Email marketing significantly contributes to successful online campaigns. Most major brands utilize email marketing to extend their reach and improve return rates.  With the correct email marketing program you can be on your way to an effective email campaign. We’ve selected 5 great options and ran through the features that are important when choosing a program for your agency.

Campaign Monitor
This program often appeals to agencies because of the 10% agency discount, and early access to product announcement feature. This allows agencies to stay a step ahead of clients in terms of new innovation. Campaign Monitor is praised for its dashboard ,which is optimized for usability. They are very thorough in all of their fields so you can be error free when entering information. They integrate analytics and allow you to manage subscribers all in the same area so you can stay on one page and access all of your important data. Some key features of Campaign Monitor are the e-commerce integration as well as the ready to use (free) templates.  Their pricing options are also unique in that you can choose a pay per campaign feature, ideal for your agency’s smaller accounts.

Constant Contact
Constant Contact offers 400+ customizable email templates a well as blank ones that you can directly code. The Facebook Fan Page app is a great feature that allows your fans to sign up for emails from your Facebook Page. The reporting data is very thorough and provides you with insights about bounced emails, complains, opt-out requests, forwards, and social sharing. Constant Contact offers several ways to import contacts, which saves a lot of headaches when you are just getting started. The pricing is based upon the number of email addresses and ranges from $15/mo-$75/mo for up to 10,000 email addresses.

MailChimp
Like Constant Contact, MailChimp offers countless email templates. In an effort to improve UX they implemented a drag and drop editor for quick and attractive emails, and their templates are even optimized for mobile devices, which is awesome. MailChimp encourages integration with other applications and offers an open API. Their reports provide data on number of clicks, top performing links, spam reports, etc. They also offer an iPad/iPhone app for on the go management, but they are lacking one for Android platforms.  There are many pricing options with MailChimp, the most popular being the “forever free” which ensure customers that their free accounts are not going anywhere – a very smart move on their part.

SendGrid
SendGrid has options for just about anybody with features that mirror most of the aforementioned programs: advanced reporting and analytics, content monitoring. You are able to track requests, deliveries, bounces, spam reports, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, category tracking and more, all in real-time. Another perk is that SendGrid’s pricing is hard to beat you can send thousands of emails for less than $10.

A-Weber
A-Weber has less template options, but makes up for it with their integration with WordPress, PayPal, Eventbrite, and more. The program allows you to segment subscriber lists by location, opens, and what pages the subscriber visited on your site. They have custom HTML options and attachment features. However, you are unable to send surveys through A-Weber. Their panel is very easy to use and they offer a great sign-up form tool for an additional way to keep subscribers connected. A-Weber can only be used with a monthly fee, but the first month only costs $1, So it is not a huge investment.