Email marketing remains one of the highest-ROI channels for B2B companies, but choosing the right platform can make or break your campaigns. The best email marketing tools combine powerful automation, seamless CRM integration, and advanced segmentation capabilities to help you nurture leads through complex B2B sales cycles.
With hundreds of platforms available, each promising to be the ultimate solution, making the right choice requires understanding what truly matters for B2B marketing success. This guide breaks down the top email marketing tools based on features that actually drive results for B2B teams.
What Makes a Great B2B Email Marketing Tool
B2B email marketing differs fundamentally from B2C. While B2C communication focuses on emotions, B2B communication focuses on information, facts, and profit. This means your email platform needs specific capabilities.
Advanced automation capabilities are non-negotiable. A good platform lets you build multi-step workflows based on user behavior, lead score, or CRM activity, so your team spends less time on manual follow-ups and more time closing high-value deals.
Your CRM and email marketing need to work hand in hand—if your email tool doesn't sync well with your CRM, you'll lose out on valuable data and waste time moving things manually. Look for native integrations with major CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive.
Other essential features include robust segmentation for targeting different buyer personas, deliverability tools to ensure your emails reach decision-makers, and analytics that tie email performance back to revenue metrics.
Top Email Marketing Platforms for B2B
ActiveCampaign: Best for Marketing Automation
ActiveCampaign has been awarded the Best Email Marketing Tool badge for 2024 and for good reason. The platform excels at sophisticated automation workflows that can handle practically any B2B scenario, from lead nurturing to event-based triggers.
This powerful tool lets you set up sophisticated automations for practically any need, be it sending discount codes to contacts on their birthday or following up with contacts interested in certain products, while its flexible contact management features mean you can precisely segment your contact list before targeting each segment with relevant emails.
The platform also includes a built-in CRM, making it easier to track the entire customer journey from first touch to closed deal. The visual automation builder is intuitive enough that marketers don't need developer support to create complex workflows.
HubSpot: Best All-in-One Platform
HubSpot is an all-in-one solution for B2B marketers with CRM capabilities, powerful tools for automation, lead nurturing, and sales alignment. The strength of HubSpot lies in its ability to unify marketing, sales, and customer service in one ecosystem.
HubSpot offers a Free Tools plan that covers a bit of everything, from marketing to sales, though marketing automation is limited on this plan to one email action and 2,000 email sends per month. This makes it accessible for smaller teams to get started.
However, be aware that HubSpot quickly becomes an expensive B2B marketing automation platform if you upgrade from the Starter Plan or need more than 1,000 contacts, with A/B testing only available starting on the Professional Plan at $890/month.
Klaviyo: Best for E-commerce B2B
While often associated with B2C e-commerce, Klaviyo shines for B2B companies selling products online. What really sets it apart is its advanced e-commerce segmentation and personalization features, including the ability to create targeted customer segments based on criteria such as email engagement, demographics, and purchase history.
Klaviyo also sports a built-in customer data platform (CDP), which research shows that email platforms generally don't double as, allowing you to combine customer data from various sources and get the fullest pictures of your customers when marketing to them.
Predictive analytics help forecast customer behavior, such as expected date of next order or churn risk. However, these advanced features come at a premium price point compared to other platforms.
Brevo: Best Budget-Friendly Option
Brevo was developed to fill a gap in the market, offering a user-friendly, one-stop-shop for email marketing and automation to small businesses, and it's often praised for its affordability.
Brevo provides 300 emails per day free and offers basic features for up to 1,000 subscribers, while MailerLite offers basic features for up to 1,000 subscribers, and HubSpot includes email marketing in their free CRM package. For B2B companies just starting with email marketing, Brevo offers the most generous free tier.
Brevo is often the most cost-effective option, starting at $9/month with no contact limit. The platform includes SMS marketing, landing pages, and automation workflows even on lower-tier plans.
GetResponse: Best for Webinar Integration
GetResponse offers all the necessary tools to send newsletters, automate your email marketing, and view and analyze statistics, while also offering additional features including a website builder, a chat function, webinar hosting, and the ability to build landing pages.
For B2B companies that use webinars as part of their marketing strategy, GetResponse provides native webinar functionality that integrates directly with email campaigns. This eliminates the need for separate webinar software and allows for seamless follow-up automation.
The platform includes send time optimization to deliver emails according to subscribers' timezones and a visual workflow builder for mapping customer journeys.
Mailchimp: Best for Beginners
Mailchimp positions itself as the #1 AI-powered email marketing and automations platform that recommends ways to get more opens, clicks, and sales. The platform is known for its user-friendly interface and extensive template library.
You can set up custom-coded automations using Mailchimp's developer tools and APIs, and it includes a journey builder where you can add branching logic, time delays, and actions triggered by behavior or tags. This makes it scalable as your needs grow more sophisticated.
The built-in CRM and audience management tools help B2B marketers keep track of contacts without needing separate software. Mailchimp offers 300+ integrations so you have everything you need in a single location.
Key Features to Prioritize
Automation and Workflows
B2B email marketing automation uses technology to trigger and tailor emails based on recipient behaviour or specific lifecycle stages, such as welcome sequences, re-engagement prompts, or follow-up reminders. This is essential for nurturing leads through long sales cycles.
Look for platforms that offer visual workflow builders and pre-built automation templates specific to B2B use cases. The ability to trigger emails based on website behavior, form submissions, or CRM data changes will significantly improve your nurture campaigns.
Segmentation and Personalization
Email marketing gets the best results when you target your campaigns and make them personal, with segmentation tools splitting your contacts up according to contact information and their behaviour to help you send timely, relevant content to the right people.
B2B buyers expect relevant, targeted communication. Personalization isn't just about using someone's first name anymore—it's about sending the right message at the right stage of their buying journey. Choose tools that allow dynamic content insertion based on company size, industry, or engagement level.
CRM Integration
The tighter the integration between your email platform and CRM, the better your results. A great email marketing platform integrates with your existing tools such as CRMs, e-commerce platforms, and analytics software, with many offering RESTful API support and webhooks so you can sync data seamlessly across all systems.
Native integrations beat third-party connectors every time. They provide real-time data sync, better reliability, and deeper functionality like updating lead scores based on email engagement or automatically enrolling CRM contacts in nurture sequences.
Analytics and Reporting
Choose a tool that offers clear, actionable insights, with bonus points if it ties email performance back to CRM data like deal stages or closed revenue, so you can show real business impact, not just vanity metrics.
B2B marketing leaders need to demonstrate ROI to executives. Look for platforms that offer revenue attribution, pipeline influence reports, and the ability to track email engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Leveraging AI in Email Marketing
AI in B2B email marketing tools can predict what your audience wants for maximum segmentation impact, optimize send times to automatically boost open rates and click-through rates, and suggest subject lines or email content that's more likely to grab attention.
AI transforms email marketing from a manual process into an intelligent system that learns and optimizes continuously. Mailchimp, for example, has AI-powered customer journeys that automatically adjust based on recipient behavior.
Beyond just content optimization, AI apps like Clay can instantly scrape the web for information, including company news, social media activity, technology adoption, and intent signals, to identify high-potential leads and prioritize accounts based on their likelihood to convert. Integrating these AI tools with your email platform creates a powerful lead generation engine.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Generic mass emails will damage your sender's reputation and cause you to lose subscribers—instead, use segmentation to ensure that each email is relevant and valuable to its intended audience. This is particularly damaging in B2B where your audience is smaller and relationships matter more.
While automation is a powerful tool, it's important to balance efficiency with a human touch by keeping messages personal and friendly while offering human connection options. Don't let your automation feel robotic—B2B buyers still want to connect with real people.
It can be tempting to blast your list with as many emails as possible, but this approach is more likely to annoy your subscribers than drive results—rather, focus on creating high-quality, targeted content that provides real value to your audience.
Making Your Decision
While a platform might look good on paper, the best way to find the ideal solution for your business is to rigorously test the tools that meet your requirements by thinking about the features that are most important to you, along with cost, usability, and deliverability.
Start by identifying your must-have features based on your current challenges. Are you struggling with manual follow-ups? Prioritize automation. Having trouble proving ROI? Focus on analytics and attribution. Is your team spending too much time building emails? Look for robust template libraries and AI content generation.
Most platforms offer free trials—use them. Test your actual use cases, import a segment of your list, and build a real campaign. Pay attention to how intuitive the interface is, how quickly you can build workflows, and whether the support team is responsive.
Remember that cost is always a consideration when choosing any platform, with the key being getting the features you need at a price you can afford, and for the best email marketing services, pricing starts low and has the flexibility to grow. Factor in not just the monthly cost but also the time your team will save with better automation and the revenue impact of improved conversion rates.
Final Thoughts
The right email marketing tool becomes the backbone of your B2B marketing operations. It should make your team more efficient, your campaigns more effective, and your reporting more insightful.
For most B2B companies, ActiveCampaign offers the best balance of powerful automation and usability. HubSpot wins if you need an all-in-one platform and have the budget. Brevo provides excellent value for smaller teams or those just starting with automation. And if you're running an e-commerce operation with B2B buyers, Klaviyo's advanced features justify the premium price.
Whatever you choose, remember that B2B marketing automation platforms offer businesses tools to improve marketing processes and shorten the sales cycle, so to succeed with marketing automation, it's important to choose the right platform for your strategy and business needs. The platform is just a tool—your strategy, content quality, and understanding of your audience will ultimately determine your success.