How We Found the Best Email Marketing Services

Automation workflows, which send pre-designed emails to subscribers after completing certain actions (like clicking a link or purchasing something from your website), aren’t exactly difficult with MailChimp, but after using GetResponse’s workflow tool it’s clear that the latter has found the superior way to automate.

Rather than relying on a series of commands listed one after another, GetResponse utilizes a more engaged and visual approach: Users drag and drop actions into the workflow, directly linking triggers and commands in a way that feels more like completing a connect-the-dots than setting up automated emails. This simplifies what can be an otherwise complex process and makes for one element of the GetResponse user experience that beats out MailChimp in terms of convenience.

Efficient A/B testing for landing pages

GetResponse adds another layer to the functionality of landing pages with A/B testing that can further increase the efficiency of your campaigns. According to McKinsey, “Customized landing pages — which send the user directly to the item or offer featured in the email — can increase conversion rates by more than 25 percent.” While minor, this feature demonstrates just another way that GetResponse has taken standard email marketing features a step further.

Customer service

We were impressed by GetResponse’s customer service. After finding an error in our account registration, we called the support line and were helped immediately by a representative who was extremely polite, understanding, and who never tried to upsell us. Maybe it was just compared to MailChimp’s lack of service options (email support is only available for the first 30 days of the Forever Free plan), but we found ourselves particularly grateful to have our concerns addressed promptly and personally.

Points to consider

Learning curve

GetResponse isn’t nearly as easy to use out of the gate as MailChimp and requires some learning to ensure you’re getting as much out of the platform as possible. This can be especially frustrating for beginners who want to ramp up quickly. However, if you’re more experienced, GetResponse should be easy to master thanks to extensive resources like a comprehensive article database, FAQs, research white papers, and courses on optimizing your experience. And if you get stuck, GetResponse offers both email support and live chat options to keep you out of the marketing weeds — for all of its customers.

Email Marketing 101

The future of email marketing is mobile

According to a 2017 study, 55% of emails are now opened on mobile devices, which means providing a marketing experience that works on both desktop and mobile platforms is more essential than ever. Both of our top picks include the ability to automatically convert your desktop designs into mobile-friendly formats, and most other major companies do as well — Whichever service you choose, make sure it provides this function so that your emails will read the way you want them to, no matter what platform they’re being read from.

Look for quality contacts over quantity

It’s easy to assume that marketing success depends on the number of people you’re reaching, but an effective email marketing campaign also depends on the recipients themselves. That means you should regularly evaluate the quality of the subscribers on your lists to make sure they’re still worth engaging. After all, sending repeated messages to someone who isn’t opening your emails will quickly turn you into more of a nuisance than an asset.

Both MailChimp and GetResponse offer scoring tools to gauge the quality of your contacts, which makes it simple to determine who you should be contacting; used in tandem with automated workflows, you can easily set up segmented campaigns based on the quality of your subscribers, sending targeted messages to different recipients in order to increase engagement.

Focus on clicks, not opens

While open rates are an important metric to monitor (how else will subscribers read the message you’ve so painstakingly composed?), click-through rates provide a much better reference point for email success. This data allows you to see the extent of your subscribers’ engagement beyond whether or not they opened your email, since we’re all familiar with opening emails just for the sake of marking them as ‘read.’

Different industries have different standards for email success, but MailChimp says the average click-through rate across all industries is 2.43%.

Email Newsletter Service FAQ

What is a good open rate for emails?

Open rate is a great way to assess if your email campaign is successful. According to MailChimp, the average open rate for emails across industries is 20.81%. To get this average, the company looked at users ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies and had campaigns with at least 1,000 subscribers.

How does email marketing compare to social media marketing?

It’s easy to think of email as little more than a means of communication, but for businesses, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow an audience. According to a report by consulting firm McKinsey, email is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. And marketing research group eMarketer finds that email campaigns have a return on investment that’s more than four times the ROI of search, display, or social media.

Is an email’s subject line important?

Yes. Subject lines play an important part in getting your customers to open your emails. Rubin Manzoor, Content Marketing Manager at Contact Monkey, says “emails need to have an interesting subject line to grab readers’ attention.” Sometimes it takes more than one try to get it right — it’s good to test a few different options. According to Hubspot, “47% of marketers say they test different email subject lines to optimize their emails' performance.”

The Best Email Marketing Services: Summed Up

More Software Reviews

Email marketing isn’t the only way to get your business off the ground. Check out a few of our other software reviews:

• CRM software
• Property management software
• Ecommerce software
• Project management software
• Photo editing software