Free Email Marketing Software. What is the Best Email Marketing Platform? A blog explaining the best email marketing software like MailChimp, Aweber, and Activecampaign, along with other options.
Sendinblue (www.sendinblue.com)
Sendinblue has a great free plan (unlimited contacts) along with support for SMS text message sending, SMTP, in-depth analytics, powerful marketing automation features all in the same dashboard. Sendinblue is also headquartered in France, so you’re guaranteed to comply with GDPR.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan lets you have an unlimited number of contacts, but you’re limited to 300 emails per day. For that reason, this platform might not be a great option if you want to send out email blasts to all your subscribers at the same time. However, if you have lots of drip campaigns, it’s quite flexible because there’s no subscriber cap.
The first upgrade is called the Lite plan, which offers 10,000 emails per month at $25.00 per month. The daily sending limit is removed.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
- A strong drag-and-drop email editor.
- Impressive automation with things like autoresponders, coupons in emails and abandoned cart messages.
- Integrations with platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, and Intercom.
- Heat mapping and A/B testing to see how your emails are doing.
- SMS marketing that can be linked to your email campaigns.
- A feature-rich WordPress plugin that lets you manage everything from your WordPress dashboard. Plus, you can handle your transactional emails through Sendinblue as well.
- Chat feature to reach out to visitors in real time. One of the unique features with an email marketing service.
- A unique CRM solution that’s integrated into the main Sendinblue package.
Who should use it?
Because of the way the free account works, Sendinblue is a great email marketing solution if you have lots of subscribers but you don’t need to message them all at the same time. If you’re only going to be sending a reasonable number of emails each day, you won’t have to pay for Sendinblue at all. It’s also a good option for WordPress users because of its official plugin and it has better analytics than many of the other free email marketing services.
Benchmark (www.benchmarkemail.com)
Benchmark boasts a speedy email designer made just for busy marketers. You can edit photos right in the editor and the templates are great for a wide variety of businesses. At the same time, their free email marketing tool is easy enough to use that your people will be able to subscribe/unsubscribe without added hurdles.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan lets you have unlimited subscribers and send up to 250 emails per month, which is almost exactly what you get with Mailchimp.
If you’d like to upgrade, you can start with 600 subscribers and unlimited sends per month for $13.99.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
- It doesn’t take much time to craft email marketing campaigns using their drag-and-drop email builder.
- You can easily custom code your emails.
- The email automation options include welcome emails, abandoned carts, and follow-ups.
- Polls and surveys are included.
- You receive tools for A/B testing and integrating with hundreds of apps.
Who should use it?
Since the free plan is one of the best on the market, I would recommend this platform to those who can’t afford to pay anything for an email marketing tool. Otherwise, it works well for bloggers and eCommerce stores (running on WooCommerce and other tools).
Zoho Campaigns – the Swiss Army Knife
Zoho are kind of a big deal in the sales and marketing world. Their impressive suite of services means that marketers and small business owners can find all that they need under one roof.
Zoho Campaigns is where the email marketing magic happens, and with a great selection of well-designed templates and an easy-to-use editor, it’s well worth checking out if you’re on a budget.
What we liked: Well-designed interface that is easy to navigate. The editor is fast and offers all the main elements, including columns, video, and polls. A cool feature is that you can upload images from Unsplash directly in the editor. Segmentation is also possible. We particularly liked their range of email and form templates.
Where they should improve: It’s a bit disappointing that no kind of automation are included in the free plan, though if you want this feature you can get it for as little as $5/month. The form builder could be easier to use with the use of drag and drop technology.
Who is the free plan suited to? Zoho Campaign’s free plan is for anyone looking for an easy-to-use email marketing service with decent subscribers and email allowances. If you need basic email marketing automation and don’t want to pay, you’d be better off going with MailerLite.
EmailOctopus
After Mailchimp and Moosend, here’s another animal in the email marketing zoo. EmailOctopus is a special breed: it used to be built on top of the Amazon SES service that provides the email infrastructure. The AWS account is optional now, though, meaning that you can use it just like any other newsletter service.
They let you have a generous 2500 subscribers for free, with a sending limit of 10,000 emails per month. If you are using Amazon’s servers, you can even use the free quota of currently up to 62,000 emails. “Currently”, because this can always change.
What we liked: prices on the paid plans are on the lower end (e.g. 50,000 subscribers for $115 per month) and once set up, the Octopus proved a well-spirited newsletter tool that is extremely easy to use. There’s an API available as well as a Zapier integration.
What they should improve: The range of features is a bit limited, though, if you are only looking to send classic newsletters and autoresponders you may have everything you need.
Who is the free plan suited to? I’d recommend EmailOctopus mainly to cost-conscious marketers who maybe already have an Amazon SES. They also seem to be relaxed about senders dealing with cryptocurrency and affiliate marketing. Industries other email providers often reject.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest-growing email marketing platforms in Europe.
It is an extremely easy-to-use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.
SendinBlue includes beginner-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users. It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using its AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.
SendinBlue offers a completely free email marketing plan with unlimited contacts. Their free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day, but all your emails will have their branding.
Their paid plans start from $25 per month for Lite. You can also include SMS to your account, but the pricing will vary based on your sending requirements.
They have improved their premium plan recently to include more advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means users now get more value for the same price.
SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice functionality to have if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content-based emails.
Drip
Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.
Their email software offers seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in signup forms to your website and capture more leads.
What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual automation workflow builder. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.
Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides, and excellent documentation.
We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.
Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.
Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.
Drip offers a free trial, and their plans start from $49 / month which includes all their features.
Recently, they’ve added SMS notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channels. This makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.
You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and more.
Each account gives you access to unlimited emails, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores.
Their Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate.
Constant Contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources.
Aside from online training, they also offer in-person live seminars across the United States. This allow small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro.
For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.
Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial (no credit-card required). After that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.
WPBeginner users can use our Constant Contact coupon code to get an additional 20% off.
Moosend
Free Plan: Unlimited emails/month for 1,000 subscribers (Sign up here)
Best for: eCommerce, SaaS, SMEs, Publishers, Bloggers, Agencies
Unique feature: No branding elements on your campaigns
Moosend is among the top free email marketing and marketing automation services that let you create elegant email marketing campaigns, automate your marketing efforts and boost your lead generation with online forms. With a variety of responsive email newsletter templates, the drag-n-drop email builder will allow you to become a creation pro without any technical expertise.
Apart from its free email marketing features, Moosend will also hook you up with marketing automation workflows and powerful segmentation features for free to increase your open rates and conversions. Through segmentation, you also boost your email list management and deliver more personalized content to your email subscribers.
Your free Moosend account also comes equipped with robust reporting and analytics to track your campaign performance and optimize your marketing efforts. Lastly, the free email marketing service offers integrations with popular apps to streamline your marketing efforts.
Overall, Moosend’s platform is an excellent option for new businesses and marketers that want to send unlimited email campaigns for up to 1,000 subscribers. You can use the tool yourself by signing up for a free account and check its features.
Moosend Features
- Email newsletter templates you can fully customize
- Drag-n-drop builder to easily create your campaigns
- Marketing automation to simplify tedious tasks
- Email list segmentation to maintain list hygiene
- Online forms to increase your lead generation
- Real-time reporting and analytics to monitor performance
- Integrations to streamline your marketing efforts
MailerLite
Free Plan: 12,000 emails/month for 1,000 subscribers
Best for: Creatives, Bloggers, SMBs, NPOs
Unique feature: A/B Testing features
Another unique platform in our free email marketing services list is MailerLite. The platform has a simple UI and a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor to take the hassle out of creating email campaigns even if you have limited experience.
Furthermore, what makes MailerLite a great free option for creatives and bloggers is the rich text editor and the built-in photo editing feature to create newsletter images that represent your brand.
Apart from email marketing, the free version will give you access to email automation features, including advanced segmentation, contact tagging, and its famous A/B testing tools. Reporting and analytics are, of course, part of the free version, giving you email campaign reports and surveys.
In general, MailerLite’s free email marketing service is simple and straightforward for beginners who want to grow their list and send their first email campaign, especially if they don’t mind the platform’s logo.
MailerLite Features
- Unsubscribe page builder
- Built-in photo editing to make attractive emails
- Subscriber management to keep your lists clean
- A/B split testing to find which elements perform better
- Reporting and survey to track your email performance
Conclusion
How To Market Yourself With An Email List: A blog about marketing yourself with an email list. Great for business owners where you need to maintain a good relationship with your customers after purchase or opt-in.