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Email remains a cornerstone of digital marketing strategies, despite the wealth of distribution methods available today. It is an effective channel to boost engagement, drive new customer acquisition, and improve retention rates. However, effective email marketing requires more than just a mailing list. Organizations also need tools to automate delivery, create compelling emails and campaigns, and track metrics. PCMag has been testing leading email marketing platforms for a decade, evaluating their capabilities, ease of use, effectiveness, and other features. Our Editors' Choice winners—including Brevo, Campaigner, HubSpot, and Mailchimp—represent your current best bets. Read on for all our top picks, links to our in-depth reviews of each, and buying advice to help you choose the right email marketing solution for your business.
Our Top Tested Picks
Klaviyo
Campaign Monitor
Omnisend
The Best Email Marketing Software Deals This Week*
- Klaviyo — $45 Per Month With 15,000 Monthly Emails and Email or Chat Support
*Deals are selected by our commerce team
- CRM integration included
- Vast selection of social media management options
- Stellar marketing automation
- Offers integrations with other HubSpot solutions
- Confusing and expensive pricing tiers
- Steep learning curve
- Productivity-focused UI
- Versatile templates and options
- Comprehensive online resources and onboarding
- Useful automation tools
- 24/7 support
- Lacks a free version
- Complex and unintuitive workflow automation
- Full marketing hub
- Extremely easy to use
- Convenient email templates and helpful reports
- Improved AI recommendations and automation
- Optional web hosting plans
- Respectable free tier
- Lower pricing tiers offer fewer features than before
- Relatively expensive
- Simple and easy to use
- Great email builder and template customization
- SMS and WhatsApp marketing support
- Good range of automation and integrations
- Free tier
- Limited landing pages
- Some features use credits and cost extra
- Occasionally lethargic loading
- Some finicky data importing
- Highly accessible for beginners
- Wide variety of email-building tools and resources
- Useful metrics
- Helpful anti-spam controls
- Appealing interface
- Limited CRM functionality
- Few automation and landing page offerings in Standard plan
- No longer offers forever-free plan
- Well-designed campaign and marketing tools
- Convenient integration with Zoho services
- Outstanding reports feature
- Some dated template designs
- Initial setup takes time
- Could be costly for some SMBs
- Excellent reporting tools
- Exhaustive list of templates for all core features
- Visually oriented for ease of use
- Somewhat limited customer support options
- Requires email marketing proficiency to be most effective
- Intuitive and elegant UI
- Wide range of third-party integrations
- Superior email deliverability rate
- Templates don't offer much flexibility
- Relatively expensive if you have thousands of contacts
- Lacks multi-channel automation
- Versatile email templates
- Easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface
- Simple automation tool
- Good SMB analytics
- Difficult contact importing when matching custom fields
- Importing HTML templates doesn't always work
- Lacks live support chat
- Phone support isn't available with every tier
- High-quality email builder and newsletter templates
- User-friendly tools
- Excellent customer support
- Affordable plans
- SMS costs can add up quickly
- Comparatively weak analytics and automation
- Competitive pricing
- Saved blocks in email builder universalize branding
- Interactive tutorial built into automation tool
- Responsive live chat and email support
- Segmentation tools are somewhat limited
- Reporting tool is insufficient for in-depth analysis
- Several fundamental features require upgraded plans
The Best Email Marketing Software for 2025 Compare Specs
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether the recipients opened and read them. Options range from text-based templates that marketers can quickly customize to more complex HTML or JavaScript ones. The good news is that it doesn't cost much to get started, nor is it an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup offer free trials and affordable starter plans, and some even provide onboarding services for new customers.
Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide that their most effective marketing tactic is a newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others might want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines so that they can provide special offers and deals to recipients.
Each approach requires different tools for creating and getting the source email out. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographics and engagement levels. And you'll probably want to integrate them with other back-end accounting and customer relationship management (CRM), and inventory management systems.
Does Email Marketing Still Work in 2025?
There's some perception in the market that email is becoming outdated in light of new channels such as chat, SMS, social media, web landing pages, and even the metaverse. That's true to some extent—and modern, multi-channel marketing campaigns should undoubtedly take advantage of as many of these channels as possible—but that's no reason to ignore email.
According to market research firm Statista, email usage is still virtually ubiquitous. According to the company's estimates, around 360 billion emails will be sent and received daily throughout 2024. It expects that figure to grow to more than 400 billion by 2027.
What Does Email Marketing Cost?
The good news is that the cost to reach prospective customers via email is generally low, while the profit potential is high.
Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails per month and bill you based on subscriber numbers. If you have a small list, look for a free plan, a low-cost plan that supports several hundred subscribers, or even a pay-as-you-go plan. On the flip side, many of these services also offer high-volume plans with 100,000 or more contacts.
As a result, the prices of email marketing contenders we review here vary widely. They start at about $3 per month (paid annually) to send out 500 emails per month in Zoho Campaigns and can go way up from there. Occasionally, it might even make sense to negotiate a custom plan directly with a sales rep.
How to Get Started With Email Marketing
Getting up and running with email marketing software isn't difficult. Generally, you'll know right away whether you like a product's user interface (UI) or not. Most of the services we reviewed offer free trials, so you can poke around before dropping any cash. The majority have modern graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not the complex business software UIs of yesterday.
Be sure to look at how a vendor provides tech support, too, since several vendors don't make support as available as we prefer. Some offer 24/7 phone support, email help, and live chat, while others leave you to rely on online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-serve help resources (such as FAQs and articles) and live support via chat or phone when you can't solve an issue yourself.
Finally, consider any regulatory compliance issues. For example, if you plan to market to customers in Europe, make sure that your software can help you with GDPR compliance. In the US, on the other hand, HIPAA mandates how you can use certain protected health information in your campaigns, while other laws govern how you can market to minors. Consult with your potential vendor to ensure it can help you with the regulations that apply to your organization.
Does Email Marketing Work With Mobile Devices?
One significant change in email marketing has been increased engagement on mobile devices rather than PCs. Mobile users access email throughout the day and wherever they are. Thanks to payment services like Apple Pay and Google Pay, smartphones have also evolved as e-commerce tools. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop that lets customers go from marketing to purchasing in a single session.
The growing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should be able to preview how your email looks in a responsive format, meaning the HTML correctly sizes images and other elements depending on the viewing device.
You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools might force you to create custom reports to see this data, which means you may have to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.
Can Email Marketing Integrate With Other Software?
Another modern trend in email marketing tools is integration with other systems, most notably CRM and e-commerce tools. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. It makes sense because both types of software deal with managing and communicating with customers.
One tactic marketers increasingly use to build trust in their email messages is incorporating user-generated content (UGC). For example, an email might include a customer review of a product, like those you'd find on e-commerce sites like Amazon. UGC can also draw from other channels, including online forums and social media.
How Does Email Marketing Use AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a big part of many digital marketing efforts, and email is no exception. AI improves email marketing mechanics such as A/B testing and audience segmentation. Depending on how much information you can feed from your CRM and sales systems, it can also help personalize email content to individual customers.
With the correct data, AI can select content, modify customer experiences on the fly, and even interact directly with customers via a natural-language chatbot. If any of that sounds attractive, you must look closely at how a prospective email marketing service implements AI and what kinds of features it offers.
Another area where AI can help is with the marketing automation capabilities that most email suites offer to some degree. Automation technology is most suitable for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. An important aspect of this is tracking the customer journey and the various touchpoints customers face from initial contact to closing the sale.
How Can You Customize Email Campaigns?
The best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These help you stay in touch with your contacts by automatically generating emails based on special occasions (such as a customer's anniversary, birthday, or past purchases), welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank-you emails for recent purchases to give some examples.
The most advanced email marketing services offer custom workflows to specify triggers based on actions (such as opening an email or making a purchase) or inaction (such as ignoring emails). With these services, you can also set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to segments of users, and you can pause or stop a campaign at any time. You can also move contacts into new segments once they complete their tutorials.
This level of customization can get very complex, so it's important not to get overwhelmed at the start. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with what you want to tell customers, when you want to say it, and why. Follow that plan, and you'll quickly build a journey that might start with a welcome email post-purchase and gradually drill down to more targeted offers as your relationship with that customer grows.
How to Solidify Your Email Marketing Strategy
Sending out campaigns isn't much help unless you can track your successes and failures and quickly make adjustments. All the services in this roundup offer some level of tracking, whether it's simple open and click-rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, or even integration with Google Analytics. Once you've got some data on your campaign, you can tweak your content to see what works using features like A/B testing, in which one part of your audience receives an email built one way while another gets a different version.
In addition to A/B testing, many services now offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of an entire campaign to test which one performs best. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important factor for content and landing pages. The right keywords can directly lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website.
Neil MacAllister contributed to this article.
