The right email platform gives you a competitive edge. Choose one built to drive revenue today while staying ahead of what’s next.

Evaluating email marketing platforms often starts with a simple realization: your current solution isn't delivering the performance your business needs.

Perhaps deliverability drops when it matters most—during your highest-revenue moments. Your personalization might be missing the mark because your platform can't accurately capture how customers actually engage with your brand. Or you're managing email and SMS separately, creating friction in what should be a unified customer experience.

The platform that served you well in an earlier stage—or the one you inherited—may now be limiting your growth potential. We see this pattern often: some platforms stretch themselves across too many channels and products without mastering any. Others leave you without strategic guidance, navigating compliance and optimization without support. Many rely on older technology that simply can't compete with the sophisticated personalization that helps you drive measurable revenue growth.

The right platform will help you connect customer data, channel execution, and business outcomes seamlessly so you can deliver experiences that strengthen both loyalty and your bottom line.

We evaluated five leading email marketing platforms—Attentive, Braze, Klaviyo, Listrak, and Wunderkind—across the key factors that matter most:

• Deliverability when it counts
• Subscriber recognition that captures more revenue
• Advanced personalization that drives performance
• Seamless coordination across channels
• Integrations to connect your marketing stack
• Expert support and compliance guidance

Whether you’re a fast-growing DTC brand, a large enterprise managing complex customer engagement programs, or somewhere in between, you’ll find clear guidance on which platform fits where you’re headed.

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Key criteria for choosing an email marketing platform in 2026

Each email service provider (ESP) has its own approach to helping brands drive revenue. Each of these criteria directly influences your performance and operational efficiency, so consider which strengths matter most for where your business is today—and where you're heading.

Here are the essential features to consider:

• Deliverability: When messages don't reach the inbox, they can't drive results. Look for a platform with reliable up-time—especially during peak periods like BFCM. The best platforms have dedicated deliverability teams monitoring your metrics and relationships with email providers, not just documentation that leaves you to troubleshoot on your own.
• Identity resolution and subscriber recognition: Triggered messages are the biggest source of email revenue for most brands. But platforms that identify subscribers only by email address can't track behavior across devices or sessions—limiting your ability to reach customers at the right moments. Look for a solution that builds comprehensive customer profiles using multiple forms of identification and server-side tracking to connect browsing behavior to subscriber profiles.
• Personalization capabilities: A good ESP will have robust personalization tools that let you segment audiences, send messages based on shopper behavior, and tailor content—like adding product recommendations—with merge tags. AI-powered platforms take it further with predictive segmentation that identifies high-intent subscribers and send-time optimization to reach each shopper when they’re most likely to engage. The gap between rule-based automation and AI-powered personalization shows up directly in revenue.
• Multi-channel coordination across email and SMS: Unified platforms consistently outperform separate tools. Shared subscriber profiles enable better targeting. Coordinated messaging increases customer spend. And you avoid syncing data between disconnected systems.
• List growth capabilities: The platform you choose should offer several ways to grow your email list on your website, social media, and through in-person interactions. The best solutions make it easy to capture email and SMS at the same time with minimal friction and gather appropriate consent by default.
• Compliance and legal protection: Built-in compliance tools should come standard with the ESP you choose. Look for automated unsubscribe handling, clear opt-in workflows, audit trails, and GDPR and CCPA compliance features. In-house legal teams that monitor regulatory changes should be included with the best platforms.
• Integration compatibility with your existing tech stack: Seamless connections to your e-commerce platform, CDP, CRM, and marketing tools enable real-time data syncing for personalization.
• Strategic guidance and migration support: Some ESPs are predominantly self-service and require you to set up and monitor your program all on your own. If you want support beyond help docs, look for a platform that has an intuitive UI for day-to-day management, but also provides migration and implementation support, ongoing strategic guidance, and proactive deliverability monitoring.

As you compare your options, anticipate your growing needs. Look for a solution that scales alongside your business, supporting you through each stage of growth.

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At a glance: The best email marketing platforms in 2026

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Attentive’s unique advantage: Email built for revenue growth

Attentive is built for brands that depend on email and SMS as core revenue channels. We focus deeply on making these two channels work together seamlessly—connecting mobile-first identity, AI trained on trillions of messaging data points, and strategic support that feels like an extension of your team.

Here's what sets Attentive apart as an email marketing platform.

Industry-leading subscriber recognition that amplifies revenue

Signal loss is one of the biggest obstacles to email performance—and it often comes down to how platforms identify customers. When profiles are built only around email addresses, tracking becomes incomplete. You lose sight when customers use multiple emails, switch addresses, and move between devices and sessions. The result: you could miss the behavioral signals that trigger personalized messages and the revenue opportunities they create.

Attentive Signal takes a different approach. Instead of relying on a single ID, we build an Identity Graph for each of your subscribers: a web of identifiers including email addresses, phone numbers, cookies, device information, browsing behavior, and more that all connect back to a single customer profile. When a subscriber returns to your site and any of their identifiers match up, we can reliably recognize who they are and personalize their experience.

We also combat signal loss through our Enhanced Attentive Tag. This server-side technology allows us to set more durable cookies that outlast browsers’ short cookie lifetimes.

The result? Attentive recognizes 20% more subscribers on-site. That means 70% more triggered email sends for brands that switch. And because you're reaching people you would have missed before, triggered email revenue jumps by 95%.

AI that accelerates performance

AI features are showing up everywhere in marketing platforms—enabling work that would be impossible to execute manually at scale. But the quality and effectiveness of AI depends entirely on what it's trained on and what it's designed to accomplish.

Attentive AI™ is built to drive revenue. Trained on more than 3,000 trillion data points, it powers everything from the copy you send to who receives it and when.

These AI features work together to improve performance across your email and SMS marketing program:

• Audiences AI automatically optimizes campaign segments by identifying high-intent subscribers most likely to convert and excluding those unlikely to engage—resulting in a 25%+ lift in email revenue on average.
• Send Time AI personalizes delivery timing for each subscriber based on when they’re most likely to engage, leading to a 17% boost in email conversion rate.
• Identity AI augments our Enhanced Attentive Tag by connecting shopping behavior and identifiers to customer profiles when other platforms would miss the connection. This drives 20% more abandonment revenue.
• AI Grow optimizes sign-up unit timing by analyzing real-time signals like referral source and browsing behavior to determine the best moment to show your pop-up to each visitor. This leads to a 25% increase in sign-ups and a 35% lift in welcome series revenue.
• Brand Voice AI learns your brand’s unique tone from messages you’ve sent in the past so you can craft email subject lines that sound authentically like your brand, not generic AI output.

At Attentive, we’re continuously investing in our AI capabilities to help you drive even better performance as your business grows.

Enterprise-grade deliverability you can trust

Deliverability determines whether your emails reach the inbox—and it's where platform infrastructure quality directly impacts your results. Attentive maintains 99.8%+ email deliverability rates with 10x faster sending speeds than competitors. Most importantly, we've had zero outages during BFCM and other peak periods when other platforms have a history of significant delays or failed to send campaigns entirely.

When brands switch to Attentive, 92% see deliverability improvements. That's because we don't just provide the intuitive tools you need to manage email on your own—we have a dedicated deliverability team that helps you maintain a strong sender reputation and maximize email engagement. This includes proactive sending strategies and guidance on implementing best practices, like BIMI, to ensure your emails actually get read.

What that looks like: dedicated IP warmup during migration, ongoing proactive monitoring of your metrics, list health audits, and proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) configured during set-up. Our team also actively manages relationships with major mailbox providers like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to stay ahead of policy changes.

That means your emails reliably reach customers during the moments that drive revenue.

Support that acts like part of your team

The difference between hands-on support and self-service only platforms shows up when you're launching, troubleshooting, or trying to improve performance. Attentive gives you both: an intuitive platform you can manage independently, backed by dedicated support that acts like an extension of your team.

Our support team has a 98% CSAT rating and quick response times. If issues arise during critical moments like BFCM, you have direct access to experts who can resolve problems fast.

At launch, dedicated implementation managers and deliverability experts help you apply best practices. Ongoing, our customer success team provides strategic guidance through best practice recommendations, templates, and optimization support.

The difference is simple: we're committed to your success, not just platfom adoption.

Unified email and SMS for maximum revenue

Consolidating email and SMS onto one platform is becoming critical for performance. 58% of consumers are more likely to purchase when they receive promotions across both channels, and they’re 2.4x more likely to buy when subscribed to both—driving 6x more spend when messages are coordinated. But coordination is a challenge when these channels live in separate systems with disconnected data.

When email and SMS share one platform, you can orchestrate seamlessly—send a cart abandonment text, then follow up with email if they don't engage. Target subscribers on their preferred channel based on engagement patterns. Suppress sends on one channel when they’ve already purchased on the other.

Attentive's advantage is in how we built this unification. When Attentive built email, we designed it to work seamlessly with SMS to create truly integrated experiences. Our identity foundation and AI features enable the orchestration that drives performance. A subscriber's action on one channel informs the other. And you can manage everything from one interface with one support team, one compliance system, and unified reporting that shows true cross-channel attribution.

When email and SMS share the same infrastructure and data, both channels perform better—and you spend less time managing them.

Migration in weeks, not months

Switching email platforms should be quick and painless. Attentive's migration process gets brands live in weeks rather than the 3–6 months that it can with other platforms.

When you switch to Attentive, a dedicated migration manager will coordinate every step. In addition to IP warmup and list auditing, we offer design support to rebuild your triggered emails in Attentive so you can start driving revenue right away. Our technical team handles integration set-up and testing to make sure everything works before launch.

Throughout the process, your email flows stay intact—no gaps in communication with customers. In a matter of weeks, you're live with better deliverability, more sophisticated personalization capabilities, and unified SMS and email orchestration.

Native integrations that connect your entire marketing stack

Your email platform should enhance your existing tools and integrate seamlessly with the tech stack you’ve already built. Attentive offers 100+ native integrations with leading tools, including:

• E-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce that sync product, customer, and order data automatically.
• CDPs and data warehouses such as Snowflake, Segment, and Amperity that allow you to activate the data you've already collected.
• Loyalty programs like Yotpo, LoyaltyLion, and Smile.io to trigger messages based on membership status, points balances, and tier changes.
• Customer service platforms such as Gorgias and Zendesk to trigger messages based on support interactions and customer satisfaction scores.
• Analytics and business intelligence tools like Triple Whale to export Attentive data for custom reporting and visualization across your broader marketing analytics. 

Real-time data syncing means more powerful personalization and triggered messages. And if we don't have a pre-built integration you need, our flexible APIs let you build custom connections with support from our technical team.

Ready to see how Attentive can transform your email marketing? Get a demo to discover why 8,000+ global brands trust Attentive for their highest-performing email and SMS programs.

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Head-to-head comparison: How Attentive stacks up to other email marketing platforms

Now that you know what you’re looking for in an email marketing platform, you’ll want to compare your options.

Each solution takes a different approach to email marketing. Some have an email-first focus, others spread across many channels and services, and a few target specific business sizes or use cases. Understanding these differences will help you find the right fit for your needs and goals.

Attentive: Revenue-driven email and SMS for growth-oriented brands

Attentive is built specifically to maximize revenue through email and SMS. Our platform unifies these high-impact channels with advanced subscriber recognition, enabling the kind of personalized engagement that turns customers into loyal advocates.

Our industry-leading identity solution recognizes more subscribers on-site. This triggers more cart and browse abandonment messages and leads to a 95% median lift in triggered email revenue for brands that switch to Attentive. Plus, the intuitive platform makes it easy to manage your program independently while our expert team provides support and strategic guidance when you need it.

Key differentiators:

• Attentive Signal recognizes 20% more subscribers on-site through a web of identifiers that connect back to unified customer profiles, plus server-side tracking technology that extends cookie life, resulting in 70% more triggered email sends and 95% higher triggered email revenue.
• Performance-driven AI trained on more than 3,000 trillion data points optimizes audience segments, individualizes send times, improves subscriber recognition, and personalizes sign-up unit timing to achieve better results across email and SMS.
• 99.8%+ deliverability rates with zero BFCM outages—including 10x faster sending speeds than competitors, dedicated IP management, and proactive deliverability monitoring.
• Flexible list growth tools that capture email and SMS simultaneously across your website, social media, and in-person with minimal friction—including our patented Two-Tap Technology that keeps your SMS messages in the Known Senders folder in iOS 26.
• Hands-on strategic support to help you implement best practices and optimize your program with 98% CSAT rating and quick response times.
• Unified email and SMS platform drives 6x more customer spend when messages are coordinated across both channels.
• Migrate in weeks—not the months other platforms require—with a dedicated project manager and deliverability experts.
• 100+ native integrations with leading e-commerce platforms, CDPs, CRMs, and other marketing tools.

Considerations:

• Built for brands prioritizing email and SMS as significant revenue channels. Attentive is designed for companies that view email and SMS as strategic growth drivers rather than promotional tools. If you’re looking for basic email capabilities, our platform’s depth may exceed your needs.
• Specialized focus on marketing communication channels. We double down on email, SMS, and push to provide best-in-class customer messaging capabilities rather than adding in other functionality like loyalty programs or full paid ads management.
• Performance scales with platform adoption. Brands that fully leverage our unified email and SMS capabilities see the strongest results. Our AI features are optional but significantly enhance performance for brands ready to use them.
• Designed for growth-focused brands ready to invest in tools that drive measurable impact. Businesses in early stages with limited marketing resources may find our enterprise-grade capabilities more robust than they currently want to invest in.

Best for:

• DTC and retail brands ($5M–$100M+ revenue) prioritizing email and SMS as primary revenue channels.
• Brands needing sophisticated AI-driven personalization at scale.
• Companies that benefit from hands-on strategic support.
• Organizations needing robust compliance support and tools for GDPR, CCPA, TCPA, and CAN-SPAM.
• Growth-focused brands ready to invest in high-ROI marketing infrastructure.

Braze: Multi-channel engagement platform built for apps

Braze is a multi-channel customer engagement platform originally designed for enterprise app companies orchestrating campaigns across email, SMS, advertising, and web notifications. While it includes email as one component, the platform spreads focus across many touchpoints rather than specializing in the channels that typically drive the most direct revenue.

Strengths:

• Enterprise infrastructure built to support large organizations with complex implementations across multiple channels and markets.
• Cross-channel engagement across email, SMS, push, in-app, WhatsApp, and web for coordinated campaigns.
• Moderate AI capabilities for generating campaign content, predicting customer behavior, and channel preference optimization.
• Essential personalization, including data collection, segmentation, and triggered emails.

Key limitations:

• Spread thin across many channels rather than specializing in highest-ROI channels like email and SMS.
• App-first foundation means it lacks the retail-specific expertise and capabilities that e-commerce brands need.
• Resource-intensive implementation and ongoing costs require significant technical resources and ongoing team support, plus annual maintenance fees that increase the total cost of your email and SMS program.
• Steep learning curve with complex infrastructure that can be overkill for brands focused on email and SMS.
• Limited list growth tools compared to platforms specializing in email marketing.

Best for: Large app-based enterprises with technical teams needing complex orchestration across five or more channels, with resources for lengthy implementation timelines and internal compliance management.

Consider Attentive if: You’re a consumer-facing brand in retail, e-commerce, entertainment, food and beverage, or travel and hospitality where email and SMS are primary revenue drivers. You want quick, expert-guided implementation, hands-on strategic support, and an intuitive solution that you can operate independently without constant technical support.

Klaviyo: Small to mid-sized Shopify brands with straightforward email requirements

Klaviyo is an email-first platform that's become popular with Shopify brands due to its e-commerce integrations and extensive app marketplace. The platform has expanded to include SMS, reviews, and a CDP, positioning itself as a jack-of-all-trades, AI-first CRM for B2C businesses.

Strengths:

• Pre-built e-commerce triggers for cart abandonment, browse abandonment, and product recommendations.
• Shopify integration with native connections and extensive app marketplace.
• Multi-channel coordination across email, SMS, and push notifications.
• Essential list growth tools, including sign-up forms, pop-ups, and landing pages.
• Marketing analytics offering advanced insights available as an add-on.
• Self-service model appeals to technically confident teams that want to manage their programs independently.

Key limitations:

• Email-first identity system misses subscribers compared to mobile-first approaches.
• Misses real time behavioral triggers by relying on Shopify-reported events instead of collecting browsing behavior natively, resulting in missed messaging opportunities.
• Historical deliverability issues during BFCM and other peak periods with documented outages.
• Jack-of-all-trades approach sacrifices sophisticated capabilities, support, and reliability in any single area by attempting to offer many features across several products.
• AI marketing agents require heavy manual work, often taking more time to fix and adjust than it saves.
• Limited AI dataset trained primarily on smaller brands with fewer sends and less sophisticated campaigns

Best for: Small to mid-sized Shopify brands with limited budgets who are comfortable with self-service and have basic email-only or email-first needs.

Consider Attentive if: You want accurate subscriber recognition and behavioral tracking, hands-on strategic support when you need it, platform reliability during peak periods, or want AI-driven personalization that meaningfully boosts performance.

Explore the differences between Klaviyo and Attentive.

Listrak: Email-centric retailers with basic cross-channel needs

Listrak is an established email platform with a long history of serving traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, offering multichannel capabilities built on older technology infrastructure.

Strengths:

• Long-standing relationships with enterprise retail clients and experience working with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
• Cross-channel orchestration between email, SMS, and push notifications for cohesive customer journeys.
• Identity resolution that unifies customer data across devices, tracking anonymous users to connect with their customer profile once they become subscribers.
• Customizable flows with preset templates for common scenarios like cart abandonment, plus the ability to create custom-triggered sequences.
• Moderate AI capabilities for product recommendations, send time optimization, and audience segmentation assistance.

Key limitations:

• Legacy ESP that prioritizes email over a truly unified omnichannel approach, limiting sophistication in SMS and cross-channel coordination compared to platforms built with orchestration in mind.
• Complex migrations with four-month implementation timelines for new programs, making switching costly in both time and resources.
• Resource constraints with a smaller support team, resulting in longer response times, slower ticket resolution, and customer-reported decline in support quality.
• Outdated platform, according to G2 reviews, with less investment in innovation compared to modern alternatives.
• Fewer built-in compliance tools, requiring more manual management of regulatory requirements.

Best for: Brick-and-mortar retail brands who prioritize email as their primary channel and want to add basic SMS and push notification capabilities without managing multiple vendors.

Consider Attentive if: You want to modernize with mobile-first identity that recognizes 20% more subscribers, need sophisticated personalization for greater revenue gains, want a quick migration, and would benefit from a more active support team.

Wunderkind: Brands prioritizing anonymous site visitor identification

Wunderkind positions itself as a performance marketing platform emphasizing anonymous visitor identification that works alongside brands' existing ESPs.

Strengths:

• Identity resolution technology that uses data from across their client base to identify anonymous site visitors.
• Works alongside existing ESP for brands that primarily want to use its identification technology.
• Email designer for basic orchestration between email and SMS.
• Managed service approach removes day-to-day email management from internal teams.
• Basic AI capabilities focused on generating content and building segments.

Key limitations:

• Not a standalone solution, requiring integration with a separate ESP to send messages designed in their platform, adding complexity and vendor management overhead.
• No control over strategy or offers—Wunderkind controls which promotions appear in abandonment messages to meet their own performance guarantees, potentially harming brand perception and profitability, while marketers cannot iterate independently and must rely on limited Wunderkind resources for any changes to their program.
• Cross-brand data sharing uses customer information across brands to target site visitors who haven't directly opted in to a brand's list—potentially increasing opt-outs, harming deliverability and performance, damaging brand reputation, and creating consent issues as regulations evolve.
• Limited platform capabilities without access to advanced AI features for personalization.
• Reduced support quality with longer service level agreements (SLAs) and limited self-service capabilities mean brands must contact support for basic requests.

Best for: Brands willing to trade strategic control for a fully outsourced approach, where the emphasis is primarily on anonymous visitor identification rather than owned customer relationships.

Consider Attentive if: You want control over your email strategy with expert support when you need it, unified SMS and email, AI-driven personalization to amplify revenue or need to ensure compliance and protect your subscriber data from being shared with competitors.

Explore the differences between Wunderkind and Attentive.

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Which platform fits your business needs?

Your business model, growth stage, technical resources, and strategic priorities all influence which platform is right for your brand. Use these scenarios to identify which solution aligns with where you are today—and where you're headed.

If you're a fast-growing DTC brand ($5M–$100M+ revenue)

Attentive is purpose-built for brands at your stage where email and SMS drive significant revenue.

With best-in-class identity delivering 95% revenue gains in triggered email revenue, AI-powered personalization maximizing performance, and 99.8%+ deliverability rates with zero BFCM outages, you get the performance and reliability growth-stage brands need.

Plus, custom migration timelines and plans and hands-on strategic support mean you're driving results quickly without months-long implementations.

If you're a large enterprise managing complex customer engagement initiatives across many touchpoints

Braze provides infrastructure for orchestrating campaigns across more than five channels, including email, SMS, push, in-app, ads, and website. The platform works for organizations with dedicated technical teams and resources for lengthy implementations across multiple markets.

Consider Attentive if email and SMS are your primary revenue drivers. You'll get deeper specialization in these high-ROI channels.

If you're looking to amplify revenue with personalization at scale

Attentive delivers high-performance personalization through AI trained on more than 3,000 trillion data points. Audiences AI optimizes segments (25%+ revenue lift), Send Time AI personalizes delivery timing (17% conversion boost), and AI Grow optimizes your sign-up unit timing (25% more sign-ups).

Add in unified SMS and email coordination, best-in-class subscriber recognition, and enterprise-grade deliverability, and you get the performance infrastructure needed to scale personalization that drives measurable results.

If you're a small Shopify store just getting started

Klaviyo offers an accessible entry point with a self-service model. The native Shopify integration and pre-built e-commerce triggers make it straightforward to launch basic email campaigns. Just be aware of historical deliverability challenges during peak periods and limited strategic support on entry-level tiers.

Consider Attentive if you want to build a sophisticated email program from the start with better subscriber recognition, unified email and SMS coordination, and strategic guidance to accelerate growth beyond basic campaigns.

If you want to augment your existing ESP with anonymous site visitor identification

Wunderkind integrates with your current email platform to add identification technology and increase triggered email revenue from shoppers who aren’t already on your subscriber list.

Consider Attentive if you want compliance protection through zero cross-brand data sharing and clear opt-in workflows.

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Frequently asked questions

1. How does Attentive's email deliverability compare to other platforms?

Attentive achieves 99.8%+ deliverability rates with 10x faster sending speeds than competitors. 92% of customers see deliverability improvements when switching.

Unlike competitors that have experienced outages during BFCM and other peak sending periods, Attentive has maintained zero downtime when it matters most.

This is backed by a dedicated IP warmup, proactive monitoring, and an expert deliverability team.

2. What ROI can I expect when switching to Attentive Email?

Attentive Email delivers an average 159x ROI. This performance comes from multiple compounding factors: better subscriber identification that leads to a 95% median lift in triggered email revenue and AI-optimized campaigns that significantly improve performance. 

Brands typically see meaningful gains within the first few months of switching, with performance continuing to grow as you leverage more platform capabilities.

3. How does Attentive handle global compliance for email (GDPR, CASL)?

Attentive provides comprehensive compliance tools built into the platform—including automatic GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM compliance tools, data residency controls, and ADA-accessible sign-up units. Our proactive approach has resulted in zero legal judgments for our customers. We monitor regulatory changes continuously and update the platform to keep you compliant as requirements evolve.

4. What is the pricing model for Attentive's email capabilities?

Attentive offers customized pricing based on factors including your subscriber count, message volume, channels used, and which AI features you choose to activate. This flexible approach ensures you pay for what you actually use and need, scaling with your program as it grows.