If you want to succeed with email marketing, then you need to do it right. There is no room for error. You also need a way to track how you are doing. This will ensure that you can improve your email marketing campaigns over time. So, what makes a good email marketing software? Well, there are a lot of features that make a software great for email marketing. But only a handful of them make a good choice for beginners and experts alike. Those features should be considered when choosing the best free email marketing software can be useful.
So let us now see which email marketing softwares perform the most.
Netcore Email API
Price: 30,000 emails free for the first 30 days, then100/ day free, forever; paid plans start at $25/mo for 150,000 emails
Netcore Email API (formerly Pepipost) is an integrable SMTP relay service for fast email delivery. That means your emails are sent to your customers in less than three seconds.
Easy email APIs give you the freedom to connect custom apps and platforms or use open source marketing platforms like Mautic and Mailtrain for sending your emails.
Once your emails are sent, the dashboard displays real-time updates about your campaign performance including the number of deliveries, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and bounces.
The AI-powered servers optimize your emails based on the success metrics for the type of email you send. For example, the predictive engagement feature automatically prioritizes delivery to users who are most likely to engage, and send-time optimization ensures your emails are sent at the most optimal time.
You also gain access to in-depth analytics that can also be delivered straight to your internal systems with the use of powerful webhooks. And if you experience any issues, the 24/7 email experts on chat resolve those quickly.
Mailchimp
Price: Free; $9/mo (Essentials), $14.99/mo (Standard), $299/mo (Premium)
Mailchimp offers access to email marketing features such as list segmentation, A/B testing, contact profiles, and more. However, it’s important to note you’ll have Mailchimp branding in your email footers with the free plan and won’t have access to premium support.
Mailchimp integrates with ecommerce providers including WooCommerce and Magento if you have an ecommerce store. Additionally, the tool integrates with WordPress, if that’s your CMS software of choice. Lastly, Mailchimp offers reports and analytics for emails so you can identify areas of opportunity.
Zoho Campaigns
Price: Free; $3/mo (Email-Based Plan), $4.50/mo (Subscriber-Based Plan), $7/mo (Pay by Email Credits)
Zoho Campaigns provides access to features such as A/B testing, reports, and email templates. If you’re already using the Zoho CRM, it makes sense to check out Zoho campaigns to see how email and CRM work together. This type of email marketing tool and CRM integration will improve your workflows and productivity.
It’s important to note that while the free version provides a variety of email marketing features, most of them have limitations.
Mailjet
Price: Free; $9.65/mo (Basic), $20.95 (Premium), request a quote (Enterprise)
With Mailjet’s free plan, you’ll have access to unlimited contacts, APIs and webhooks, an advanced email editor, and analytics. However, with the free plan, there are no available features for A/B testing or automation.
Mailjet’s interface is easy to use and since the tool gives you full API access, Mailjet is ideal for businesses that require technical adjustments.
Benchmark
Price: Free; $13/mo (Pro), request a quote (Enterprise)
Benchmark is designed to cater to enterprise-level businesses, is user-friendly, and easy to implement. It has a drag-and-drop editor, a variety of email templates, sign-up form options, and drip campaign features.
However, there’s no option for A/B testing or automation features on the free tool. Furthermore, contacts can’t be added via list import in the free plan — you can only email contacts who fill out Benchmark subscriber forms.
MailerLite
Price: Free; $10+/ mo for 1,000+ subscribers
MailerLite is ideal for small businesses that want to send bulk marketing emails. It’s well-equipped with preview features so you can review your email on desktop and mobile before sending it.
However, the API and integration capabilities are not as robust as some of the other options in this list.
ExpressPigeon
Price: Free; request for custom pricing for paid plans.
ExpressPigeon is a good solutionfor businesses with short email lists that include high-priority subscribers. With ExpressPigeon, you can effortlessly build and personalize emails, automate email responses, and send high-volume emails.
Best of all, you gain access to all of the premium features with the free plan — however, there are low send and subscriber limits. ExpressPigeon is regarded as having some of the best customer satisfaction scores in the industry.
HubSpot Email Marketing
HubSpot, probably best known for their marketing automation platform, recently launched a free email marketing tool that can support a lot of a small business’ transactional email needs.
Whether you need to send kickback emails from lead offers, thank you emails after purchase, or just promote current campaigns, HubSpot Email Marketing’s free version can do that. One of the best parts of HubSpot’s free email tool is its ease of use. The tool features a handy drag-and-drop visual editor, and it also comes equipped with ready-made templates to get you up and running immediately.
What makes HubSpot Email Marketing stand out is, of course, its native integration with other HubSpot tools, such as the free-forever CRM. Once you start an account, you get access to both tools so you can create a centralized contacts database, organize it in lists, and manage and track email performance.
Sender
Sender is one of the best free email marketing tools in the market with features to ensure deliverability. It lets you create stunning newsletters without any HTML knowledge. Just choose from a template and customize it with elements like images, videos and text. You can even personalize your newsletters for each recipient to create an even bigger impact.
Sender’s robust analytics feature is one of the top reasons why it’s on our list. It lets you track who opened your emails and clicked on the links, when they were opened and more. It even helps you build accurate buyer profiles based on your subscriber actions, so you’ll be able to optimize your existing email strategy and craft compelling offers.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a marketing communication platform that features both email marketing tools and additional functions such as customer relationship management and landing page creation. With over 70 design templates, Sendinblue’s email design functions make it easy to create a great-looking email. Plus, all of these templates are responsive, and you can preview your results to can ensure your design looks the way you want on any screen format.
After you design your email, you can use features like A/B testing and segmented recipient lists to take the manual effort and guesswork out of optimizing your campaigns and targeting your ideal audiences.
Starting out as a transactional email provider, Sendinblue have successfully expanded into the email marketing service space, offering advanced features such as SMS marketing and email automation.
On their free plan, you can have an unlimited number of subscribers and send up to 9,000 emails a month, although there’s a daily cap of 300 emails. A few of the features are also off-limits – you won’t get access to email heat maps, details of openers and clickers, or ad-free emails.
What we liked: Marketing automation is a little more sophisticated than other tools’, with options to build and even test various campaign workflows (e.g. based on page visits, email engagement, product purchases). Reporting is also pretty good, although it’s a little annoying that the free plan doesn’t give you details of who opened and clicked. Their paid plans are pretty affordable, starting at only $25 for 40,000 emails.
Where they should improve: While their templates are mobile-responsive, they could do with a wider variety (although you can always find and use your own templates). And they’re missing features such as A/B testing, which come as standard in most other tools.
Who is the free plan suited to? If your email marketing is less about newsletters and more about sending trigger-based campaigns (such as welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, or emails based on web visits/email engagement), Sendinblue is a decent option to try.
Omnisend – a smart tool for ecommerce
As an email service that’s strongly geared to ecommerce, Omnisend has a lot of exceptional features, including automation workflows, the ability to automatically add your store’s products to your newsletters, and cool email add-ons like scratch cards and gift boxes. What’s more, all of these features are available on the free plan, along with website tracking, 24/7 support, deep reporting, and landing pages. Not bad at all.
Unfortunately, a recent change in Omnisend’s pricing means that the number of emails you can send has decreased dramatically. What were 15,000 emails per month (2,000 per day) are now just 500, and you can only contact 250 subscribers. This might work for you if you need an advanced service but have few subscribers, but I imagine you’ll quickly outgrow the allowances.
Free Trial: www.omnisend.com
Conclusion
Email marketing is still a key strategy for a growing business. In fact, 57% of B2B marketers say email is their top channel for generating leads. There are a lot of great email marketing tools out there to help you make the most of your email campaigns, but sometimes free software is better than paid.