7 top email collection tools: a comprehensive comparison for small businesses 

TL;DR: Behind every small business’s growing email list is an effective email collection tool. With it, you can effortlessly capture the contact details of your website visitors and social media followers, and begin nurturing value-driven relationships.  

Nearly 50 years ago the first email blast went out, generating $13 million in sales. To this day, email marketing holds its ground as a powerful marketing form. Studies show that email marketing generates an average of $42 for every dollar spent—translating to an impressive ROI of 4,200%. 

As an entrepreneur ready to unlock this potential for your business, it’s all about having the right tools on hand. But with so many options to choose from, it can be difficult to find the best-fit tool for your needs. 

We’re here to help you make sense of this saturated marketplace. In this guide, we share the seven best email capture tools available today, compare their features, and help you understand what makes each one unique. 

The simplest way to collect email addresses for your business is through an opt-in form. Using your email capture tool, you can create and design eye-catching opt-in forms to place strategically on your website and social media. 

A beautifully designed form catches attention at the right moment. Usually, forms promise access to an exclusive offer or freebie in exchange for contact information. 

Aiming to make the process as easy to complete as possible, forms provide input fields where audience members can fill out their email address and other details you need, such as first name and opt-in preferences. From there, your tool adds the information to a database and grants your audience access to the promised asset, offer, or newsletter.  

A few examples of how you might collect this information are by:

With so many email capture tools on the market, we turned to G2 to see what real people have to say about the software they use. 

Here are the best email capture tools to supercharge your email marketing in 2024 and beyond:

Flodesk empowers entrepreneurs to create attractive and oh-so-clickable emails for their audience. Its extensive (and beautiful) template library is perfect for small businesses that need a creative hand in their campaigns.

The powerhouse tool gives you the freedom to design engaging Full Page Forms, Popup Forms, and Inline Forms with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. Content creators, photographers, and e-commerce store owners are just a handful of the many Flodesk members who love the gorgeous templates they can customize to match their brand. 

Flodesk is ideal for any business that wants to build and grow its audience with inspiring forms to use across its website, standalone landing pages, and social media profiles.

You can sign up free with Flodesk to test all the features and see how it works for your business. After 30 days, you’ll continue having access to Link in bio and all of Flodesk’s forms. Or upgrade with straightforward pricing, that doesn’t increase no matter the size of your subscriber list.

ZoomInfo MarketingOS is a GTM (go-to-market) solution and business database that makes it easy to identify any decision-makers within an organization that you’d like to engage with. It collects their information from various online touchpoints and provides actionable insights to help you convert them into customers.

ZoomInfo is not a dedicated email marketing software and offers various business products. Its marketing solution is popular with B2B companies and includes tools to collect emails and nurture leads.

You’ll need to get in touch with ZoomInfo MarketingOS for their pricing information, as it’s not visible online. However, G2 reviewers indicate that the pricing may be too high for smaller businesses. 

ZoomInfo offers a free trial, so you can test whether their marketing solution is right for your business.

AWeber is a fantastic email marketing software and collection tool for small businesses. One of the platform’s biggest selling points is its marketing automations that take the busy work out of email marketing. AWeber also works with over 750 partners to give you integrations with the tools you already use.   

With a library of pre-built templates that you can customize for your website and socials, it’s quick and easy to create perfectly branded email capture forms. 

AWeber offers four price plans that increase based on your number of subscribers and the features you want to access. Here’s how they start:

Unfortunately, AWeber doesn’t offer a free trial. And although it has a free plan, it’s limited. 

When signing up, you’re likely to need the Plus plan at a minimum. This allows you to remove the AWeber branding from your forms, landing pages, and emails. 

Retention.com helps e-commerce businesses connect with their anonymous website visitors. Through its publisher network, the platform can reach visitors who haven’t yet purchased from you or filled out a form. 

While many of the features are geared towards retaining customers and re-engaging those with abandoned carts, Retention.com’s Grow product focuses on email collection. Grow scans the company’s extensive opt-in publisher network for information matching the unknown visitors to your website. If there’s a match, it sends you the person’s email address, so you can kickstart a relationship and potentially earn a new customer. 

Keep in mind that this email collection tool is only available for U.S. markets. Other countries have different data protection and privacy regulations, which makes global compliance tricky. 

Retention.com doesn’t display its pricing on its website. However, on G2, it shows two different pricing plans:

You can request a demo from the sales team to get a feel for the platform before committing.

Mailmunch is a popular growth and email marketing app for solopreneurs, bloggers, startups, and enterprises. Running on more than 500,000 websites to date, Mailmunch’s toolkit—including forms, popups, and landing pages—generates millions of sign-ups every day.

Mailmunch keeps pricing simple, basing it on your number of contacts. Here’s a look at how it starts: 

Ortto is an easy-to-use yet sophisticated AI-powered marketing automation and analytics platform that’s helping over 3,000 businesses to grow. When it comes to email capture, Ortto combines powerful tools to turn anonymous visitors into potential buyers through banners, surveys, opt-in forms, and more.

Regardless of the type of popup you choose to capture email addresses, Ortto offers eye-catching designs you can customize. Personalize input fields, time the popup display, and add your brand’s styling to make it yours. 

Ortto offers three pricing plans, all of which cover up to 10,000 contacts: 

Professional: $509/month

Business: $849/month

Enterprise: $1,699/month

You can try Ortto free for 14 days, giving you time to explore their features (excluding SMS), add 10,000 contacts, and send 100 emails. Your other option is to set up a demo with their sales team.

Another great option for small businesses with online stores, Privy provides tools to grow your sales through email and SMS. The platform not only helps you grow your email list but also drives interaction with your subscribers to gently move them along the sales funnel.

Privy offers several features to capture email addresses and turn casual browsers into committed subscribers.

There’s a limited free plan available to test drive the platform. After that, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the three paid packages, which are based on your number of contacts. Here’s how pricing starts:

If you’re wondering how to build your email list, here are ten helpful tips to help you land the right email addresses:

There’s an art to collecting emails and building your list. Having the right email collection tools, like Flodesk Forms and Link in bio, will help you grow your list (and your business). But remember, designing the form is just the beginning of the process. You’ll need to ensure you’re delivering value. 
Join the ranks of design-savvy small business owners and marketers who want to level up their email marketing strategy in 2024. Designed especially for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and creatives, Flodesk is easy to use, fully integrated, and packed full of tools that’ll help bring your brand to life. Sign up free.