Best Email Marketing Software: Choose on Data, Not Templates
Email marketing software is bought on template galleries and regretted on deliverability. Every serious platform sends email competently, so the differences that matter are structural: how you are charged, how your product and order data gets in, and what happens to your sender reputation when a campaign goes badly. Get those three right and the rest is copywriting.
Whichever one you pick, don't pay list price.105 of the SaaS tools compared here have a discount code, a startup programme or free credits.See what you qualify for →
Deliverability is the product, everything else is packaging
An email that lands in Promotions or spam has the same production cost as one that lands in the inbox and earns nothing. Platforms differ in how they manage this: whether you send from a shared pool or a dedicated address, how aggressively they suppress unengaged contacts, and whether they force you to authenticate your sending domain before the first campaign goes out.
Shared sending infrastructure is the hidden risk on cheap and free plans. Your reputation is partly the reputation of everyone else on that pool, and if the platform is lax about who it lets on, you inherit their behaviour. Providers that verify accounts slowly and annoyingly at signup are usually the ones protecting you.
Do the unglamorous setup before anything else. Authenticate the domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, send from a subdomain you use only for marketing, and warm it gradually. Skipping this is the single most common reason a first campaign underperforms, and no amount of subject-line testing recovers it.
The pricing model decides your cost, not the price
Two models dominate. Contact-based pricing charges for everyone in your list whether you email them or not, which punishes hoarding and rewards ruthless list hygiene. Send-based or credit pricing charges for volume, which suits large lists mailed occasionally, and punishes high-frequency automation.
Mailchimp and Klaviyo sit in the contact-priced camp, which is why an ecommerce list full of one-time buyers who never open anything quietly becomes your most expensive subscription. Brevo prices closer to volume, which changes the calculus entirely if you hold a big list and mail it rarely.
Work out which model you are on before you build the list, because the growth tactics differ. Under contact pricing, a lead magnet that pulls in unqualified signups is a liability. Under send pricing, it is nearly free. Choosing the wrong model and then optimising against it is how teams end up paying for an audience that will never convert.
Marketing email and transactional email are separate systems
Receipts, password resets and shipping notices are transactional. They must arrive within seconds, they cannot be caught in a marketing filter, and they should never share a sending reputation with a promotional campaign. Running both through one marketing platform is convenient until a bad campaign damages the domain and your password resets start bouncing.
Postmark exists specifically for this split, keeping transactional streams isolated and fast, and it is the kind of decision that looks like over-engineering until the day it saves you. Send transactional mail from a different subdomain to your marketing mail, so a reputation problem on one cannot contaminate the other.
The practical rule: if the email is triggered by something the user did to their account, it is transactional. If it is triggered by a date, a segment or a marketer, it is marketing. Route them separately from day one, because retrofitting the split means re-authenticating and re-warming everything.
Pick by where your data lives
For ecommerce, the platform's depth of store integration matters more than its editor. Klaviyo built its position on pulling product, order and browse data out of the store and making it addressable in segments, which is what makes abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows work properly rather than as generic reminders. Omnisend targets the same job with a lighter setup.
For B2B and SaaS, the CRM is the centre of gravity and email is a surface on top of it. Running campaigns from HubSpot keeps contacts, deals and sends in one object model, which means your reporting is not a reconciliation exercise between two tools that disagree about who a contact is.
For a content business or a newsletter, almost any of them works, and you should optimise for cost per send and the ability to export your list cleanly. Mailchimp's free plan is the standard starting point here precisely because it asks nothing of you upfront.
What goes wrong after the first three months
List decay is the slow one. Contacts who have not opened anything in six months drag open rates down, which drags placement down, which reduces opens further. Suppress them on a schedule instead of running a win-back campaign every quarter and hoping. A smaller engaged list outperforms a large stale one on every metric that matters, including revenue.
Automation debt is the fast one. Flows get built, duplicated and half-disabled until nobody can say with confidence what a new signup actually receives. Once a month, enrol a test address and read every message it gets in order. The overlaps and contradictions you find will be worse than you expect.
The third failure is measurement. Open rates have been unreliable since mail clients started pre-fetching images, so tracking them as your primary metric means optimising for noise. Judge campaigns on clicks and on revenue attributed in your analytics, and treat opens as a directional signal only.
Keeping the bill down while you scale
The largest saving available is not a discount, it is deleting contacts. Under contact-based pricing, a quarterly suppression sweep of long-unengaged subscribers cuts the invoice and improves placement at the same time, which is rare. Build it into the calendar rather than treating it as a cleanup task you will get to later.
The second is refusing to buy tiers for features you can get elsewhere. Landing pages, forms, SMS and pop-ups are all upsells inside email platforms, and all of them exist as cheaper standalone tools that integrate fine. Buy the sending engine and the segmentation, and be sceptical of the rest.
The third is simply not paying list price. Several of these platforms run startup terms, partner arrangements or genuinely usable free plans that go unclaimed because they are not on the pricing page. The directory keeps the current SaaS offers in one place, covering the email, CRM and support tools most early teams buy in the same quarter, which is the point at which the savings actually compound.
The offers mentioned above
Pulled live from the directory, so what you see here is what the listing says.
Mailchimp
Marketing & Growth
Free plan, 14-day Standard trial, 15% off for 12 months at 10,000+ contacts
Free planDirect link
Postmark
Developer Tools
$75 account credit
CreditsLink on plan
HubSpot
Marketing & Growth
$14,000
Percentage discountLink on plan
Also mentioned on this page with nothing currently on offer: Brevo, Klaviyo, Omnisend. We track them so you do not have to go looking.
SaaS codes, all in one place
105 listings in SaaS, with the redemption codes and programme links behind one subscription. Browsing is free.
Common questions
What is the best email marketing software for a small ecommerce store?
Klaviyo if you want deep store data driving segments and flows. Omnisend if you want the same job done with less setup. Both beat a generic sender because the product data is what makes the automation work.
Can I just use my CRM to send marketing email?
For B2B, usually yes, and it saves you reconciling two contact databases. For ecommerce, no, because CRMs rarely handle product catalogues and order histories well enough to power the flows that earn money.
Why are my emails going to spam?
Almost always domain authentication or list quality. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, send from a dedicated subdomain, warm it slowly, and suppress contacts who have not engaged in months.
Do I need separate software for transactional email?
Yes, once receipts and password resets matter. A dedicated transactional provider on its own subdomain means a poorly performing campaign cannot stop customers logging in.