What is the Best Email List Management Software?
1. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation, and CRM platform designed to help grow small to mid-sized businesses.
Cost: starting at - Lite: $15/mo, Pulse: $70/mo, Professional: $159/mo, and Enterprise: $279/mo.
- ActiveCampaign does a great job of offering a wide range of options to categorize current and new contacts. It lets you painlessly categorize all your lists by allowing you to create tags.
- The tags help separate subscribers and give the company the ability to send personalized emails to each individual. The tags are also automated and apply itself to subscribers' profiles depending on what actions they take relating to your content. All of this is included on a drag and drop interface that's user-friendly as you view or edit the automation and segments.
- ActiveCampaign can be useful for every business, but its features are geared more toward e-commerce businesses.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is a growth platform where CRM meets email list management and creates an all-inclusive community between your sales, marketing, and customer support teams.
You'll receive smart and static lists that will help you separate your contacts by the available filters, and a reporting dashboard to keep track of your metrics that influence email list segmentation. However, you have limitations to these features on the free version, so if you're a startup company then we recommend starting out with the free version.
Cost: starting at - Starter: $50/mo, Professional $800/mo, Enterprise $3,200/mo.
- Unlike other mailing list software, HubSpot gives you a unique amount of flexibility when managing your subscribers on its Marketing Hub. This is true for any of the purchased plans and the free version.
- Although Hubspot is a CRM, integrating with other CRMs is available for those who want HubSpot to strictly be their mailing list manager software. The integration feature is really convenient for syncing data you have on the main CRM you're using to avoid having to manually import data.
- One downside is the complexity of the system. The learning curve could deter your team from learning the software so in return, you'll waste time and money. That's why we recommend making sure your team is dedicated to using and learning the system to see results.
3. MailChimp
MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that provides everything you need to develop a successful marketing campaign. So how does a customer relationship management tool (CRM) fit in with email list management programs - we'll show you.
Cost: starting at - Premium: $299/mo, Standard: $14.99/mo, Essentials: $9.99/mo, and Free Basic Plan.
- Part of what makes MailChimp a unique CRM is because it's also a mailing list software. The platform allows you to tag every contact so you can remember and get an idea of what they like, who they are, and how they typically engage with your e-mail content. MailChimp is able to break down your list's statistics to give you an in-depth understanding of the health of your lists and subscriber engagement.
- The downside is that although they have a free version, it doesn't come with all the necessities a business will need to effectively manage its email lists and segment. With the free version, you'll be missing out on these organization features and key assets:
- Address finder
- Advanced segmentation
- Unlimited audiences
- 24/7 customer support
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an email marketing platform that gives you the right tools to email list manage process by using its automation features.
Cost: starting at Free Plan (up to 1,000 subscribers) and Complete: $29/mo (can increase based on the number of subscribers).
- ConvertKit is solely meant for managing an email list so it has everything you need to segment subscribers and create or send high-quality content. This management system has a simple and clean interface making it easy to navigate through and edit your automation that will influence the creation of your segments.
- ConvertKit is better for creators that have a blog as a business and sell a service or product online. It doesn't integrate with any of the popular CRMs, like Salesforce, that a lot of mid-sized to enterprise companies use.
5. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a SaaS company that creates digital marketing products involving email automation and segmentation.
Cost: starting at - Lite: $25/mo, Essential $39/mo, Premium $66/mo, Enterprise (needs quote), and Free Basic Plan.
- Sendinblue has basic CRM capabilities that work nicely with its simple automation feature. Its automation system allows small to mid-sized businesses to organize their address lists and provide information that caters to that group.
- Although we like that it gives you the ability to create different segments, the software fails to recognize duplicate contacts. This risk subscribers receiving duplicate messages that are sent on the same day.
Bonus: Clean Email Bulk Email Management Tool
Once you decide to choose one of the email list management programs for your business, you may want to add an email cleaner and unsubscribing tool, like Clean Email, to have an organized inbox.
Why?
Clean Email segments your inbox into categories using tags and filters that will help you find, delete, and unsubscribe from unnecessary emails. It's a great way to keep your email inbox clean without the overwhelm of going through single emails.
How?
Clean Email automates the process of going through emails individually when you set up rules using the Auto Clean feature. From there, the software will apply whichever action you told it to do and will remember the rule so that it can apply it to other emails in the future. Just like managing contacts with an email list software, Clean Email analyzes your inbox to figure out the next steps.
Conclusion
As for contact database managers, we think that ActiveCampaign hits the mark on all of the email list management best practices. For instance, to manage email lists efficiently, you need to focus on categorizing. You'll want an email list management software that allows you to separate customers by tags, demographics, interests, behaviors, the open rate, and more. The good news is that ActiveCampaign does it all without an intensive learning curve. In conclusion, our team hopes this guide helps you choose the best email list management system for your business.
