Launch Your First Campaign With These Email Marketing Platforms

Looking to launch your first email campaign? 

Today, there are more options than ever for high quality email marketing management platforms, and it can feel overwhelming to compare features and pricing, especially when you haven’t had previous experience building email campaigns before.

Where to even begin?

Here we cut through the noise and present the easiest email marketing platforms to build your campaigns on, and to grow your brand with.

Even in 2024, email marketing is still the most powerful tool for reaching your sales goals, but not enough small businesses are taking advantage of the marketing opportunities available to them through email.

With AI-equipped suggestions for CTAs, Subject lines and Headers, your campaigns practically write themselves.

All you need is your strategy: Click here, Why It Is Essential to Have an Email Marketing Strategy.

Drawing comparisons on price, AI-support, SEO, analytics, email design, CRM, and automation features, these are the email marketing platforms providing the best services today: 

• Constant Contact

• Mailchimp

• Hubspot

Yes, you read that right. 

Constant Contact and Mailchimp are technologically geriatric in terms of email marketing platforms (they’ve been around for 20 years already!), but they are still the best point of entry for brands looking to launch their first campaigns, with robust features and convenient integrations that make building your email campaigns so easy.

But once your brand has tested the waters of email marketing – meaning, you’ve grown your subscriber list, converted customers, and driven traffic or engagement to your website – you might consider switching to a platform that supports all of your digital content needs.

That brings us to Hubspot. 

Hubspot is the best all-in-one platform for ALL of your email marketing, content development, advertising, customer communications, sales management and administrative business operations. At its core is Customer Relationship Management software, allowing you to track multi-channel leads.

Whether you’re starting with zero subscribers, or only a few hundred, email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, Mailchimp and Hubspot can accelerate engagement and traffic with your brand, and lead to real sales, and return on your investment.

Click here for: How to Increase Sales with Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Constant Contact

Constant Contact has been around a loooong time, and they have one of the most expansive tool sets available for email marketing today. 

They feature AI-generated copy, a library full of automated emails to engage with your subscribers with ease, and all the integrations you need to build Landing Pages, segmented email campaigns, and social media campaigns directly through their platform.

Constant Contact is a fantastic gateway into email marketing for your small business, so you can learn the in’s and out’s of which features are working the strongest in your favor. 

Constant Contact really wants you to monetize your email marketing strategy, offering 3 baseline pricing tiers providing a range of features and limits to the amount of emails you can send to your subscriber list:

• The Lite tier ($12/mo) allows you to email your subscriber list only 10x each month.

• The Standard tier ($35/mo) allows you to email your subscriber list only 12x each month.

• The Premium tier ($80/mo) allows you to email your subscriber list only 24x each month.

The baseline pricing tiers for Constant Contact are deceivingly low– your real monthly costs are determined by the size of your contact list. This can be great as you’re just starting out, but as your subscriber list grows, you’ll be facing steeper costs. 

For example, you may have chosen the Standard tier, advertised at $35/month, but if you have 18,000 subscribers, you’re actually paying $260/month. 

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Constant Contact’s pricing table

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This is actually a standard pricing structure for most email marketing platforms, as you’ll see, Mailchimp and Hubspot have similar pricing tiers and subscriber limits. Most of the competing platforms and services do as well.

So you want to make sure you have a strong email marketing strategy that is actually converting your subscribers into paying customers to make your ROI with each campaign.

Click here: How to Launch an Email Campaign That Converts 

Many businesses find their Email Marketing footing through Constant Contact before shopping for a more cost-efficient platform that excels in the niche that best serves their subscribers. 

Mailchimp

Mailchimp has also been around a looong time… they were one of the very first email marketing platforms ever built!

Because of Mailchimp’s longevity, it has secured its legacy early on by being one of the first 3rd-party integrations accessible across all kinds of digital platforms. 

One of those platforms is Hootsuite, probably the most widely used social media management platform by brands worldwide.

Together, Hootsuite and Mailchimp are a much more powerful product, allowing for better synchronization between social media and email campaigns. 

Mailchimp also operates on a tiered pricing system, with a subscriber minimum of 500 and limits to the number of monthly emails you can send: 

• The Free tier ($0) allows you to email your subscriber list only 2x each month.

• The Essentials tier ($13/mo) allows you to email your subscriber list only 10x each month.

• The Standard tier ($20/mo) allows you to email your subscriber list only 12x each month.

• The Premium tier ($350/mo) allows you to email your subscriber list 300x each month.

Again, these are only baseline pricing tiers for Mailchimp – your real monthly costs are determined by the size of your contact list. 

The Standard tier starts at $20/month, but remember, that’s for a subscriber list of 500. If you have, say 18,000 subscribers, then you’re actually paying $285/month.

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Mailchimp’s pricing table

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And that may be in addition to your Hootsuite account: the “starter-pack” Professional tier begins at $99/month.

However, if you have not yet chosen any content management platform, and you’re ready to go all in, then consider Hubspot. 

Hubspot

Hubspot is the platform that does it all, going well beyond the inbox to incorporate many other outlets in content or digital marketing. You can stream line campaigns across multiple different channels with greater overhead management.

Robust content management systems like Hubspot are great for the brand going Total Pro, and fully investing in their Content Marketing Strategy. 

So what all does Hubspot do?

They have at least 6 digital industries covered in their vast platform:

• Marketing

• Sales (vs Salesforce)

• Customer Service

• CMS

• Operations

• Commerce

Each of these are customizable entities within Hubspot to help your business thrive online. 

Hubspot is a one-stop shop for ALL of your content development, advertising, customer communications, sales management and administrative business operations.

Best of all, Hubspot has FREE Customer Relationship Management Software for up to 1 million contacts, including:

• Contact and task management

• Email tracking and engagement

• Email templates and scheduling

• Document sharing

• Meeting scheduling

• Live chat

• Sales quotes

The Starter tier at Hubspot begins with 1,000 contacts at $18/month (and increases $18/month per additional 1,000 contacts). For 18,000 contacts, it’ll cost $274/month.

However, Hubspot is at its best at a Professional tier with 2,000 contacts at $800/month + the one-time Professional Onboarding Fee of $3,000. 

Your price also increases $225/mo per additional 5,000 contacts. 

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Hubspot’s pricing table

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But the Professional tier includes the real benefits and advantages of choosing this platform:

• Social media 

• Omni-channel marketing automation

• Teams

• Campaign Reporting

• Custom Reporting

Choosing Hobspot’s Professional tier is best for the brand building its in-house media team and Content Marketing strategy across multiple channels. It is a full-service platform that provides business and marketing managers with greater overhead on all aspects of their company.

Each of these email marketing platforms serve slightly different needs and their monthly costs are relatively similar. 

There are hundreds if not thousands of email marketing platforms available across the internet, but these three are the top major players (and have been) for a reason. They suit the small business owner as perfectly as the major corporate marketing teams that continue to use them for high-profile campaigns.

Constant Contact and Mailchimp are still the best in the biz for small businesses to launch their first campaigns and build their subscriber lists and strategies on. They are the most user-friendly platforms, with the widest range of tech products that have been tested and proven by thousands of brands worldwide.

Once your subscriber list has significantly grown and you’ve been successful in monetizing your email marketing, then we can consider more boutique, cost-efficient, niche-expert alternatives to the email marketing platforms mentioned here.

Ready to build your first campaign?

Schedule your consultation with Rising Mountain today!