Email newsletters remain a key part of an effective online marketing strategy in 2020. There are nearly 4 billion email users worldwide and that number continues to climb. Fortunately, there are a range of email newsletter tools available to help you tap into that growing audience. Which email newsletter tool is the best fit for your needs?
To help you answer that question we gathered a list of the top email newsletter tools on the market, along with descriptions of what they do and their pricing information. To be clear, a fair share of the tools listed here are general email service providers, and do more than send email newsletters. But their offerings include email newsletter templates and design tools, as well as features that help you manage your list of newsletter subscribers, all important features when managing an email newsletter.
First, let’s start with the basics of email newsletters.
What are email newsletters?
Email newsletters are the digital age cousin of the old-school, printed newsletter. The purpose of an email newsletter is to share news and information that’s useful to a specific audience. When it comes to your business, your audience is your existing and potential customers.
An email newsletter is a great place to share:
- Interesting details about your work and your team, for example, recent hires and upcoming webinars and events;
- Best practices and tips;
- Industry news and trends;
- Photos and stories from customers; and
- Links to articles, videos, listicles (e.g., 10 best U.S. vacation spots) and other content related to the topics that your audience cares about.
In order to be effective, email newsletters have to be sent on a regular basis. Aim for at least once a week. They also need to share information that is useful to your audience, not just promoting your businesses. Let’s talk more about that.
Why send an email newsletter?
Email is still king when it comes to marketing directly to a targeted audience. Social media posts are dropped into crowded feeds, but an email message lands directly into your customer’s inbox.
Email newsletters build value and relationships. They position you as a trusted source of information.
Why does home-dev.rasa.io care about email newsletter tools?
The short answer: Because home-dev.rasa.io is an email newsletter tool.
Here at home-dev.rasa.io, our focus is on building smarter email newsletters. Use our platform to design your email newsletter template and hand pick what news websites, social media feeds and other content sources you want to gather articles from. Then home-dev.rasa.io gets to work building your email newsletter.
The secret ingredient? We leverage artificial intelligence to sift through your curated content and deliver a unique email newsletter for each person on your email list. Read more about how home-dev.rasa.io works.
Of course, we think our platform is awesome. You should definitely check it out if you’re interested in sending a customized email newsletter and automating aspects of your email outreach. You know what else is awesome? Transparency. In this case, transparency means acknowledging that each business is coming to the table with different needs and email newsletter tools (including our own) are hardly one-size-fits-all.
The key is finding the tool that works for you and your business. Use the following list to help you understand your options and find the right fit.
27 Email Newsletter Tools for Marketers in 2020
Free tools
TinyLetter
Pricing: Free
TinyLetter is a simple, no frills email newsletter tool geared mostly toward writers of personal newsletters. Think of someone writing a family newsletter or a musician who wants to connect with her fans. This tool does not offer advanced reporting or other business-grade features. For that, they point users to their parent company, Mailchimp.
Image source: Tiny Letter | www.tinyletter.com
Pricing: Free
LinkedIn offers a newsletter creation tool as part of its platform. This isn’t technically an email newsletter, but it works in a similar way.
The platform’s publishing tool allows you to build a newsletter and reaches out to your contacts with an offer to subscribe (you can turn this option off if you’d like). Users can publish up to one article to their newsletter every 24 hours.
Free tools for small users
Benchmark
Pricing: Free for up to 250 emails a month; Starts at $11.89 a month for Pro plan
Benchmark’s drag-and-drop functionality makes polished, design-forward email newsletters attainable even for marketers that don’t consider themselves tech savvy. Users also get a full range of features that cater well to scaling teams, including detail analytics, spam testing tools, A/B split testing and auto-responders. Another plus? The platform is international in scope and is available in nine different languages. If you need things available in several languages, check this tool out.
Source: Benchmark | www.benchmark.com
Campayn
Pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts; plans start at $19 a month
Campayn bills itself as an email marketing tool for non-experts. Expect an email editor with drag-and-drop functionality, custom HTML upload and specialized tools for adding calendars, Google Maps embeds and PDFs to emails, along with automation and reporting features.
HubSpot
Pricing: Free to start; Professional edition starts at $800 a month
HubSpot offers an email newsletter tool with a drag-and-drop email editor, as well as advanced features like A/B testing, personalization and smart content rules. The tool also integrates with other HubSpot products, including its free content relationship management (CRM) tool, to analyze how your campaigns are going.
EmailOctopus
Pricing: Free for up to $2,500 subscribers; sliding scale based on total subscribers
EmailOctopus is a good option to consider if you’re looking for an affordable high-volume email newsletter tool. Emails are sent through Amazon’s transactional service, which requires you to set up an Amazon SES account, but you get all the trappings of a regular email marketing tool, including templates, a rich email builder, analytics and automation.
You can send emails to 30,000 subscribers for about $75 total, or less than half of what most major email marketing software charge.
Mailchimp
Pricing: Free for up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 contacts; $9.99 a month for up to 50,000 contacts; $14.99 for 100,000 contacts; and $299 for 200,000+
Mailchimp is a heavy-hitter when it comes to all things email. And it’s free, which makes it a good place to start for small and medium-size businesses that are new to sending email newsletters.
The platform offers a range of templates and a straightforward drag-and-drop builder to get your email newsletter up and running quickly. The platform also has basic tools for automating and segmenting your emails, though scaling teams may find them limiting.
Mailjet
Pricing: Free for up to 6,000 email a month; plans start at $9.65 a month for up to 30,000 email a month
Mailjet prioritizes two things: sending speed and developer resources. Interested in building your own email solutions? This is a tool to check out. Mailjet’s developer-friendly features include an API solution for software engineers to build onto their platform. The platform emphasizes its solutions for fast-growing teams, including collaborative tools that help large teams work together on email campaigns.
Revue
Pricing: Free for up to 50 subscribers; starts at $5 a month for less than 200 subscribers
Revue is an email newsletter tool designed for writers and publishers, with names like Vox Media and Fast Company among its users. The platform has a simple, text-focused email builder tool that lets users embed media, drag-and-drop links to relevant content and add integrations to content curation tools like Pocket.
Sendicate
Pricing: Free for up to 500 subscribers; plans start at $9 a month
Sendicate is a design-centric email newsletter tool for small businesses. Access email newsletter templates and an easy-to-use email builder, as well as more advanced features like subscribing segmenting, reporting and email scheduling.
Sendinblue
Pricing: Free for up to 300 emails a day; plans start at $25 a month for up to 40,000 emails a month
Sendinblue brings together email newsletters, SMS marketing and chat in a platform that caters well to small and mid-size businesses. Get access to an extensive library of templates, HTML editor and drag-and-drop functionality in building email newsletters. You can also link automated emails, including an email newsletter signup, to a range of customer actions using the platform’s powerful automation features.
Vision6
Pricing: Free for the first 250 emails; plans start at $9 a month
Vision6 stands apart for its range of next-level contact segmenting features. If you’re interested in sending hyper-targeted email, this is a tool to look at.
The platform features a spreadsheet-like interface to help you manage and group subscribers, alongside standard features like easy-to-edit templates, drag-and-drop functionality and social media integrations.
Zoho Campaigns
Pricing: Free for up to 2,000 emails a month for up to 2,000 subscribers; plan-based pricing starting at $32 a year or $6 per credit for pay-as-you-go credits
Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing software designed to work hand-in-hand with the brand’s CRM. If you’re already a Zoho user, this could be the email newsletter solution for you.
Features include a library of free email newsletter templates, analytics and newsletter preview options that allow you to see what your email newsletter looks like on different email servers and devices. The tool also optimizes email newsletters for mobile, tablet and desktop.
Paid tools
AWeber
Pricing: Plans start at $19 a month for up to 500 subscribers
AWeber is well-established in email marketing software, offering a solid email newsletter tool for small businesses. Features include email designs and detailed reporting, as well as automation and segmentation tools. The tool also integrates well with a number of key systems, including WordPress and Shopify.
AWeber’s subscriber segmentation tools function well, but aren’t as powerful for scaling teams. If you want to send email newsletters to multiple segments, and have more control over your distribution, it may not be the right fit.
BombBomb
Pricing: Plans start at $29.99 a month
While most email newsletter tools focus on text and images, BombBomb stands out for its emphasis on video. Use BombBomb’s app to record video or upload video through YouTube and use the tool’s templates to design a video-friendly newsletter. Your newsletter subscribers receive the videos as GIFs automatically generated by the software. BombBomb also provides useful in-app tutorials to walk you through getting started.
Campaigner
Pricing: Free 30-day trial; plans start at $19.95 a month
Campaigner is a good option for growing teams interested in taking advantage of more advanced features, like email automation workflows. The tool has standard features like email newsletter templates and an easy-to-use email builder, as well as workflows for setting up detailed email triggers tied to specific customer actions, for example, filling out a form on your website or their response to a previous email.
Constant Contact
Pricing: Starts at $20 a month for up to 500 contacts
Constant Contact is a solid email newsletter platform for businesses large and small. The platform offers a range of user-friendly features, including hundreds of email newsletter templates to get you started.
The platform also has a helpful onboarding process, a plus for businesses looking to jump in quickly. If you’re looking for more powerful features, like complex automation tools, this may not be the best fit.
Drip
Pricing: Free 14-day trial; plans start at $49 a month for up to 2,000 contacts
Drip’s CRM and related email newsletter tools are designed specifically for ecommerce users. Its advanced email features include visual workflows and cross-channel marketing automation for retailers interacting with customers on social media, email and other platforms. The tool also has a range of ecommerce integrations like Shopify, Magento and Woo Commerce.
Emma
Pricing: Starts at $89 a month for up to 10,000 contacts
Emma stands out for its user experience and its exceptional design. Expect beautiful built-in email newsletter templates, as well as the automation and campaign management tools typically found on professional-grade email marketing platforms. Emma also offers email personalization through dynamic content and tools for specific industries, including franchises, nonprofits, gyms and universities.
Image source: Emma | www.myemma.com
GetResponse
Pricing: Starts at $15 a month for Basic plan with 1,000 contacts
GetResponse is built to scale alongside your business, starting with basic email marketing, including email newsletters, and allowing you to add more advanced tools like landing pages, webinars and autoresponders as you go. Design and customize your emails with a drag-and-drop editor, or choose from hundreds of ready-made templates.
The platform also offers access to some 5,000 licensed images from Shutterstock. Feel free to experiment; the platform offers a free 30-day trial on any of its plans.
Keap
Pricing: Starts at $79 a month for up to 500 contacts
Keap’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform offers a whole set of email marketing tools, including a library of flexible templates to get you started building an email newsletter.
Other features include segmentation tools that subdivide your contact list by industry or how subscribers interact with your content, A/B testing and auto spam checking to make sure your email newsletter lands in inboxes.
Ontraport
Pricing: Starts at $79 a month for up to 1,000 contacts
Ontraport’s “all-in-one” marketing software is designed for entrepreneurs and small businesses, and includes an email newsletter tool within its email marketing suite.
In addition to templates, the platform offers features like advanced segmentation for targeted campaigns and automated email re-engagement to help you remove unresponsive contacts and re-engage with those you haven’t heard from in a while.
Mad Mimi
Pricing: Plans start at $10 a month for up to 500 contacts
Mad Mimi’s primary selling point is its simplicity. It aims to make sending and tracking email newsletters as easy as possible. Create emails, build a contact list and send newsletters to a subscriber list. The platform also offers the option to add slightly more advanced features like creating drip campaigns or adding integrations.
MailUp
Pricing: Varies depending on email speed and features
MailUp’s differentiating factor is its pricing structure, which has users pay on a sliding scale based on how quickly they need their messages delivered. If you’re OK with sending emails at a slower pace, this could be a good fit in terms of pricing.
Otherwise, expect many of the same features as other email marketing tools, including a drag-and-drop email builder, HTML editor and well-designed email newsletter templates to choose from. WordPress users take note: MailUp offers a WordPress plug-in that you can use to capture newsletter signups on your website.
Sendloop
Pricing: Plans start at $9 a month
Sendloop has been in email marketing since 1999 and continues to deliver a powerful set of tools at a reasonable price point. Features include a suite of tools for optimizing email delivery like its 24/7 blacklist monitoring that tracks and addresses delivery issues. This tool also has a developer platform for building marketing solutions that you can sell to others.
Substack
Pricing: Substack charges a 10% fee on paid subscriptions
Substack is an email newsletter tool designed to help writers start a paid email newsletter. Its users include high-profile media names like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The platform offers design-forward email newsletter templates and tools for processing paid newsletter subscriptions.
Image source: Substack | www.substack.com
Vertical Response
Pricing: Plans start at $11 a month; nonprofits get 10,000 emails a month for free
Vertical Response is a crisply designed, straightforward email newsletter platform for small and mid-size businesses, but it suits nonprofits particularly well. The tool offers a special nonprofit pricing plan that allows qualifying organizations to send up to 10,000 emails a month for free, as well as a 15% discount on its plans.
Which tool is right for me?
As this list shows, there are a lot of options out there to help you send email newsletters to your audience.
In addition to price point, consider the following when weighing whether an email newsletter tool is the right fit for your business.
>> How big is my subscriber list? The smaller your list, the less reliant you are on features that come with paid plans.
>> How large is my team? If its mostly one person or a small team sending your email newsletter, steer toward a smaller tool. Consider upgrading if you’re looking specifically for
>> Do I want to automate more of my email marketing? Powerful automation tools come with a price tag, but they’re worth it in terms of optimizing your email newsletter strategy.
Weigh your options before purchasing, make sure to regularly reassess your needs over time and don’t be afraid to experiment with your email newsletter strategy.
