We looked at and compared a number of email marketing systems on the market in 2016 and want to highlight some of our findings.

First and foremost, any email marketing system that comes in as a downloadable software was omitted because these are the same platforms that are used by spammers to spam the world. So Sendblaster and other systems like these were immediately precluded.

Secondly, any email marketing platform that required us to meet with a sales person or had to speak to them over the phone were also omitted because this is 2016 and there is no reason why I should have to speak to a sales person to be able to get setup with one of the most basic marketing tools on the planet. I should be able to sign up and send out email campaigns within minutes 24-hours a day and 365 days a year. Sign-up, payment and fulfillment should all be conducted on the cloud. So platforms like Apsis, Expression, Radica, emarsys were all excluded in our assessment but out of interest we did speak to a sales rep from two  of these email marketing platform providers and found their pricing to be about 4-5 times higher than cloud-based provider and they tried to tie us into 12 month contract (which century are they in?).

We compared Vertical Response, SendSmith, MailChimp and Constant Contact which we considered to be the 4 best email marketing platforms available today and we used:-

1. Features
2. Email Delivery Rate
3. Interface User Friendliness
4. Availability of Templates
5. Ease of creating EDMs
6. Post Campaign Reporting
7. Multi-lingual Support
8. Pricing

	Vertical Response	SendSmith	MailChimp	Constant Contact
Features	7.0	8.0	8.0	7.0
Email Delivery Rate	6.0	8.0	8.5	6.5
User Friendliness	7.5	7.5	8.0	7.0
Availability of Templates	6.0	8.5	7.5	8.0
Ease of Creating EDMs	8.0	8.5	8.0	6.0
Post Campaign Reporting	7.5	9.5	8.0	7.0
Multi-lingual Support	NO	YES	NO	NO
Pricing	8.0	7.5	7.5	8.0
Total	50.0	59.5	55.5	49.5

We assigned 2 points for systems offering multi-lingual support.

From the comparison table, SendSmith was the best email marketing platform for 2016 with 59.5 points, Mail Chimp was in 2nd place with 55.5 points, Vertical Response in 3rd place with 50.0 points and Constant Contact at 4th place with 49.5 points.

We liked elements and different features from all of these platforms but across the board SendSmith was the most all-rounded one. We were surprised to find that in today’s globalised world that 3 out of the 4 top email marketing systems were available only in English; how could a global company reach a world-wide audience when the interface is English-only?