3 Best Email Marketing Tools with Manager approval // February 2023

How to choose email marketing software with Manager approval

Manager approval is an important feature for keeping your email marketing account in good stead – especially for companies managing a large email list.

But not all email marketing tools offer Manager approval.

Having analysed 678 different tools across 113k data points, we’ve found 5 tools that offer Manager approval and should meet your needs. In this interactive guide, we’ll help you whittle this down to a small handful of tools to consider.

🪄 This guide is personalised to you based on your contacts, budget and business type. If you haven’t already entered these, we recommend doing so to improve this guide.

1. What’s your budget?

How much you spend on email marketing software is going to depend on the size of your contact list, the features you need and what your organisation can afford to invest in an email marketing platform.

Based on 100000 contacts, the average monthly cost of an email marketing tool with Manager approval is $1526/month. As your maximum budget is currently set to 1000 you may want to consider increasing this a little.

While it’s true that you get what you pay for with email marketing software, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the cheaper platforms are worse.

Firstly, effective email marketing is about communicating the right message to the right person at the right time – at scale. The more leads you have (and the higher value they are) the higher the potential ROI of your email marketing activity.

As a Enterprise business with 100000 contacts, you'll most likely get a better ROI with a mid-level/premium platform that offers functionality beyond basic newsletters.

Secondly, the price you pay today is unlikely to be the price you pay one year from now. As such, it’s prudent to consider how much you might pay if your mailing list doubled or tripled. Don’t worry, we’ve done the maths for you for the top three tools!

ActiveCampaign

Omnisend

Keap

100K contacts

$549/mo

100K contacts

$720/mo

100K contacts

Custom $

200K contacts

Custom $

200K contacts

Custom $

200K contacts

Custom $

300K contacts

Custom $

300K contacts

Custom $

300K contacts

Custom $

Visit website

14-day free trial included

Visit website

Start for free

Visit website

No free trial

ActiveCampaign is the most affordable platform today, and will also provide you with affordable list growth longer term.

Lastly, while it’s helpful to have a clear budget in mind it’s also worth noting that the features (and therefore the results you can produce) with different tools are different. At 100000 contacts, you'll have plenty of scope to improve your results with features like A/B testing and automation sequences, so it makes sense to consider these in your evaluation process.

Which brings us neatly onto our next question.

2. What features do you need?

Besides needing Manager approval, it’s worth considering what other critical features you might need from your email marketing software.

Most basic features like templates, an easy-to-use visual editor, and segmentation are table stakes and found in virtually all tools. You may, however, want to consider some of the more unique email marketing requirements that your team needs.

As an

you may wish to consider excluding any tools that don’t offer enterprise-grade security features such as SSO & SAML, reputation monitoring and manager approval functionality.

Other enterprise features you might want to consider filtering by include:

CRM - Do you need an email marketing platform with a built-in CRM, or will it integrate with your existing CRM?
Other systems - Are there any other systems or data warehouses that you need to be able to send data to? If in doubt, choosing an email marketing tool with a REST API will ensure that you can connect it to most systems.
Compliance requirements - do you need to be compliant with any regional or industry-specific rules (such as GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA)?
Reporting requirements - Do you need a platform with attribution features that will enable you to report on revenue and ROI?

With 100000 contacts, maintaining list hygiene and optimising email engagement rates will also likely be on your mind. Batch Sending, send time optimisation, dedicated IP and reputation monitoring are all worth checking to help you maximise email deliverability.

If there are any specific features that you need, you can enter them here to automatically filter out any of the 5 tools that don’t have them.

3. Does it integrate with your tech stack?

At a minimum, your email marketing software should communicate with whichever platform you use to collect and store customer or user data. This not only helps you hit your marketing objectives by having up-to-date segment information, but it also makes personalising your emails (and therefore increasing engagement) much easier.

As a Enterprise business you’ll also want to consider whether or not it’s important for your email marketing software to integrate with:

Any ERPs, data warehouses, data lakes, or databases.

Any reporting tools or dashboards you use
Any marketing channels you heavily use (e.g. Google Ads, Instagram Ads)
Any internal communication or project management tools you use as a team

While it’s ideal to find an email marketing platform with the native integrations that are critical to your business, most tools rely on integrating with a service like Zapier, Make or Automate.io that enables you to connect almost any imaginable combination of tools.

Feel free to enter any integrations you need in the box below to further whittle down your list of 5 email marketing tools.

4. What do other companies like you think?

The email marketing software recommendations on StackUp are made algorithmically – and most influenced by Satisfaction Score.

This score is based on 100,000’s of ratings we’ve collected from real users of these tools. The reason we use this metric is that it highlights the platforms that deliver a good overall experience.

This matters because, let’s face it, every email marketing tool says the same thing – easy to use, a wide range of templates and lots of features.

Yet, much of what separates the wheat from the chaff is revealed through actual usage. From email deliverability rates, to support quality, security and platform stability, these are all things that can make or break an email marketing tool.

Satisfaction Score is a good proxy for this, as the tools with low scores are typically plagued by these issues, whereas those with high scores tend to get these things right.

Based on this, our algorithm has recommended HubSpot as the best-fit for your business with the highest user satisfaction score.

5. Can you try it for free?

All email marketing providers worth considering will offer a free trial. If not, that should probably trigger some alarm bells.

The top three recommendations above all offer free trials, and we’d recommend signing up for a trial with at least two of them so you can make a good comparison.

We hope this data-led approach has helped narrow your search and find the right email marketing service for you.

HubSpot (here's the link to start a 14 day free trial- no credit card required)
ActiveCampaign (here’s the link to start a 14 day free trial - no credit card required)
Omnisend (here’s the link to start a 30-day free trial - credit card required)

Email marketing tools

3 Email Marketing Tools with Manager approval

Your results (3)

ActiveCampaign

Omnisend

Keap

User sentiment

Segmentation

User sentiment

Segmentation

How to choose email marketing software with Manager approval

1. What’s your budget?

2. What features do you need?

3. Does it integrate with your tech stack?

4. What do other companies like you think?

5. Can you try it for free?

About the author

Marcus Taylor

You might also like...

Integrations

Features

Use cases