Email Marketing Blog

So you’ve decided to start focusing more effort on your ‘small’ business, and perhaps you’re still working out of your bedroom, but your customers don’t need to know that. You’ve been sending out emails to your list of around 50-200 recipients that you’ve built up over the last few months, but Outlook isn’t quite cutting

Salesforce CRM was originally built to meet the needs of enterprises and large businesses. It’s not surprising, then, that it can feel pretty overwhelming for the little guys. When I was working for what I’d call a small-to-medium-sized company in Barcelona, we had a dedicated Salesforce expert on the team to help the salespeople with

If you work in sales or marketing, you’ve most likely come across HubSpot in one capacity or another. Owning almost a third of the marketing automation market, it’s clear HubSpot is a widely used platform. Champions of inbound marketing, they have tons of free resources available; most notably their free online course and comprehensive blog.

Despite HubSpot’s popularity, many people are looking for an alternative solution. And though the Free CRM plan is very appealing, the price tags attached to its paid plans aren’t so attractive for small businesses. But what about ActiveCampaign? How do its prices compare to HubSpot’s and what features does it offer? We’re going to look at all of

As far as email marketing platforms go, Constant Contact is a dinosaur. Founded more than 20 years ago, it saw its user base grow significantly around 2011 but has since lost a lot of traction to competitors like Mailchimp. Comparing the popularity of Constant Contact Vs Mailchimp On the one hand, this is understandable as

Google tells us that ActiveCampaign gets, on average, double the hits when compared to ConvertKit. But does that mean it’s actually a better email marketing service? I’m going to use this ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign review to dissect everything from ease of use and price all the way to deliverability. ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign: Summary Are you ready to

  Ready to take your Shopify store to the next level? Chances are, you’ve probably already thought about using email marketing to do that (if you’re not already!). Email marketing can offer a great way to improve conversions, boost sales, and get more repeat business to your store. However, the icing on the cake is that

So maybe you’ve decided your email newsletters are in need of a refresh. Or you’re just sick of your newsletters falling apart when viewed on mobile (and potentially getting missed by up to 77% of your subscribers). Unfortunately, sometimes the templates available in your newsletter tool just don’t cut it. And you simply may not

These days, it’s impossible to run successful email marketing campaigns without the help of autoresponders. Why? Because autoresponders are perhaps the cheapest, easiest and most effective way of converting your subscribers into customers. Picture this: you run a consultancy. A visitor comes to your website and registers to download a free eBook. You provide them with a

AWeber’s big claim to fame, over their 18 years of existence, is to be the company that invented the autoresponder. By comparison, MailChimp is certainly the new kid on the block – albeit the kid everyone’s talking about thanks to their clever marketing and share-worthy mascot. So how do the two email marketing solutions compare? Our

One has earned a reputation for itself as ‘the content creator’s email marketing software’. The other is the world’s most popular email marketing platform. Both boast raving fans who will passionately defend why each one is the bees’ knees of email marketing. We’re talking, of course, about ConvertKit and MailChimp. At a glance, both actually

Celebrating over 18 years in the business, Mailchimp is an email marketing software veteran. It claims to send over 600 million emails every day over its platform, so this should give you an idea of its popularity. Why is it so popular? Aside from its solid marketing, I’m going to guess it’s because its platform

Whether you want to build a contact form, a sign-up form or a survey, there are tons of form builders out there (of course, you want to know what the best online form builder is). What’s great is that these tools take out the complicated coding aspect, meaning that you often only have to drag

You’ve been doing some research for a newsletter service and noticed that MailChimp and GetResponse keep popping up? Well, that’s because they’re both quite good! They rank pretty well in our list, just under ActiveCampaign. We’re going to dive in and look at the differences between each service, in a number of categories, to help

ClickFunnels claims that its Platinum plan is worth more than a 4-year college education (founder Russel Brunson actually gives students permission to drop out of school in one of his many videos!), and at $3,564 a year that would indeed reflect the actual cost of attending some European universities. So, is it really worth it and is

Once upon a time, when I was living in London and working for a fast-paced marketing agency (and drinking way too much coffee), my job was to manage digital projects for some pretty big-name clients. One of the project requests that frequently came in was landing pages. My clients were regularly running big-budget email marketing

This is the sixth email deliverability test we’ve carried out, and, as with every test, it brought quite a few surprises. If you’d like to make a comparison between this test and the previous one, check out our test from February 2020. For those of you who are coming across our tests for the first

Update: See our latest deliverability test from Oct 2021 here.  For those who were eagerly awaiting this moment, I can announce that our latest deliverability results are finally here! Making this our seventh email deliverability test to date. Of course, this round wasn’t without surprises. In fact, as you’ll see, there were quite a few

Six months have passed since our last deliverability test, and I have to say that a lot has changed in such a short period of time. And even more has changed since our first tests four years ago! This is our eighth email deliverability test to date, and you’ll see that there were quite a

If you’re not happy with Mailchimp but can’t decide between the two relatively new players, MailerLite and ConvertKit, you’re not alone. In a sea of endless email marketing automation options, businesses and creators are seeking simplicity and flexibility. Many of us look for an email marketing tool that offers the “complete package,” especially if you’re

Email marketing is all about trying to stay relevant: sending the right message at the right time, and read by the right recipient. If you can’t hit that trifecta, your campaign will head to the trash without the slightest chance of being read. Email marketing automation is hailed as the ultimate solution to staying relevant.

Here’s a common problem: You send out a confirmation order email or a newsletter through your website hosting provider’s email server, but unfortunately hardly any contacts receive the message. That’s a particular issue with self-managed newsletter software like Supermailer, Sendblaster, or with WordPress plugins such as Mailpoet. Why does this happen? Well, there are two underlying problems here.

Whether you’re a retail store owner, blogger/media professional, or educator, you may have been advised to try email marketing. It’s good advice. Email marketing ROI continues to rise, securing you $44 for every dollar you spend on your email campaign. If you’re on the fence about newsletters, don’t be. Newsletters don’t have to be boring

I got my first email address when I was around 12 years old. I used to love AOL’s encouraging “you’ve got mail” greeting, though my inbox was fairly vacant back then. Flash forward to 2021 and, though I’ve been through 3 different personal email addresses (plus a ton for various places of employment and education),

Atlanta-based Mailchimp is a pretty big name, serving more than 20M customers worldwide. However, after spending some time comparing providers I can’t help but wonder if the attraction is more tied up in the marketing than the actual product. Perhaps notoriety isn’t everything? Since Mailchimp started charging users per contact, as opposed to just subscribed contacts (which was

Kartra is aimed at solo-preneurs looking to take their business online. And I have to say that Kartra’s wide range of features do seem to facilitate this. Even the lowest tier plan comes with all features, including email marketing, landing pages and helpdesk. But how much will all this cost you and is it worth it?

We know you’ve heard a lot about Mailchimp. Constant Contact? Possibly not. While they have been around since 1995 and serve roughly half a million users worldwide, their share of the market is nothing compared to Mailchimp’s. Though Constant Contact is Mailchimp’s biggest competitor, it owns just 8.69%. Mailchimp owns a whopping 62.23%! It should

Whether you’re a solopreneur or a small business, the likelihood is you have to manage a number of clients and all that relates to them (invoices, emails, orders, contracts, etc.). This can get messy quickly, especially if you have to share this information with other members of your team. Don’t get me wrong, I love

Salesforce has more products than any other SaaS application I know, so it’s no wonder this company dominates the CRM market. Launched in 1999 in San Francisco by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. Back in the day, Siebel (which now belongs to Oracle) was the big

Freshworks CRM offers three different plans: Customer-For-Life, Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud. The first is a kind of amalgamation of the Sales and Marketing Cloud, with an increased contact allowance. Within these three plans, you’ll have three tiers to choose from: Growth, Pro and Enterprise. To be honest, it’s not entirely clear how each plan differs as

HubSpot is a big name in the sales and marketing world. If you haven’t used one of its products, you’re likely to have found yourself on its website via one of its blog articles. In fact, it’s worth analyzing HubSpot’s very successful inbound marketing strategy and seeing how you can apply it to your business. But

Here’s a fun fact: when Google first released Gmail in 2004, many dismissed it as an April Fool’s joke. The 1 GB of storage offered just seemed too good to be true (back then, rivals like Hotmail and Yahoo only offered 2 MB). And the April 1 release date obviously didn’t help, either. 17 years

If you’ve landed on this comparison, it’s likely you’re looking for an alternative to HubSpot. Perhaps you’ve been using its Free CRM plan but have now come to the point where you either cough up $50/month or look for another service? If that’s you then well done for shopping around. People often pay excessive amounts just

There’s no denying that Mailchimp is more widely known than MailerLite. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it offers a better service. If you’re reading this article, you’ve either tried Mailchimp and are not fully satisfied or you’ve heard good things about MailerLite and want to see how it compares to other popular email marketing tools like Mailchimp. I,

Let me make a confession. I used to be a huge fan of MailChimp. This was probably about 10 years ago, when I was just getting started in the world of email marketing, and using MailChimp for many of the small business clients I was working for. I loved its ease of use, templates and designs.

Let’s start with something unusual for our unbiased reviews: I’ll begin with a shortcoming of Constant Contact templates…. They are not organized in categories. Yes, this means you’ll have to scroll through a ton of them before you find something that meets your needs. But in all honesty, it’s not the end of the world.

It’s almost unfair to pit one of our top and lowest rated solutions against each other. We’ve written extensively about how ActiveCampaign is one of the strongest newsletter tools you can use for your business thanks to their mastery of automations. Meanwhile, AWeber underwhelmed us with their lack of features and sometimes confusing editor. However, it’s worth

In the small-to-medium business space, two big names often come up in conversations around the best email marketing automation software: ActiveCampaign and Drip. ActiveCampaign has steadily built a reputation for itself as a marketing automation leader over the last 15 years, serving over 70,000 businesses worldwide. Core offerings include its powerful workflow editor and integrated CRM.

Surveys are a great tool for gathering any kind of data in an effective, cost-free manner. Allowing the respondents to answer the questions anonymously, free survey tools provide you with a non-intrusive way of collecting information without having to leave the office. The ways in which you can use surveys are practically endless, meaning that companies

It takes no time at all to hit send in your newsletter tool. But what happens when an error has slipped in? Or even worse – what if the whole concept behind the newsletter is all wrong? Don’t worry, we are here to help you with the low-down on seven of the biggest email marketing

Email marketing is now easier than ever. Going back a decade ago, the tools were clunky, laborious, and really no fun to use at all. But thanks to a new breed of providers there’s no excuse anymore. Regardless of the size of your business, you must have an email marketing strategy in place. Now getting started

Launched a few years ago, Wix’s email marketing service (formerly known as Wix Shoutout) is designed to be a simple, easy-to-use add-on to any Wix website. Now found within Wix’s Ascend bundle – which also includes live chat, invoices, video and lead capture – the email marketing tool is very much designed to make Wix

When the pandemic hit, millions of employees were forced to work from home, causing many potential problems for businesses and the people themselves. How are we going to communicate? Can we work as effectively? In just a few weeks, countless people around the world had installed applications like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts, to

We’re all familiar with Google, but if you’re a business user, you’ve probably also come across Google Workspace at some stage, though you probably knew it by its former name: G Suite. What is Google Workspace, exactly? Google Workspace is Google’s range of cloud-based office productivity tools. It initially only included Gmail, Docs, and Sheets,

Do you remember when you’d have to go down to your local computer store to buy the latest version of Microsoft Word… on a disk? You might even have one buried deep in a desk drawer somewhere. Of course, nowadays you can buy and download your software as digital files quickly and easily with a

This is the fifth email deliverability test we’ve carried out, and it’s just as fascinating as our previous round. If you’re not familiar with our tests, this is something we started doing back in August 2017 in order to monitor the deliverability rates of the world’s most popular email marketing services. The providers we’ve looked

  Please note: find all of our deliverability tests here (including the latest ones).   In light of receiving such great feedback from Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz and SparkToro, we were eager to get our next round of deliverability results out. When Rand shouted us out on Twitter back in May we were

  Please note: find all of our deliverability tests here (including the latest ones).   Following on from our previous email deliverability test last year, we’re pleased to release the results of our latest round of testing. There were a few surprises this round – the third in our series of deliverability tests (we launched the

A lot of email experts argue that email deliverability is the responsibility of the sender. Which is partly true – there are plenty of things you can be doing to reduce the likelihood of your email getting marked as spam. But tell that to the marketer who has spent months cleaning email lists, building immaculately-coded templates,

If you use Google Mail, you’ll notice it’s constantly getting better at filtering your emails. Firstly, it will send unsolicited messages to the spam folder. If they’re from a newsletter, they will land in your Promotions tab. This is all part of a larger trend designed to completely remove spam from our digital lives. And

After several months of hard work, we finally reached the finish line: EmailToolTester has a new look. We have been comparing and reviewing the best newsletter and offering advice on how to start your own email marketing campaigns tools since 2011.   While our old website builder, Webnode, was a reliable asset for many years,

You might think email marketing is going out of fashion. Aren’t there too many email newsletters already? Yes, of course there are. To tell you the truth, many of them are being ignored (and rightly so). The old ‘subscribe and blast’ approach stopped working a while ago. Ever since Gmail started filtering newsletters into the