Email Marketing is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. In fact, email marketing is a $40 billion dollar per year industry with an open rate of 48% and a click-through-rate of 20%. If you want to learn how to use email marketing software to market your business for free or build a successful online business with paid traffic , this blog post is for you .
In this review, we shall be looking at top email marketing services: Sendinblue, Ominisend, Campayn, Mailjet, GetResponse, SendPulse and EmailOctopus, and how to go about their subscription plans.
Sendinblue – doing one-on-one right
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
Campayn
Free Plan: Up to 500 subscribers and 12,500 emails per month
Paid plans: Start at $19 per month
As its name indicates, you can use Campayn to build quality email campaigns. If you only have a small email list (fewer than 500), then you can access their free Basic Plan. This offers all the core features.
As with most modern email marketing tools, Campayn features a simple drag and drop interface. You can set the perfect backdrop for your email message with a beautiful design that reflects your brand. You can use one of their templates or design your own.
It includes a contact manager that helps you keep your contacts up-to-date and track how they’re interacting with your emails. You can segment your list.
Campayn provides numerous options for designing sign-up forms, including website forms, hosted forms, Facebook forms, and pop-up lightbox forms.
It also makes life easier by enabling you to automate your most popular email marketing campaigns based on triggers for key customer activities.
Once you’ve started sending emails, you can track the success of every email campaign with detailed, real-time reports that allow you to see who opened it.
MailJet
Free Plan: 6,000 emails/month (200/day) for unlimited subscribers
Best for: SMEs, eCommerce, Enterprises
Unique feature: SMTP relay service
MailJet is a platform that started as a transactional email service. Later, it evolved into an email marketing platform with advanced email marketing tools, APIs, and Webhooks. MailJet is one of the free email marketing services that provide a “pay as you grow” pricing model that can be pretty beneficial if you’re low on budget.
The email service’s drag-n-drop email builder is easy-to-use, while the basic segmentation features will help you create more personalized email campaigns for your target audience. Furthermore, MailJet lets you collaborate on emails with your teammates, allowing you to update numerous elements simultaneously.
Now, as far as customer support is concerned, this free email marketing tool doesn’t offer online customer support for their free plan. Despite the lack of an online support team, MailJet’s free version makes newsletter design easier, offering you basic automation tools to get started.
Mailjet Features
- Store unlimited contacts details
- Email campaign co-creation
- Reporting and advanced email stats
- SMTP relay service
Mailjet Pricing
MailJet’s free plan might be a bit limited compared to the other free email marketing services. For extra features and online customer support, the platform offers three tiers starting at $9.65/month.
GetResponse – a free plan with unlimited emails
GetResponse has only recently added a free plan to their offering, but we’re very happy they have. We’ve been following GetResponse’s product updates for years, and can say that they have some very interesting niche features, though you’ll see below that the features included on their free plan are slightly more limited. These pro, paid features include webinars, sales funnels and advanced marketing automation
What we liked:
What is included are unlimited emails and a website builder with 5 GB of bandwidth. You can also connect your own domain and make use of their SEO-optimization tools.
There are over 500 email templates to choose from, and the editor is flexible and easy-to-use.
Where they should improve:
Unfortunately, you can only store up to 500 subscribers on the free plan, which isn’t many compared to the other tools on the list. You’re also limited to just one landing page.
Autoresponders and automations are reserved for higher-tier paid plans, and, of course, you’ll have to put up with the GetResponse branding.
Who is the free plan suited to?
Small businesses with few subscribers looking for a tool to set up both a simple website and manage their email marketing.
Free trial: www.getresponse.com
SendPulse – for multichannel messaging
SendPulse offers a multichannel platform for marketers looking to do more than just email marketing. Its wide solution set includes web push notifications, SMS, Viber and even transactional emails via SMTP.
SendPulse’s free plan is one of the more generous in terms of sending limits, with a monthly allowance of 15,000 emails, however, you are only allowed up to 500 subscribers.
What we liked: You get access to some very useful features even on the free plan, including autoresponders, A/B testing, and advanced reporting such as click heat maps and opens by location. Web push notifications come included in the free plan, and you can also opt to have a free monthly plan of 12,000 SMTP emails.
Where they should improve: I came across a few issues with their email editor, which was at times buggy and slow. Without a workflow-based editor for basic autoresponders, these can also be a bit cumbersome to manage.
Who is the free plan suited to? A multichannel platform won’t appeal to everyone, but if your business uses web push or transactional emails to communicate with customers, SendPulse’s free plan could save you a considerable amount of time and money.
Free Trial: sendpulse.com
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.
Free plan: www.emailoctopus.com
Conclusion
While there are many email marketing services available to big businesses, one that is gaining popularity for smaller businesses, bloggers and affiliate marketers is the freemail campaign service Mailerlite . It has all the necessary features you will need to create, send and manage direct mail campaigns within minutes.