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6 min read

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EFFECTIVENESS

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By Alex Cowell

Part of the deal: what can marketing platforms offer you?

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Life goes on, and something that was just right yesterday may turn out to be insufficient today. It’s OK, these things happen. And when they happen in our line of work, sometimes the issue lies in the marketing platform you’re using. So, let’s say you wanted to pick a new marketing platform for yourself — where would you start?

You need to find a platform that has the right tools, suits your marketing strategy, and preferably isn’t too costly. But the market is filled to the brim with various solutions — and there’s no way you have enough time to test out every major platform and see what it has to offer, whether it works for you, and if it’s worth its price. That’s where we step in — we did the research for you.

Disclaimer

This article compares the features and prices of various marketing platforms to show how pricing works and what you can get for a certain budget. We were looking for the main features for email marketing, therefore some others (website builders and whatnot) are left out as they’re not relevant. If you want to learn the pros and cons of the platforms, feel free to browse the previous article.

During the research, our target metrics were:

10,000 subscribers
50,000 emails sent monthly
50,000 monthly website traffic

Based on these metrics, we compared the plans different platforms offer and the tools they include in the package.

If you want to just check the boxes with your desired features and see exactly what platforms offer the right tools for you and for how much — leave your email address at the end of this article and we’ll email you our Platform Choice Simplifier 5000 for free. Other than that, let’s begin!

Constant Contact

Constant Contact opens our shortlist with just $80 for 10,000 subscribers in the contact base and unlimited email sending. This is the lowest price for such a volume, considering you go for the Core plan. What do you get for this money?

Sign-up forms
Drag & Drop email builder
Email template library
A/B testing
Email and audience reports
Basic audience segmentation
Marketing calendar

Constant Contact’s Core plan provides access to everyday marketing tools, making usual manipulations simple and convenient. It’s a great package for such a low price, considering it allows you to store and manage up to 10,000 subscribers — and it’s scalable.

However, if you need more in-depth analytics, actual automation, and more advanced tools you may be used to from your previous platform, you’ll have to take the way more costly Plus plan.

MailChimp

Next up we have MailChimp with $87 for the same number of contacts and a sending cap of 100,000 emails per month. It’s a good deal considering you go for the Essentials plan which, quite like Constant Contact’s Core plan, gives you more basic tools. Which exactly?

Sign-up forms
Drag & Drop email builder
Email template library
A/B testing
Email and audience reports
Basic audience segmentation
Marketing calendar
Email scheduling
Personalized recommendations

The Essentials plan is a little buffed version of the Core plan. While it also gives you the basic tools, it adds new features to the table as well, like personalized recommendations and some more (remember, we leave out the features that are less relevant to email marketing).

Some of the tools you might need in everyday work, however, are only accessible in high-tier plans. Purchasing them will also increase your sending volumes and the contact base size.

Markeaze

Markeaze calculates prices differently: your number of subscribers is unlimited, and you pay for the sending cap. Markeaze charges $90 for 50,000 emails per month on the Start plan. The Start plan suits new and smaller businesses — let’s see the features it offers.

Drag & Drop email builder
Email template library
Email health checks
A/B testing
Advanced email and audience reports
Advanced audience segmentation
Marketing calendar
Email scheduling
Personalized recommendations
HTML code editor
Mobile optimization

In Markeaze, the Start plan mainly differs from the high-tier plans by the sending volume. Its sole purpose is to make email marketing as automated and simple as possible, and it gets the job done, saving you time and hassle.

If your sending volume exceeds 50,000 emails per month, you can buy for $2.70 for 1,000 emails or consider high-tier plans with 500,000 and 1,000,000 emails per month. Other than that, the Start plan gives you access to all current and upcoming features in Markeaze.

OmniSend

OmniSend’s Standard plan allows you to reach up to 10,000 contacts with a monthly sending cap of 120,000 emails. It would cost you $115, making OmniSend the first platform on our list to cross the $100/month mark. Let’s see what they have to offer!

Sign-up forms
Drag & Drop email builder
Email template library
A/B testing
Basic email and audience reports
Advanced audience segmentation
Email scheduling
Personalized recommendations

OmniSend provides a wide variety of marketing tools, not necessarily focusing on email marketing. It’s a solid solution for those who want their platform to cover much of their non-email work; when it comes to emails, the Standard plan doesn’t cover the reports side all too well.

HubSpot

The titan among mere mortals, HubSpot breaks all records when it comes to pricing. If you were to have those 10,000 contacts in your HubSpot contact base, you’d have to pay $440 monthly. That’s for the Starter plan, of course — for anyone wondering, it’ll be around $1200 on the next plan. So, what’s included in the Starter package?

Sign-up forms
Drag & Drop email builder
Email template library
Email health checks
A/B testing
Email and audience reports
Basic audience segmentation
Mobile optimization

Considering that even the Starter plan is this expensive, the tools might seem underwhelming. But it includes all the free features, too — with removed limitations. And second of all, with HubSpot you pay for the service more than for the tools — they offer great customer support.

HubSpot has the most generous free plan, too. It didn’t make it to our list because of the volume limitations, unfortunately. When it comes to the paid plans, it’s hard for us to state anything since HubSpot charges so much higher than average. It’s up to you to decide if the offer is worth it.

To conclude

Of course, these are not the only email marketing platforms out there, but we picked these five to give you an understanding of how prices work in the industry. You don’t always get the best offer for the highest price; and if the cost is low, you don’t necessarily waste your money for nothing.

Feature	Constant Contact	MailChimp	Markeaze	OmniSend	HubSpot
Sign-up forms	+	+	+	+	+
Drag & Drop email builder	+	+	+	+	+
Email template library	+	+	+	+	+
Email health checks	-	-	+	-	+
A/B testing	+	+	+	+	+
Email and audience reports	Basic	Basic	Advanced	Basic	Basic
Audience segmentation	Basic	Basic	Advanced	Advanced	Basic
Mobile optimization	-	-	+	-	+
HTML code editor	-	-	+	-	-
Email scheduling	-	+	+	+	-
Marketing calendar	+	+	+	-	-
Personalized recommendations	-	+	+	-	-

The main advice here is to figure out exactly what features you need and start searching based on them. Some platforms will have the right toolset but won’t have the volumes you require; some will charge too much; some will just not be for you. But there’s always plenty more fish in the sea, so don’t settle for anything less than you need.