An email marketing campaign is a great way to nurture leads, generate sales, and connect with customers. It is also one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics. In this article, we’ll overview some of the best free email marketing tools for sending newsletters.
Is Email Marketing Important for businesses?
We’re in a time where video platforms like Youtube have become the best marketing platform. But does email marketing still works? And the simple answer is yes! Email marketing is still an effective and personalized way of marketing. Although there are advanced features available on social media platforms, here are two simple reasons why email marketing is still one of the best marketing channels. First, email is the go-to communication platform for personal and professional use. It means you won’t see many irrelevant ads taking away your attention. Additionally, email as a medium adds trust because your message is personalized and not like long Youtube videos or cringy social media reels. In short, email marketing works, and you get impressive results. Whether you’re new to email marketing or a marketing extraordinaire, you’ve heard about email newsletters. Let’s talk about newsletters.
What is an Email Newsletter?
Simply put, an email newsletter updates your business to your subscribers. In reality, it’s much more than that, and many people get hung up on what they should write in their newsletters. Let’s say you’re having a sale this week. How would you let your customers know? A great email newsletter! With a clear understanding of email newsletters, you may wonder why they are essential. Well, newsletters are a great way to keep your subscribers engaged because they are time-sensitive emails that get sent out on a specific date and time. They are great for checking the level of engagement with your products or services among your audience. It’s a great way to provide content that your subscribers will engage with. Think of your email newsletter as a private social platform, and your subscribers are your exclusive audience.
Is Email Newsletter Marketing Free?
Truly, the answer on how many emails you want to send out in a day, week, or month. If you want to send 40-50 emails in a day, you can do it using your Gmail account, that’s free. However, if you’re sending more than 50 emails per day to unknown connections, your emails might land in their spam folder. To ensure that your emails are not hitting the spam folder, you can use an email marketing tool that offers you to send up to 100-200 free emails in a day. We’ll cover some of the best free email marketing options later in this article. Before moving to that part, it’s essential to understand the pros and cons of free email marketing.
Benefits of Free Email Marketing
Personalized Reach: Email offers the freedom to send a message to someone to who you want to send it. Unlike other social media channels where you’ve got a generalized target audience. No Technical Skills Required: You don’t need media creation or editing skills to write a good email copy. You can express yourself, adding up a personalized touch to your messages. Built an Audience: Over a while, email marketing enables you to create your dedicated audience. These are your content readers who care about what you say. Free: It’s clear that email marketing is free, and you don’t need any gadgets, different types of equipment, or any software like you need in the case of Youtube, Instagram, or different media channels.
Although email marketing comes with a lot of benefits, there are some cons that we would like to mention.
Limitations of Free Email Marketing
Spamming: When you send out hundreds of emails without the receiver’s consent, it’s considered spam activity. It’s not a good sign because it irritates the customer rather than adds value. Same Target Audience: Normally, emails are sent to people who’re already your customers. But with social media platforms like Youtube, you’ve got a greater scope of demand generation and reaching a wider audience. Email Design: Poorly designed emails will take up your time without getting you any results. The problem with free email marketing software is that you don’t get enough designer templates available in their premium plans. International Privacy Laws: If your target audience contains international customers, you need to ensure that you’re violating regulations like GDPR are followed.
How to Select a Free Email Marketing Platform?
With so many options available in the market, selecting and settling on an email marketing platform is not easy. Here are some of the things you should consider while selecting an email marketing platform: Key Metrics: Check the number of emails you can send monthly and the subscriber limit. Automation: Writing emails day in and day out and then replying to all emails is time-consuming and tedious work. Thankfully, many software offers automation processes to speed up repetitive tasks. Email Features: Any email marketing software should have some basic features like A/B testing, split testing, email segmentation, and tags for adding personalization to the emails. Templates: A drag-and-drop interface with readymade email templates make it easy for small businesses to send emails independently rather than outsourcing the work to agencies. Analytics: It should provide the dashboard to track the necessary metrics that help check and optimize the performance of your email campaigns. Support: Finally, it’s essential to check that the email provider you’re settling with offers quick support when you run into technical glitches. Pricing: Although we’re focusing on free email marketing tools in this article, we believe pricing is an unskippable factor. In case you find a suitable tool that matches your business requirements, you’ll want to upgrade if your business starts growing over some time. Before we jump into more details about free email marketing software, here’s a quick glimpse of what you’ll get in their free plans.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing solution by Zoho that takes care of your email campaigns. To check the performance of your email campaigns, you get access to features like split testing, analytics reports, and more. Features:
Easy to use drag and drop editor Pre-built newsletter templates A/B testing Email Segmentation Contact list management
You can send up to 12,000 emails per month to 2,000 contacts with Zoho’s forever-free plan. However, if you want to automate your marketing process, you’ll need to upgrade to their premium plans.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is great free email marketing software if your email list is under 300 subscribers. It follows GDPR-compliant rules and offers a WordPress plugin to track your analytics data. Features:
Easy to use drag and drop email editor Support for email marketing Integrated CRM software for tracking customer interactions Official WordPress plugin for analytics
With SendinBlue’s free plan, you can send 300 emails per day. Their premium plans start with the lite pricing plan allowing you to send 20,000 emails monthly at just a $25 monthly fee.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular free email marketing platforms helping small businesses send professional-looking emails. It comes with a simple email builder that includes many pre-built templates. Basically, all you have to do is to customize these email templates to match your business requirements. Features:
Marketing CRM Email Segmentation WordPress plugin Plenty of integrations Free landing pages
With MailChimp’s free plan, you can send up to 500 emails/day with an overall limit of 2500 emails per month. The free plan also provides you limited access to email segmentation capabilities, automation, and analytics dashboard.
MailerLite
MailerLite is a relatively new tool in the email marketing ecosystem. However, the platform has gained good traction because of its clean UI design, highly targeted email settings, and integrations with popular tools like Zapier, Typeform, WordPress, and more. Features:
A/B testing, test email settings, and more Email template library Popup and form embedding features
Using the free account, you can store 1,000 contacts and send up to 12,000 emails per month. You can unlock MailerLite premium features like heatmaps and 24/7 live support by paying just $9 per month.
Omnisend
Omnisend caters to multiple marketing channels like email and SMS marketing. It’s built with a vision to help eCommerce stores and therefore comes with single-click integrations with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more. With Omnisend, you can easily create automated marketing workflows to collect leads through popups and send emails, SMS, or push notifications. Features:
Readymade email templates Email option popups, landing pages, spin wheels A/B split testing for email campaigns GDPR consent forms
Their free plan allows you to send only 500 emails per month which is comparatively lesser than other email marketing tools.
Mailjet
Mailjet is a popular free email marketing tool known for its minimalist email templates, drag-and-drop email builder, and plenty of template preset modules. An advantage of the Mailjet free version is that you get access to APIs, SMTP relay, and webhooks for different integrations purposes. Features:
GDPR compliant subscription Clean and minimalist templates Integrations with Prestashop No cap on adding subscribers
With a daily email limit of 200, the free plan from Mailjet offers you 6000 emails every month. The premium plan will cost you $15 per month, unlocking all the premium features like email segmentation, validations, and online customer support.
EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a great email marketing tool for small businesses. Founded in 2015, the company’s primary aim is to offer affordable email marketing solutions. Their interface is simple and has more than 35 readymade email templates that can save you time from building emails from scratch. Features:
Pre-made templates Advanced email list segmentation Email builder Integration with 47+ apps
With EmailOctopus free plan, you can send up to 10,000 emails to 2500 contacts per month.
Cleverreach
CleverReach is the perfect tool for both beginners and email marketing professionals who want to see quick success. The simple setup, clever features, and partner-like service enable companies to have direct and personal communication with their customers. Features:
Responsive email templates Plenty of third-party integrations Drag and drop email editor GDPR-compliant email marketing
With Cleverreach’s free service, you can send 1000 free emails per month. Their premium plans start at $30 per month, offering you access to unlimited emails.
Smartmail
Email marketing by SmartMail is a fully managed “done for you” service that helps eCommerce companies maximize their return on investment. Unlike other free email marketing tools, it’s a service that helps you get the maximum return on your email marketing spending. Some of their offered services are campaign management, email list building, setting up email automation, SMS marketing, and more. Features:
Dedicated email strategist On-brand template designs Strategy creation/direction Massive ROI Audience segmentation
Since it’s a service provider platform, you need to schedule a meeting from their calendar to get started for a personalized email marketing solution.
Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one platform for handling your marketing activities. It’s more of a CRM platform that connects your email activities and customer responses in an intuitive dashboard for better communications. This tool allows you to create forms, landing pages, and lead-generation opt-ins. Features:
Ad management Library of signup forms, pop-ups, and banners CRM support Access to email analytics reports Live chat and chatbots
Using Hubspot’s free plan, you can send 2000 emails per month. Since it’s a CRM, a good thing is you can check all the email interactions in a dedicated dashboard.
Sender
Sender on our list of free email marketing tools. It’s designed for small businesses that have a low budget for marketing but want to utilize the power of email marketing. Despite the low prices, the platform provides all the essential features like drag-and-drop builder, email analytics, segmentation, and web notifications. Features:
Built-in spam checking feature Automation workflows Tracking support with Google Analytics Plenty of popup forms, embeddable forms, and GDPR consent forms Built-in image library and image editor
With Sender’s free plan, you get a generous subscriber limit of 2,500 contacts and a monthly sending limit of 15,000 emails.
Summary
With this blog, we wanted to share some of the key platforms for email marketing. It’s a key component of online marketing, and it is being used by companies of all sizes. Although free, with proper planning and execution, email marketing campaigns can be highly effective. It can be used to provide customers with information on new products, services, or special offers. It also allows you to build a relationship with existing customers. If this article helps you, we strongly recommend reading our article on premium email marketing tools for growing your business.
