We always recommend that our website clients have a lead capture section somewhere on their website. It doesn’t necessarily need to be large or have its own page, but audience building is key to running a successful online marketing campaign and building relationships with prospects or potential customers/clients.

Lead capture can be as simple as a newsletter form subscription section on your blog or can be more advanced and include a lead magnet like an automatic download of a pricing guide, checklist, or freebie. 

However you decide to capture emails on your website, you’ll need an email marketing platform.

The Top 3 Email Marketing Platforms We Recommend For Our Clients

It’s important to consider more than just price when choosing your email marketing platform. First, think about your purpose for how you intend to use the platform. Does the platform have the features and functionalities you need? Is it user-friendly and easy for beginners? How is their support team? 

Today we want to share with you the 3 main platforms we recommend to our clients. This is not an inclusive list of all of the good email marketing platforms out there, but these are our current favorites:

Flodesk

We’re going to start with our all-time FAVORITE email marketing platform right now, Flodesk. Flodesk is insanely user-friendly, allowing you to create an alluring email marketing campaign (and automation) very quickly with their beautiful and modern ready-made templates. 

They make it easy to create beautifully branded campaigns and if you’re reading this, we’ve probably already nailed the importance of branding consistency into your head by now! ;P

Flodesk Integration with Websites

Flodesk allows you to easily create inline, popup, or full-page forms within their platform to embed on your website.

They make the process of creating and modifying your forms simple, by giving you a selection of templates to choose from and walking you through the editing and publishing process step-by-step.

Who is Flodesk for?

We recommend Flodesk for online shop owners, creative entrepreneurs, and small businesses of many kinds who are interested in boosting their sales through email marketing, building drip email campaigns, and growing their audience.

Flodesk Pricing

Unlike other platforms, Flodesk does not penalize you for growing your email list… I mean, isn’t that the whole point?! Their plan includes unlimited everything: unlimited emails, unlimited subscribers, and access to all features for one flat [affordable] rate.

Check out Flodesk’s website and pricing.

Convertkit

Convertkit is another awesome email marketing platform that makes getting started with advanced email marketing campaigns easy, even for beginners. 

They have a simple and intuitive user interface that makes it easy to navigate wherever you want to go. When you log in, you are greeted with your analytics and forms dashboard.
One of our favorite features about Convertkit is how easy they make creating automated email sequences (or funnels).

Email sequences are a series of pre-written emails that are sent out at different intervals. These are great for lead generation, challenges, sales funnels, and even welcome series. Convertkit makes it easy to get started with email sequences and even provides an example of how they should look.

Who is Convertkit for?

We recommend Convertkit for creators (musicians, authors, podcasters, designers, coaches) and creative entrepreneurs. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that their target market is creators.

I’m no employee over there or anything, but it seems like Convertkit’s mission is to help creators shape culture, reach more clients, communicate with their fans, and increase their online conversions whether they are a beginner or advanced digital marketers.

Another benefit of Convertkit for creators is that it makes selling digital products to fans and selling your work online easier than ever before (no tech skills required.) 

Additionally, with Convertkit you can create landing pages, build email sign-up forms to embed on your website, create customized automation with targeted content through funnels and sequences, and as we mentioned, start selling your digital products in just minutes from your website.

Convertkit Pricing

Convertkit does have a FREE plan that has limited features for up to 1000 subscribers. Their upgraded plans start at $29/mo and increase based on subscriber count.

Check out Convertkit’s website and pricing.

Mailchimp

Ok, so I’m always looking for the newest and most fresh tools out there, and honestly, Mailchimp has been around forever. In Mailchimp’s case, I consider this to actually be a positive thing. Since they have been around a while, they integrate with so many different platforms, plugins, and tools in the digital space.

Mailchimp is not as fresh or user-friendly as either Flodesk or Convertkit, but they do have many of the same features.

MailChimp Pricing

The reason Mailchimp has made it on this list is because we tend to recommend it to our clients who want to do things right but aren’t sure they are ready to invest in another monthly subscription. 

Let’s face it, between hosting and website maintenance costs, digital marketing subscriptions, and software costs, things can really start to add up!

That being said, Mailchimp has a FREE plan with limited features for up to 2,000 contacts a month, which is plenty for many small businesses and entrepreneurs who are just starting out with email marketing. Their free plan also includes (Mailchimp branded) forms and landing pages, which can be integrated into your website for lead generation. 

Their upgraded plans start at $9.99/mo (which is still cheaper than the other two platforms). 

Keep in mind that although this platform is less expensive than Flodesk and Convertkit, it is not as user-friendly and can consume more of your personal time. 

Check out MailChimp’s website and pricing. 

There are many other wonderful platforms out there that we have used outside of Flodesk, Convertkit, and Mailchimp, but we’ve found that these three are great for what our clients generally need.

We hope you found this list of email marketing platforms we recommend for small businesses and entrepreneurs helpful.

Finally, we’d love to answer any questions you may have, so if any come up feel free to slide into our DMs on Instagram!