Everywhere you look, marketers and online influencers are touting the advice:
“You need to build a list”!
Why? Because with email marketing, you have complete control. Not only do you own your list, but you don't have to rely on Google's ever-changing search engine algorithms for website traffic or Facebook's pay-to-play advertising model. If you want to grow and nurture your business, email marketing is the way to go.
If you don't know how to start an online newsletter or aren't sure why you need a list, read on. We're going to review five of the best free email marketing services and why you need to start using one.
The Five Best Free Email Marketing Services
1. Sendinblue
One of the best free email marketing plans I've found. Sendinblue offers 9,000 free emails per month — which include access to their email template designer, unlimited contacts, and mobile-friendly designs. They also have advanced marketing solutions like automated workflow, triggered campaigns, transactional stats, retargeting functions, send time optimization (which sends your email at the best time of day), and they are fully GDPR compliant. However, due to the nature of this plan, there are daily sending limits, and you don't have access to custom branding.
If you need a more robust plan, Sendinblue's Lite plan offers users 100,000 emails per month for just $25.00 a month — which is one of the cheaper plans I've seen on email marketing services.
2. Constant Contact
One of the better-known email marketing platforms, Constant Contact, offers a free 60-day plan, which includes professional-looking templates, opt-in forms, analytics, and their extensive online library of marketing tips and strategies.
This platform is extremely easy to use, and you don't have to supply a credit card for the free 60-day trial period. If, after 60 days, you decide this is the right platform for you — the paid version is only $20 a month for 500 contacts. Constant Contact offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on their service.
3. MailChimp
Their free plan includes 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails a month. MailChimp offers both email templates and the ability to create your emails from scratch. Save emails you create as a new template to use in the future. Other features include a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, subscriber profiles, third-party integrations, analytics, sending plain text emails, and more. With MailChimp's free plan, you don't get custom branding, pro support, and many other advanced marketing tools. However, it is simple to use and gives the essential features you need to manage and grow your subscriber list.
With MailChimp, you're charged based on the number of subscribers you have, so if you need a larger plan, the next level up (2,001 – 2,500 subscribers) will cost you $29.99 per month.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit tends to be the goto email marketing service for creators, small business owners, and bloggers. It's a robust platform that offers a lot of bells and whistles in terms of stats, funnels, and automation, but it also comes with a steep learning curve.
With their free plan, you get:
- Unlimited landing pages
- WordPress plugin for forms (including pop-ups)
- 30+ premium landing page templates
- Unlimited traffic
- Customizable domain setup
- Mobile responsive designs
- Manage up to 1,000 subscribers
- Unlimited email broadcasts
- Subscriber tagging
Once you surpass 1,000 subscribers, the next plan starts at $49 per month. ConvertKit also offers its users a lot of free training courses like how to get your first 100 subscribers.
5. MailerLite
MailerLite is a simple and affordable email marketing solution for small business owners. Their free plan includes up to 1,000 subscribers with 12,000 emails per month, a drag-and-drop editor, mobile-friendly emails, landing pages, forms, list segmentation, and automation.
However, the downside of this free plan is you don't have access to their newsletter templates, and the MailerLite logo is included in the footer of every email you send.
For unlimited emails, for 1,000 subscribers, the cost is only $10 per month, and the next tier is $15 for up to 2,500 subscribers.
Email Marketing Can Be Intimidating At First
- What's an autoresponder?
- How do I get people to sign up?
- How do I make a newsletter?
Don't stress yourself. You can create test accounts on any of these services. Play around with them, send out some test emails, and learn how everything works. Then pick the one you are most comfortable with for your email marketing.
Whatever you do, sign up for at least one of these services and start building your subscription list today. Having a newsletter is one of the best things you can do for your home-based business.
Why You Need One of These Email Marketing Services?
Why is everyone saying you need to start a newsletter? Simple. Successful marketing is built on visibility and a target audience — two things newsletters give you.
Getting the Eyeballs (Visibility)
- How many people see your Facebook posts? Right now, 7% of your followers on average.
- How about Twitter? Difficult to say, but definitely not all of your followers.
- Your blog? Well, Google Analytics can give you a good idea, but the short answer is: it varies.
- How many people get your newsletter: nearly 100% of the people who sign up.
Your subscription list is a guaranteed audience. Everyone who signs up will receive your email and will make an active decision to read it or delete it. Only a newsletter can do this. Good newsletters routinely get opened and read over by 25% of the people who sign up. Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? None of them can offer that.
But it gets better.
An Audience Who Wants More YOU
Newsletters don't just get you eyeballs. Your subscriber list is a collection of people who want to hear what you have to say. So not only are people reading your newsletter, but your audience is already interested in what you offer. Your subscriber list is a self-selecting target audience. Audience targeting doesn't get better than that. Which is why …
Newsletters Have the Best Conversion Rates
Hands down, the best way to make a sale is from your subscriber list. Your customer list is marketing gold — a self-selected target market that wants more and invites you to market directly to them. All you have to do is give them what they want.
There you have it, five free email marketing services, and the reasons you need to start using one today. It is never too early to start building a subscriber list.
Originally published February 16, 2015. Content updated in September 2020.
After working as a massage therapist, flea market vendor, and customer service representative, Jessica Burde has found success as an online marketer and self-published author. Today she helps other stay-at-home moms start their dream businesses. Jessica's Creative Home-Based Business Ideas worksheet is available as a free download.
Wow, it is nice to see a lot of good tools in one place. Providing the basic guide to start email marketing for real. I also suggest you consider EngageBay. They provide a free account with just the right amount of access needed to start. It is not a free trial but a free account. If the need grows at least the plans lined up are really affordable.
Thanks for sharing, Roy! I’ll have to check them out.
Looks like Send in Blue has significantly raised their pricing. The 40,000 emails per month plan, which is the cheapest one they offer, isn’t $7 anymore. It’s $25!
Thanks, Anne Marie, I’ve got that updated.
Like most email campaign service providers, Constant Contact can pride itself in providing some of the traditional solutions for email marketing. However, its unique additional tools impress more. Event Spot and social media campaigns are some of the tools I believe most email marketing tools should provide. Take advantage of this simple tool and enhance the performance of your campaign. Export your old email list or simply create a new one, nothing beats the efficient and performance-oriented Constant Contact.
Your subscription list is a guaranteed audience. Everyone who signs up will receive your email and will make an active decision to read it or delete it.
YES! And you own your email marketing list — so you don’t have to worry about algorithm changes.
Thanks for the helpful tips on email services! As a new blogger, I hear that starting an email list is a necessity and I didn’t know about a lot of these services. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Sierra,
Glad you enjoyed the list of companies!
Yes, starting an email list should be on the top of your to-do list.
Do you plan on trying any of these email marketing services out?
Hi Jessika,
This is a wonderful & informative blog. For me Sendinblue is take away. I would like to add as well.
Currently I am using Zoho Mail https://www.zoho.com/mail/.
The mail advantage of Zoho is-
-You can create upto 5 email on your own domain
-You can use 2000 emails list and 12000 a month mailers for you email campaigns. (https://www.zoho.com/campaigns). This is a good option for beginners.
Like you, I also push for having a great subscriber list. because, all other kind of traffic is actually not yours but subscribers are. They are your real fan & most loyal reader.
Thanks for sharing, Madhu!
A very useful list, thanks for sharing. I think that there is also one tool that deserves recognition. It is remail.io. I use it a lot in my email marketing issues and I`m really satisfied with it functionality and usability.
Thanks for sharing, James!
Email automation is definitely of great help in marketing nowadays. My team uses Remail.io for that. Has anyone else tried it?
Have you tried Omnisend? Of course they do have only a trial.. But at least for my audience the prices are alright. But I mean good things do cost money. Tho Omnisend is oriented towards Ecommerce.
i’m currently using Aweber in a trial. It’s better than Get Response, I think.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for Sharing this great article, E-mail marketing is very good and get you a decent amount of traffic.
I am using free service of MailChimp to send email from my blog.
Now my subscribers are growing and I am finding another free service. Somebody told me that mail relay is offering 75,000 https://mailrelay.com/en/
Thanks for sharing the additional email marketing resource!
Well, I am going to try Send in Blue in my site, MailChimp looks old fashioned
Good luck! Keep us posted on how it works out for you.
MadMimi doesn’t have a personalized email option. I’ll try the others.
Also is there any way to put attachments in the emails of any of these services?
I know I can link to a document in web environment but I need to send attachments.
Thnaks in advance.
I know you can add an attachment with Constant Contact.
Hi Jessica
You may be interested in participating in the contest on my website, as I’m looking for people who write an in-depth review about (and for) Mailigen (which is an email marketing provider). The most valuable reviews will get a reward.
If you’re interested: http://revarder.com/mailigen-2nd-contest/
Best,
Gabor
Hey! Thanks for sharing this informative article. I too use email marketing for my business and currently relying on MailGet Bolt ( https://www.formget.com/mailget-bolt/ ). Everything is going pretty well but after reading this list I am having second thoughts about it. Should I continue with it or look for another email marketing service provider?
I’m not familiar with that company.
Very helpful.. Hi, I used Mailchimp for my company,(premium villas in cochin) So here are some points that I have noticed : Customer support team is good, they help me for my setup, every time I call there is someone to pick up the call, Price is too less, I have never found as cheap as Mailchimp, so price wise it’s awesome. There are lots of features which include Customized template, list of bounced back emails, User can upload all contact on cloud, Integration API, HTML Template etc. So overall Mailchimp is come with complete features very less price.
Thanks for sharing your experience with MailChimp!
I’m using “Zender” which is a free marketing and transactional email service. It provides 2 types of APIs for .NET and PHP developers, you can check it under this link: http://zender.sharptag.com. I’ve been using it for a couple clients and it is working properly.
I haven’t heard of Zender — I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for sharing, Rania.
Starting an online business with a disability means that I can be very inconsistent with my ability to create fresh, new content. Thank you, Holly, for these useful options. I have just done a search, and LiveWire seems to also be a viable, free option as well.
-Layla @TheGothWriter
I apologize I see that it’s Jessica and not Holly who actually wrote the article. I saw that the one who replied to most of the comments was Holly, so I got mixed up. ADHD strikes again.
Glad you enjoyed the list, Layla. Yes, Jessica wrote the article and I’m the Founder and Owner of the site =) Thanks for stopping by!
From my almost 10 years perspective the best among other providers is Constant Contact. Because? Great deliverability, support and stability.
Hi Erica, I used Constant Contact for many years and they do have a great platform. I’m now with ConvertKit because I needed something more robust it terms of marketing, tracking, and segmenting.
Thanks for sharing this useful information. Now I’m going to use MailChimp for email marketing. But one thing that I want to know, is there autoresponder service is available for free version or not? Thanks!
I believe the auto-responder is an upgrade you’d have to purchase.
Thanks for sharing, madmimi used to offer 2500 contacts? What happened?
I guess as they’ve grown they’ve decided to limit how many free contacts they offer.
Recently gone through bulk email service provider and I got http://www.swipemail.io which offer you 2000 free email on sign up. Under the section White Label you also get the permission to create your own logo, company name and favorite icon. You can create your list and quick upload your data and start your campaign and after sending the campaign you can view your reports. Pretty good free service, I think it new in the market.
Thanks for sharing, Xander. I haven’t heard of swipe before — I’ll have to check it out.
Hi, I was wondering which ones don’t require their logo on any of your forms. I Mean for the free versions. I know you mention one that does make you use their logo. Is that the same for all of them? Thanks!
I don’t think Constant Contact or MailChimp has the logo on the free options — but I’m not 100 percent certain. You can always sign up for the free account and send a test email. Good luck!
I have the same question. I think for the free versions there is no option to remove the logo of the company from the forms. It’s usually a paid option. Well, go figure.
Recently i have tried the service for email marketing SendPulse. And i was really surprised about a huge range of opportunities to contact with my clients. I have varied business so from time to time i need different tariff. When i started ueasing this service i had a lot of questuios, thank goodness the support team always helped me. But be really attentive cos they are carreful about spam.
recently i have tried the service for email marketing SendPulse. And i was really surprised about a huge range of opportunities to contact with my clients. I have varied business so from time to time i need different tariff. When i started using this service i had a lot of questions, thank goodness the support team always helped me. But be really attentive because they are careful about spam
Thanks for SendInBlue. I knew there had to be such a service and luckily I kept looking. Cheap and without limitation of users. I was already a little tired of seeing the same half a dozen services on all websites without including it.
Thanks again for the information.
You’re welcome, Arkadi. Let me know how you like it.
Mailing list really improves a stabilized amount of followers. For a beginning I would recommend Mailerlite. It is easy to use newsletter, which even gives a free plan with unlimited emails till 1,000 subscribers, has many good features, like landing pages, autoresend function and A/B split testing. And fairly-priced: https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing.
Thanks for sharing! This platform is new to me.
Another good one is GetResponse. They are kind of an all-in-one marketing platform and their marketing automation is very easy to master.
Thanks Madison. What does their free plan look like?
GetResponse has a 30-day trial and then it’s $15 a month.
Thanks for sharing, Madison!
Keep up the good work @Holly…
Do you know the daily sending limit of sendInBlue?
More so, have u a concise free material to set up a mailing list, kindly help with that.
Thank you
I’m not sure what the daily sending limit is with SendInBlue. This post has some good tips for building your email list: https://www.theworkathomewoman.com/10-ways-to-build-a-high-quality-opt-in-email-list/
Very helpful! I am just getting started on launching my blog so I am trying to set up the basics, thanks so much for sharing!
Hi
I would like to suggest to try Utixo mailing platform, it’s a cloud service good for end-user and resellers.
Which of these clients provide the most analytics/tracking for free?
That’s a great question! I’ve used Constant Contact and they provide open rates and CTRs. I would assume all of them offer these basic stats. What metric do you want to track?
Hello, found your post coming from the MadMimi site:
their free contingent has shrunk to 100 recipients by 8/2016.
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing, Hans. I’ll have to update my information.
I recently move onto Apptivo. This marketing tool features are easy to use. According to me, it worth for pay.
Have you tried benchmarkemail.com ? It is one of the few email marketing with free plan which has all the benefits of paid email marketing
Haven’t tried BenchmarkEmail — thanks for sharing!
try mvizz.com, with free availability. mVizz is the most powerful email marketing service provider with easy to use custom template designs and dashboard.
Thanks for sharing, James. I’ll have to check that one out.
Great article Jessica Burde ! Often when doing email advertising, it is very simple to miss the various email marketing tools that are vital to the progression. Many people think that sending advertising emails is all about having an auto-responder and that’s it. The truth is that you necessitate extra email marketing tools than just an auto-responder to be successful as a professional marketer.
Did you consider http://FreshMail.com ? I recently made the switch and find it to be very easy to use and priced more flexibly for growth. But I haven’t done nearly the amount of research and comparison you did!
That one is new to me, Chris. What is their payment structure?
Actually MadMimi does not have a free plan. It’s kind of a test plan for 100 e-mails which is not enough event to get a glue if it works properly or not… I’ll try other suggestions but I’m kind of disappointed right now
Do you already have 100 email subscribers on your list? If not, Mad Mimi is a good starting point offering 100 free subscribers.
SendInBlue has a free plan that includes up to 9,000 emails a month: http://bit.ly/1KI5Ta6
Constant Contact has a free 60 day trial period, then it’s only $15 per month for 500 contacts: http://bit.ly/20vvBrI
Mailigen offers a free 30 day trial period, then it’s only $10 per month for 500 subscribers: http://bit.ly/20vwGzQ
As your list grows — you’ll need to pay for more robust options. But hopefully at that point your business is generating significant revenue, so it’s not an issue.
I love this article! I’m very new into blogging and in the midst of starting up my home based business. I was looking for an email subscription but was very confused what to choose. This comparison really helped. Thank you!!
Glad you enjoyed the list, Suzie. Good luck on your blogging journey!
I have done lot of SEO to increase traffic to my blog but never tried Email Marketing because I thought it was useless. After reading your post, I have changed my mind and decided to do Email Marketing for my blog. I hope it will work. There is only one problem for me. How can I get good list of Email for email marketing.
Reply
This article explains how to build your subscriber list: https://www.theworkathomewoman.com/10-ways-to-build-a-high-quality-opt-in-email-list/ Good luck!
Holly, thanks a lot for this info. I had been putting off email marketing for years, until someone asked me to include them in my email list. Can’t put it off anymore.
Hey Tony,
Glad you enjoyed the list!
Yes, I wish I would have focused on growing my list from the start.
Good luck with your email marketing strategies!
Thanks for sharing! Now I’m using free trial version of GetResponse and I’m satisfied.
Acaro would you be so kind and tell me something more about GetResponse? I want to try software to manage my newsletters but I really don’t know which one is the best (and not so expensive!).
Active Campaign’s free plan is not listed on their website. Don’t know how to sign up for it. Did they discontinue it since this was posted?
Looks like they only have a free 14 day trial now: http://www.activecampaign.com/free/
Constant Contact offers a free 60 day trial: http://bit.ly/20vvBrI
For Mailigen epic free account I would suggest to put this link http://www.mailigen.com/solutions/free-mailing because only with this landing page you can actually sign up for Epic Free account.
Unfortunately regular sign up wont work as it will be for paid customers.
Please make the changes to not to confuse potential users.
Thank you.
Thanks Anna – I’ve updated the link.
Thanks for the article! It’s nice that there are people out there who know just how poor some people are so they offer free things to get us started. I hope one day I may be able to pay it forward.
Try http://growmail.co.uk they have free account and great templates
I’ve been using StreamSend for a couple clients. It’s not as well known, but they’ve been around a while and the pay-per-email model really works if you have a large client/prospect base and only email once or twice per month. They’re also currenlty running a 30-day free trial.
https://www.streamsend.com
Thanks for sharing, Phil.