decisions about future email marketing strategies.

• Autopilot campaigns: Automate email marketing by creating sequences of emails that are sent automatically based on specific triggers or actions. This feature can save time and effort for businesses and increase the efficiency of their email marketing campaigns.

Customer support options: Knowledge base and FAQs

Who should consider EmailOctopus?

EmailOctopus is suitable for small businesses and startups looking for a cost-effective solution to manage their email marketing campaigns. The software includes customizable templates, a drag-and-drop editor, automation workflows, and email segmentation based on subscriber interests and behavior, among other email marketing features. EmailOctopus’s automation workflows help users create targeted campaigns that automatically get triggered based on subscriber actions such as opens or clicks.

You may consider Levitate if you want an email marketing platform to build stronger relationships with customers and streamline communication workflows. One of the key features of this standalone solution is the ability to automatically analyze email threads and suggest follow-up actions. It prioritizes important messages and helps users stay on top of their email communication. The software enables personalized email communications through contact segmentation and dynamic content, allowing businesses to create targeted campaigns tailored to specific groups and individual recipients.

Product features of interest*:

• Multiple message templates: Generate multiple message templates and save them to use in the future instead of beginning from scratch every time. This feature saves time and ensures your messages have a consistent tone and format.

• Email delivery tracking: Analyze the performance of email campaigns in real time. This feature allows you to track email opens, clicks, and other metrics, providing you with valuable insights and helping you make informed decisions to improve engagement and drive conversions and revenue.

• Email deliverability: Monitor bounce rates, spam complaints, and other metrics that impact email deliverability. This ensures that users' emails reach their intended recipients and do not end up in spam folders.

Customer support options: Call, email, and knowledge base

Who should consider Levitate?

If integration with popular CRM platforms and productivity tools is a must for you, you can consider Levitate. It supports integration with tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, and Google Calendar, making it easier for you to manage your customer communication and workflows in one place.

If growing your subscriber list is at the core of your email marketing strategy, consider MailerLite. With this standalone email marketing solution, you can create responsive campaigns and send personalized emails to increase subscribers and build customer relationships. MailerLite allows you to send tailor-made target emails to specific customer segments at a static time or based on the subscriber's time zone. It also offers marketing automation features, web forms, pop-up customizations, survey templates, and landing page builders. MailerLite is a web-based tool with a mobile app for iOS devices.

Product features of interest*:

• Automation workflow builder: Build advanced workflows with triggers to automatically deliver emails, based on specific events such as clicking a link or completing a form. Automation workflow builder also lets you set up rich site summary (RSS) emails to notify subscribers about new content.

• Mailing list segmentation: Divide your subscribers into smaller audiences based on a set of characteristics (location, age, behavior, or any other relevant criteria) to deliver targeted emails, resulting in higher engagement rates and increased conversions. MailerLite also auto-updates segments as your list grows.

• Subscriber management: Use the subscriber management interface to import, add, filter, and organize your subscribers. You can segment them into interest groups, edit individual profiles, and remove inactive subscribers to maintain an updated subscriber list, ensuring that emails are delivered to active and engaged subscribers.

Customer support options: Knowledge base and FAQs

Who should consider MailerLite?

Consider MailerLite if you want to monetize your audience. You can integrate MailerLite with eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce, embed custom product blocks, and create email campaigns based on customers' buying behaviors. With MailerLite, you can monetize your newsletters and manage the entire journey in one place—from collecting leads and payments to automatically delivering paid subscription emails. It also lets you import your eCommerce platform directly into your newsletter, saving you time by automatically uploading product images, descriptions, and prices.

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing solution that offers email automation to send automated, scheduled emails to keep your subscribers engaged. The tool uses autoresponders to improve your campaigns and save time on manual responses. As an email marketing solution, Systeme.io makes tracking and analyzing the performance of your campaigns easier. It also identifies the best-performing campaigns and shows you how you can optimize your low-performing ones.

Product features of interest*:

• Automated email sequences: Set up automated email sequences, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, follow-up emails after a purchase, and more, to engage and nurture your subscribers. Users can also create trigger emails based on specific actions taken by subscribers, such as opening an email or clicking a link.

• In-depth statistics: Track email campaign performance by analyzing the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate of your emails, as well as see which links and images are being clicked. Use this information to make data-driven decisions and optimize your future email campaigns for better results.

• Tailored emails: Categorize customers based on their behavior, demographics, and preferences, among other criteria. Use this segmentation to create targeted email campaigns that are tailored to specific groups of customers, improving engagement, building stronger relationships, and increasing your conversion rates.

Customer support options: Contact form, knowledge base, and video tutorials

Who should consider Systeme.io?

If you are looking for an all-in-one platform for your online business, consider Systeme.io. With sales funnels, email marketing, membership sites, and an affiliate program—all included in one central location, this tool lets users manage their entire online business without the need for multiple third-party tools. Additionally, it offers a visual drag-and-drop editor for email campaign creation and automation, as well as advanced segmentation options to target specific groups of subscribers based on their behavior and interests.

If you're concerned that your subscribers are missing important campaigns and you want to increase your chances of reaching them, UseINBOX's auto-resend feature can help. You can automatically resend your email to subscribers who didn’t open the initial email or those who didn’t click on any specific links with either the same content and minor adjustments or entirely new content. As a standalone solution, UseINBOX comes with automation features that allow you to set up email campaigns and automate recurring emails for birthdays, milestones, and anniversaries. You also have the option to segment your audience into groups based on different criteria such as location or gender.

Product features of interest*:

• Drag-and-drop newsletter creation: Create visually appealing email newsletters without the need for coding skills. UseINBOX provides a drag-and-drop editor that enables users to customize and design their newsletters by adding images, text, buttons, and other elements.

• A/B split testing: Test two different versions of email campaigns and see which version performs better. Users can test different subject lines, content, calls-to-action, or sending times to optimize their campaigns and improve their engagement rates.

• RSS campaigns: Trigger rich site summary (RSS) campaigns that automatically send out emails to subscribers whenever new content is published on your website or blog. This helps keep your subscribers engaged and informed about your products and services.

Customer support options: Live chat, email, and help center

Who should consider UseINBOX?

UseINBOX email marketing software is suitable for those who want to maintain a clean email list and maximize return on investment (ROI). Its email verification feature checks your email list for invalid or inactive email addresses and lets you remove them to prevent hard bounces and increase your deliverability and engagement rates. If you're new to email marketing or haven't verified your list in a long time, UseINBOX's verification feature can help you make a fresh start and ensure your campaigns reach the right audience.

As a marketing suite with email marketing capabilities, VBOUT lets you create personalized email campaigns, automate campaign workflows, and optimize their performance with A/B testing capabilities. You can optimize the timing of your email campaigns by scheduling them for when your recipients are most likely to open or click. VBOUT’s machine learning algorithm observes the behavior patterns of your contacts and determines the optimal delivery time for your emails. You can either choose a pre-installed template to create your email campaign for specific audiences or use the drag-and-drop editor to get creative control over responsive templates.

Product features of interest*:

• Dynamic visuals: Personalize your emails for targeted audiences and integrate dynamic visuals such as animated GIFs, CTA buttons, add-to-calendar events, and images.

• A/B testing: Leverage A/B testing to compare two versions of an email and determine the winning criteria based on metrics such as open rate and click-through rate to optimize future email campaigns.

• Chunk sending: Send emails in smaller batches to test the responsiveness of your email marketing campaigns. This helps users monitor the performance of marketing campaigns and pause/resume them whenever required.

Customer support options: Live chat, call, and email

Who should consider VBOUT?

If you are looking for a tool that offers deep integration with AI platforms (such as OpenAI), you may want to consider VBOUT. Its AI-centric features, including predictive email sending, subject line analyzer, AI content generation, sentiment analysis, and intent detection, help marketers perform advanced data analysis to create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns.

An email marketing tool can cost as low as $8 per month, or all the way up to $200+ per month, depending on various factors—features, number of emails per month, number of subscribers, business size/type, training availability, deployment options, integrations, and storage. Most email marketing automation software typically include the following pricing plans:

• Free trial: No-cost trial plans ranging from 14 to 30 days, giving users access to either all or limited features of the software.

• Free version: Free software plans offer basic features and limited premium feature access; ideal for small businesses or individuals with a limited budget.

• Entry-level: Starts at $8 per month and offers limited features; good option for small businesses or teams with basic email marketing requirements.

• Mid-tier: Mid-range pricing for email marketing tools ranges from $19 to $110+ per month and offers features such as email verifiers, subscriber list management, and click tracking.

• High-end: Advanced plans offer unlimited emails, advanced segmentation options, A/B testing suite, and custom reporting options.

Hidden costs associated with email marketing software

Besides the software license itself, there may be additional costs associated with an email marketing tool, including data migration, training, hardware and IT and maintenance/upgrades, which small businesses should budget for when considering a new tool. Additionally, even the free plan of an email marketing solution may have some hidden charges, such as charges to use certain design elements in your email campaigns or charges to send campaigns to a bigger group of audience.

• Does it offer email campaign templates?

Consider email marketing tools that provide pre-designed email templates, which can be customized to create professional-looking email campaigns quickly. These templates provide a starting point for your email campaign designing process as they come with placeholders for images, text, and calls to action. 

• Is there a spam blocker in this tool?

To increase the chances of your marketing emails reaching the intended recipient's inbox, it is better you invest in a tool with a built-in spam blocker. This feature scans the contents of your emails for potential spam triggers, such as excessive use of capital letters, certain phrases or words, and suspicious links. It then alerts you to fix these issues before sending out an email.

• Does it support CRM integration?

To enhance your marketing efforts, look for an email marketing solution that integrates with your existing customer relationship management (CRM) system. This functionality eliminates the need for duplicate data entry and maintains consistent lead and customer data across all systems. By leveraging customer preferences stored in the CRM, email marketing software can create targeted mailing lists and personalized outreach based on demographics, interests, or past purchase behavior.