Email marketing is one of the main tools used in digital marketing and online advertising. It helps you keep customers engaged, make sales, increase profits, and inform your audience about new products and services, and any updates you want to share with them.

It is the fastest and easiest way to communicate with your customers, potential clients, and people interested in your company.

Once people clicked the subscribe button on your website, advertisement, or landing page, the journey begins. Using high-quality content, a well-think calendar, and the right strategy, you will convert your audience into customers, and keep people interested in what you offer them.

In this article, we will compare the best 10 email marketing platforms in 2021. You will easily decide which platform is the right one for you.

What is an email marketing platform?

Usually, companies have very large audiences, the numbers start from a few thousand people and goes up to millions of subscribers.

The only way to manage these audiences is to use an email marketing platform.

SO what is an email marketing platform? This software helps you in several ways:

• Save your subscribers into a contact list.
• Manage your contact lists.
• Help you design attractive emails and newsletters.
• Create landing pages.
• Analytics. You will know exactly who opened your emails, who read them, who click on the links, who complained, who unsubscribe, and so on. You need analytics as a person needs his eyes.
• Compare different campaign results.
• Create Customer Journeys.
• Build signup forms.
• And much more.

Email marketing platforms are now more complex, yet simple to use, than they were years ago.

With only 1 such platform, you can do almost everything you need for digital marketing, depending on your strategy.

You can do complete email marketing, you can create gorgeous landing pages and connect them with your own custom domain, you can create social media posts, design and send printed postcards, bring people back to your website using Facebook, Instagram, or Google ads, and much more.

Analyzing the best email marketing platforms in 2021

There are many email marketing platforms out there and there are lots of differences between them. We will compare the best 10 email marketing platforms in 2021 below so you can choose which ones is right for you.

Pricing starts from $0 (MailChimp up to 2,000 contacts) and goes up to $1,190 per month if you pick MailChimp premium plan and you have 200,000 contacts. Pardot costs $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.

Zoho Campaigns will cost you $3 per month to send out 500 emails per month.

As you see, the prices and basic conditions (number of contacts) are extremely different and above we discussed about only 3 email marketing platforms.

If you have a small number of subscribers, you should definitely look for a company that offers a free plan or a very low-cost plan.

A story from my personal experience. Prepare to laugh. 🙂

Here is a good story from my personal experience. It happened tons of years ago, but I learned my lesson.

Before using email marketing platforms, I used to send all the emails one by one. And I did that for several hours a day. I used to send up to a few hundreds emails per day. I had weeks in which I sent 10,000 emails or even more.

All of that work was done manually. I never thought of looking for an email marketing platform.

At one point, I got smarter. I saw an ad about a tool used to send mass emails with just a few clicks.

And I immediately subscribed for a monthly plan. It was around $10 per month or something like that.

The tool was an extension of Gmail and it was super basic. It helped only to send mass emails and track the results in a very simple and not accurate way.

But I was happy, I was saving a lot of my time.

The bad thing was that I didn’t check the other solutions which were much better than the one I was using.

And even worse.

That better solutions were absolutely FREE to use. At least for the number of emails I were sending.

So I paid $10 per month to use a basic email marketing platform while I could have used a super tool for free.

Lesson learned. 🙂

That is why it is extremely useful to take a look at this comparison and see the differences.

Even more, you should test these solutions very well before subscribing or paying several months.

Top 10 email marketing platforms in 2021

Find below a great comparison to get you started.

The starting price is very different but also what you get is different.

Check with care if you really need all that features or if a basic plan fits you well.

Our first choice is MailChimp.

Here are 7 reasons why we select MailChimp as the winner of this comparison:

1. This email marketing platform has a free plan that has included everything you need to start creating powerful email campaigns. It comes loaded with gorgeous templates, with a super simple to use email builder, with tracking, and an intuitive interface.
2. You can upgrade the plan you are using with just a few clicks.
3. There is also the possibility to downgrade your premium plan to a free plan. You can do it only once, after that the software removes this option.
4. You can pause the premium plan 2 times a year. If you send emails only from time to time, you can easily pause billing while keep everything in your account. You will not be billed until you resume your account.
5. MailChimp has everything you need included. They miss annual plans (no big deal) and the 24/7 Phone Support (again no big deal). You can live without both very well with MailChimp. We have many years with MailChimp and not even once had a problem.
6. This software has the friendliest interface and you can start using it from minute 1, without difficulties.
7. The plans are affordable and customizable.

Even if for us MailChimp is the best, I still recommend you take a look at all the other solutions.

Conclusions

No matter what email marketing platform you will choose, emails will help your marketing and sales team hit their targets.

Take your time and test each platform, establish what functionalities you need, and pick the best solution for your company.