Today, in this blog post, I am going to present you the best email marketing platforms for eCommerce.

One of the smartest things to do as an eCommerce store owner is to invest in an email marketing platform.

Despite some declarations of its death, email marketing has continued to gain phenomenal results for businesses.

However, with so many email marketing tools in the market, choosing one is overwhelming. Keeping track of the multiple platforms and email marketing strategies is an uphill battle.

You don’t have to spend your time comparing different eCommerce email marketing solutions, as we’ve done the research for you.

What to Look for in a Good eCommerce Email Marketing Tool?

Most email platforms have similar basic features. That’s why it can be difficult to get one that best suits your needs.

But what makes one email marketing tool better than the other for an eCommerce platform?

  1. A good tool has to easily integrate with your eCommerce platform. Whether you use Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce, you need a platform that has seamless yet in-depth integration with it.
  2. Awesome audience segmentation features that will enable you to send personalized emails to your audience. Targeted emails that are customized based on your contacts’ interests or action on your site.
  3. It should have smart automation features. This way, you can scale your email marketing efforts in a breeze. You get to create automation workflows that will send emails out without your constant monitoring.
  4. A great platform allows you to create opt-in forms to be embedded in your eCommerce store. This makes it possible to continuously capture leads for your business.
  5. One with either pre-built templates or easy to use drag-and-drop feature that allows you to create email templates that suit your needs. You should be able to customize your email templates and even make shoppable posts.
  6. In-depth reports and analytics feature. You need to know whether your email marketing efforts are bearing fruits. Detailed analytics let you know the areas you need to improve on so you can maximize your ROI.

Top 5 Email Marketing Platforms for eCommerce

Drip

Drip email and eCommerce marketing platform logo

When it comes to email marketing with an outstanding eCommerce CRM, Drip stands out (review).

More so, it does this with a simplified user interface. Just like its name ‘Drip,’ they focus on the creation and execution of automated (drip) emails whenever certain conditions are met.

It is one of the best tools in the market optimized for lead gen and conversion. You’ll get signup forms for direct lead capturing from your website, then nurture these leads using the automated emails and increase your conversion rate.

Drip segmentation

In addition, Drip has a powerful audience segmentation feature. As a result, you can group your subscribers into segments and tags creating more personalized lists used to send targeted emails.

Drip segmentation feature

Honestly, it packs a punch when it comes to their intelligent segmentation system.

You can segment them according to the customer’s lifetime value or events like purchases made, abandoned cart, returned products, pages visited on your store, and so many more. And you get the option to add tags manually or on your automation workflows.

Drip integrates well with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, among other eCommerce platforms. You’ll be able to track every visitor on your site equipping you with valuable eCommerce metrics related to customer buying behavior.

Basically, you get A1 site tracking of all activities in your store, even the product shipping details so you get to emails that engage each customer on a personal level.

Drip  workflow builder

They have a visual workflow builder that makes them stand out from the pack. It is as easy-to-use as the ConvertKit visual builder but with the raw power and functionality of ActiveCampaign. Of course, it doesn’t have the glitch associated with the ActiveCampaign builder.

You can easily create complex or simple workflows with their drag-and-drop builder. It allows you to see a graphical representation of your workflow. As a result, managing bulk email campaigns is no issue.

Drip lead nurturing workflow

You will comfortably nurture leads and upsell to existing customers as you can see everyone’s position on your sales funnel.

What’s more, you have detailed analytics that shows you exactly how much revenue was generated from every email campaign thanks to the revenue attribution feature.

With the personalization feature, powerful segmentation, robust visual builder, and seamless integration with multiple eCommerce platforms, it is ideal for online stores.

Pricing

For 100 subscribers, you pay $1. Well, this is meant to be their free plan so it costs you just a dollar.

Drip pricing

They have 3 price tiers. Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. The basic starts at $19 for 500 people and $49 for 2500 subscribers.

They also offer a 14-days free trial with all their paid plans and you get 24/7 live chat and email support. Plus just the other day they added SMS service to all their plans so you get both email and SMS.

Bottomline: Any eCommerce that wants to push their email campaigns to the next level using intelligent segmentation and smart automation should go for Drip. You get all the advanced features in a pretty easy-to-use interface.

Akshay recommends: MailChimp vs Drip: An In-Depth Email Marketing Showdown

ActiveCampaign

Just like Drip, ActiveCampaign is a CRM with email marketing capabilities. You use ActiveCampaign if you want something fancier that combines our email marketing, sales, and CRM.

With ActiveCampaign, you are guaranteed of creating hyper-targeted campaigns as all the functions are focused on automation via logic-based funnels.

Right from the moment your contacts land on your page, you start to engage them based on their behavior.

ActiveCampaign seamlessly integrates well with most eCommerce platforms including Shopify and WooCommerce.

ActiveCampaign and WordPress integration

In addition, it integrates with WordPress so you can track every single action your customers take on your site. This way you get to follow them all through your different conversion stages.

And while most email marketing platforms focus on engagement, ActiveCampaign focuses on closing your deals faster.

With eCommerce integration, you get to add new customers to your ActiveCampaign list, filter your orders, contact abandoned carts, and even notify orders of their product status.

Take segmentation, for instance, you get to segment and tag your contacts based on their interests, actions, and demographics. From their location to actions taken, social data, and behaviors.

ActiveCampaign lead scoring

This way, you are able to pay special attention to the most promising contacts. Their smart scoring system helps you qualify contacts increasing your conversion rate.

And guess what? It’s not only the emails, they supplement them with SMS so you can reach your contacts on the go.

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Also, you get detailed reports and awesome geo-tracking, website tracking, and track link actions. So you can optimize your marketing efforts to get the best results.

But, the only problem with AciveCampaign is that it’s not as easy to learn as Drip. The UI is so loaded that you can’t see everything at a glance and it’s a bit glitchy. So be ready for a steep learning curve.

One good thing they have is an extensive knowledge base. The phone and live chat aren’t 24/7 like on Drip but they are responsive. You won’t have any problem with support as you even have 2 active Facebook groups.

Pricing

If you have used GetResponse then they have a familiar pricing plan. They both adjust their prices as per your list size and features.

And you have a 14-days free trial for their pricing plans. The Lite price starts at $15 a month for 500 subscribers.

ActiveCampaign pricing

The Plus starts at $70/month for 1000 subscribers & Professional starts at $159/month. For the Enterprise, give them a call. Also, if you sign up for their annual billing, you get 20% off monthly.

Another good thing they offer is free migration services from whatever email platform you are migrating from.

Bottomline: If you are an experienced marketer running and eCommerce, then ActiveCampaign is ideal for you. Its sales automation features and smart triggers make it one of the most holistic and powerful CRM and email marketing platforms for your eCommerce.

Akshay recommends:
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Omnisend

If you’ve been looking for the best omnichannel marketing platform for your eCommerce store, Omnisend is heaven-sent.

Any eCommerce that’s serious about their growth and scaling their business should seriously consider Omnisend.

It was built for the sole purpose of helping eCommerce stores achieve their goals.

Omnisend email editor

They aren’t limited to email marketing alone but they combine SMS, web push notification, Facebook ads retargeting, and Google customer match. Basically, you are engaging customers from as many fronts as possible.

Lead generation forms

To top it off, all channels let you create hyper-targeted campaigns. Lead capturing is great as you get pop-ups and signup forms for your website. So you get to target your exact customer and send them personalized content at the right time.

Sophisticated automation, check! Intelligent segmentation, check! Omnichannel, double-check!

It will seamlessly integrate with all the major eCommerce platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, among others. And with all these, you get cookieless tracking, cross channel, and cross-device revenue attribution.

You’ll know who visited a page, made a purchase, abandoned cart, shipping details, and you get to engage all these types of different contacts.

Omnisend analytics

If you want to know the performance of your campaigns, they have you covered. You are guaranteed in-depth monitoring and analytics across all your marketing channels so you can always maximize your ROI.

Also, creating emails and newsletter is easy peasy. The drag and drop editor makes it easy to customize the templates and create shoppable emails.

Oh! We can’t forget their campaign booster that automatically re-sends unopened emails to your contacts. This ensures that they get super helpful deals.

Omnisend has pretty decent customer support. Their live chat is 24/7 and you have numerous articles, guides, webinars, etc. You can also reach them by email and you don’t have to worry about waiting hours on end for a reply.

Pricing

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What I love about Omnisend is that they have a free plan. It costs you zero to send up to 15000 emails a month. And it comes with all the important email marketing features, signup forms, and reports.

They have 3 pricing plans Standard, Pro, and Enterprise.

Bottomline: Any eCommerce store owner interested in an all-in-one multi-channel solution especially if they need to launch large-scale email campaigns should go for Omnisend. Well, the multiple channels can be pricey so stay away if you’re on a budget.

Klaviyo

When it comes to Shopify integration, Klaviyo (review) is king.

It was developed specifically for eCommerce from the ground up. It has deep integration with Shopify making email marketing more effective.

Klaviyo advanced segmentation

It makes your email marketing process a mix of advanced segmentation, automation, efficient popups, and so many more features.

Integrate it with your online store and you’ll be able to track every single action your contacts take on your site. As a result, you are able to send relevant products to your email subscribers.

It gets too deep that you can even see who viewed a specific page or asked anything about a product from support. Basically, you get real-time tracking and website tracking.

klaviyo abandoned cart workflow

With this amount of data you can even send product recommendations, abandoned cart messages, Facebook retarget ads, down to order details.

Also, Klaviyo is one heck of a star in email automation. If you don’t know how to create an email sequence, worry not, they have you covered.

They have a Flow Library that is packed with ready-to-use workflows to lead your customer down your sales funnel. Drip and Omnisend can actually come in as Klaviyo alternatives.

Klaviyo reporting and analytics

And you get detailed analytics and reports. Data is really important in measuring the performance of your campaigns. They give you all the important metrics to analyze your campaign performance and know the best performing products.

However, you need to be prepared for the steep learning curve. And the good news is that you have a huge resource library with helpful information. Training, guides, webinars, you name it, they have it. They also have live chat, email, and phone support. It’s not 24/7 but they are super responsive.

Pricing

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Klaviyo doesn’t come cheap. But I have to say to you it is worth every penny.

The good thing is that they have a free plan for 250 subscribers for up to 500 emails. Their plan starts at $25/month.

Bottomline: Klaviyo is perfect for eCommerce store owners especially those who run Shopify stores. You get better automation, segmentation, and customization of emails.

Akshay recommends:
Klaviyo vs MailChimp – Which is Best for eCommerce Automation?

Privy

With Privy, you get two online engagement levels.

The first mode of engagement is by using displays like banners and popups. They help you grow your email list and reduce abandoned carts.

The second mode of engagement through email marketing. With these two combined, you have a conversion and sales-driving powerhouse.

You can easily create targeted and highly customized emails using their targeting and triggers feature.

Privy lead capture forms

You can create rules to target selected visitors with multiple email and display campaigns. You can segment your audience based on the time they spend on your store and send targeted displays.

This way you get to know and capture warm leads as visitors scroll through your site.

Also, you can start an exit-intent campaign just before visitors leave your page. So you get to reduce your bounce rate by reaching out to abandoned carts.

Privy won’t give you advanced automation like Drip, Klaviyo, or ActiveCampaign would.

Privy automation workflow

But you can create automation workflows with their easy to use drag and drop editor. You can also segment your contacts using automation.

It also integrates with all major eCommerce platforms from Shopify to BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, among others.

Customer support on Privy is only available during business hours but it is responsive and fast. Plus there is a rich knowledge base for you to dive into.

Pricing

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They surprised me that they have a forever free plan. The only catch is you only get to send up to 3000 autoresponder emails a month. No advanced targeting either. But, you can create display campaigns.

That said, they have paid up plans. The Plus, Commerce, and Growth plans.

Bottomline: Privy is mainly used by marketers and marketing agencies but small businesses can also use it to boost sales. However, large enterprises might not find Privy advanced enough for them.

Conclusion

There you go, you have our top email marketing platform for your eCommerce.

They all focus on optimizing online store conversions and boosting sales tenfold. Yes, they are a gold mine. Solid frameworks used to immediately engage your audience as soon as they visit your page. And they strategically deliver the relevant message at the right time to the right audience.

A quick recap, use:

  • Drip if you need an easy to use interface with advanced segmentation, automation, and eCommerce functionality.
  • ActiveCampaign if you need an all-in-one CRM backed with advanced email marketing features to boost your eCommerce conversions. Also, it’s great if you don’t mind the learning curve.
  • Omnisend if you are looking for an omnichannel marketing platform for your online store. With Omnisend you get SMS, web push notifications, email marketing, and Facebook ads.
  • Klaviyo if you have a Shopify store and you need to grow and scale your business. You will get more than enough data with Klaviyo to help you create hyper-targeted emails and optimize your campaigns.
  • Privy if you are big on display campaigns and you don’t mind so much about advanced automation, Privy is the best tool for you.

So, what are you going to choose?