Jul 11, 2023
Despite being the oldest digital marketing channel, email still delivers outstanding results for businesses of all sizes.
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:
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:
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.
Insider
Klaviyo
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Omnisend
GetResponse
Constant Contact
Mailchimp
Moosend
Mailerlite
ConvertKit
ActiveCampaign
Turn email into a revenue generator and maximize your marketing budget with Insider
These have everything you need to create and automate email campaigns. At the same time, they also:
These robust capabilities make them a better fit for:
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:
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.
With Insider, you can easily create personalized email messages by:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
If you’re interested in how AMP emails work, we have an interactive AMP email builder that you can use for free.
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:
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.
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 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:
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
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:
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
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:
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
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:
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:
This is a much more cost-effective way to convert anonymous visitors compared to traditional retargeting ads.
Insider has two distinct products that help you further personalize your users’ on-site experience: InStory and EUREKA.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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)
Brevo is a customer relationship management (CRM) suite that supports channels like:
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.
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a collection of marketing tools. These tools are bundled into different plans for:
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.
GetResponse is a cost-effective email marketing platform and website builder. It lets brands:
Besides email, GetResponse also supports SMS, web push notifications, live chat, and online ads.
Constant Contact is a platform that combines various email and digital marketing tools. They’re separated into two distinct products:
Besides email, Constant Contact also supports SMS and has features for A/B testing, social media marketing, SEO, and landing page building.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Insider is an ideal email marketing solution for scaling mid-sized businesses and enterprise brands looking to:
Additionally, our platform can:
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).