Email Marketing Blog

You probably know that email deliverability and sender reputation are vital if you’re sending out email newsletters and campaigns, but why is it important? And what can you do about it? In this post, I’m going to look at the importance of email deliverability and all the things you need to do to improve your

The past two years have seen vast changes in the way we work as a response to the pandemic. Namely, more and more of the US workforce and beyond are working remotely, either part-time or every day, which has subsequently increased reliance on video conferencing platforms. Most of us have become pretty familiar with various

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

ActiveCampaign is a fantastic email marketing service, but it’s not for everyone. Perhaps you’ve tried it out and couldn’t get your head around it, or perhaps you’re specifically looking for a free or more affordable tool? Whatever the reason, we’re glad you’re here, because we’ve got a whole host of excellent ActiveCampaign alternatives to show

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

This article isn’t about how your small business should be doing email marketing. It’s not even about why your small business should be doing email marketing. By now, we think email marketing has more than proven its worth. There’s no shortage of research that shows that email marketing generates around $36 for every $1 spent. Or that

There’s no denying it. We live in an ever-more digital world. During the lockdown, perhaps you took an online yoga class with your instructor or had a consultation with a health practitioner? Now that lockdown is easing up in many countries, small and large businesses are having to rethink how they do business. The use

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

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 it’s

While Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools out there, the company’s decision in May 2019 to stop its native integration with Shopify was a deal-breaker for many ecommerce brands, and many turned to Omnisend as an alternative. Mailchimp has since reopened its partnership with Shopify, but is it too late? Looking

Email marketing has huge potential, but it must be done right. Aside from selecting the best email marketing service, you’ll also need to make sure it comes with professional-looking templates you can adapt to your needs. Or, if not, you’ll need to find a dedicated email template builder like Stripo, BEE or Chamaileon. Why Use An

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

If you’re looking into sales funnel software, first of all, well done. You might be one step ahead of your competitors. As any marketer knows, if you’re going to make it in the current climate, you’re going to need an intelligent digital marketing strategy, and sales funnels could very well help you with that. 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

Despite HubSpot’s popularity, many people are looking for HubSpot alternatives. And though the Free CRM plan is very appealing, the price tags attached to its higher-tier 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

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 20 years, serving over 180,000 customers worldwide. Core offerings include its powerful automation workflow editor and

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.

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 online 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

Since you already spend time writing and designing your email newsletters, why not try making money off them as well? Turning a newsletter into a money-making asset isn’t an impossible task. There are many ways of doing so, and various newsletter creators have had major success with newsletter monetization (as we’ll share below!) So if

As far as email marketing platforms go, Constant Contact is a dinosaur. Founded over 25 years ago, it saw its user base grow significantly around 2011 but has since lost a lot of traction to competitors like Mailchimp. On top of their email marketing tools, they have introduced a variety of new features, ideal for

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, often recommended as one of the best CRMs for small businesses. Champions of inbound marketing, they have tons of free

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

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

In this article, we’re going to compare Mailchimp and Sendinblue, two very popular email marketing solutions for small businesses. Atlanta-based Mailchimp is a pretty big name, serving more than 20M customers worldwide. However, after spending some time comparing email marketing tools, I can’t help but wonder if the attraction is more tied up in the

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,

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. What’s the solution? A mass email service, otherwise known as a

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

I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not the biggest ClickFunnels fan. You know how you can really fall in love with a product due to excellent branding? Well, ClickFunnels’ ostentatious marketing materials did just the opposite to me. But, of course, it isn’t just the branding that puts people off. It’s also the price,

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?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received from businesses I don’t want to hear from. Even though I’ve hit “Unsubscribe” so many times, the emails just keep coming. Aargh! I won’t be naming any names here, but I definitely won’t be buying from these businesses, no

Whether you want to build contact forms, sign-up forms, payment forms or online surveys, 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 online form builder apps take out the complicated coding aspect, meaning that you often only

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.

These are two of the best email marketing services in our opinion. The main difference between GetResponse and ActiveCampaign is the range of features they offer and what they charge for them. ActiveCampaign’s specialty is marketing automation, allowing you to build complex workflows based on email engagement, web events, and events in third-party tools (e.g.

While ActiveCampaign is undoubtedly a superb customer experience automation tool, the platform isn’t one to rest on its laurels. In 2020, ActiveCampaign upped its game when it added landing page functionality to its existing range of features. Called Pages, ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder promises to help users build attractive landing pages for uses such as:

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

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

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 going

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

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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  I can’t believe that with this email deliverability test, we’ve completed nine tests to date! It was four years ago that we started testing the top email marketing platforms to determine which had the best email deliverability (and which were the worst email

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 $36 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

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

The 7 Best Calendly Alternatives Setmore – Payment processing included on free plan Simplybook.me – Modern design options Trafft – Generous free plan Squarespace Scheduling – Professional-looking booking platform for any website Wix Bookings – For Wix users TimeSync – Great for scheduling phone and video calls Monday.com – Internal scheduling and project management tool

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

Everyone has heard of Mailchimp. It is literally the most popular email marketing platform on the market. But I guess if you’ve found your way here, you want to know just how popular. We’ve been keeping a close eye on Mailchimp over the years, reviewing new features such as landing pages, changes in pricing and

WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs. In fact, more than 60m websites are built on WordPress! And if you’ve landed on this page then you’re most likely one of many who make up that number. Whether you’re a blogger, have an ecommerce, a review site, or some other online business, WordPress is a powerful solution.

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

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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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

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

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 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

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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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 mid-test and keen

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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 first round in

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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

Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.  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

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