With the rise of email marketing as a digital marketing tactic, more and more companies are providing customers with the ability to send and receive emails quickly and easily. While some prefer to do all of the work from a desktop while others enjoy the freedom of mobile emailing, either way, customers have demanded convenience and companies have listened, providing solutions such as free online email marketing tools.
To help customers get the most out of their email marketing strategies and eliminate the overwhelm of regular mailboxes, companies have offered email marketing tools such as mailchimp, hootsuite, and Constant Contact. While these services can be used to good effect, only a few stand out as superior, free online email marketing tools.
In this article, you’ll discover five free, online email marketing tools that deserve your time and money. We’ll cover everything from engagement to deliverability and explain why you should consider each one for your own use.
1. MailChimp
Launched in 2004, MailChimp is widely considered to be one of the most popular email marketing platforms, offering a free plan as well as paid tiers. The platform provides all the functionality found in larger email marketing tools, such as Aweber and Mailpot, with the additional benefit of a flashy user interface.
MailChimp’s strength comes from its ease of use. Since its inception, the service has provided an interface simple enough for anyone to use and quick enough to allow even the most inexperienced marketer to get their feet wet. This makes it a great option for those looking to try emailing for the first time or for those who want to revisit the practice and are looking for an easy solution.
One of MailChimp’s unique selling points is its ability to integrate with other services, such as Shopify and HubSpot, and even your own applications. This gives you the opportunity to take advantage of many different platforms, all within one service. It also means that you don’t necessarily have to give up your email list when you switch services. If you decide later that you want to move to a different platform, you can always export your list to continue using it.
That being said, MailChimp’s free plan limits you to just 500 subscribers and three email campaigns per month. If you’re looking for a free solution that offers more flexibility, you should consider moving to one of the paid plans.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another highly popular email marketing service with a significant following amongst marketers. Like MailChimp, Hootsuite was developed with the goal of making emailing easier for all users. Much like MailChimp, Hootsuite provides an easy-to-use interface as well as the ability to integrate with other platforms.
Hootsuite is strongly positioned as a content curator, helping you discover the best content on social media for your curated list of blogs and websites. Once you’ve established yourself as an authoritative voice in your industry, hosting your own blogs or sending out regular news pieces, you can use the platform to easily send out personalized messages to your audience. To get started, you simply need to enter a name for your account, verify your email address, and choose a password. From there, you can begin setting up your curated lists of blogs and websites, as well as creating new content to share.
The great thing about Hootsuite is how many third-party applications and platforms it can connect to. If you use social media for your marketing strategy, you’ll find that Hootsuite can help you find the best content from your favorite accounts, schedule posts to coincide with upcoming events or holidays, and even measure the success of your marketing efforts. If you’re looking for a solution that can help you track the overall performance of your digital marketing efforts, Hootsuite is a great choice.
3. Constant Contact
Continuous Contact is a customer-focused email marketing solution that was founded in 2003 and is now owned by HubSpot. Unlike some other services, Continuous Contact was developed with marketing in mind, providing you with an email marketing dashboard that’s both informative and easy to use.
One of the distinguishing factors of Continuous Contact is how it uses data to provide relevant and personalized information to users. The platform’s analytics tool, HubSpot Connect, pulls data from various sources, such as your email marketing service, Google Analytics, and other third-party tools, to provide you with a complete picture of how your campaign is performing. This makes it easy to track the success of your emailing efforts and determine which approaches work best for your own projects.
Similar to Hootsuite, Continuous Contact allows users to curate a list of blogs and websites that they feel are relevant to their industry. From there, they can easily set up automated email campaigns to send out periodic messages to their audience, driving more leads and sales to their own websites.
4. Shopify
If you’ve ever shopped at Nordstrom, you may have dropped into their café to get a coffee before you left. If not, you might consider it now that the café has opened its doors to the general public. Nordstrom’s shopping brand, Shopbop, created a shopping café to increase foot traffic and provide its shoppers with a place to linger a while and rest their weary feet. That space, as it turns out, is a little bit more than a simple café. It’s become quite the hub for people who love to shop and eat. And you may have noticed that the café is totally free.
Shopify is the largest e-commerce tool provider, with stores in over 80 countries. Their commerce platform, Shopify Plus, is designed to make it easy for businesses of all sizes to get online and sell their products, whether they’re a brick-and-mortar store or an online-only retailer.
With Shopify, you can create multiple stores, all from the same account. Create a separate store for each of your product lines. You can also create separate stores for different countries, so you can make it easy for customers from other countries to find the products they want, when they want them. You can set up automated shipping to make sure your customers get their goods fast and reliably. And you can integrate with over 150 other apps and platforms, including email marketing services, to make your job easier.
The great thing about Shopify is how much it can do without requiring any special training. Even people who are not tech-savvy or seasoned business-owners can create effective marketing websites with the platform, using the simple drag-and-drop editor to put together a stylish, functional storefront.
5. Mailpot
Finally, we have Mailpot, a simple but effective email marketing tool for beginners created with the goal of simplifying the process of getting started with email marketing. Launched in 2011, Mailpot provides a simple interface and a streamlined signup process that makes it easy for anyone to get started with email marketing.
If you’re just getting started or you’re looking for a solution that doesn’t require too much tech-savvy, Mailpot could be the perfect option for you. You can create professional-looking email campaigns quickly and easily without requiring any coding or design expertise.
What’s great about Mailpot is that it takes the stress out of trying to figure out what program to use and how to use it. Once you’ve created your campaign, you can simply send out messages to your audience. You don’t need to set up automated emails or wait for the delivery of an email blast. Like many of the other platforms on this list, you can start with a free plan that allows you to send up to 500 emails per month. You can then move to a paid plan if you want to expand your reach.
With the exception of Constant Contact, which allows for a free account with advertising and no email limit, the other four services listed here offer a free plan with a limit on how many emails you can send per month. The good news for marketers looking for a free option is that all the platforms listed here have an easy-to-use interface and allow for some creative thinking if you want to use the tools for more than just sending out promotional emails.
Final Takeaway
While many vendors try to up-sale you on additional services, such as MailChimp’s popular Add-Ons for businesses, the other four solutions listed here are completely free. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution that connects you to all the essential tools you need to get started, you might want to consider one of these email marketing tools. What’s more, since these are all free solutions, you don’t need to worry about paying monthly fees or having to upgrade your account even if you grow your list.