5 of the Best Email Automation Tools

As a marketing tactic, email marketing is easily the most profitable method available.

To exemplify this, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $42. That’s a 4200% ROI (return on investment).

For all of its merits, however, conducting an email marketing campaign is still work, and that email campaign will require time that could be spent elsewhere.

Enter automated email campaigns. Using an email marketing automation tool, these campaigns can completely remove the time required for managing a traditional email marketing campaign.

According to Moosend, 80% of marketing automation users see improved lead generation, and 77% of them see more conversions overall.

Additionally, users of email marketing automation tools report a productivity increase of 20%, and 36% of marketing automation users use automation to shave off repetitive tasks.

These are just a handful of statistics in favor of email automation; if you look, you’ll find plenty more echoing that same positive sentiment.

After hearing all of that, you might be wondering about email automation software and how it could help you set up email automation workflows and save you or your business time.

If you’re looking for the best email automation software on the market, you’ve come to just the right place.

But before I can go into the best email marketing automation tools, there’s something important to address first…

What is email automation?

Email automation, sometimes also called email marketing automation, is the process of using software to automate the sending and tracking of email campaigns, typically using triggered emails. This allows businesses and organizations to send relevant messages and targeted email campaigns to their subscribers at the perfect time based on their behavior, preferences, and other important data.

Some email automation examples can include welcome messages, promotional messages, and marketing emails; pretty much any kind of mass or recurring email can be automated using an email automation tool. The sales funnel can be entirely automated, autonomously guiding the customer journey while minimizing lost customers.

What I’ve mentioned above is just a glimpse into the capabilities of email automation, A.K.A. the basic tactics. There are many advanced email automation tactics that I won’t go over here, but they do exist and many email automation tools support them.

What should I look for in an email automation tool?

When it comes to the best email automation software, there are a handful of features that you’ll see in all of them. These include the following:

Advanced Communication Sequences

When I say “Advanced” communication sequences, I don’t mean standard things like automated welcome emails or one-off messages to new subscribers.

I’m talking about the automation of customer relationships, where your email automation workflows can follow the customer throughout their customer journey.

Personalized Messaging

Another major feature of any great email automation tool is the ability to automatically send personalized emails to your customer base based entirely on customer behavior.

You shouldn’t have to look at customer analytics to send targeted email campaigns at the right time, and the best email automation tools allow you to set up triggers based on customer data, which trigger email messages when a customer completes an action.

Additionally, you should be able to create several such email triggers, and they should both be able to be active at the same time.

Advanced Statistics

When it comes to monitoring a marketing funnel, you should be given more insight into the funnel than just how many customers clicked a link or conversions.

A few examples of deeper statistics include the efficiency of your automated emails, where customers drop off along their journey, and many more.

E-Commerce Integration

Lastly, ecommerce businesses should be able to integrate their ecommerce platform of choice with their email automation tool, allowing them to automatically send marketing emails to prospective customers and transactional emails to customers who have already bought a product. For more on transactional emails, here is an article where I give my top three transactional email marketing services. There will be some overlap between this list and the transactional email list, so stay tuned for that.

Now, with all of that out of the way, the question now is…

What are the best email automation tools?

Here is our shortlist of the best email automation software:

• MailerLite – Best for Beginners
• Getresponse – Best All-in-One
• EmailOctopus – Best for Small Businesses
• ActiveCampaign – Best for SaaS (integrations)
• Aweber – Best for Entrepeneurs

MailerLite is an email marketing service founded in 2005, with over 1 million worldwide users today.

Full of incredible email marketing tools like an automation editor, a drag-and-drop website builder, and signup forms, MailerLite is a user-friendly email marketing service for individuals or small businesses looking to supercharge their marketing campaigns without breaking the bank.

I’ve reviewed MailerLite by itself in another article; if you want a more in-depth version of what I’ll discuss here, pay that review a visit.

Features:

Drag-and-Drop Automation Builder

You can use MailerLite’s automation editor to create custom automated workflows so that when a subscriber joins or new subscribers join, MailerLite can group subscribers into whatever category you want, then email subscribers with promotions or other marketing material.

This makes subscriber management a simple task; just set up your marketing automation, then let it handle subscriber management and bring subscribers through whatever email chain you choose. Whether it be visiting a page, clicking a link, or on an exact match of a date, automation can be triggered by any of these things and sort subscribers into interest groups of your choice.

Multi-Trigger Email Automation

As an addition to MailerLite’s marketing automation software, several triggers can be active at once without interfering with each other. This is one of the major benefits of email automation; if a person was handling this, they could easily get confused about what emails to send with several triggers from potential customers going off at once, and the possibility of losing a customer increases.

Transactional Emails

MailerSend, a sister service to MailerLite, is a transactional email service provider which helps to automate the “boring” emails that fall under the umbrella of “transactional”. As mentioned previously, if you want to see more about what transactional emails are and the best transactional email services, here is an article I’ve written on the topic.

In short, transactional emails are emails sent in response to a customer’s action. A purchase receipt email is the most obvious example of a transactional email, but there are other examples like registration emails for a new subscriber, feedback emails for existing email subscribers, password reset emails, and many more.

MailerSend offers the same automation builder style as MailerLite, a simple, drag-and-drop sandbox with branching paths and triggers.

Pricing: MailerLite offers a free plan including their email automation builder, where you can send up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 1,000 subscribers. Their paid plans start at $10/mo, and each plan adds more automation features onto the free plan.

I’ve made a more in-depth GetResponse review here; this is a cliff-notes version of that review.

Getresponse is an all-in-one marketing platform that provides email marketing, landing pages, webinars, and marketing automation.

Its advanced segmentation options, drag-and-drop email editor, and integrations with e-commerce platforms make it an attractive choice for businesses and marketing teams looking to grow their audience and revenue.

As Getresponse is based in Europe (Poland, more specifically), their platform is designed to be GDPR-friendly and is also friendly towards CAN-SPAM regulations. This takes the headache out of compliance management and saves businesses and sales teams quite a bit of time.

Features:

Complex Automation Trees

Getresponse allows businesses and marketing agencies to send automated emails based on a highly customizable automation editor, which lets users create automated emails with dozens of automated email marketing templates.

You can also create your own, but Getresponse offers dozens of templates which cover everything from welcome emails customer retargeting to webinar promotion, and much more.

Contact Profiles

Getresponse’s email automation platform allows users to track and rate customer actions to create custom segments based on specific customer data and criteria.

You can use an unlimited number of tags for more in-depth profiling, and you can customize segments to include anything from location to lead scoring.

Nurture New Sign-Ups

Getresponse’s email automation enables users to send automated emails whenever a new subscriber comes in, and can start a conversation with that customer. From there, you can segment contacts based on their wants and needs and hone in on those existing customers who are most likely to buy into your product or convert however you so choose.

Pricing: Getresponse’s free plan for up to 2,500 emails per month to 500 contacts, which also includes their website builder and basic automation. Their paid plans start at $19/mo, and introduce degrees of segmentation into the automation software. Their “Marketing Automation” plan, at $59/mo, includes all automation features available on Getresponse’s extensive platform.

EmailOctopus is a cost-effective email marketing platform that offers automation, analytics, and integrations with popular tools like Zapier and Shopify. Its user-friendly interface makes it ideal for small businesses and startups looking for a lean and simple email automation platform.

Out of all the email marketing automation platforms I’ve tried, EmailOctopus’ feature suite is easily the simplest. There’s minimal feature clutter, and their automation builder is incredibly simple, with many options to trigger email messages.

Features:

Email Builder

EmailOctopus provides an intuitive drag-and-drop email builder to aid you in your marketing efforts to ensure your email automation system functions well and looks good.

Plus, they provide a litany of email templates if you want to hit the ground running and implement your marketing strategy as soon as possible.

Marketing Automation

EmailOctopus makes automated emails as simple as possible, with a short and succinct list of triggers on top of a simple drag-and-drop editor to set your automations up.

You can send an automated welcome email, then have the system pause for a period before you engage new customers with a “how to get started” style of email, then follow up on any additional triggers you may set up to guide the customer journey.

EmailOctopus API

EmailOctopus not only allows you to trigger emails based on standard things like contacts signing up for a newsletter or opting out of the said newsletter, but EmailOctopus also offers an API for clients to build their apps with and allows you to create automated email workflows with custom triggers from API calls.

Pricing: EmailOctopus offers a free plan, including email automation for 10,000 emails per month to 2,500 subscribers. Their paid plans scale off how many subscribers you want, starting at $8/mo.

Used by over 60,000 organizations worldwide, ActiveCampaign is an email marketing tool that helps you create a simple automated email marketing campaign to boost subscriber interaction.

In addition to its automated email capabilities, ActiveCampaign also has a CRM (customer relationship management) service which can help minimize the amount of applications a sales team or business uses in total.

Features:

Automated Contact Scoring

ActiveCampaign allows users to create automated email sequences and gauge how the recipients interact with those emails, which can be turned into a score where, once a threshold is crossed, you could put more effort into converting them or contact your sales team.

Automation Map

Setting up automated email follow-ups is one thing, but if the user interface isn’t helpful, then you’ll never get anywhere.

With ActiveCampaign’s automation map, you can get a birds-eye view of all the automation on your account and their statuses, allowing you to get a better idea of what is working and how to adjust your business strategy.

Integrations

Using the automation editor format, you can also integrate ecommerce apps like WooCommerce and Shopify into your workflows in order to track abandoned carts and send transactional emails when a customer makes a purchase.

Pricing: ActiveCampaign offers a free 14-day trial, but it doesn’t have a free plan. Their paid plans start at $29 per month, paid yearly which includes email marketing automation, standard email marketing, and the ActiveCampaign API.

Aweber takes the ease of use of other email marketing platforms and takes it a step further, allowing its users to utilize a wide range of templates and free high-quality stock images as a part of their platform, plus Canva integration if you want to create something more specific.

Additionally, they have automated email sending for abandoned carts, welcome emails, and confirmation emails as well.

Features:

Auto-Newsletter

Aweber offers users the ability to automatically notify your email list when you make a blog post or YouTube upload, giving you and your content the early boost it needs to succeed in the algorithm. Aweber connects with Facebook, WordPress, Shopify, Etsy, Paypal, and many more platforms for you to upload content to.

World-Class Email Deliverability

Whether its a welcome email to new customers or a marketing email to existing customers, Aweber’s world-class email deliverability makes sure your emails reach their recipients’ inboxes without you having to become an email deliverability expert. No need to worry about jargon like SMTP relays, ISP throttling, or any other technical terms relating to email deliverability. You can just rely on Aweber to get the emails to inboxes.

AI Email Template Designer

On top of email templates for those who don’t want to spend time creating their own emails, Aweber offers an AI-assisted email template designer so you can create stunning branded emails quickly, and automating the details so you don’t have to focus on them.

Pricing: Aweber doesn’t offer a free plan, but they offer a 30-day free trial where you can test drive the platform’s automation capabilities. Their paid plans scale off how many subscribers you want, starting at $12.5o/mo.

Conclusion

In short, there are many invaluable tools that can help you or your business automate many tedious email-related tasks. We’ve only reviewed 5 of the best email automation tools here, but there are many more options in the realm of email marketing.

If you’re not satisfied by any of these tools, I’ve written a guide on how to choose an email automation tool for yourself. Check that out if you’d rather do your own research.