8 Best Email Marketing Software for Small Business in 2023

Email marketing success often depends on finding the right software. The best email marketing software for small businesses is affordable and easy to use for email campaign creation, automation, reporting, lead nurturing, and triggered emails to increase conversions. We compared dozens of providers and narrowed it down to the six best email marketing services to make your decision easier.

• Best email marketing software overall: Mailchimp
• Cheapest for large contact lists: SendX 
• Best for transactional emails: Sendinblue
• Best for sales lead generation and nurturing: HubSpot
• Great basic ecommerce tools and integrations: Constant Contact
• Excellent for extensive email automation: ActiveCampaign
• Best for email marketing beginners: Moosend
• Top free all-in-one ecommerce site builder and email marketing app: MailerLite

Best Email Marketing Software at a Glance

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*Some email marketing features require subscription to a paid plan
**Billed annually or pay an increased rate

1. Mailchimp: Overall Best Email Marketing Software for Small Business

Mailchimp is the best email marketing service for small business overall thanks to its robust feature set, ease of use, and affordability. Plus, it’s fast becoming an all-in-one marketing hub. In addition to email marketing software, you will now find a website builder, landing page builder, built-in customer relationship manager (CRM), marketing tools for social media, and even direct mail postcard marketing.

However, Mailchimp’s bread and butter is still email marketing. It includes various features to help you manage a master contact list, create email campaigns, automate triggered email sends, segment your audience, and analyze the success of each campaign you send. It’s easy to build webforms in Mailchimp and then embed them on your website and social media to streamline list building and lead generation.

Best of all, you can use it for free for up to 500 email subscribers with access to quite a bit of functionality, including automated emails. As a leading email marketing service, it integrates with over 300 other apps, including all-in-one website builders like Squarespace, and various Mailchimp-friendly sales CRMs, and ecommerce software.

Mailchimp is an ideal option for small businesses just starting with email marketing and looking for a free, easy-to-use solution. However, it’s also a great choice for any business looking for a comprehensive email marketing tool with social ad integration and more A/B testing options than competitors.

Customer support is harder to come by, though—for phone support, you have to upgrade to the highest-priced plan at $299 per month. Likewise, advanced features like predictive analytics, multivariate testing, and tools for adding email subscribers through lookalike audiences require a Standard or higher subscription.

Mailchimp Pricing & Plan Features

*Based on 500 contacts; the monthly cost of any plan increases based on number of contacts

Still, Mailchimp’s inclusions for the price are impressive, especially for small businesses that don’t have huge contact lists. If you have a sizable contact list or a list growing steadily, consider SendX instead. It’s the cheapest email marketing software on our list for large contact lists. It also includes nearly all of the same features offered by Mailchimp, including advanced email features and landing pages.

How It Works

Learning how to use Mailchimp’s email marketing platform and drag-and-drop email editor is easy and fairly intuitive, and there are built-in prompts to guide you through the process. During account setup, you can also opt in to emails with tips to improve your email marketing efforts.

Mailchimp makes it easy for you to create and segment contact lists (called “audiences”). Plus, you can create and send emails to your audiences or audience subsets based on tags. When setting up an email marketing campaign, Mailchimp will automatically evaluate your subject line and suggest how to improve it.

Use premade templates or start from scratch to create individual or automated email campaigns. Send automated responses when someone subscribes to your list or fills out a contact form on your website. Easily set up triggered emails, such as an abandoned cart notification, using Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop editor.

Mailchimp automatically creates a text-based version of your email and adds a footer with the information required per the U.S. CAN-SPAM regulations. The preview mode lets you see what your email will look like when viewed on desktop, mobile, or tablet devices. Plus, you can quickly send a test email to one or more email recipients to ensure your email is error-free, all the links work, and it’s audience-ready.

The Campaigns reports show open rates, clicks per open, delivery success rate, and survey responses. The data can help inform you of what you need to improve or what’s already working, and you can even see who opened your emails or clicked on links to identify hot leads that may be ready to convert. Mailchimp’s Content Optimizer will make suggestions for you if you subscribe to the Standard or Premium plan.

Our Expert Opinion

Mailchimp’s free plan is a great choice for any new small business just getting started with marketing emails. As your business grows, it’s easy (and affordable) to upgrade to a paid plan to get more features or add more contacts. Mailchimp limits the number of emails you can send each month, so if you’re looking for email marketing with unlimited sends, consider Constant Contact for basic ecommerce integrations or SendX for large contact lists.

Visit Mailchimp

2. SendX: Cheapest Email Marketing Software for Large Contact Lists

SendX is far and away one of the cheapest options for startups and small businesses. While there is no free plan, pricing starts under $8 per month, and the cost increases level-to-level based on the size of your contact list are modest, especially compared to Constant Contact, HubSpot, and even Mailchimp.

While we haven’t discussed user reviews for other providers, it’s worth mentioning here. SendX has high user ratings (e.g., 4.6 out of 5 on G2), with many SendX reviews especially citing the quality of customer care they received. For startups and solopreneurs who have to do it all marketing-wise, this type of support is invaluable.

Another aspect we like about SendX is that advanced features aren’t locked behind higher tiers. Every user gets access to drip campaign automation, A/B split testing, webforms, and conversion-generating features like auto-responders, triggered and condition-based automation, and list segmentation.

A few things are lacking in SendX that you get for free with HubSpot and Mailchimp, most notably advertising and social media integrations. Likewise, no survey tools come with Mailchimp starting in the free version. While SendX offers fewer ready-made integrations than some competitors, it includes essential ones like WordPress, Shopify, and Pipedrive CRM, and the ability to create thousands more through Zapier

SendX Pricing & Plan Features

How It Works

Create an account and set up your first campaign in minutes with SendX. Try it free for 14 days with no credit card required, including creating and sending up to 100 emails. There are dozens of premade templates to help you get started more quickly, and the email editor is easy to use.

The SendX user interface is clean, modern, and easy to navigate. Follow the step-by-step “get started” instructions, including embedding code onto your website to ensure your domain is white-listed for increased deliverability. Like Mailchimp, it’s easy to import your contacts via comma-separated values (CSV) files or drag and drop a preformatted comma-separated list (Email, First Name, Last Name).

Create a pop-up or embedded forms to increase sign-ups and conversions on your website. Add forms to your landing pages or create landing pages for them in SendX. Embed videos and even add a countdown timer to create a sense of urgency for site visitors.

Our Expert Opinion

SendX is the best cheap and small business email marketing software you probably never heard of. All features come standard, and the cost is affordable regardless of the size of your contact list. While it doesn’t have survey tools and ad integrations, it has all the essential features most small businesses need, including multi-layered automations.

Try SendX

3. Sendinblue: Best Platform for Sending Transactional Emails

Sendinblue has a bevy of tools to promote your business, generate and nurture leads, and stay in touch with current customers. It offers a free plan that limits you to 300 emails per day, whether they are marketing or transactional. The number of contacts you can have is never limited, regardless of which plan you choose.

Most businesses rely on transactional emails to communicate with customers when they make online store purchases or users who make changes to their accounts. Set up automated transactional emails with order confirmations to send invoices or provide shipping and delivery updates to keep customers aware of what they purchased and when it should arrive.

Transactional emails are helpful in other ways, such as when a customer requests a password reset for their account or changes their password or login information, or for double opt-ins when someone subscribes or sets up an account. Managing all these types of emails manually would take way too much time, which is why you should use an email tool like Sendinblue.

Transactional emails often involve more than one software application. Sendinblue won’t let you down in this area, with dozens of ready-to-plug-and-play third-party integrations and Zapier, which can facilitate thousands more.

Pricing is low compared to some of Sendinblue’s competitors, but higher than the more affordably priced SendX. Plus, some of the features you may take for granted on lower-tier plans with Mailchimp or Constant Contact, like A/B testing, are available only on higher plan tiers or require the purchase of an add-on.

Sendinblue Pricing & Plan Features

How It Works

Sendinblue makes it especially easy (and free) for ecommerce businesses to send transactional emails, such as confirmation emails when a purchase is made on your site. Personalize emails with the contact’s information or send text marketing messages via short message service (SMS), even on the free plan.

Get your email campaign or transactional email designed quickly using one of the dozens of template designs or layouts available. Once you choose a template or layout, it’s easy to edit your campaign with Sendinblue’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

The size of your contact list doesn’t matter with Sendinblue, since there are no limits on the number of contacts you can have, but you may need to pay more to increase your monthly email sends within the plan you choose. Upgrade to a paid plan for more monthly emails and features, such as advanced analytics (location and heatmaps, for example), a landing page editor, and integrated Facebook ads.

Our Expert Opinion

When sending transactional emails to your customers, the best option is Sendinblue. The forever-free plan is generous in its features, but you’ll have to live with Sendinblue branding unless you upgrade to the Starter plan (plus an add-on) or the Business plan. However, removing branding to white label your business emails starts at just $11 with Mailchimp.

Visit Sendinblue

4. HubSpot: Best Email Marketing Tools for Lead Generation & Nurturing

HubSpot is well-known in the marketing world as a comprehensive sales and marketing platform. Email marketing and HubSpot CRM are among the free tools, so you can build your mailing list at zero cost through seamless integration with HubSpot CMS, one of the best website builders for small businesses. HubSpot is also an excellent email marketing service for list management, with advanced tools for segmenting audiences and personalizing campaigns.

Of note for this update is that HubSpot dropped the pricing for the base tier of this product significantly. Pricing used to start at $45 per month with two user seats and now comes in at a much more small business-friendly cost of $20 per month (or $18 with annual billing).

The drag-and-drop landing page builder by HubSpot is another free tool you can use to increase email campaign conversions. Plus, new this year, HubSpot’s web content management system (CMS) is also free to use, making it a one-stop for building a strong brand presence and lead and sales generation solution for your small business.

HubSpot templates are mobile-friendly—as easy to view on a mobile phone as on a desktop. Each template is designed to produce conversions, from getting people to visit a landing page to signing up for a demo or purchasing a product from your website.

The free plan includes HubSpot branding, but moving to a paid plan removes branding from your emails, forms, landing pages, and live chat app on your site. All these additional tools boost your email marketing efforts because you can use them to build contact lists, direct traffic to high-converting landing pages, or add webforms and a chatbot to your website.

HubSpot is the undeniable leader as a robust all-in-one sales and marketing solution. However, HubSpot’s lowest-tier plan is somewhat limited—SendX is far more generous in email sends, number of features, and contacts. You get a lot more with HubSpot’s more expensive plans, but for a high price—over $800 or as high as $3,600 per month, which is a bit out of reach for most small businesses.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pricing & Plan Features

*Save 10% on any plan by paying annually
**You can have up to 1 million non-marketing contacts on any plan

How It Works

Use HubSpot’s free tools to create marketing emails and landing pages from scratch—or customize their premade templates. With any paid plan, HubSpot branding goes away, and you can start sending mass email campaigns. At its core, HubSpot is an inbound marketing tool, so you use the tools to capture emails to convert site visitors to subscribers and landing pages to encourage sales.

Our Expert Opinion

HubSpot offers some of the best free email marketing tools for lead generation and nurturing, with robust features for building and managing contact lists and creating landing pages. The lowest-priced paid plan is more limited in features and number of contacts allowed than providers like Constant Contact. However, its combination of email marketing alongside scalable, comprehensive sales and marketing software is unmatched.

Visit HubSpot

5. Constant Contact: Best Email Marketing Software for Basic Ecommerce

Constant Contact started its life as event management software but evolved into a cross between a CRM system and an email marketing tool. It integrates seamlessly with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Etsy, and WooCommerce, and has loads of customizable templates.

One of the most appealing features of Constant Contact is its easy integration with (and the ability to add products from) your Shopify store to marketing emails. The drag-and-drop email editor is easy to use, and Constant Contact offers about twice as many templates as other providers. Also, Constant Contact doesn’t limit the number of emails you can send per month.

Although Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free plan, you can take it for a test drive with a 30-day free trial. After that, you’ll have to subscribe to a plan based on the size of your contact list. You’re limited to 500 contacts on the lowest tier, and if your list goes over 500, you’ll be automatically upgraded to the next tier at $35 per month.

Constant Contact makes it easy to post to social media simultaneously, saving you a lot of time. Likewise, Facebook and Instagram ads can be managed from the platform. However, Google Ads integration, surveys, and nearly all email automation is locked behind its more expensive Plus plans, starting at $45 per month for up to 500 contacts.

Constant Contact costs more than Mailchimp and our cheapest email marketing software provider, SendX. Mailchimp is free for up to 500 contacts, but for the same number of contacts with Constant Contact, you’ll pay at least $9.99 per month. With SendX, you can send unlimited emails to up to 1,000 contacts for $7.49 per month, and all of the platform’s features are included with your plan.

Constant Contact Pricing & Plan Features

How It Works

It’s easy to use Constant Contact, regardless of prior experience with email marketing tools. There are hundreds of easy-to-modify templates to get you started when creating an email to send to your contact list.

The drag-and-drop design editor is easy to use, and managing your contact list is intuitive too. Add tags to segment your audience based on whatever you want (products, location, sex, or any other information you have about your subscribers).

You can preview your email before you send it out to ensure you have no missing links or typos and compare its look on desktop vs mobile. But unlike Mailchimp, you can’t see precisely how it will look in different inboxes (e.g., Gmail vs Outlook email inboxes).

A/B testing is available with Constant Contact, but only for subject lines. Comparatively, Mailchimp allows you to split-test up to three elements of an email, such as body text or the time sent—not just subject lines. Likewise, you can create and send surveys with the free version of Mailchimp, but you must now upgrade to the Plus plan with Constant Contact for surveys.

Our Expert Opinion

Constant Contact is a top email marketing platform for businesses with smaller contact lists that want to send lots of emails (contact list size is limited—the number of emails that can be sent is not). It’s ideal for smaller Shopify sellers who want to add products directly to emails. However, its tools aren’t as sophisticated as ActiveCampaign, and it’s not as affordable as Shopify-friendly competitors like Mailchimp, MailerLite, and SendX.

Visit Constant Contact

6. ActiveCampaign: Best for Email Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign has the most advanced email marketing automation capabilities. If you have fewer than 2,500 contacts, it’s more affordable than marketing automation juggernaut HubSpot. There are many different options for automating emails, such as time triggers to encourage more opens, and action or behavioral triggers, like after a contact opens an email or clicks a link.

Since ActiveCampaign includes a multi-deal sales CRM beginning with the Plus plan, HubSpot is its closest competitor feature-wise. The sales CRM includes deal assignment, pipelines, and lead scoring, and uses machine learning to send email content when a lead is most likely to convert. Beginning with the Plus plan, you can get integrations with more than 870 apps, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

ActiveCampaign has comprehensive ecommerce tools for list building, dynamic content based on the lead, and tools for customer retention and loyalty. Though you’ll pay more for ecommerce tools with ActiveCampaign than Constant Contact, the return provided by sophisticated ecommerce and CRM features could be worth the cost.

There is no free version, but the Lite plan starts at $9 per month. While it’s low compared to HubSpot’s $20 per month base tier, it only includes 500 contacts compared to 1,000 with HubSpot. With any plan, you will pay more as your contact list grows. For example, if you have 5,000 contacts, you’ll pay $79 per month on the Lite plan or $209 for the Professional tier.

ActiveCampaign is far more expensive than SendX, especially as your contact list grows. Likewise, if you don’t need super-robust CRM features, the customer relationship management tools that come standard in Mailchimp’s free version could be the more practical choice for your business.

ActiveCampaign Pricing & Plan Features

How It Works

Setting up automations is easy with ActiveCampaign’s visual workflows, and you can create layered “if-this, then-that” conditional logic style flowcharts to create email drip campaigns. You can also form automations for triggered transactional emails, so customers get an email confirming a purchase or an appointment, get follow-up emails when an item ships, and receive reminders for upcoming service appointments.

Segmentation is also a big deal for ActiveCampaign. As with other email marketing tools, you can create separate groups based on tags, but you can also create custom fields to track specific info from emails. You can even create multi-step forms to segment contacts as they fill out webforms on your landing pages.

You can also send SMS marketing campaigns with ActiveCampaign with all but the Lite plan. Sendinblue and Constant Contact are the only other providers on this list to offer that functionality.

Our Expert Opinion

ActiveCampaign offers excellent value for the money. It’s the best option for any size business that wants complex and advanced email marketing automations for lead nurturing and sales, as this comes in every plan. It can get pricey overall as you grow your contact list, so Sendinblue’s no-limit contacts feature may be better for companies with many email contacts.

Visit ActiveCampaign

7. Moosend: Best Email Marketing Software for Beginners

Moosend became a rising star among email marketing platforms after being acquired by Sitecore in 2021. With a 30-day free trial period and a basic plan that starts at $7 monthly, this email marketing software appeals to small to medium brands with unlimited emails for all subscription levels.

Another testament to its value for money is the decent range of email marketing automation tools available even in its basic pricing tier (features that platforms like ActiveCampaign and MailerLite only offer in higher-priced plans).

But Moosend’s most appealing aspect of this list is its user-friendly but comprehensive drag-and-drop email builder. This makes it easy for email marketing beginners to customize everything from the basic templates to the detailed marketing automation templates. Alternatively, adding your own HTML code or building a plain text version of your email is also easy.

With a minimal learning curve, Moosend boasts impressive email campaign designs that any small business client can achieve. Also, Moosend offers A/B testing in the base tier and notable spam and delivery testing that significantly decreases the possibility of email campaigns being marked as spam. In fact, their website highlights a 98% sender reputation rate for their service users.

Moosend offers a 30-day free trial with a solid lineup of services that rival other email marketing software platforms’ paid plans. In the free trial period, businesses can send unlimited emails and utilize the platform’s various automation workflows. They can also create a landing page and use the form builder.

Paid plans start at $7 per month, paid annually, but this is the base tier that can accommodate only up to 500 contacts. As your contact list grows, the rate also increases. However, it is still affordable with $38 per month for a 5,000-contact list.

Moosend is one of the cheaper providers on this list. However, if there is a need for CRM features, ecommerce options, and robust third-party integrations, Mailchimp or MailerLite are excellent alternatives—and both offer free plans. As you’ll notice from the table below, very few features are hidden behind higher-tier plans, similar to SendX.

Moosend Pricing & Plan Features

How It Works

Moosend’s top-of-the-line reporting begins when you connect your website to the software. From there, Moosend’s automation, segmentation, and reporting tools will allow you to track customer experience, conversions, sales, and customer behavior. Digital marketers can use this data to make groups of contacts for targeted or follow-up email campaigns. Triggered transactional emails are also available for paid accounts.

One of the platform’s biggest strengths is its marketing automations for all tiers, even for the free trial. Moosend makes it easy to set up sophisticated automated workflows, or you can start with a ready-made workflow template instead. There are 18 workflow templates available on Moosend, and you can save your custom workflows as a template for the future as well. Each template is fully customizable and can be used to optimize email campaigns.

Our Expert Opinion

Moosend is an affordable email marketing solution that can create well-formatted and optimized email campaigns even with little to no background knowledge. It is the best option for small to medium businesses that aim to send high numbers of emails monthly and automate their campaigns easily. Mailchimp may be a better fit for businesses that still want a user-friendly email editor but also want CRM integrated into their software.

Visit Moosend

8. MailerLite: Free Ecommerce Website Builder & Email Marketing

MailerLite offers one of the most generous free-forever plans among email marketing software. Like other services on this list, MailerLite goes beyond email blasts and offers automation, landing pages, a website builder, and sign-up forms and pop-ups—even on the free plan. A campaign is relatively simple to set up, with a drag-and-drop editor and email builder available in-house. Its value for the money closely rivals the functionality of Mailchimp.

Optimizing email campaigns is easy with A/B split testing for all paid plans. At the same time, all pricing levels have an embedded survey tool that allows you to collect data and insights to optimize the campaign directly. MailerLite allows unlimited automated email sequences and steps as well as an email automation builder in the free-forever plan. However, its automation capabilities are more modest than ActiveCampaign or Moosend.

One of MailerLite’s biggest pros is its ecommerce capabilities, which involve on-site product selling and ecommerce integration. MailerLite offers a range of ecommerce templates and allows users to build product pages, set up payments, and promote products through email marketing all on their platform.

Users can also connect to an online store and import their products seamlessly into the email builder’s design blocks. Finally, sales can be tracked directly from their campaign.

MailerLite offers a free-forever plan for up to 1,000 contacts, while its base plan starts at $9 a month. This is a more than reasonable pricing range, which unlike Sendinblue or HubSpot, doesn’t include a steep increase in pricing after the free-forever plan. The Growing Business and Advanced tiers increase in price as your contact list grows.

The different pricing tiers also offer users a 30-day free trial to try out their additional features. This includes 24/7 email support, unlimited monthly emails, ecommerce builder, and dynamic content. The Enterprise plan is offered to businesses with over 100,000 subscribers, but you’ll have to contact their sales team for pricing.

MailerLite Pricing & Plan Features

How It Works

MailerLite’s automation dashboard allows users to build and edit automated workflows with a user-friendly editor. Segmentation and personalization capabilities are also quite solid, which allows for building automated dynamic or static groups from the subscriber list. The segments on MailerLite are similar to Mailchimp’s segments, such as behavioral, based on a database field, purchases, automation membership, and the like.

Subscriber list management is straightforward: group subscribers, create your own fields, or report on email subscribers. Although this is a decent range of personalization, it is still slightly underwhelming compared to Sendinblue, for example, which offers tag-based segmentation on top of those.

Our Expert Opinion

MailerLite is an impressive email marketing software for its price. It is one of the best options for small businesses, particularly those looking for Mailchimp alternatives or wanting to incorporate ecommerce in email campaigns. Its free-forever plan includes the necessities of email marketing and more, allowing MailerLite to stack up to market leaders in email marketing.

Visit MailerLite

How We Evaluated the Best Email Marketing Platform for Small Business

To choose the best services, we considered more than just email marketing features, cost, and ease of use. We looked at apps that further aid your campaigns, whether through marketing automation, data enrichment of your contacts, contact management, third-party integrations, and extras like landing pages for conversions.

We chose Mailchimp as the best email marketing service for small businesses overall. It offers features for everything from building a contact list and segmenting audiences to creating campaigns, automating drip emails, setting up triggers, analyzing results, testing A/B variations, and sending email blasts to your customers.

It’s also an affordable email marketing tool, as a small business can use it for free for up to 500 contacts and scale affordably to higher plans as the business grows. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with hundreds of other business apps and has a form builder to create custom lead generation forms to embed on your website and social media.

Visit Mailchimp

Here are the factors we considered in choosing the best email marketing platforms:

• Cost and fees: Software must be affordable to be accessible to small businesses. We considered whether a tool offered a free version or free trial as well as the overall cost and pricing structure of each platform.
• Ease of use: We only chose apps that are easy to learn and use. Otherwise, a business might not get the maximum value or desired results to grow. Ease of use also impacts the overall value of the money.
• Features: Regardless of primary functionality, the best services offer robust features, including features to boost marketing emails from good to great and provide a good return on investment (ROI).
• Customer reviews: How current customers rate and what they say about a company is one of the best ways to determine whether it’s right for your small business. We considered what customers had to say and how they ranked each company on our list.
• Expert score: We’ve used a wide range of email marketing software platforms firsthand and tested the features, functionality, intuitiveness, and user-friendliness of each one as part of this review.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the best email marketing software to choose for beginners?

While we recommend Mailchimp as the best overall for most small businesses, Moosend is the best email marketing software for beginners. Its design tools are easy to use, even for true email marketing beginners. What’s more, automation is included, and that’s also easy to set up with Moosend’s guided interface.

Are there different types of email marketing?

Marketing emails can encompass a variety of topics but generally pertain to four types: newsletter, promotion, acquisition, and retention (or loyalty) emails. You can also consider them informational, behavioral (e.g., when a contact performs or doesn’t perform an action), and transactional, like receipts, confirmations, and password change request emails. Learn more by reading our email marketing guide.

How effective is email marketing for small businesses?

Email marketing has a high average return on investment (ROI) of $32 to $45 for every $1 spent. Success depends on finding the best provider, targeting your audience, and providing valuable content, and it’s affordable and easy to get started with any of the providers above. Learn how to successfully introduce your business to prospects via business emails in our article with nine effective business email introduction templates.

Bottom Line

Finding the right platform comes down to your budget, desired features, your contact list size, and how many marketing emails you want to send each month. Our top pick for small business email marketing is Mailchimp. It has a robust feature set, provides an all-in-one marketing hub, and has plans to fit almost every business. A forever-free plan is available to startups, solopreneurs, and small businesses, with plans that scale as your business grows.

Visit Mailchimp