Last month, our founder Chris L. Davis decided to revisit the email marketing landscape and what is available now. In this post, we will continue to look at more email marketing software that can help you in your email marketing efforts.

AWeber was one of the first email marketing platforms that info marketers flooded at the beginning stages of digital marketing. It was previously considered the “gold standard” for email marketers and a lot has changed since those days. However, I must give credit where it is due as they have been around for over 20 years.

• Features: AWeber has all the basic features of an email marketing platform including: autoresponders, forms, custom fields, and newsletters/broadcasts. Some of the more recent features include: building landing pages, custom forms, the ability to sell your products and services with their online store builder. As expected, you can create segments using tags and custom fields. Their form builder can create up to 25 other fields in order to help you segment faster by collecting those answers into a custom field. Tags can be applied based on actions taken by your subscriber or by custom field responses.
  
• Integrations: Given their tenured online presence, Aweber natively integrates with a ton of other marketing software. You can also connect AWeber to many of your favorite web apps by using their API. For everything else you can use Zapier and/or Make to connect to other apps.
  
• Functionality & Ease of Use: You can quickly get up and running with AWeber as they have over 600 email marketing newsletters and templates. You even have the option of using your own URL or Facebook Page in order for them to create several templates for you with your company branding. If you want to create graphics they integrate with Canva so you can design without having to leave AWeber’s platform. Their drag-and-drop builder makes customizing your emails easy. AWeber has easy to follow instructions that are embedded as videos throughout their platform that teach you how to use each of their features.
  
• Limitations on Free Plan: You can accomplish a lot by using the free version of AWeber. However if you want the ability to split test your emails, use abandoned carts, purchase tagging automations, use branded click tracking links,save and send to custom segments or any type of advanced analytic reporting, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Overall

AWeber has been around for a long time and has been a staple in the email marketing industry. They pride themselves with making sure that your email deliverability is reliable. Their pricing is simple and straightforward. If you are just getting started and not very techy it’s worth taking a look at what they have to offer.

MailerLite is a newer email marketing platform in comparison to Aweber. At a quick glance of their website and you get the feel they more than likely share audiences with ConvertKit. They offer quite a few features to help you grow your business.

• Features: With MailerLite you can do email marketing, automations, newsletters, and build landing pages. In addition, they have a full website builder to create an entire website. Some more unique features include an email verifier (which is useful for making sure your emails actually hit the inbox) and paid newsletter subscriptions (and other paid digital products). MailerLite also lets you organize your subscribers by groups (what they call tags) and segments. Groups (tags) are great if you want to manually be able to group people by different criteria. You can use their automations to trigger sending emails to these different groups. Segments are good for keeping groups of subscribers who meet certain criteria you set automatically up to date. MailerLite also syncs with Facebook custom audiences.
  
• Integrations: MailerLite integrates with over 100 different apps. Though not as many as Aweber or Mailchimp, you can use their API to connect your account with other applications and integrations or use the API documentation to create your own integrations. MailerLite integrates natively with popular platforms like MailerCheck, Shopify, Facebook Audiences, Stripe, Typeform, WooCommerce, and WordPress You can integrate MailerLite with even more apps and platforms using Zapier and/or Make.
  
• Functionality & Ease of Use: MailerLite is easy to use and get started with. They provide helpful step by step instructions. You can create email campaigns, landing pages and forms in minutes with their drag-and-drop editor.

Overall

MailerLite offers a lot of features in their Free Forever plan. It’s sufficient if you are just getting started with your email list and want an all-in-one solution that not only lets you send emails but also build landing pages,full websites, and take payments.

Sendinblue is a, self proclaimed, all-in-one marketing platform designed to provide you with the same marketing and sales tools that big brands have without having to allocate a huge marketing budget.

• Features: Sendinblue’s main features are its email marketing function to send emails, build automations, landing pages, and forms. However, their more unique offerings consist of Facebook ads, CRM capabilities (you can track your sales pipeline and keep all information about a contact and your interactions and files in one place), SMS marketing, and chat features. There is a universal inbox for your team and you can send transactional emails. Their marketing automation features include a workflow editor in addition to page tracking ability that lets you create advanced marketing automation workflows and track the behavior of your subscriber on your website. They even have a place for people to schedule meetings with you.
  
• Integrations: Sendinblue offers 2 main ways to integrate. One is with their API which will allow you to integrate with any tool regardless of platform. The other is through the Sendinblue plugin. It’s worth checking their website as most tools that you use already have direct integrations (they call them plugins) with Sendinblue.
  
• Functionality & Ease of Use: Sendinblue makes it easy to get started. They have a drag-and-drop builder to make email creation a breeze. You can start from their template library. Everything is customizable no matter what feature you are using.
  
• Email Centric Pricing: Sendinblue charges based on how many emails you send and not on how many subscribers or contacts you have. Their free plan includes unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails sent per day.

Overall

SendinBlue may be a good choice if you are just getting started with email marketing and want everything in one place. They don’t lock you into contracts and even offer the option to get pre-paid email credits and SMS credits. Be aware that on the free plan there are limitations of not being able to split tests, use the landing page builder or run Facebook ads from your account. However transactional emails and SMS are included on the free tier.

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that is built for ecommerce (more specifically, to integrate with Shopify). Their segmentation and engagement features revolve around the ecommerce data that is integrated with it. Without an ecommerce platform integrated it doesn’t make sense to consider it as a standalone email marketing solution.

• Features: Klaviyo has email marketing and segmentation tools so that you can personalize the subscriber’s experience. They also have SMS marketing, forms to capture subscriber information and to segment out the gate, ecommerce automations (like abandoned cart automations, post purchase automations, back in stock automations and more), and a pre-built template library to get you up and running quickly.
  
• Integrations: Klaviyo is best known for their ecommerce integrations. They integrate with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magneto Commerce, PrestaShop, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and more with just one-click. They have over 200+ prebuilt data integrations. Again, to get the most out of this platform you’ll want to integrate it with an ecommerce platform they natively integrate with.
  
• Functionality & Ease of Use: Klavio has a clean interface which makes getting started easy. Complexities only arise as you start using the platform more deeply. For instance the lack of tags in workflows and creation of properties (aka custom fields) are not ideal and leave a lot to be desired. In addition, the fact that you can’t change a start trigger to a workflow once it’s built drives our founder crazy. However, one thing Klaviyo gets right is engagement tracking. They provide you with a lot of built in settings and features to keep a clean list with high deliverability.
  
• Pricing: If you have less than 250 contacts and send 500 or less emails per month you can get started on their free plan. Otherwise, Klaviyo remains on the more higher priced side of email marketing solutions as your marketable contact size grows. However, given the analytics and revenue reporting you get it may be worth it for your business.

Overall

Even with its shortcomings, Klaviyo is a good solution to pair with your ecommerce store (especially Shopify). It is unique as it allows you to truly market around your customer purchase data and their behavior. Once you learn how to work with the software things get better.

Conclusion 

Email is certainly not dead. And with a plethora of options available out there, now is a good time to beef up your email marketing game. We have just reviewed a few of the more well known, and prominent offerings; however, there are more than enough solutions for you to find one that best fits your business. Hopefully these articles have helped.

Are you using any of these email marketing platforms in your business? Which one is your favorite? Let me know in the comments below.