Email marketing should be an important part of every business strategy, and Benchmark Email is a good choice. Like Vertical Response, Benchmark Email offers a free plan that gives access to most features, so you can give it a try while you grow your subscriber base. Its free plan includes twice as many contacts as Vertical Response's plan and creating emails and adding users is much easier with Benchmark Email, too. Editors' Choice MailChimp also offers a free plan, however, and neither it nor Campaigner, with which it shares our top rating, showed the same sort of glitchiness I saw with Benchmark Email in my testing.

To understand how Benchmark Email stacks up against the competition, I calculated how much it would cost a small business with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database to sign up for the service. The price tag would be $28.95 per month, similar to that of iContact. While many email marketing tools have a cap on how many messages you can send in a month, a List-based subscription from Benchmark Email (more on this in the next section) means there are no limits on the number of messages you can send per month, which is also the case with iContact.

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