The Best Email Marketing Service for Ecommerce

11 min read

Many of us dread the sound of an email arriving in our inbox or the notification number for unread messages slowly rising. This widespread frustration has given email a bad reputation. But, just like Taylor Swift’s earworm of a song, email is difficult to ignore and has proven staying power as a dominant means of digital communication.

For these reasons and more, you should consider capitalizing on the benefits of email, particularly as a tool for growing your ecommerce business. So, whether you’re new to email services or looking to upgrade your email marketing campaigns, keep reading! In this article, we’ll cover the best email services for your ecommerce business.

Email Marketing Services: An Overview

If you’ve never heard of an email marketing service before, it might be helpful for you to take a quick peek at Ecwid’s introduction to email marketing and its benefits. Writ large, email marketing services help you create visually appealing email marketing campaigns to send out to your list of subscribers.

The services can help you schedule emails to be sent out at specific times, such as when a customer leaves an item in their cart but doesn’t purchase it or when someone new joins your mailing list. They can also help you compile customer information for personalized and targeted communication.

These services can be a game changer for your ecommerce business, helping you bring in (and keep) customers who might have otherwise slipped through the cracks. Because we want to help you optimize your email marketing experience, Ecwid has compiled helpful resources to help you increase email signups, stick to email marketing best practices, and create the perfect welcome email.

Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service

Before you get to work building an effective email marketing campaign, you first need to choose the best email marketing service for your ecommerce business. Below, we’ll consider the benefits of the major services on the market today. No matter the size of your email list, the type of communications you plan to develop, or how many bonus features you’re interested in, this list will help you make an informed decision.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email marketing services for a reason. The service offers multiple membership levels, including a free account that gives you access to key features like data collection, email and automations, and a creative design assistant.

Primarily, the service is known for its ease of use and the quality of its premade email templates, so if you’re a small business owner looking to quickly upgrade your marketing capabilities, Mailchimp is a great option.

Example of Mailchimp email campaign. Image source.

Other key features of Mailchimp include the ability to group customers into demographic categories and assign tags based on their interactions. With this information, you can create (or use a prebuilt) “journey” that automatically sends communications based on a customer’s activity. If an item is left in a customer’s cart, your journey could send a reminder email, wait three days, check to see if the customer has made the purchase, and then respond appropriately.

With Mailchimp, you’ll be able to use customer data to optimize and automate your communication processes to make as many sales as possible. And, while some of these features are only available with paid accounts, Mailchimp’s pricing structure takes into account the size of your contact list to price their services. When you’re just starting out, the price for services will be appropriately low until you’re able to build your customer base and increase your contacts.

Best of all, Mailchimp easily integrates with your existing website or ecommerce platform of choice, including Ecwid!

Constant contact

If you’re looking for an email marketing service that’s straightforward and effective, Constant Contact might be the best choice for you. As befitting an email marketing service, Constant Contact’s primary focus is, you guessed it, email. The service offers over a hundred well-crafted email templates to choose from, each of which is easy to edit and customize.

Constant Contact even offers a branding tool, which will pull images, colors, and other branding elements from a URL that you provide—meaning you can easily match the branding of your email campaigns to that of your preexisting website or store.

Example of Constant Contact email campaign. Image source.

Constant Contact offers just two pricing levels, Email and Email Plus. Email starts at $20 (for a contact list of 500 or less) and Email Plus begins at $45. While there’s no free account option, if you’re not satisfied with the service, you can close your account and receive a full refund within the first thirty days.

Along with their templates and simplified tools and pricing structures, Constant Contact also offers customizable sign-up forms, which help you gather more customer contacts, and integration with social media to post advertisements on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Similarly to Mailchimp, Constant Contact can also be connected to an existing website or ecommerce platform, as well as tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Office.

Worth noting too is Constant Contact’s reputation for excellent customer service, which includes live communication with support staff and downloadable guides.

Klaviyo

If you believe in the power of data and personalization, Klaviyo might be the best email marketing service for your ecommerce business. Klaviyo’s focus is on customer data and how that data can be used to effectively tailor communications to the individual. The service stores your customer data, allows you to build personalized customer experiences across email and other channels, and then measure the results of your campaigns in revenue.

Though services like Mailchimp offer similar customization journeys, Klaviyo stands out by making personalized, automated marketing processes their primary focus. Unlike other services, they also report success metrics based in dollars, rather than clicks.

Example of Klaviyo email campaign. Image source.

The service includes ready-to-go campaign automations such as drip campaigns, abandoned cart reminders, and sale promotions. They also allow you to build your own campaigns and email templates but make the process easier with a drag-and-drop system that helps you include only the features and designs that you need.

Klaviyo offers a free account for businesses with fewer than 250 contacts. Their site also includes a Return-on-Investment calculator that projects—based on the size of your email list, your annual ecommerce sales, and your industry—how much you’d pay for Klaviyo per month as compared to your estimated monthly ROI.

AWeber

If the world of email marketing feels overwhelming and you aren’t sure how best to market or even what to write in your email communications, AWeber offers a variety of educational resources to help you master both their services and marketing in general. The service’s features are fairly straightforward: email marketing, email automation, ecommerce integration, and sign-up form building tools.

AWeber stands out by offering a YouTube channel that includes engaging, step-by-step guides to creating email newsletters, customizing your sign-up forms, building an automated campaign, and more.

Example of AWeber email campaign. Image source.

Alongside this YouTube channel, AWeber’s site includes a large and in-depth collection of troubleshooting and how-to articles called the “Knowledge Base,” which covers every aspect of their site’s capabilities. If that’s not enough reading material, AWeber also published a blog with more general advice about email marketing and ecommerce best practices.

AWeber offers two pricing levels: Free and Pro, which starts as low as $16.15. The Free account includes up to 500 contacts, email templates, sign-up forms, and more.

Keap

While perhaps not as well known as some of the above services, Keap is another great email marketing service for new businesses and solo entrepreneurs. Keap’s features include the standard email marketing tools, such as automated emails, great templates, and data collection. They also offer an array of additional services to support any growing business, such as a sales pipeline manager, text-message marketing, and helpful graphics to visualize your sale and contact growths.

Keap comes with a similar pricing model to Mailchimp, with a free account for businesses with fewer than one-hundred contacts and three priced levels with added features. Keap stands out from other services by offering one-to-one coaching, unlimited customer support, and a community of industry experts sharing helpful information and tips. For entrepreneurs who want to feel supported and part of a learning community, Keap is a great option for your email marketing service needs.

Email Marketing and Ecwid

We hope our email marketing articles and resources will help you make the most out of whichever service you chose! If you host a website or store on Ecwid, don’t forget to integrate your email marketing service and start making more sales today. If you haven’t had the chance to try Ecwid, why not open a free account? We let you keep the account active and free for as long as you need it!

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Apr 21, 2022

About the author

Max has been working in the ecommerce industry for the last six years helping brands to establish and level-up content marketing and SEO. Despite that, he has experience with entrepreneurship. He is a fiction writer in his free time.