5 Best Email Marketing Software (By Industry & Capabilities)
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Despite its age, email remains the top channel for marketers.
With 4.48 billion email users worldwide as of 2024, it’s no surprise that 81% of brands leverage email in their marketing strategy, nor that it’s the dominant channel. Given email’s low costs and high engagement rates, 75.6% of B2C marketers say email is their most effective customer engagement channel.
With some of the highest ROI, email is a must-have marketing channel. For modern brands to stand out and keep their customers’ attention, they need email capabilities that allow them to deliver high-quality, engaging emails at scale.
To help brands execute flawless email marketing campaigns, we explore what email marketing software is, the core benefits of using it, and leading software providers.
What is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software refers to a platform that helps brands manage their email marketing strategies and campaigns. They enable brands to develop email lists, build customizable email templates, craft email marketing campaigns, schedule and send these campaigns, and collect analytics data.
For email marketers, it’s an integral tool for building, managing, and optimizing a brand’s email marketing strategy and campaigns.
Email marketing software is sometimes mistaken as simply an email service provider (ESP). However, email service providers exclusively offer email marketing or bulk email delivery services. In contrast, email marketing software powers a variety of email marketing functions, including customer segmentation, process and campaign automation, and data collection and analysis.
6 Benefits of Using Software for Email Marketing
Sure, email marketing software empowers brands with capabilities they’d otherwise never have, allowing them to expand their offerings for customers. But it also helps them improve operational efficiency by automating processes and increasing productivity.
Specifically, email marketing software helps brands:
- Build dynamic email campaigns with no code: Email marketing software enables marketers to build complex email campaigns without code. This means teams can craft engaging campaigns that leap off the page with minimal effort.
- Generate and nurture leads more effectively: Emails are commonly used for lead generation and lead nurture campaigns, which help turn prospects into customers. They are an ideal medium for teaching customers about your brand and its offerings and incentivizing customers to make a purchase.
- Foster a deeper relationship with your existing customers: When leveraged properly, email can help brands build a deeper relationship with customers by providing customers with a direct line of communication for brand updates, feature changes, offers, and even customer support. In certain instances, brands go a step further by enabling two-way communication through email, providing customers with a direct means to engage with the brand.
- Automate the process to improve operational efficiency: Sending thousands, if not millions, of emails would be an arduous manual task. Thanks to automated solutions, brands can create stunning email campaigns quickly and deploy them in bulk to millions of recipients at once, saving teams significant operational time and resources.
- Segment customers more accurately: The effectiveness of your email campaign directly correlates to how well your emails target your audience. Email marketing solutions help brands automate the process and get accurate results faster, freeing marketers up to make more strategic decisions.
- Conduct reliable A/B testing for your campaigns: Smart brands are constantly refining their email campaigns to maximize impact and engagement. Email marketing software enables brands to seamlessly A/B test subject lines, preheaders, segments, and content to optimize your email marketing campaigns.
Simply put, email marketing software helps brands execute their email marketing campaigns to engage customers more effectively. Now that we know the main benefits, let’s look at some of the best software options on the market.
5 Best Email Marketing Software & Tools by Industry & Needs
To help you choose the right email marketing solution, we explore some of the top brands, and cover their main advantages and disadvantages to help you select the platform that’s best for you.
1. Best for email campaign creation: Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform specializing primarily in email and SMS marketing. It’s focused heavily on the retail and ecommerce space with an abundance of ecommerce integrations available. While it’s ideal for retail brands, it may not be quite as well suited for brands in other industries like banking and finance, media and entertainment, or quick service restaurants (QSR).
What stands out about this tool:
Klaviyo is ideally suited for brands that want a point solution that excels exclusively in email and SMS marketing.
2. Best for templated campaigns: Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform that specializes primarily — as the name would suggest — in email marketing. It gained popularity after shifting to a freemium model in 2009, and is now widely used for managing email marketing campaigns. Due to its popularity, it offers users a wide array of integrations.
While they have expanded to provide support with SMS messaging, push notifications, and websites, their focus has always been on email campaigns themselves. This means Mailchimp may not be the best option for brands that plan on running fully integrated omnichannel campaigns, especially if they prioritize other channels over email.
Mailchimp also has a limit on the number of emails that can be sent per month, which makes it more well-suited for small businesses that can stay within this limit, but not as ideal for growing brands that need to send more emails than Mailchimp allows.
What stands out about this tool:
Mailchimp makes email campaigns so easy a monkey could do it. One of the biggest ways they achieve this is by offering customers dynamic templates that can be uniquely customized.
3. Best for gathering customer feedback: Omnisend
Omnisend is an ecommerce marketing automation platform that provides email and SMS marketing capabilities. It enables brands to build email lists and automate campaign deployment with an easy to use drag-and-drop email builder. This means it’s easy for teams to not only build email campaigns, but also preview them to make sure they’ll hit the mark.
Omnisend is focused on powering ecommerce marketing initiatives, and has an abundance of retail integrations. However, its other offerings are a bit underwhelming, which means it may not be as well suited for different industries like QSR, Media & Entertainment, or Banking & Financial.
What stands out about this tool:
In particular, Omnisend has features that help brands gather and leverage customer feedback for greater impact. Brands can use email and SMS campaigns to incentivize customers to leave reviews, automating the process to save time while still collecting reliable zero-party data.
4. Best for email delivery: SendGrid
SendGrid is an email marketing tool that is focused first and foremost on email deliverability. As a point solution, SendGrid doesn’t have a built-in engagement engine. This means marketers will have to integrate with an omnichannel analytics solution to get robust data and reliable insights. It also lacks AI-optimization capabilities, which means it requires more manual effort to improve campaigns.
While SendGrid excels at offering easy-to-use email API services, it lacks more advanced features like email automation.
What stands out about this tool:
SendGrid specializes in email deliverability, helping brands ensure that more emails end up in recipients’ inboxes, even when operating at scale. They allow brands to automate much of this process, helping them perfect email scheduling, timing, and frequency.
5. Best cross-channel solution: MoEngage
We’d be remiss to leave ourselves off the list.
Here at MoEngage, we believe automation and personalization are critical to better conversions and ROI for your email campaigns. Our comprehensive, cross-channel marketing platform is designed to help you build dynamic, omnichannel experiences that effectively leverage email as a core channel.
We provide easy integration with email service providers, so you can easily manage your email campaigns alongside the rest of your marketing strategy using MoEngage.
Robust, omnichannel analytics provides deep insights into customer behavior and activity so you can better understand, segment, and target your customers. Automate both campaign deployment and optimization, streamlining operations and increasing campaign performance.
What stands out about our tool:
As a leading cross-channel marketing solution, MoEngage doesn’t just help brands execute flawless email marketing campaigns, it also enables them to craft cross-channel experiences that engage customers on all touch points. With personalized messaging that resonates, we help brands increase engagement, conversions, and retention.
How To Choose the Right Tools for Email Marketing
The right email marketing tool enables brands to do their job faster, more effectively, and with greater success. While different brands will certainly prioritize different features, we explore some of the main things brands should look for when choosing an email marketing solution that can effectively engage modern consumers.
The tool you choose should empower you to do the following things.
1. Easily customize out-of-the-box templates
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Many solutions have out-of-the-box templates designed for the most common email marketing scenarios, like welcome campaigns, cart abandonment campaigns, and promotional campaigns. These templates can then be customized to fit your brand’s unique needs and optimized for greater engagement.
Develop campaigns from scratch using MoEngage’s HTML builder or create campaigns entirely without code using our intuitive drag-and-drop email builder. This allows you to build emails in minutes so you can deploy beautiful campaigns quickly.
Why this is a key criterion:
Marketers can quickly create and deploy email campaigns that would otherwise take significant time to build from scratch. Brands can then rapidly adapt to changing customer needs, expectations, and preferences.
2. Build dynamic, engaging emails
Boring copy text is no longer enough to capture your customers’ attention, let alone convince them to buy.
Modern brands must build interactive emails that include personalized product recommendations and offers, surveys, ratings, feedback requests, countdown timers, and more. MoEngage helps brands include these interactive elements so they can foster engagement and collect meaningful feedback about customer preferences.
Why this is a key criterion:
Email marketing software gives brands the infrastructure and functionality to build complex, intriguing emails that foster engagement and elicit high click-to-open and click-through rates.
3. Improve email deliverability and exposure
You need to walk before you run. Brands that overlook email deliverability will struggle to see meaningful results from even the most well-executed email campaigns.
Email marketing solutions should help brands successfully deliver more emails to inboxes, ensuring your campaigns can realize their full potential. Tools should help brands increase email deliverability by setting up proper sender authentications, maintaining a strong domain and IP reputation, cleaning your email list, and ensuring legal compliance with privacy regulations. They even help with optimal delivery timing and send frequency.
MoEngage helps brands maintain trustworthy email lists and keep emails out of spam folders so more emails get to your customers. Also, our deliverability consultancy services help brands establish a clear email marketing strategy, set up necessary authentications, assist with placement issues, and send bulk emails at scale.
Why this is a key criterion:
Your email campaigns are no good if they don’t make it to your customers. Deliverability ensures your emails end up in your customers’ inboxes and aren’t sent in vain.
4. Respond automatically with real-time smart triggers
Real-time smart triggers automatically send customers email campaigns based on where they are in the customer lifecycle, from welcome messages, to reminders about items in the cart, to win-back campaigns.
The best email marketing software like MoEngage enable brands to set up smart triggers that automatically enroll customers into email campaigns based on their activity with your brand. Being able to trigger these campaigns based on real-time activity allows you to create seamless customer journeys that guide customers through to purchase and beyond.
Why this is a key criterion:
By having campaigns that automatically trigger based on customer activity, you can ensure your campaigns are always contextually relevant and timed perfectly, drastically increasing conversion rates.
5. Inform customers about important messages and alerts in a timely manner
Consumers want to be informed about the buying process and kept in the loop about their orders.
Brands need to be able to alert customers in real-time about completed transactions, delivered parcels, password resets, and updated terms of service. And this all needs to be done via the customers preferred — and trusted — mode of communication.
MoEngage’s Inform enables brands to create and manage real-time transactional alerts across channels like email through a single API. This empowers brands to deliver critical messages to customers at the optimal time, based on a particular action they take. This can be used to alert customers when their delivery has arrived, their rewards points are expiring, a password reset request has been processed, a transaction has been completed, and more. It also enables brands to manage these alerts cost-effectively.
Why this is a key criterion:
Provide customers with informational updates about transactions, product updates, changes to their terms of service, and more — all using a single API. Brands can also align their branding across transactional and promotional messaging, which are often managed by different teams.
6. Personalized product recommendations and offers
Generic product recommendations no longer land well with customers; too often, they aren’t relevant to the customers needs, don’t meet their qualifications, or simply don’t align with their preferences.
Email marketing solutions that offer in-depth customer segmentation enable brands to recommend personalized product recommendations and unique offers. Also, marketers can easily extract insights on customer interests, shopping history, and behavioral data to understand customer interests and preferences.
With personalized emails tailored to your particular customers, brands are able to drastically increase customer engagement, conversions, and lifetime value.
MoEngage’s personalization engine ingests your entire product catalog, empowering you to better understand your customers and serve them personalized recommendations across all engagement channels.
Why this is a key criterion:
Personalized recommendations and offers resonate with customers more, leading to greater engagement and conversion rates.
7. Predict customer activity and meet them where they’re going to be
To make sure your email campaigns resonate with your customers, you need to ensure you’re delivering relevant emails that provide your customers with value. But it’s extremely challenging to do that when customer needs, interests, and expectations can shift on a dime.
Modern email marketing solutions offer predictive analytics which allows teams to anticipate customer activity so you can deliver engaging content at the optimal time. Anticipate dormancy, churn, or even conversions, so you’re ready to reach out at the ideal moment. Create customer predictions for even more particular instances to anticipate who’s most likely to purchase during the holiday sale or who’s likely to re-install your app in the next 7 days.
MoEngage’s predictive capabilities help teams build omnichannel email campaigns that are specifically tailored for your customer’s next best action, so you’re always guiding them forward (and never holding them back).
Why this is a key criterion:
By anticipating customer activity, brands are able to stay a step ahead of their customers and create engaging emails that capitalize on customer interest quickly when it shifts.
8. Email + AI combo to save time and think “SMART”
Most brands operate dozens — if not hundreds or thousands — of different email campaigns. When you’re operating at this scale, it can be extremely challenging and time-consuming to craft interesting, enticing copy or make improvements to each individual email.
Email solutions with generative AI help brands automate the creation of interesting and engaging copy and images for their emails. This means brands can quickly and efficiently craft email copy and images for their campaigns without manual work. These tools also automatically track campaign performance and optimize future campaigns based on the results.
MoEngage’s Generative AI engine — Merlin AI — understands context based on your target audience and particular use case, learns (and improves) from past campaign performance, and empowers you to build effective campaigns with ease.
Why this is a key criterion:
Email marketing tools that leverage generative AI help brands save significant time developing email campaigns by automatically generating copy for your emails. This is essential for managing and executing email campaigns efficiently at scale. This also helps brands eliminate bias from their optimization process, ensuring they make improvements based on what the data shows (and not just their instincts).
9. Automation capabilities
Marketing automation is an integral component of modern email marketing solutions, especially for brands that are looking to expand their operations at scale.
Automation enables brands to alleviate manual workload and improve operational efficiency by helping brands automatically segment their customers, create engaging emails, and A/B test their email campaigns.
MoEngage helps brands automate various elements of their email marketing strategy, from segmentation, to campaign creation, to bulk email delivery, and even to generating granular insights and campaign optimization. With personalization capabilities steeped in, like our Best Time To Send feature, brands can automatically engage customers at the best time.
Our AI powered campaign optimization and personalization solution — Sherpa — also enables brands to automatically optimize their campaigns using A/B testing. This means that even on autopilot, your email marketing campaigns will automatically improve on their own, increasing traction, engagement, and conversions.
Why this is a key criterion:
Automation allows brands to streamline their operations and improve efficiency, so they can deliver results at scale. Marketers also save significant time and resources on elements of their email marketing strategies, from campaign creation, to deployment, to management, and even real-time optimization.
10. Omnichannel marketing support
While email is an extremely important marketing channel for communicating with your customers, it’s not the only channel (and shouldn’t be the only channel you use). When choosing your email marketing software, it’s important to choose a solution that will integrate with your other engagement channels, helping you deliver a seamless experience for customers no matter how (or where) they connect with your brand.
MoEngage’s Cross-Channel marketing solution is specifically designed to help brands create omnichannel experiences that effectively engage customers wherever they are.
Why this is a key criterion:
Your customers aren’t just using email, so you shouldn’t just be connecting with them via email. Ensure email is one of many communication channels within your omnichannel arsenal and that you’re integrating it seamlessly into your customer experience. Continue the conversation across all your brand touchpoints by creating seamless customer interactions across channels, including email, mobile push, SMS, and in-app messaging.
11. Robust omnichannel analytics for deep insights
Connecting with your customers is incredibly hard when you’re just taking your best guess. We wouldn’t recommend removing your instincts entirely, but it’s certainly best to rely on real data to guide your decision-making.
Omnichannel analytics provides marketers with a complete view of their customers so they can deeply understand engagement with their brand. This helps them analyze their customer segments, identify the greatest weaknesses in their email sequences, and optimize their email campaigns for greater impact. More than anything, it helps brands identify where to make these changes by helping them actually measure the performance and impact of their email marketing efforts.
MoEngage’s customer insights and analytics capabilities ensure customers have detailed insights about customer behavior, activity, and preferences. We also help brands actually leverage this data when crafting their omnichannel campaigns to ensure they deliver seamless experiences on all channels, from email, to SMS, to mobile push.
Why this is a key criterion:
Relying on trustworthy, comprehensive omnichannel analytics ensures you can collect information about your customers from different places so you can understand them holistically. This allows you to unify data as opposed to using point solutions, which often cause data discrepancies.
The Difference Between Email Marketing Software and Cross-Channel Marketing Software
Most marketers start with a stand-alone email solution and then use multiple point solutions as they grow, expand, and add channels to their repertoire. Over time, this complicates their Martech stack and slows them down.
Instead, we suggest brands opt for a cross-channel solution that has a strong suite of channels or supports easy integrations so that all the data and campaigns are in one place and you can move fast and scale easily.
Cross-channel marketing solutions enable brands to manage all their channels in a single place, making it easier to manage data, deploy omnichannel campaigns, and orchestrate a seamless customer experience. It enables brands to easily integrate their email marketing efforts into their overall marketing strategies. This omnichannel approach affords brands more flexibility and functionality so they can take advantage of more opportunities.
Maximizing Campaign ROI With MoEngage’s Email Marketing Solutions
Brands looking to engage customers effectively need to optimize for impact over impressions. If you’re only focusing on getting email into an inbox, you’re leaving a lot of value on the table, as there’s no guarantee that the customer on the other end will actually open the email, engage with the content, and then convert.
MoEngage’s Cross-Channel Marketing solution has strong email capabilities built-in and the ability to integrate with ESP to offer enhanced capabilities. Rather than being a stand-alone email service provider or point solution that specializes on a single use case, MoEngage is an all-in-one-platform with robust email marketing features. This makes it easy to execute your email strategy as part of your overall marketing efforts and conduct all the tasks you need in a single place.
Schedule a demo with our team to learn how MoEngage can help you manage your email marketing campaigns, and seamlessly integrate it into your overall marketing strategy.
