Top Email Marketing Software in India

• Mailchimp: Best for all-in-one marketing
• Zoho Campaigns: Best for fully integrated business suite
• Drip: Best for e-commerce
• MailerLite: Best for selling paid subscriptions
• Campaigner: Best for experienced marketers
• GetResponse: Best for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
• Moosend: Best for legacy companies
• Brevo: Best for unlimited contacts
• ActiveCampaign: Best for automated email marketing
• Constant Contact: Best for customer support options

Email marketing software are platforms designed to enable you to easily create and send marketing emails to leads and customers. They provide features to help you manage your contacts, segment audiences and track interactions with your emails. They can also help you stay compliant with your email marketing efforts by ensuring you only send marketing emails to those who have subscribed and agreed to receive communications from you.

Many email marketing programs include tools, such as drag-and-drop email editors, landing page builders, custom forms for your sites for lead generation and workflow automation. All of these tools help you create digital marketing campaigns. Then run various reports to help you see what you need to tweak to better interact with your audiences, such as click-through rates and open rates.

We evaluated some of the most popular email marketing services according to the pricing and features they offer for small and medium businesses (SMBs). We also factor in third-party ratings and reviews from G2, Trustpilot and Capterra to include expert and customer feedback in our rankings. We then scored these contenders across four categories of features with 14 different metrics that were weighted to favor features that small business owners find valuable in a provider. Here is an expanded look at some of the factors that we used for our rankings.

Pricing

For pricing, we considered the starting price for software and the highest price that a provider charges for its plan, then ranked them as far as what we considered to be cheap, moderate and expensive options. Those providers that offered lower starting prices or plans at higher tiers that offered more beneficial features for the price fared the best in our rankings. Pricing accounted for 15% of our weighted scoring.

Features

We wanted to know how a software’s available features compared with its competitors. Some of the features we compared included email send volume, image libraries, social media integrations, marketing automations and A/B testing. We weighted features at 40% of our total score.

Third-party reviews

We turned to reviews from real users to gauge their opinion of each software. To gain the fullest picture of reality and reduce bias, we gave higher ratings to providers who had received positive reviews―scoring at least 3.5 out of 5 on each third-party website. These reviews accounted for 10% of the total score.

Expert analysis

Our team of experts also ranked additional criteria from customer reviews that included stand-out features as well as value for the money, popularity and ease of use. For value for the money, we wanted to know if a provider’s paid plan pricing aligned well with the additional features it offered. For popularity, we looked at how widely it was being used. For ease of use, we considered how much of a learning curve that the platform required to get customers operational. Altogether, these criteria make up 35% of the total score.

Choosing the best email marketing software comes down to what your team needs. The most basic email marketing tool will help you create, send and track emails. For more advanced features, consider an email marketing platform that offers more than email sends. Look for all-in-one solutions that let you create landing pages, set up web intake forms and include automation to make your job easier.

Consider these factors to choose the right tool for you:

• Send volume: Do the send limits and their corresponding price points make sense for your business plans for the near future?
• Migration: Can you easily migrate customer data from an existing platform into the new one?
• Integrations: If you need to, can you use your email list for retargeting ads on social media and around the web? Does the platform work with your existing CRM, online store and other systems?
• Design: Do the available templates and customization options fit your brand? Do the free themes and templates include features that serve your needs?
• Ease of use: How easily can you create and send an email or set up an automation? Will you need to hire an email specialist, designer or coder to build emails?
• Autonomy and customization: How much control do you have over the look and feel of your emails and newsletters? Does the platform have the functionality you need? Will your customers see the software’s logo on your emails?

Essential Features

As stated above, basic features of an email marketing platform should be present in all options. At the very least, you should expect email creation tools and contact management. You should be able to segment your audiences into two or more categories; for example, you can create a non-marketing contact list (vendors, business partners, etc.) that stands apart from your subscribers.

You should also expect basic reports, so you can see what your open rate is on an email campaign and click-through rate, so you know whether your CTAs are effective. Among other essential features of email marketing software are integrations and automation. Integrations help you share data to and from your email marketing platform and other tools you may use, such as CRM or project management software.

Automation and AI

On the more advanced spectrum of email marketing features are automation and AI. Some of the best email marketing platforms include workflow automation for campaigns. So, you should be able to set up a series of emails for a segmented audience and set a schedule for each email to send based on conditions (opened email, clicked a link, didn’t open email, etc.). This makes each campaign more effective and requires less hands-on effort for the marketing team.

As far as AI goes, you may find machine learning features, including predictive analytics, to help you gauge which leads are hotter than others and could benefit from an email or time-based predictions, such as optimizing the best time to send an email for higher open rates. There are also tools that will give you AI-generated content, including subject lines, images or body text.

Design and Templates

To find the best email marketing platform for your business, consider how each one handles design. Drag-and-drop editors make it much easier to create emails that look great without requiring much design experience or talent. You can also benefit from pre-made templates, so you don’t have to create a newsletter design from scratch. Some templates are even made for the best CTR possible.

Customization

Some free and low-priced plans for email marketing tools are great to use when you’re just getting started, but keep in mind that you’re likely to have little to no customization options. Part of the reason they may have such a low cost is because the companies may include their branding on your emails you send and forms you create and host on your website.

Consider choosing an email marketing platform that costs a little extra to give you more control over how your emails, landing pages, forms and surveys look. You’ll look more professional if you can add your own branding to your content and not give away what is essentially ad space to your email marketing service.

What Does Email Marketing Software Cost?

Email marketing software varies wildly in price, depending on the level of plan you choose. There are free plans that limit your sends per day or month and low-cost plans that could run you around INR 415 to INR 830 per month with similar limitations on sends or on the size of your contact list. The average cost of email marketing platforms for up to 500 contacts is around INR 1,661 per month (based on Forbes Advisor’s top 10 list).

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing and digital marketing that is highly effective for several reasons. Whether you use email marketing as your main marketing tool or as a supplement to other forms of direct marketing, it remains a cost-effective strategy that can drive sales.

More than 4 billion people in the world use email, so it’s an ideal place to meet customers with sales, marketing and information. In fact, email marketing seems to be improving over the years. In 2022, nearly 67% of email marketers reported an increase in open rates. And email marketing is designed to open lines of communication between consumers and businesses, unlike traditional direct marketing strategies. Perhaps this is why unsubscribe rates are low: GetResponse’s 2024 email marketing benchmarks report shows an average unsubscribe rate of 0.09% for North America.

The key to running successful email marketing campaigns boils down to the methods you use. It starts with the tools you use, how you build and segment your email list and studying the results of your campaigns. Here are a handful of tips to help you improve your email marketing strategy:

1. Use Tools Made for Email Marketing

Standard email services, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail aren’t meant to be used for email marketing. When you use email marketing software, you can easily manage a contact list, generate leads and send and track bulk and blast emails. Many of the tools made for email marketing include features or integrations with other types of software to help with marketing, such as CRM and landing page builders.

2. Build Your Email List Proactively

You may already collect email addresses from customers after an interaction with them, but there’s more you can do to build your email list. Whether you sell a physical product, digital item or a service, you should have some information that’s valuable to offer for free—or for an email address. Offer e-books, free trials, coupons or a webinar to leads and all they have to do is provide an email address.

These free offers you create can live on your website and you can promote them on social media or through digital advertising. As you grow your email list, you can then start segmenting, which helps you market to each group with better intent.

3. Segment Your List by User Intent

Segmentation is one of the key factors of effective email marketing. When you divide your audience into groups that separate user interests, you can create more personalized campaigns. At the very least, you can segment your audiences by purchase history (customers vs. leads), but you can go granular. Try segmenting by geographical location, types of purchases and website interactions.

You can even send surveys or set up sign-up forms to let your customers and leads tell you what they’re interested in, which makes it easier to segment them. Some of the best email marketing services include automated segmentation, which creates lists based on sales history or how a user has interacted with your site.

4. Engage Your Readers at Every Step

Crafting an effective marketing email is about more than just the body of your email. You can increase your open rates and CTR by tweaking many elements of your emails, starting with the from and subject lines.

• From: Try to avoid generic “from” names. Use your brand name or a name your users will recognize.
• Subject line: Several email marketing software help ensure you keep your subject line short so it’s eye-catching for the recipient. The preheader line is what shows up after or below the subject line, which can be a bit longer and include more enticing info to encourage a click. Use an emoji or two to make it fun.
• Body text: This is the meat of your message. You want to keep it short but informative and lead directly to the action you want your readers to take.
• Call to action (CTA): These are buttons or links that drive the email recipients to click through to your website, a form or a product page.

Also, make sure to optimize the send time. The best time to send an email varies, but the consensus is that 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays is the optimal window. To hedge your bet even more, send on a Monday; data from HubSpot shows that 22% of marketers say Monday is the best day for high open rates.

5. Measure Your Email Marketing Campaign Results

One of the best ways to find out if your email marketing campaigns are working is to check the reports. Most email marketing software include at least the basic reports, such as open rate, bounce rate and CTR.

If you’re using split testing, or A/B testing, for subject lines, body text and CTAs, you’ll be able to see what worked best and what didn’t. Use the data you gather to hone your email marketing strategy so you can increase your open rate and CTR.

6. Scrub, Rinse and Repeat

You’re going to have bounced emails. It’s only a cause for concern if it happens too often or you don’t scrub the bad emails. A high bounce rate can affect where your email ends up for your readers; that is, your emails could end up in spam folders and not the inbox as you want.

Just ensure you scrub those email addresses that weren’t delivered for whatever reason (fake email address or blocked email, for example). You should be able to easily remove the bounced email addresses and carry on with your campaigns (with a bit of fine-tuning for better results the next round).

• Free Password Manager
• Best SEO Tools
• Monday.com Review
• Types Of CRM Applications
• Best Project Management Software
• Free Project Management Software