We all know the importance of lead nurturing and our inboxes are a place where we spend a lot of time. That’s why sending emails from a bulk email marketing service is a great way to build relationships with your customers without spending money on ads. It’s also free to send as many bulk emails as you want to as many people as you want.
Email marketing’s best kept secret is that you can send emails using a free bulk email marketing tool.
EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a simple email marketing tool that runs on the Amazon SES infrastructure. While the free plan doesn’t offer as many features as some of the other free email marketing tools on this list, it does allow a lot more emails per month than most of them.
You can send out unlimited emails from as many email addresses as you like. This makes it the perfect solution for a small agency or entrepreneur representing other brands. It also integrates with third-party apps like MailOptin, WordPress and Zapier so you can seamlessly exchange customer data between different tools.
Moosend
Moosend is an excellent email marketing tool that lets you automate repetitive tasks and saves you time. You can design behavioral email campaigns based on your subscribers’ information and/or activities. You can use its advanced segmentation feature to send highly accurate emails to each recipient, increasing open rate and click-through rate as well as ROI.
This tool provides you with a detailed campaign performance report so you know exactly how to optimize your campaigns and get even better results. You can even integrate it with some of your favorite apps to seamlessly pass on vital information between different tools. It’s also one of the only free email marketing tools that won’t include its logo in your emails.
Mailjet
Mailjet comes with intuitive and collaborative tools to help you build effective email marketing campaigns. Customize any of the pre-designed templates and create responsive emails to impress any recipient no matter which device they’re using. If you work with a team, you’ll love the platform’s real-time collaboration feature that allows for seamless collaboration.
This email marketing tool also lets you add dynamic content so you can create personalized and relevant emails for each recipient. This helps you get much better results out of your email marketing campaigns. You can also integrate the platform into your CRM and easily manage your mailing list through a single dashboard.
MailerLite – ticks most of the boxes
As its name suggests, MailerLite’s focus is on delivering a simple, no-frills email marketing service. The result is an easy-to-use newsletter tool with some surprisingly useful features (think landing pages, forms, and marketing automation). And their ‘Free Forever’ plan gives you access to most – but not all – of their features.
What we liked: Their tool is super intuitive, so even if you’re an email marketing novice, you’ll have no problem getting campaigns up and running. And as long as you have less than 1,000 subscribers, you can send 12,000 emails a month, and even set up automations and landing pages for free.
Where they should improve: Unfortunately their templates aren’t available on the free plan, meaning you’ll need to build your own. There’s no spam or design testing, and while we like their workflow-based automation editor, it’s limited to just a handful of automation functions (sending trigger-based emails, updating contact fields etc).
Who is the free plan suited to? We think MailerLite is one of the best free email marketing services around. But we think it’s especially handy for budget-conscious businesses looking for an easy, all-in-one solution for their inbound marketing.
MailChimp – making email marketing fun
Let’s face it – email marketing can be a little dry sometimes. MailChimp is a breath of fresh air, and their fun and quirky branding, paired with some solid, user-friendly features, have helped it quickly become the world’s most popular email marketing service.
Their free account gives you 10,000 emails a month for up to 2,000 contacts, with access to landing pages, forms and reporting. However, if you want ad-free emails and access to features like A/B testing, chat/email support, inbox previews, and time zone delivery, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their monthly or pay-as-you-go plans.
What we liked: They have a great variety of well-designed and (mostly) mobile-responsive templates, with plenty of flexibility to edit as needed. Their reporting is comprehensive, with stats on conversions, social activity, e-Commerce tracking and email domain performance. You’ve also got forms that easily integrate with your site, landing pages, and over 800 third-party integration options.
Where they should improve: Although they promote themselves as ‘the world’s largest marketing automation platform’, their automation could be massively improved with a workflow editor and more automations beyond just autoresponders. Emails also have a tendency to end up in Gmail’s Promotions tab – fine if your emails are promoting sales and offers, but less than ideal if they’re informational or transactional. The interface could also be a bit more user-friendly. Find out more in this Mailchimp alternatives post.
Who is the free plan suited to? Marketers who want to send nice-looking promotional emails to a relatively large number of subscribers, and access to deep-level reporting. Be aware that Mailchimp doesn’t have the most competitive prices in their paid plans.
Sender – easy does it
A simple interface and smooth user experience make Sender one of the easiest email marketing tools to use. Its free plan also has a substantial allowance of 2,500 subscribers and up to 15,000 emails per month. You get a nice amount of features included too – automations, transactional emails, push notifications and forms.
What we liked: The automations included on the free plan are surprisingly advanced – you’ve got options to send abandoned cart campaigns, for example, and to perform actions such as moving subscribers to different lists or updating custom field values. In general, the simplicity of the tool is a nice change from the overcomplexity of other similarly-featured tools.
Where they should improve: While the email template designs aren’t bad, it would be nice to have a few more on offer. Integrations are limited to just a handful of third-party applications, including WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento.
Who is the free plan suited to? If you’re after an easy-to-use, no-nonsense email marketing service (with a few nice extras thrown in), you’ll appreciate Sender’s simplicity and utility.
Free Trial: sender.net
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 automations 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 subscriber and email allowances. If you need basic email marketing automation and don’t want to pay, you’d be better off going with MailerLite.
Sendinblue
Free Plan: 9,000 emails/month (300/day) for unlimited subscribers
Best for: eCommerce, Publishers, Agencies
Unique feature: SMS personalization features
Sendinblue is a free email marketing platform that started as a transactional email platform and then expanded its reach into email marketing and marketing automation. The tool will give you access to a drag-n-drop builder to customize your email templates and create your newsletters.
While the template library isn’t rich, Sendinblue is great if you need mobile-responsive campaigns. Apart from its email creation abilities, the email service equips you with free SMS marketing features to engage with mobile users.
Email and SMS personalization are also available on the free plan, along with various segmentation options to manage your contact list more easily. Marketing automation is also included in the free plan. You can create workflows with the workflow editor, but you can only target up to 2,000 contacts.
Overall, Sendinblue is a great email marketing tool with SMS marketing options and a good sender score. However, you should keep in mind that your email campaigns will include the Sendinblue logo.
Sendinblue Features
- Mobile-friendly newsletter campaigns
- SMS marketing personalization for targeted messages
- Advanced segmentation options to group subscribers
- Contact lists and details to keep your contacts organized
- Send transactional emails and SMS sending
- Online form builder to boost lead generation
Sendinblue Pricing
Sendinblue’s free plan has all the necessary features you need but with a strict daily email sending limit of 300. Paid plans start at $25/month, offering A/B testing tools and more advanced features.
CleverReach
Free Plan: 1,000 emails/month for 250 subscribers
Best for: B2B, SMBs, eCommerce
Unique feature: Reminder emails and autoresponders
CleverReach is among those free email marketing services that started as something else. In this case, the tool is a technology service provider for email marketing that has come to be one of the free email marketing tools to talk about.
But is CleverReach as clever as it claims to be when it comes to its free email tools? Well, CleverReach earns points for its clean and straightforward UI and short learning curve. While the drag-n-drop builder is fairly easy to use, there’s still some room for improvement.
The free tool also allows you to connect your CMS, CRM, and shop systems via the CleverReach Plugins. Among others, you can benefit from the service’s reminder emails to give your webinars and other reminder-needing events a boost.
CleverReach Features
- Plugins such as Shopware, WordPress, and Salesforce
- View unsubscribes from contact list
- Import HTML campaign
- Automated reminder emails
CleverReach Pricing
CleverReach’s free plan is great for beginners who don’t need many features. Paid plans start at about $18, giving you access to autoresponders, removing ads, and lifting your email marketing automation limitations.
Conclusion
Email marketing is an effective way to promote your business globally. It allows you to reach out to new customers easily, with the help of the internet. Once you’ve set up an email account on your computer or mobile device, anybody can mail thousands of emails at once with just a few clicks. But if you want to carry out large-scale email marketing effortlessly, without spending a fortune or losing time in composing personalized messages or creating templates, there are companies that have set up bulk email marketing services for free. Each vendor offers different tools for email marketing. However, there are basic things they all have in common.