Email remains a critical component of digital marketing strategies, one that effectively drives customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. However, an effective email marketing campaign goes beyond a simple mailing list; it demands robust tools for automated delivery, compelling content creation, and comprehensive metric tracking. PCMag has been testing leading email marketing platforms for a decade, evaluating their capabilities, ease of use, effectiveness, and other features. Our Editors’ Choice winners—including Brevo, Campaigner, HubSpot, and Mailchimp—represent your current best bets. Read on for all our top picks, links to our in-depth reviews of each service, and buying advice to help you choose the right email marketing solution for your business.
EDITORS’ NOTE
May 19, 2026: We’re currently testing multiple services for potential inclusion in this roundup and will overhaul this story soon. In the meantime, our lineup of recommended email marketing services remains unchanged, and the existing picks have been vetted for currency and availability.
The Best Email Marketing Software for 2026
Compare Specs
Buying Guide: The Best Email Marketing Software for 2026
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether the recipients opened and read them. The options range from text-based templates that marketers can quickly customize to more complex HTML or JavaScript ones. The good news is that it doesn’t cost much to get started, and it’s not an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup offer free trials and affordable starter plans, and some even provide onboarding services for new customers.
Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide that their most effective marketing tactic is a newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others may want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, allowing them to provide special offers and deals to recipients.
Each approach requires different tools for creating and distributing the source email. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographics and engagement levels. You’ll probably want to integrate them with other back-end accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and inventory management systems.
Does Email Marketing Still Work in 2025?
There’s some perception in the market that email is outdated due to web chat, SMS, social media, web landing pages, and even the metaverse. That’s true to some extent—and modern, multi-channel marketing campaigns should undoubtedly take advantage of as many of these channels as possible—but that’s no reason to ignore email.
According to the market research firm Statista, email usage remains virtually ubiquitous. According to the company’s estimates, around 376.4 billion emails will be sent and received daily throughout 2024. It expects that figure to grow to more than 400 billion by 2027.
What Does Email Marketing Cost?
The good news is that the cost to reach prospective customers via email is generally low, while the profit potential is high.
Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails per month and bill you based on the number of subscribers. If you have a small list, consider a free plan, a low-cost plan that supports several hundred subscribers, or a pay-as-you-go plan. On the flip side, many of these services also offer high-volume plans with 100,000 or more contacts.
As a result, the prices of email marketing contenders we review here vary widely. They start at about $3 per month (paid annually) to send out 500 emails per month in Zoho Campaigns and can increase significantly from there. Occasionally, it might even make sense to negotiate a custom plan directly with a sales rep.
How to Get Started With Email Marketing
Getting up and running with email marketing software isn’t difficult. Generally, you’ll know right away whether you like a product’s user interface (UI) or not. Most of the services we reviewed offer free trials, letting you explore them before committing any money. The majority have modern graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not the complex business software UIs of yesterday.
Be sure to consider how a vendor provides tech support, since several companies don’t make support as readily available as we prefer. Some offer 24/7 phone support, email help, and live chat, while others leave you to rely on online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-serve help resources (such as FAQs and articles) and live support via chat or phone when you can’t solve an issue yourself.
Finally, consider any regulatory compliance issues. For example, if you plan to market to customers in the European Union, ensure that your software supports GDPR compliance. In the US, on the other hand, HIPAA mandates how you can use certain protected health information in your campaigns, while other laws govern how you can market to minors. Consult with your potential vendor to ensure they can assist you with the regulations applicable to your organization.
Does Email Marketing Work With Mobile Devices?
One significant change in email marketing has been increased engagement on mobile devices rather than PCs. Mobile users access email throughout the day and wherever they are. Thanks to mobile payment services like Apple Pay and Google Pay, smartphones have also evolved as e-commerce tools. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop that enables customers to transition seamlessly from marketing to purchasing within a single session.
The growing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should be able to preview how your email looks in a responsive format, meaning the HTML correctly sizes images and other elements depending on the viewing device.
You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may require you to create custom reports to view this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.
Can Email Marketing Integrate With Other Software?
Another modern trend in email marketing tools is integration with other systems, most notably CRM and e-commerce tools. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. It makes sense because both types of software are involved in managing and communicating with customers.
One tactic marketers increasingly use to build trust in their email messages is incorporating user-generated content (UGC). For example, an email might include a customer review of a product, similar to those found on e-commerce sites such as Amazon and its competitors. UGC can also draw from other channels, including online forums and social media.
How Does Email Marketing Use AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant component of many digital marketing efforts, and email marketing is no exception. AI enhances email marketing mechanics, including A/B testing and audience segmentation. Depending on how much information you can feed from your CRM and sales systems, it can also help personalize email content to individual customers.
Recommended by Our Editors
With the correct data, AI can select content, modify customer experiences in real-time, and even interact directly with customers via a natural language chatbot. If any of that sounds attractive, you must look closely at how a prospective email marketing service implements AI and what kinds of features it offers.
Another area where AI can be beneficial is in the marketing automation capabilities that most email suites offer. Automation technology is most suitable for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. An important aspect of this is tracking the customer’s journey and the various touchpoints they encounter from initial contact to closing the sale.
How Can You Customize Email Campaigns?
The best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These help you stay in touch with your contacts by automatically generating emails based on special occasions (such as a customer’s anniversary, birthday, or past purchases), welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank-you emails for recent purchases, among other examples.
The most advanced email marketing services offer custom workflows that allow you to specify triggers based on actions (such as opening an email or making a purchase) or inaction (such as ignoring emails). With these services, you can also set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to segments of users, and you can pause or stop a campaign at any time. You can also move contacts into new segments once they complete their tutorials.
This level of customization can become complex, so it’s essential not to get overwhelmed at the outset. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with what you want to tell customers, when you want to say it, and why. Follow that plan, and you’ll quickly build a journey that might start with a welcome email post-purchase and gradually drill down to more targeted offers as your relationship with that customer grows.
How to Solidify Your Email Marketing Strategy
Sending out campaigns isn’t much help unless you can track your successes and failures and quickly make adjustments. All the services in this roundup offer some level of tracking, whether it’s simple open and click-rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, or even integration with Google Analytics. Once you’ve got some data on your campaign, you can tweak your content to see what works using features like A/B testing, in which one part of your audience receives an email built one way while another gets a different version.
In addition to A/B testing, many services now offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of an entire campaign to test which one performs best. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important factor for content and landing pages. The right keywords can directly lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website.
Neil MacAllister contributed to this article.
