The Definitive Guide to the Top 12 Email Service Providers for Bloggers

An unfiltered, no‑nonsense review of the top 12 email service providers trusted by bloggers, creators, and online entrepreneurs who actually care about results. If you want the truth — not hype, not affiliate‑driven fluff — this breakdown will show you exactly which platforms deserve your attention and which ones don’t.

Size matters. What is the size of your email list? I mean, how many people do you have on your email list? And talking about your email list, which of the email service providers looks after your list?

Back to size. Is your email list:

• Anemic?
• Teeny weeny?
• Non-existent? or
• Huge?

If you have a product to sell or an affiliate offer to promote, can you send an email to a targeted list of at least 2,500 engaged subscribers who love to read your emails?

Develop An Effective Strategy For List Building

If you’re not comfortable with any of those questions, then you need to smell the coffee and wake up to the idea that you need an effective strategy for building an email list.

As a blogger, author, copywriter, internet marketer, coach, a content marketer or other online entrepreneur, your email list is your greatest asset. Implemented properly, your email list will certainly become the most important tool in your business for creating relationships and making sales.

That’s why you should take your time and invest in a good email service provider; also called email hosting providers or simply email providers.

Still not convinced you need an email list? Check out the following stats. According to Capterra:

• The average return on $1 spent on email marketing is $44.25;
• When marketed through email, consumers spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers.
• 44% of consumers made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email they received
• Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion.

What Is An Email Service Provider?

So, assuming you’ve bought into the idea of building a targeted email list. You now have a strategy for building an email list that includes a killer lead magnet, and a landing page/optin page that crazy converts.

So, what next?

There’s one huge part of the jigsaw that’s still missing. You need email automation and an email marketing platform that works. This will be provided by your email service provider. An email service provider (ESP) is a company that offers email marketing or bulk email services. It is the software used by bloggers and other content managers to manage their email marketing, such as for sending promotional email campaigns

Why is email automation so critical? By automating your email workflow, you can unlock the true potential of your email list. It will help you turn your leads into customers. It will make your subscribers more engaged. And if you set it upright, all this will happen with a minimum amount of intervention on your part.

Without an email service provider with an email platform that works:

• You won’t be able to immediately and automatically welcome your subscriber to your list with an automated welcome email.
• You won’t be able to send updates to your email audience telling them about new products, blog posts and sales or discounts.
• You won’t build relationships with subscribers that’ll turn into sales or conversations at your next meetup or conference.

And you certainly won’t have your email platform send the right email to the right person for you while you chill on the couch looking at all the revenue you got from your last email.

So if you don’t have an email marketing platform or you are not satisfied with the one you currently have, or perhaps you don’t have one that provides you with powerful email automation, then this article is definitely for you.

Why You Need Email Service Providers

For the benefit of those who are new to this concept, to build your email list, you need an email service provider (ESP). It is very important to start with email service providers who are good and reputable. Good email service providers will provide you with a software that does these seven things:

• Store the email addresses of all your subscribers. These can be very easily converted into a csv file, if you need to export the list somewhere else, or if you decide to change ESP.
• Store important data from every email campaign, including the following information:
  • Number of emails sent
  • Those who opened each email;
  • Those who clicked on any link on the email; and
  • Those who unsubscribed
• Post their deliverability rates. For example, you can go to any of the major email service providers to find out their deliverability rates, which will help you choose a good provider.
• Work hard to improve those deliverability rates. For example, the major email service providers will have dedicated staff who work daily with major ISPs to get your emails delivered to their recipients.
• Actively ban any marketers who spam or engage in other questionable practices. This improves deliverability for everyone else.
• Provide an autoresponder service. Autoresponders are emails sent automatically to your subscribers when triggered by a series of events you determine. They can be used to greet new subscribers, alert them about new products or services, or even wish them a happy birthday. All you have to do is set up the rules, write the message, and let the autoresponder take care of the rest. Many of the best autoresponders will also have reporting tools to help you keep track of how your email campaigns are performing so you can constantly improve and retool.
• Provide a system where your subscribers can unsubscribe at any time. This is important, as there are two basic rules of engagement that come with email marketing:
  • Always have permission to market to someone via email; and
  • If that permission changes, stop sending them email marketing

Review Of The Top 12 Email Service Providers For Bloggers [Email Service Providers List Alphabetically]

When it comes to the Email Service Providers (ESP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite for bloggers, what are the top 12? According to Capterra, there are over 251 email marketing software solutions currently on the market. How then does one choose the top 100 email providers, let alone the top 12? We will go into this in just a moment.

But first, when deciding on which of the email service providers or customer relationship management suite to use, think of the following:

1. Understand that there are no perfect email service providers (ESP) or customer relationship management (CRM) suite. They all have pros and cons. Select the one that best fits the way you and your business works.
2. Review your current situation. [If you don’t yet have one, then skip this step.] Who are your current email service providers? What are they brilliant with? What are they not so good at? What are you dissatisfied with taking into consideration the following:
   • Integration
   • Functionality
   • Usability
   • Your budget and resources
   • Customer support
3. Know your requirements for a new provider. What do you really want? E.g. you may be interested in the  best paid email service in India, best paid email service 2018 or 2019, best paid email service, best paid email service for small business or even best email service for privacy.
4. Research the market
5. Make a shortlist of at least 3 prospective providers
6. Test/ request demos from your shortlisted vendors
7. Make a decision and start the migration process

Back to our list of the top 12 email service providers for bloggers. Please note that I am arranging this in alphabetical order. This list is based on my understanding of what most bloggers use, based on market share and reviews. Feel free to let me know in the comments if you think I have missed out an ESP software that should be in the top 12.

Active Campaign

ActiveCampaign is one of the most affordable email service providers for small businesses and their software is exceptionally well-designed. It is a great option for any business size.

ActiveCampaign is an integrated marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) suite with a foundation in email marketing. Targeted towards small-to-midsize businesses, the software is designed to help organizations build their contact lists, create professional emails, manage campaigns, track customer behavior and measure their marketing campaign performance.

For a long time, the only email service providers that provided automation capabilities were hugely expensive products like InfusionSoft and Ontraport. This put the power that automation out of the reach for many small businesses and entrepreneurs.

ActiveCampaign is an affordable email service provider that also includes some impressive email marketing automation features. This makes it one of the best choices for power email marketers.

ActiveCampaign’s email marketing and marketing automation applications include drag-and-drop email design, lead capture forms, social integration and tracking, lead segmentation, website tracking and email campaign reporting. While ActiveCampaign integrates with several leading third-party CRM solutions, it also offers its own sales force automation (SFA) features, including contact management, drag-and-drop deal tracking, pipeline management and lead scoring.

They offer an extremely flexible pricing plan for any business, from small to enterprise. Prices start at just $9/mo for 500 contacts. Despite this, not many people have even heard of them.

All plans include unlimited emails, unlike Campaign Monitor, which offers both basic plans with limited emails, and more expensive unlimited plans. You can save 15 percent off the monthly cost by paying annually; however, ActiveCampaign does not offer pay-as-you-go plans, like Campaign Monitor and MailChimp do.

Pros:

• Great customer support – Their customer support is amazing, they really go all-out to make sure you comfortable using their product. While I don’t have any first-hand experience with ActiveCampagins’s customer support, it’s evident from the hundreds of positive reviews.
• Great user interface – The first thing that you notice when you start using ActiveCampaign is how well-designed and intuitive the user interface is. It’s one of the only marketing automation tools that I’ve come across that needs practically no training to understand.
• Zapier Integration – ActiveCampaign integrates with over 150 different tools via their Zapier integration. While this enables you to connect ActiveCampaign with a huge variety of tools, you will need a paid Zapier subscription to access certain integrations.
• Fantastic pricing – For the majority of small business who don’t want to commit to paying thousands of dollars per year to try marketing automation, ActiveCampaign is a great option. Their pricing starts at just $9/month with no upfront setup fees.
• ActiveCampaign’s email management abilities are all-around solid, from the split testing to the functionality to create special date-based campaigns. (You can send customer birthday emails, for instance.)
• And as another plus, ActiveCampaign makes it seriously simple to upload contacts. In fact, they are the only solution I’ve found that allows you to sync your contact info from a third-party program, like such as your company’s CRM.
• They also have an awesome drag-and-drop interface.
• The main power of