Best Email Marketing Software in 2026: 11 Top Tools

Email marketing software helps businesses build an email list, segment subscribers, send campaigns, and track performance. 

An email list gives you a direct line to your customers. While SEO and social media have their place, email marketing tools make it so your marketing is not at the mercy of any one platform or update. It’s why 41% of small businesses say email is the channel they expect to provide the most value in 2026.

Laura Thompson, co-founder of Three Ships, experienced this first-hand. She built an $8.5 million beauty business and claimed email is “such an underrated channel” in a Shopify Masters interview.

But to send emails, you need a platform to do it through. This guide shares how to find the best email marketing software for your business, from simple tools with free plans to complex apps with advanced features.

Best email marketing software at a glance

There is no email marketing software that’s the best option for every business. It depends on your email list size, existing toolstack, budget, and essential features.

As you begin to compare platforms, here are 11 options to consider:

How to choose email marketing software for your store

While every email marketing service is a little different, check for similar basic features when shortlisting options for your ecommerce store:

Marketing automation

Email marketing automation uses customer data to personalize campaigns based on actions the subscriber takes. That could be:

• Welcome emails sent when a new subscriber opts in
• Abandoned cart emails sent when a shopper leaves something in their cart
• Loyalty reward email reminders sent when customers meet a points threshold
• Back-in-stock emails sent when an item on the subscriber’s wish list comes back in stock

“If anyone’s signing up for my newsletter, they are getting a ’Hey, here’s Tique. Here’s a little bit about the brand,’” says Tique Chandler, founder of Chandler Honey, in a Shopify Masters episode. “A couple of days later: ‘Here’s some recipes you might like. Here’s some more things that you might find interesting.”

Omnisend’s 2026 data found that automations made up just 2% of all emails but generated 30% of revenue attributed to email. Almost one in three clicks from this type of email resulted in a purchase, with automated campaigns averaging $2.87 in revenue per send.

Templates and design

Litmus’s State of Email report found that, in 2024, 62% of teams took two weeks or more to produce a single email. By 2026, over three-quarters said it takes three days or less. 

Templates can speed up the email creation by having a basis to work from. Shopify Messaging, for example, has more than 100 customizable templates for different types of email. They automatically include your brand’s colors, logos, and products. 

Integrations

Integrations pass data between your email marketing software and other business tools, including your ecommerce platform. Brava Fabrics, for example, uses Shopify’s integration with Klaviyo to pass order, inventory, and customer data between the two platforms. 

“With Klaviyo, we can customize emails, automate flows, integrate with Shopify, and build excellent deliverability,” says the Brava Fabrics team in a Klaviyo case study. Email became Brava Fabrics’s most profitable marketing channel: It recorded a 101% increase in online sales growth and a 76% increase in email revenue as a result.

Pricing and free plans

Each email marketing tool has their own pricing structure. Some offer free plans, like Shopify Messaging’s 10,000 free emails per month. Klaviyo also supports up to 250 customer profiles and 500 monthly emails, while Mailchimp limits email templates to paid plans only.

Deliverability

Roughly 83.5% of emails reach a subscriber’s inbox; the rest go missing or land in spam folders. Your choice of email marketing platforms can influence deliverability. Platforms have a unique system to determine a sender’s email reputation. The higher their trust is in you, the more likely your emails are to arrive in your audience’s inbox.

Segmentation

Segmentation divides your subscribers into groups based on qualities they share. Use this to send personalized emails and engage the 83% of subscribers who are more likely to buy when product suggestions are relevant to their needs and preferences. 

Airsign, for example, used Shopify’s unified customer data to segment shoppers who’d purchased a vacuum at launch. These people didn’t have the chance to buy replacement filters because the subscription for those launched three months later.

“We identified the segment in Shopify, created a discount for that specific segment, communicated with them in a way that was very personalized for their needs, and we saw about 30% of those people convert,” says Airsign’s co-founder Alex Dashefsky.

Lead capture and sign-up forms

Roughly 4.82% of people who see an email sign-up form will complete it, according to Wisepop’s 2026 analysis. Choose a platform that lets you customize this form with your store’s branding. 

Treat lead capture forms as an opportunity to gather extra data on your subscribers. 

“Don’t just collect information for the sake of collecting information—use it to personalize your emails, the customer’s experience, or deliver more value [with your products or services],” says Neil Hoyne, chief strategist for data and measurement at Google, in a Shopify Masters interview.

Analytics and reporting

“It can be very difficult to figure out which channel a sale came through,” says Guillaume Drew, founder of Or & Zon, in a Shopify Masters interview. 

Shopify sheds light on what email subscribers do after engaging with your campaigns. Each subscriber has a unified profile. Any data you collect on them—like the emails they’ve opened, links they’ve clicked, or products they’ve viewed—sync back to this profile. 

When customers use that same email address to buy products, their order history shows in the profile to connect email activity to revenue. 

The 11 best email marketing software tools for ecommerce

1. Shopify Messaging
2. ActiveCampaign
3. MailerLite
4. Klaviyo
5. Omnisend
6. Drip
7. Brevo
8. Constant Contact
9. HubSpot
10. Kit (formerly ConvertKit)
11. Mailchimp

These email marketing tools were evaluated using the following criteria to help you assess your options and make the best choice:

• Cost: How much it costs to get started
• Free plan: Whether you can start testing for free 
• Shopify App Store rating: Ranking according to peer reviews (if available)

1. Shopify Messaging

Shopify Messaging is an email marketing tool with pre-made templates and a visual editor available inside the Shopify admin.

You can send branded emails to your subscribers directly from Shopify. It scales with you as you grow, with custom templates, advanced marketing automations, and lead capture forms for your online store.

The Shopify Messaging app lets you:

• Use Sidekick to write, design, and personalize emails with AI
• Choose from a growing collection of email marketing templates like products, sales, restock, newsletters, holidays, and events, or build and save your own templates 
• Customize an email by editing text, buttons, images, and discounts
• Personalize your subject line, preview text, and body text with customer information and dynamic product sections
• Import customer and subscriber lists into Shopify, and build your list using Shopify Forms
• Segment your subscribers based on where they live, what they’ve bought, and their loyalty program status from unified customer profiles inside Shopify
• Automate email campaigns to connect with customers at the optimal time in their customer journey
• Connect email performance to customer behavior, including sales across your online store and retail locations
• View upcoming campaigns on an email marketing calendar

“We made the decision to drop another mailer service to save money,” says Searsport Rug Hooking in a review published on the Shopify App Store. “The renewal was going to be $3,300 for the year and the size of our mailing list and level of use.”

• Free plan: Yes 
• Cost: Free for your first 10,000 emails every month; from $1 per 1,000 emails thereafter 
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.7 out of five stars

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has a library of pre-built marketing automations to launch email campaigns, like abandoned cart emails or a welcome series. This email marketing software also has pre-built integrations for more than 1,000 apps so you can connect your business tools, including CRMs, payment processors, and team communication platforms.

ActiveCampaign offers:

• A native CRM to track customer data
• Automated emails, such as cart recovery and post-purchase emails
• Product catalog displays in your marketing emails 
• The option to add SMS or WhatsApp messaging into your email marketing strategy

ActiveCampaign pulls directly from your Shopify data to send personalized emails that drive sales. Use an email template and deliver 1:1 messages to customers based on past interactions with your brand. 

• Free plan: No, but a 14-day free trial
• Cost: From $19 per month 
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

3. MailerLite

MailerLite is an email marketing automation tool that offers a drag-and-drop newsletter builder. Design campaigns using content blocks for countdown timers, product features, surveys, and image carousels. 

Features include:

• Pop-up and newsletter templates
• Drag-and-drop email editor
• More than 70 prebuilt content blocks
• Email automation workflows
• Subscriber segmentation

Mailerlite’s integration with Shopify to display products inside email campaigns, and track campaign performance within your Shopify admin. 

• Free plan: Yes: up to 500 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails 
• Cost: From $10 per month 
• Shopify App Store rating: 2.6 out of 5 stars

4. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a leading platform in the Shopify ecosystem, with thousands of stores using Klaviyo to send personalized emails, SMS messages, and sign-up forms.

Klaviyo provides:

• Over 350 pre-built integrations with tools like Meta, ShipStation, and Smile
• Free and flexible account options: Klaviyo is free until you have more than 250 contacts, then you can pay month-to-month based on the size of your contact list
• Pre-built forms, templates, and automations
• Ability to send personalized product recommendations and dynamic content based on past interactions with your brand
• Targeted SMS marketing, with detailed analytics to track your SMS campaign performance
• Dynamic forms you can A/B test to optimize email copy
• Growth-focused reporting with email and SMS performance analytics
• Data sync to build lookalike audiences for Facebook and Instagram ads to find more relevant customers for your business

“Klaviyo has a lot of really advanced targeting,” says Adam Wolfe, founder and CEO of Boost Auto, who uses Klaviyo’s integration with Shopify. “We can filter down to something as specific as, ‘OK, this guy drives an ’05 Chevy Silverado. What other products can we get him?’ All the data flows over to Klaviyo to manage it over there. The sales just come in.”

• Free plan: Yes: free for 250 contacts
• Cost: From $15 per month 
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

5. Omnisend

Omnisend is top-rated email marketing software in the Shopify App Store. It features pre-built marketing automation workflows and no-code editing to configure custom email campaigns.

Features include:

• Automated emails 
• A drag-and-drop email builder
• Dynamic coupon codes
• Automatic product picker
• Fully customizable pop-ups, including exit intent pop-ups and spin-to-win wheels 

Get access to web push notifications and audience segmentation to send messages across SMS. It also offers a built-in audience sync for Google and Facebook ads.

• Free plan: Yes: up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month
• Cost: From $16 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

6. Drip

With Drip, you get access to an email and SMS marketing platform that offers A/B testing, smart segmentation tools, marketing automation features, and powerful reporting to help you build email drip campaigns. 

Key features include:

• Drag-and-drop design tools
• Real-time customer segmentation 
• Deliverability team
• Cart recovery automation

If you have a list of more than 17,500 contacts, Drip also offers a free migration service to import your data. 

• Free plan: No, but a 14-day free trial
• Cost: From $39 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars

7. Brevo

Brevo is a broader marketing automation platform that lets you send emails, SMS, and push notifications. You can use it to send transactional emails and automated campaigns, like back in stock reminders and price drop alerts.

Features include:

• Native CRM tool 
• Transactional email automation
• Predictive sending using AI
• Custom sign-up forms 
• Unlimited subscribers

Brevo also has a native live chat platform built into the email marketing software, which lets you answer customer questions with AI.

• Free plan: Yes, up to 500 emails per month
• Cost: From $19 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

8. Constant Contact

Constant Contact was one of the first email marketing vendors, dating back to 1995. With this platform, you can organize and build your email list and manage templates.

Constant Contact offers: 

• Email tracking system and built-in social media sharing tool
• Abandoned cart reminders
• Drag-and-drop product blocks
• Email campaign reporting 
• Custom segmentation

Constant Contact integrates with Shopify, syncing your customer lists with your subscriber lists automatically. 

• Free plan: No, but a 30-day free trial 
• Cost: From $12 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: 3.1 out of 5 stars

9. HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM platform with free email marketing tools. It helps businesses use AI to grow their email list, send campaigns, and follow up with leads. You can connect it to your Shopify store with the HubSpot data sync app. 

Features include:

• Automated personalization
• AI-generated subject lines and email copy
• Customizable templates
• Integrations with more than 1,600 tools

If you’re a complete beginner, HubSpot offers a free email marketing certification to learn how to use the software. 

• Free plan: Yes, 1,000 free marketing contacts
• Cost: From $9 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: Not available

10. Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit is an email marketing platform built for creators. Described as an email-first operating system, it offers email marketing tools alongside newsletters, landing pages, email forms, A/B testing, and brand sponsorships. 

Standout Kit features include:

• Unlimited landing pages and forms
• Drag-and-drop editor and landing page builder
• Audience tagging and segmentation 
• Visual automations 
• A/B testing and detailed analytics 

You can connect your Shopify store with Kit through the Kit App Store. Customers who’ve purchased at least one product will be synced to your Kit account.

• Free plan: Yes, for up to 10,000 subscribers
• Cost: From $33 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: Not available

11. Mailchimp

Founded in 2001 and later acquired by Intuit, Mailchimp offers email and SMS marketing tools. It integrates with more than 300 apps including Shopify, Canva, and Zapier, and has templates for multiple types of email. 

Some of Mailchimp’s features include:

• More than 130 email templates 
• SMS marketing
• Landing page builder
• Drag-and-drop editor
• Email marketing automations

Mailchimp’s free plan gives access to email templates, landing pages, and sign-up forms. For templates, you’ll need a paid plan which starts at $13 per month.

• Free plan: Yes, but excludes email templates
• Cost: From $13 per month
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Find the best email marketing software for your store

When looking for the best email marketing software consider price, features, and ease of use. 

Start with free versions of these email marketing tools to evaluate options first-hand. Check for ease of use and integrations with your online store. 

Shopify Messaging, for example, uses unified customer, inventory, and order data from your Shopify admin. It uses this to display product information in campaigns and track what happens after subscribers open your emails.