8 Best Email and SMS Marketing Software Tools for Both Channels
2026-02-01 03:29 Diff
https://useinsider.com/best-email-and-sms-marketing-software/

Email and SMS are among the most widely-used marketing channels. However, many teams still don’t synchronize their marketing strategy across them. 

For example: 

  • They often send product suggestions via email and follow up with SMS messages offering the same products, regardless of how people reacted to their email. 
  • They don’t personalize their email and SMS communications based on customers’ on-site or in-app behavior, which creates an even more disjointed experience.

At the same time, the power of using  both email and SMS lies in the ability to   coordinate your efforts and personalize your messaging, content, and product recommendations across both channels. 

In this article, we’ll explore the eight best email and SMS marketing software tools that can help you do that, including:

  1. Insider One
  2. Klaviyo
  3. Omnisend
  4. Brevo
  5. Mailchimp
  6. ActiveCampaign
  7. TextMagic
  8. SlickText

Before we dive in, note that the first four tools bring both email and SMS marketing features under one roof. This helps you streamline your marketing stack and create automated email and SMS campaigns.

The final four tools specialize in only one channel but can be integrated with other SMS or email tools. This approach typically takes more time and effort to set up and maintain but still allows companies to synchronize their efforts and run multi-channel campaigns.

Insider One can help you create, personalize, and automate marketing campaigns across messaging channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp, as well as on your website and mobile app. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.

Is Email and SMS Marketing Still Effective in 2025?

Yes, email and SMS marketing is still highly effective in 2025, though both channels are used and the strategies behind them must evolve to meet changing consumer expectations and technology advancements.

Today, users expect brands to coordinate and personalize their efforts across the entire journey. This means that to achieve success with email and SMS marketing, you need to understand how your audience interacts with both channels and leverage each one at the right time.

How Much Does Email and SMS Marketing Cost?

The cost of email and SMS marketing varies significantly depending on the tools you use, the volume of messages you send, and the features you need. 

For example, beginners looking for simplicity can start for a few dollars per month or even for free. Typically, as your contact base grows and you start requiring complex capabilities (like advanced personalization and integrations) with other channels, the cost of running an email and SMS increases.

As a result, enterprises and other large business can spend thousands or even tens of thousands based on factors like:

  • The size of their contact base.
  • The complexity of their workflows.
  • The number of emails and SMS messages sent per month.
  • Their integration needs.

These tools bring email and SMS marketing capabilities all in one place. This means you can use them to run cross-channel campaigns without integrating with other solutions and complicating your workflow.

Insider One

Insider One brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for channels like email, SMS, on-site, WhatsApp, web push, and more.

Over 1200 brands like AVON, Burger King, LEGO, and Toyota use Insider One to improve conversions, revenue, and lifetime value (LTV) by aggregating all their customer data in one place and personalizing every touchpoint along the customer journey.

Our platform has been ranked as a leader across various G2 categories, including personalization software, mobile marketing software, customer data platform (CDP), and more. Customers also rank Insider One at top of categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and support quality.

Insider One’s extensive channel support, personalization engine, and automation features can help you:

  • Grow and manage your email and SMS subscriber lists. .
  • Create and automate personalized email and SMS marketing campaigns based on customers’ behaviors and preferences.
  • Use AI-powered algorithms to send the right messages, to the right people, at the right times, on the right channels.
  • Track and improve metrics like clickthrough rates (CTR), conversions, revenue, and more.

In the next sections, we’ll show you exactly how Insider One’s email and SMS marketing tools work.

Grow Your Email and SMS Subscriber Bases

Insider One helps you grow your email and SMS subscribers by running targeted lead-generation campaigns.

You just need to select where you want to run your campaign — e.g., on your website or mobile app — and choose who sees them.For example, you can show an SMS opt-in campaign only to visitors browsing a certain URL, to customers who are logged in, to people who are just about to leave your site or mobile app, and so on.

You can also choose from various opt-in templates — from simple opt-in messages to two-step opt-ins and gamified templates that entice users with mystery gifts. 

These templates are customizable, so you can easily add your brand’s logo, colors, and messaging.

For example, LEGO offered first-purchase discounts to all visitors who subscribed to receive emails, which helped increase their subscriber base by 361%. Additionally, their regular email messages were received with an over 30% open rate and helped convert many leads into paying customers.

Create Personalized Emails and SMS Messages

Insider One has many options for building your email and SMS messages and adding dynamic elements to them.

For example, the screenshot below shows some settings you can tweak while creating an email.

As you can see, it’s easy to add dynamic content to your subject lines and preheaders, like the recipient’s name, their last browsed category, and much more.

The same goes for SMS — adding dynamic content is as simple as opening the editor and choosing from a list of attributes.

You can also design your emails with a user-friendly  drag-and-drop editor, create custom designs by editing the HTML directly, or select from our customizable email templates.

For example, the screenshot below shows how the drag-and-drop editor works.

Just like with the subject lines and preheaders, it’s super easy to add various personalization elements to the email or SMS body, like the user’s cart items, previously purchased items, or browsed items.

You can also start with one of many customizable templates for use cases like cart abandonment, browser abandonment, customer surveys, and much more.

Insider One also supports AMP emails that create a more interactive email experience. 

For example, say you have a segment of customers who bought a black shirt from your store a month ago.

You can have Insider One send these customers product recommendations that complement that shirt — like gray and black shoes — and present them in a carousel directly in the email.

Besides providing a more interesting shopping experience, AMP can help you collect feedback from customers by embedding surveys directly into the email.

When creating your emails and SMS messages, you can set up different unsubscribe methods. For instance, SMS subscribers can opt out by texting a specific word by clicking on a link that leads to a dedicated unsubscribe page.

Finally, Insider One ensures you aren’t sending too many emails or SMS messages. Our frequency capping settings limit the number of messages that subscribers can receive per day, week, or month. 

This is essential, as it prevents you from overloading your subscribers and losing their interest. 

Automate Your Email and SMS Campaigns

While sending one-off emails and SMS messages can yield good results, Insider One also ensures you can tap into the full potential of both channels by creating contextual, automated marketing campaigns.

This is possible thanks to our journey builder called Architect, which lets you trigger cross-channel campaigns based on:

  • Events, which can be any user actions on your site or app, such as page visits or completed purchases.
  • Attribute changes, which reflect user-level shifts, like a loyal customer who stopped buying or a non-regular customer who visited a product three times in a week.
  • Dynamic dates, which are great for running replenishment campaigns for products that are purchased at a regular schedule.

Price drops, restocking of popular items, and much more. 

For example, say you want to send transactional emails to customers after their purchase, then run a cross-sell campaign via SMS two weeks later.

You can use our customer journey builder to instruct Insider One to wait for a purchase event and send a confirmation email. From here, you can have Insider One wait for two weeks and then send an SMS with relevant product recommendations.

As we showed earlier, your email and SMS message can easily be personalized based on customer behavior and preferences. For example, the SMS can contain recommendations for products that are usually purchased with the one customers bought two weeks ago. Or, it can include discounts for products that the customer browsed on your site in the meantime.

Remix was one of the companies that saw awesome results for their email marketing campaigns with our automation and personalization features. 

They built an email onboarding journey based on how users engaged with their brand. If users didn’t make a purchase one week after registering, they were sent an email to save their preferred search filters.  

After a few days, they sent a second email with a list of brands available on the site and how to mark their favorites. Finally, a third email followed with ways to combine orders and save money on shipping.

This new automated email journey resulted in a 104% increase in first purchases compared to the previous quarter.

Since Insider One also has A/B testing capabilities, you can compare different paths and channels against each other to see which one produces better results. 

For example, you can test which version of your cart abandonment emails brings back more customers. Or, you can send an email to 50% of the users in a journey and an SMS to the other 50% to see which channel leads to more conversions.

With our Winner Autoselection feature, you also don’t need to worry about interpreting the results of your tests and changing the journey based on them. Insider One will do that for you depending on the results you’re looking for — whether that’s more opens, clicks, conversions, revenue, or another KPI.

Insider One’s journey builder and automation functionalities are very versatile, so if you want more details, check out our eCommerce marketing automation guide.

For a real-life example, refer to our case study with eCommerce brand NA-KD. They used Insider One to consolidate customer data and deliver personalized customer experiences across email, SMS, and web push.

The result was a 25% increase in LTV and 72x return on investment (ROI) over the first 12 months of using Insider.

Use Insider One’s AI-Powered Algorithms to Improve Relevance, Open Rates, and Conversions

So far, we’ve mostly focused on the manual steps of creating email and SMS messages, campaigns, and automations. 

But when it comes to improving the results of your marketing efforts, Insider One’s powerful AI-powered algorithms can do a lot of the heavy lifting. They can help you find the right audiences and engage with them on the right channels with relevant messaging, content, and product recommendations.

Here’s how.

#1 Powerful Segmentation

Insider One lets you segment your SMS and email lists based on any criteria you can think of — from users’ countries and devices to their purchase history, the events they’ve performed, the pages they’ve visited, the email engagement, and much more.

Plus, Insider One automatically creates predefined audiences of users who: 

  • Interacted with you via a marketing channel like email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
  • Visited a product page but didn’t add an item to their cart.  
  • Abandoned their carts, and so on.

However, you can also use our AI-powered predictive segmentation to make your targeting even more specific. 

For example, when you click the “Predictive” button, you’ll see many automatically generated predictive audiences. These allow you to target people in your contact list based on their:

  • Likelihood to purchase.
  • Likelihood to churn.
  • Discount affinity.
  • Potential LTV.
  • Affinity toward certain attributes, and more.

Here are some example segments you can create by combining our standard segmentation with AI-powered predictive audiences:

  • UK customers with iOS devices who have signed up for your newsletter, have spent over $100 with your brand, and have a high likelihood of churning.
  • US visitors with a high discount affinity who have visited a certain product category two times over the last week.
  • Australian customers who have purchased from you repeatedly and have both a high likelihood of churning and a high discount affinity.

#2 Next Best Channel Predictions

Oftentimes, marketing teams try to engage customers on a channel that simply doesn’t produce the desired results. When that happens, it can be very difficult to decide what to do next. 

For example, say you sent an email with discounted products to customers who have a high discount affinity. For whatever reason, the email doesn’t bring in enough sales, so what do you do next? Do you wait for some time before trying again or try another channel like SMS, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger?

With Insider One’s AI-powered next best channel predictions you don’t have to guess. Instead, our platform automatically decides which channels to try next based on each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.

You can limit the types of channels Insider One can choose from, e.g., select between only SMS or email, or include other channels like WhatsApp and web push.

#3 Smart Product Recommendations

Email and SMS are among the most powerful channels for product discovery. And with Insider One’s AI-powered Smart Recommender, you can show your audiences dynamic product recommendations tailored to their interests.

This feature lets you take advantage of different discovery strategies by highlighting trending products, recently viewed items, location-based bestsellers, highest discounted products, and items purchased together. You can also create custom recommendation strategies.

Besides increasing conversions and revenue, this feature saves you tons of time, as you don’t have to worry about manually updating your product recommendations. Instead, our algorithms dynamically update recommendations based on each user’s most recent behavior at the moment they open your email or SMS.

The Smart Recommender is an essential feature for many of our customers:

“Insider One’s Smart Recommender, their AI-based product recommendation tool, has been a boon for our business. Since we started using it on our website, we have witnessed a 3.6X increase in AOV by showing personalized product recommendations based on customer interests and previous browsing history. The algorithm that it works on is quite flexible and we are able to make changes easily whenever we need to.”

For a more detailed example, check out our AVON case study. They were able to increase AOV by 11% and clickthrough rates (CTR) by 13% thanks to our Smart Recommender.

Analyze Success Metrics for Email, SMS, and All Other Marketing Channels

Insider One gives you key metrics for your SMS and email campaigns, including deliverability, open rates, CTRs, and conversions.

You can also track the performance of your sign-up strategy by subscriber growth and unsubscribe rates over time.

However, you’re not limited to monitoring just one channel or campaign. For example, you can see which combination of channels yields the best results in terms of reachability.

Additionally, every customer journey you create with Architect can easily be analyzed. For instance, the screenshot below shows the live statistics for two touchpoints in a customer journey (web push and email).

You can also zoom out and focus on higher-level metrics for each journey, such as how many users entered, completed, and dropped from it, the total conversions and revenue it brought, and much more.

Lastly, we know that many marketing teams already have an analytics stack in place and want to track their results there. That’s why you can enable UTM parameters when creating email and SMS campaigns and continue tracking your results in your preferred analytics solution (e.g., Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics).

Collect Behavior Data and Personalize Every Touchpoint Along the Customer Journey

One of the biggest limitations of most email and SMS marketing tools is that they don’t support other channels. As a result, you can create a personalized experience for email and SMS, but not on all other touchpoints customers have with your brand.

For example, the on-site or in-app experiences won’t be tailored based on how users interact with your emails and SMS messages. The reverse is also true — your email and SMS campaigns won’t be personalized based on what users did on the site or in the app.

There are workarounds to this issue (such as integrating a bunch of systems) but they’re either expensive, time-consuming, or both.

That’s why Insider One brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities and channels under one roof. This lets you personalize every touchpoint — from your site and app to channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp — and deliver a consistent, individualized customer experience.

Here’s how this process works:

First, Insider One’s Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) aggregates all your customer data in one central database and creates 360-degree profiles of all your customers. 

Our CDP can combine data from all online and offline sources — including analytics tools, survey platforms, email marketing platforms, marketing automation platforms, customer relationship management systems (CRMs), point-of-service (POS) devices, and much more.

Note: If you’re not familiar with CDPs and their importance for creating personalized cross-channel campaigns, check out our detailed article on the 7 best CDPs in 2025.

Then, with your customer profiles in place, you have all the data you need to create personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns, including:

  • Customers’ names, emails, phone numbers, and other contact info.
  • Behavioral data, like last visited, purchased, and abandoned products,
  • Interactions with your brand on each marketing channel, including email and SMS (as well as which channel each customer prefers).

Insider One also creates profiles for anonymous visitors and automatically populates them with behavioral data. This means you have valuable personalization data before visitors have bought anything from your business.

For example, say you have a segment of subscribers who have shared their email with you but haven’t bought anything yet. Insider One keeps track of all their behaviors on your site in real-time, so you can send them relevant product suggestions via email.

You can also try to collect their phone numbers (with help from our templates, as we showed earlier) and unlock another communication channel to see if they prefer to interact over it.

As these subscribers browse your site and interact with your marketing communications, their profiles get continuously enriched. 

For instance, their last browsed or abandoned products change. Their discount affinity and likelihood to churn may lessen or grow. You can use all this information to create even more targeted marketing campaigns with higher open rates, conversions, and revenue.

Finally, thanks to our broad channel support and cross-channel automation capabilities (via Architect), you can create personalized marketing campaigns across all customer touchpoints, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and on-site.

To see Insider One in action and learn how it can help you create individualized, cross-channel marketing campaigns, book a live demo with our team.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an SMS and email marketing platform for eCommerce businesses. It offers various personalization, automation, and contact management features for both channels. It also has segmentation capabilities that help marketers break down their contact lists by standard and custom properties and attributes to ensure their messages get sent to relevant audiences.   

Learn more: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types

Omnisend

Omnisend is a cloud-based eCommerce automation platform for email and SMS marketing with pre-built templates and automations for both channels. Besides email and SMS, teams can use Omnisend to send web push notifications, build signup forms and popups, and sync their audiences for social media and Google search ads. Omnisend also integrates with popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo is a CRM platform that combines various marketing and sales tools. Its email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing tools are some of the most important aspects of the platform for marketing teams. For sales teams, Sendinblue offers a shared inbox, CRM, and a meeting scheduling tool.

These final tools are focused either on email (Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign) or SMS (TextMagic and SlickText). They can be integrated with each other and with other email or SMS tools via pre-built integrations, APIs, or third-party apps like Zapier. 

As a result, teams can use these service providers  in conjunction, although that requires more work to set up and maintain than using a platform that supports both channels natively.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a cost-effective marketing, email, and automation platform. It’s one of the pioneering email marketing software tools for small businesses that still exists as a standalone product after its acquisition by Intuit. While Mailchimp doesn’t have native SMS capabilities, it has integrations for SMS tools like SimpleTexting and Burst SMS.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign offers an email marketing solution and tools for sales teams. It comes with various features and capabilities, including email automation and personalization, a CRM, a landing page and form builder, and a lead scorer. ActiveCampaign has integrations with various SMS marketing tools, including SlickText and TextMagic.

TextMagic

TextMagic is a simple text message marketing software. You can use it to send all types of text messages — including alerts, notifications, and confirmations — and set up SMS marketing campaigns. TextMagic also has a feature for converting your emails to text messages and sending them to any mobile phone number. As we said, it can be integrated with ActiveCampaign, as well as with Mailchimp and other email tools (via Zapier).

SlickText

SlickText is an SMS marketing platform that helps teams deliver targeted messages to the right audiences. It comes with both beginner and advanced features like SMS shortcodes, autoresponders, MMS marketing, text surveys, automated workflows, and opt-in popups. SlickText can be natively integrated with ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, and other email marketing tools.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Email and SMS Marketing Software

What is SMS marketing software?

SMS marketing software allows businesses to send promotional messages, alerts, and updates to customers via text messages (SMS). SMS marketing tools typically include features like:

  • Mass texting for sending bulk messages to multiple recipients at once.
  • Automated campaigns for triggering messages based on customer behavior or specific dates (e.g., birthdays and product launches).
  • Personalization for tailoring messages based on 
  • Analytics for tracking the success of campaigns by analyzing delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and more.
  • Two-way messaging for engaging with customers by receiving and responding to their messages.
  • Segmenting for targeting audiences based on customer data (location, preferences, etc.) to send targeted messages.

Does SMS marketing still work?

SMS marketing still works in 2025 and remains an effective channel for businesses to engage with customers. This is due to many reasons like SMS’ high open and conversion rates, instant deliverability, and massive reach.

Which CRM has the best SMS integration?

Most popular CRMs offer integrations with widely-used SMS services. Here are some of the ones that offer excellent SMS integrations:

  • HubSpot.
  • Salesforce.
  • Zoho CRM.
  • Pipedrive.

Which is the best software for email marketing?

There’s no universally best email marketing software — it all depends on your needs, workflow, and budget. Midsized enterprises usually need robust email platforms that handle massive contact bases and integrate with a variety of solutions, like Insider One, Salesforce, or Adobe Campaign. Most small businesses can rely on simple and cost-effective solutions like Mailchimp, Kit, or Moosend.

Which is the best SMS marketing tool?

The best SMS marketing tool depends on your business needs, budget, and other factors like ease of use, integrations, and additional capabilities. Some popular options include:

  • Insider One for large businesses looking to build effective SMS campaigns and integrate SMS with other marketing channels.
  • Klaviyo for small and midsize brands aiming to build and automate campaigns across email and SMS.
  • SimpleTexting for small teams looking for a user-friendly that offers all standard and some advanced SMS capabilities.

Is email marketing compatible with mobile devices?

Yes, email marketing is not only compatible with mobile devices but also essential if you want your email strategy to succeed. With smartphones and tablets becoming the primary way many people check and interact with their emails, optimizing your emails for mobile is crucial. That’s why most email solution providers offer ways to optimize and test your emails for a variety of mobile devices.

How Does AI Enhance Email Marketing?

AI enhances email marketing by making campaigns more personalized, efficient, and data-driven via capabilities like:

  • Personalization at scale: AI allows for tailored email content based on customer behavior, such as purchase history or browsing patterns. It dynamically adjusts email elements like product recommendations, ensuring each message feels tailored without manual effort.
  • Predictive segmentation: AI predicts customer behavior (e.g., likelihood to buy) and segments email lists more accurately. It targets specific groups with relevant offers, ensuring higher engagement by delivering the right content to the right audience.
  • Send-time optimization: AI determines the best time to send emails for each subscriber based on when they are most likely to open and engage with them. This improves open rates and avoids emails getting lost in crowded inboxes.
  • Automating A/B testing: AI automates A/B testing by testing multiple variables in real-time, such as subject lines or CTAs, and continuously learns from results. This speeds up optimization and enhances email performance without requiring manual intervention.
  • Content generation: Generative AI tools can create things like email titles, body copy, and images using simple text prompts. This can drastically speed up campaign creation.

Drive More Email and SMS Conversions with Insider One

Insider One can help you maximize your digital marketing budget by syncing your email and SMS campaigns and tailoring them to your customers’ behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.

Our platform can also:

  • Aggregate all your customer data — from CRMs (like HubSpot and Salesforce), survey tools (like SurveyMonkey), customer support software (like Zendesk), and any other system — in one place.
  • Predict behaviors with our AI-powered intent engine, like how much different segments are projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or churn.
  • Deliver personalized experiences to customers on your website and mobile app, as well as on channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and web push.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider One can help you reach your business goals.