July 15, 2021

Best Email Marketing for Shopify: 15 Plugins Compared

Reading time about 10 min

As an online store owner or marketer, you naturally want to use the best email marketing app for Shopify.

Email marketing is the first and probably most important part of any ecommerce strategy. It lets you stay in touch with potential and current customers. You’re able to reach them anytime directly.

The best email marketing tool for ecommerce business should give you:

  • Transactional emails
  • Promotional email campaigns
  • Marketing automation
  • Personalized messages

So, what’s the best email marketing for Shopify store owners? We rounded up the best email marketing tools to help you carry out your ecommerce email strategy.

These 16 Shopify email marketing plugins and tools are the top choices for online stores. But before we go deep, here’s an overview of their pricing.

The Best Email Marketing Plugins for Shopify

1. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a powerful marketing platform for Shopify stores. It offers the marketing tools big players use without the steep price. Sendinblue’s mission is simply to help businesses grow.

Sendinblue’s email plugin for Shopify gives you quick access to all of the platform’s functionalities so you can drive sales from one place:

  • Transactional emails (order confirmations, delivery notifications, password resets)
  • Shopify newsletters, promotional campaigns, and Shopify abandoned cart emails
  • Automated campaigns and workflows – if-this-then-that rules
  • A/B testing of emails
  • Inbox – centralize incoming emails in a shared inbox for the team
  • SMS marketing and automation
  • CRM – manage your contacts easily
  • Customer tracking – events, behavior, engagement monitoring and tagging
  • Signup forms – grow your email list
  • Landing page builder – streamline the ad experience with branded content
  • Chat – your live communication with site visitors and Facebook Messenger contacts in one place
  • Facebook ads – create and run your campaigns targeting contacts and lookalike audiences directly without exports
  • Campaign click maps and performance breakdowns
  • Premium deliverability

The beauty of the integrated platform is that it all works together. It’s easy to kick off your multi-channel strategy. Segment by any action or attribute to create specific customer groups, and target via email, SMS, and Facebook as needed. 

You can also automate complex engagement campaigns based on customer’s behavior. For example, you can:

  1. capture a lead, 
  2. ask for their interests, 
  3. tailor a welcome series accordingly, 
  4. send highly relevant offers, 
  5. follow through an order with shipping info via SMS
  6. continue personalizing the engagement for retention 
  7. reactivate with a individual birthday offer 

– all from within Sendinblue.

Concerned about GDPR? Sendinblue makes collecting consent for email marketing easy.

Sendinblue Pricing:

  • The Sendinblue Shopify plugin is free to download and use.
  • Sendinblue’s free plan includes unlimited contacts and 300 emails a day.
  • Pricing for paid plans starts at just $25 a month for 20,000 emails sent. 
  • 100 SMS messages sent cost $1.34 (for U.S. numbers, for other countries prices may vary).

Download the free Sendinblue app for Shopify >>

2. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a major player in the Shopify app store. It offers email campaigns, personalized automated flows, CRM, SMS, and push notifications.

Pricing: Klaviyo is free for up to 250 contacts (email) and 50 contacts (SMS). They charge by contact list size so 20,000 contacts stored (not emails sent) would cost $375 a month, including 150 SMS sends per month.

Check out this Klaviyo vs. Sendinblue comparison for more on their pricing and email marketing features for ecommerce.

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp recently re-launched their partnership with Shopify, now offering a direct integration. This allows Mailchimp users to connect their account with their Shopify storefront and share data across the two platforms. 

Pricing: Mailchimp’s free email marketing plan includes 2000 contacts and 10,000 emails per month. If you’re looking to use their Shopify integration, it’s likely you’re in need of transactional emails too, which are sold in blocks of 25,000 monthly emails for $25. SMS marketing with Mailchimp requires a third-party paid integration.

Take a look at this detailed comparison of Mailchimp and Sendinblue to learn more about which platform is better for your business.

4. Drip

Drip is yet another email marketing tool you can use on Shopify. It lets you run email campaigns, automations and SMS. There are also lookalike audience sync, opt-in forms, and rich segmentation options.

Pricing: After a 14-day free trial, Drip charges to use the integration. On top of that, it’s $289 a month for 20,000 contacts (no limit on emails sent). This price includes 100 SMS sends.

5. Omnisend 

Another app featured among the best email marketing for Shopify is Omnisend. It offers personalized and transactional emails, segmentation, A/B testing, and SMS. Also, automated workflows, web push notifications, landing pages and popups. And they have lots of reports.

Pricing: The Omnisend-Shopify integration is free to install. After the 14-day free trial, paid plans start at $16 based on the number of subscribers. For example, 20,000 subscribers and all features listed cost $350 a month for unlimited email sends and 23,333 SMS.

6. Privy

Privy started out with popups and extended into email later. Their core offering is signup forms, bars, banners, and landing pages. They also have email and SMS campaigns that can be automated.  

Price: Privy is free to install and mail up to 100 contacts. A list of 20,000 would cost $300/ month. SMS comes included in this price for 100 contacts.

7. Marsello

Marsello joins the list with email marketing campaigns, automation, reward points programs, SMS, lead capture forms, and segmentation. In addition, it also has feedback forms that measure customer satisfaction.

Pricing: Marsello is free to install and the lowest plan is $99 for 1000 subscribers. Our benchmark of 20,000 contacts in your list would cost $289 a month with Marsello. 700 SMS credits comes on top of this for $25 per month.

8. Constant Contact

Another popular choice for Shopify email marketing is Constant Contact. It’s a tool that combines email marketing services, automation, list-building tools, social media posting and ads, and surveys. It also offers a website builder.

Pricing: The Constant Contact integration is free to all paying users. Prices then start at $20 a month for 500 email subscribers with limited features. All features and 20,000 contacts cost $225 a month. Compare Constant Contact vs. Sendinblue pricing.

9. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is yet another option for ecommerce stores on Shopify. It focuses on email campaigns, including transactional, personalization, email automation, and signup forms.

Pricing: Campaign Monitor is free to install. Prices then start from $9 a month for 2500 emails to 500 customers. 10,000 contacts and unlimited emails would be $399/ month. 

Get the same features without paying for contacts: Sendinblue vs Campaign Monitor

10. MailerLite

MailerLite comes with the standard email marketing software features: lead generation, personalization, automation of email campaigns, surveys and feedback, plus a website builder.

Pricing: The MailerLite plugin is free. There’s a free plan for up to 1000 subscribers and the price for 20,000 subscribers is $100/ month.

See how MailerLite and Sendinblue compare.

11. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is not an ecommerce-only marketing solution, but Shopify customers can find email functionality, SMS, automation, in-depth CRM, custom forms, segmentation, and site messages.

Pricing: The ecommerce marketing suite starts at $15 a month for 500 contacts (billed monthly). Then, 10,000 contacts and most features come at $286/ month. Here’s a cheaper alternative to ActiveCampaign that gets the job done.

12. SmartrMail

SmartrMail is all about email marketing: fighting cart abandonment, welcome series, product recommendations. They have segmentation and automation, as well as popups and templates, too. It’s a simple and straightforward tool to use.

Pricing: SmartrMail’s pricing starts at $19 a month. The unlimited features come at $249/ month for 20,000 contacts.

13. Consistent Cart

Consistent Cart is the email part of CartKit. It includes email and SMS campaigns, marketing automation and lead capture. Their focus is recovering abandoned carts.

Pricing: Consistent Cart is free to install. After that, prices start from $29 a month, but the SMS functionalities come with the $99 plan.

14. MailMunch

MailMunch is another marketing tool that started out with lead generation forms and pages, and expanded into email. They focus on email templates and offer stock images for you to use. Note that there are three different MailMunch plugins in the Shopify App store.

Pricing: MailMunch is free to install. For 20,000 contacts, you can expect to pay $79.99 per month.

15. GetResponse

GetResponse is another email marketing platform that has campaigns and automations, website builder, push notifications, popups, webinar hosting, conversion funnels, social ads, chat and landing pages. 

Note: There is no official plugin in the Shopify App Store, but there are third-party ones that help you integrate.

Pricing: The most basic plan starts at $145 for 25,000 contacts. To access all features, you’ll need a custom quote.

Compare Sendinblue vs. GetResponse pricing

16. SendGrid

SendGrid is more about email deliverability as its core offer is email marketing API for transactional emails. It has email campaigns with automations and signup forms as well. There’s no plugin on Shopify but you can integrate your store with it.

Pricing: Basic email campaigns up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month are free. 25,000 contacts start at $50/ month depending on the email volume sent but this doesn’t include automation features. The API is priced separately.

Related: The Best SendGrid Alternatives for Transactional Email

The Best Email Marketing App for Shopify

Among the best email marketing apps for Shopify, which one is the best for your online store?

All of the tools have friendly drag-and-drop editors and at least some automation workflows. From then on, it depends on your ecommerce marketing strategy and what you want to achieve. If you don’t want to have too many marketing tools, go for a more comprehensive solution.

Only be careful as some of these tools can get quite expensive fast as you grow your email list, which gets in the way of growth.

Sendinblue is the only one that doesn’t charge by contact list size, but by emails sent. You only pay for what you use! 

Ready to find your marketing zen?

Take the stress out of your work day with a solution that’s built for you!

Get started free