Best Email Automation Software To Streamline Your Email Marketing Efforts and Maximize Your Profits

Email marketing is crucial for the success of any online business. Even if you haven’t sent a single marketing email in your life, you’re probably aware of the fact that you’ll need to rely on email automation software to set everything up, create the campaigns, and get in touch with your subscribers. 

The trouble is, there are hundreds of different tools to choose from. If you have little or no email marketing experience, you probably won’t even know what to look for, let alone how to compare tools and select the best one for your business.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of the six best email marketing automation software solutions—so you can see what each one of them offers and make an informed decision. Before we get into the meat of things, we’ll talk a bit about what features and functionalities you should look for in an email automation software.

Let’s jump right in!

How To Choose the Best Email Automation Software For Your Business

Every business is unique. Depending on who you want to target with your emails, what you’re offering, and how complex you want the email campaigns to be, you’ll favor one email marketing tool over the other. 

For example, if you’ve just launched your business, it wouldn’t make much sense to go for an advanced email marketing platform that offers dozens of features, most of which you won’t use. At the same time, if you have a well-established business, with thousands of subscribers and half a dozen different mailing lists, free email marketing tools won’t cut it. 

Regardless of what situation you’re in, here are the different parameters to pay attention to when choosing an email automation tool for your business:

1. Email builder and templates

2. Sign-up forms

3. Segmentation and personalization

4. A/B testing

5. Analytics and reporting

6. Integrations

Email Builder and Templates

When thinking about an effective email marketing campaign, most people look at the big picture, often overlooking the fact that they’ll also have to craft each individual email. That’s not an issue if you’re in an enterprise or an agency with internal copywriters and designers who can turn your vision into a captivating email.

If you’re a blogger, an affiliate marketer, or a solo entrepreneur, the story’s a bit different. Without any coding and graphic design experience, opting for an email automation tool that doesn’t offer templates would be a grave mistake.

It’s always best to choose a tool that lets you utilize email templates and has a built-in drag-and-drop email builder. Even if you plan on hiring professional designers, templates and intuitive email builders will make their job a whole lot easier. In case you’re planning on creating the emails yourself, you won’t spend weeks trying to put the emails together.

Either way, email templates never hurt. An easy-to-use email builder is also a big plus, even if you’re planning on creating your emails from scratch since it allows you to quickly touch up your emails before hitting that “Send” button.

Sign-Up Forms

If you’re just starting out and don’t already have a sizable mailing list, you should look for an email marketing tool that also allows you to generate the leads. Even if you opt for the best tool ever, it won’t do you any good if you didn’t have anyone to send the emails to. 

That’s why you should look for a decent email automation software that also enables you to create sign-up forms and capture your audience’s contact information. Otherwise, you’d have to rely on at least two different tools and spend a bunch of time figuring out how to integrate them.

The much better option is to opt for the one with built-in sign-up forms that you can tweak and add to your website in minutes. The email addresses you collect this way will be imported into the tool automatically, so you wouldn’t have to worry about any of the technical details. 

Segmentation and Personalization

Segmentation is the key to success of any email marketing campaign. The last thing you want to do is send every single person on your mailing list a generic, dull, boring marketing email. In order to get the most out of your email marketing campaign, you need to personalize your marketing messages.

The only way to do this is by segmenting your audience based on their demographics, psychographics, and interaction with your business. Even if you don’t plan on relying on segmentation all too much at the moment, it will come in handy further down the line.

Our recommendation is to always choose email automation software that offers advanced segmentation and automation capabilities. Look for tools that allow you to create or leverage events and triggers and create advanced drip campaigns. 

These features will enable you to send different types of emails to people who click the links in your emails, download attachments, make purchases, etc. The idea is to send the right message to the right person at the right time. 

Tools that let you monitor and act on these events and triggers will allow you to tweak your campaigns according to your audience’s level of interest, making it easier to convert them from subscribers to paid customers. 

A/B Testing

As a concept, email marketing is rather straightforward. In practice, however, getting everything done right is a lot more difficult than it sounds. 

While there are some rules you should follow and email marketing tips you can implement in your campaigns, nobody can tell you for certain what will work for your business. It all depends on your target audience and what it is you’re trying to promote. 

You need to try out different things, measure the success of the campaign as a whole, as well as every single email, and tweak your campaign as you go.

The best way to do this is through A/B testing. This practice refers to changing a single variable in each email and testing the performance of the “original” one against the tweaked version. 

A/B testing will allow you to try out different: 

• Email subject lines

• Email copy

• CTAs (calls to action)

• Visuals

If you’re just dipping your toes into the waters of email marketing, we strongly recommend choosing an email automation software with built-in A/B testing capabilities. 

Analytics and Reporting

Alongside A/B testing, there are various email marketing metrics that can help you gauge the performance of your campaigns, such as:

• Open rates

• Click-through rates

• Bounce rates

• Unsubscribe rates

Nearly all email automation software will have some form of analytics, providing you with vital information regarding your campaign’s performance. If a tool doesn’t offer these insights, you should, in all honesty, look elsewhere. 

Another thing to consider is how this information is presented. It’s always best to have all the data in one place, and it’s a huge plus if the information is presented in an easy-to-understand manner—through color-coded graphs and charts.

Integrations

When you’re looking to add a new tool to your business’ arsenal, you should always think about how well it would integrate into your existing workflow. It’s always best to opt for the one that integrates with other tools you’re already using—such as your CRM (Customer Relationship Management software). 

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the tools themselves.

ConstantContact

ConstantContact is an excellent choice for e-commerce businesses. Apart from being a decent email marketing automation tool, ConstantContact also allows you to create stunning e-commerce websites in minutes, upload products to your online store, connect the tool with your social media accounts, and more. 

ConstantContact Homepage

The tool features an easy-to-use email builder and allows you to leverage advanced automation to create trigger-based, personalized emails. ConstantContact also facilitates social posting—which can be done straight from the tool’s dashboard—and allows you to manage your contact list with ease. You’ll also have access to real-time performance tracking and A/B testing. 

There is a one-month free trial, so you can test out ConstantContact risk-free before committing to one of the paid plans. The price depends on the number of contacts, starting from $20 for just email and $45 for email plus additional features for up to 500 contacts. 

While not the cheapest tool on the market by any means, ConstantContact offers everything you’d need to launch and run a successful e-commerce business.

Hubspot

Hubspot is regarded as one of the best email automation tools out there. The company’s Marketing Hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing software that can help you automate all your marketing efforts. 

Hubspot Marketing Hub

Rather than offering a simple autoresponder, Hubspot offers a full suite of tools that you can use to: 

• Craft powerful email campaigns

• Create high-converting landing pages and opt-in forms

• Plan, execute, and optimize your SEO strategy

• Manage the content on your blog

• Create and run ads on different platforms

• Run effective social media campaigns

The idea behind Hubspot is that you won’t ever need another marketing tool. As you can imagine, having a software solution that handles every aspect of your business doesn’t exactly come cheap.

The Hubspot subscription is $800/month, which makes it difficult to recommend to anyone other than professional marketers with extensive experience. 

iContact

iContact is a tool designed to simplify email marketing. The main pitch of the tool is that you can create professional-looking emails in minutes instead of hours. After fiddling a bit with their templates and email editor, we can attest to this fact. Not only does iContact make creating emails surprisingly easy—but it also makes the whole process fun! 

iContact Homepage

Creating an email sequence with iContact is as easy as it can be. The tool’s UI is super-intuitive—everything is done through drag and drop. Even if you have absolutely no experience with creating and setting up email campaigns, iContact makes it a breeze.

The entire sequence is represented visually, so you can see how the emails flow, when each email is sent, and what triggers a specific message. Simple yet powerful—just what you’d want your email automation software to be!

iContact Automation Editor

Image source: iContact

Apart from the drag-and-drop editor, iContact’s strong suites are:

1. A/B testing

2. Performance reporting

3. Audience segmentation

4. Integrations—Zapier, Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, Woocommerce, SurveyMoney, etc. 

CampaignMonitor

CampaignMonitor is another straightforward yet incredibly powerful email automation tool. As the name suggests, the tool excels at monitoring the performance of your campaigns, providing actionable insights into your subscribers’ activities, and letting you leverage them to create personalized campaigns.

CampaignMonitor Homepage

Aside from monitoring, the main appeal of this tool comes from the fact that it’s incredibly easy to use. You can pick it up and create a high-performing email marketing campaign in a few hours, even if you’ve never seen an email automation tool before in your life. With a drag and drop email builder and an intuitive sequence creator, you’ll have your campaigns up and running in no time. 

Hatchbuck

If you’re looking to get in touch with prospective customers, as well as create a strong, trust-based relationship with them, Hatchbuck is an excellent choice. Hatchbuck is one of the best CRM and email marketing software solutions that helps you stay connected to your target audience across all communication channels.

The tool puts the spotlight on the customer, letting you automate different aspects of your business related to acquiring prospects, engaging your leads, and converting them into buyers. Hatchbuck’s features include:

1. Email marketing

2. CRM and sales automation

3. Landing page and opt-in form creation

4. Services and integrations

When it comes to email marketing automation, Hatchbuck isn’t the most advanced tool out there, but it gets the job done. It offers dozens of email templates and features both a drag-and-drop as well as an HTML email editor. 

Hatchbuck Email Builder

Hatchbuck also provides list management and campaign monitoring, although it does not feature triggers and events, so it’s best for simple, linear email sequences. 

Marketo

Marketo is a nifty tool that provides its users with a ton of data on their email subscribers, allowing them to take personalization to the next level. 

The tool includes advanced behavior tracking, providing the much-needed context that will help you pinpoint what stage of their buyer’s journey each lead is. In turn, this will help you approach every single subscriber with a personalized message that will pique their interest and help move them further along your marketing funnel and eventually convert them into customers. 

Marketo Homepage

 

When it comes to creating and monitoring your email campaigns, Marketo covers all the basics. It includes an intuitive email editor with pre-built templates, let’s you utilize triggers and events, and allows for advanced audience segmentation. 

One thing to note is that Marketo also lets you connect the tool with your social media profiles, allowing you to find new customers and convert them into brand advocates. The tool also enables you to create retargeting ads based on your subscribers’ activity. 

Skyrocket Your Revenue With White-Label Email Automation Software

If you’re looking for an email automation software solution that can help you create powerful campaigns in minutes and maximize your email marketing ROI—we’ve got just the thing for you! 

Our email sequence creator lets you build newsletters, cold email sequences, and drip email campaigns with ease. With the help of our drag-and-drop email creator, you’ll be able to craft compelling emails in seconds. The tool tracks your open, bounce, and click-through rates automatically, so you’ll know exactly how each of your emails is performing at any given time.

But that’s not the best part! The biggest advantage Sell SaaS offers is the ability to resell our software under your own brand.  You only need to add your company name, logo, and colors, and you can start reselling the software right away. 

There are no special reseller licenses or any additional fees—you can get started today for free! You also get to choose the price you want to resell the software for, and you’ll get to keep between 60% and 80% of each sale. Plus, we’ll handle all the technical details like setting up domains and payment links and providing customer support, so you can focus on growing your business and maximizing your revenue.

Apart from the autoresponder, we offer a dozen powerful, fully white-label tools you can start reselling today to maximize your profits:

Maximize your email marketing ROI and create an additional, passive revenue stream with Sell SaaS—get started today for free!