Small business email marketing is a powerful medium to establish direct contact with prospects and customers. It is a principal customer retention tool for many businesses. Done right, it can be a game-changer and hugely impact your bottom line and ROI.  However, your success with email marketing primarily depends on picking a tool that delivers your emails to the right inbox at the most appropriate time. Pick the wrong tool and you would be wasting your time and money on a service with terrible email deliverability and a handful of features. On the other hand, the right tool makes it easy to

  • Build and manage contacts
  • Deliver targeted emails to the right inbox
  • Segment users into groups, such as demographics, interest, age, and gender
  • Engage the right users and motivate them to visit your website
  • Track the performance of your marketing campaigns

A majority of Internet users have signed up with at least one email service, if not more. Radicati statistics reveal that there are more than 3.8 billion active email accounts, which offers you a huge potential for growth.

Mailchimp Alternatives

If you have tried Mailchimp and are looking for an alternative, let us explore some of the best small business email marketing tools here. The purpose is to find the right marketing solution that grows with your business.

#1. ActiveCampaign

The all-in-one email marketing tool, ActiveCampaign comes complete with pre-built workflows to customize your automation process. Designed for small business email marketing purpose, ActiveCampaign comes complete with multidimensional email segmentation. This enables you to segment your email list according to different categories, from country to email opens, page visits, and device, among others. You can leverage this feature to send targeted offers to particular segments and customize follow-ups.

ActiveCampaign is easy to use and features the drag-and-drop email builder for your campaigns. If you seek a powerful automation builder compared with Mailchimp, go for ActiveCampaign, which is priced at $9 per month and offers an array of features that you do not get with the former. It integrates with more than 700 apps.

A free trial is available.

#2. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a full-suite email marketing tool for small and large businesses to create beautiful, engaging emails. The campaign builder is easy to use and seamlessly integrates with third-party apps. Crafting customized messages is a breeze with Campaign Monitor, which ensures that the right message reaches the right person at the right time.

Pricing starts at $9 per month. Starting with Campaign Monitor is easy. Setting up an account is free.  Creating the first email marketing campaign does not cost anything.

#3. ConvertKit

Easy to use and navigate, ConvertKit is another powerful Mailchimp alternative that offers a simple way of managing contacts. While Mailchimp may be confusing with too many options, ConvertKit gets an upper hand for its straightforward way to manage contacts.

Another feature that puts ConvertKit above Mailchimp is its sequences feature that enables you to check how contacts move through. You can build a sequence of emails effortlessly without the need to jump to another section and add multiple sequences.

There is no free plan available, with the basic plan starting at $29/month. Getting started is easy with a 14-day free trial.

#4. iContact

Another small business email marketing tool that works as an excellent alternative to Mailchimp, iContact is a highly scalable solution for marketing automation. It is seamless to build and maintain email lists with iContact through landing pages and social sign-ups.

The tool offers tasteful templates that make the emails look attractive for leads and customers. Besides email marketing, the full-suite marketing automation tool features reporting, social media management, landing page builder, and analytics. With iContact, reports are available in macro and granular views.

The email marketing solution integrates with social networks to help you grow and improve conversions.

iContact offers three plans, with the basic plan starting at $14 per month.

#5. MailerLite

MailerLite is another reliable email marketing alternative to MailChimp. With unlimited email sends available in MailerLite, this is one of the most effective marketing automation services to supercharge your email marketing campaign. The best thing about this solution is that it offers most features without costing too much. What’s more, the MailerLite subscription plans are much cheaper than that of MailChimp. Its affordable pricing makes it an excellent option for beginner email marketers.

Both tools offer free plans, with MailerLite offering all customer support features to its customers, including those on the free plan. The simple yet intuitive interface of MailerLite makes it an easy-to-use automation tool for small businesses with little to no technical knowledge.

Pricing plans start at $10/month.

#5. Mailjet

What sets Mailjet apart from Mailchimp is the pricing criteria. Pricing depends on the number of emails sent, compared to Mailchimp, which is priced based on the number of list contacts. Additionally, Mailjet offers free storage space for unlimited contacts. This means you can store 30,000 contact lists without sending emails. Being an ISO27001 certified company, Mailjet ensures the highest level of data security. Mailchimp does not have these data security and confidentiality certifications.

Mailjet enables users to use the same platform to send, manage, and monitor marketing and transactional emails at no extra charge. With Mailchimp, users need to subscribe to Mandrill, a separate tool and interface, for the purpose.

In the free plan, you can send as many as 6,000 emails per month.  Pricing plans start at $9.65 per month.

#6. Send Grid

Easy to use and set up, SendGrid is a cloud-based email platform that has earned the distinction of delivering more than 18 billion emails per month. If you are looking for a tool to send millions of emails, look no further than SendGrid. The email marketing solution is known for unmatched deliverability, sending emails in a more efficient and faster way over HTTP or SMTP.

If you seek the best email tool to send password recovery messages or notifications from your website, you should opt for SendGrid. They are pioneers in the API transactional email market. Another feature that gives SendGrid an edge over the competition is its reputation monitoring indicator.

Opt for their free plan if you are just starting out and acquiring new users. You can always upgrade when you have a good number of users.

The basic plan is free. Pricing plans start at $9.95 per month for 100,000 emails.

#7. Constant Contact

One of the leading Mailchimp alternatives, Constant Contact comes complete with social media integration, drag-n-drop editor, and real-time reporting.  Its educational resources set the email marketing solution apart from many others on the market. Constant Contact is one of the best small business email marketing tools with a high deliverability rate. It uses a spam check tool, which helps check any deliverability issues with your campaign.

With Constant Contact, users can send a series of personalized targeted emails. As far as customer support is concerned, Constant Contact offers additional phone support.

Pricing plans begin at $20 per month, with one free month on each plan.

Your choice of a small business email marketing tool primarily depends on your specific business needs. It is best to explore all options, pricing, integrations, and features before finalizing a tool that fits in as the best Mailchimp alternative for your needs.