Email marketing is an essential tool in any business. When you work off existing contact lists to nurture and engage prospective customers, it can keep your customers engaged, track their journey, and boost your sales. As some expert marketers say, “the money is in the list.”

Using email newsletters can help you reach subscribers directly through their inbox. They ensure high visibility and encourage more engagement vs if you use websites or social media.

Having a tool that can address your email marketing needs is vital to the success of your business. In this article, we compare email marketing tools Sendlane and ConvertKit.

These tools can manage your contact list, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether these were opened and read. In this article, we will review these email marketing tools, including their features, to help you choose which tool is suited for your business.

Sendlane and its Origin

Sendlane is a newcomer in the email marketing software industry and is perfect for small or large online businesses. It is a marketing and email automation platform that also comes with a drag-and-drop landing page builder.

This tool is designed to help customers keep the entire management of their sales funnels into one accessible platform. It also provides users with landing page templates that they can customize.

Sendlane allows its users to create emails that are personalized and send them off to targeted segments. This solution enables marketing managers to create email lists based on several factors such as purchase behavior, audience demographics, location, point of sale, and a lot more. Email retargeting allows business owners to strategically allocate and distribute workflows strategically based on user interaction on their websites.

Founded in 2013 by digital marketers Jimmy Kim, Zakariah Meftah, and Anik Singal, Sendlane was born because they weren’t entirely satisfied with what existing email marketing tools had to offer to marketers at the time.

Their dream was to create the ultimate digital marketing platform, bringing about and managing campaigns, sales marketing funnels, broadcasts, and intelligence-driven behavior.

Sendlane also allows third-party integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify, Privy, and a lot more. Its services are provided on a subscription basis each month, while excellent support is provided through live chat, email, and an online knowledgebase.

Features of Sendlane

Aside from the usual autoresponders and email broadcasts, Sendlane has several high-quality features that are designed to make your digital marketing business easier. Below are some of the powerful features of Sendlane.

1. Landing Page Creator

One of Sendlane’s competitors, GetResponse, has a wide range of products bundled together in addition to their basic email marketing services like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), webinars, Forms, and Landing Pages to name a few. Sometimes, it can be so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to differentiate between a general marketing tool and an email marketing platform. (READ More: GetResponse vs Sendlane)

This is not the case with Sendlane. It provides an additional tool for its users – the landing page creator, perfect for marketers who need additional tools to enhance their marketing. This feature is included in all of the plans that Sendlane offers.

2. Drag and Drop Email Editor

Sendlane has an excellent drag-and-drop email editor. Many of its users have professed that it is the best feature of Sendlane than other drag-and-drop features of different email marketing platforms.

Sendlane’s email editor is seamless. You will not experience any form of lag or unusual layout issues. Each email element is accessible from the left side menu and you have control over all the aspects of the layout.

3. Standard Reporting and Analytics

An effective email marketing tool must have real-time analytics and report for emails sent through the platform. Sendlane is no different. It provides its users’ access to its basic-level, real-time reporting and analytics features. This covers the essentials such as:

Click rates
Open rates
Unsubscribes
Bounces
Most active subscribers
Link clicks

4. Advanced Contact Tagging and Automation

With this feature, you can create workflows to modify your email marketing funnel and behavior based on your subscribers’ actions. If a subscriber meets or fails to meet a specific condition that you have specified, you can remove them from that list automatically and tag or add them to another one.

5. Send Times Optimization

Another excellent feature of Sendlane is the optimized timing feature, which you can either enable or disable on every email. When you allow it, Sendlane tracks your subscribers’ open habits and then delivers emails at the best period to individual contacts. As you collect more data, the feature gets better.

6. Integrations

Sendlane can integrate with all of the leading web services and applications such as Easy Webinar, Convertri, Privy, etc. Integrations are added to the email marketing platform regularly by its team of hardworking developers.

Sendlane Pricing Plans

There are some things that you need to understand before using Sendlane. The first thing is there is no free plan at all. However, prospective users can only expect and use a 14-day free trial, and you can only use a credit card to help you sign up.

Secondly, all of Sendlane’s plans are powered with the same features. If you must pay more at all, it is to obtain or grow a higher number of contacts and not have access to additional features.

And lastly, the only thing that counts in your quest to grow your customer base and email list are unique contacts. Placing the same contact on multiple email lists still counts as only one contact, especially as you move towards your limit.

Below are the pricing plans of Sendlane.

For 2,500 contacts: $49/month
For 10,000 contacts: $139/month
For 25,000 contacts: $219/month
For 100,000 contacts: $599/month

ConvertKit and its Origin

ConvertKit is a new, sleek, easy-to-use and simple email marketing tool built by Nathan Barry. You can create and manage your email list and send emails called “broadcasts.”

ConvertKit is specifically tailored for bloggers, content creators, and infopreneurs. It gained popularity after getting the backing of influential marketers such as Pat Flynn and Joanna Wiebe.

Features of ConvertKit

Below are some of the powerful features of ConvertKit.

1. Tagging and Segmentation

ConvertKit is totally built around the tagging system, which is by far the best way to manage your subscribers and automation.

There’s only a single list for all of your subscribers. You can tag individual subscribers based on sign-up forms and their behavior on your site. You can even tag subscribers according to the links they click in your emails. Then you can segment your subscribers based on forms and tags to send your emails to a large and specific audience with a few clicks only.

This feature in ConvertKit is extremely useful in sending targeted emails to a particular part of your audience.

2. Automation

ConvertKit has a powerful visual automation or workflow builder. With this feature, you can set triggers easily like a joining form or a tag, and you can send a particular set of emails called a sequence. You can even have several triggers for a single workflow, which allows you to send targeted emails to your subscribers.

3. Email Broadcasts and Templates

If you are new to email marketing, you know that sending fancy and complex emails can hurt your deliverability. That’s why ConvertKit keeps it simple for you.

Its email composer has all the necessary options such as adding links, bold, italic, adding images, etc. Once you’ve composed your email, you can preview it in your browser and send it to yourself.

4. A/B Testing

ConvertKit allows you to conduct split testing while sending broadcasts to decide which performs better.

5. Forms and Landing Pages

ConvertKit allows you to create landing pages and sign-up forms and embed them into your website.

With ConvertKit’s WordPress plugin, you can choose to show a specific form on a designated page. You can also use shortcodes to embed those forms.

6. Tracking and Reporting

This feature of ConvertKit tracks basics like your subscriber growth and your net total email subscribers. It also provides necessary reports for your broadcasts, sequences, and sign-up forms.

7. Integrations

ConvertKit can integrate with a ton of different apps, and it also supports Zapier integration.

ConvertKit Pricing Plans

Below are the different packages offered by ConvertKit.

0 – 1,000 subscribers: $29/month
1,000 – 3,000 subscribers: $49/month
3,000 – 5,000 subscribers: $79/month

(READ MORE: How much does ConvertKit cost?)