Email marketing remains a dominant force for a reason. With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, it’s a channel with unparalleled reach. More importantly, it’s how customers prefer to communicate with brands. Studies show that 60% of consumers favor email for receiving promotions and product updates, and marketers consistently report high engagement rates.
However, with thousands of tools available, finding the right fit can feel overwhelming, especially for a web creator advising a small business client. You need a solution that is not only powerful but also intuitive and seamlessly integrated into your existing workflow. This guide cuts through the noise to review the seven best email marketing platforms for small businesses in 2025. We’ll explore what makes each tool unique, helping you find the right fit to scale your operations, strengthen customer relationships, and deliver demonstrable results for your clients.
What to Look For in an Email Marketing Platform
Before diving into the specific tools, it’s essential to establish the criteria for a great email marketing platform, especially from the perspective of a web creator building sites for small businesses. Your client’s success depends on having the right features without unnecessary complexity.
Ease of Use and Integration
For any small business, time is a precious resource. A platform with a steep learning curve can be a significant barrier. The ideal solution should be intuitive, allowing you or your client to manage campaigns without needing a dedicated marketing expert.
Integration is the other half of this equation. A tool that doesn’t play well with your website’s content management system (CMS) can cause endless headaches. For businesses running on WordPress, a WordPress-native solution is the gold standard. This means the tool is built specifically for the WordPress environment, not just connected to it via a third-party plugin. This native approach minimizes plugin conflicts, eliminates data-syncing issues, and ensures a smoother, more reliable experience within a familiar dashboard.
Core Features: Automation and Segmentation
To truly drive results in 2025, a platform needs to do more than just send bulk emails.
- Marketing Automation is the engine of modern email marketing. The ability to set up automated workflows, or “flows,” is non-negotiable. These are pre-built sequences of emails triggered by specific customer actions. For example, a “Welcome Series” for new subscribers or an “Abandoned Cart” reminder for potential shoppers. These flows work for you 24/7, nurturing leads and recovering sales without manual intervention.
- Audience Segmentation is the key to personalization. Instead of sending the same message to everyone, segmentation enables you to group contacts based on specific criteria, such as their purchase history, location, or past email interactions. This enables you to send highly targeted messages that resonate with each customer, leading to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
Scalability and Fair Pricing
A small business needs a platform that can grow with it. The tool you choose today should support your client’s needs tomorrow, whether they have 100 contacts or 100,000. Look for platforms with tiered plans that allow you to scale up features and capacity as the business expands.
The pricing model should be transparent and fair. A usage-based model, where you pay based on the number of contacts or sends, is often the most logical for small businesses. Avoid platforms with confusing fees, long-term contracts, or high costs for essential features. A generous free tier is also a huge plus, as it allows you and your client to get comfortable with the platform before committing financially.
Analytics and Reporting
How do you prove to your client that your marketing efforts are working? The answer is data. A great email marketing platform provides clear, real-time analytics that show you exactly how your campaigns are performing. This goes beyond simple metrics like open and click rates. You need to see the direct return on investment (ROI), such as how much revenue each email or automation flow has generated. This kind of demonstrable ROI is crucial for web creators looking to provide ongoing value and justify their services.
1. Send by Elementor
Send by Elementor is not just an email marketing tool; it’s a complete communication toolkit designed from the ground up as a native part of the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem. Its core purpose is to empower web creators to move beyond one-off website builds and become indispensable, long-term partners for their clients. It simplifies the traditionally complex world of marketing automation, allowing creators to seamlessly integrate powerful email and SMS campaigns that boost client sales and customer retention.
Why Send by Elementor is a Game-Changer for Web Creators
What truly sets this platform apart is its deep, native integration. It wasn’t an external tool that was later adapted for WordPress; it was born there. This eliminates a whole class of problems that creators often face with other platforms, such as managing clunky APIs, troubleshooting data syncing errors, or dealing with plugin conflicts that bog down a website. Instead, everything is managed from the familiar WordPress dashboard, creating an intuitive and efficient workflow.
This approach transforms the service offering for a web creator. You can confidently add professional email and SMS marketing to your list of services, creating a reliable stream of recurring revenue. You’re no longer just handing over a website; you’re providing an ongoing engine for growth, strengthening your client relationships for the long haul.
A Deep Dive into Key Features
Send by Elementor consolidates the essential marketing tools into a single, cohesive platform, reducing the dependency on multiple plugins that can complicate a website’s architecture.
The All-in-One Communication Toolkit
- Email Marketing & Automation: At its heart is a powerful email campaign builder. Using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can design beautiful, responsive emails without touching a line of code. The platform comes equipped with ready-made templates built on Elementor’s own design best practices, allowing for a quick start on professional-looking campaigns. You can easily build out newsletters, promotional blasts, and sophisticated automation sequences.
- SMS Marketing & Automation: Recognizing that customers engage across multiple channels, Send by Elementor integrates SMS marketing directly into the toolkit. Text messages have an immediacy that email can’t match, with over 90% being read within three minutes. By offering this service, you can help clients reach customers with time-sensitive offers or important updates, all managed from the same central dashboard.
- Marketing Automation Flows: This is where Send by Elementor truly shines for driving client results. The platform includes both pre-built and custom workflows to automate communication based on user behavior.
- Abandoned Cart: A customer adds an item to their cart but leaves without buying. Send by Elementor can automatically send a reminder email (or SMS) a few hours later, perhaps with a small discount, to encourage them to complete the purchase. This one flow can significantly boost revenue.
- Welcome Series: When a new user subscribes, a multi-part welcome series can automatically introduce them to the brand, showcase popular products, and offer a first-time purchase incentive. This builds an immediate relationship and encourages engagement.
- Re-engagement: If a customer hasn’t made a purchase in a while, you can set up a flow to automatically reach out with a special offer or a “we miss you” message to bring them back into the fold.
- Advanced Audience Segmentation: The platform allows for precise audience targeting. You can create segments based on a wide range of data, such as purchase history from WooCommerce, on-site behavior, or how they signed up. For example, you could create a segment of “VIP customers” who have spent over a certain amount and send them exclusive offers, or target users who have bought a specific product with recommendations for complementary items. This level of personalization makes marketing far more effective.
Empowering the Web Creator’s Business
Send by Elementor is fundamentally a tool for business growth, both for your client and for you.
- Shift from Projects to Partnerships: It provides a clear pathway from project-based income to stable, recurring revenue. You can offer clients a monthly retainer to manage their email and SMS marketing, creating and optimizing campaigns and automation flows. This makes you an ongoing strategic partner rather than just a one-time vendor.
- Prove Your Value with Clear ROI: One of the biggest challenges for any agency or freelancer is demonstrating the value of their work. Send by Elementor’s
real-time analytics solves this problem directly. The dashboard clearly connects marketing activities to client revenue. You can generate reports that show your client, “This abandoned cart flow we set up last month recovered $X in lost sales,” providing undeniable proof of your impact.
Summary
For any small business operating on WordPress, and especially for the web creators who build and manage those sites, Send by Elementor presents a uniquely powerful and logical choice. It’s a comprehensive communication toolkit that lives inside the ecosystem you already know and trust. Simplifying advanced marketing tools and integrating them seamlessly into WordPress allows you to amplify your clients’ results while simultaneously building a more profitable and sustainable business for yourself.
2. Yotpo Email Marketing & SMS
Yotpo provides a platform that unifies email and SMS marketing efforts, designed for eCommerce brands looking to drive revenue through customer engagement. The system enables users to build and grow their subscriber base with high-converting, compliant opt-in forms. From a unified platform, brands can create precise audience segments for personalized messaging by using over 180 different customer data points.
The tool supports advanced marketing strategies, including multichannel and multi-message campaigns and automation flows. To help optimize these efforts, it includes features for comprehensive performance analytics and A/B testing, allowing marketers to refine their approach for better engagement and ROI. The pricing model allows users to pay as they go, offering transparency without tying them to contact list fees or platform fees.
3. AdRoll
AdRoll is a digital advertising platform focused on helping businesses drive conversions through personalized advertisements. It is designed to improve customer engagement across various stages of the marketing funnel. Over 140,000 companies have used the tool to manage their digital ad campaigns.
Key features include retargeting campaigns, which allow businesses to re-engage visitors who have left their site. The platform also offers automated audience segmentation and multiple targeting options, such as contextual, look-alike, and demographic targeting. Analytics and attribution features are included to help users measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. While the app is free to install, paid packages are required to access features like marketing automation and social media integrations.
4. Octane AI
Octane AI operates as an advanced quiz platform for Shopify merchants, designed to create more personalized shopping experiences. The core idea is that by engaging customers with quizzes, brands can collect valuable zero-party data and analyze it to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and preferences.
This understanding is then used to recommend the most suitable products for each individual, which helps in building a stronger relationship between the brand and the buyer. The platform is trusted by over 3,500 Shopify merchants. Octane AI offers several paid plans, with pricing tiers based on the number of engagements (quiz completions) per month.
5. Shopify Inbox
Shopify Inbox is a free business chat application developed by Shopify for its merchants. The tool is designed to help business owners turn browsers into buyers by engaging them in real-time conversations directly on their online store. It facilitates live chat support, which many brands find increases customer loyalty and sales.
When engaging with a customer, the app provides merchants with valuable context, such as which products the customer has viewed or what is currently in their cart. This allows for more personalized support, targeted product recommendations, and the ability to offer timely discounts to encourage a purchase. To help manage conversations efficiently, it also includes AI-powered features like instant answers and suggested replies.
6. Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals
Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals is a tool designed to help eCommerce brands foster customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases. It empowers brands to create customized loyalty and referral programs with flexible reward structures. This allows businesses to incentivize a variety of customer actions that are valuable to them, such as making a purchase, engaging on social media, writing a review, or referring a friend.
The platform can be used to create tiered loyalty programs and behavior-triggered campaigns to keep customers engaged. As part of Yotpo’s larger suite of products, it integrates with their Reviews, SMS, and Email platforms to create a more connected ecosystem for managing customer retention. The tool offers a free plan for new stores, with paid tiers available for businesses with higher order volumes and a need for more advanced features.
7. Subi Subscriptions App
The Subi Subscriptions App is a tool built for Shopify stores that want to launch and manage subscription-based services. It provides a user-friendly environment with an intuitive customer portal, making it easy for shoppers to subscribe and manage their recurring orders. The setup process is designed to be quick, and the streamlined, mobile-friendly design aims to provide a smooth experience for customers.
For merchants, the app offers tools and insights to track key performance metrics related to their subscription offerings. This helps them optimize their programs for growth across various verticals, including beauty, wellness, and food and beverage. A unique aspect of their service is that every merchant receives access to a dedicated customer success manager for personalized support in building their subscription model. Pricing is structured with a free starting plan and several paid tiers for access to more advanced features.
The Business Case: How to Pitch Email Marketing Services to Your Clients
As a web creator, you are in a prime position to expand your service offerings and provide even more value to your clients. Moving into email and SMS marketing is a natural next step, but your clients might not immediately see the need. Here’s a simple framework for pitching these services, using a tool like Send by Elementor as the perfect, low-friction solution.
1. Identify and Frame the Problem
Start by looking at your client’s business through the lens of common growth challenges. Don’t just sell “email marketing”; sell the solution to a specific pain point.
- For the Client Losing Sales: “I noticed your site gets a good amount of traffic, but many visitors add items to their cart and leave without purchasing. This is really common—in fact, the average cart abandonment rate is over 66%. We can set up an automated email sequence to remind these customers about the items they left behind and recover a significant portion of that lost revenue.”
- For the Client Needing to Build Relationships: “Getting a first-time buyer is great, but getting them to come back is how a business truly grows. Right now, there isn’t an automated system to welcome new customers. We can create a welcome series that introduces them to your brand story, showcases your best products, and makes them feel valued from day one. This is key to building loyalty.”
- For the Client with a Limited Marketing Budget: “Running ads to acquire new customers is getting more expensive. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective channels available. By focusing on the audience you already have, we can drive repeat sales and increase customer lifetime value without a massive ad spend.”
2. Present a Simple, Integrated Solution
Once you’ve framed the problem, introduce the solution as an easy, natural extension of their existing website. This is where a WordPress-native tool is a major selling point.
“The best part is, we can do all of this directly within your WordPress dashboard using Send by Elementor. There are no complex external tools to learn or messy integrations to manage. It’s built to work seamlessly with your site. We can start with one or two key automation flows, like the abandoned cart and welcome series. They’re ‘set-and-forget’ systems that will work for you in the background.”
3. Emphasize the Measurable ROI
Clients want to see results. The final, and most crucial, part of your pitch is to highlight how you will track and report on success.
“With this system, we won’t be guessing if it’s working. The analytics dashboard shows us in real-time exactly how much revenue each email and automation flow generates. Every month, I can provide you with a simple report that shows the clear ROI on this service. You’ll see precisely how our efforts are contributing to your bottom line.”
By following this framework, you shift the conversation from “buying a tool” to “investing in a growth strategy.” You position yourself as a proactive partner who understands their business and has the integrated tools to deliver measurable results.
Final Thoughts
Selecting the right marketing platform is a foundational decision for any small business aiming for success in a competitive eCommerce landscape. The tools we’ve reviewed each offer a different approach to promoting products, engaging customers, and optimizing the buyer’s journey. Your goal should be to find the one that best aligns with your specific business needs, your target audience, and your long-term growth strategy.
Whether your primary objective is to increase average order value, boost conversion rates, launch a subscription service, or enhance customer loyalty, the best tools are those that integrate smoothly into your workflow and provide clear, measurable results.
For web creators and their clients who operate within the WordPress ecosystem, the choice becomes even clearer. A platform that is born for WordPress, like Send by Elementor, offers an unmatched level of seamless integration and ease of use. It transforms marketing from a complex, external task into a natural extension of the website itself. By choosing a tool that not only amplifies your client’s growth but also empowers your own business model, you are investing in a strategy for shared, sustainable success.
