12 Best email marketing platforms for different use cases (2024)

Because of this longevity, tons of email marketing tools have appeared on the market over the years. Pretty much all of them have features for:

• Building up and managing email lists.
• Designing emails with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.
• Scheduling individual emails and automating bulk email campaigns.
• Reporting and analyzing key email metrics, like deliverability rates, open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and so on.

However, most brands’ needs evolved beyond these standard email marketing use cases. As platforms adapted to meet these needs, the email marketing software category as a whole changed.

Some solutions still stick to email as their main offering, while others have expanded to other channels like SMS and push notifications. Some have stuck to building features for marketing teams, like form and landing page builders, while others are adding capabilities for sales teams, like lead scoring and deal tracking.

In short, finding the right email solution is more complicated than ever before. That’s why we’ve gathered the 12 best email marketing software platforms and organized them into two categories:

• 7 Email marketing platforms with advanced automation and personalization features for different channels. These tools are more suitable for companies that want to maximize their email marketing spend and coordinate their efforts across other channels like SMS and push notifications. 
• 5 Email-only marketing platforms. These are a better choice for small brands and individual creators who aren’t using other channels and have smaller contact lists (or are just getting started with email).

We’ll discuss each platform’s main features and which teams can take advantage of them to help you get a good sense of which one(s) might be a good fit for your business.

Insider can help you create, personalize, and automate campaigns across channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp, as well as on your website and mobile app. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.

Email marketing platforms with advanced automation and personalization features for different channels 

These have everything you need to create and automate email campaigns. At the same time, they also:

• Have more advanced, AI-powered email marketing features, like dynamic product recommendations and send time optimization.
• Support other channels, like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
• Let brands build automated cross-channel journeys.

These robust capabilities make them a better fit for:

• Mid-sized and enterprise businesses with larger contact lists, cross-channel marketing needs, and other complex use cases.
• Fast-growing startups that are looking to improve their email results, expand their reach to other channels, and implement new marketing plans.

#1 Insider

Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, on-site, online ads, and more.

Over 1200 brands, including AVON, Burger King, LEGO, and Toyota, use Insider to:

• Grow their email and SMS subscriber lists.
• Create and automate personalized email and SMS marketing campaigns.
• Send the right messages to the right audience segments at the right times using our AI-powered algorithms.
• Scale their marketing campaigns and personalization efforts to all customer touchpoints, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, on-site, and more.
• Aggregate their customer data to get a clear view of their customer journeys and overcome data silos.

Thanks to its versatility and ease of use, Insider has been ranked as a leader in categories like personalization software, mobile marketing software, customer data platform (CDP), and more.

In the next sections, we’ll show you how to use Insider’s email marketing product, personalization capabilities, and cross-channel automation features to maximize your marketing efforts and budget.

Build and automate high-converting personalized email campaigns

With Insider, you can easily create personalized email messages by:

• Using our drag-and-drop email builder.
• Using the HTML editor to create your email design.
• Starting with a customizable email template and tailoring it with your brand’s logo, colors, and so on.

As you can see below, the drag-and-drop email editor lets you personalize each message by adding the recipient’s name, last browsed products, cart items, and many other dynamic elements to the email subject line and body.

Once you’ve designed your individual emails, you can start building automated workflows using Architect—our cross-channel journey builder and marketing automation tool.

Just like creating individual emails, Architect lets you build automated email campaigns with a simple drag-and-drop editor.

For example, say you want to send transactional emails after a successful purchase and follow them up with an email survey two weeks later. You just have to trigger this journey based on the purchase event and instruct Insider to wait two weeks before sending the survey.

You can also use the power of AI to maximize your email marketing efforts with:

• Send Time Optimization (STO): This feature picks the ideal send time for each email based on the recipient’s behavior and likelihood of engagement.
• A/B Test Winner Autoselection. Insider comes with built-in A/B testing for comparing different versions of emails (or even different channels) against each other. The Winner Autoselection feature uses our AI algorithms to automatically direct customers to the winning path based on metrics you’ve selected, like open rate, CTR, revenue, and so on.
• Dynamic product recommendations. Insider’s AI-powered Smart Recommender can show dynamic product recommendations tailored to each customer’s interests. Our algorithms can update these recommendations in real time based on each user’s most recent behavior at the moment they open your email.

Remix is one of the companies that used Insider’s email personalization and automation capabilities to turn more leads into customers. With help from our team, they were able to set up an email drip campaign that: 

• Sent an email to leads who hadn’t made a purchase one week after their registration.
• Sent a second email that showed how to mark a brand as a favorite.
• Sent a final email with ways to combine orders and save money.

This new flow resulted in a 104% jump in first purchases compared to the previous quarter. For more details on their challenges and approach, check out the complete Remix case study.

Turn email into a revenue generator with interactive experiences powered by AMP

Email has traditionally been used as a way to attract users’ attention and get them to an external website or app to complete a desired action, like:

• Buying a product.
• Completing a survey.
• Booking a reservation, and so on.

The problem here is that the extra step of going to a site or app adds friction to the customer journey, inevitably leading to lower conversion rates. 

Insider helps you overcome that problem by delivering interactive, web-style experiences with AMP-based emails. Thanks to this functionality, you can use email as a revenue generator and not just as a way to get users to your site.

Here are some popular ways our customers take advantage of AMP emails:

• Interactive product carousels. You can add images of different products and let users mix and match them just by clicking on buttons in the email. This is a great way to let people explore your product catalog without having to go to your site or app. 

• Email bookings. If your brand sells a service or rents a product, you can have users book a timeslot directly through their email. As you can see below, you can also let them adjust parameters, like price, dates, and participants, without going to your site.

• Post-purchase email surveys. You can use AMP emails to let customers submit survey answers by simply clicking on a button. This is much easier than giving them a separate email link, resulting in more answers.

If you’re interested in how AMP emails work, we have an interactive AMP email builder that you can use for free.

Scale your email lists with interactive lead-generation campaigns

Besides creating high-converting email campaigns, Insider also makes it easy to grow your email list.

Our platform lets you create targeted lead-generation campaigns on your website and mobile app. For example, you can create an opt-in campaign for:

• Users opening your mobile app for the first time.
• Visitors browsing a certain category on your site.
• Any other segment of potential or current customers.

Our gamification templates can also help you rapidly grow your lead database. For example, Mac Cosmetics used the Wheel of Fortune template (shown below) on their site and added over 53,000 subscribers to their lead database in two days.

You can also make the sign-up experience more interesting by having users scratch off a virtual coupon or offering mystery gifts, as shown below. 

Make all touchpoints as personalized as your emails

While email is an important part of our platform, it’s far from the only channel we support.

In fact, with Insider, you can personalize every touchpoint customers have with your brand—from the online ads they see to their on-site experiences, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp messages, and app push notifications.

SMS

SMS is frequently used with email as a one-two combo, especially by eCommerce businesses. With Insider, you can coordinate your efforts across both channels to ensure a consistent customer experience and maximize your marketing spend.

Building individual SMS messages and campaigns is just as easy as creating emails. As you can see below, the SMS editor lets you choose from a variety of dynamic attributes to personalize each message, like:

• Age.
• Name.
• Cart items.
• Last browsed and purchased products.
• And many more.

There are also lots of SMS templates that can help get you started. Plus, you can use Architect to set up all kinds of automated SMS campaigns based on user behaviors, price drops, and more.

Lastly, you can provide users with different unsubscribe options. For example, you can let them opt out by texting a specific word by clicking on a link that leads to a dedicated unsubscribe page.

Suggested reading: 8 Best email and SMS marketing software tools for both channels

WhatsApp

While not big in the U.S., WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app worldwide. Insider is one of the few Meta-verified Business Solution Providers for WhatsApp, which means you can use our platform to take full advantage of WhatsApp’s marketing capabilities.

For example, you can use Insider to send:

• Price drop alerts, abandoned cart messages, and other promos.
• Order confirmations and other transactional messages.
• Appointment reminders.
• And more.

You can also use WhatsApp’s newest and most advanced marketing feature, called conversational commerce.

This feature lets you create an end-to-end buying experience inside WhatsApp. Customers can discover products, add them to their carts, and (in some countries) complete their purchase without leaving the app, which reduces friction and increases conversion rates.

Suggested reading: Detailed review of the 8 best WhatsApp marketing software tools

Website and mobile app content, messaging, and product recommendations 

While lots of email marketing platforms can personalize email content (and even SMS and web push content), very few have on-site personalization capabilities. 

At the same time, if you grab customers’ attention with a personalized email but your site shows them totally irrelevant content, messaging, and products, you’ll miss out on valuable conversions and revenue.

That’s why Insider lets you tailor every element of your site or app to each visitor’s behaviors and preferences. 

For example, Insider can personalize:

• Banners.
• Categories.
• Product recommendations
• And much more.

As a result, when users show interest in specific content or product via email, SMS, or any other channel, they’ll see that when they land on your site. This creates a cohesive customer experience, which in turn produces higher conversion rates.

For a real-life example of the power of on-site personalization, check out our case study with Philips.

Working together with our Account Management team, they were able to deliver highly-relevant product recommendations to each user thanks to our AI-powered Smart Recommender. For example, users on a product page were shown relevant recommendations based on their past behaviors and preferences.

This led to a 40.11% conversion rate uplift on their mobile website and over 20,000€ of incremental revenue.

Suggested reading: The ultimate guide to website personalization

Web and mobile app push notifications

Push notifications are a powerful engagement tool and a fantastic way to maximize your marketing budget as there’s no additional cost for sending each one, unlike channels like email, SMS, and retargeting ads.

Insider lets you use all kinds of web and mobile app push notifications, including:

• Sliders.
• Carousels.
• Cart reminders.
• Product discovery pushes.
• Recurring push notifications.
• Geofence push notifications. 
• And many more.

When paired with on-site personalization, push notifications can also be extremely useful for reducing the time it takes to turn leads into visitors and lowering acquisition costs.

For example, say you have a segment of anonymous visitors who are browsing a product category on your site but leave without buying anything. Insider can help you bring them back to the site and convert them by:

• Sending them personalized web push notifications based on the category they were browsing.
• Personalizing their experience once they get back to your site by showing them relevant products from that category.

This is a much more cost-effective way to convert anonymous visitors compared to traditional retargeting ads.

Site search results and mobile stories

Insider has two distinct products that help you further personalize your users’ on-site experience: InStory and EUREKA.

• InStory lets you add eye-catching, Instagram-like stories to your site. Like all other elements, these stories can be personalized to each customer’s behaviors and preferences. They’re a great way to drive product discovery, increase customer engagement, and generate more conversions.

• EUREKA lets you deliver personalized site search results. This tool helps every searcher find the products they’re looking for much faster, resulting in a smoother shopping experience, more conversions, and a higher average order value (AOV).

Create individualized cross-channel campaigns (with the help of AI)

As we showed earlier, Insider’s journey builder lets you create all kinds of automated flows for email, SMS, push notifications, and other channels.

You can also use Architect’s personalization and automation features to coordinate your efforts across all of these touchpoints and ensure each message reaches the right person at the right time on the right channel.

Here’s how the process works:

First, you select which customer segment to target. You can start with one of the many automatically created audiences of users who abandon their carts, abandon a product page, interact with your brand on a specific channel, and/or others shown below.

You can also use our AI-powered predictive audiences to make your segments even more precise. Our algorithms help you target users based on their:

• Likelihood to purchase
• Likelihood to churn.
• Discount affinity.
• Projected spending.
• The stage of their lifecycle status.
• Predicted conversion range
• And more.

With your segments in place, all you have to do is select how the journey unfolds. 

For example, say you have a segment of regular customers who also have a high likelihood of purchasing. 

If you’re running search ads on Google, you can have Insider follow up your ads with a personalized email. If that doesn’t work, you can have Insider wait for a while and then send them an SMS or WhatsApp message with a limited-time discount coupon.

While this is simple to set up, it can be difficult to know exactly which channel to try next. This is where Insider’s AI-powered next-best channel predictions can help.

With this feature, you just have to select between a list of channels, and Insider will automatically decide which one to use based on each customer’s behavior patterns and likelihood of converting.

And as we said earlier, you can also rely on the AI-powered STO and A/B Test Winner Autoselection to:

• Send each campaign message at the most appropriate time.
• Automatically analyze the results of your tests and guide users to the best path in the journey.

Lastly, you can analyze the results of your campaigns right inside Architect or in the dedicated dashboards that show key metrics like clicks, conversions, revenue, and more.

Consolidate your customer data and analyze your campaign results

Our Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) is one of the biggest reasons for Insider’s performance and versatility.

The CDP aggregates customer data from any online or offline source—like customer relationship management systems (CRMs), content management systems (CMSs), APIs, analytics tools, and more—into a single database. 

This helps you overcome data silos and gives you a unified, 360-degree view of each customer, as shown below.

Overall, the CDP is the foundation of Insider and an essential tool for our customers:

“At the forefront of this is Insider’s amazing Customer Data Platform (CDP) as that’s the product that knits everything together. Their CDP helps us integrate data from a variety of sources together to act on it to create engaging cross-channel campaigns. We are able to understand our customers better since the data aren’t siloed now but are in a single, centralized location.”

As people browse your site and interact with your brand on different channels, their profiles get continuously enriched, giving you an even more precise view of their journeys.

There’s no additional charge for our CDP even if you only use Insider’s email platform (or another channel-specific tool), so you can always aggregate your data instead of having it scattered across different systems.

Note: If you haven’t worked with a CDP before, we highly recommend checking out our guide to the best CDPs.

You can also zoom out to get a high-level view of your audience. For example, the screenshot below shows an analytics dashboard with the number of known and unknown users, their reachability by channel, funnel conversion rates, and other essential metrics.

You can build custom dashboards with any metrics relevant to your team or external stakeholders. For example, you can build dashboards to analyze your campaign results per channel (email, SMS, web push, etc.) and ones with higher-level metrics, like revenue, AOV, churn, and retention.

To see Insider in action and learn how it can help you create individualized, cross-channel marketing campaigns, book a live demo with our team.

#2 Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a marketing automation software for email, SMS, and mobile push notifications. It lets brands target users based on their behaviors, locations, purchase histories, and other advanced segmentation criteria. It also helps companies coordinate their SMS, mobile push, and email marketing strategies and make use of multi-channel templates for different use cases. 

One downside to Klaviyo for small users is that it no longer offers email support for their free plan after the first 60 days.

Suggested reading: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types#3 Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

#3 Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo is a customer relationship management (CRM) suite that supports channels like:

• SMS.
• Email.
• Live chat.
• WhatsApp.

Additionally, Brevo offers a sales platform for tracking leads, managing pipelines, automating repetitive tasks, and more. Lastly, there’s also a separate offering for enterprise businesses called BrevoPlus, which includes better security, more flexibility, and personalized customer support.

#4 HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a collection of marketing tools. These tools are bundled into different plans for:

• Individuals and small teams, which includes an email marketing solution, a signup form builder, live chat, and a landing page builder.
• Larger teams, which comes with everything in the previous plan, plus custom reporting, social media marketing tools, and omnichannel marketing automation capabilities.
• Enterprises, which adds custom events, multi-touch attribution, and other advanced features.

#5 Omnisend

Omnisend is a cloud-based eCommerce automation platform for email and SMS marketing with pre-built templates and automations for both channels. Besides email and SMS, teams can use Omnisend to send web push notifications, build signup forms and popups, and sync their audiences for social media and Google search ads. Omnisend also integrates with popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.

#6 GetResponse

GetResponse is a cost-effective email marketing platform and website builder. It lets brands:

• Set up basic email flows and autoresponders.
• Automate email marketing campaigns.
• Use AI to generate emails.
• Create entire websites and individual landing pages.

Besides email, GetResponse also supports SMS, web push notifications, live chat, and online ads.

#7 Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a platform that combines various email and digital marketing tools. They’re separated into two distinct products:

1. Email & Digital Marketing, which is suitable for small business owners looking to start and scale their email marketing.
2. Lead Gen & CRM, which is targeted toward marketing and sales directors looking to align their teams and convert leads.

Besides email, Constant Contact also supports SMS and has features for A/B testing, social media marketing, SEO, and landing page building.

Email-only marketing platforms

These are among the best email marketing services in the traditional sense. They have all the features beginners, individual business owners, and small brands need to get started with their email marketing program and scale it up to a point.

They don’t support other channels natively, so they either have to be:

• Integrated with other channel-specific service providers (e.g., SMS tools, web push solutions, personalization platforms, WhatsApp marketing software, and so on).
• Replaced with a solution that brings multiple channels under one roof (for brands that outgrow the simpler email marketing use cases).

#8 Mailchimp

Mailchimp is among the most popular email marketing tools for individuals and small businesses. While the company was acquired by Intuit, Mailchimp still exists as a standalone email product. It has features for list segmentation, email campaign automation, and AI copy generation.

While it’s still an affordable tool, Mailchimp’s paid plans are a bit pricier than some of the other options below when looking at the number of emails sent per month. 

#9 Moosend

Moosend is another popular email marketing and automation tool for small businesses. Like Mailchimp, it was also acquired by a larger company (Sitecore) but continues to exist as a separate brand. Besides the standard email marketing features, Moosend also lets brands build forms and landing pages and use CRM tools to manage their email lists. 

It’s also a slightly more cost-effective option than Mailchimp as it lets you send unlimited emails to more contacts at a lower monthly cost.

#10 Mailerlite

Mailerlite combines a suite of digital marketing tools, with email being at the heart of their offering. It offers all the standard features you’d expect from an email marketing solution (with a generous free plan), like email automation, list management, and more. Additionally, Mailerlite has a simple website builder that helps brands quickly launch new sites or individual landing pages.

#11 ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a creator marketing platform centered around email. The platform is built to help different types of content creators—like email newsletter writers, bloggers, podcasters, and musicians—scale their businesses. It comes with useful features for monetizing creator businesses by selling webinar courses, memberships, eBooks, and more.

#12 ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is among the most versatile platforms in this category. While it doesn’t support channels outside of email, it brings together tools for a variety of sales and marketing use cases. For example, it has a landing page and form builder, a CRM for keeping track of leads, and a sales engagement and automation solution. ActiveCampaign also has lots of integrations for eCommerce platforms like Shopify, and WooCommerce, CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, and more. 

Turn email into a revenue generator and maximize your marketing budget with Insider

Insider is an ideal email marketing solution for scaling mid-sized businesses and enterprise brands looking to:

• Make the most out of their email marketing efforts and budget.
• Coordinate their campaigns across all channels and personalize every customer touchpoint—including email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, on-site, and more.

Additionally, our platform can:

• Aggregate all your customer data in one place so you can overcome data silos and get a clear view of your customers’ journeys.
• Predict behaviors with our AI-powered intent engine, like how much different segments are projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or churn.
• Help you use the power of AI and personalization to ensure you’re always sending the right messages to the right people at the right times.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.