Educational

Choosing an Email Marketing Platform: What Your Practice Needs to Check First

---

Evie Hamilton

August 27, 2026 · 10 min read

You probably inherited the email platform. Somebody set it up years ago, the login is in a shared password file, and it works well enough that nobody has looked at it since. Then the invoice goes up, or the principal asks whether patient details should really be sitting on an American server, and suddenly it is your problem to solve between a staff roster and a supplier call.

Here is the short way through it. Every email marketing platform comparison you will find ranks them on features, and the features are nearly identical. The things that actually matter to a practice sit in the pricing help page, the terms you agreed to, and the data storage policy. This piece covers those three and skips the rest.

Email marketing platform pricing: what are you actually paying for?

This is where practices quietly lose thousands a year, and it is the easiest thing to fix.

Mailchimp counts every contact stored in the account, including people who unsubscribed and people who never subscribed. If you have been running the same account since 2018, you are paying every month for patients who left the practice years ago.

Klaviyo charges for active profiles, meaning anyone the system could email. Dormant patients keep costing you until somebody actively suppresses them. Brevo charges for emails sent instead, with your plan setting a limit on how many contacts you can store. Zoho Campaigns is the most forgiving, because its own documentation says unsubscribed contacts are not counted in your plan and bounced ones are not either.

Is your patient list even allowed on there?

This one surprises people, because it has nothing to do with what the software can do. It is a line in the contract somebody clicked through when they set the account up.

Klaviyo's acceptable use policy prohibits using the platform for "medical records or health information". That is a ban, in plain words, on the platform's own website. Omnisend says much the same. Brevo's terms have you agree not to use the service to collect, manage or process sensitive data, and a patient list is exactly that.

Mailchimp does not ban it. It tells you that working out whether the service suits your obligations is your job, and that it will not be liable if the service falls short. That is a different risk, not a smaller one.

Two platforms are built to take it. HubSpot sells a Sensitive Data capability on its Enterprise tiers. Zoho Campaigns gives you a compliance settings group with encrypted fields, restricted exports and an audit log.

Where does your patient list live?

Klaviyo stores all customer data in the United States and states in its privacy FAQs that it does not offer storage anywhere else. Mailchimp's servers are in the United States as well. Brevo keeps everything inside the European Union.

Two will keep it here. Zoho runs data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, and HubSpot has an Australian region you can move an existing account into.

You can check a Zoho account in five seconds. If your login address is campaigns.zoho.com.au your data is in Australia. If it is campaigns.zoho.com, it is in the United States. Zoho assigns the region automatically when the account is created, based on where the person signing up was sitting, so plenty of Australian practices are on the American one without knowing.

The email that gets practices fined

If you read one section, make it this one, because it is the mistake most likely to be sitting in your practice right now.

Your recall reminders and appointment confirmations feel like service messages. Under the Spam Act, the moment one of them carries a promotional line or a marketing link, it becomes a commercial message and needs a working unsubscribe like any newsletter.

This is not theoretical. In March 2026 the regulator fined Lululemon $702,900, and the emails in question were order and delivery confirmations that carried promotional content. The company had classified them internally as service messages. ACMA disagreed.

ACMA has also said plainly that you cannot hand these obligations to a third party. Your agency, your platform and your practice software vendor are not the ones liable. The practice is.

Do you have consent, or just a list?

Health information counts as sensitive information under the Privacy Act, and the definition is broader than most practice managers expect. Names, addresses, billing details and Medicare numbers all count when you collected them while providing a health service.

That matters because of what it does to consent. Under Australian Privacy Principle 7.4 you can only use sensitive information for marketing where the person has consented to that use, and the shortcut other businesses can rely on elsewhere in APP 7 is closed to you. Someone booking a consultation has not agreed to your monthly newsletter by doing so. Being an existing patient does not supply that agreement either.

The practical question is simple. Could you produce a record of who consented, when, and how? Any segment that fails that test is a risk sitting in your account rather than an asset.

So which email marketing platform should you pick?

For a single-site practice with a patient list, an in-house newsletter and no ecommerce, Zoho Campaigns is usually the sensible answer. Australian hosting, no charge for dead contacts, and paid plans from eight Australian dollars a month for 500 contacts, or six if you pay annually. The free tier covers 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, which is more than many practices need.

Be realistic about the trade-off. Zoho rates 4.3 out of 5 across roughly a thousand reviews, level with Mailchimp and below Klaviyo. The template editor is dated, and getting good delivery depends more on setting up your sending domain properly than it does on the bigger platforms. For two well-built campaigns a month, none of that is a problem.

HubSpot is the answer where the practice wants one system holding the CRM, the website forms and the email, and has the budget for Enterprise. Brevo suits a large list you email rarely, if health data on the platform is not an issue for you. Klaviyo is built for online retail and its terms rule out patient data, so for most clinics it is off the list before the comparison starts.

You are not really choosing software. You are choosing whose terms your patient list will sit under, and which country's servers it will sit on, for the next five years.

Your Monday morning list

If you would rather have someone run this properly against your actual list and your actual setup, that is the work we do. Talk to ContentClicks and we will tell you which platform fits before you pay for one. We have written separately on why email is still the channel worth investing in and on what happens when a platform you depend on changes the rules overnight.

Frequently asked questions

Which is the best email marketing platform for a medical or dental practice in Australia?

For most single-site practices, Zoho Campaigns, because it hosts your data in Australia, does not charge for unsubscribed or bounced contacts, and starts at eight Australian dollars a month. HubSpot Enterprise is the answer where the practice wants CRM and email in one system and has the budget.

We have been on Mailchimp for years. Do we actually need to move?

Two things decide it. Check how many of your contacts are dormant, because you are paying for all of them, and check whether your practice is comfortable with patient details being stored in the United States. If both answers are fine, staying put is a perfectly reasonable decision.

Do our appointment reminders need an unsubscribe link?

If they contain any promotional content or marketing link, yes, and that is exactly what the Lululemon penalty in March 2026 turned on. A reminder with nothing promotional in it is treated differently, which is why keeping clinical reminders and marketing separate is the cleanest setup.

Can we email patients who have been to the practice but never signed up to anything?

Not on the basis of the treating relationship alone. Health information is sensitive information under the Privacy Act, which means you need their consent to use it for marketing, and an existing patient relationship does not supply it.

How much should a practice expect to pay?

A single-site practice with a few thousand contacts can run a compliant setup for well under fifty dollars a month, and often for nothing on a free tier. If you are paying substantially more than that, the cause is usually dead contacts you are being billed for rather than anything you are actually using.

References

• Australian Communications and Media Authority. (n.d.). Avoid sending spam. acma.gov.au
• Australian Communications and Media Authority. (2026). Lululemon penalised $702K for spam breaches. acma.gov.au
• Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. (2023). Chapter 7: APP 7 Direct marketing. oaic.gov.au
• Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. (2025). Guide to health privacy: introduction and key concepts. oaic.gov.au
• Klaviyo. (n.d.). Acceptable use policy and Privacy FAQs. klaviyo.com
• Brevo. (n.d.). Terms of use and About Brevo's pricing plans. brevo.com
• Mailchimp. (n.d.). About Mailchimp pricing plans and Standard terms of use. mailchimp.com
• Zoho. (n.d.). Subscription type, Campaigns pricing and Know your data centre. zoho.com
• HubSpot. (2025). Sensitive data and Data centers. hubspot.com