Email software

The single biggest cost driver is the pricing model. Most ESPs, including Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Kit, charge by the number of contacts stored, with a send allowance attached. Brevo charges mainly by the number of emails sent per month, regardless of list size. If you hold a large list and email it rarely, send-based pricing is usually cheaper; if you have a lean list and email it several times a week, contact-based pricing often wins.

Watch for contacts that count even when unsubscribed or inactive. Cleaning the list of people who have not opened in a long period both reduces cost and protects deliverability.

Deliverability is the share of your email that reaches the inbox rather than spam. It depends on your sending reputation, the ESP's infrastructure, list hygiene and authentication. Since February 2024, Google's sender guidelines require bulk senders to Gmail to authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC policy, and offer one-click unsubscribe; Yahoo introduced matching requirements. Any ESP worth choosing walks you through these settings.

Good deliverability habits are simple: send only to people who opted in, keep complaint rates low, remove hard bounces immediately, and warm up a new sending domain gradually.

Automation is where email software earns its fee. A welcome sequence, a browse or cart-abandonment flow, a post-purchase follow-up and a win-back series run continuously once built. E-commerce-focused platforms such as Klaviyo pull order and product data from the shop to trigger and personalise these flows; ActiveCampaign is known for branching automations that combine email with CRM steps; Kit is built around creators selling newsletters and digital products.

Segmentation makes each send relevant: past purchasers versus browsers, location, engagement level, or interest tags. Relevance, more than design, drives clicks.

Open rates became less reliable after Apple's Mail Privacy Protection began pre-loading images in 2021, which inflates opens. Clicks, conversions and revenue per recipient are now better guides. For shops, attributed revenue from flows is the metric that justifies the subscription.

Email marketing is regulated. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, the GDPR and the ePrivacy rules generally require opt-in consent for marketing email to individuals, with a soft-opt-in exception for existing customers in some cases. In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act requires accurate sender information, a physical postal address and a working unsubscribe mechanism. Email software helps by recording when and how each contact subscribed, managing double opt-in, and processing unsubscribes automatically. It does not make an unlawfully collected list lawful. Buying lists is both legally risky and damaging to deliverability, because purchased addresses produce bounces and spam complaints that harm your sending reputation for every future campaign.

Most opens now happen on phones, so templates should be single-column, with large tap targets and short subject lines. Keep the most important message and button near the top. Use real text rather than text inside images, because many clients block images by default and screen readers cannot read image text. Test across major clients — Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail — using the ESP's preview tools. A plain, well-written email often outperforms a heavily designed one, especially for business audiences, because it looks like a personal message rather than an advertisement.

The value of email software rises with the data it receives. Connect your e-commerce platform to trigger order-based flows, your website forms to capture subscribers with source tags, and your CRM so sales and marketing see the same contact history. Check whether integrations sync in real time or on a schedule, because a cart-abandonment email that arrives the next day loses most of its effect. Review which fields sync in both directions to avoid overwriting data.

ESP: email service provider. SPF, DKIM and DMARC: DNS records that prove you are allowed to send from your domain. Hard bounce: a permanent delivery failure. Soft bounce: a temporary one. Segment: a filtered group of contacts. Flow or automation: a sequence triggered by behaviour. Double opt-in: confirming a subscription by clicking a link in a confirmation email, which improves list quality.

Every number on this page links to the organisation that published it: an independent research firm, an official product or pricing page, a public filing, or official documentation. We do not publish our own estimates as facts, and where a figure is reported by the company it describes, it is labelled company-reported. Prices are taken from official vendor pages and change often, so open the linked source before relying on one. If a widely repeated figure could not be traced to a primary source, we left it out. Entries are reviewed when the underlying sources publish new editions, and the update date at the top of the page shows the latest review.