A Step-by-Step Guide To Picking the Right Email Marketing Tool

So, you’ve decided that email marketing is a must-have in your marketing toolkit. 

You’re not alone. According to the 2023 Email Workflows Report by Litmus, 87% of businesses say email marketing is critical to their success.

Choosing an email marketing platform is not just about features anymore. The wrong choice can lock you into higher costs, limit growth, or force a painful migration later. The right choice should fit how you plan to grow, monetize, and communicate over the next few years.

By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of what to look for in an email marketing platform, and more importantly, you'll feel confident in choosing the right one to power your email strategy, boost email ROI, and help your business thrive.

TL;DR: How to choose an email marketing platform

• Start by defining your main goal: leads, sales, or monetization

• Small teams should prioritize ease of use and predictable pricing

• Creators and media brands benefit from built-in growth and monetization tools

• Ecommerce teams need deep integrations and revenue tracking

• Always test a platform before committing long-term

Why Trust Me?

Kawusara Salley has three years of experience with email marketing, working on side projects and volunteering to help businesses with their email projects. She’s also a passionate software reviewer who has tested 15 top email marketing platforms and loves sharing her unique insights in plain, simple language.

Table of Contents

• TL;DR: How to choose an email marketing platform

• Assess Your Email Marketing Needs and Goals

  • 1. Evaluate your business size

  • 2. Identify the type of emails you want to send

  • 3. Define your email marketing goals

  • 4. Consider industry-specific requirements

    • Best fit by industry:

  • 5. Take note of your budget

• Key Features to Look for in Email Marketing Tools

• What Matters Most by Use Case

• Comparing Email Marketing Companies and Services

  • Making the decision: choosing the right email mark …

• Leveraging beehiiv for Your Email Marketing Success

• Frequently asked questions

  • How do I know if I’ve outgrown my email platform?

  • Is free email marketing software worth it?

  • Should I switch platforms or stick with what I hav …

  • What’s the biggest mistake when choosing a platfor …

Assess Your Email Marketing Needs and Goals

When you understand your email marketing needs and goals, you’ll be better prepared to choose a platform that is right for your business. To get started, here are five key factors to consider:

1. Evaluate your business size

The size of your business plays a big role in choosing the right email marketing platform. If you're a small business, you'll likely want a budget-friendly tool with an intuitive newsletter editor and basic audience segmentation and automation tools. 

However, if you’re part of a larger company with more complex needs and a big budget, it’s better to choose a platform with advanced automation, segmentation, and analytics tools. While this comes with a steep learning curve in the beginning, investing in training your marketing team will pay off in the long run.

Quick rule of thumb:

• Solo or small team: choose the simplest platform that covers your must-haves

• Multi-person team: prioritize permissions, reporting, and automation depth

• Growing list: make sure pricing scales predictably with subscribers and volume

2. Identify the type of emails you want to send

There are two broad categories of emails you can send to your email subscribers and customers: marketing emails and transactional emails. 

Marketing emails—like newsletters, promotions, and product updates—let you engage with your audience, stay top of mind, and boost product sales. Most email marketing platforms support this, but not all of them offer transactional emails. 

Transactional emails are automated messages sent to customers to take a specific action on your website or app. This includes creating a new account, resetting a password, abandoning their shopping cart, or purchasing an item. 

If you need transactional emails, confirm the platform supports them natively or integrates cleanly with a transactional provider.

3. Define your email marketing goals

Different businesses have different email marketing goals. Understanding your main goal—lead generation, product sales, effective multi-channel campaigns, or email monetization—helps to identify platforms with unique features that’ll support your goal. 

For example, if email marketing is a channel to generate leads for your B2B business, you might want to look out for platforms with a built-in CRM and lead scoring tools. 

Meanwhile, if your main goal is to boost product sales, you’ll want to check if an email marketing platform offers robust segmentation, automation, and A/B testing tools to make it happen. 

And if you want to run effective multi-channel campaigns that boost brand awareness and eventually lead to more sales, look out for platforms with social media scheduling and ads management features. 

How about if you’re looking to make money directly from your newsletter? Then your tool of choice should have built-in monetization tools like ads management and paid subscriptions. 

If you can only choose one goal to optimize for, pick the one tied closest to revenue- it will make the platform decision much easier.

4. Consider industry-specific requirements

Depending on your business’s industry, certain email marketing tools will be better suited for you. 

For instance, if you’re in the creator or media industry, you’ll benefit most from an email marketing platform with built-in growth and monetization tools. This way, you can grow your email list faster and generate an additional passive income stream.

In contrast, if you run an e-commerce business, you'll need a platform that integrates with your online store, allows you to showcase products in emails, tracks revenue from campaigns, and segments customers based on purchasing behavior for more targeted, sales-driven campaigns.

Best fit by industry:

• Creators/media: growth + monetization built in

• Ecommerce: store integrations + product blocks + revenue attribution

• B2B: CRM + segmentation + multi-step workflows

• Local/service businesses: simplicity + templates + basic automation

5. Take note of your budget

After assessing multiple email platforms and narrowing it down to a few options with the features you require, compare their pricing plans with your budget to help you make a final decision.

Many platforms charge based on your subscriber count and email volume. So, if you plan on sending frequent campaigns or have a growing contact list, make sure the platform’s pricing scales with your long-term needs. 

Pricing surprises usually happen for two reasons: subscriber-based tiers and features locked behind upgrades. Always check the cost at your expected list size 6–12 months from now.

Key Features to Look for in Email Marketing Tools

The previous section hinted at certain key features to look out for in an email marketing platform. But this time, we’ve rounded all the key features in a list, so it’s easier to decide which ones you do and don’t need.

1. Ease of use: Check how intuitive the platform’s interface and newsletter editor are. It’ll save you lots of time and effort, so you can focus on what matters—publishing emails! And if you plan to design graphic emails, having access to a template library makes it easier to get started.

2. Audience management: Your chosen email marketing platform should have sign-up forms and a landing page builder (or website builder) for collecting new subscribers. It should also have a segmentation feature to group these subscribers for running personalized, targeted campaigns.  

If you have more complex needs, the platform should also be able to automatically segment users based on their behavior. For example, it should let you group subscribers based on the actions they take in an automation sequence or the specific links they click in your emails. 

3. A/B testing: Platforms with this feature let you test different versions of an email to see which one performs best. Some platforms let you test two variations of an email’s content, while others let you test up to five versions. Besides email content, there are platforms that let you optimize other areas like subject line, sender name, and send time.

4. Automation: If you’re planning to launch multiple automated email sequences that welcome new subscribers, promote an upcoming event or product launch, or educate your customers on product features, then having an automation tool in your email platform is a must. Ensure the automation tool covers the core triggers and actions you need for running your email sequences. 

And here’s a pro tip: check out a platform’s automation template library to gauge its capabilities and see if it can support the use cases you have in mind.

5. Integrations: Your email marketing platform should seamlessly integrate into your existing tech stack. So, check if it has native integrations that connect with your CRM tool, e-commerce shop, social media, or ad platforms. And if you’re looking to connect with custom apps or ones that aren’t natively supported, check if they have a Zapier integration or allow access to their API.

6. Analytics: Most platforms provide basic email marketing metrics like open, click-through, and bounce rates. However, some platforms go further by offering industry-specific insights. 

For instance, platforms tailored to e-commerce businesses show revenue generated from your emails, while platforms built for creators and media companies let you visualize your most effective audience growth channels. 

7. Monetization tools: Email marketing platforms can help promote your business’s products, but if your goal is to generate income directly from your newsletter content, you'll need to choose tools with built-in monetization features. These tools allow you to run ads and offer paid subscriptions to turn your content into a revenue stream. 

8. Email deliverability: This shows the percentage of your emails that will land in your recipient's inbox (instead of the dreaded spam folder). So the higher your deliverability, the better.

One big factor that affects this is your email platform’s sender reputation. To get a sense of what this is, check Email Tooltester’s deliverability reports, scan review sites to see if the platform’s users are complaining about it, or conduct your own deliverability test.

That said, sender reputation is only one piece of the puzzle. Regardless of the email platform you choose, you need to ensure you’re following best email deliverability practices to boost your deliverability. 

9. Customer support: A good email marketing platform should have an extensive resource library with help center articles, video tutorials, webinars, or community forums. You should also check if they’ve got responsive customer support via your preferred channel—email, live chat, or phone.

10. Pricing: If you're on a tight budget, look for free plans that let you use basic features and run simple email campaigns for a smaller audience. As your list and email volume grows, be sure to check how these impact the pricing in different email marketing platforms to see which fits with your budget.

What Matters Most by Use Case

If you run a newsletter or creator business:
Prioritize publishing workflow, growth tools (referrals/recommendations), monetization (ads/paid subs), and audience analytics.

If you run ecommerce:
Prioritize deep integrations, behavioral segmentation (purchasers vs browsers), automation flows, and revenue reporting.

If you run B2B marketing:
Prioritize CRM integration, lead capture, segmentation, scoring, and multi-step nurture sequences.

If you run a small business:
Prioritize ease of use, templates, simple automation, and pricing that won’t spike as your list grows.

Comparing Email Marketing Companies and Services

Now that you know what to look for, here’s the fastest way to compare platforms: shortlist tools by your use case, then test the one feature you care about most (automation, segmentation, analytics, or monetization).

If you’re overwhelmed, start with three categories:

• Newsletter-first platforms (best for creators/media)

• CRM-first platforms (best for B2B)

• Ecommerce-first platforms (best for product sales)

To explore more options, check out our list of the best email marketing services. 

And for a smoother email marketing experience, consider pairing your chosen email platform with some of our top software picks for email marketers. These tools will help you with content research, designing custom graphics, and managing your email projects.

Making the decision: choosing the right email marketing software

You made it here! And it’s now time to make a decision on which platform is right for you. Use this simple three-step process to guide you:

1. Shortlist: Pick 2–4 tools that match your primary goal and must-have features.

2. Test drive: Use a free plan or trial and test your #1 workflow (welcome series, promo campaign, segmentation, reporting).

3. Decide: Choose the tool that feels easiest to run consistently and supports growth without forcing early upgrades.

Leveraging beehiiv for Your Email Marketing Success

Choosing the right email marketing platform is easy when you know what you need and what to look for. Many platforms, like beehiiv, offer free plans and trials, so you can test them before making your choice.

beehiiv is a perfect fit if you’re a content creator or digital solopreneur looking to grow your personal brand or monetize your newsletter content. 

Its unique set of analytics, growth, and monetization tools has helped over 150,000 creators (and counting) to grow into recognizable brands and build profitable businesses.

Growth tools

Most email marketing platforms leave you to grow your newsletter on your own…but not beehiiv. 

Join beehiiv’s recommendation network to cross-promote newsletters with other creators on the platform. So when someone subscribes to another creator’s newsletter, beehiiv will recommend yours. If they’re interested, they’ll subscribe. 

You can also turn your existing audience into brand ambassadors. beehiiv’s referral program makes it easy to reward your subscribers for bringing in new signups. This system helped The Brink’s newsletter grow to 14,000 subscribers in just one month.  

“Delivering the [reward] to people whenever they've made a referral—It's a digital product, but you guys just do that in a really easy way. I don't have to set up any automations or anything. It's juFrequently asked questions

How do I know if I’ve outgrown my email platform?
If you’re paying for features you don’t use, struggling with automation limitations, or your costs spike with list growth, you’ve likely outgrown it.

Is free email marketing software worth it?
Yes — free plans are great for validating your workflow and building consistency. Just confirm what limits you’ll hit as your list grows.

Should I switch platforms or stick with what I have?
Switch if your platform blocks growth, automation, monetization, or reporting. Stick if the pain is minor and you can solve it with better processes.

What’s the biggest mistake when choosing a platform?
Choosing based on today’s price instead of how pricing and features scale at your expected list size in 6–12 months.st kind of just done. I like that a lot. That's definitely saved me a lot of time” — Marcus Ramsey, Founder of The Brink

Monetization tools

beehiiv’s ad network is the easiest way to start monetizing your newsletter content—it’s like Google Ads but for newsletters. 

You get to promote top brands and earn some extra cash on a cost-per-click basis. Jennifer Chou leveraged this feature to boost her newsletter revenue:

“The ad network... It works on autopilot. One time a lot of people clicked on a B2B ad that paid two dollars per click. So I made $600 from that one email, and that was from the beehiiv ad network.” — Jennifer Chou, Founder of Vegan Tech Nomad

You can also run a premium subscription, where your audience pays a monthly fee to receive premium newsletter content. Jennifer also uses this feature to make an extra $627 in MRR. 

Analytics

Besides covering basic analytics, beehiiv provides insights for optimizing your subscriber growth and income. 

For example, the Subscribers by Acquisition graph shows which marketing channels are bringing in the most subscribers, so you can double down on your most effective marketing channels. 

“To be able to see where the traffic source is coming from has been really crucial for us to figure out what our strategy is to gain and increase followers.” — Cody Hock, Co-founder of Enjoy Basketball

beehiiv also compiles a list of your top-performing posts across specific periods, making it easier to adjust your content strategy. For example, if you notice posts about a certain topic or product getting more clicks or conversions, it’s a sign to create more content around that subject.

These features are super cool, right?

You can test them by signing up for a free beehiiv account.

Get started with beehiiv today! 

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if I’ve outgrown my email platform?

If you’re paying for features you don’t use, struggling with automation limitations, or your costs spike with list growth, you’ve likely outgrown it.

Is free email marketing software worth it?

Yes — free plans are great for validating your workflow and building consistency. Just confirm what limits you’ll hit as your list grows.

Should I switch platforms or stick with what I have?

Switch if your platform blocks growth, automation, monetization, or reporting. Stick if the pain is minor and you can solve it with better processes.

What’s the biggest mistake when choosing a platform?

Choosing based on today’s price instead of how pricing and features scale at your expected list size in 6–12 months.