Some would read the phrase ‘email marketing’ and grimace in distaste. But it doesn’t have to be that way. When used tastefully, email newsletters can add a personal touch to the persona of your company. You can summarize the content of your blog, give teasers into what your company is working on, or simply share stories about the experiences of your team. Any one of these types of content can make your users feel closer to your organization — I know this from my own personal experience with the companies that I admire.
Once you decide what you want to share with your customers, you need to choose a tool that makes email campaigns a pleasurable experience. Luckily, there are no shortage of good options in this area. Here are some tools that have enjoyed success this century.
AWeber
Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.
Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, we’ve got just what you need to make email marketing work for you.
MailChimp
MailChimp will help you manage and grow your mailing list, design beautiful emails, get into the inbox, and track your campaigns.
Free + Easy = People Power.
Emma
Create, send and track your email campaigns in style.
Meet Emma, the email marketing and communications service that’s taken a unique approach to web-based software. We think it should be easy to use (goodbye, cluttered interface). It should be made for you (farewell, generic templates). And it should even be fun (see ya around, support phone queue).
It’s all about email marketing in style, and it’s why 20,000 small and midsize businesses, non-profits and agencies have chosen Emma to power their email newsletters and campaigns. And we’d love to help you.
sendloop
Sendloop is a professional yet easy-to-use email marketing and mail list management service for any kind of online/offline businesses.
Newsberry
Send and track email newsletters: join the thousands of companies who trust Newsberry for the email marketing success.
iContact
The Email Marketing Service That Allows You to Easily Track Sends, Opens, Clicks, and More!
StreamSend
StreamSend is the most comprehensive and cost-effective permission based e-mail marketing suite available, and it is our honour to provide this powerful email marketing suite to marketers, entrepreneurs and online retailers around the world.
CampaignMonitor
Email marketing software for designers and their clients.
Send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. Earn a tidy profit by letting your clients send at prices you set.
Campaign Monitor is one of the more popular services out there, but it’s aimed more at professional web designers. And they are so confident in their product that they allow their customers to rebrand the Campaign Monitor package and offer it to customers of their own. Great support and a flexible API make this possible.
And many of their clients have taken advantage and offer their own email marketing packages built on the Campaign Monitor engine. Some email marketing tools can be a bit intimidating to start using, so these companies have attempted to make it a little easier for the end user: some focused completely at ease-of-use or doing the design, some are focused at a niche market.
Check out these other services that may suit your needs.
AshWebMail
AshWebMail is built to give you the tools to succeed in email marketing. This means that every feature we build and decision we make is focused on one thing – helping you rock at email marketing. Happy rockin’!
Breeze
Breeze lets you create and send amazing email campaigns. And it’s really, really easy.
Broadcast
The cost-effective way to reach your target audience.
It’s simple – we do the design, you add the content, manage subscribers and track the success of your campaigns using Broadcast’s built in reporting facilities. No installation, no setup, no fuss.
MagicMail 2.0
Create stunning email campaigns as easy as 1-2-3.
mail&go
Create and deliver fantastic email campaigns. It’s so easy you can just mail&go.
ScoutMailer
The easiest way to manage your camps, councils, troops or crews e-mail mailing list.
ScoutMailer is a super simple web application designed to make it easy to send e-mails to your camp, council, troop or crew. Send messages, manage your list and monitor the results. It doesn’t get any easier than this!
Selectmailer
Selectmailer – quite simply the best, easiest and most measurable e-marketing tool! Selectmailer is being used to send tens of thousands of attractive HTML email newsletters every day.
Are you connecting with your customers as well as you can? Your users and customers should feel like the know you personally. Any of these great tools can help you to show the human side of your company or product and make your users feel more at home.
Great article Chris!
We use MailChimp at Marketcircle – love the user experience of their website and find the humour and casualness keeps things fresh.
@Ryan Agree! humor is a plus in mailchimp’s service.
Im purchasing credits right now, I use it for http://www.revistavivir-ca.com, and it has hardly ever given me any trouble. I don’t even want to try out the other ones.
I also use Mail Chimp but there would be different benefits for depending on the business needs of my clients. gonna trial a few others! thx
Chris – would love your feedback on the best event registration software to integrate with these bad boyz above.
@nataliegiddings
About a quarter of those services are basically white label versions of Campaign Monitor.
I thought i’d mention that Breeze is re-branded Campaign monitor (it’s one of the examples on their site) and i’m pretty sure both scoutmailer and broadcast are aswell (the graphic of the graph and pie chart on their respective homepages is a giveaway).
Just goes to show the quality and re-brandability (is that word?) of Campaign Monitor. Great stuff.
Excellent article! This was just what I’m looking for, good to see others giving their feedback as well. At first I wanted to use Aweber but as I have a strat-up business I want to keep things at low cost as much as possible. Thanks again!
I’ve always recommended Mail Chimp to my clients. But seeing as about a quarter of the sites on this round up are the same service rebranded, I guess I better take a look at Campaign Monitor.
Just signed up for mail chimp. Cool and simple interface. Just the right mix.
I use MailChimp to email market, but I’m still trying to figure out how to market my services better.
Maybe there should be a post explaining how to email market effective? I would read that post (:
What about interspire emailg marketer? that’s really awesome!
Ummm…
Probably worth noting that Breeze, Broadcast, Magicmail, Mail&go, Scoutmailer & Selectmailer are all front ends to campaign monitor.
Do you think that the more people can be drawn in by a more attractive email from your company or that most people see company emails as spam or clutter in their email and don’t even bother to open them?
Constantcontact wasn’t on here huh? Interesting… maybe I need to switch
I recomend http://www.envialosimple.com have good price and quality.