Email marketing is a big field with a wide range of available solutions ranging from free to paid. If you’re considering using email as a marketing strategy, you obviously don’t want to spend any more money than you have to. There are plenty of entirely free email management solutions out there that still provide a ton of value.
Here are the best out there!
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.Pro Tip: Get HubSpot’s Free Email Marketing Tools to create, personalize, and optimize your marketing emails without waiting on designers or IT.
Collect contacts through HubSpot’s forms, manage contacts in their advanced CRM and send up to 2,000 emails a month for free. You can also add unlimited users and assign contacts to each of them.
The drag and drop editor is pretty smooth and helpfully points out anything you might have missed. Unfortunately, they do not offer anything special when it comes to email templates – you just have one basic newsletter or promotion template to customize. It’s also not possible to unload your own or code it in HTML.
If you want access to templates, automations and landing pages, you’ll have to upgrade to their Sales or Marketing Hub.
What we liked: You have access to a robust CRM, form builder, ads and a few other cool features. In terms of ease of use, the software doesn’t feel overwhelming at all. Primarily a CRM, they are generous when it comes to contacts, allowing you to store up to 1 million for free!
Where they should improve: Though there is (virtually) no cap on contacts, you might find that 2,000 emails a month isn’t enough. You’ll also have to put up with the HubSpot branding being present at the end of every email you send. They could also include a few nice templates in the free plan or at least the option to upload your own.
A limitation to HubSpot’s free plan is that you’re not able to properly authenticate an email sending domain through SPF and DKIM – that said, they didn’t score too badly in our deliverability testing.
Who should use the free plan: Small to medium-sized businesses who are in need of a decent CRM – because this is where HubSpot really shines. You’ll need to take into account that the monthly sending limit is quite low compared to other tools (though one-to-one sales emails don’t count towards this) and neither A/B testing nor automations are included.
Mailjet – lots of potential
Another newsletter provider traditionally known for sending transactional emails, Mailjet has evolved into a more complete email service, although their features are still relatively basic. Their free plan is generous in terms of capacity (unlimited contacts and up to 6,000 emails a month, with a 200-email daily limit). It’s a little less generous in terms of access, however – premium features like automations, segmentation and A/B testing are only available to try out for free for 30 days.
What we liked: The drag-and-drop editor is a breeze to use, and they have a decent range of email templates to choose from.
Where they should improve: Everything still feels a little new and unpolished – there’s just a handful of automation workflows available, for example, and lots of features still under development.
Who is the free plan suited to? If volume is important to you, and you don’t need sophisticated features, Mailjet’s free plan will serve you well.
Free Trial: www.mailjet.com
Benchmark – sleek and simple
With a clean and minimalist design, Benchmark is one of the most user-friendly newsletter tools we’ve tried. What’s more, their free Starter plan gives you access to all areas – marketing automation, forms, surveys and reporting included – with a few caveats (you won’t be able to activate automations or A/B tests, for example, and sign-up forms will only allow you to add 75 subscribers a day). You’ll also only have 250 emails/month, which is not many at all.
What we liked: They have a great variety of modern-looking and mobile-friendly templates, and a drag-and-drop editor that’s hard to beat in terms of usability. Support, even on the free plan, is fast and responsive. And they offer integration with over 300+ tools, including WordPress, Facebook and Shopify.
Where they should improve: Deliverability rates with Benchmark were disappointingly low (particularly to Outlook and Hotmail inboxes). You’re also unlikely to stay on the free plan for very long, as they charge $5/month to upgrade your image storage from 10MB to unlimited and only allow for 250 emails/month.
Who is the free plan suited to? Businesses who tend to send more text-based emails might have a better chance of staying under the file storage limit (and having their emails delivered) – so if you’re after a nicely designed and straightforward tool, Benchmark is a good choice.
Benchmark Video Review
Free Trial: www.benchmarkemail.com
MoonMail – powerful, but at a price
MoonMail leverages Amazon’s cloud network to send their email and was built with volume in mind. Their free plan however is one of the most restrictive, with just 300 emails a month, and a daily cap of 1 campaign a day (with only 10 recipients per campaign). You’re obligated to use their own domain as the email sender address, and have no access to automations. Support and the ability to edit custom fields is also limited. Plus, we have to say their tool isn’t the easiest to use, with a lot of back and forth required to set up campaigns.
Free Trial: moonmail.io
CleverReach – professional but limited
CleverReach offers a complete, enterprise-grade email marketing service, with functions like marketing automation, forms, and reports. Their Lite plan gives you access to most of their features and allows up to 1,000 emails to a maximum of 250 subscribers every month for free.
What we liked: Their editor is easy to use. We also like their workflow-based automation editor, comprehensive reporting, and handy campaign calendar.
Where they should improve: The free plan is very limited in terms of automations, templates and registration forms. And it’s a shame that not all their templates are responsive.
Who should use the free plan: If your list is small and EU compliance is a big priority for you, CleverReach is the way to go – double opt-ins come as standard, and data is hosted within Europe.
Free Trial: www.cleverreach.com
YMLP – it’s a no from us
This Belgian newsletter provider do have a free plan for up to 1,000 contacts, with a pretty good level of access to different features, but there’s a lot that needs to be improved. For one, both their templates and editor are extremely outdated (ever seen an email that looks like it’s been put together in Microsoft Word? Then you get the picture). The reporting on the free plan is also a little scant – you won’t get data on opens, clicks, or contact activity. And their navigation is a bit clunky. In general, YMLP feels like a bit of a dinosaur compared to the other more modern-looking and feature-rich tools. It’s not one of the free email marketing software we’d recommend.
Free Trial: www.ymlp.com
Moosend
Price: Free; $8/mo (Pro), request a custom plan (Enterprise)
Moosend is ideal for people looking to get their feet wet in email marketing. The free tier comes feature-packed, but you’re maxed at 1,000 subscribers and won’t have a dedicated IP address.
Moosend offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, email marketing automation triggers, real-time analytics, and list segmentation features. Moosend doesn’t offer a CRM, but if you’re looking to solely do email marketing, it might be a good start for your business.
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.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is the email marketing toolkit you need to create powerful campaigns quickly and easily. The selection of features available means you can mix and match them to suit your needs.
Choose effective automations, advanced segmentation, and A/B testing to better understand your audience, and create transactional email campaigns, SMS marketing strategies, and more with the extra features.
All of this comes at an extremely affordable price – there’s even a free option to start with that lets you send up to 300 emails a day.
What’s great about Sendinblue is that you can store an unlimited of contacts across all plans – even the free plan. That way you don’t need to worry about increasing email costs as your subscriber list grows.
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.
Start using Sendinblue for free today >>
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.
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.
Email marketing is the cornerstone of any modern marketing department. For years, it’s been one of the most effective ways to build your brand’s awareness and grow your customer base, but how can you really figure out which email marketing platform is best? To start, you’ll want to look at what types of technology they offer, like automated drip campaigns or analytics reports. Then, you’ll have to determine if their existing customer base fits with your target audience.