Firstly, if you’re open to trying something new, here is a full review of the inbuilt Rainmail system, with all the good and bad.
AWeber
AWeber is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.
While AWeber is a bit outdated in some ways compared to newer competitors, it is a long standing industry leader, very easy to get started, and it connects seamlessly with countless platforms including WordPress and Rainmaker.
You’ll get access to ready-to-use email design templates, list management, autoresponders, and email tracking with detailed insights.
Support options include good live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.
AWeber offers a 30 day free trial. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month.
Downsides: Because of AWeber’s list-based paradigm (rather than newer tag-based email providers) what you know about a subscriber on list A is isolated from what you know about that same customer on list B – and you’ll even pay twice, for the same customer!
Read a full in-depth review here.
Mailchimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers. They offer a very easy to use interface with great tools and awesome support.
Great especially for ecommerce sites, it integrates beautifully with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms.
MailChimp also comes with an easy visual email creator, merge tags, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking and analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on user’s timezones and setup segmenting based on geolocation.
Support is offered by email, live chat, and a huge knowledgebase with how-tos, videos, and tutorials.
MailChimp offers a forever free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers (which allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month). Their paid plans start from $10/month.
Downsides: Like AWeber, MailChimp’s archaic 1-list-to-rule-them-all structure makes it difficult (downright cumbersome) to offer multiple lead magnets/opt-in incentives to potential subscribers on the same list. Yes, you can create more than one list if you adamantly want to. Just know that it may prove cumbersome to have to set up subscription emails, landing page URLs and forms all-over, for each new list.
Read a full in-depth review here.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform tailored specifically for professional bloggers, authors, and podcasters. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful – consistently compared to InfusionSoft in its capabilities, but rated miles ahead of Infusion, ActiveCampaign, and even Mailchimp in usability and ease-of-use.
ConvertKit allows you to easily offer “content upgrades” (opt-in bribes) and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy-to-manage autoresponder series allowing you to send drip emails.
With ConvertKit, you can easily segment contacts into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This is great for marketing automation.
ConvertKit offers email based support and have an extensive knowledgebase with great learning material.
Pricing for ConvertKit plans starts from $29/month with a 30-day refund policy.
Downsides: Not ideal if you want fancy email templates (best for plain-text emails)
Read a full in-depth review here.
Active Campaign
Like InfusionSoft, ActiveCampaign combines email marketing with CRM and sales automation. It comes with all the tools you will need to create smarter email marketing campaigns.
ActiveCampaign comes with a beautiful email template editor and mobile friendly signup forms. It allows you to segment contacts based on their actions, location, behavior, and social data. It can also fetch additional data about your contacts using only their email address.
It integrates beautifully with many third party software including WordPress. You can also send SMS messages to your contacts for follow up on campaigns.
ActiveCampaign’s plans with CRM start from $49/month. You can also request a demo with limited features for a test run.
Although the pricing on ActiveCampaign gets quite high, it’s far more affordable than InfusionSoft totally worth the money if marketing automation is what you’re looking for. ActiveCampaign is a lot closer than ConvertKit to Infusionsoft’s feature-set and flexibility. But again: the flexibility comes at a cost: complexity.