A Closer Look at the Top 5 Email Marketing Platforms for Small Businesses

Email marketing continues to be one of the best ways to build and maintain a client base. It’s great for reaching out to new, potential customers, staying connected with established clients, and announcing product launches or promotions in style. But it can also be time-consuming, tedious, and, at worst, ineffective. Here are five tools your company can use to make sure every email you send is a winner.

MailChimp : This company’s offbeat approach to branding and interface shouldn’t fool you; beneath the shiny, lighthearted exterior, it’s a powerful suite of tools for running an email marketing campaign (or more). Importing lists is a breeze, and you can filter your emails to select segments of your list to target particular markets or clients. And it’s cheap: free for 2,000 subscribers or 12,000 messages a month, with pricing starting at $10 for unlimited.

Infusionsoft : “The world’s leading automation software for small businesses” is not cheap, but it promises to improve your email marketing in a major way: users report a 300% increase in profit. Building your campaigns happens via an exciting, eye-catching flowchart process that produces similarly dazzling results. Infusionsoft’s campaigns stand out for the personalization they offer within each message, as well as for the vast amount of automation at work: once you click “Go,” you can sit back and watch a truly amazing process begin. The basic package is a hefty $200/month, but few other companies can promise such immediate and earth-shaking results for your business.

MadMimi : MadMimi simplifies email marketing while adding a ton of options to make your messages have an impact. Its WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor makes it easier than ever to add good-looking, well-formatted links to your emails, along with social media buttons letting readers retweet or post your content with a single click. And their analytics tools are surprisingly detailed, allowing you to track clicks and shares easily within the app. Pricing starts at $10/month.

Zoho : Zoho advertises itself as “the operating system for your business,” offering a full suite of tools for online marketing, but it really shines when it comes to email. Dividing the process into Basic Details, Content, and the Audience, Zoho simplifies the process with easy list functions, a great HTML content editor, and the ability to save default layouts for emails (and thus time down the road). User-defined tags are another feature that sets Zoho apart, letting you create custom tags and fields to highlight the products and services you’re offering. Pricing starts as low as $5/month.

Flashissue : Flashissue has one of the best drag-and-drop editors we’ve seen; a toddler could whip up an eye-catching email with their system. It’s particularly well-suited for newsletters, since it’s integrated with Google and Facebook to share contact lists. And Flashissue automatically summarizes content from around the web, cutting down your time hunting for stories. After collecting them, you can use Flashissue to personalize links and headlines for a less formulaic email. The free version is amazing, but premium accounts give you more contacts to work with and start at only $20.