In the search for the ideal email marketing tools, it’s important to have a clear-cut vision of what you do as a business and what kind of tasks you want to delegate to these tools.
When deciding what to choose from the offer, consider the following criteria:
- Price-to-quality ratio (as cheap as possible, to be honest)
- Integration capabilities
- Scalability and flexibility
The tools we singled out here are a very good match for startups and small businesses who are on a tight budget but want to make sure they don’t miss out on key features and are manageable as the business grows.
#1 EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a lesser-known email marketing platform that is a better fit for small and medium-sized businesses with a tight budget.
Features
Integration is enabled for more than 500 services that tie email marketing campaigns together in full scope; this includes popular apps such as Shopify, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, Salesforce, and many others.
According to their website, automation is simple and powerful – drip sequences and onboarding processes are time-based and help streamline the workflow.
Templates are easy to tweak or create from scratch, with drag and drop editor that lets you prepare the campaigns for all types of devices. EmailOctopus also offers eleven email templates free of charge.
Analytics updating happens in real-time, and it shows the in-depth data the moment campaign is sent; the data is displayed in a clear and simple manner, enabling you to track email openings, clicks, bounces, subscriptions, and unsubscribes.
List-growing forms let you collect the email addresses with easily embedded forms and WordPress plugins, without coding and complex integrations.
Other features include human support, bounce handling (by clearing out the bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints automatically), developer API that enables you to integrate EmailOctopus into websites and apps, and complete GDPR compliance.
Pricing
Email Octopus has both free and paid plans.
The starter is a free plan that includes:
- Up to 10.000 emails per month (with EmailOctopus branding on emails)
- Up to 2.500 subscribers
- Storing the statistics for up to 30 days
- Basic support
Pro plan, on the other hand, also includes:
- Scalable pricing (depending on your business scope)
- Full email design control
- Storing the stats forever
- Priority support
EmailOctopus offers a special 20% discount for nonprofit organizations.
It also has a neat Savings calculator feature that allows you to compare their pricing to competitors. Just enter the number of subscribers and the number of campaigns you launch on a monthly basis.
#2 Sender
Sender is a GDPR-compliant email marketing service with loads of features that help grow the audience, create visually appealing email campaigns, automate them, and track the stats regarding deliverability.
They emphasize their low prices. Citing their FAQ: “We believe that email marketing wasn’t meant to be as expensive as it currently is – our mission is to make email marketing affordable for every marketer.”
Features
Automation features include:
- Drip campaigns
- Welcome emails
- Abandoned cart emails
- Membership renewal reminders
- Happy Birthday emails
When it comes to audience growth features, Sender allows you to create custom subscription forms and fields for collecting the subscriber data, and segment them based on multiple criteria. Additionally, they provide CMS plugins and API integrations that instantly synchronize the subscriber data once you connect Sender with your website or webshop.
To create custom newsletters and email campaigns, you don’t need to know anything about HTML. Apart from free, mobile-friendly templates, Sender has an intuitive drag-and-drop newsletter editor that allows you to personalize emails. If you have a pre-made newsletter template in HTML format, you can easily import and send it.
For advanced email analytics, Sender has real-time open and click tracking, keeps an eye on subscriber actions and their profiles, clicks the map, and allows Google Analytics integration.
Sender maintains high email deliverability with a high reputation, dedicated IP addresses, instant feedback, corrective actions in case someone marks the email as spam, and expert deliverability consulting. Non-existing emails are automatically removed from the list.
Pricing
There are a few types of pricing plans you can choose from.
Free forever! plan includes up to 1.500 emails per month and up to 2.500 subscribers. This plan still has access to all the Sender features but has a Sender.net branding on the bottom of your emails.
A monthly plan is customizable – it starts with 9€ for up to 60.000 emails and 5.000 subscribers; for anything above 100.000 subscribers, you need to get in touch and create a plan that suits your needs.
There is also a Prepaid option – starting with 30€ for 10.000 emails (0.3 ct per email), going up to 990€ for 1.000.000 emails (which translates to 0.099 ct per email).
If you choose to pay yearly, you get two months of usage for free.
#3 SendPulse
SendPulse is a multi-channel marketing platform with an extensive list of services it offers – not just emails. These include bulk SMS service, Facebook Chatbot, and more. They also have a Partner, Referral, and Loyalty Programs as a way to attract new users.
Features
Reporting – SendPulse can sort geographic, device, and browser stats, provide the error statistics, and shows the reports via visual graphs. They can be downloaded in XLS or PDF formats, and a mobile app for iOS/ Android lets you manage and view the stats on the go.
Subscription forms – pre-designed, or customized: you can pick the branding, images, style, and text, and create a responsive subscription form.
Trigger Emails – complete the initial email automation with Automation 360. You can set up a custom event email – abandoned cart, thank-you note, registration/ confirmation/ re-engagement email, or feedback – these will notify the customers according to your presets. Everything is tracked and displayed with visual statistics.
API – SendPulse uses the REST API and works over HTTP protocol; the latest versions of SendPulse API client libraries are available at GitHub, and the API is accompanied by detailed documentation, designed for developers.
Web Push Monetization – each time a subscriber clicks on an advertisement, you earn money; customize the web push ads frequency, and run them through quality control before sending. You can pick Cost per click or Cost per mille model. Afterward, you can look into the stats and analyze the web push ads’ performance.
Drag and Drop Editor – it requires no coding skills to create the email templates and customize the design with various colors, images, text, and videos of your choice. Apart from drag-and-drop elements,
SendPulse offers over 130 ready-made email templates. Templates are adaptive to multiple devices, and you can preview them from the recipient’s angle before sending it. There is also a Component Library with pre-made email elements, and you can save them for future templates in the Saved Elements section.
Pricing
SendPulse has a complex, scalable way of calculating the total amount of your payment, depending on the services you’re interested in, their length, and scope.
For Email marketing, you have the following options for email pricing:
- Monthly subscription-free model includes up to 500 subscribers and up to 1500 emails; the cheapest option gives you the same limit for emails and subscribers, but with professional features, and costs $8 per month – or $6.4 per month if billed annually ($76.8 in total, saving you $19.2)
- Pay as you go – plans start with 10.000 messages and cost $32 ($0.0032 per email)
- VIP Plan – when you have over a million subscribers – pricing is custom, an email template is tailored according to your wishes, and you get a personal manager as the main advantage.
Transactional email plans include:
- Monthly subscription – 20% off when billed yearly. Basic plan is free for up to 12.000 emails, and you may opt for 50.000 emails at most, for $13.48 per month. Pro plan offers a dedicated IP address and goes up to 300.000 emails for $139.88 per month. Enterprise gives you an IP address as well, with up to 5.000.000 emails for $1,459.88 per month. These are the discounted prices for annual billing.
- Pay as you go – the smallest package includes 10.000 emails for $15, while the largest offers up to 1.000.000 emails for $780.
Dedicated IP addresses are available for order, up to 4 of them.
SMS Pricing varies from one country to another; upon signing up, you get to send 10 test SMS for free.
For Web Push, there are 2 pricing plans:
- Basic – free; for up to 10.000 subscribers, you get unlimited web push notifications, personalized messages, an automated series of messages, RSS to web push, and HTTP/HTTPS support.
- Pro – the cheapest option costs $190.56 per year (20% for annual billing), and for 30.000 subscribers you get everything a Basic plan includes – plus priority support, A/B testing, segmentation, API access, integration with Automation 360, and the branding is removed. The Pro plan can include an unlimited number of subscribers, costing $1,918.56 per year with the discount included.
For Facebook Messenger Chatbot plans, you have 2 options:
- Basic – Free service that includes unlimited subscribers, up to 3 bots, 10 variables and 10.000 messages per month.
- High Volume Sending – starts from $9.85 per month for 1000 subscribers; it removes the SendPulse branding and offers unlimited bots, variables, tags and messages per month.
#4 Klenty
Klenty is an email automation software tailored to suit the needs of the whole sales teams – including inbound, outbound, and sales ops.
Features
Prospect management – easy import and export of leads and prospects with duplicate detection, dashboards that show each prospect’s status, with custom fields, tags, and filters. Klenty also has a Collision Detection system, which prevents multiple representatives from contacting the same prospect.
Email Campaigns – Klenty helps you create the email sequence or drip campaign, fully customize it and automate the follow-ups; Reply Detection stops the campaign once the reply is received, and bounces, auto-replies, and out-of-office replies are tracked.
CRM Integration – syncing contacts, emails, tasks, and more; Klenty can be natively integrated with Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, and Freshsales.
Click to Call – this feature enables you to call the prospects with a single click without exiting the software, and it records the calls, automatically saves the records, and tracks and takes the callbacks.
Gmail plugin – schedules the emails with Send Later option, while Smart Reminders notify you to revisit your notes and emails. Signatures and templates are easy to insert from Klenty, and the plugin tracks the email engagement.
Pricing
Klenty has 3 plans:
- Tall – $25 monthly, per user; includes CRM integrations, Calendly, Zapier, Slack, Gmail Plugin, API access, email cadences, mail merge, importing prospects, and reply detection.
- Grande – $50 monthly per user; it includes everything Tall plan does, plus CRM Plugin, advanced CRM integration, and beta versions of Click to Call and Advanced Cadence Features.
- Venti – $80 monthly per user; apart from everything included in Grande, it includes custom reports, website tracking, and 2 additional email accounts for each user.
The prices above are with annual payment discounts included; Klenty also offers discounts and custom plans for nonprofit organizations and startups.
Klenty has a free trial period that lasts for 14 days – during that time, you can try out all the plans and features and decide upon a plan that fits the best.
Get Business Emails to get Started with your Campaigns
To get you started with email activities, no matter is in your sales or marketing team, we created ZeroIn Email Lookup tool that works on Linkedin and Sales Navigator Profiles and has a growing database of over 17 million business contact data.
With ZeroIn you can quickly match all the data from your LinkedIn people search results with our database, add all the data to a specific campaign within ZeroIN light CRM, and include them in your email outreach.
Not sure how it all works? Give it a try!