Did you know that email marketing via newsletter platforms provides a Return on Investment (ROI) of approximately 144%? Such high ROI is almost impossible to achieve through other marketing campaigns. Needless to say, you need to tap into this to increase your business’s reach urgently.
Based on my personal experience, email marketing does lead to substantial benefits. While I will never suggest you only rely on this, it is an excellent supplement to your marketing campaign.
Before starting, I strongly suggest you evaluate the email newsletter tool you should use to find the best one. I have tested several platforms, so you don’t have to. Here’s a list of some of the best.
Beehiiv is a platform entirely focused on newsletters. Everything they do and build is for improving the newsletter functionality.
Substack started just like Beehiiv, fully focused on newsletters, but now they’re branching out and for the better.
MailerLite is an interesting email marketing tool, it’s much more than just for sending newsletters.
What are newsletters?
Newsletters are regular email updates sent to subscribers through an email marketing platform.
A newsletter for any business aims to offer relevant content, news, and information on various topics about products or services you offer. They keep your readers updated, build relationships, and share ideas.
If you are hosting an event or putting something up on sale, how will you tell everyone about it? Before the internet age, you would ideally post an ad or publish a press release.
While the idea of reaching your audience with updates remains the same, it is much easier to do now. You can reach your entire audience with one mouse click using newsletter platforms.
Newsletters are responsible for keeping your subscribers updated with relevant information. I often use my newsletter to create awareness about specific podcast episodes and blog posts and share some exciting news, offers or collaborations.
Having said that, newsletters are a way to keep in touch and motivate potential customers to purchase or check out your newest blog post.
Newsletters, therefore, can be easily said as the ‘life force’ of an email marketing campaign.
However, be careful: If you start sending out emails every day, you might lose your subscribers. It’s extremely important you keep the business newsletter content relevant and exciting for the receiver.
Be consistent: It’s all about being consistent. If you start sending out newsletters, you can’t just stop or take a break for one week. You have to keep up your promise to your subscribers and users.
I recommend writing how often subscribers can expect your newsletter on your sign-up form. This way, your subscriber will know precisely what they are getting. It will also serve as a promise for yourself.
In this article, I have rounded up the best email newsletter platforms for you to pick the right tool for your email marketing.
Top 11 newsletter platforms
While you can send emails through Gmail or Outlook, these do not provide desired features for running a marketing campaign. These email providers are severely limited regarding supported file types and editing capabilities. Due to this reason, you should use a newsletter advertising platform.
I’ve compared the 5 best online newsletter advertising platforms on 12 parameters so you can quickly review them individually and find the platform that suits your needs.
| Beehiiv | Substack | Mailerlite | Encharge | Mailchimp | Ghost | ConvertKit | Mailmodo | Aweber | ActiveCampaign | Constant Contact | |
| Free Plan | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |||||
| Analytics and Reporting |
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| Automation builder | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |
| Paid Newsletter Subscription |
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| Ecommerce Integrations | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | ||
| Drag and drop newsletter editor | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |
| Sign-up Forms | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Landing Page builder | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |
| A/B Testing | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |
| Mobile App | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |||||
| Segmentation | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Email Templates | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ |
Beehiiv: Best for growing your newsletter
Beehiiv is an all-in-one online newsletter platform offering world-class growth tools to help creators scale their audience, monetize their content, and collect audience data. Beehiiv is simple and has features you will love as a beginner and professional writer.
The newsletter advertising platform includes advanced customization, superior analytics, optimized deliverability, audience polls, advanced segmentation, subscribe forms, custom fields, flexible text editor, custom domains, and multiple team member support.
It provides a simple solution to manage and grow your newsletter without paying for various tools separately.
Beehiiv offers a free plan with 2500 subscribers and two paid plans with fixed prices. You can get their Growth plan for $42/month, billed monthly, and the Scale plan, $84/month, billed annually.
While other platforms’ pricing grows with the number of subscribers, Beehiiv’s pricing stays fixed, which makes it a great option if you have a large subscriber base.
Pros of Beehiiv
- Thorough Analytics and reporting
- Easily monetise your newsletter
- Segment your subscribers easily
Cons of Beehiiv
- Missing drag and drop editor
- Missing pre-built email templates
Substack: Best for community growing newsletter
Substack is a subscription network that allows independent writers and podcasters like you to publish directly to your audience and earn money from subscriptions. You will ultimately control your intellectual property, mailing list, and payments.
Without ads and algorithms getting in the way, you can sustain a direct relationship with your readers and return complete control over your creative work.
If you’re a writer and content producer who wants to launch a newsletter, Substack offers a free option for you. Essential tools for creating and publishing newsletters and functionality for receiving payments and managing subscribers are all accessible under the free plan.
Another good thing about this online newsletter platform is that If you already have an audience on WordPress, Mailchimp, Ghost, Medium, Tumblr, or another platform, you can easily import your posts and email list in the Substack setup process.
Substack has also introduced Notes, which resembles Twitter. This feature is similar to tweets, as they are posts shared publicly on the platform. Like tweets, your subscribers or readers can also react to Notes by liking or restacking them, like retweeting and leaving comments.
Pros of Substack
- Grow your newsletter in the community
- Use Substack Notes to create awareness
- Interact with your audience in multiple ways
Cons of Substack
- No integrations to add subscribers
- No custom landing page drag and drop
- No automated campaigns
MailerLite: Best all-around newsletter platform
The best thing about this email newsletter tool is that the design can be as easy or complex as possible. This is the most sought-after newsletter platform. You must choose from numerous previously designed content blocks for navigation menus, images, texts and logos.
MailerLite offers an initial free plan for up to 1000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails but with limited features. It allows multiple upgrades starting at $10 per month.
MailerLite paid newsletter offers monetization by handling lead collection, payments, and automated delivery of paid subscription emails, simplifying the entire process.
It allows you to create customized sales pages, accept payments securely through Stripe, and convert regular subscribers into paying customers through automated email workflows.
In addition to creating an email newsletter building and sending it to you, this online newsletter platform can also perform advanced tasks like A/B split testing, email automation, photo editing, contact list segmentation, etc. You can also schedule your newsletters.
This software can be a lifesaver if you need to run an e-commerce website. It enables you to import a product catalogue. You can even build and send emails automatically using the RSS-to-e-mail feature if you use an email newsletter to promote your blog.
Pros of MailerLite
- A generous free plan
- It's super user-friendly to use
- A lot of email marketing modules in one tool
Cons of Mailerlite
- Missing full styling control of landing pages
- Very limited on integrations
- Very limited automation options
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Encharge: Best for building automation flows
Encharge is an excellent online newsletter platform for building automation workflows because it provides a range of features that make it easy to create complex, targeted campaigns based on subscriber behaviour and other triggers.
Encharge offers plans that can help your business newsletter scale. Their Growth Plan starts at $79/month, and their Premium plan costs $129/month. In addition, you can check their enterprise plan with custom pricing depending on your business needs.
One of the best things about Encharge is that it gives you over 50 native integrations to connect seamlessly to your system. These include Facebook ads, HubSpot, Calendly, Typeform, Slack, Mailchimp, and Intercom.
Encharge also provides a powerful marketing automation feature to create automated campaigns based on triggers, such as sign-ups, purchases, or website visits.
Users can create complex automation workflows that send targeted messages to subscribers at the right time.
My favourite feature after using Encharge for more than 2 years is that I can send newsletters in the receivers’ timezone. So if I want all my receivers to receive the newsletter at 11 am in their timezone, this is super simple to set up.
If you want more information or a walkthrough of Encharge, then watch my review here.
Pros of Encharge
- Advanced automation module
- Site and form tracking
- Send emails in receiver's timezone
Cons of Encharge
- A bit pricey
- No e-commerce integrations
- Lacking integrations
Mailchimp: Great Free Plan To Get Started
Mailchimp has always been a top choice for bloggers and small businesses. It is one of the best newsletter advertising platforms to advertise your business for free. Besides, Mailchimp also provides some outstanding features for e-commerce and email marketing tools.
Mailchimp’s free plan includes 10,000 emails per month with 2,000 subscribers. If you want access to unlimited emails, you can upgrade for only $10-313 per month. Mailchimp provides a plan comparison tool to quickly select a plan based on desired features.
This is the top newsletter platform choice for bloggers because it has tools for making Instagram and Facebook posts and ads. Moreover, it also connects and integrates with websites like Shopify, Salesforce, and Eventbrite.
One of the features I like most about Mailchimp is its email editor. It’s pervasive, and you can create beautiful templates for your newsletter without writing any code. You can easily use your images, fonts and much more to make the newsletter into your content style.
While Mailchimp has a WordPress plugin, it’s a bit limited. I, therefore, recommend you check other platforms if you use WordPress.
Pros of Mailchimp
- Super easy to use and get started
- Endless integrations and plugins
- One of the best email drag and drop builders
Cons of Mailchimp
- Once you scale it becomes pricey
- Limited customisations and advanced features
- Too limited reporting
Ghost
Ghost is a powerful application designed for you as media creators to publish, share, and build a business around your content. It offers advanced tools to create websites, publish content, send newsletters, and offer paid subscriptions to members.
With Ghost, you can customize your website using free or custom themes, ensuring a unique and personalized look. You can publish by web and email newsletter with advanced workflows. It also supports rich media such as images, videos, audio, and interactive elements to offer services or products.
Ghost simplifies your process of building subscribers by providing native signup forms to convert anonymous viewers into logged-in members.
It also offers analytics to track member activity and engagement to help you understand your audience better. It also supports offers and promotions to attract new subscribers and grow the business.
I also like Ghost is integrated with various tools and platforms, including referral programs, push notifications, social sharing, payment gateways, and A/B testing, which might be on your checklist, so you can consider checking all their integrations.
It provides resources and guides to assist you in content sharing, audience growth, and maximizing the platform’s features.
It offers different pricing plans to cater to various needs. The Starter plan is for only $9/month, billed yearly. The Creator plan is for only $25/month, billed yearly. The Team plan costs $50/month and is billed yearly.
If you have a larger audience, you can check its Business plan with features like unlimited staff users, advanced domain configurations, and a 99.9% uptime service level agreement (SLA) which costs 199/month, billed yearly.
Pros of Ghost
- Perfect if you want a website fully focused on your newsletter
- Great integrations for making a premium newsletter
- Very user-friendly, and the design is super modern
Cons of Mailchimp
- Limited on analytics
- Functionality is locked on Mailgun
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an email marketing platform designed to support creators, coaches, authors, podcasters, and business owners like you in growing and monetizing your audience.
ConvertKit provides you with the tools you need to build your audience, automate marketing efforts, and sell digital products and subscriptions, all while offering various pricing options.
They offer a free plan which includes unlimited landing pages, forms, and broadcasts, audience tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products and subscriptions. This plan is available for up to 300 subscribers.
If you need more advanced features like automating your work, they also offer paid plans like the Creator plan, priced at $15 monthly. It provides all the Free plan features, community support, and the option to migrate subscribers from another platform.
If you’re an established creator looking to scale your business, they offer a Creator Pro Plan priced at $29 monthly. It includes all the features of the Creator plan, as well as additional benefits like priority live chat and email support, unlimited team members, advanced reporting, automated email sequences, visual automation builders, and a newsletter referral system.
Pros of ConvertKit
- Great customisation for landing page building
- Perfect for managing lead magnets
- Advanced customisation flows
Cons of ConvertKit
- Steep learning curve
- Drag and drop builder for emails is lacking
- Can be a bit pricey
Mailmodo
Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that aims to enhance email-led growth with engaging emails, faster workflows, and impressive results. It offers interactive emails, intelligent recommendations for higher open rates, and a user-friendly interface that saves time.
With Mailmodo, you can create beautiful and interactive emails, achieve better open rates, improve your email performance, and work more efficiently.
It’s easy to start with Mailmodo, and you need to set up your domain, import contacts, and send emails. The platform provides human support throughout your journey, offering free onboarding assistance and integration with other tools for seamless contact import.
It offers different pricing plans to accommodate your various needs. The Silver plan costs $99/month and includes features such as 40,000 contacts, 75,000 email-sending credits, unlimited, customizable templates and campaigns, and email and chat support.
Their Gold plan, priced at $249/month, provides 100,000 contacts, 250,000 email-sending credits, dedicated onboarding support, all integrations, and automated email sequences, among other features.
But if you have more extensive contacts, you can check out their Platinum plan, priced at $599/month, which offers 300,000 contacts, 1,000,000 email-sending credits, dedicated customer success support, and additional features.
Mailmodo also offers a custom plan with custom template development, detailed deliverability reports, custom integration setup, key account management, domain warmup, and custom API integration for users with unique requirements.
Some of Mailmodo’s powerful features you will love include drag-and-drop editors, personalized content, email automation, visual journey builders, high deliverability or custom email delivery service, auto-triggering of transactional emails, user segmentation, comprehensive reporting on a single dashboard, A/B testing, data export, integration with essential tools, and dedicated IPs with Mailmodo SMTP.
Pros of Mailmodo
- Outstanding support
- Segmentation works flawlessly
- The best for AMP emails
Cons of Mailmodo
- Importing lists can be tedious
- Drag and drop builder is lacking fonts and features
- Site tracking can sometimes be difficult
Aweber
AWeber is an email marketing platform that offers a range of features for email marketing, landing page building, email automation, e-commerce pages, and web push notifications. It provides an affordable alternative to other solutions and helps you to achieve your goal.
With Aweber, you can effortlessly attract more customers through ready-made, eye-catching landing pages and easily add sign-up forms to your websites. It also integrates with other tools to automate list growth.
You can also increase your revenue by setting up online stores, accepting subscriptions and payment plans, and collecting payments in various currencies.
AWeber offers personalized emails and easy creation of email marketing campaigns. It also leverages automation to handle repetitive tasks, such as responding to leads, providing pre-built automation, and increasing sales through upsell, cross-sell, and abandoned cart emails.
It can also assist you in getting more visibility for content by automating Etsy sales, increasing YouTube views, and driving more readers to the latest blog posts. AWeber integrates with popular tools like PayPal, Shopify, WordPress, Facebook, and Zapier.
If you plan to switch to AWeber, you don’t need to worry because they have free migrations and a team of experts available to move accounts at no cost. The platform provides 24/7 support through phone, live chat, or email with highly trained specialists.
AWeber offers different pricing plans to cater to various needs. They offer a free plan with limited subscribers and features, but you can upgrade it anytime.
The Lite plan, priced at $12.50/month billed annually, is suitable for users with up to 500 subscribers and includes basic features. The Plus plan costs $20.00/month, billed annually, and the Unlimited plan costs $899/month. Their paid plans all include unlimited subscribers.
Pros of Aweber
- High email deliverability
- Validates your subscribers for spam accounts
- Great pricing for unlimited subscribers
Cons of Aweber
- Very basic in the functionality
- Lacking advanced email marketing features
- Lacking automation features
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a platform that combines email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools to help businesses create exceptional customer experiences. It offers a range of features to support different stages of customer engagement and growth.
ActiveCampaign allows precise targeting to find the right prospects and expand your audience. It also includes website tracking, email marketing, email segmentation, subscription forms, and deliverability optimization.
ActiveCampaign powerful features include marketing automation, messaging, text capabilities, event tracking, dynamic content, and integration with Facebook Custom Audiences.
It also allows individual audience members to take the next step through features like landing pages, CRM and sales automation, lead scoring, pipeline automation, and attribution.
They offer different plans depending on your needs. They have different marketing plans, including email and marketing automation, which start at $49/month, paid yearly.
If your business focuses more on Sales, including CRM and sales engagement, their plan starts at $19/month, paid yearly. Their Bundles, including marketing automation and sales CRM, start at $93/month, and their Transactional Email, which includes API and SMTP for your site or app, starts at $15/monthly, depending on how many emails per month.
Another good thing about ActiveCampaign is it includes features such as conversations, split testing, predictive sending, predictive content, and web personalization.
If you also want a more personalized email marketing campaign, ActiveCampaign enables you to craft tailored email newsletters, campaigns, and promotions.
They also provide powerful marketing automation tools to save time and money, advanced CRM functionalities, messaging, and live chat capabilities for meaningful customer interactions.
ActiveCampaign integrates various communication channels such as email, SMS, chat, website, and social media, allowing your business to connect with customers immediately.
Pros of ActiveCampaign
- Many integrations
- The most advanced automation builder
- The new drag and drop builder is great
Cons of ActiveCampaign
- Missing export options for tags
- It becomes expensive once you scale
- Lacking analytics
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an email marketing platform allowing you to create email campaigns and social ads, track your success, respond to comments, and grow your customer list quickly.
Constant Contact’s plans include Lite, Standard, and Premium, each with different features starting at different prices.
Lite starts at $12/per month and includes essential email marketing, automated welcome emails, social marketing, event management, and AI content recommendations.
The standard plan starts at $35/month and includes everything in Lite plus email marketing with subject line A/B testing, pre-built automation templates, contact segmentation, and social media ads integration.
If you’re looking for more advanced features than Lite and Standard, their Premium plan includes everything in Standard plus advanced email marketing, custom automation, custom contact segmentation, search engine optimization, and advanced ads with a dedicated Ad Manager for only $80/monthly.
Constant Contact reporting and contact management functions are simple to use and understand. Therefore, even if you have yet to gain experience with email marketing, you can quickly get started using this email marketing software.
Due to the high cost and lack of a free plan, Constant Contact is more suitable for bigger companies.
Pros of Constant Contact
- Great analytics on campaigns
- Beautiful email templates to use
- Perfect for large subscriber lists
Cons of Constant Contact
- The UX for the drag and drop builder needs an update
- The search option makes it difficult to find email campaigns
- Missing better export options of data
Key Factors to Consider When Selecting the Perfect Newsletter for Your Needs
Features: A newsletter platform should have the necessary features that align with your email marketing goals. List down the features that will benefit your business so you can check each platform if that’s what you’re looking for.
Ease of use: A user-friendly platform with a simple user interface and clear documentation can help you save time and effort in creating and managing your campaigns. It also reduces the learning curve for you and your team.
Pricing: Choose a platform with cost-effective price options that align with your budget and email marketing needs. You should also note that most of the newsletter platform increases the price as the number of subscribers grows.
Deliverability: A newsletter platform with a good reputation for email deliverability and spam compliance is essential for ensuring your emails reach subscribers’ inboxes. Low deliverability can impact your email marketing campaigns, affecting your open and click-through rates.
Scalability: Choose an email marketing platform to handle your expanding email list and changing needs. A scalable platform should provide flexibility regarding the number of contacts, filtering options, and email sends, and customization possibilities.
Customer support: A reliable newsletter platform should provide helpful and competent customer support. This guarantees that you can get assistance when needed, solve any problems that may emerge, and increase the efficiency of your email marketing.
Considering these factors, you can select a newsletter platform that aligns with your specific needs and goals, allowing you to create and run successful email marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Email marketing or newsletter promotion is one of the most commonly used forms of marketing. Above discussed newsletter platforms are the best tools in the market. It is easy to get lost with hundreds of platforms out there. I listed five of the best newsletter platforms in this article that can serve various business needs.
There is no such thing as a perfect newsletter advertising platform. The online newsletter platform you select depends on your needs. You want to send newsletters to share updates about your online store, you should use Beehiiv.
However, if you want to send your blog posts through emails, Mailchimp is more suitable. Similarly, if you want complex designs without having to use technical skills, you should try out MailerLite.
While all the online newsletter platforms discussed above provide great features, they ultimately focus on providing services for specific customers. Therefore, comparing different platforms and finding the best for you is extremely important.
I have compiled 4 simple, actionable tips to increase your open and click-through rates. Read it here.
Beehiiv is my product recommendation because of its full focus on just being the best newsletter platform built for growth.
I believe they’ve taken over the throne from Substack, even though Substack are building great things.
