Are You Doing Email Marketing? Here are the Best Free Tools and Software for It: A blog around email marketing and how you can use simple tools for it.
HubSpot Free Email Marketing Tool
Price: Free; paid plans with Marketing Hub: $45/mo (Starter), $800/mo (Professional), $3,200/mo (Enterprise)
HubSpot offers a reliable and feature-packed email marketing tool that’s suited for growing businesses — for free. Create professional, personalized, and on-brand marketing emails that engage and grow your audience.
With the drag-and-drop email builder, you don’t need to wait on IT or designers to help you create your emails.
Additionally, the tool is automatically integrated with your free, all-in-one CRM platform. This means you can easily tailor and personalize emails based on relevant data stored in your CRM (e.g. name, company, previous purchases, previous sales conversations, previous support tickets, etc.).
Lastly, with the tool’s email reporting analytics, you’ll be able to identify exactly what is and isn’t working among your audience members.
SendPulse
Price: Free; $8/mo (Standard), $9.60/mo (Pro), $13.44/mo (Enterprise)
Send Pulse has over 130+ templates to choose from or you can create your own using the drag-and-drop editor. Under the free plan, you’ll have access to Send Pulse’s highly regarded support team, including support via live chat.
In terms of functionality, Send Pulse has a “Resend” feature that allows you to resend unopened emails with different subject lines, which is valuable for time scrapped marketers. They also offer web pushes, SMTP, Viber, and more.
4. Sendinblue
Price: Free; $25/mo (Lite), $65/mo (Premium), request a custom quote (Enterprise)
If your business relies heavily on transactional emails, such as forgotten password help and invoice receipts, then Sendinblue might be ideal for you. With their extensive developer APIs, you’ll be able to integrate with their email system to achieve custom and required technical processes.
With Sendinblue’s free plan, you’ll have access to a vast array of templates, personalization, A/B testing, contact management, workflow editor, and real-time reporting.
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.
Mailchimp (mailchimp.com)
Mailchimp is a favorite of many bloggers and small businesses because it was one of the first big email services to offer a completely free plan. Not only that, but Mailchimp has some excellent eCommerce and email marketing tools.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan includes 10,000 emails per month for up to 2,000 subscribers.
If you would like to upgrade to unlimited emails it costs $10 per month – the catch is that you can only have up to 500 subscribers – which isn’t the case for some alternatives.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing services?
- The drag-and-drop editor, along with the beautiful templates that you can personalize, are some of the best in the business.
- You get a landing page builder – use them to promote special offers.
- Mailchimp has tools for Instagram and Facebook ads and posts.
- Connect with tools like Shopify, Eventbrite, and Salesforce.
- The automation tools include options for abandoned carts, welcome campaigns, and product recommendations.
- A/B testing and segmentation make your emails more effective.
- Great award-winning customer support available 24/7.
Who should use it?
We like Mailchimp for any small business owners and bloggers who appreciate great designs and stellar deliverability (it will also help you optimize your open rates). It’s also nice if you have an eCommerce store or plan on automating emails and you’d like to make your workflows more efficient.
3. MailerLite (www.mailerlite.com)
MailerLite is one of the best free email marketing services that gained popularity in the last two years. This tool makes it easier for users to improve interaction using pop-ups and surveys.
How many emails/subscribers do you get for free?
The free plan will let you send up to 1,000 emails without having to spend a dime. And while the free version will give you access to nearly all of the essential email marketing features, you might have to miss out on some advanced features.
By that, I mean you won’t be able to create templates, get live chat support or check CTR using a heatmap, or perform A/B testing. You can unlock all this for $10 per month. If you want to increase the subscribers limit to 2,500 then you need to spend $15 per month instead.
What makes this one of the best free email marketing software?
- You can create beautiful email newsletters, pop-ups, and surveys.
- Easily design a mobile-optimized email template for free.
- Send a newsletter to your global subscribers at optimum time using delivery-by-time-zone.
- You’d be able to control your backend using the custom HTML editor.
- Find the most converting landing page using A/B split testing and heatmap analysis.
- The dedicated support team for providing high-class live chat experience (premium plan)
- Get access to 49+ newsletter templates for blog, eCommerce, business, and more.
- Has an API for developers built on HTTP and REST.
Who should use it?
MailerLite can be used for creating landing pages (for webinars, for example), pop-ups, and surveys from a single dashboard. All this plus the heatmap testing makes it ideal for startups, small to mid-sized businesses, and eCommerce stores that need good deliverability.
Conclusion