So you’ve decided to start focusing more effort on your business, and perhaps you’re still "small" working out of your bedroom, but your customers don’t need to know that.
Marketing trends and channels evolve over time. While some trends come and go quickly, one of the channels that has remained more or less the same is email.
You’ve been sending out emails to your list of around 50-200 recipients that you’ve built up over the last few months, but Outlook isn’t quite cutting it anymore. Sometimes your emails get lost in the void that is spam folders, and then there was that one time you accidentally CC’d instead of BCCing! That sadly caused a few unsubscribes, which, of course, had to be removed manually. There must be a better way, right?
Looking for a way to run your email marketing efforts without breaking the bank? It might be time to try out a more professional email tool. The free yet "professional" email marketing services on this list all let you send thousands of emails per month without spending a single penny.
No more spam surprises and no more embarrassing personal data breaches.
| Provider | What's included for free? | Comments |
|---|---|---|
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| MailerLite offer a decent amount of features on its free plan. This includes autoresponders, sophisticated webforms, (limited) reporting and email support. There are only basic structural templates included, however. |
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| A web-based email marketing service, that helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. Whether you’re an email marketing expert or don’t know what a newsletter is, there’s a lot you can do with MailChimp., you have restricted features available on the free account (e.g. no advanced segmentation and delivery by time-zone). But you still have a more generous subscriber amount, and it’s just as user-friendly. And most importantly, you can't use their email or chat support. There's also a small ad banner in each email you send. |
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| This simple and easy-to-use email marketing tool includes a sizeable sending allowance and some handy extras like automations and push notifications. |
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| With decent email and subscriber allowances, Zoho's Forever Free plan is worth checking out. Though automation is reserved for its paying customers, it does allow you to A/B test your emails, use its CRM features and offers a wide range of modern email templates. |
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| In terms of extras, this is probably one of the more generous free plans we’ve seen, with access to nearly all areas of the tool (landing pages and team accounts not included). It’s also the only tool we’ve tested that doesn’t include its own branding in your emails. Rich email templates & Drag & Drop Editor. |
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| Though the sending allowance is small, Omnisend's free plan comes with all advanced features, including landing pages, website tracking and marketing automation. (Read our full review) |
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| A large sending allowance and some unique messaging features make SendPulse’s free plan a top option for multichannel marketers. Things like Resend to Non Openers and Heatmaps are great advantages. |
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| A refreshingly simple newsletter software with very low prices. Doesn't have a whole load of features but what it does, it does well. You can integrate it with numerous other tools through Zapier and has a great easy to use editor. |
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| HubSpot’s free plan is slightly limited in terms of emails, as you have a monthly sending limit of just 2,000. They are, however, pretty generous with subscribers and CRM features. Their branding is present in all emails. It comes with a free CRM included. |
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| Sendinblue’s free plan is a little more restricted in terms of emails. You can have up to 9,000 p/m, but there is also a daily limit of 300. You also have their branding present in all emails, but you can also personalize SMS and track Pages. |
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| Similar to Sendinblue, Mailjet have a sending limit on their free plan, and a daily limit of only 200 emails and 6000 per month. Some of the best features include APIs, SMTP Relay and Webhooks. |
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| Thought the free plan includes unlimited subscribers, with an allowance of 250 emails/month, you won't be able to do much.Drag and Drop Editor. |
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| This Amazon-powered email service is disappointingly stingy in their free plan, with a limit of just 300 emails per month and 1 campaign per day. |
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| CleverReach's free allowance is pretty limited when you compare it to other newsletter services. There is also a small ad in your outgoing emails that can’t be removed. (Review) |
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| YMLP (Your Mailinglist Provider) is threadbare in both form and function. The design looks as if it's a relic from the 90s, and you'll need to be versed in HTML, or have a designer handy, to get something useful from the editor. |
Some additional useful tools are:
- Email Subject Line Analyzer allows you to test your subject lines and scores each based on a handful of metrics to help you pick the best one. It also provides actionable tips on how to improve your subject lines.
- Headline Analyzer Tool allows you to test your headlines and scores each based on a handful of metrics to help you pick the best one. Just like the tool above, it can provide clear action items on how to make your headline more compelling.
- Hunter is a sweet tool that allows you to find email addresses for a domain name.