12 Best Free Email Marketing Services to Save Money in 2024

Updated Aug 6, 2023.
Best Free Email Marketing Services to Save Money

Are you looking for the best free email marketing services that will help you save money in 2022? You’ve come to the right place.

2021 was rough and every business had to reduce the size of their budgets and allocations, to cut corners to make business ends meet. During such times, spending big bucks on email marketing does not seem like a good idea.

And, why should it be?

You should be able to send emails to your customers without having to pay extra for it. While you can do it simply from your email inboxes, the fact is that it is just not that easy when you have a contact list of over a thousand contacts.

This is where free email marketing services come in.

Not only can you send emails to all your contacts throughout the month, but these tools help you take your marketing campaigns to the next level with marketing automation, email builders, transactional emails, newsletter building tools and many more.

Since there are many service providers in the market, we have created this guide which will help you choose the best email marketing software available.

What Can I Expect From Free Email Marketing Services?

A free email marketing service may not offer advanced features or may not offer all the features they offer with their paid plans. Here is what you can expect from free email marketing services.

1. You can send bulk emails

Every free email marketing service will let you send emails in bulk. However, since they are free, there may be a limit on the number of emails you can send or the number of contacts you can send them to.

Very few free email marketing services will let you send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts using their free plan.

2. Basic marketing automation

Almost every free email marketing service will offer some basic email marketing automation that will let you automate your workflows. This way you can automate your repetitive tasks.

You can choose triggers that will create a particular action. Some of the most common automation workflows will involve cart abandonment, birthdays, anniversaries, signup confirmations, and others.

3. Reports about your email marketing campaigns

Since data is very important with any marketing campaign, free email marketing services offer the most common reporting features that give you an overview of how your campaigns are performing.

You will be able to see the number of times your emails were opened, desired action was taken and even the number of users who unsubscribed from your contact list.

4. Drag-and-drop email builders

While you will be able to create content rich emails, every free email marketing service generally offers a free drag-and-drop editor that will help you design emails the way you want.

You will be able to move the elements around and will also be able to add images, videos, colors, forms, social media links, and other supported elements to your emails.

5. A/B testing

Free email marketing services will also let you test different elements like subject lines, email content, sender names and other elements to determine which email version works best for your audience.

While these are some of the most common things you can expect from free email marketing services, there are different other features that each service provider may offer.

Now let us move on to our list of the best free email marketing services in the market in 2021.

Best Free Email Marketing Services, Tools, and Platforms

1. Sendinblue

Best free email marketing service for small businesses for transactional and trigger based emails.

Sendinblue is one of the easiest and functional email marketing services for small businesses

Sendinblue is one of the easiest and functional email marketing services that businesses can use to send their email campaigns, SMS, transactional emails or triggered emails.

You can customize your emails and send personalized emails to all your contacts irrespective of the number of contacts you have.

You can choose an email template from the template library or design your email from scratch or even code your emails yourself if you have coding skills. The drag and drop editor lets you add vibrance to your emails by adding elements and styles.

You can add your contact’s name or use the advanced personalization feature to build stronger relationships with your contacts.

If you have a large contact list but would like to send your emails only to a set number of people in it, Sendinblue even lets you segment your contacts to send better targeted emails. You can also test different versions of your email using A/B testing to see which works the best.

Sendinblue also lets you schedule your messages instead of always sending them out immediately. This lets you create your email marketing campaigns at your time and yet send them as planned.

If you would like to take your email marketing a step further, you can complement it with Sendinblue’s SMS marketing feature that lets you send SMSes to your contact list.

Even with your SMS campaigns, you can personalize them and get real time reports on deliverability and engagement.

If you want your business to be available at all times, Sendinblue also lets you easily add a chatbox to your website where you can directly answer your customers or assign team members to handle particular conversations.

In case you have upto two thousand contacts, this free email marketing service can help you up your automation.

You can run campaigns on autopilot, send automated re-engagement campaigns, build workflow, follow-up with shoppers, continuously track how your campaigns perform and much more.

Sendinblue offers some real-time analytics that help you understand conversions, ROI on your campaigns and the performance of your emails in general.

With Sendinblue, you can also ensure that all your transactional emails are also set up well. You can set up the welcome emails, password reset and other transactional emails, choose their design and layout and forget about them. Sendinblue takes care of the rest.

If you are running multiple campaigns at the same time, Sendinblue also lets you create landing pages for each of your campaigns. The best part, you don’t have to be a coder to do so.

When in the process of growing your contact list, Sendinblue also lets you integrate signup forms on your website which prompt every visitor to sign up.

With Sendinblue, you can be sure that your email marketing campaigns will see high deliverability and you can target your customers the way you want while ensuring high security of your emails and customer data.

Pricing

Sendinblue Pricing Plan

Sendinblue offers a free plan and other priced plans as well. With the free plan you can have unlimited contacts on your list but you can send only up to 300 emails per day.

2. ConvertKit

Best free email marketing services for content creators.

ConvertKit is the best free email marketing services for content creators

ConvertKit has been created with content creators in mind and offers features that would help them grow and build their email lists and also sell their products online.

Whether you sell online courses, music, ebooks, or provide a service, ConvertKit is ideal for digital products as well as services.

With ConvertKit you can have your visitors on your Youtube pages or blog to sign up for your emails and send them an auto-download of something you offer, everytime someone becomes a member of your contact list.

If you want to run an email marketing campaign. ConvertKit lets you create good-looking professional emails easily with their Email Designer and offers styling options that help you add images, videos, and designs to your emails to match the tone of your blog or other pages.

ConvertKit has an integration with Unsplash which gives you instant access to millions of images to use in your emails. You can also add clickable CTAs to your email and even code your email if you know how to code.

Once you send your emails, you can be sure that they will get delivered as ConvertKit offers one of the highest deliverability rates and an average open rate of 30%.

Imagine you are organizing an exhibition of your artwork and would like to take registrations from your email list, ConvertKit lets you include signup forms with every email and also lets you create landing pages for every email campaign even if you do not have your own website.

Before you start sending your campaigns to your entire list, ConvertKit lets you choose and segment the contacts that you want to contact by adding tags to your contacts. You can then filter your list to pick out the ones with the relevant tags.

Every time you have a new signup to your list, ConvertKit also automates the onboarding emails and all other routine tasks related to your email marketing campaign so that you can focus on content creation rather than menial tasks.

Choose from the many integrations that ConvertKit offers which are great for content creators selling their work and streamline your sales, leads, CRM, analytics and others.

Pricing

ConvertKit Pricing Plan

ConvertKit offers a free plan and two other plans starting at $29. If you have upto 1000 contacts and require only basic features to create email campaigns, the free plan would be all you need. For advanced features you can choose from the other two plans based on your requirements.

With every plan, the price keeps changing for every 1000 users who join your list.

3. Benchmark

Best email marketing platform with a very easy to use platform.

Benchmark is the best email marketing platform with a very easy to use platform

This free email marketing software offers some advanced email marketing features that can help businesses achieve their email marketing goals with ease.

The interface is easy-to-use and very user friendly making it a great choice for beginners and small to medium sized businesses as well.

Benchmark’s email builder lets you build emails with their drag-and-drop editor or using HTML based on what you prefer. You can also build emails with their RSS email options which help you automate some of your emails.

Not only can you add emails to your emails using Benchmark but you can also edit your photos in Benchmark’s software before adding it to your emails. There are also several templates that you can choose from to speed up the email creation process.

Benchmark allows you to match your emails with your brand image and also lets you test different versions of your emails using their A/B testing.

To ensure that your emails perform the way they were intended to, Benchmark’s integration with Litmus allows you to check your emails in different email environments to ensure every element loads the way you want them.

Apart from the RSS emails, you can also automate certain types of emails by selecting actions that trigger them and also choose an action that occurs when a contact performs a particular action on your emails or your website.

You can include a signup form on your website with Benchmark that lets you grow your contact list. You can also segment your contacts according to different parameters, import existing contact lists and also integrate with other platforms like WordPress, Salesforce, Zapier and others.

Benchmark also lets you include survey forms in your emails that help take email engagement a notch higher.

If you need to create a landing page, but do not have a developer to do so, you can also use Benchmark’s drag-and-drop landing page builder that lets you create functional landing pages.

Benchmark’s reporting functionalities also help you get a deeper insight into your email campaign’s performance and tells you the number of times your emails were opened, desired action was taken and other important information.

Integrate with different platforms like Shopify, Facebook, Zapier, Zoho and others and bring all your important functions in one place.

Pricing

Benchmark Pricing Plan

Benchmark offers three different plans where one of them is free and one of them is a custom plan. The free plan lets you send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts, however it offers fewer features than the other two plans.

4. Moosend

Best free email marketing service for robust automation workflows.

Moosend is the best free email marketing service for robust automation workflows

If you have many repetitive tasks that take up a majority of your time, Moosend could be an ideal solution for your business that will help automate your workflows and save a lot of time.

You can automate your user onboarding emails, abandoned cart emails, reminders, password resets, and more.

All you have to do is to choose a trigger and an action that will be performed once the trigger is created.

Moosend takes automation to a higher level than its competitors by offering multiple triggers, recurring emails, conditional actions, workflow sharing, spot-on scheduling and many more.

You can use Moosend’s drag-and-drop editor to create the most beautiful and professional emails. It lets you effortlessly segment your audience and send targeted email campaigns that yield very high results.

Once your campaign has been sent, you can easily track the number of opens, clicks throughs, shares and unsubscribers using Moosend’s effective analytics.

Add your customer’s name to each email so that it creates a personalized experience.

If your business actively sends weekly or monthly newsletters, you can jazz it up by adding videos, images or other creative elements and send them to your contacts with a click.

Create the best looking emails with no coding experience at all.

You can also choose from their gallery of templates, all of which are highly responsive and load well on all kinds of devices.

If you are an eCommerce business, you can also integrate your emails with your online sales and sell directly through mails and collect payments for the same.

Moosend also offers integrations with clouds and social media profiles tomake sharing through emails easy.

When you add a CTA to your emails, with Moosend you can also create a professional landing page with their easy-to-use drag and drop editor.

With every email you can also add responsive user friendly forms, and style them to match the look and feel of your brand.

Along with social media integrations, Moosend also helps in integrating with all your other marketing efforts by offering integrations for CMS, CRM, eCommerce, lead generation and list validation.

Moosend offers some of the most extensive email marketing features that companies of all sizes can benefit from.

Pricing

Moosend Pricing Plan

If you have under 1000 subscribers in your email list you can use the free plan which has all the basic features. However, if you have above 1000 users, you would be required to subscribe to their paid plans which rise in price for every 1000 users in your list.

Every plan lets you send unlimited emails to all your users.

5. Omnisend

Best free email marketing service for eCommerce businesses.

Omnisend is the best free email marketing service for eCommerce businesses

Omnisend offers some email marketing features that eCommerce businesses will find really appealing as it can help them boost their online sales.

Not only can you create professional looking emails that match your eCommerce storefronts but you can also segment and target your users based on their user history on your online store.

Omnisend offers some unique features like product picker, dynamic discount code creator, scratch cards and product recommendations which not only help make sales through emails but also make the experience personal for every customer.

On sending your emails, you can see the data analytics reports and get a picture of how many times your emails were opened, the different products that were sold or clicked, unsubscribers and generate click maps and other advanced reports.

You can even send SMS campaigns using Omnisend if you need to send urgent or small messages to your customers or make sale announcements.

With Omnisend, you can utilize their pre-built workflow automations to automate welcome emails, product or card abandonment emails, order confirmations and shipping statuses and more.

It lets you test different versions of your emails using A/B split testing and also lets you segment your target audience within a single workflow.

If you are in the process of growing your email contact list or even your SMS contacts, Omnisend offers popup forms that you can add to your eCommerce store, schedule a time when the popups show, create landing pages and also capture abandoning visitors.

Omnisend as the name suggests, helps you create an omnichannel customer experience by integrating all your marketing campaigns together on one single platform. This way you can track performance from one single platform and run multiple campaigns easily.

Since data is so important for eCommerce stores, Omnisend includes some robust reporting and analytics like campaign automation reports, channel level views, cookieless tracking, audience growth trends and many more amazing features.

Online store owners can truly up their email marketing game with this functional email marketing tool.

Pricing

Omnisend Pricing Plan

The free plan lets you send 15,000 emails per month to your contacts irrespective of how many you have. If you choose the paid plans, with every 500 customers, the pricing and the number of allowed emails keeps increasing.

6. MailerLite

Best free email newsletter software with very high effectiveness.

MailerLite is the best free email newsletter software with very high effectiveness

MailerLite is ideal for small businesses as it offers extensive features and the paid plans are less expensive than its competitors. It is an extremely easy-to-use tool and is very easy to set up as well.

Whether you want to send text-rich emails to your contacts, send beautifully designed newsletters or make announcements, you can benefit from MailerLite’s drag-and-drop editor, rich text editor or even code your own emails with the HTML editor.

If your email campaign requires a website but you do not have developers on board, MailerLite’s drag and drop website builder does the job for you.

It lets you design your website and add as many content blocks as you need and create mobile friendly websites and pages.

You can also use the same functionality to create effective, professional looking landing pages for each email campaign.

Add popups to your website to grow your contact list, customize them or use templates, choose from the custom settings and embed the popup to your page to collect subscribers to your newsletter.

MailerLite also lets you create and design forms that you can embed on your pages or even your emails, helping you collect information from visitors as well as subscribers.

Once your contacts list has taken off, with MailerLite’s subscriber management features, you can organize your contacts, create interest groups by adding tags and filter your contact list the way you want.

You can also personalize every single email that you send out by adding your recipient’s names throughout the emails and also send the birthday or anniversary wishes.

With MailerLite you can automate specific workflows and communicate with your customers at the right time, everytime. Automate your welcome messages, birthdays and anniversaries, product recommendations, follow-ups and other similar events.

Improve the performance of your email campaigns by testing different versions of your emails using A/B testing, schedule sending times according to different time zones, auto-resend unopened emails and other optimization features.

Once your campaigns are live, MailerLite offers advanced reporting that generates click maps, surveys, campaign reports and other reports that help determine performance.

With such extensive features, all your email marketing requirements can be addressed from one central location.

Pricing

MailerLite Pricing Plan

If you have under 1000 contacts in your mailing list, MailerLite offers a free plan that lets you send 12000 emails each month.

However, anywhere above 1000 and you will be required to choose their paid plans where the number of permitted emails depends on the number of contacts you have.

7. Sender

Best email marketing service with high deliverability.

Sender is the best email marketing service with high deliverability

With the high deliverability that this cloud-based email marketing software provides, small to medium sized businesses can be assured that their emails will get delivered on time and will reach all their customer inboxes.

Right from newsletters, surveys, promotional emails to announcements, you can create professionally branded emails in very less time. Sender offers a library of templates that lets you create your email campaigns in minutes without the need to code.

However, there is an HTML editor in case you change your mind and would want your emails to be coded.

Every email campaign created through Sender is optimized for the mobile first experience and is mobile responsive.

Sender lets you easily grow your contact list by helping you create subscription forms that match the design of your websites. You can then segment your subscribers by tagging them, use filters, add custom fields to your forms and gather customer information the way you want.

This free email marketing software promises high deliverability compared to its competitors because it is confident about the hardware that it operates on.

It helps you identify bad emails, detects bounced emails and clears your contact list of them, integrated the feedback loop system and much more.

If you would like to analyze in detail how your email campaigns have been performing, Sender offers some very good analytics that tell you about the open rates, click throughs, click maps, and subscriber profiles.

You can even integrate your email campaigns with Google Analytics through sender and see how your traffic is being impacted by the email campaigns.

If you want to integrate your website or application with an email marketing service, Sender may be a good choice as it offers a step-by-step guide on how to connect with the APIs.

Sender is also working on some features that will allow users to create attractive professional landing pages if you would like your email campaigns to lead up to a specific destination. For creating such landing pages too, Sender will eliminate the need for coding.

Another feature that Sender is soon planning to launch is the SMS marketing feature that will let you add SMS marketing to your email marketing campaigns.

Like most businesses, your business probably requires other tools as well to work in sync. Instead of having to move between screens again and again, Sender also offers integrations with many third-party applications like Magento, WordPress, WooCommerce and others.

This way you can bring your CRM, CMS, eCommerce stores, all to one central location.

Pricing

Sender Pricing Plan

Sender's free plan seems to be quite generous compared to its competitors. You can send 15000 emails each month to up to 2500 subscribers with the free plan. Moreover, all the features offered by Sender are included in the free plan.

8. HubSpot

Best email marketing service with powerful lead capturing and extensive inbound marketing features.

HubSpot is the best email marketing service with powerful lead capturing and extensive inbound marketing features

Hubspot’s inbound marketing features can help businesses keep their customers engaged with very personalized or targeted messages and offers.

You can create beautiful emails with the help of their drag-and-drop editor, add elements to your emails like videos, images, designs and also add call-to-action buttons. You can either choose to design your own emails or choose from the free templates that Hubspot offers.

Once your emails are set to be sent to the recipients, Hubspot lets you tailor your emails for every single contact on your email list. You can add a person’s name or customize messages according to the stage of customer journey they are in and segment them with other filters.

Hubspot also offers a scheduling feature that helps you show your campaigns to recipients at the most desirable time in the day according to the time zone they are located in.

You can test different versions of your emails, to ensure high open rates. The A/B testing lets you play around with the subject lines, call-to-actions and content so that you send out the emails that have the highest chances of being opened.

This inbound marketing tool offers many other tools apart from email marketing. Hubspot offers a blogging tool that lets you create blogs, publish them and promote them through different channels.

You can automate your workflows so that repetitive tasks get performed at the right time even without you being present in front of your computer system. Ensure that welcome emails, cart abandonments and other required emails have been scheduled with a click.

Some other features that it offers include tracking social media brand mentions, social media channel integration, allocating marketing assets to team members, creating landing pages and others.

In other words, Hubspot is a great inbound marketing tool with extensive features and email marketing just as one of them.

Pricing

HubSpot Email  Marketing Pricing Plan

Hubspot offers a bundle of services instead of simply offering a plan for email marketing and campaigns. The free plan lets you send upto 2000 emails per month to upto 1000 contacts on your list.

9. Mailjet

Best free email marketing service that allows multi-user collaboration.

Mailjet is the best free email marketing service that allows multi user collaboration

Mailjet offers one feature that other email marketing services or newsletter creating platforms do not offer. It lets a team of marketing professionals and developers collaborate on emails in real time.

This can be a distinguishing feature for many businesses that have dedicated teams for online marketing.

Mailjet is said to have a very clean user interface which is also very intuitive and lets you create professional, engaging emails in minutes. You can design your own emails or use the ready-made templates offered.

Contact management becomes easy with Mailjet as you can embed a pop-up on your webpage that collects contact information from visitors, syncs them to your existing list and also lets you import your contacts in different file formats.

Mailjet offers some advanced analytics that help users track the performance of their campaigns and also lets users link their campaigns to Google Analytics to get a deeper view into the data.

If you need to send transactional emails to your contacts, you can also use Mailjet’s SMTP relay or Send API to send them.

Mailjet promises high deliverability and also lets you personalize your transactional emails.

You can automate your workflows and never miss a customer’s birthday or anniversary, send automated welcome emails, dated emails and more. Workflows can be greatly simplified using Mailjet’s email automation feature.

Whether your readers open their emails on mobile devices or desktops, every email designed on Mailjet is mobile responsive and has high loading speed on all devices. It also ensures that the resolution on each device is excellent.

With Mailjet’s A/B testing, you can even send upto 10 versions of your emails to subsets in your contact list and determine which works well for a specific target. This testing allowance is quite higher than most other free email marketing service providers.

You can use Mailjet as a team solution where all your members can contribute to a campaign through one central platform.

Pricing

Mailjet Pricing Plan

Mailjet’s free plan is quite generous compared to its competitors. It lets you send 6000 emails per month and 200 emails per day. This email marketing tool prices it packages based on the number of emails and not the number of contacts that you have.

With all the plans, you can have unlimited contacts in your email list.

10. SendPulse

Best free email marketing tool with great analytics and reporting.

SendPulse is the best free email marketing tool with great analytics and reporting

SendPulse is not just a simple email marketing tool that simply helps you send emails but takes care of your complete email campaigns. You can send personalized emails, back them with personalized SMS campaigns and also send push notifications to all your contacts.

With SendPulse, you can create the most professional and beautiful as well as functional emails using their drag-and-drop editor. It lets you add images, videos, YouTube videos and even add functional links to your social media channels.

If you are short on time, you can also choose from their pre-designed templates and save on a lot of time.

SendPulse is good for you if you do not have a coder on board or would like to simply take things in your own hands.

One of the features that SendPulse is known for is their extensive subscription form features. You can design subscription forms that exactly match your brand’s image and your website.

Furthermore, you can choose to embed them, add as a pop-up, a floating form or a fixed form. You can also choose when and where on your website does the form appear.

SendPulse offers an automation feature called Automation 360 that helps automate your workflows in ways that reduce errors, send timely emails on every occasion and saves a lot of time.

You can automate cart abandonment emails, purchase emails, confirmation emails and much more with the click of a few buttons.

If you need to send transactional emails to your customers, SendPulse also lets you do so using their SMTP Relay or API.

SendPulse is known for its effective reporting of email campaigns and offers some of the best email marketing performance reports. You can analyze the open rates, click-through rates, delivery statuses and many other features.

SendPulse can help businesses create effective, trackable and well-rounded email marketing campaigns using the features offered.

Pricing

SendPulse Pricing Plan

SendPulse offers different plans dedicated to email marketing, transactional emails, SMS marketing and others.

For email marketing it offers four plans, out of which the free plan lets you send up to 15000 emails to 500 subscribers. This could be suitable to businesses that are just getting started with their email lists or others who have small personal email lists.

However, with the free account, you cannot invite other users to collaborate with you on your email campaigns.

11. Zoho Campaigns

Best free email marketing software with a very vast range of integrations for all business functions.

Zoho Campaigns is the best free email marketing software with a very vast range of integrations for all business functions

Zoho Campaigns comes packed with features that make it easy for email marketers to create well-rounded, effective and trackable email campaigns that perform well. It also offers some advanced email marketing features that some other service providers have missed.

You can create customized emails using their drag-and-drop editor and also utilize their customized templates from their gallery.

Once your emails are created, Zoho Campaigns offers dynamic personalization where the content or the message changes based on the stage of the customer’s journey.

It also lets you interact with your customers through emails by including features like polls, surveys, attachments, reply tracking, images and videos.

You can also test different versions of your emails using A/B testing to see which version amongst two perform better.

If you have a very long contact list, Zoho Campaigns makes it easy to manage and segment your list by using the subscriber management feature. This lets you add tags to all your contacts so that you can send them targeted email campaigns later.

You can even include a subscription form that matches the design of your pages to your website to grow your contact list further. Not only this, you can also add forms to your emails to collect information as needed from your contacts.

With Zoho Campaigns you can leave the mundane daily emailing tasks to Zoho Campaigns by setting up simple workflows. It also lets you set autoresponders as and when you need them.

Using the campaign management feature offered by Zoho Campaigns, you can also collaborate with all your team members on your campaigns and assign roles, approve emails, edit campaigns and much more.

Zoho Campaign offers some of the best and widest variety of integrations that help you perform all important related business functions from a centralized location. Some of them include Zoho CRM, Hubspot, OneDrive, Survey Monkey, PayPal and many more.

Pricing

Zoho Campaigns Pricing Plan

12. Mailchimp

Best email marketing tool for small businesses and non-profit organizations.

Mailchimp is the best email marketing tool for small businesses and non profit organizations

While Mailchimp might not offer advanced automation, it is still a very effective tool if you are looking for good email templates, great reporting features and some effective integrations that can help businesses manage their email marketing campaigns with ease.

With Mailchimp, you can easily design your emails and give them the professional appearance you desire using Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop editor.

You can use their content studio as a gallery where you store, create and upload your content for future use. This can speed up the process of creating your emails as you have everything ready at your fingertips.

Even though Mailchip does not offer the most advanced automation, it does offer marketing automation features that help you visualize your customer’s journey and tag them to send them automated emails as they progress.

It also offers integrations with several eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Zapier and others which help send targeted automated emails when customers make purchases, abandon carts and other instances.

Since data is important to every business, Mailchimp also offers you detailed analytics which is also one of their differentiating features.

You can get all the basic analytics you need and also integrate with your social media channels, eCommerce store, get smart recommendations, and others.

It lets you test different versions of your emails using their A/B testing and gives you data about what works better.

All the reports offered by Mailchimp helps you derive data-backed insights that let you identify which campaigns have been successful and what isn’t working for your audience.

Manage your audience by creating customer segments for better targeting, create landing pages easily without the help of a developer, design customer journeys to improve personalization.

There is so much you can do with Mailchimp.

If you feel some features are missing in Mailchimp’s email marketing software, it also offers several integrations that make up for it.

Connect your email marketing campaigns with LinkedIn, Vimeo, Calendly, Hootsuite, Twitter and others and bring different important business functions under one roof.

Pricing

Mailchimp Pricing Plan

Mailchimp offers four different pricing plans where the free plan is ideal for small businesses to meet their basic email marketing needs. With the free plan, you can send 10,000 emails per month to 2000 contacts.

The daily limit for the free plan is 2000 emails.

How to Choose the Best Free Email Marketing Service?

Now that you are aware of the best email marketing services in the market, how do you choose one that suits the needs of your business the best?

We have made a list of factors that you must consider before you purchase the best email marketing service.

1. Offers elaborate email marketing features

Some email marketing services might only allow you to perform the bare minimum tasks of composing bulk emails and sending them to your contacts. But, successful email marketing campaigns require more than that.

Choose a free email marketing service that offers the complete package. Choose one that not only lets you send bulk emails but lets you segment your audience for better targeting, offers personalization, marketing automation, landing pages, subscription forms and more.

2. Lets you design your own emails

Every successful email marketing campaign requires that their emails match the tone of their brand and the brand image.

Choose a free email marketing software that lets you design your own emails, choose colors that match your brand colors, add videos and images, link to your social media accounts and more.

The service you choose must also leave you the option of coding your emails using an HTML editor, in case you decide to code your emails at any point.

3. Eliminates the need for coding

While it is good to have the option of coding your emails, choose a free email marketing software that eliminates the need to code your emails.

The email marketing software you choose should also let you build your landing pages with a drag and drop editor with an option to code if you wish to.

4. Helps you grow your subscriber list

It is very likely that your contact list is not quite developed right now and you might want to build your subscribers. Choose a service that lets you convert your website visitors into customers or subscribers.

The service you choose must allow you to include a subscription form on your website and must allow you to customize every element of your subscription forms the way you want.

5. Offers marketing automation features

Often marketers have to perform repetitive tasks for every customer as the customer moves through his or her journey as a customer. These tasks can take up a lot of productive time.

Choose a free email marketing service that lets you automate your workflows so that repetitive tasks get performed automatically.

The service you choose must let you automate car abandonment emails, onboarding mails, password resets, birthdays, anniversaries and others.

6. Let’s you send transactional emails

Choose a free email marketing service that lets you send transactional emails and trigger based emails through their SMTPs and restful APIs.

7. Includes in-depth analytics and reporting

Every email marketing campaign needs to be backed with data. Choose a free email marketing service that gives you a detailed analysis of the open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribers and other information.

Mailchimp A/B Testing Email Works
Source: Zapier

Also evaluate if the service you choose offers A/B testing so that you can test different versions of your email to determine which email elements work for your audience.

8. Offers valuable integrations

You might want to bring all your related business functions to one common place, which is why always choose a free email marketing service that lets you integrate with different eCommerce platforms, CRMs, lead generators, social media platforms and others.

9. Offers customer segmentation and personalization features

You may have a long contact list but not everything you wish to send out may be relevant to every contact on your list.

The email marketing service you choose must let you segment your contacts into groups by adding tags to them. This way, you can send relevant campaigns only to relevant audiences by filtering the desired parameters.

This feature allows for targeted email campaigns.

Facts about personalization

Also, choose a service that lets you add names to your emails. This ensures that your customers stay engaged and have conversations with your brand.

10. Allows you to send bulk emails

This one is obvious, but worth mentioning. Since you are looking for the best free email marketing software, be aware that there will be limits on the number of emails you are allowed to send each month or even each day.

Analyze your requirements and choose a free email marketing service that lets you send as many emails as you need.

Free Email Marketing Tools FAQ

What limitations do free email marketing services have?

The major limitation of free email marketing services is that since they are offered for free, you will not be able to utilize their advanced features like advanced analytics, advanced marketing automation and others. 

Free email marketing services only allow you to use the basic email marketing features that will get your email marketing campaigns running.

Also, free email marketing services let you send emails only to a specified number of contacts or a certain number of emails each day. This limit might not be sufficient for all sizes of businesses who may have many contacts on their list.

How can I send bulk emails for free?

Instead of manually entering every email address while composing your emails, and sending them individually to your contacts, you can send bulk emails for free using free email marketing services. 

Most of these services let you send a specified number of emails to a certain number of contacts which almost always are sufficient for sending bulk emails for free. 

For example, Sendinblue lets you send emails to unlimited contacts but has a daily limit of 300, CovertKit lets you send emails to 1000 subscribers on your list whereas Benchmark lets you send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts. 

Since the plans are free, the features offered are also limited.

What is better than Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a good email marketing solution if you are a small to medium sized business or are a non-profit organization with basic email marketing needs. 

If you are looking for advanced feature rich solutions, other email marketing services mentioned in our list could solve your purpose.

Since Mailchimp lacks automation, the best alternative to Mailchimp is Moosend as it has very robust marketing automation features. 

If you are looking for a better alternative to Mailchimp because yours is not a small business, you could consider Omnisend which is ideal for eCommerce businesses, Mailjet which offers real-time team collaboration and Sendinblue that lets you send transactional or trigger based emails. 

Are free email marketing tools worth it?

Free email marketing tools are definitely worth it considering the importance of keeping your customers engaged and also the need to keep in touch with your customers once they have crossed the user acquisition stage. 

You may have zero contacts in your list when you start off and email marketing tools will help you grow it to over a thousand by including signup forms on your website. 

If you already have a long contact list, an email marketing service will eliminate the need to manually send emails to each of your contacts every time you want to convey a message or make an announcement or promote your products.

With free email marketing tools, all the important email marketing tasks get handled for free. If you require advanced features, you can opt for the paid plans that these service providers also offer at very reasonable prices.

Start Your Free Trial: Which Free Email Marketing Tool Should I Pick?

So, have you started your search for the best free email marketing tool yet? If not, let us give you a quick overview before you come to a conclusion.

Sendinblue will help you send transactional and trigger based emails, if that is what your business needs. If you are an eCommerce platform and want a service that integrates several eCommerce functions, Omnisend is the choice.

If you are a content creator or an artist, who has a small list or is just growing their list, ConvertKit would be a good choice.

Benchmark is a good solution for those looking for ease-of-use.

Similarly each email marketing service mentioned in our tool is good for something or the other. If you want a service high on automation, choose Moosend. If automation is not a priority choose Mailchimp.

If you want your whole team to work together on emails like Google Drive, choose Mailjet and for extensive integrations choose Zoho Campaigns.

Different email marketing services and different email newsletter services have different USPs. Carefully analyze your requirements and choose a tool that matches them and also lets you send emails in bulk to all your contacts.

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Martin Luenendonk

Editor at FounderJar

Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.