It has a powerful keyword research and keyword suggestion tool, in-depth domain analytics with versatile (and real-time) reporting, and a very useful backlinks analytics feature, among others.

However, SEMRush certainly isn’t perfect by any means. There are plenty of SEMRush alternatives with lower price tags (or even totally free), and there are tools that are better in certain aspects.

Here, we will discuss those SEMRush alternatives, both paid and free ones. Let us start with some of the best free alternatives available today.

Free SEMRush Alternatives

We all like free things, and these free options are great for small bloggers just starting out, small businesses with a tight budget, and some of them are even good enough for big companies that don’t really need the advanced features of SEMRush, Ahrefs, or other premium keyword research tools.

1. Google Keyword Planner

Since most of us are aiming our SEO efforts to rank on Google, it would only make sense that Google’s own Keyword Planner is one of the best keyword research tools available.

The best part is, if you have a Google account (which is also free), you can Google Keyword Planner without any limitations.

Pros of Google Keyword Planner:

For being a free tool, Keyword Planner is especially good at what it does. There are two core features here: finding new keywords and getting search volume and forecasts.

Using it is simple: enter your seed keyword(s) and then Keyword Planner will show suggestions for keywords, along with important metrics like average search volume, PPC (Pay Per Click) costs, etc.

As a keyword suggestion tool, Google Keyword Planner is probably the best today, especially considering it’s free.

Cons of Google Keyword Planner:

Some of the metrics displayed by Google Keyword Planner are only rough estimates. For example, Keyword Planner will only show “Low”, “Medium” or “High” on the Competition tab.

2. Ubersuggest by Neil Patel

Ubersuggest is another free tool with similar core features to Google Keyword Planner. Coming from Neil Patel, one of the most prominent thought leaders in the world of digital marketing, and it’s absolutely free.

Pros of UberSuggests:

Contrary to Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggests is pretty accurate with its metrics. It only displays 3 metrics: search volume, PPC cost (CPC), and SEO difficulty, but all 3 are pretty accurate, comparable to SEMRush.

Also, it recently launched a new “Content Ideas” feature, where it will suggest topic ideas, along with useful metrics like number of backlinks generated by similar content and estimated monthly visits.

Cons of UberSuggests:

Doesn’t give too many keyword suggestions compared to SEMRush and even Google Keyword Planner. A good approach is to get your keyword suggestion from Google Keyword Planner, and copy it to UberSuggests for more accurate metrics (and content idea suggestions).

3. Searchmetrics

SEMRush is not only about keyword research and keyword suggestion, but also a great analytics tool to analyze your site’s performance from backlinks profile to organic traffic to referring domains. Searchmetrics is a relatively unknown, but a great SEMRush alternative for this role.

You will need to create a free account, but besides that, Searchmetrics is totally free. Simply enter your domain URL (or your competitor’s), and Searchmetrics will generate a report of the domain’s performance on SEO, all in a single page.

Pros of Searchmetrics:

One-page, streamlined analytics report that is totally free.

Cons of Searchmetrics:

Obviously the generated report is less complete compared to SEMRush’s, and only offers basic analytics tools.

Paid SEMRush alternatives

While as mentioned, the most common issue people have with SEMRush is its hefty price tag, some of us are probably looking for SEMRush alternatives due to other reasons. Below are some paid alternatives for SEMRush, along with a brief discussion for each on how they’ll compare to SEMRush.

1. Ahrefs

Probably the closest competitor to SEMRush, Ahrefs is very similar to SEMRush in terms of features and overall functionality. Price-wise, Ahrefs also offers similar package plans to SEMRush. All Ahrefs’ packages are $0.95 cheaper than SEMRush’s offers. In the long run, you still spend less, saving almost a dollar monthly.

Pros of Ahrefs:

As mentioned, Ahrefs offer similar set of features to SEMRush for almost a dollar cheaper each month.

Ahrefs is also stronger than SEMRush in the link analytics department: reporting more metrics and each more accurately than SEMRush. In the past, its keyword research function is significantly below that of SEMRush’s, but nowadays it’s catching up.

Another unique feature of Ahrefs is the useful SEO Toolbar add-on for Chrome and Firefox. This toolbar will show useful metrics like search volume, backlinks profile, and PPC cost for all search engine results on your browser. A very useful feature.

Cons of Ahrefs:

Only one user can use Ahrefs at any given time, even if you opt for the more expensive packages. This can be an issue if more than one people are working on SEO in your company.

2. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another famous name in the world of SEO and digital marketing, due to their prominent digital marketing blog and their Domain Authority scoring system. Similar to Ahrefs, all of Moz’s plans are $0.95 cheaper than SEMRush (even cheaper if you subscribe to annual plan), so it’s another cheaper alternative (albeit so slightly).

Pros of Moz

Not related directly to the Moz Pro tool, but Moz offers various useful resources on the SEO and digital marketing topics in general. By subscribing to one of Moz Pro’s plans, you’ll get 1 on 1 session with an actual expert that will help you in achieving your SEO goals.

As mentioned, Page Authority and Domain Authority are devised by Moz, so all their tools will integrate these metrics (which can be very useful).

Moz’s interface is very user-friendly and arguably the best compared to SEMRush and Ahrefs, and even then there are the various resources that can help you learn about the platform.

Also, the very basic plan can be accessed by two different users, which can be useful if you have more than one SEO marketers.

Cons of Moz

It takes a little longer to receive data and reports from Moz compared to SEMRush. Also, most of Moz’s good features are offered for free, while the advanced features included in the pro plans are a little bit lackluster compared to SEMRush.

3. SpyFu

SpyFu, as the name suggests, is a tool focused in spying on your competitors’ sites. SEMRush does offer similar features, but due to its focused approach, SpyFu’s competitor analytics features are more in-depth and diverse.

With that being said, SpyFu is a little lacking on features to analyze your own domain, but is significantly more affordable than SEMRush at just $33/month, one-third SEMRush’s price.

Pros of SpyFu:

As mentioned, SpyFu costs just a third of SEMRush’s, Ahrefs’, and Moz Pro’s costs, while offering a very advanced set of features for competitive analysis. You can, for example, get a detailed breakdown of your competitor’s traffic sources (so you can target similar sources), their Google Ads spending, their ranking keywords, and their backlinks profile, among others.

In the competitor analysis department, SpyFu is arguably the best in its class. SpyFu is also relatively easy to use, and by being a SpyFu registered customer, you can also get a plethora of learning sources.

Cons of SpyFu:

SpyFu, as mentioned, is focused on competitor analysis, and while you can also use the same tool to analyze your own domain, it won’t be as comprehensive as SEMRush or Ahrefs. There are no dedicated keyword research and keyword suggestion tools as well.

However, considering its cost, there are plenty of workarounds for this issue, for example by combining SpyFu with free keyword research and analytics tools we have discussed above.

4. Monitor Backlinks

Another key feature of SEMRush is the ability to analyze your and your competitor’s backlinks profile. Backlinks analysis is important so that you can avoid Google penalty due to low-quality links, while by analyzing your competitor’s backlinks, you can also gain insights on how to build your own.

Monitor Backlinks starts from $47/month where you can monitor 1 domain and 2 competitors’ domains. However, there is the Free Backlink Checker tool where you can generate free reports for two websites per week, which is a handy free alternative for backlinks analytics.

Pros of Monitor Backlinks

Focusing on—as the name suggests— monitoring backlinks profile, Monitor Backlinks is very powerful in that purpose. Even the free tool can generate reports for 300 backlinks for free, and for the premium plan, you get various advanced features like the ability to monitor important metrics like Citation Flow and Trust Flow, the ability to preview a link and scan for malware, and many more.

If you are solely looking for a backlinks profiling tool, Monitor Backlinks is a good choice.

Cons of Monitor Backlinks

Considering its fairly limited (focused) set of features, the $47/month price tag is quite expensive.

5. Serpstat

Serpstat is a cost-effective alternative to SEMRush that offers a range of features for SEO and SEM. Regarding pricing, Serpstat is significantly cheaper than SEMRush, making it an attractive option for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Pros of Monitor Backlinks

The software boasts an impressive set of features, including keyword research, competitor analysis, site audit, backlink analysis, a keyword database with over 6 billion keywords, and the ability to track website rankings on various search engines. It also provides a detailed analysis of website visibility and performance on search engines.
Unlike Ahrefs, Serpstat allows multiple users to access the platform simultaneously, making it an ideal choice for larger organizations with multiple SEO specialists.

Cons of Monitor Backlinks

Serpstat’s link analysis capabilities are not as strong as Ahrefs, and it may not provide as many metrics for backlink analysis. However, it constantly improves its link analysis tools to catch up with its competitors. The user interface of Serpstat may not be as intuitive as SEMRush, and it may take some time to learn how to use all of its features effectively.

In conclusion, Serpstat is an excellent alternative to SEMRush, providing a comprehensive set of features for digital specialists at a significantly lower price. While it may not be as vital in link analysis as Ahrefs, its constant improvement and updates make it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes.

End Words

We all have different needs and different SEO goals. For some of us, SEMRush is probably still the best option for most SEO experts even after considering all these alternatives. However, there are tools that are focused on certain features, making it a better alternative to SEMRush in that aspect. There are also a plethora of free tools that might be sufficient for your current needs.

The post Best SEMRush alternatives: Paid and Free Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, obviously Mailchimp will be the benchmark for the other tools, and here we will start by discussing its key highlights. Mailchimp is still the industry leader in email marketing tools, and not without its reasons. First, Mailchimp has the benefit of being one of the first players in creating a user-friendly email scheduler, with its drag-and-drop approach and various templates to choose from. Ease of use is indeed the key highlight of Mailchimp as an email marketing tool, while also providing a well-rounded set of features. However, many other Mailchimp alternatives – as you’ll learn further below – offers more advanced features in one area or the other. For example, Mailchimp’s automation features are relatively basic, and there’s no drag-and-drop composer for automation. Mailchimp, as one of the oldest email marketing tools available, is still leading the industry amidst the saturated competition. One of the biggest reasons, is the fact that it’s a well-rounded tool that is very easy to use with its rich set of features. However, Mailchimp is certainly not the perfect tool for all situations, there are other Mailchimp alternatives that offer different features, more advanced functionalities, and different price ranges. Below, we will discuss 6 of the best of these Mailchimp alternatives. However, let us begin with a brief discussion of Mailchimp itself, and why it’s so popular.

Key Features:

• Easy to use composer with a drag and drop approach
• Automated email scheduler and workflow
• Personalization features
• Segmentation features for better audience targeting
• A/B testing
• Lead capture features to capture email addresses via signup forms, pop-ups, and landing pages

We can consider MailChimp as a well-rounded tool designed for beginners or those who are only looking for simplicity and ease of use. Power-users and advanced marketers, however, might benefit from other Mailchimp alternatives with more specific advanced features.

Pricing: The limited free version is sufficient for most basic marketers, the cheapest “Essentials” plan is $9.99/month, and the Premium plan is $299/month.

Top 8 Best Mailchimp Alternatives

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is much more than an email marketing tool compared to Mailchimp. Omnisend allows you to connect several marketing channels into the same seamless automated workflow. While email marketing sits at the core of Omnisend, you can do use a lot of by improving your email marketing: email automation workflows, drag-and-drop visual composer, pre-built templates, email capture and lead generation forms, and more. Omnisend offers advanced segmentation to target your customers based on their profile data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior.

Pros of Omnisend:

• Advanced segmentation for precise targeting
• Email capture using popups, static sign up forms, landing pages, and gamified forms
• Live website tracking for behavioral data and A/B testing
• 24/7 customer service

Cons of Omnisend:

• Relatively expensive with its email subscriber-based pricing
• Not too many email templates included

Pricing:

For starters, you can try out Omnisend’s 14 days trial package to see whether it fulfills your specifications or not. For basic email marketing, Omnisend offers a free plan that lets you send up to 15,000 emails per month. After that, their paid plans start off at only $16 per month.

2. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor also offers ease of use and user-friendliness in its email builder, making it the direct competitor to Mailchimp in the visual builder department. Campaign Monitor is also strong in its email automation features, offering a better automated email workflow than mailchimp that is more user-friendly with more advanced features. A few minor downsides about Campaign Monitor is in the lead capturing aspect. For example, you can’t configure pop-ups. Also, it’s not dedicated to ecommerce so it doesn’t has as many integrations with ecommerce platforms compared to other tools (it does offer integrations with Shopify and Magento, among others).

Pros of Campaign Monitor:

• Slightly more affordable than MailChimp across all plans
• Easy to use, very visual email buildier and automated campaign builder. Various templates available
• In-depth analytics and reporting tools, useful in developing your strategy and evaluating your progress

Cons of Campaign Monitor:

• No free plan, and the $9/month plan is relatively basic
• Although easy to use initially, has a pretty steep learning curve for the advanced features

Pricing: starts at $9/month, the most expensive plan is $149/month. There’s also the option for custom, advanced plan called Emma HQ, and the option to pay per campaign.

3. TargetBay

TargetBay is more than an email marketing tool. It has three products under its wing – BayEngage, BayReviews, and BayRewards. BayEngage is an email marketing tool that supports SMS marketing as well. It has all email marketing features at affordable pricing, which makes it a direct competitor to Mailchimp. The email marketing tool BayEngage, TargetBay’s product, is an easy-to-use and user-friendly tool that offers pre-built email templates with a drag-and-drop builder along with advanced segmentation, reports, and analytics with UTM tracking, making it perfect for campaign tracking. BayEngage has a powerful email automation feature, making it easy and better automation workflow along with SMS and more advanced features.

Pros of BayEngage

• Advanced segmentation features
• A/B testing
• 24/7 dedicated account manager, be it on any plan
• In-depth analytics and reporting
• Create your own pop-up to capture emails or showcase your offers for website visitors

Cos of BayEngage

• Relatively fewer email templates
• The pricing plan for the 50000 email subscribers is not displayed on the pricing page, but you should contact the sales team.

Pricing: TargetBay offers a 14-day free trial and pricing starts at $169/month for 100K emails. Pricing scales with eCommerce needs. Although this can look costly, it is not. The catch is here since the eCommerce needs to scale up the tool has come up with direct pricing for 100K emails per month. (Note: If the emails sent per month are relatively less, then pricing also drops off).

4. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is not only an email marketing tool, but also an all-round digital marketing and sales automation tool offering various advanced automation and scheduling features. The Lite plan, however, is focused only on email marketing and email automation, with some excellent features like the ability to create segmented lists for targeting purposes, autoresponder set-ups, and analytics, among other features. As a digital marketing automation tool, however, ActiveCampaign is among the best available. So, if you are also looking for a solution for your overall digital marketing campaign, ActiveCampaign can be a great option.

Pros of ActiveCampaign:

• Great customization and personalization options
• As a well-rounded digital marketing and sales automation tool, very cost-effective
• The lite plan (dedicated for email marketing), is also very cost-effective where you get unlimited sending with just $9/month

Cons of ActiveCampaign:

• The user interface is relatively outdated, and not as easy to use as MailChimp
• Customer service is sometimes not very responsive

Pricing: Free trial available, the Lite version is $9/month, and the Enterprise (full) plan is $229/month

5. Mailjet

Like Mailchimp, Mailjet is a cloud-based email marketing tool focusing on simplicity and ease of use, characterized with the visual, drag-and-drop style email builder. Mailjet also offers basic email automation features, which can be useful for those looking to implement drip campaign. There are two main factors why Mailjet might be an interesting Mailchimp alternative: there is a relatively useful basic plan that is totally free, which can be useful for those looking for a free tool to assist their email marketing  campaign, and it’s very easy to setup SMTP server with Mailjet. SMTP can significantly improve the speed of email delivery, so this can be useful for time-sensitive campaigns (i.e. limited-time offer, flash sale, etc.).

Pros of MailJet:

• Easy SMTP server setup
• The basic version (that is totally free) is fairly useful and might be sufficient for most basic email marketing needs
• The most affordable option in this list where the paid plan starts from $8.69/month
• Easy to use with user-friendly interface
• Can easily implement sign-up forms within the email

Cons of Mailjet:

• Fairly basic features compared to others on this list so far, basic segmentation,targeting, and automation features.
• Customer service not as good as MailChimp

Pricing: free version available, basic plan is $8.69/month and the premium plan is only $18.86/month. Customized enterprise version available.

6. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a Mailchimp alternative focused for ecommerce companies’ email marketing needs. So, there are several useful features for ecommerce needs like the ability to design opt-in forms, landing page builder, recipient analytics, and so on.

Features-wise, ConvertKit is probably the best on this list with various unique features designed for—as the name suggests— conversion.

Pros of ConvertKit:

• Rich set of conversion-focused features, the best choice for ecommerce businesses
• Great marketing automation features
• Great user interface, easy to use campaign builder, website design, and marketing automation builder, among other features

Cons: 

• Relatively expensive with its email subscriber-based pricing
• Not too many email templates included
• Steep learning curve due to its deep set of features

Pricing: Free trial available, $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers, $79/month for up to 5k subscribers, customizable plan available

7. Aweber

Unlike some of the tools in this list that offer well-rounded digital marketing automation features, Aweber is totally focused on email marketing. In fact, Aweber is one of the oldest email marketing tools around that is still widely used today not only for its popularity, but also functionality. For instance, Aweber offers more email templates than any other tools in this list, where each template is completely customizable. Aweber also offers one of—if not the best—visual email builder around. Also, Aweber has very intuitive email capture features, where you can easily create popups and forms. There is, however, a major downside in Aweber’s segmentation features. This can be a problem if you are aiming for more targeted personalizations in your email campaign.

Pros of Aweber:

• Easy to use email creation features, among the best in its class.
• Great analytics features including intuitive A/B testing tool
• Responsive and fast customer service
• A lot of customizable email templates

Cons of Aweber:

• Lack of targeting and user segmentation features
• The basic plan is limited for 500 email subscribers, so might not be cost-efficient if you have a big contact database
• Relatively basic email automation features

Pricing: Free trial available, plans start from $19/month for up to 500 subscribers.

8. HubSpot

HubSpot blends AI-powered functionalities with a straightforward email builder to create a highly capable, yet easy-to-use email marketing tool. HubSpot includes a drag-and-drop email builder that further streamlines the campaign creation process through numerous goal-based templates. You can also set up rule-based workflows that pull in data from your contact lists to easily send and deploy personalized emails. As for analytics, HubSpot provides insights into your campaign’s click and open rates and also reveals how many users either glanced, skimmed, or read through your emails in their entirety.

Pros of HubSpot: 

• AI writing assistant that generates personalized emails based on your input.
• An intuitive drag-and-drop email builder with numerous templates.
• Email health reporting tools to monitor and boost sending reputation.
• A/B testing with in-depth analytics.
• Free version available.

Cons of HubSpot: 

• Steep pricing differences between paid plans can cause issues in terms of scalability.
• Design elements within the email builder can only snap into place, which can limit customization options.

Pricing: You can access basic email marketing features completely for free. Paid plans are available in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, which starts at $15 per user per month.

End Words

As you can see, each of the 7 Mailchimp alternatives we have shared above has their own advantages and disadvantages. There are mainly two reasons for choosing an email marketing tool that is not Mailchimp: either you are looking for something cheaper, or you are looking for more advanced features not offered by Mailchimp. It’s important to figure out your needs carefully with the help of digital marketing consultant before making your choice, and choose the one according to your email marketing goals.

The post Best Effective Mailchimp Alternatives to Look At appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, Ahrefs is certainly not a perfect tool for everyone: some might think it’s too expensive and are looking for cheaper/free Ahrefs alternatives, some others might want different features and benefits.

Here, we will discuss five of the best alternatives to Ahrefs available, but before we begin, let us discuss the benchmark: Ahrefs itself.

A Brief Overview on Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools/software available today. A common misconception is that Ahrefs is just another keyword research tool. While it’s true that keyword research is indeed one of Ahrefs’ strong suits, Ahrefs is—technically— a suite of various SEO tools from content research/curation, link building analytics, SEO audit, and many more.

There are at least five core features where Ahrefs really shines:

• Backlink Profile Analysis

Ahrefs is often regarded as the best in the backlink analytics department, especially due to its massive link index. Simply enter any URL, and Ahrefs will give an in-depth report about the backlink profile. We can use this insight to build our own link building tactics and validate our target keywords.

• Keyword Research

Probably the most important feature for any SEO tool. While some might say that Ahrefs is relatively subpar in this department (as we’ll learn while discussing Ahrefs alternatives below), Ahrefs actually offers an excellent set of keyword research features, giving you all you need to find and analyze target keyword and content ideas.

• Content Insights

Analyze various topics and trending content to find out which actually produce the most backlinks, traffic, and engagement on various social media networks. 

• Site Audit

SEO audit is an important aspect of SEO success, analyzing your site to find possible technical errors and optimization issues, so you can make the necessary adjustments.

• Rank Tracking

Track the ranking performance of your target keywords, where you can filter by device and location. 

Pricing:

Ahrefs offers four different plans:

• Lite for $99/month, 1 user, some locked features
• Standard for $179/month, 1 user, most core features unlocked
• Advanced for $399/month, 3 users, more data with each analysis and report
• Agency for $999/month, 5 users, even more data than the advanced plan

As you can see, Ahrefs isn’t necessarily an affordable tool, and this is probably the biggest reason many people are looking for Ahrefs alternatives. 

Part of why Afrefs is relatively expensive is the fact that it included several different tools in one. This can either be a good or bad thing. For example, those that only want a content research tool might opt for a dedicated tool for that, which might be more affordable and might offer more focus in its features.

With that being said, here are some of Ahrefs alternatives we’ll recommend.

1. SEMRush

SEMRush is often regarded as Ahrefs’ closest competitor for several reasons. First, SEMRush is also an all-in-one SEO suite. 

In fact, for a bit of history, SEMRush was the first one to adopt that approach as a well-rounded SEO tool, while Ahrefs initially is “just” a link analytics tool. 

However, over the years, Ahrefs has added various features and tools to catch up with SEMRush, the leading all-in-one SEO tool at that time. We might get a hint about this at how Ahrefs priced their plans $0.95 cheaper than SEMRush.

Nowadays, they both offer very similar sets of features, but there are also key differences to consider, which in general are:

• Ahrefs is still better—overall— in the link analytics department, considering it was their first expertise

• SEMRush, on the other hand, offers more keyword research features. However, some might feel that SEMRush’s UI for keyword research is too complex due to all the displayed metrics

• SEMRush is slightly better in the technical SEO features. For instance, the site audit feature is more comprehensive.

• SEMRush offers more accurate, and faster rank tracking

• Ahrefs wins in the content analytics and research department with its “Content Explorer” feature

Pricing: 

• Pro for $99.95/month, Guru for $199.95/month, and Business for $399.95/month

Conclusion: for most SEO purposes, SEMRush is the better tool and the $0.95 difference is definitely worth it. However, if you want to focus more on backlinks analytics and content insights, Ahrefs is still better.

2. Moz Pro

Another strong contender as one of the best Ahrefs alternatives, Moz Pro is yet another all-in-one SEO suite offering various different tools from keyword research to site audit. Moz offers a similar price to Ahrefs with the standard plan costing $99/month, so they are very similar to each other in many different aspects. 

It is noting that Moz Pro’s Large plan is significantly cheaper than the comparable Ahrefs Business plan ($249/month vs $399/month), so it might be a plus point if you require a large amount of data/insights and a lot of users. 

One of the key highlights of Moz Pro is the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority(PA) metrics, both developed by Moz and are widely used by SEO marketers nowadays to measure ranking performance.

Again, since both tools are offering similar features, here are some important considerations between the two:

• Ahrefs, again, is better in the link analysis department, but it’s worth noting that Moz Pro includes DA and PA in its link analytics (called Link Explorer). Moz Pro is slightly better than SEMRush in this department.

• Moz Pro shows more keywords compared to Ahrefs and SEMRush in its Keyword Explorer.

• Moz Pro is the pioneer of local SEO analytics and is still the best today in this aspect

• Moz has a great community, and its blog is one of the best resources for SEO information and tutorial

Pricing: Standard ($99/month), Medium ($179/month), Large ($249/month), Premium ($299/month)

Conclusion: offers less functionality overall compared to Ahrefs, but some really nice features in its Keyword Explorer and Moz Local. The Large plan is more affordable than Ahrefs’ and SEMRush, and if you regard DA and PA as important SEO metrics, Moz Pro is the way to go. 

3. BuzzSumo

Unlike SEMRush and Moz Pro, which we have discussed above, BuzzSumo is not a dedicated SEO suite, but rather focuses on content analytics, one of the key features of Ahrefs.

BuzzSumo only offers two core features, but is really good—if not the best— on what it does:

• Content analytics: scouring the internet and social media networks for the trending content for the topic, and displaying key metrics like engagement, number of shares, backlinks, and so on
• Influencer outreach: finding key influencers for a certain topic, a unique feature not offered by Ahrefs

It is also worth noting that BuzzSumo does offer basic SEO analytics functionalities like keyword research and backlinks analysis, but they are not as comprehensive as Ahrefs’.

Pricing: Pro ($79/month), Plus ($139/month), Large ($239/month), custom plan available.

Conclusion: if you are only looking for a content analytics tool, BuzzSumo is a more cost-efficient alternative while providing a more in-depth content analytics feature. If you are also planning to start an influencer marketing campaign, BuzzSumo is a great choice. 

4. SEO Powersuite

As the name SEO Powersuite suggests, this is another all-in-one SEO tools suite, similar to what Ahrefs offers. 

However, there is one key difference from SEO Powersuite compared to Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz Pro: it is not sold as a SaaS product with a monthly subscription, instead, you only need to pay for one time, much like traditional software.

The best part about SEO Powertools is probably the fact that the free version is so good with all the SEO features from the premium packages included, you are only limited in volume and you can’t save projects or generate a report. Meaning, if you only want an analytics tool for strategizing purpose, the free version is probably sufficient. 

It is also worth noting that SEO Powersuite offers a really good link profile analytics feature, comparable to Ahrefs’, and some might even swear that SEO Powersuite is better than Ahrefs’ in this department. 

Pricing: a free version with all SEO features (limited data volume only), $299 one-time purchase for the Professional package (unlimited data), and $699 for the Enterprise package with advanced reporting features.

Conclusion: an excellent Ahrefs alternative with great core features. The traditional one-time-only pricing will be more cost-effective if you plan to stay long in the SEO game. 

5. Majestic

Majestic is a UK-based SEO suite offering various SEO features from site analytics (site explore), link profile analysis, domain comparing, and others.

However, just like Ahefs, Majestic is especially focused on the backlinks analytics department, with over 230 billion URLs in its link database. 

Probably the most interesting selling point as an Ahrefs alternative is Majestic’s pricing: the basic plan, called Lite, is ‘only’ $41.67/month, more than half of what’s offered by Ahrefs and SEMrush, while offering comparable features in the backlinks analytics department.

However, for other crucial SEO features like keyword analytics, Majestic is a little lacking compared to other alternatives in this list.

Pricing: Lite ($41.67/month, 1 user, 5000 data volume), Pro ($83.33/month, 1 user, 15000 data volume), Full ($333.33/month, 3 users, 30000 data volume)

Conclusion: an affordable alternative if you are especially looking for a backlinks checker.

End Words

Each of the Ahrefs alternatives we’ve discussed has its own pros and cons: some are affordable (one is free), some others offer a different set of features and/or specializations. It’s important to choose the right SEO tool according to your needs and your budget to maximize cost-efficiency. If you want to discuss what tool will be right for your business don’t hesitate to contact B2B SEO consultant.  

The post Top 5 Effective Ahrefs Alternatives to Pay Attention to appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, it’s important to get as many advantages as you can to stay ahead of the competition, and fortunately nowadays there are many marketing tools designed for content marketing that can help you in various areas.

Here, we will discuss five of the best content marketing tools available. Each has their own specific feature set, and will cater to a different purpose.

Let us begin.

1. Best All-In-One Research Tool: SEMRush

SEMRush is best known as one of the most popular SEO tools, especially for its excellent keyword research features.

However, SEMRush is actually a very powerful tool for content marketing with a wide range of possible applications, for instance:

Keyword Magic Tool: search for keywords that are relevant for your business and often searched by your audience. Since SEO is an integral aspect of content marketing, this is a very important feature to have.
Topic Research: Simply enter your keywords and SEMRush will provide various suggestions to find a topic to work with.
SEO Optimization: suggestions for various SEO optimizations. Again, SEO is a very important aspect of content marketing.

Content Audit: evaluating various aspects of your content, especially regarding user experience.
Analytics: monitor your brand performance, social media engagement, and many other important metrics
Backlinks Profile: check your competitors’ backlinks profile, which can be useful in getting our own inbound links

SEMRush is especially useful for keyword research purposes, both to find keywords for your own content and to check your competitors’ target keywords. A great, all-around tool to assist you content marketing.

Pricing: Pro ($99.95/month), Guru ($199.95/month), Business ($399.95/month). No free plan, but free trial available.

2. Best Content Curation Tool: BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the most important tools for content marketing with two core features:

Content curation: find out what kind of content is trending in your niche, across various social media networks. BuzzSumo will also display various useful metrics like engagement metrics, backlinks profile, etc.
Influencer analytics: giving insights about key influencers for a certain niche. This can be very useful for content promotion purposes, as well as to get backlinks from key influencers that might be related to our content

As a tool, BuzzSumo is relatively simple with just a few features—but it is really good at what it does.

Content curation is often the most difficult and lengthy process in formulating a content marketing strategy, and with BuzzSumo we can tackle this issue with just a few simple clicks.

Simply enter your keyword, and BuzzSumo will show the most shared content for the keyword across different social media networks. BuzzSumo will also show useful metrics for the content.

Nowadays, building relationships with other influencers to promote your content is very important, and BuzzSumo is also one of the best tools to gain insights about key influencers.

Pricing: Pro ($79/month), Plus ($139/month), Large ($239/month), custom plan available.

3. Best Content Organizer Tool: CoSchedule

CoSchedule is actually a full-fledged marketing organizer suite with many different features from asset management organizer to social media management tool, each ‘feature’ is priced differently or you can also get the full marketing suite package starting from $150/month.

However, here we will especially focus on CoSchedule’s content organizer feature. In a nutshell, Coschedule content organizer is an editorial calendar where we can plan our content schedule, and view all the different schedules in one place. This can be very useful if we plan to publish many different content in various different platforms (different social media networks, your blog, etc.).

CoSchedule offers seamless integration with other important content marketing platforms from WordPress to Google Docs to Evernote, among others.

We can also use CoSchedule as a collaboration tool if you have several content marketers in your team. You can post comments on your schedule, and ask questions to easily communicate within your team without sending any emails.

Pricing: Growth ($60/month) for 3 users, Professional ($250/month) 5 users, custom Enterprise plan tailored for your needs available

4. Best Conversion Optimization Tool: Convert Pro

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless it can convert visitors into prospects, and ultimately, paying customers. This, will turn your content marketing into an effective lead generation device.

Convert Pro is a WordPress plugin known as one of the most effective lead generation plugins available, with some powerful features such as:

• Easily create call-to-actions (CTAs) for your content
• Build an email list
• Implement a lead magnet offer in your content
• A/B testing
• Seamless integration with various CRMs and email marketing tools
• Integration with Google Analytics to monitor the performance of your content
• Drive traffic to your website and promote videos
• User segmentation features to easily group different audience for better targeting
• So, if your website is WordPress based and you want an effective lead generation from your content marketing, Convert Pro is a must-have plugin considering its pretty reasonable price.

It’s also a lightweight plugin that won’t slow down your website, and as a paid plugin, you get a dedicated customer service and tutorials to help you get the most of ConverPro.

Pricing: $99 annually or $399 one-time payment, Agency bundle for $249/year or $699 one-time

5. Best Content Optimization Tool: CrazyEgg

We can be fairly subjective in assessing the quality and performance of our own content—especially if we are the content creator.

This is where a website performance analytics like CrazyEgg can fill the gap.

CrazyEgg offers the standard heat map analytics feature to check where your visitors are clicking on your website, as well as other useful analytics features like confetti report, scroll maps, and overlay maps, among other. Tracking all these metrics will provide you with a very powerful insight in evaluating your content’s performance.

You can monitor different ‘heat’ by browser/device, referral pages, and country, to evaluate in content’s performance in detail for specific situations (i.e. your content might not perform well in mobile devices).

So, you can reposition high-performing content to more popular areas of your website, and you can also re-optimize underperforming content.

CrazyEgg, with all the powerful features, is very easy to use where everything is displayed visually, and you can view all the useful metrics with just a single click on a specific area of your website.

Pricing: Basic ($24/month) for 30,000 page views and 100 recordings/month, 1 website; Standard ($49/month) for 75,000 page views and 500 recordings/month, 3 websites; Plus for 150,000 page views and 1,000 recordings/month, unlimited websites

6. Best All-in-One AI Content Workspace: Narrato

When you’re scaling up content production, the biggest concern is usually the content quality. If it’s the same for you, Narrato AI is the solution. It is a powerful content creation and marketing software that is capable of consistently generating high-quality content at scale.

It comes with tons of other features for managing your entire marketing operations. Here is a quick look at these –

• AI Content Genie for automated content creation. This AI feature on the platform auto-generates social media and blog content based on relevant themes.
• AI Content Assistant: 100+ AI and SEO tools for creating any kind of content, from blog posts, social media posts, copy, and even AI images and memes. It also offers advanced AI tools for content ideation, keyword research, SEO and content optimization. For any specific needs, there’s an option to create custom AI templates.
• Content planner and scheduler: Global content calendar and automated content publishing support for numerous platforms or CMS. You can also use Narrato’s API and custom integrations to publish content on other platforms/CMS.
• Content planning tools: Custom style guides and content templates.
• Collaboration features: In-line comments, messages, and @mentions.
• Project management: Searchable repository of content, custom content workflows, workflow automation, and task assignment.
• Content team and freelancer management: Onboard your content team and choose the right access level. Manage in-house content team and also freelance writers.

Pricing: Plans include Pro at $36 per month and Business at $76 (both include 4 user seats). Custom pricing plan is available if you want more or less of anything.

End Words

Content marketing is not only about the content creation process. Other aspects of content marketing from content promotion to the research/curation process to content scheduling, are often overlooked but yet, equally important.

The five tools we have discussed above, each covered different aspects of content marketing. In our opinion, they are the best available today according to their respective functionality.

While content marketing is now very competitive, these tools can help you up your game to deliver better value for your audience.

The post Top 5 Content Marketing Tools For Business Success appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will help you determine the best enterprise-grade email marketing solutions that can fit your organization’s current needs—and available budgets.

First, however, let us discuss one of the most frequently asked questions:

What Qualifies An Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions From Ordinary Ones?

Before we begin our discussion for the best enterprise email marketing solution available in the market, here are some important criteria we used to differentiate between enterprise email marketing tools and mid-sized ones:

• Contact Database Capacity: Obviously, bigger enterprises engage to a lot more leads and prospects, that can often reach hundreds of thousands if not millions. We mainly look for email marketing solutions that are offering huge contact database/lead storage capacity and are reliable enough (in terms of processing power, bandwidth, and overall stability) to handle the size of the data.
• Deliverability: A very important aspect to consider for any email marketing software. There’s nothing worse than realizing that only half of the people in your email list are actually receiving the email. Different email marketing solutions might offer different approaches to maximizing the deliverability. For instance, some might automatically blacklist addresses that trigger a bounce, and some might be able to automatically sort the contacts based on open rate.
• Advanced Audience Segmentation: The large quantity of leads/prospects that are engaged by the enterprise will have different “readiness” level. One prospect, —or group of prospects— might be more ready to make a purchase than others, depending on many different factors from demographics data to different urgency. Thus, proper segmentation solutions to differentiate between these readiness levels are necessary, so the enterprise can properly implement hyper-targeted email campaigns for each.
• Analytics, Testing, and Reporting Tools: Enterprises rely on data, not gut feeling, and various analytics tools from A/B testing to heat mapping to the analytics of various engagement metrics are necessary for an enterprise environment. The email marketing solution must be able to deliver reliable and intuitive reporting so executives and managers in the enterprise can readily use and analyze the reported data.
• Flexible and Advanced Email Builder: Content and how we present it are still the main cores of email marketing. An email builder capable of dynamic content is required so we can better cater to the needs of different user segments (as discussed above), so it can dynamically adjust content depending on different segments (age, previously triggered actions, etc.) The more flexible the email builder is, with more advanced features, the better. However, ease of use is still an important factor to consider.
• Lead Scoring: With the quantity of generated leads, a lead scoring solution—or even better, automated lead scoring solution— is required so the enterprise can properly allocate time and resources only on prospects with the highest likelihood of converting. The email marketing solution should provide the ability to establish different scoring criteria according to the business’s preferences, needs, and goals.
• Integration: In an enterprise environment, it’s more common to have many different
• Customer Support:Reliability is a very important factor to consider, but no software will be 100% free of technical and non-technical issues. Reliable customer support—or even better, dedicated customer support—, is an important factor to consider when choosing between different enterprise-grade email marketing solutions.

Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions 2025

1. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot is certainly one of the most prominent names in the world of digital marketing today, especially thanks to its marketing blog and HubSpot academy, positioning HubSpot as the go-to resource for anything digital marketing.

First, it’s important to note that HubSpot offers five different “products”: CRM tool (which is free, forever), Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and finally, HubSpot CMS. 

It’s easy to mistake the HubSpot Marketing Hub as HubSpot’s enterprise email marketing solution due to its name. While the Marketing Hub does offer basic email marketing features and a little email automation, it’s the Sales Hub that actually offers a full-blown email marketing and automation service. 

It’s worth noting, however, that the email automation features are only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan, which will cost you at least $500/month and $1,200/month, respectively. Marketing Hub’s Professional Plan will cost you $800/month, so it’s important to consider that the Sales Hub is also more ‘affordable’. 

With that being said, there are three key highlights of HubSpot Sales Hub as an enterprise email marketing hub: 

• Ease of use: HubSpot is famous for its very intuitive, easy to use interface. A drag-and-drop visual email builder that is easy enough to learn even for absolute beginners.

• Integration: HubSpot offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party apps and integration with its own free HubSpot CRM. This is probably one of the main selling points of using any HubSpot products.

• Reliability: HubSpot offers a very stable ecosystem with trustworthy data, and you can control almost every aspect of your sales and marketing campaigns in just one single dashboard.

Conclusion: Not exactly the most affordable, and not exactly offering truly unique features. It’s the whole package that made HubSpot Sales Hub a really popular and powerful solution. Definitely worth it if you do have the budget.

Pricing: 

• • Free plan (similar to the HubSpot free CRM)
  • Starter, starts from $50/month
    • All features of the free CRM plan
    • Deal pipeline
    • Email tracking
    • Email scheduling
    • Meeting scheduling
    • Live chat
    • Ref productivity performance
  • Professional, starts from $500/month
    • All features of the Starter plan
    • Automation for deal stage, task, and lead rotation
    • Workflow extensions
    • Personalized video creation
    • Personalized quotes
    • Data organization (products, teams, currencies, etc.)
  • Enterprise, starts from $1,200 a month 
    • All features of the Professional plan
    • Automation playbooks
    • Call transcriptions
    • Predictive lead scoring
    • Calculated properties
    • Quote-based workflows
    • Electronic signature
    • Recurring revenue tracking and analytics
    • Team management features

2. Pardot

First things first, Pardot is even more expensive than HubSpot Sales Hub, with the most “affordable” plan starts from a whopping $1,250/month, and you’ll need to pay more if you have more than 10,000 contacts in your email database.

With that being said, what’s so special about Pardot? First, Pardot is not only an email marketing tool, but a full-fledged marketing automation tools covering various powerful features. 

For instance, there up to 50 automation workflow rules with the basic plan, lead scoring features, SEO analytics features, and even marketing attribution. 

Pardot is owned by SalesForce (possible affiliate),  one of—if not the—most prominent names in the sales CRM industry, so there’s no doubt about its overall quality. Also, obviously it also offers seamless integration with SalesForce. 

Highlight:

• Features: simply put, probably the richest, most advanced set of features available today.
• Customer Service: also one of the best. Very fast, responsive, and helpful, as expected for what you pay for the service. 
• Resources: with Pardot membership, you also get access to various resources from written guides to webinars to accessing certified consulting services.

Totally worth it if you do have the budget and also in need of a well-rounded digital marketing solution. If you only want a dedicated email marketing software however, HubSpot is arguably a more cost-efficient investment. 

Pricing: 

• • • Growth: starts from $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts
      • Basic automation features
      • Basic lead capturing features
      • 50 automation rules
      • Variable tags
      • Engagement features
      • Lead nurturing
      • Basic lead scoring
      • Basic analytics for 100 SEO keywords and 10 competitors
      • Basic data management
      • Basic marketing training and guides
      • Basic integrations
      • Basic domain setup
    • Plus: starts from $2,500/month for 10,000 contacts
      • All from the Growth plan
      • Advanced automation with dynamic content and 100 automation rules
      • Advanced lead scoring
      • Advanced analytics for 250 SEO keywords and 25 competitors
      • Multi-touch marketing attribution
      • Advanced integrations
      • Advanced marketing training and guides
    • Advanced: starts from $4,0000/month for 10,000 contacts
      • All from the Plus plan
      • Advanced data management for 100K calls per day and 10GB file hosting
      • Advanced analytics for 1,000 SEO keywords and 100 competitors
      • AI-assisted analytics and lead scoring
      • Advanced automation with 150 automation rules

3. Drip

Drip is a relatively new brand compared to others in this list, has only entered the email marketing solutions market in 2013. 

However, Drip quickly gained popularity as one of the market leaders, especially due to its rather unique focus to—as the name suggests—drip marketing or autoresponder. However, it also offers advanced workflow builder and workflow split testing.

All in all, Drip probably offers the richest, most advanced set of features compared to others in this list. For example, there’s the Event Tracking feature where we can easily segment different users by “tagging” them, giving us a more intuitive way to implement segmentation. For example, we can tag users who purchased a product during the last holiday season (so we can send a specialized campaign for the next holiday). 

Drip also offers a very intuitive Visual Workflow builder, where we can easily create an email marketing automation campaign with heavy personalizations. If necessary, we can also add specific personalized metrics for different subscribers.

The main philosophy behind Drip is to provide an easy to use email marketing automation and personalization. 

So, enterprises who are currently looking to implement email marketing automation, but don’t want it to be too technical, can look to Drip as an interesting option. 

Drip, however, isn’t exactly the cheapest option available, with subscription plan starting from $49/month for ‘only’ 2,500 contacts.

Drip’s key highlights:

• Automation Features: the best in this list regarding automation with a modern, unique approach to automation workflows and autoresponders.
• Event Segmentation:  a unique feature where you can easily create user segmentations by “tagging” them based on performed events. A very intuitive approach.
• Ease of Use: even with all the advanced and rather unique features, Drip is very easy to use with its sleek, very well-designed interface

Pricing: price is based on the number of contacts.

• • • Starting from $49/month for 0-2,500 contacts
    • $122/month for 2,500-5,000 contacts
    • $184/month for 5,000 to 10,000 contacts
    • $1740/month for up to 140,000 contacts, or call drip for more.

Conclusion: a unique enterprise email marketing solution designed for better automation and drip campaign. 

4. ActiveCampaign

After we’ve discussed two (really) expensive solutions for enterprise email marketing, this time we have a (very) affordable contender in ActiveCampaign.

The most affordable—Lite— plan starts from a mere $9/month, but you only get basic email marketing features and you can only store 500 email addresses. Since we are mainly talking about enterprise email agency, most probably the better investment is going to be the Professional plan ($129/month, 500 contacts), or at least the Plus plan ($49/month, 500 contacts). 

ActiveCampaign charge extras based on the number of contacts, for example, if you have 10,000 contacts, the Professional plan will cost you $270/month—still very affordable compared to the two options above.

While ActiveCampaign is a cost-efficient alternative, it still offers a pretty decent set of features, especially with the Professional and Enterprise plans. The catch? The user interface is fairly obsolete, and the email builder is not very intuitive compared to—for example— Hubspot.

Highlights of ActiveCampaign:

•  Not Intimidating Price: for enterprises who don’t want to make the jump to paying thousands of dollars each month in email marketing solution, ActiveCampaign is certainly an interesting alternative
• Great Automation Features: Automation workflows and sequences are really well-designed and very intuitive, you can easily build an automation workflow immediately
• Zapier Integration: while ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer any built-in integrations with third-party software, it can connect to 1500+ apps via Zapier integration.

Conclusion: a great option for enterprises looking for a cost-efficient email marketing software with a decent set of features. Great email automation tools included, especially considering its price.

Pricing:

• • • Lite: starts from $9/month for 500 contacts
      • Basic email marketing features only
    • Plus: starts from $49/month for 500 contacts
      • Everything from the Lite plan
      • CRM and sales automation
      • Lead scoring
      • Deep Data Integrations
      • SMS marketing
      • 1 on 1 training
      • Up to 25 users
      • Custom branding and user permissions
      • Conditional content
    • Professional: starts from $129/month for 500 contacts
      • Everything from the Plus plan
      • Site messaging
      • Marketing attribution tool
      • Predictive sending and win probability features
      • Split automation
      • Up to 50 users
    • Enterprise: starts from $229/month for 500 contacts
      • Everything from the Professional plan
      • Advanced, custom reporting
      • Custom domain
      • In-depth onboarding
      • Free design services, free social data, phone support, dedicated account representative
      • Uptime SLA
      • Unlimited users

5. Sendinblue

Similar to ActiveCampaign, SendinBlue is a relatively affordable email marketing solution, and there is even a free plan—that is actually free forever— for unlimited contacts. You are limited to just 300 emails per day, but that’s probably sufficient for enterprises who are not looking to get too heavy with their email marketing campaign.

The most expensive plan (outside the custom Enterprise plan) is ‘only’ $173/month, where you’ll get the ability to send 350,000 emails/month, email and management automation features, and bonus features (outside email marketing scope) like a landing page builder and chatbot, so it’s quite nice to have.

Also, the plans are not based on contacts/subscribers size, but on emails sent per month. This can be a decisive factor if you are an enterprise with a really big contact database since SendinBlue will be, — in most cases—, a more cost-efficient option. SendinBlue was originally designed for eCommerce (transaction-focused) emails, so there are a lot of useful eCommerce related options like transaction-focused autoresponders.

With all those features, SendinBlue is quite easy to use with a pretty comfortable learning curve. The catch? The interface is quite obsolete by today’s standard.

Highlights of SendinBlue:

• Affordability: a cost-efficient option and the plans are not limited to your number of subscribers. This might be an interesting selling point for enterprises with a huge email database.
• Integration: SendinBlue—for its price—, surprisingly includes a massive library of plugins and third-party integration with popular software and tools like OptinMonster, Magento, and WordPress among others.

Pricing:

• • Free: 300 emails/day, unlimited contacts
  • Lite: $25/month
    • 40,000 emails/month
    • No daily sending limit
  • Essential: $39/month
    • All features from Lite
    • 60,000 emails/month
    • Remove Sendinblue logo/brand
    • Advanced statistics
  • Premium: $66/month
    • All features from Essential
    • 120,000 emails/month ($173/month for 350,000 emails/month)
    • Facebook ads management
    • Landing page builder
    • Management automation
    • Chatbot
    • Multi-user access
  • Enterprise: custom-tailored plan

Conclusion: If you don’t mind the fairly outdated interface and the pricing model that limits you for email sending per month, SendinBlue is a great, cost-efficient enterprise email marketing solution.

6. ConstantContact

ConstantContact, although relatively unpopular compared to some others in this list, is actually one of the oldest email marketing software we have today, having been around since 1995.

In recent years, however, ConstantContact has grown rapidly in popularity as one of the most reliable email marketing services, including for the enterprise environment.

ConstantContact pricing is fairly simple, with only two different plans available: the basic Email plan starting from $20/month and the Email Plus plan—unlocking the automation features, among others—, starting from $45/month. Both of these prices are for 500 subscribers/contacts and will increase as your contact list grows. For example, if you have 10,000 contacts in your database, the Email Plus plan will cost you $125/month, and the Email plan will be $95/month, still fairly affordable.

A major selling point for ConstantContact is its interface, which is really modern-looking like today’s standard of minimalist, responsive-designed apps. However, it’s fairly basic in the features department, although it does offer all the necessary features for decent enterprise email marketing practices. 

Key highlights of ConstantContact:

• Deliverability: Out of the other platforms we have tested here, ConstantContact offers the highest deliverability rate of 97%. Also, fast delivery time and overall, very reliable.
• Interface: Modern-looking, minimalist and sleek interface. Very intuitive and easy to use.
• Affordability: Among the most affordable solutions we have tested, although it doesn’t really offer too many features.

Pricing (price based on the number of contacts, no credit card free-trial available):

• Email Plan (starts from $20/month for 500 contacts)

1. Unlimited sent emails
2. Basic Pop-up forms features
3. Basic Ecommerce features

• Email Plus Plan (starts from $45/month for 500 contacts)

1. Advanced eCommerce features
2. Customizable pop-up forms
3. Automated Email features
4. A/B Testing features
5. Dynamic Content

Conclusion: Some people value interface and design among other factors, and in such cases, ConstantContact is the best alternative in this list. Fairly affordable, but offers a relatively basic set of features and relatively basic integrations.

Email Marketing Best Practices and FAQ

Email marketing is, on the one hand, a very effective marketing channel with the highest ROI. Yet, on the other hand, executing effective email marketing can be quite difficult with all the saturation and competition.

It’s important to actually have an email marketing plan, and execute the strategy flawlessly so that your email(s) won’t end up in the dreaded spam folder.

Below, we will discuss some important things when planning and executing your email marketing strategy.

Elements of a Successful Marketing/Promotional Email

Content body:  often called “copy”. The body of your email, the core of your message. Should focus on only one topic, and should be consistent with your brand message and identity. 

CTA: since this is a marketing email with the intention to convert in one way or another, call-to-action (CTA) is very important. It should be well-placed and should be designed to stand out. The offer tied to the CTA must be relevant to the email’s content.

Images/photos/infographics/video/gifs: you can use any kind of media in an email nowadays. The main principles are that it should load properly and quickly on all devices, engaging (immediately eye-catching), and relevant. 

Timing: it’s about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. It will vary depending on your audience, so you must conduct proper research to find the best possible timing for your ideal audience. 

Personalization: as mentioned, it’s about sending the right message to specific people. Email personalization today is more than using the receiver’s first name in the subject line. With various AI tools and platforms available today, we have more ways to hyper personalize our emails. 

Mobile-friendliness/responsiveness: more than half of all business emails today are opened on mobile devices. Your email should be optimized for any devices, and the best way to achieve this is to adopt a mobile-responsive design (or use an email builder that supports responsive templates). 

Email Personalization Basics

The key to successful email personalization is to really understand your (ideal) audience: their behaviors, their needs, and their pain points. 

Why is personalization important? 

Simply put, our email inboxes are getting saturated with each and every year. Studies suggested that an average office employee receives more than 120 emails each day. How many of them are actually opened? How many went straight to the spam folder? 

According to campaign monitor, emails with personalized subject lines have a 26% higher open rate, while personalized message (body) can improve click-through rate from a mere 0.4% to 2.1%, 5 times higher. 

As briefly mentioned above, various tools and solutions have now allowed us to bring more hyper-personalizations to our emails beyond simply using the email receiver’s first name in the subject line and in email greetings.

Here are some personalizations you can implement:

• Include location-specific or time-specific information when appropriate, i.e. unique holidays in some countries/regions
• Send content according to the prospect’s current stage in the marketing funnel, for example, by sending a specific email to people who recently abandoned a shopping cart or have consumed a specific content
• Including relevant and personal events in the email (i.e. a trending movie or tv series, etc.)
• End your emails with a personal signature with a human’s name. Very simple and very important, yet often overlooked.
• Relevant call-to-action that is interesting and valuable for the specific reader

What Is Email Segmentation

Segmentation, in a nutshell, is dividing your (large) email list or database into smaller “segments”.

We can use many different approaches to segment our email list, for example, based on demographics data (unique interests or characteristics), based on their stage in the marketing/sales funnel, and so on.

Email segmentation is closely tied to personalization (discussed above), and the main idea behind it is that different email receivers will have a different level of “readiness” to convert into actual customers—which should be your end goal. 

For example, a free trial or discount offer might be effective for the audience who already recognize their own problems/pain points and started to recognize that your brand is a possible solution. However, it might not be as effective for customers who don’t even know what their actual problem is. 

So, we put them into different segments and send different personalized emails to each segment accordingly. 

The better we can target—and segment— our ideal customers, the better we can build trust and credibility with each segment, and thus the higher the chance to convert them.

How Can We Segment our Email List

The most efficient approach in segmenting our email list is to create several different opt-in (sign-up) forms with different lead magnets, specifically tailored according to each stage of the buyer’s journey or marketing funnel.

Also, various email marketing solutions (including the ones we’ve reviewed above) offer the feature to segment your email database based on demographic data and/or behavioral data such as:

1. Stage in the marketing funnel (might be called differently with different platforms. Hubspot, for example, used the term “lifecycle stage”.
2. Geographical location—might dictate different holidays, regional events, etc. that we can use in personalizations.
3. Industry/niche they work in, especially for B2B businesses.
4. Previous engagements with your brand—i.e. If they have bought your product in the past during the holiday season, so you can target them with a personalized message this next holiday season.
5. Specific job title/role in a company. Again, particularly useful in B2B email marketing.
6. Preferred language.

There are, however, no set rules on how we should segment our email list, and you can certainly as many different categories and segments as you want. There is only one rule: each segment must be as exclusive as possible so you cant hit them with a more targeted personalization. 

Implementing Marketing Automation

Automation is how we can use both segmentation and personalization to good use, in order to maximize the results of our email marketing campaign. 

Remember that the main idea of email marketing comprises of three things:

1. Sending email to the right people (segmentation)
2. With the right message (personalization)
3. At the best possible time (automation)

Nowadays, various email marketing software or platform can help us in implementing automation—including the ones we’ve reviewed in this guide—, but in practice, there are several different approaches to implement email automation:

• Email Autoresponders/Drip Campaign

As the name suggests, the autoresponder works by sending “response” to a specific audience who has triggered a specific action and then sends follow-up messages on a regular interval until another action is triggered. 

For example, when someone downloads your ebook lead magnet, the autoresponder will send a custom-tailored, personalized “response” automatically. 

The autoresponder approaches require us to prepare a set of different emails according to these different “triggers”, these emails are often referred to as drip emails, and thus autoresponder campaign is often called “drip campaign” or “drip marketing”. We can then decide on a schedule to define how far apart these emails are going to be sent—- every few days, every week, etc. —

The main benefit of an autoresponder campaign is that when you’ve set it up properly, you can basically forget it and let the campaign work automatically, just as intended. You only need to update the drip campaign periodically when you need to add or change the triggers—or the responding messages.

• Automation Workflows

We can think of email workflows as an “enhanced” autoresponder. While autoresponder can only send messages at a regular interval until the receiver took a certain action (or unsubscribe from your list), workflows can execute different actions based on different yes/no criteria.

There are two key elements of email automation workflow: 

• The goal(s), that is, the desired action of the user after a specific step on the workflow
• Criteria: the action that would qualify a user for a specific workflow (yes), or another workflow then the action is not taken (no).

So, workflows—as opposed to autoresponders—-, can change the course of action depending on the actions taken by the user. For example, the workflow can send a different email for a user who’ve abandoned the cart the 2nd time than another user who’ve just abandoned the cart for the very first time.

Remember that the more accurate and personalized your sent email is, the higher the chance of conversions. 

Email marketing solutions that offer workflow functionalities tend to be more expensive, but generally will provide justified, additional value compared to those offering traditional autoresponders. 

End Words: Our Final Choice(s)

The six enterprise email marketing solutions we have tested above are very different from each other, and each of them offers their own unique set of features and selling points.

With that being said, choosing just one between them as our ultimate recommendation is going to be very difficult.

However, for the sake of this guide, here are our final recommendations:

• Best For Automation: Drip

With automation and personalization being very important in today’s very saturated email marketing environment, Drip offers the best features in those aspects with advanced and unique automation builders and advanced event-based segmentation. 

• Best All-In-One: HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot is still the best choice if you already possess an existing ecosystem of marketing/sales tools with its huge library of third-party integration (and integration with HubSpot’s other products). If you are looking for seamless integration, overall ease of use, and great set of features, HubSpot is your best bet.

• Best Affordable Choice: SendinBlue

We covered several affordable options in this list, but SendinBlue offers more flexibility in its prices because you are not charged a higher price based on yo ur contact size. A decent set of features, and quite reliable. 

The post Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Here, we will discuss 8 of the best social media marketing tools available, as well as how you can implement them in your digital marketing strategy.

Let us begin.

1. Animoto

Site: https://animoto.com/

Pricing: $9/month or $5/month if you subscribe for 1 year. (14-day free trial)

Promo code: 20% off all plans with the promo code YAAAAAS

What it does:

Videos are an integral part of social media marketing nowadays, not only for image and video-centric platforms like Pinterest or Instagram, but for all major social media platforms. Video is currently the most engaging and the most shared content medium, so it only makes sense to focus on it. 

On the other hand, video production is a thing a lot of social media marketers struggle with: first, it requires a pretty steep learning curve, and second, producing a video can be very expensive.

This is why Animoto comes in as one of the most affordable and easy to use video making tools. At just $5 monthly, you get a lot of layouts and templates to work on, licensed music and sound, stock photos and animations, fonts, and so much more. With the more expensive packages, you can also consult with an expert for 30-minutes, which can be useful for those needing advice. 

2. Audiense Insights

Site: https://audiense.com

Pricing: starting from $696/month

What it does:

A key aspect of any marketing is about understanding your audience. If you can understand what your customers actually need, the problems they are facing, and their behaviors, you can market any product to them. 

In this regard, Audiense is a very powerful tool that can provide very detailed reports about any audience according to your criteria, no matter how niche the audience group is. The A.I.-based tool will apply machine learning to instantly understand the population of your target audience, the connections between people within the group, and their behaviors. 

Audiense will also provide insights about key demographics info, interests (in brands, influencers/celebrities, hobbies), and can also compare the audience with your competitors.

Although it’s fairly priced, Audiense is a very advanced tool which justifies its value. Will turn your social media marketing game to another level.

3. HubSpot

Site: https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/social-inbox

Pricing: $20/mo or $15 if you commit for a year, but you pay monthly.

What it does:

Take care of your customers by connecting with them on platforms where they spend most of their time. You can set up keyword monitoring and email alerts so that the right team can get details about your customers at the right time. Create and manage your marketing campaigns, CRM and social media content all from one place. HubSpot’s Social Media Marketing Software can take care of creating, optimizing and scheduling content for Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

With AI-powered content creation for social media, you can stop worrying about content ideas and focus on engaging with your audience. For Instagram and Facebook, AI suggests hashtags that your audience is interested in. This saves time and eliminates guesswork. All you have to do is share raw ideas with the AI assistant, and it will create the rest of the content for you. You can also access reporting from within the dashboard. These reports are designed to help you grow with your audience.

3. Canva

Site: https://www.canva.com/

Pricing: Freemium (starts at $12.95/month, 30-day free trial)

What it does:

Good visual designs are also an important aspect for any successful social media marketing: good photos,well-designed images, and value-packed infographics are highly engaging and shareable. However,sometimes a social media marketer doesn’t have access to a graphic designer, and this is where Canva comes in.

Canva is, in its core, a cloud-based Photoshop where you can create images from scratch easily. This is because you can find many professionally-made templates from business cards to posters to infographic maker.

The infographic maker is a very useful feature where you get a huge library of various graphic elements, and you can easily create a beautiful infographic with just a drag-and-drop approach. 

4. BuzzSumo

Site: https://buzzsumo.com/

Pricing: starts at $79/month ($948 annually) 

What it does:

There’s a reason you’ll probably find BuzzSumo not only on the top of many social media marketing tools lists, but also on many digital marketing lists in general:because it’s so useful.

BuzzSumo’s core functions is to analyze the internet and especially social media platforms for trending topics and keywords, as well as finding key influencers for these topics. In a nutshell, we can use BuzzSumo to find out what kind of content (or post) that will perform for a certain topic. 

So, how will BuzzSumo plays in the world of social media marketing? For instance, you can use BuzzSumo to analyze your performance and impact on various social media platforms, as well as analyzing your competitors’ social media presences.

BuzzSumo, however, is technically a content marketing tool, and since nowadays we can’t separate social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing (another area where BuzzSumo shines), this is an especially powerful, all-purpose digital marketing tool. 

5. Built-in Analytics on Social Media Platforms

Most major social media platforms offer their own analytics, which are especially useful to analyze your performance and make the necessary adjustments. The best thing is, they are all totally free.

Instagram Insights 

Instagram’s analytics, dubbed Insights, allow you to check various important metrics like the performance of your posts (and your growth over time), how users interact with your posts (number of likes, shares, etc.), and check important demographics data of your audience (their location, gender, age range, etc.)

By analyzing this data, you can evaluate your performance on Instagram and develop a better approach.

Twitter Analytics

Similar to Instagram insights, Twitter analytics will provide useful data about your performance on the platform. For example, Twitter will show you your top performing posts, demographics data of your audience, and the performance of your engagement with your followers (which is an especially important aspect with Twitter). 

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook’s analytics tool is very detailed and powerful, as basically you can get any information related to your posts and followers: number of engagement, likes, followers growth, posts performances, ads performance (if you invest on Facebook Ads), and there’s also a feature to compare your Page with similar other Pages (called Pages to Watch), which is very useful in analyzing your competitors’ performance.

6. Hootsuite

Site: https://hootsuite.com/

Pricing: Freemium (premium starts at $19/month)

What it does:

In this age of automation and personalization, having a social media management app is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. 

There are numerous social media scheduling and management tools available on the market: Buffer, SproutSocial, and Hootsuite, among others. Most of them offer similar core functionalities with just a few unique features.

So, why do we pick Hootsuite over all the other similar tools? Hootsuite is a more well-rounded option over its competitors offering scheduling, analytics, and monitoring tools all in just one dashboard. 

As a scheduling tool, Hootsuite offers pretty complete features from the ability to queue post according to a timed-schedule, AutoSchedule feature to automatically queue your post according to optimal times, and so on.

However, Hootsuite is especially strong in its analytics features. Above, we have discussed how native analytics of the social media platforms are already powerful, but Hootsuite offers so much more. For instance, you can monitor all the different platforms in one single dashboard, making it easier to compare the performance between each platform. You can create custom social streams by including or excluding specific keywords, assigning locations, filtering by languages, and so on. This can be useful to get insights according to your specific needs.

The free plan includes control over three social profiles and 30 scheduled posts, while the most affordable plan ($29/month) offers unlimited scheduling and 10 different social profiles.

7. Statusbrew

Site: https://statusbrew.com/

Pricing: 14-day free trial (lite starts at $69/month)

What it does:

Statusbrew has 1:1 feature parity with industry leaders like Sprout and Hootsuite. The tool provides a unified experience for managing social media from a single hub.

The scheduler allows you to curate various content types, including carousels, threads, polls, and stories, for multiple networks, with bulk scheduling options available. The internal tagging feature makes it easy to organize and categorize content by campaign, streamlining the entire process.

Their Inbox is similar to other tools that sync engagement from connected networks in real-time, but it stands out with its intuitive interface and automation features. You can set up automated actions, like automatically hiding or deleting negative or spam comments on brand profiles. Queries that require attention, such as pricing requests, can be routed to specific team members with active alerts. Plus, engagements can be organized into different views for better visibility and management.

The analytics dashboards are easy to navigate and give a clear view of the combined impact of your social media efforts. With over 230 metrics in the widget library, you can create custom dashboards for the specific metrics your brand or clients care about. These dashboards can be shared via live links or downloaded as PDF or CSV files for further analysis.

8. Mention

Site: https://mention.com/en/

Price: Freemium (starts at $29/month, 7-day free trial)

What it does:

Mention is a marketing analytics platform focusing on—-as the name suggests—- brand mentions. Mention will monitor not only the major social media platforms, but also millions of blogs, forums, and sites (based on Mention’s claim, they monitor over 1 billion sources daily) for any mention of your brand (or your competitor’s) name.

You can also use Mention to check the popularity of certain keywords and topic, and also to get more insights about your competitors. You can customize Mention using Boolean approach to track queries and brand mentions according to your preferences and needs.

A very simple tool, function-wise, but really is the best at what it does.

9. Affable Discovery  

Site: https://www.affable.ai/

Pricing: credit-based pricing, starts from $90 for 30 credits (1 credit for 1 monthly influencer analytics)

What it does:

Affable is an A.I.-driven analytics tool that can identify and analyze ideal influencers and audiences for your business. You can submit your preferences and needs for influencers (i.e., X number of followers located in a specific city, have used a specific product, 80% of female followers, etc.), and Affable will deliver a list containing 10 influencers who matched your criteria, along with reports for key metrics like engagement rates, follower demographics, etc. 

Influencer marketing is now also an integral part of social media marketing, and Affable can save your time and resources in finding the right influencers for your business. Since you also get a detailed report for these influencers’ followers, you also get a new source to get more audience.

10. Narrato

Site: https://narrato.io/

Pricing: Three plans, starting from $36 per month (4 user seats included)

What it does:

Automatically generated social media content by an AI Content Genie. That’s probably one of the most unique social media marketing tools offered by Narrato. This unique AI tool creates social media posts (and also blog content), complete with relevant emojis, hashtags, and images. Simply share your website URL and content themes, and watch as the AI Content Genie delivers a new batch of content every week. If there’s something that needs changing, you can easily edit and add your own touch right on the platform before publishing.

Narrato offers a variety of AI tools to streamline social media content creation. You can create content using notes, themes, or URLs, and generate posts for holidays or quotes. The platform tailors content specifically for LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. It also features an AI Twitter thread generator, AI meme generator, and AI image generator, alongside a comprehensive library of CC images and GIFs. For any other social media marketing needs, there are custom AI templates.

End Words

There are certainly many more social media marketing tools used by marketing consultants with various pricing packages, various functions, and various sets of features. The 8 tools we have discussed above covered various important areas of social media marketing from audience analytics, content creation, performance analytics, and influencer marketing purposes. All of them can act as a benchmark when you are considering other tools for their respective purposes. 

The post Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The solution? Personalization, automation, and scheduling management, and these are where a social media management tool like Hootsuite can shine.

However, Hootsuite certainly is not a perfect tool with its own pros and cons. There are other alternatives with better pricing and unique features. In this guide, we will discuss some of the best HootSuite alternatives in the market.

Before we begin, let us briefly discuss Hootsuite as the benchmark for the alternatives.

A Brief Overview of Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the pioneers of social media management platform, and arguably the most well-known. Hootsuite remains competitive among its competitors due to its well-rounded set of features: it can manage your social media profiles, provide a reliable automation scheduling, and one of its key strengths is its superb analytics features where you can analyze your performance on various social media platforms in one dashboard.

Pros of Hootsuite:

1. Complete set of social media tools from analytics to scheduling
2. All major social media platforms are supported (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, WordPress alternatives, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.). No extra installations necessary
3. Intuitive user interface, very easy to manage all your social media profiles in different tabs.
4. Easy auto-scheduling
5. Powerful analytics reports in one single dashboard
6. Extra applications you can install to enrich your experience

Cons of Hootsuite:

1. The free plan is fairly limited with just control over 3 social media profiles, basic scheduling an analytic features.
2. The premium plan starts at $29/month, and to use extra apps and features you will need to pay more, the cost can get quite expensive with all the extras
3. The analytic tool, although very powerful, will have a significant learning curve.
4. Training is not mandatory but will cost another $21/month at the very least. It is, however, worth noting that Hootsuite Academy’s certifications are very valuable and well-respected

Pricing:

1. A free plan is available, with control over 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages
2. Premium pricing starts from $29/month with 10 social profiles and unlimited scheduling for 1 user. Pricing changes with more social profiles and more users.

As you can see, the main issue of Hootsuite is about cost. So, are there any Hootsuite alternatives that are more affordable with similar or even better features?

Best Hootsuite Alternatives

1. Sendible

Another strong contender as one of the best Hootsuite alternatives is Sendible, another all-in-one social media management tool that can handle scheduling, content curation, and analytics. Priced roughly the same as Hootsuite, and Sendible’s dashboard is somewhat of a cross between that of Sprout Social (a single dashboard approach) and Hootsuite (multi-column approach), where you have one priority inbox but you can also add customizable streams for different profiles.

Pros of Sendible:

1. Integration with all major social media profiles, especially powerful for Instagram
2. Easy and versatile scheduling features like the ability to upload a CSV file for scheduling a lot of posts at once
3. Unique content curation feature, integration with Canva
4. In-depth analytics and reporting feature
5. Great social listening feature with a dedicated Monitor tab

Cons of Sendible:

1. No free plan offered, 14-day trial is available
2. Steep learning curve, the analytics feature is not as user-friendly as Hootsuite

Pricing:

1. No free-plan, but there’s a 14-day free trial
2. Starts at $29/month for 12 social profiles and 8 scheduling queues.

2. Socialoomph

Previously called TweetLater, Socialoomph was originally a Twitter management and automation tool, but has since expanded to other social media platforms. Due to that history, Socialoomph is especially powerful in Twitter management with various advanced features like the ability to tweet via mail and a keyword search tool.

It is also an affordable social media management tool for other platforms with easy-to-use scheduling management.

Main features of free account

Pros:

1. Relatively affordable at just $15/month for the cheapest plan.
2. A good choice if you focus on Twitter marketing, although it can also integrate with other platforms from Facebook to Linkedin, among others
3. Unlimited scheduled posts even for the free plan

Cons:

1. Limited analytics and reporting features
2. A lot of its advanced features are focused for Twitter

Pricing:

1. Free plan available (1 social profile only)
2. Pricing starts at $15/month (also for 1 social profile but extra features), the “professional” plan starts from $25/month for 10 social profiles

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social and Hootsuite are very similar to each other in so many levels. Both are excellent at both scheduling and analytics, but their approaches are quite different. For instance, with Hootsuite we can customize different tabs and columns, each corresponding to a social media profile. On the other hand, with Social Sprout all posts from all platforms are integrated to just one “stream” or feed.

In the analytics department, Hootsuite is a little bit more versatile with the ability to customize various aspects of your reports. On the other hand, Sprout Social’s reporting is more simple and practical.

In short, Sprout Social is probably one of the best Hootsuite alternatives if you prefer simplicity and minimalist approach.

Pros of Sprout Social:

1. Can integrate with all major social media platforms
2. Simple, easy to use interface with minimalist design approach
3. Included social CRM features, some are very useful like the ability to view and share customer records.
4. Advanced scheduling tools that are unique to Sprout Social
5. Integrated messages/inbox collecting all messages from your social media profiles in just one place. Useful feature to easily engage with your followers.

Cons of Sprout Social:

1. A little lacking in LinkedIn integration
2. Relatively expensive with the cheapest plan priced at $99/month

Pricing:

1. No free plan, but there’s a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) for all the premium plans
2. Starts at $99/month including 5 social profiles. To unlock full features including content library and in-depth competitive reporting, you will need to pay $249/month

4. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse’s tagline is “managing social media has never been easier”, showing its focus on simplicity. The inbox interface is very simple and resembling your standard email inbox, so you can easily see which posts you have read, and which still demands attention. There are also analytics, reporting, and automation scheduling features, all designed with simplicity in mind.

Pros of AgoraPulse:

1. Integration with major social media platforms
2. Powerful analytics features that are easy to use at the same time, arguably the best among its competitors
3. Feature to categorize your audience based on different variables (most engagements, most mentions, etc.). AgoraPulse can do this automatically through a badge system, but you can also do it manually.
4. Powerful social listening and engagement features, you can easily keep track of your conversations 24/7

Cons of AgoraPulse:

1. Very expensive with the cheapest plan costs $89/month. However, for big agencies,arguably Agorapulse’s premium plans deliver better overall value
2. Not very powerful in the CRM department

Pricing:

1. No free plan, but free-trial available
2. Starts at $99/month or $89/month when paid annually for 10 social profiles, extra costs for add-on profiles and users

5. Buffer

Buffer is also a well-known social media management tool and probably the closest competitor to Hootsuite.

Buffer’s strength lies in its smart scheduling feature, with an intuitive user interface where you can easily add your posts in various forms (videos, photos, articles, etc.) and scheduled with a virtual queue. Buffer can then figure out the best possible time to post your content according to your target audience.

Pros of Buffer:

1. Integration with various social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more).
2. With the smart scheduling feature, you don’t have to individually schedule each post, as Buffer will determine the optimal time
3. Integration with Pablo, a useful image editor that will automatically resize and format your images for the respective social media platform
4. RSS feed integration with all the available plans
5. More affordable than Hootsuite with the cheapest plan costs

Cons of Buffer:

1. Analytics features are sub-par compared to Hootsuite only $15/month and billed monthly
2. Limited scheduled posts for the premium plan (the cheapest plan limits 100 scheduled posts).

Pricing:

1. Basic free plan for 3 social media profiles and 10 scheduled posts
2. Premium plan starts from $15/month for 100 scheduled posts, 8 social media profiles and 1 user. The most expensive plan is $99 per month for 25 profiles and 2000 scheduled posts, 6 users.
3. Free trial for all the premium plans

6. Plann

Plann is a comprehensive platform for managing your Instagram presence, offering scheduling, analytics, and strategic tools focused on
a visually appealing interface similar to Instagram. With a user-friendly drag-and-drop workspace,
users can create a custom-branded feed that reflects their unique style and helps them succeed on social media.

Pros of Plann:

1. User-friendly interface: Plann is designed to be simple and easy to use, making it accessible to people with little to no social media experience.
2. Content planning and scheduling: With Plann, users can plan and schedule their content ahead of time, saving time and ensuring a consistent presence on their social media platforms.
3. Performance analytics: Plann provides performance analytics that helps users track the success of their social media campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t.
4. Multi-platform support: Plann supports multiple social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook, allowing users to manage all their social media accounts in one place.

Cons of Plann:

Limited features compared to other platforms: While Plann offers a range of features, it may not have all the features that more comprehensive social media management platforms offer.
Limited analytics: While Plann provides performance analytics, they may be limited compared to what is available on more comprehensive analytics platforms.

Pricing:
Plann offers a range of pricing plans, starting with a free plan that includes basic features, and going up to a premium plan that includes all features for $15/month. The Build plan is great for small team members, making it ideal for businesses and teams managing multiple social media accounts.

7. Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a social media management platform that’s a one-to-one replacement for Hootsuite. It lets you manage large amounts of real-time social media engagement in an organized way, all from a single, unified inbox. What sets Statusbrew apart is its advanced features in setting up custom automation for social interactions, scheduling, and publishing tasks. This means you can focus on creating great content while Statusbrew handles the rest, ensuring your brand stands out on social media. This tool is recognized as one of the best Hootsuite alternatives in the market due to its latest industry-standard features. 

Pros of Statusbrew:

1. Easily manage tons of conversations on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, and GMB.
2. AI sentiment analysis to understand the audience behavior and preferences
3. Unified Inbox to provide a bird’s eye view of each conversation across different channels
4. Bulk scheduling to plan out the content up to a year in advance
5. Team approval workflows to avoid any kind of internal errors
6. Social listening & brand keyword monitoring
7. 190+ reporting metrics, custom widget creation with sharable live links
8. Integrations: Zendesk, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more

Cons of Statusbrew:

TikTok & Email Intergration is missing.

Pricing:

• Plans start from just $69 per month 
• There’s a 14-day free trial available
  

8. Planable

Planable is a visual social media management platform that stands out with its collaboration-first approach. While Hootsuite focuses on analytics and scheduling, Planable’s strength lies in its approval workflows and team collaboration features. The platform displays your content exactly as it will appear on each social media platform, making it incredibly easy for clients and team members to review and approve posts without any confusion.  This makes it an excellent Hootsuite alternative for agencies and teams managing multiple clients.

Pros of Planable:

1. Integration with all major social media platforms 
2. Exceptional collaboration features with multi-level approval workflows, perfect for agencies managing multiple clients
3. Visual content calendar with drag-and-drop functionality and live mockups showing exactly how posts will appear
4. Intuitive interface that’s extremely easy for clients and non-technical team members to navigate
5. Client-facing views that can be shared without exposing internal comments and workflow
6. Customizable reports that can be tailored to highlight the metrics that matter most to your clients

Cons of Planable:

1. Analytics features are more basic compared to Hootsuite and available only in higher-tier plans
2. Advanced features like in-depth competitive analysis and social listening are not as powerful as dedicated enterprise tools
   

Planable’s public pricing (USD) is workspace-based (you pay per workspace, per month):

• Free plan: $0 (includes all features, but limited to 50 total posts to create/schedule).

• Basic: $33 / workspace / month (includes 60 posts/workspace/month, unlimited users).

• Pro: $49 / workspace / month (includes 150 posts/workspace/month, unlimited users).

• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

Add-ons (per workspace/month):

• Analytics: $14 / workspace / month

• Social inbox: $9 / workspace / month

Conclusion

There are many excellent Hootsuite alternatives available on the market: some are more affordable, some others provide better overall value in features. Hootsuite, however, remains a strong social media management tool used by many digital marketing consultants with its well-rounded set of features and relatively affordable plans.

The post Best Hootsuite Alternatives for Your Business Success appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The lines between the two are now (very) blurred, and with all the available channels, new tactics, and the increasing number of personnel, the need to streamline all these marketing and sales processes in one single app/solution is now more important than ever.

This is where HubSpot gained its popularity as a platform that simplifies and takes care of the whole business process in one single dashboard.

More About HubSpot

Let us first discuss HubSpot as the benchmark in this guide.

The name HubSpot has been really dominant in the digital marketing niche for the past decade. Every digital marketer out there knows about HubSpot and probably has attended the famous HubSpot academy or at least registered for its webinar at one point or another.

HubSpot is especially successful due to the popularity of its blog and various other resources, making it the go-to site when you want to learn about digital marketing. In short, HubSpot practically invented and established the inbound marketing practice.

Behind its (very) strong online presence, Hubspot is a company selling various marketing and sales tools, but it’s especially well-known for the HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and HubSpot CRM.

In practice, the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, integrated with the CRM, combined as an all-in-one digital marketing automation solution where we can automate various touchpoints from the first time a website visitor is attracted to your site, to the lead generation process, and the lead nurturing process until they are finally ready for purchase.

It’s difficult to discuss Hubspot as a platform in its entirety, so let’s instead discuss the three different solutions on their own.

The HubSpot CRM

We can get the basic HubSpot CRM for totally free, while the advanced CRM is included with HubSpot Sales Hub (more on this below).

In fact, HubSpot offers a free version of its tools for all categories (CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service). We will briefly discuss them in their respective sections below.

Hubspot Free CRM tool provides a solution to manage all the necessary tasks associated with sales and marketing in one single dashboard, where the sales/marketing representative can easily view various data of the sales/marketing funnel such as:

• Contact information
• Website activity of the said contact
• Records of every company in your sales database (for B2B sales), you can view all engagement and transaction details in a single dashboard
• Storage, management, and analytics/reporting of data related to deals/opportunities
• Storage, management, and analytics/reporting of sales/marketing activities

Acquiring new customers is certainly not an easy task to fulfill, and will involve many different activities that might overlap with each other. Let’s take a look at all the different activities:

• Searching for leads/prospects
• Qualifying leads
• Keep track of all the different opportunities, prospects, and deals at all the different stages (lost opportunities, some that might need further nurturing, won deals, etc.)
• Keep track of internal activities (meetings, develop strategies, appointments with prospects, etc.)

The free Hubspot CRM can help in managing and organizing these activities in a single intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard. For being a free tool, the attention to details given by HubSpot CRM is simply amazing, tracking every single interaction with any prospect and/or customer, and present the information in an easy to follow interface.

Pricing: totally free, enhanced CRM included in HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub

It’s important to note that Hubspot Sales Hub is significantly more affordable than the Marketing Hub (which we will discuss below). Part of the reason is that HubSpot is indeed more well-known as a marketing brand, and arguably the Hubspot Marketing Hub does offer an overall richer set of features—as we’ll learn further below.

HubSpot Sales Hub essentially covers features and solutions to encourage sales conversions. The basic—Starter—plan offers features like deal pipeline and basic email tracking/scheduling for lead nurturing purposes.

However, it’s only with the Professional plan (starts from a whopping $800/month) that we’ll get sales automation features like lead rotation and sales tasks automation.

There are three main highlights of the HubSpot Sales Hub:

• The intuitive interface: all of HubSpot tools are very easy to use with its sleek interfaces

• Rich set of features: all controlled within a single dashboard so you can manage and monitor everything in one place

• Integration: HubSpot Sales can integrate seamlessly with various platforms like SalesForce, Google Calendar, Slack, LinkedIn Sales Navigation, and of course, HubSpot CRM.

All in all, HubSpot Sales Hub is a really nice solution with jam-packed features designed to improve sales conversions, especially when combined with HubSpot CRM.

Pricing:

• Free plan (similar to the free CRM tool discussed above)
• Starter, starts from $50/month
  • All features of the free CRM plan
  • Deal pipeline
  • Email tracking
  • Email scheduling
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Live chat
  • Ref productivity performance
• Professional, starts from $500/month
  • All features of the Starter plan
  • Automation for deal stage, task, and lead rotation
  • Workflow extensions
  • Personalized video creation
  • Personalized quotes
  • Data organization (products, teams, currencies, etc.)
• Enterprise, starts from $1,200 a month
  • All features of the Professional plan
  • Automation playbooks
  • Call transcriptions
  • Predictive lead scoring
  • Calculated properties
  • Quote-based workflows
  • Electronic signature
  • Recurring revenue tracking and analytics
  • Team management features

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is probably the most popular solution in HubSpot’s arsenal and is essentially a suite of many different marketing tools covering various marketing channels from content marketing to lead generation/lead capture to email marketing, among others.

An important thing to note: HubSpot Marketing Hub’s starter plan used to cost $200+/month, but HubSpot has since adjusted the price to $50/month, exactly the same price as the Sales Hub’s Starter Plan.

Meaning, there’s simply no better time to invest in HubSpot Marketing if you like the package offered by the Starter plan, that mainly includes lead capture/generation and lead management features, such as:

• Ad management
• Live Chat & Chat Bot
• Opt-in forms
• List segmentation
• Track your prospect’s website activity
• Email marketing features
• Ad retargeting

As with HubSpot’s Sales Hub, however, the marketing automation features are locked behind the paywall of the Professional plan, which starts from $800/month (as mentioned, more expensive than the Sales Hub). It’s worth noting, however, that the Professional Plan used to cost a whopping $12,000+/month, so again, there’s no better time to invest in HubSpot Marketing.

The Marketing Hub can also assess the current “health” of your website—including and especially SEO performance—, a crucial aspect of any online brand, monitor social engagements, and interactions across many different platforms, tracks customer interaction, and so on, all in a single dashboard.

As with HubSpot Sales Hub, one of the key highlights here is HubSpot’s excellent third-party integration with various tools and solutions. Arguably this is even more important than in Sales Hub since, with the (arguably) richer features of the Marketing Hub, we can build a powerful ecosystem of marketing solutions with HubSpot Marketing as the foundation.

Pricing:

• Starter Plan: Starts at $50/month
  • Ad management
  • Email marketing features
  • Lead capture features
  • Live chat and Chat Bot
• Professional Plan: Starts at $800/month
  • Marketing automation
  • Smart content creation tools
  • SEO tools
  • A/B testing
  • Landing page & CTA builders
  • Video hosting and management tools
• Enterprise Plan: Starts at $3,200/month
  • Hierarchical team management features
  • Single sign in
  • Customizable sales funnels
  • Filtered analytics and views

Reasons To Look For HubSpot Alternatives

Above, we have discussed the three different solutions offered by Hubspot, and as we can see, all three (even the free CRM tool) are very reliable and easy to use. Both the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub offer really good sets of features, among the best available in the market today.

So, why do people look for HubSpot alternatives, despite all the good things it offers?

The thing is, HubSpot does have a major downside: it’s (very) expensive and most small and even medium-sized businesses simply can’t afford HubSpot.

Yes, HubSpot does offer fairly decent free tools and very affordable Starter plans for both the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub—for just $50/month—, but the most important features (sales and marketing automation features), are locked between the Professional plans ($500/month for Sales Hub and $800/month for the Marketing Hub).

The thing is, if we only want automation there are plenty of alternatives that are significantly more affordable. In fact, there are more affordable solutions for any features offered by HubSpot.

What made HubSpot really good as a solution is the whole package, but not all of us need all those features. If, for example, we only need sales automation, then we can look elsewhere for a more affordable HubSpot alternative.

It is, however, worth noting that HubSpot apparently understood this issue and has since adjusted its price significantly. The Marketing Professional plan, as mentioned above, used to cost more than $12,000/month.

To summarize, in general, there are two main reasons in looking for HubSpot alternatives:

• You are looking for a more affordable alternative according to your marketing needs and available budget
• You are looking for a different set of features (or just one or two specific features)

When reviewing all the different solutions in search of the best HubSpot alternatives below, these two factors will be our main considerations.

Best HubSpot Alternatives

As we have discussed, HubSpot is a brand with various solutions/software in its product line, from CRM to Marketing Hub to Service Hub and CMS.

Thus, when looking for these HubSpot alternatives, we won’t (or rather, can’t) look for a single product that can replace all of those solutions, but instead, we’ll focus on five different categories with four different HubSpot alternatives:

• Best of HubSpot CRM Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Sales Hub Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot All-In-One Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Alternatives on a Budget

Best of HubSpot CRM Alternatives

Winner: Salesforce Essentials

Salesforce Essentials is simply one of the most popular CRM platforms available today. In fact, on their website, Salesforce claimed that they are indeed the #1 CRM named by International Data Corporation (IDC).

First, we have to consider that HubSpot’s CRM is free, while Salesforce essentials will actually cost you $25/month. So the main question is whether the difference in price is justified as a HubSpot CRM alternative.

For instance, you get automation features with Salesforce Essentials, which you only get from HubSpot by spending at least $500/month. Another key highlight of why Salesforce’s solutions are so good is the mobile app (for both iOS and Android), that offers real-time data and custom reports. With Salesforce Essentials, you simply get everything offered by HubSpot CRM, and more.

With that being said, if you only need a CRM tool and don’t want to spend on marketing automation solutions or conversion optimization tools, Salesforce Essentials is probably your best possible investment.

As a side note, although we mainly recommend the Essentials plan, there are more premium plans offered by Salesforce CRM with extra sets of features. We listed them in the pricing section below.

Pricing:

• Essentials: $25/month/user (annual billing)
  • Emails and meetings tracking automation
  • Manage and track leads, accounts, and opportunities
  • Guided onboarding and setup
  • Support and integration across email, chat. Phone, and social channels
  • Customer self-service and automation to save time
• Professional: $75/month/user (annual billing)
  • Manage the entire sales cycle
  • Track sales leads, opportunities, and customer cases
  • Manage marketing campaigns, orders/opportunities, contracts
  • Real-time insights
  • Accurate sales forecasts
• Enterprise: $150/month/user (annual billing)
  • Automate business processes with workflow and automated approvals
  • Custom-tailored record type
  • Integrate with any system using Salesforce web services API
  • Manage complex sales territories
  • Check how sales deals have progressed with deal trending
• Unlimited: $300/month/user (annual billing)
  • Unlimited online training
  • Over 100 admin services
  • 24/7 toll-free support
  • Unlimited custom apps, custom objects, custom tabs
  • Sandboxes for development and testing

Runner-Up: PipeDrive Essential

PipeDrive is another popular CRM tool, and one of its key highlights is the fact that it’s more affordable than Salesforce, with the Essential plan only costs $12.50/month/user, half what Salesforce offers.

With its affordable price, PipeDrive offers a decent set of features, especially with its intuitive, easy to use interface. With PipeDrive, you can easily track your leads/prospects and monitor various metrics in one single interface, so you can have a clear overview of the sales funnel.

A really useful feature of PipeDrive is the fact that we can easily switch between modules, and turn these modules on and off according to your preferences and needs. With this, we can create a customized interface that can suit our exact needs.

Another reason to chose PipeDrive as your HubSpot CRM alternative is when your business serves international customers, as PipeDrive currently supports 13 currencies, so you can have an easier time analyzing revenue.

Pricing:

• Essential: $12.50/user/month (billed annually)
  • Customizable pipelines
  • Contact and org management
  • Deal management
  • Data import/export
  • Custom fields
  • Sales assist
  • Email inbox linked to contacts and deals
  • Sales and activity dashboard
• Advanced: $24.90/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Essential plan
  • Non-branded web forms
  • Contact Data enrichment
  • Real-time matching inboxes
  • Tracking Email Open rate and CTR
  • Custom user and admin permissions
  • Customizable email and task automation
• Professional: $49.90/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Advanced plan
  • One-click call and call tracking
  • Meeting scheduling (unlimited)
  • Email distribution list
  • Multiple customizable dashboards
  • Sales management app
  • Team management solutions
  • Revenue forecasting
• Enterprise: $99.00/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Professional plan
  • Dedicated account manager and customer service
  • Extra custom-tailored features to suit your business’s needs
  • Enhanced security to protect data and business revenue
  • Flexibility in team management and user permissions

Best of HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives

Winner: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing solution that is more geared towards email marketing, and one of its key highlights is the (very) affordable Lite plan, that starts from just $9/month—significantly more affordable than HubSpot.

If you are solely looking for an email marketing automation solution—which is the most common function people look for in a marketing software/hub—, ActiveCampaign is a very good and cost-efficient choice.

If you want email automation (together with CRM and sales automation), you can get it from the relatively affordable ActiveCampaign Plus plan, which starts from a mere $49/month (remember that we only get automation from HubSpot with $800/month). We also get a nice set of advanced features like lead scoring tools and Deep Data integrations.

All in all, we’d really recommend the ActiveCampaign Plus plan as a cost-efficient alternative for HubSpot marketing.

Pricing:

• Lite: starts from $9/month for 500 contacts
  • Basic email marketing features only
• Plus: starts from $49/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Lite plan
  • CRM and sales automation
  • Lead scoring
  • Deep Data Integrations
  • SMS marketing
  • 1 on 1 training
  • Up to 25 users
  • Custom branding and user permissions
  • Conditional content
• Professional: starts from $129/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Plus plan
  • Site messaging
  • Marketing attribution tool
  • Predictive sending and win probability features
  • Split automation
  • Up to 50 users
• Enterprise: starts from $229/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Professional plan
  • Advanced, custom reporting
  • Custom domain
  • In-depth onboarding
  • Free design services, free social data, phone support, dedicated account representative
  • Uptime SLA
  • Unlimited users

Runner-Up: Pardot

Pardot is a marketing software solution owned by Salesforce, which we have discussed above as our recommended alternative for HubSpot CRM. With the big name of Salesforce, we can obviously expect quality from Pardot, and indeed Pardot is a very powerful marketing suite and is a worthy alternative for HubSpot Marketing Hub.

The catch, however, is that Pardot is a very expensive solution—even more, expensive than HubSpot—, with its most ‘affordable’ plan starts from $1,250/month.

With the package of features offered, however, even the basic “Growth” plan of Pardot is a more powerful marketing suite than HubSpot Marketing’s Professional plan.

If you do have the budget, Pardot is definitely a worthy Hubspot marketing alternative, with a very intuitive interface/dashboard and advanced set of features.

Pricing:

• Growth: starts from $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts
  • Basic automation features
  • Basic lead capturing features
  • Basic lead scoring
  • Basic analytics for 100 SEO keywords and 10 competitors
  • Variable tags
  • Engagement features
  • 50 automation rules
  • Lead nurturing
  • Basic integrations
  • Basic data management
  • Basic marketing training and guides
  • Basic domain setup
• Plus: starts from $2,500/month for 10,000 contacts
  • All from the Growth plan
  • Multi-touch marketing attribution
  • Advanced automation with dynamic content and 100 automation rules
  • Advanced integrations
  • Advanced analytics for 250 SEO keywords and 25 competitors
  • Advanced lead scoring
  • Advanced marketing training and guides
• Advanced: starts from $4,0000/month for 10,000 contacts
  • All from the Plus plan
  • Advanced automation with 150 automation rules
  • AI-assisted analytics and lead scoring
  • Advanced analytics for 1,000 SEO keywords and 100 competitors
  • Advanced data management for 100K calls per day and 10GB file hosting

Best of HubSpot Sales Hub Alternatives

Winner: Ontraport

Ontraport is an all-in-one sales, marketing, and CRM suite that mainly focuses on email and drip marketing as a nurturing-conversion tool.

As a HubSpot sales alternative, Ontraport basically covers everything from email—as mentioned—, content creation (blog, video marketing, etc.), CRM database, landing page builder, social media scheduler, and of course, automation even with the basic plan.

One of the key highlights of Ontraport is its affordability—considering its rich features—, starting at ‘only’ $79/month for 1,000 contacts. With that price, you get several unique features not offered by HubSpot such as customizable metrics to suit your business completely.

Also, Ontraport offers a very flexible block-based visual editor, that you can easily navigate to build landing pages, opt-in forms, and email newsletter—so you don’t have to switch between different builders each time.

A very versatile, highly customizable alternative for HubSpot Sales Hub that is also cost-efficient.

Pricing:

• Basic: $79/month
  • 1,000 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 1 user
• Plus: $147/month
  • 2,500 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 2 users
• Pro: $297/month
  • Free account setup
  • 10,000 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 3 users
• Enterprise: $498/month
  • Free account setup
  • Dedicated account manager
  • 20,000+ contacts
  • 200,000 emails/months
  • 5 users

Runner-Up: Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

Infusionsoft is known as one of the oldest marketing automation platform available, and back in the mid-2010s or so was highly regarded as the best solution available—much like HubSpot today—. Infusionsoft has since changed rebranded itself into Keap, but the name Infusionsoft is still retained as its premium plan’s name (see at the pricing section below).

With that being said, one of Keap’s key highlights is its very reliable, integrated CMS system, and while being (slightly) more expensive than Ontraport, still very affordable compared to HubSpot marketing. You get access to marketing automation features and the ability to track recurring revenue— a rare feature in this price range—, for just $149/month (as of today, November 2019, there’s an ongoing special offer by Keap so this Pro plan will only cost you $44/month. Affiliate )

Very intuitive, easy-to-use (although a little obsolete) interface, but quite robust in functionalities with different sections in its interface (CRM, eCommerce Marketing, Admin, Pipeline, etc.)

Pipeline is Keap’s lead management tool that helps users manage deals and opportunities in a single dashboard, much like what HubSpot offers, and there’s also a lead scoring/lead management tool called Lead Scores that is highly customizable according to your needs.

A well-rounded platform, slightly more expensive than Ontraport but well-worth the price.

Pricing: (all plans for 500 contacts and 1 user)

• Grow: $49/month
  • CRM
  • Segmentation
  • Tracking and managing appointments
  • Phone line and text messaging for US iPhone
  • Manage quotes, invoices, and payments
  • Data migration
• Pro: $149/month
  • All features from the Grow plan
  • Marketing Automation
  • Recurring payment tracking
  • Landing page builder
  • Sales Pipeline automation
  • Smart forms, internal forms
• Infusionsoft: $199/month
  • All features from the Pro plan
  • Lead scoring tool
  • Company records storing and tracking
  • Analytics and reporting

Best of HubSpot All-In-One Alternatives

Winner: Aritic PinPoint

Aritic PinPoint is a really well-rounded marketing solution offering features that are on par with what’s offered by HubSpot Marketing Hub but with a significantly more affordable price tag.

For instance, with the most affordable Lite plan starting at ‘just’ $59/month, we already get marketing automation—which will cost you at least $800/month from HubSpot Marketing—. Aritic PinPoint offers automation tools not only for email marketing, but also for social media posts, SMS, and push notifications, among others. All of them are useful in the different stages of marketing and sales funnels.

In the analytics and lead scoring aspects, Aritic PinPoint is also pretty decent, and can effectively track your lead profiling and lead behavior—paired with multi-channel, cross-channel, and omnichannel campaign— to nurture these leads.

PinPoint also offers unique features not offered by HubSpot like in-app messaging, double opt-in customization, live workflow view, video campaign manager, helpdesk, native integration for SMS campaign, and so on.

It doesn’t offer as many third-party integrations as HubSpot, but is more cost-efficient across all plans. A worthy contender, and one of the best HubSpot alternatives available today.

Pricing:

• Lite: $59/month
  • Marketing automation
  • Deal-based CRM
  • Sales Pipeline
  • 10x Free emails per contact
  • Push Notification Campaign
  • Lead Capture Forms
  • List Segmentation
  • Lead Scoring
  • Manage Email Campaigns
  • Send Newsletter
  • On-page Widgets
  • Responsive Landing Pages
  • Website tracking
  • Integrations
  • 1 Free User
• Starter: $219/month
  • All features from Lite
  • Multi-channel Drips
  • SMS campaigns (Powered by Twilio)d
  • Engagement scoring
  • 1 on 1 SMS (Powered by Twilio)
  • Social Monitoring
  • Contact Marketing Stages
  • Marketing Messages
  • Read Mailbox
  • Lead source Analytics
  • Advanced Email Analytics
  • Facebook Custom Audience Sync
  • Lead Enrichment Integration
  • Marketing Asset Management
  • 2 Users Free
• Professional: $249/month
  • Marketing Messages
  • Progressive Profiling
  • Dynamic Content
  • Tasks & reminders
  • Dynamic Email Campaigns
  • Facebook Lead Ads Integration
  • Twitter Lead Ads Integration
  • Advance Campaign Analytics
  • Team Management
  • Kiosk Mode
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Custom dashboard
  • Custom reports
  • Chat support during office hour
  • 5 Users Free
• Enterprise: custom-tailored plan, call for pricing

Best of HubSpot Affordable Alternatives

Winner: SendinBlue

SendinBlue is more popularly known as an affordable but powerful email marketing tool, but in recent years has expanded its software as not only a full-fledged marketing automation solution but also a proper CRM and sales software.

One of the key highlights of SendinBlue is—quite obviously—, its affordability, with the automation features and all of its advanced features like chatbot functionalities and landing page builder tools are available for just $66/month. Keep in mind, that with HubSpot we only get automation with its Professional plan, starting from a whopping $800/month or $500/month for the HubSpot Sales.

Sendinblue—as mentioned—, originated from a conversion-focused email marketing tool, so you will find a lot of useful features geared towards transaction-based emails like various autoresponders and eCommerce email templates.

Overall, very easy to use although the interface looks a little bit outdated by today’s standard. There are also various third-party integrations and plugins that can enable Sendinblue to work with popular platforms like WordPress or Optinmonster

Pricing:

• Free: 300 emails/day, unlimited contacts
• Lite: $25/month
  • 40,000 emails/month
  • No daily sending limit
• Essential: $39/month
  • All features from Lite
  • 60,000 emails/month
  • Remove Sendinblue logo/brand
  • Advanced statistics
• Premium: $66/month
  • All features from Essential
  • 120,000 emails/month ($173/month for 350,000 emails/month)
  • Facebook ads management
  • Landing page builder
  • Management automation
  • Chatbot
  • Multi-user access
• Enterprise: Contact for price, custom-tailored according to your needs

How We Made Our Choices

Above, we have discussed how we reviewed and test HubSpot alternatives based on 5 different categories:

• 1. Alternatives for HubSpot CRM
  2. Alternatives for HubSpot Marketing Hub
  3. Alternatives for HubSpot Sales Hub
  4. Best all-around HubSpot alternative (that covers CRM, sales and marketing features)
  5. Best HubSpot alternative in a budget

For each category, we’ve reviewed all the different tools, solutions, and software using different criteria according to the purpose/function of the category. Below, we will discuss them one by one.

Choosing HubSpot CRM alternatives

There are several key considerations in choosing the best CRM tools to replace the free HubSpot CRM tool:

• Affordability: Since HubSpot CRM is already a free tool, we only consider alternatives that are also free, or at least very affordable—affordable being less than $50 per month.
• Value: For paid but affordable solutions, the tools must provide at least a slightly better set of features than the free HubSpot CRM. If it’s a free tool, then the offered features must be comparable to HubSpot.
• Unique Proposition: Whether the software/solution offers a unique feature not offered by HubSpot CRM.

Choosing HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives

HubSpot Marketing Hub is certainly one of the best marketing automation software available in the market today. It doesn’t really offer truly unique functions or features not available anywhere else, but there are three main highlights of HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• The intuitive interface that is very easy to use
• Reliable and easy to setup marketing automation features
• Well-designed analytics and reports that you can monitor in one single dashboard

With those point being said, here are our main criteria in choosing the best alternatives for HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• Marketing Automation: one of the major downsides of Hubspot Marketing Hub is that the marketing automation solutions are only available on the Professional plan or above. Meaning, it’s locked behind a $800/month paywall. We’re looking for alternatives that can provide a comparable automation features at a lower price.
• Affordability vs Price: Hubspot Marketing is certainly one of the easiest to use marketing hubs available in the market with its intuitive dashboard where we can see everything in one place, but it’s also one of the most expensive. We’re looking for solutions that can fight toe to toe—feature-wise— while being more affordable, or tools that are simply better in terms of functionality.
• Unique Features: Even with all the good things surrounding HubSpot marketing, it’s certainly not a perfect product with rooms for improvement. We are looking for solutions that simply provide unique value propositions outside what HubSpot currently offers.

Choosing HubSpot Sales Hub alternatives

While arguably HubSpot Sales Hub isn’t as popular as the Marketing Hub or the free CRM tool, it’s still a popular conversion-optimization tool especially due to its intuitive interface, great third-party integrations with popular software—as expected from HubSpot ecosystem—, and its rich set of features and analytics reporting we can access from just one, intuitive dashboard.

With that being said, here are our main concerns in looking for the best alternative for HubSpot Sales Hub:

• Affordability VS Value:  although the HubSpot Sales Hub is (significantly) more affordable than the Marketing Hub, it’s still quite expensive compared to many similar solutions. We are looking for tools that can provide similar features as HubSpot Sales Hub while offering ing a more affordable plan.
• Integration: a sales conversion tool typically can’t perform on its own and will need to integrate at least with a CRM and a marketing platform. Third-party integrations will be one of our main considerations here.
• Unique Features: arguably the Sales Hub is the least unique compared to HubSpot Marketing Hub. We are looking for solutions that provide a more complete set of features, or really unique and valuable conversion optimization tool.

For the last two categories: Best All-In-One Hubspot Alternative, and Best Affordable HubSpot Alternative, our criteria are fairly straightforward:

For All-In-One HubSpot Alternative, we are looking for a solution that can be a direct replacement to the whole HubSpot ecosystem (CRM+Marketing+Sales Hubs) feature/function-wise— while considering cost-efficiency.

For the Affordable HubSpot Alternative, our main concern is obviously affordability, but the solution(s) must also provide a valuable set of features, at least comparable to HubSpot’s starter plans.

End Words

Let’s be honest, all of the HubSpot alternatives we have discussed above—and even HubSpot itself, are all really good platforms offering their own unique values and amazing sets of features.

In most cases, the best approach to look for marketing, CRM, or sales solution (or all of them in a single agency management software like Function Point) is to first figure out the needs of your organization, speak to a digital marketing consultant or SEO expert and pick the most cost-efficient option that provides the features you currently need.

The post 8 Best Hubspot Alternatives You Should Switch To appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, email marketing is also a highly competitive field. The average person can receive hundreds of emails in a single day, so a proper execution is necessary to capture your audience’s attention.

Fortunately, there are various email marketing tools that can help you in planning, executing, and automating your email marketing, where you’ll need all the advantages you can get.

Yet, with all the different options available, it can be confusing to choose the right email marketing tool with the right price and the features you actually need.

With that being said, here are our recommendations for  5 of the best email marketing tools, a brief overview about the, and their pros and cons.

Top 5 Email Marketing Tools

1. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the oldest email marketing tools ever invented, and is still the industry leader even with the arrival of newer competitors with new technologies.

One of the key reasons for that, is the fact that Mailchimp was one of the very first user-friendly email scheduler, offering various templates and a visual builder to build your email with a drag and drop approach.

So, the key highlight of MailChimp is its ease of use. However, Mailchimp also offers a fairly well-rounded set of features to cover all your email marketing needs.

Also, MailChimp offers great integration with hundreds of software and applications, from popular ones like WordPress, WordPress alternatives and niche CMSs. It’s very easy to integrate MailChimp with your existing environment.

Pros:

• Very easy to use template editor
• Generous free plan allowing 10,000 emails and 2,000 subscribers
• Great third-party integration with hundreds of platforms
• Great reporting functions
• Great lead capture features
• A/B testing

Cons:

• Hard to program automation compared to its competitors
• Strict policy prohibiting affiliate marketing

Pricing: A free version, enough for basic email marketing needs. The cheapest Essentials plan is $9.99/month, and the Premium plan is $299 per month

You can also check Mailchimp alternatives.

2. ActiveCampaign Lite

ActiveCampaign is a full-fledged digital marketing tools suite, offering various sales and marketing automation tools.

ActiveCampaign Lite, however, is solely focused on email marketing, with various features like setting up autoresponder, analytics report, great user segmentation features, and many more.

A key advantage of the ActiveCampaign Lite, however, is the ability to send unlimited number of emails with a very competitive price, at just $9/month, you even get quite advanced automation features in its basic plan.

You might also want to consider subscribing for ActiveCampaign’s full Enterprise plan, which offers some of the best digital marketing tools available today.

Pros:

• Cost-effective as a well-rounded sales and marketing automation tools suite
• The Lite plan, focused on email marketing only, is also very affordable where you get unlimited number of emails sent for just $9/month
• Great, easy to use personalization features

Cons:

• Fairly obsolete user interface compared to newer competitors
• Slow customer service

Pricing: Lite version for email marketing is $9/month (unlimited emails), Enterprise plan is $229/month. No free plan available.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is quite similar to MailChimp in many different ways, but mainly because it also offers an easy to use visual builder with a drag and drop approach.

However, Campaign Monitor offers better email automation features, with a more user-friendly email automation workflow and more advanced automation features.

On the other hand, Campaign Monitor is slightly lacking in its lead capturing features. Again, especially when compared to MailChimp.

Pros:

• Cost-effective, slightly more affordable than MailChimp with all of the offered plans
• Easy to use, user-friendly visual builder
• Great and easy to use automated campaign builder
• Great reporting and analytics tools, you can easily evaluate your campaign and develop your strategy

Cons:

• No free plan offered, the $9/month plan is comparable to MailChimp’s free plan with slightly more features
• Pretty steep learning curve for the advanced functions, although initially easy to use

Pricing: The most affordable plan is $9/month, and the most expensive plan is $149/month. You also have the option to pay per campaign or a custom plan based on your needs.

4. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing tool focused on ecommerce, offering several unique features that are useful for ecommerce-specific needs. For example, the feature to do recipient analytics, opt-in forms designers, and landing page builder, among others.

ConvertKit probably offers the richest feature set among the other tools in this list, especially focused on conversion (hence the name ConvertKit). A well-rounded tool for any email marketing needs, even when you are not planning to do ecommerce.

However, it’s quite expensive with its subscriber-based pricing model. If you do have the budget, ConvertKit is a very good choice especially if you want to boost your conversion.

Pros:

• Great set of features, especially for conversion-focused features designed for ecommerce needs
• Easy to use marketing automation features
• Intuitive user interface with great visual builder
• Advanced marketing automation features
• Website builder as an extra feature

Cons:

• The cheapest plan is relatively expensive, and limited to 1,000 subscribers
• Steep learning curve with a very deep, advanced features
• Not many templates

Pricing: Starts from $29/month (1,000 subscribers), the most expensive plan is $79/month (5,000 subscribers), custom plan available, no free plan.

5. Mailjet

Similar to MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, Mailjet is an email marketing software that especially focuses on simplicity and intuitiveness with its drag-and-drop email builder.

Mailjet does offer relatively basic email automation but is sufficient for most email marketers. However, there are two interesting selling points that might make Mailjet the best choice for you: just like MailChimp, the free plan is fairly useful. Second, it’s very easy to integrate an SMTP server with Mailjet.

SMTP can be useful if you want to improve the speed of email delivery, so it’s a valuable feature to have if you are going to implement time-sensitive email campaigns (i.e. limited offer).

Pros:

• Easy, reliable SMTP server
• Very easy to use, intuitive builder
• Free basic version, sufficient for basic email marketing
• The paid plan is also affordable at just $8.69/month
• Can integrate sign-up forms within the email

Cons:

• Customer service not very responsive
• Basic overall features compared to others in this list

Pricing: free version available, the most affordable plan is $8.69 per month, and the premium plan is $18.6/month.

5. Respona

Respona is a powerful email marketing and outreach tool designed to streamline your communications and improve your overall marketing strategy.

Originally built for link builders, Respona has evolved into an all-in-one email marketing platform that combines user-friendly features with advanced automation and data-driven insights.

Respona stands out due to its integration of data credits, which allow you to enrich your email campaigns with up-to-date contact information and AI personalization.

With a robust set of features that cover email marketing, lead generation, and automated workflows, Respona is a versatile tool for businesses of all sizes, from in-house teams to large enterprises.

Pros:

• Comprehensive set of email marketing and outreach features
• Data credit system for finding and verifying contact information
• Unlimited email sends, campaigns, and users for unrestrained marketing efforts
• Priority support and strategic sessions in higher plans
• Enhanced security and dedicated success manager for enterprise needs
• Easy-to-use interface with advanced automation capabilities

Cons:

• Higher price point compared to some competitors
• Significant learning curve for teams new to advanced email marketing tools
• Lacks a free tier beyond the 14-day free trial for more extensive hands-on experience

Pricing:

• Pro: $399/month. Includes 5 email accounts, 300,000 data credits/year, unlimited emails sent, unlimited campaigns, unlimited users, and 50k active contacts.
• Unlimited: $799/month. Offers everything in Pro, plus unlimited email accounts, 600,000 data credits/year, white-glove onboarding, three strategy sessions, priority support, and 100k active contacts.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes everything in Unlimited, plus enhanced security, a dedicated success manager, advanced permissions, and a service level agreement (SLA).

Conclusion

Each of the 5 email marketing tools we have discussed above offers their own unique selling points, and each has their disadvantages.

It’s important to first figure out your email marketing goals, and choose the right tool that can help you in achieving that goal(s), according to your needs and budget.

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