23 Best Email Management Software & Tools for Small Businesses

Email management software integrates with business email apps like Gmail and Outlook to improve deliverability, conversions, team collaboration, and productivity. The best tools save you time with automation, bring in more leads and sales, and show you how to improve future campaigns. With that in mind, here are nearly two dozen of the best email management software for small business communication and collaboration, including many you can use for free.

• HubSpot: Best Free Email Tools for Sales & Marketing
• Constant Contact: Best Email Marketing Platform for Beginners
• SendX: Most Affordable for Large-scale Email Marketing
• Mailchimp: Best for Email Marketing Automation
• Google Workspace & Gmail: Best for Cloud-based Email Management
• Hiver: Best Email Tools for Team Collaboration via Gmail
• Boomerang for Gmail: Best Tool for Sales Email Scheduling
• Streak: Best Gmail Email Management Tool for Sales Agents
• Help Scout: Best Email Collaboration Tools for Customer Support
• Hunter: Best Free Business Email Software
• GetProspect: Best Email Tool for Finding Addresses on LinkedIn
• DeBounce: Best Tool for Verifying Contacts
• Prowly: Best for Contacting Media Professionals
• FindEmails: Best Lookup Tool for Bulk Email Lists
• Todoist: Best for Task Management
• Calendly: Best Software for Setting Up Meetings & Events
• Trello: Best Tools for Team Task Management
• BatchedInbox: Best Way to Reduce Distractions in Gmail
• WiseStamp: Best Email Tool for Custom Signatures
• MailTrack: Best Tool for Tracking Email Opens
• Attach: Best for Email Forwards & Attachments Tracking
• DocHub: Best Email Tools for Electronic Document Signing
• Grammarly: Best Way to Proofread Emails Before Sending

Email is one of the most effective tools for sales and marketing. Email marketing statistics show that over 90% of American adults use email, making it ideal for focused messaging, clear calls to action, and action-triggered emails. It also works for multiple objectives, from brand awareness to increasing conversions.

Here are the best business email software for small businesses:

1. HubSpot: Best Free Email Tools for Sales & Marketing

HubSpot’s world-class, industry-leading email software is offered starting for free with up to 999 contacts. This gives startups and small businesses a way to get started for free, and its base plan is also very affordable.

When you’re ready to upgrade, the base tier includes up to 1,000 contacts, an email send limit of five times your number of contacts, form and email automation, and two user seats. U.S.-based users also get access to Payments. Plus, you can use the HubSpot email app to work on the go from anywhere.

You’ll get some pretty impressive lead generation tools included when you opt to use HubSpot’s free email software and other tools. Some of the most valuable ones for small businesses include tools that help:

• Build landing pages to generate leads and automate lead assignment to specific sales agents for follow-up
• Send a welcome email and launch lead nurturing drip email campaigns to move prospects through the customer journey
• Connect advertising accounts to see results and ad interactions, tie ad spend to sales, and re-engage contacts

You can use HubSpot’s email tools to create messages that look like mass email blasts or plain-text personal messages to send company updates, announce new products and services, extend special offers, and reignite cold leads. Get started for free today.

Visit HubSpot

2. Constant Contact: Best Email Marketing Platform for Beginners

Constant Contact is one of the most well-known email marketing tools. Plus, it has some of the most comprehensive yet beginner-friendly features we’ve seen, from the drag-and-drop campaign builder to hundreds of premade templates, targeted email sends, automation tools, and in-depth analytics.

While not as robust, all Constant Contact users have integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tools. This makes it a great option for companies that rely on email to move potential customers through the sales funnel.

A drawback of Constant Contact is that it doesn’t offer comprehensive A/B testing beyond subject lines, and A/B testing is locked behind the second tier. Mailchimp is a better option if you want to test variations or send multiple versions of your emails to increase engagement and conversions. It’s also more expensive than other email software for marketing, especially for large lists—go with SendX instead.

In addition to ease of use, Constant Contact offers thousands of integrations with design, e-commerce, social media, and sales apps, including Canva, Shopify, Instagram, Salesforce, and more. While it doesn’t offer a free plan, you can use it free for 60 days, allowing you to test it out before committing to a paid plan.

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3. SendX: Most Affordable for Large-scale Email Marketing

SendX is one of the cheapest and easiest email tools you can use for marketing and sales campaigns. Plans start under $10 and will be far less expensive as your list scales than other email marketing apps. For example, lists with 10,000 contacts on Mailchimp will cost at least $100 a month vs $59.99 with SendX (or $44.99 per month paid annually).

It’s easy to create multi-level marketing and sales-triggered automations to streamline workflows, nurture leads at every stage of your sales funnel, and increase conversions. For more details, see why SendX made our list of the best email marketing software and what makes it so startup and small business-friendly.

Unlike most other email marketing tools, no features are locked behind higher tiers with SendX, which is also great if you’re on a tight budget. Your monthly cost to use SendX depends strictly on the size of your contact list, and prices don’t jump nearly as steeply as they do with other providers for larger contact lists.

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4. Mailchimp: Best for Email Marketing Automation

Industry leader Mailchimp also made it to our list of best email marketing software for small businesses. It allows you to easily create and send email newsletters and set up automated triggered and conditional workflows to reach, nurture, and convert leads and prospects.

Starting for free, you can create lead generation web forms for your small business website, publish landing pages, and send email updates to up to 500 contacts (previously, Mailchimp allowed up to 2,000 contacts for free, so this is a bit of a downgrade). If you have large contact lists, SendX offers comparable tools at a lower cost as you scale, and HubSpot allows up to 999 contacts in its free tier.

With paid plans, you can schedule emails and set up automated workflows for someone visiting your website, downloading something, or clicking on a link in an email. You can also create drip campaigns to nurture leads and customer relationships in your sales pipeline over time. This can be invaluable in longer customer buying cycles and upselling, cross-selling, and loyalty marketing efforts.

Mailchimp integrates seamlessly with most small business website builders and WordPress websites. This makes it easy to generate and sync leads to Mailchimp for future marketing and sales email campaigns. It also integrates with the online graphic design platform, Canva. Simply connect your Mailchimp and Canva accounts, and the graphics you design on Canva can be easily added to your marketing and sales email campaigns. Try it for free today.

Visit Mailchimp

Best Built-in Email Management Tools

Whether for internal communication or marketing to customers, email is heavily used in the corporate world, including 64% of small businesses, per email marketing stats. As such, email inboxes can often quickly become unmanageable, hindering productivity. The email management tools below allow for better organization, scheduling, and collaboration, so you can save time and get more work done.

5. Google Workspace & Gmail: Best for Cloud-based Email Management

Google Workspace is an industry leader for cloud-based email services, offering convenient tools for making online team collaboration easier than ever. Each plan includes cloud storage, built-in Google Chat and Google Meet in the Gmail interface, collaborative file and document notifications, and more. Gmail users can even manage multiple email accounts in their inbox, with comprehensive filters and categories for easy organization.

Once users sign up, they can seamlessly utilize the productivity and collaboration programs on Google Workspace such as Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets. At the same time, it comes with a bunch of handy features like meetings with automatic invites through Google Calendar and an intuitive Google Drive cloud storage. Finally, users can even extend the functionality of Gmail’s email management capabilities using Gmail add-ons and extensions.

Try out Gmail for free with a personal account for 15GB cloud storage and access to all Google programs. Once you’re comfortable, you can set up Gmail for business for as low as $6 a month. New Google Workspace users can enjoy a 10% discount for the first 20 users.

Get Google Workspace

6. Hiver: Best Email Tools for Team Collaboration via Gmail

The features provided in Gmail are more than enough for the typical business email user. But for sales, customer support, and other teams relying heavily on email, native tools aren’t enough. Fortunately, there are hundreds of free and paid email tools built just for Gmail to fill the gap, including Hiver’s email management software designed for help desk use.

Here are some of the email management tools that make Hiver a great pick:

• Robust Gmail customer support and help desk integration
• Shared drafts and templates for common email inquiries
• Tools to assess and improve call center metrics like average time to resolution and number of cases started, in progress, or closed

Hiver offers seamless management of incoming customer emails and chats—right from Gmail. Connect your team’s shared email inbox and then easily find unassigned queries, assign them to team members, and see the progress and status of all open, pending, and closed inquiries. Managers can use the dashboard to track and measure performance and get alerts of any service level agreement (SLA) violations.

Save even more time by adding shared templates for emails and chat that your team can use to respond to common questions. Or, start a response, save it as a shared draft, and assign it to your teammate to finish up and send. And, to keep your inbox clean and manageable, Hiver automatically removes closed and unresolvable emails.

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7. Boomerang for Gmail: Best Tool for Sales Email Scheduling

Boomerang for Gmail is extremely easy to use and can be added to Gmail quickly. It’s perfect for small business owners and sales teams wanting to schedule emails, book appointments, and monitor their inboxes from their phones, or who want help constructing new emails.

In addition, Boomerang for Gmail’s scheduling tools make it easy to set up meetings in and outside your company. Create and send an email, and your prospect can schedule a sales presentation or demo at the most convenient time.

Boomerang’s artificial intelligence (AI) powered writing assistant has your back when it comes to composing winning sales emails. It will let you know if your message is too long, lacks questions to spark engagement, or contains complex terms a recipient might not understand. It scores these, along with the sentiment, to determine when your email has the right stuff to produce a conversion (e.g., scheduling a demo, signing up for a free trial, or buying something).

Try Boomerang for Gmail

8. Streak: Best Gmail Email Management Tool for Sales Agents

Streak’s unique feature is that it’s a Chrome web browser extension. It can be linked to your Gmail to keep track of sales, projects, hiring, or in custom ways that fit your needs. Organize your inbox and keep the most important messages at hand for easy follow-up, or use the scheduling tool to plan your day in one go and let the extension do the work for you.

Streak is an especially great email tool for sales agents. With it, sales agents can instantly see whether a prospect opened their email as well as see a list of all tracked emails. Agents can even send personalized emails to multiple prospects simultaneously and monitor them in the mobile app.

Keep track of important messages for follow-up, view prospect data like notes and company information right from your inbox, and create custom pipelines to track any project or process. Collaborative sales teams can see which activities were performed in shared pipelines and who performed them to eliminate duplication of work and make sure prospects are being nurtured.

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9. Help Scout: Best Email Collaboration Tools for Customer Support

Help Scout enables teams to collaborate on answering emails, especially for customer support, and offers tools for both email management and productivity. Its shared email inbox lets you assign emails and tasks to team members. Plus, it helps write and share private notes, handle phone and live chat conversations, and create templated replies for frequently asked questions.

Beyond Help Scout’s email collaboration software is its handy workflow tools. These let you set up custom automations, like assigning emails with specific words to certain team members or moving them to email folders. It also has an email sidebar that provides helpful information about your email recipient, from their contact details and previous email conversations to their activity in other apps.

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Best Email Management Software for Contact List Building

Cold emailing is a long-established strategy for prospecting and sales. To build a list, your best bet is to use an email lookup tool to search and verify email addresses. From bulk verification features to platforms specializing in media contacts and public relations strategies, below are some of the best email finder tools for building contact lists.

10. Hunter: Best Free Business Email Software

Hunter is our top pick as the best free email lookup tool for domain-related email addresses. Since a list of domain names can be uploaded in bulk, it’s an efficient prospecting tool for sales teams that want to generate a list of email addresses for cold emailing or market research.

Use Hunter to find the business email addresses behind domains and then send emails to connect with potential customers using premade cold sales email templates. Hunter can help you grow your email list of potential clients and customers—starting from free.

Visit Hunter

11. GetProspect: Best Email Tool for Finding Addresses on LinkedIn

GetProspect is the perfect email lookup tool for a business-to-business (B2B) sales team that wants to get leads straight from LinkedIn. Starting without enough contacts is a problem most businesses go through during the early stages. GetProspect helps your business grow its contact list by collecting valid emails from LinkedIn in bulk, making it great for building a prospecting database or targeting people based on job titles or industries.

You can further enhance your contact list-building efforts with GetProspect’s Chrome extension. Simply add the extension to your browser, save profiles from a LinkedIn search, and extract data, including email addresses, without triggering LinkedIn’s profile view limits.

The quality of email addresses is also ensured through a 12-step email verification process, ensuring 97% deliverability. Upload your emailing list to GetProspect and get results in minutes regarding the quality of your contact data. This is valuable because sending emails to junk addresses wastes time and can even land your email campaigns in junk mail instead of inboxes.

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12. DeBounce: Best Tool for Verifying Contacts

DeBounce is a tool for bulk email address verification. Using verified email addresses allows you to eliminate all useless leads and focus on legitimate ones. It also helps you eliminate spam trap emails that could get your messages sent to junk or spam folders, and, in the process, improves deliverability overall.

Add the DeBounce JavaScript widget to your web forms to validate emails in real time and weed out fake email addresses. Use data enrichment tools to gather more information from 10 different sources and know more about the individual who belongs to each email address on your list, such as their name and even photos.

Integrate DeBounce with over 100 third-party apps, including leading email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Drip. Likewise, it integrates with WordPress plugins like Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms, and you can create “Zaps” to connect it to other business software you use through Zapier.

Use DeBounce on a one-time or occasional basis, or subscribe to Email List Monitoring to test and clean up your contact list database continually. This reduces the chance that your cold emailing campaign will include obsolete email addresses, resulting in high bounce rates, lower deliverability, and less cost-effective email campaigns.

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13. Prowly: Best for Contacting Media Professionals

Prowly is a valuable PR email tool for businesses wanting to build a media contact list for press releases. Users can access journalists’ basic contact details in the database of over 1 million media professionals around the globe, even during the free trial. Upgrading to a paid plan unlocks other helpful features, such as contact list building, media pitching, and press release creation and distribution.

Prowly’s built-in customer relationship manager (CRM) allows easy list building and email communication to thousands of journalists worldwide. It also has an online press release generator and distributor, letting you build and send press releases directly to journalists’ inboxes.

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14. FindEmails: Best Lookup Tool for Bulk Email Lists

Building large contact lists through paid sources can be expensive—FindEmails offers one of the more cost-effective ways to do this. In fact, with the highest-plan tier, your cost could be less than a penny per email. For this reason, we recommend it as the best email lookup finder for:

• Businesses on a budget looking to quickly engage a lot of prospects with cold emails
• Budget-conscious teams needing to source or verify large lists

All features come with all plans, so the only factor cost-wise will be how fast you want to build your list. Import and export emails one by one or in bulk using spreadsheets. Find emails using the app or via the Chrome extension. Also, save time, as there’s no separate process for verifying the email addresses you find or upload.

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Best Email Management Software for Productivity & Collaboration

Researcher Gloria Mark found that more time spent on email equates to lower performance and higher stress. But email tools for productivity and collaboration can turn your work email software into a time-saving, stress-reducing powerhouse. Whether managing tasks, meetings, team-based workflows, or limiting email distractions, the email tools below can help.

15. Todoist: Best for Task Management

Todoist is the best email tool for individuals managing tasks through email. It integrates with Outlook, Gmail, and several other popular email apps, including Zoho Mail. You can also use it with popular apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams—although the platform lacks some features teams need in a task manager. To get you started quickly, there are a number of prebuilt templates you can use in Todoist, including:

• Meeting agendas
• Project and goal trackers
• One-on-one meetings and reviews
• Accounting and bookkeeping tasks
• Blog post and book writing, design requests, and a content calendar
• Travel planning
• Class planning
• Training and onboarding checklists
• Feature planning, and more

It’s also a good tool for human resource management, as you can set up workflows for new employee onboarding and training. Most are geared toward the needs of the solopreneur or small business owner, or for individual employee tasks. For an app better for team task management, we recommend Trello (see below).

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16. Calendly: Best Software for Setting Up Meetings & Events

Calendly is one of the best email productivity tools for sales campaigns. It allows easy scheduling of meetings without having to go back and forth with emails. It’s ideal for sales teams that want to make it easy for prospects to schedule meetings for sales presentations and demos, including when multiple team members are involved, as calendars can be meshed and synced. Here are a few of its top use cases:

• Allowing prospects to book time for sales presentations or demonstrations as part of a sales email campaign
• Cold email campaigns and lead nurturing sales email campaigns
• Scheduling meetings within a team or with clients, prospects, candidates, vendors, and more

Calendly integrates easily with Gmail and Outlook as well as social platforms Twitter and LinkedIn. Once an appointment is made, it’s synced to all attendees’ calendars. You can set up email reminders to decrease no-shows, and if a meeting needs to be canceled or rescheduled, that’s easy with Calendly too.

Instead of managing calendars and appointment scheduling manually, you’ll be able to set schedules in one interface. Calendly helps you arrange meetings with clients, staff, partners, and prospects, and it’s all integrated with your business email.

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17. Trello: Best Tools for Team Task Management

Trello is such an effective task and project management tool that in years past, our team used it to manage our site’s complex content calendars within teams. It was easy to create a card to initiate a new article, task writers and graphic designers, and move the cards throughout each phase of our publishing process.

The visual orientation makes it super-easy to create tasks, assign them, and monitor whether tasks are getting done on time. As such, Trello is a great app for managing multi-step processes, and cards can be created and managed by email. This makes it an excellent tool for:

• Managing people projects like onboarding and training sequences
• Content creation and publishing for a business blog or multi-author publication
• Creating workflows for lead nurturing and onboarding new clients
• Multi-departmental projects, such as collateral and script development for revenue operations (RevOps) teams

For managers, Trello offers the advantage of multiple views. So, while your team might view everything in Kanban view, you can toggle to calendar, timeline, and table views to get a better idea of where everything is in the project. And, Trello integrates with several other apps via Power-Ups to streamline workflows even further.

The free-forever plan may be all a freelancer or small team ever needs, making it a very cost-effective email tool for task management. In addition to being able to make cards from email, users will get email notifications for just about everything, from being added or removed from a task or board to its due dates.

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18. BatchedInbox: Best Way to Reduce Distractions in Gmail

BatchedInbox only has one core offering: delivering emails to users only during specific times of the day. There are no other pricing plans or add-ons, just a fixed rate of $9.99 a month. If this seems like a lot to pay for one email tool, consider this. The average employee experiences a work distraction once every 10 minutes, and email is the most common one.

In fact, an employee might spend anywhere from 28% to half of their time on email, checking it as much as 11 times every hour. In addition, with every distraction comes extra time needed to refocus—making the value of this business email tool skyrocket. With a $9.99 BatchedInbox subscription, you get:

• Unlimited batching and scheduling for one email address
• Complete access to all controls
• The ability to retrieve emails on demand

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Best Email Tools for Improving Recipient Experiences

Your email strategy doesn’t end once you hit “send.” The best emails create positive experiences for their recipients, improving communication and brand perception. The email tools below have features for enhancing emails with custom signatures, tracking engagement, facilitating conversions, and ensuring your email is at its best before it gets sent.

19. WiseStamp: Best Email Tool for Custom Signatures

WiseStamp makes sure your emails stand out from the rest with a custom professional email signature. Add elements like headers, footers, fonts, images, videos, and action-inspiring buttons and build different email signatures for different uses.

You can use the email signature generator completely free to design one email signature from scratch or a template, but it will contain WiseStamp branding until you opt for a paid plan. Design a unique signature for business email, or use WiseStamp to create a unified branded professional email signature template for your whole organization.

Notably, HubSpot also has a free email signature generator, which is why it (along with WiseStamp) both made our list of the best email signature generators. However, HubSpot only offers a free version and lacks the templates and customization you can get with a paid plan through WiseStamp.

WiseStamp transforms boring cold emails into impactful advertising or marketing campaigns. Instead of sending plain and spammy all-text emails, it lets you create your own email signature design or start with one of the hundreds of professionally designed email signature templates that fit your industry or style.

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20. MailTrack: Best Tool for Tracking Email Opens

MailTrack is a valuable business email tool for tracking emails sent to clients or coworkers. It even made it to our list of top Gmail add-ons and extensions. Getting read receipts showing when an email has been read lets you know the best times to send emails and whether your email was effective (based on responses or actions taken). It can also be the basis for follow-up email scheduling, such as scheduling a follow-up email after an offer email has been read.

You can use MailTrack to track emails individually or in bulk. The free-forever version displays branding, but allows unlimited tracking, real-time notifications, and email alerts. It also has 72-hour reminders if you didn’t receive a response and even the ability to see whether emails sent to you are being tracked.

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21. Attach: Best for Email Forwards & Attachments Tracking

Beyond whether an email was read, Attach gives you data regarding what happens after. Learn whether your email was forwarded, attachments were viewed, and how your email’s content was engaged with. In turn, you can use this data to make more informed decisions about how best to reach prospects.

Understanding the best way to reach your potential customers helps you choose the right practices and eliminate ineffective ones, such as:

• Sales agents looking for insights as to buying signals or whether a lead is going cold
• Data-driven marketing teams looking to optimize campaign performance
• Businesses looking for a central library for sales and marketing materials for outside sales agents
• Companies that send important or sensitive information and attachments

If you’ve ever had a moment of regret after sending an email, Attach can help with that too. You can make changes to files or swap them out after sending a campaign. You can even update document security by adding a password or revoking access entirely to protect sensitive documents.

Attach also lets you create a central library of assets for things like proposals, contracts, or marketing materials. This way, all your agents will send the materials you want to represent your business. This is especially useful for companies that employ outside sales agents, such as homebuilders with outside real estate listing agents, or companies with franchise locations, like insurance agencies and financial advisers.

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22. DocHub: Best Email Tools for Electronic Document Signing

From financial transactions to contracts, employment offers, and sales, being able to sign documents digitally is the standard in today’s business world. Digital document signing (aka e-signature or e-sign) is exactly what DocHub allows you to do. For occasional users, the free plan allows up to five e-signatures and three sign requests per month.

If your document requires multiple signatures, DocHub has a workflow for that. Likewise, when sending the same document to many different individuals, like an acknowledgment of receipt for an updated employee handbook or terms of service, DocHub has a bulk signature process. You can also create templates for documents that you send out frequently to save time, and when returned, they will be organized under your templates so you can find them easily.

Besides that, documents don’t have to be sent by email—you can publish your templates publicly and share them through a URL or via Facebook or Twitter. When someone completes the form, you will automatically receive a copy. Get started for free today.

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23. Grammarly: Best Way to Proofread Emails Before Sending

With a Microsoft Outlook extension and free Chrome extension for browser-based platforms like Gmail, Grammarly is the best email tool for eliminating typos before sending emails. Grammarly helps prevent these mistakes and even has a tool that helps you improve your writing through suggestions.

Nearly everyone (93%) says they’ve made an email mistake at work at some point. These include typos, grammar issues, incomplete emails, or emails that weren’t easy to understand. Even if you proofread a message several times, a typo could remain, making it off-putting to the reader.

Need more proof? Consider these statistics:

• In a 10-year study, professionals who didn’t end up in director-level roles made 2.5 more writing mistakes than those who did. (Harvard Business Review)
• Pros who earned fewer promotions made 45% more mistakes than their counterparts who were promoted two to five times more during a 10-year period. (Harvard Business Review)
• 42.5% of web users say they are likely to be put off by spelling and grammar mistakes. (CXL blog)

The free version could be all a small business or freelancer needs to ensure they don’t put embarrassing mistakes through in email or in other written content—try it today.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

If I have email marketing software, do I need other email tools?

Email marketing is just one email tool out of dozens you can use to increase productivity, sales, and facilitate communication and collaboration. Email marketing software allows you to scale marketing emails by sending campaigns in bulk instead of one at a time. But other types of email tools help your emails stand out, allow you to track and measure performance, and improve your ability to reach and convert prospects.

How are marketing & sales emails different?

Generally, marketing emails are sent in bulk using software like Constant Contact or Mailchimp. These include communications like email newsletters, promotional email blasts, and customized emails for specific list segments. Sales emails, on the other hand, are emails sent to individual prospects at various stages of the sales funnel sent through email apps.

How much should you spend on email tools?

Many email management software have free versions to try. Depending on the size of your organization or contact list, or the features you want, you may need to move from a free email tool to a paid plan, but most cost less than $10 per user, monthly. The good news, in either case, is that these tools should improve your campaigns. In turn, they produce increased conversions and revenue to offset the subscription cost.

Bottom Line

Using the right combination of email management software will help you scale, manage, and understand your audience and their needs much better. From tools you can integrate on your small business website to standalone apps and software to acquire and convert leads, these email tools can take your marketing and sales campaigns from good to great.