You are looking for an email marketing service, but the free options are too limited, or feel clunky to use. You don’t want to spend money on an email list service right now… But you still need a way to automate your mailing list. There are some awesome free email marketing tools available to help you build your first list, A/B test email campaigns, and more.
Constant Contact – Best Drag-and-Drop Builder
- PRICE STARTS AT $20/MO
- DRAG-AND-DROP EMAIL BUILDER
- 100+ MOBILE-FRIENDLY TEMPLATES
- SIMPLE AUTOMATION TOOLS
Constant Contact is a great platform we recommend to those of you who are newer to the email marketing world.
That’s because of their intuitive drag-and-drop email builder. It allows you to easily create new emails that look good and on-brand—no coding knowledge needed. Adding text, image, video, coupons, polls, and events to any message is simple and straightforward.
It couples excellently with their more than 100 pre-built, mobile-optimized templates.
With Constant Contact, you can track the results of your campaigns in real-time. You’ll see everything from open rates to click-through rates, as well as data for each individual subscriber.
Automation is a key benefit of Constant Contact. You can trigger welcome messages for new subscribers and set up drip campaigns based on their actions.
Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial, which is one of the best offers you’ll find in the industry.
Pricing for Constant Contact’s email software is straightforward. There are two plans for you to choose from—Email and Email Plus.
Like most email marketing platforms, your rate will be based on the number of subscribers on your list.
Sendinblue – Best for Growing Your List
- PRICE STARTS AT FREE
- UNLIMITED CONTACTS
- DRAG & DROP EDITOR
- HIGHLY CUSTOMIZABLE
Sendinblue offers a fully-automated email marketing solution for growing businesses.
That means if you’re just beginning your business and looking to grow your list (and your sales), Sendinblue is a top contender.
They offer a combination of drag-and-drop editors along with automation to optimize your email marketing campaigns.
They also offer a host of lead nurturing tools to help you grow even more including:
- Landing pages. Create actionable and engaging web pages to collect leads for you.
- Sign up forms. Place forms anywhere on your website to get user information.
- Facebook ads. Leverage the power of Facebook marketing to nurture more leads.
- Retargeted ads. Powerful ads based on a user’s previous online interactions.
With all this, Sendinblue helps cultivate audience, lead, and customer growth.
The platform is available via a fantastic free plan that gives you unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails per day. That’s a pretty great deal—especially if you’re running a bootstrap startup or solo operation.
Their email builder is incredibly intuitive with a drag-and-drop editor allowing you to easily create the look and feel of your email.
Visit MailerLite
PRICE STARTS AT $0
PREMIUM PLANS START AT $10/MO
ALL BASIC EMAIL FEATURES
A/B TESTING TOOLS
TRY MAILERLITE FOR FREE
MailerLite offers all of the essentials with none of the fat.
It’s a great option for anyone who wants a straightforward email marketing service. You’re a creator who doesn’t need a ton of bells and whistles. You just need the tools to start your newsletter or send emails—and do so well.
It’s also nice for teams. Nobody is going to be intimidated by this platform, which means everyone is going to use the core features at their disposal.
The platform still offers tools for automation, landing pages, pop-ups, and surveys, so it’s not like you’re extremely limited. But even the UI for each one is fairly spartan and straightforward.
MailerLite has a drag-and-drop editor, which makes it easy for anyone to design a high-quality message. Segment your subscribers to enhance personalization and optimize your campaigns with features like A/B testing.
I’d recommend MailerLite for those of you who want simple email software at an affordable rate.
Moosend – Best for AI-Powered Ecommerce Sales
- STARTS AT $0
- AI-POWERED ECOMMERCE
- UNLIMITED EMAILS
- REPORTING & ANALYTICS
Moosend offers an email marketing solution no matter if you’re a complete beginner or if you’re a seasoned pro.
From their easy drag-and-drop email builder, to their easy segmentation tool, to their accurate real-time analytics, they have all the features you need to nail your email marketing campaigns.
Our favorite thing about Moosend is their ecommerce AI. It leverages machine learning and collaborative filtering to target customers with products they might like based on the shopping habits of similar customers.
You’ll also be able to easily cross sell based on customer shopping habits, and keep track of how often they buy certain products (e.g. perishables) so you can regularly promote the products they need to them when they need it.
I haven’t seen any other email marketing service do this. But it has the potential to really help out the newer ecommerce business looking to level up their targeting and segmentation game.
Moosend also does the basics of email marketing very well. Their advanced personalization features allows you to create emails unique for your target customer. Their segmentation tool allows you to spit your audience by purchasing behavior, cart abandoned products, and more.
They don’t offer that many themes with just 40 responsive themes to choose from. However, they’re all highly customizable and eye-catching.
AWeber – Best Value For Low Subscriber Count
- PRICE STARTS AT $19/MO
- GREAT FOR <500 SUBSCRIBERS
- A/B TESTING AND AUTOMATION TOOLS
- 700+ PRE-BUILT TEMPLATES
AWeber is a traditional email marketing service that’s reliable and very affordable.
Where AWeber really shines, though, is its simple pricing structure. In fact, it’s very lucrative to those with small lists (500 subscribers or less).
Unlike other platforms that add features and capabilities for plans at different price points, AWeber offers all of its features with every plan.
Pricing is based strictly on the number of subscribers on your list. So you’ll get the same features whether you have 20 contacts or 20,000 contacts.
Here’s an overview of the pricing tiers.
- 0 – 500 Subscribers — $19 per month
- 501 – 2,500 Subscribers — $29 per month
- 2,501 – 5,000 Subscribers — $49 per month
- 5,001 – 10,000 Subscribers — $69 per month
- 10,001 – 25,000 Subscribers — $149 per month
With AWeber, you’ll get all of the basic features that you expect with an email marketing service:
- 700+ pre-built templates
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Email analytics
- A/B testing
- Sign up forms
- Automation
- Third-party integrations
- Subscriber segmentation
AWeber is an industry leader in email deliverability rates. They make sure that your content is optimized to reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
Drip – Best for New Ecommerce Businesses
- PRICE STARTS AT $49/MO
- 24/7 LIVE CHAT AND EMAIL SUPPORT
- CRM FOR ECOMMERCE STORES
- AUTOMATIC REVENUE ATTRIBUTION
Drip is a relatively new platform. It’s a CRM that offers email marketing for ecommerce businesses.
I like Drip because they’re great for new ecommerce merchants since they focus on offering smaller, independent shops the same powerful automation and segmentation tools for email marketing as larger ecommerce stores.
As such, they’re great for newer brands looking to get a leg up.
With Drip, you can track valuable commerce metrics related to customer intent and purchase behavior.
You’ll be able to segment new website visitors from returning customers. Drip also lets you target users who abandoned their carts.
Their CRM helps you reach customers through multiple touchpoints online, including email. Drip also has a revenue attribution feature, giving you a clearer view of which campaigns are actually making you money.
Again, this is ideal for ecommerce shops.
With personalization capabilities, powerful segmentation options, and detailed analytics, Drip has everything you need to succeed with email marketing.
Pricing is based on the number of customers in your account. All plans come with the same features and benefits.
ConvertKit – Best for Influencers, Bloggers, and Creators
- PRICE STARTS AT $29/MO
- EXCELLENT FOR INDEPENDENT CREATORS
- CUSTOM FORMS & REPORTING
- EASY TAGGING AND SEGMENTING
ConvertKit is one of my favorite email marketing services.
It’s a perfect choice for creators of all stripes. That includes influencers, bloggers, video producers, musicians, artists, and more. That’s because their platform focuses more on engaging your audience and nurturing them with landing pages, ecommerce platforms, and membership sites.
You’ll be able to create leads out of casual visitors to your social media accounts, blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook pages, and more.
For those of you who want to build automated email funnels at an affordable price, ConvertKit will be a top option for you to consider.
To set up automated emails, you’ll be guided through a simple visual flow chart.
Instead of having multiple lists of contacts, ConvertKit groups all of your subscribers into one list. But you’ll still be able to tag them manually for segmentation purposes or with auto tags based on their behavior to improve the personalization of your campaigns. That’s great for creators with big audiences.
ConvertKit is best for sending quick emails with clean formatting. There are no complex designs or distracting elements here.
Like most email marketing software, ConvertKit pricing is based on the number of subscribers you have.
- 0 – 1,000 Subscribers — $29 per month
- 1,000 – 3,000 Subscribers — $49 per month
- 3,000 – 5,000 Subscribers — $79 per month
If you switch to ConvertKit with more than 5,000 subscribers, you’ll benefit from their free concierge migration service. You can save some money and get two months for free if you sign up for an annual plan.
ConvertKit has more than 70 third-party direct integrations, customizable forms, and custom reporting. Email and live chat are available for 12 hours per day, Monday through Friday, with limited support on nights and weekends.
ActiveCampaign
Ease of Use
Here’s what our testers thought of ActiveCampaign’s user experience: “The entire flow is very straightforward and easy to grasp. ActiveCampaign has a couple of unique aspects that we didn’t find with other service providers, namely the personal consultation call and the spam analyzing tool.”
Adding your contacts to an email list is a standard process with options to insert them individually, importing email contacts in bulk from a file, or copy-pasting. If you have a list with another email marketing service, you can connect it, and your contacts get transferred automatically. You can organize the contacts by adding tags to each of them.
Before you can start creating your email, you have to build a campaign. There are several specific options for the type of campaign: standard campaign, automation, RSS triggered, date-based, and split testing. The next step is adding a list to your campaign; however, you can’t add contacts individually or include all of your available subscribers.
You can create your email from scratch using the editor tool, choose a template, or insert custom HTML code. You can choose from 21 available templates and a bunch of layout options. The design tool itself is based on a drag and drop functionality with pre-defined elements that you can add to your email. There are also some additional design options for each component. ActiveCampaign also features an image editing tool in the email editor, which is a time saver.
Once you’re done with your email, you get to the summary page. Here you can turn on different tracking features, add a date for scheduling your email, and run a Spam Check. The latter shows you how likely your message is considered spam by the email software – something unique we haven’t encountered with other service providers. You can now send the message immediately, schedule it, or simply save and exit the editor.
Believe it or not, one of the best ways for your business to go viral online is by giving away free marketing tools. No, I’m not talking about giving away something that you will charge them for later. As a matter of fact, I believe that this is one of the best ways that a small business can go viral without spending a single dime.