You may think of email solicitations as annoying spam, but for many businesses, they are a highly cost-effective way to generate sales. Even at low open and conversion rates, email marketing can be well worth the effort.
Using the right platform, however, is critical to ensure that your email marketing solution is a good fit for your business.
To get things started, below is a comparison chart for the features of the six of the most popular email marketing platforms:
As you can see, the platforms are very similar, and it is hard to differentiate one from the other based on features. So let’s check out monthly prices:
(In the table below, some pricing levels for certain products were omitted to make comparison easier. Also, the number of emails that can be sent each month are unlimited.)
(Please note that Constant Contact and iContact offer yearly prepay discounts of 15%. GetResponse also offers one at 18%, and ActiveCampaign offers a yearly prepay discount as well.)
As you can see, the best price depends on the number of emails in your subscriber list. For many businesses, these differences in price will not be meaningful enough to control a decision.
One service, however, has a high-value option that should be checked out: MailChimp.
For MailChimp, up to 2,000 addresses and 12,000 emails are free monthly forever, and it appears that MailChimp stands alone with this offering. For this reason, for businesses that are new to email marketing, MailChimp is likely the place to begin. You don’t have to worry about a free trial expiring, and you can use a robust subscriber list. You can also send out up to six emails to each subscriber each month, which should be enough to get started.
After you’ve established a basic understanding of what features matter most to you for email marketing, it may be worthwhile to start testing out other services.
Good luck!