Money is on the list. The list here signifies mainly an email list (it can be any list of your leads). In this post, I shall try to present you with a good overview of Email marketing automation plus the top 6 email marketing tools, most of them which I have used personally.

Digital marketing has changed a lot since its evolution. Email marketing is one of the practical practices in digital marketing that provides a fruitful outcome with limited efforts. If you have not tried it yet, I shall definitely recommend opting for a good email marketing tool.

There is a high chance that you will find good results using that.

Disclaimer note: This article contains affiliate links, which means we make a small commission if you end up buying the product at no extra cost. Saying so, we give high marks to the products, review those which we test and find the best.

Your marketing or lead generation plan should always include a good email marketing tool. It’s one of the main requirements for any business to grow. Always consider investing in such a tool as investing in your business.

FACT: In 2019, global email users amounted to 3.9 billion, which is expected to grow to 4.3 billion in 2023 (Statista).

If you are short of time, just click on the topic of your choice below

What is Email Marketing?

If you are a digital marketing specialist, you are already familiar with the term email marketing. However, many marketing experts overlook this making practice when compared to other available options.

Email marketing is the practice where you send commercial emails to a bunch of email subscribers.

For newbie readers, email subscribers are the users who have signed up to an email list and have permitted you to send promotional or informational emails to their inboxes.

Email marketing is a great way to increase the sales and revenue of your business.

Check out some cool stats about email marketing.

  • Welcome email has a very good opening rate of 82% compared to average rate of 21%, so try to make your welcome email sequence as engaging as possible.
  • Emails which are personalised get an opening rate of 50% more than the average emails.

So, if you can master email marketing and copywriting, your business will do wonders.

Primarily there are two types of emails that are sent to the email subscribers.

Type 1: Promotional Emails

Emails created solely to promote a new product or announce a jaw-dropping offer to the readers are called promotional emails.

This campaign is mostly sent 3-10 times within a tenure of 2-3 weeks. Over-distribution of promotional emails looks annoying and harms your efforts of promoting your product/offer.

A promotional email usually contains a CTA (Call To Action) that drives the user to a specific landing page for conversion. It’s important to make sure the email template matches your business theme.

Type 2: Informational Emails

Another form of marketing email is informational emails, where your motive is to educate the reader with the latest news or updates that impact the reader’s life.

A daily or weekly newsletter is the most common example of an informational email. Bloggers, website owners, marketers more often use informational emails to update the readers about new content on their website.

Informational emails are a great way to enhance your website traffic and educate the readers about your new product/services.

When sending an informational mail to your subscriber’s segment, it’s crucial to ensure accurate information.

The emails you received last year from the Ministry of Health (regarding COVID-19 updates) are one of the best examples of Informational emails.

What is Email Marketing Automation?

You now have a basic idea about email marketing! Have you ever thought that sending manual emails to every single user is a crucial time wasted? Well, the advancement of technology has blessed us with the concept of email marketing automation.

Email marketing process

Email marketing automation should be an integral part of your business as it automates email campaigns.

It eliminates the time required to follow up with your subscribers, write personalized emails to each of the people, drafting and send emails periodically to every subscriber, so that marketers or bloggers like you have more time in doing more productive work. How does that’s sound?

Yes! With automation, everything in email marketing takes care of itself and sends the emails without indulging a dedicated professional all day round and thus automating your marketing.

Email marketing automation is based upon a workflow created by you in any of the email marketing tools. The workflow runs within the boundaries that you have set up or directed.

In this process, an email sequence is generally set, when any of your audience opt-in to share his or her email details in return to any lead magnet (can be an ebook, any course, coupons or any offer) and give you the permission to send them your emails.

In this regard, you can also check out some of my other related articles, which consists of tutorials, strategies and many more as below,

How To Use Email Marketing Automation?

For marketers, it is the use of email for marketing strategy. However, adding email marketing automation is a great way to save your time and efforts without compromising the results.

Email automation is all about the automatic sending of emails based on triggers and actions. The email (with specific template & information) is directly pushed to the reader’s email box when an event is triggered. Remember entire automation of email marketing makes it convenient to shoot tons of emails in a single go.

So, if you are influenced by the potential of an email marketing automation system, it’s essential to know how you can take its benefits and start earning handsome results wit revised strategies for email marketing.

Simple email automation when someone opts into my list is shown below.

An email automation workflow

Steps To Plan Email Marketing Automation

Collect Emails: Most email marketing tools let you create custom landing pages for your website or business that help you collect customer emails in return for a lead magnet, which your audience will find useful to get. You can use your social media platforms to collect emails and create your email list.

Create Segments: Emails you collected require segmentation. It means you should segregate the emails based on their age, country, profession, etc. Remember, your segmentation should focus on your business requirements.

Create Personalised Emails: This is the beloved part of email marketing automation. Here you create emails with custom fields. Whenever the email is sent, the custom fields can be replaced with the first name/last name/gender/profession, etc as per your requirements.

You can either create your own email template or use existing templates that best match your business and email theme.

Use Tracking Codes: With every link, you add on the CTA(call to action button), it’s essential to add the UTM code, which provides easy tracking of the conversion source and medium. You can use any UTM builder available online and create your custom link to track the customer.

Schedule the Email: Once you are done with the email template and segmentation, you can schedule your email templates (for their respective segments) at a specific time. Your email will be automatically sent to the email subscribers.

With email automation, numerous businesses across the globe are reaching prospective customers and witnessing a high conversion rate compared to old email marketing tactics.

What are the Benefits of Email Marketing Automation

Now, many of you would wonder how email marketing automation can benefit you in your existing email marketing practices. Well, there are numerous advantages of considering email marketing automation tools to your current practices. Below listed are the prominent benefits of marketing automation.

Increased Transactions: With automation, you are allowed to set personalized fields in your email (E.g., name, company name, age, birthday, etc.). These customized emails have a high potential to match human psychology and deliver you a high open rate.

According to one study, Emails that are personalized get an opening rate of 50% more than the average emails. . Moreover, such customized emails have a six times higher transaction rate than the old format.

Effective Segmentation: Manual email marketing makes it tough to segregate the email list and create custom email templates for specific user segments. With email marketing automation, it’s now simple to make segments and send them different emails as per their interests.

You can create segments for leads and customers based on their age, country, and other filters. With the use of email segmentation, you can witness a higher CTR (click-through rate).

Increased Revenue: With transaction-oriented emails, you have a high chance of a conversion. In a transactional email, you provide a specific button that focuses on a transaction (e.g., download an eBook, purchase a product, subscribe to a YouTube channel, etc.). Transactional emails have a high potential for conversion.

Measure Metrics: With the use of email automation, you can measure and split test many options for your business, such as which headline or subject works better. What type of templates are more liked and which of your business offerings keeps your audience more involved.

By measuring your metrics, you can easily know the loopholes and good points of your business and can work on that to grow it.

Integrate With The Customer Buying Cycle: Many email automation tools are available that provide you with behavioural targeting. Working with customer buying cycles lets you target the right customer at the right time with the right product/service.

It means you can understand the customer buying cycle and make alterations in your email message/template based on the customer’s needs.

Affordable: Email marketing is highly affordable compared to any other promoting options such as paid ads or SEO. Most of the email marketing tools work as a funnel for your business, from email opt-in to nurturing leads, they are great tools for your business.

Top 6 Email Marketing Automation Tools: My recommendations

It’s time to move ahead to learn about some of the great email automation tools. Below are the six top email automation tools that you can add to your marketing practices to grow your business.

Tool 1: Moosend

Moosend can very well sail you down the path of email marketing and automation with their powerful analytics. With the new robust AI tools, moosend can help you immensely advance in your email marketing journey.

The tool provides you free email automation, landing pages, subscription pop-ups and forms, an editor builder, and a good delivery rate. The best feature of Moosend is that it provides an email marketing automation platform in the free plan itself and might be the only one that has such an option.

Benefits of using Moosend

  • An email editor
  • Split testing available
  • Email marketing automation
  • Plans are cheaper
  • Chat-box facility
  • Campaign analytics
  • Subscription forms and landing page builder
  • Email reporting and analytics

Pricing

Moosend pricing is very attractive to beginners, with a free plan which consists of email automation is a great option to try for.

Moosend plans and pricing
Also, check for the email automation option in free plan below,

Advantages:

  • A forever free plan
  • Email automation included in free plan
  • Plans are cheaper to other tools
  • Integration with popular tools
  • Unlimited emails in free plan
  • Affiliate marketing friendly

Disadvantages:

  • Landing page builder is not advanced.
  • Support is not available in weekends.

Tool 2: Convertkit

Convertkit email marketing tool

ConvertKit is one of the popular email marketing tools highly used by digital marketers.

It helps you automate the email marketing campaigns and send automatic emails to the customers. It provides you with multiple benefits, including mail automation, landing page creation, email broadcast’ lead generation, and more. For first-time users, Convertkit comes with a 14 days trial period.

The tool also has a free plan which you can use up to 1000 subscribers.

Benefits of using Convertkit

  • Free landing page builder with fully customizable templates
  • Create custom pages for lead magnets, course sign up with ease
  • Easy integrations with other tools like Shopify, WordPress, Zapier and many more
  • Unlimited sign up forms with responsive templates
  • Option to design popup forms
  • Incredible email reporting
  • RSS to email automation
  • Access to A/B testing

Pricing

For getting the details on the plans and pricing of Convertkit, refer to the below table.

Convertkit pricing

One of the best things is that Convertkit has a free plan up to 1000 subscribers. There are a good variety of standard landing pages and subscription forms which can be used freely for email subscribe purpose. In the free plan, you will get the email broadcast facility also with email support.

However, there won’t be any option of Automated funnel & sequence of emails in the free plan, for that, you have to upgrade to any of the higher plans.

Advantages:

It makes it easy to start collecting your first leads and get those emails out to build momentum

  • Convertkit is easy to use and user friendly.
  • A forever free plan upto 1000 subscribers.
  • It is a straightforward email marketing tool
  • One unique email address only counts as one contact, even when added to various email lists.
  • ConvertKit has lots of helpful tips and guidance in its knowledge base.

Disadvantages:

  • Not affiliate marketing friendly.
  • Email automation not included in free plan.

Tool 3: Getresponse

Getresponse email marketing tool

GetResponse is an email marketing automation tool that allows you to execute email marketing via 100% automation and check the results with detailed statistics.

Nowadays, GetResponse is offering an ‘all-in-one’ e-commerce and online marketing solution that has expanded its scope from being a conventional email marketing tool.

That’s why, presently, GetResponse is not limited to only email marketing features; instead, it provides chat features, e-commerce features, webinar hosting, landing pages, a website builder, and automated sales funnels.

The best thing with Getresponse is that it has just started a forever free plan. In the free plan, you can use the premium features for the first 30 days, after that you have to upgrade to a paid plan to continue the premium features.

Getresponse forever free plan

Benefits of Getresponse:

  • Automated Email Responses
  • Dynamic Content Creation
  • Data Quality Management
  • Segmentation
  • Basic Web Analytics Reporting
  • Marketing Lead Database
  • A/B Testing
  • Great library of Landing Pages and Forms Creation
  • Manage Email Deliverability
  • Building and Personalizing Emails
  • Online Behavior Tracking
  • Sending Outbound Emails
  • Forever free plan with email autoresponder.
Getresponse pricing plans

Advantages:

  • Intelligent list automation
  • Design and spam testing
  • Conversion Funnel and landing page feature
  • Live chat to ensure you’ll never miss a new lead
  • 99.5% of time mail do not goes to spam folder
  • Google and social media ads tracking & monitoring
  • Easy to integrate with more than 150 applications
  • Pretty easy to use
  • No credit card details required to sign up for a trial
  • Started a forever free plan.
  • Affiliate marketing friendly.

Disadvantages:

  • Automation is available only on higher-tier plans after first 30 days.

Tool 4: Mailchimp

mailchimp email marketing tool

MailChimp is considered the first email newsletter tool that was introduced in the digital market.

They offer a free plan to send up to 10,000 emails every month to a maximum of 2,000 subscribers. That’s why it is a favourite for small businesses or individual business owners looking for a small yet effective email marketing platform.

With its premium plans, you can get numerous automation and integration options that lessen your efforts and provide you with expected results.

Benefits of using Mailchimp

  • Customer Journey Builder
  • Multiple starting and branching points
  • Pre-built journeys
  • Custom-coded templates
  • Multivariate testing
  • Advanced Segmentation
  • Behavioral Targeting
  • Marketing CRM
  • Good for ecommerce and small business.

Pricing

Check out the pricing of Mailchimp with its various plans,

Mailchimp plans and pricing

Advantages:

  • It offers creative freedom in terms of design and layouts
  • Easy to save templates and maintain consistency in your emails
  • Easy to implement
  • Quick integration available with most of the Lead Generation / Opt-in Tools
  • Affordable in terms of pricing

Disadvantages:

  • Confusing and tedious task to create Landing Pages
  • Old email templates
  • Not affiliate marketing friendly.

Tool 5: Aweber

Aweber email marketing tool

Aweber is yet another email marketing tool that comes with automation features and other marketing tools. It is also one of the popular names in the top email automation tools available online.

A plethora of email templates gives you the freedom to decide when and how to send the emails. For successful email marketing campaigns, Aweber is considered a highly effective tool. The email delivery rate is very high for Aweber.

The tool offers to migrate your email account along with your all data, such as subscribers, landing pages, subscription forms etc. from any other email marketing tool to its database freely.

It is beneficial for small businesses, bloggers, entrepreneurs, podcasters, and other online content creators.

Benefits of using Aweber:

  • Unlimited email templates
  • AI powered template designer
  • Integration with most of the populan tools
  • Drag & drop builder
  • Pre-stocked images
  • 24/7 customer support
  • Free migration services
  • Landing page builder
  • Web push notifications
  • Email automation with drip campaigns.

Pricing:

Check out the below snapshot for Aweber pricing with plans.

Aweber pricing

Advantages:

  • Provides ease of use
  • Straightforward user interface
  • Good customer support
  • Offer enough customization
  • Gives great bulk email automation functionality
  • Provides a free plan.

Disadvantages:

  • Less effective abandon cart campaign system
  • Free plan is available in selected geographical locations.

Tool 6: Activecampaign

Activecampaign email marketing tool

In our list of top 6 email automation tools, ActiveCampaign is one more feather, which helps you take advantage of email marketing with automation tools.

It provides you with dozens of email templates with the facility to change everything from font to background colour. Alongside email marketing tools, it also offers website-related tools like landing page building, live chat, etc., which are a plus to its email automation features.

Benefits of using Activecampaign:

  • AB Testing
  • Activity Dashboard
  • Alerts/Notifications
  • Campaign Analytics
  • Campaign Management
  • Customizable Templates
  • Data Import/Export
  • Engagement Tracking
  • Automation split testing
  • Real-Time Analytics
  • Social Media and third party Integration

Pricing

To know about the various plans and pricing, just go through the below snapshot.

Activecampaign plans

Advantages:

  • Provides high delivery rates
  • Allows you high levels of customization for content
  • Uses contacts activity and preferences to deliver information at the most appropriate time
  • Encompass latest needs of its clients
  • Provide thorough reporting

Disadvantages:

  • Becomes complex with a high level of reporting
  • Does Not provide a free plan

Frequently asked questions?

1. What are the benefits of email automation?

– The major benefits of email automation are personalized email sending, better email segmentation, doesn’t need your periodic intervention, your business grows while you sleep, increases business revenue by promoting products with planned automation, nurturing your audience and one of the best promotion options, affordable than most of the other sources.

So, email marketing automation helps you to fully control your business growth road map.

2. Which email marketing tool is good for affiliate marketing?

– In my experience, Getresponse is one of the best email marketing tools for affiliate marketing. They have developed from just a tool to a sales funnel. Moosend is another good tool for affiliate marketing, that has a forever free plan with email automation.

3. Difference between email autoresponders and email automation.

– Email autoresponders are emails that are scripted for an email reply. It is triggered when a person sends an email to another address or opts for any lead magnet in a website etc.

Email autoresponders can also be an email sequence intentionally provided at particular dates of a month. These are generally straight forward simple email sequences or replies.

Email automation is more complex compared to an autoresponder. Email automation is all about the automatic sending of emails based on triggers and actions.

It is based upon a workflow created by you in any of the email marketing tools. The workflow runs within the boundaries that you have set up or directed. Here emails can be segmented based on audience insights, personalized emails and many more.

4. Do email marketing tools have any trial period?

All of the email marketing tools discussed above have a free trial period. The least trial period is 14 days. Getresponse has a 30 day trial for the premium features.

Conclusion: My final verdict

Email marketing is one of the most powerful options to spread your word. With automation included in email marketing, you can run your business on autopilot. This is one of the most economical ways to grow your business. As I have stated above, a small investment in a good email marketing tool can grow your business immensely.

If you are just a beginner and have financial constraints, then just go for Moosend or Getresponse forever free plans to start with.

Most of the above email marketing tools are tested by me. From all these, my favourite is Getresponse. This tool has developed itself into a full-fledged sales funnel software and is very affiliate marketing friendly. In the free version, you will get the email autoresponder option.

The mail delivery rate is pretty good. You name it, and you get it in Getresponse. With great chat support and an exclusive database, Getresponse is the one I strongly recommend.

So, which email marketing tool do you use?

Do tell me in the comment box. I would love to see your suggestions too. And if you find any other great email marketing tool, let me know about that.

That’s all for now,

Tanay 🙂