Agreed! Email marketing works…. but it can be quite costly at times.. Sometimes very costly! As a budding entrepreneur, blogger, affiliate marketer you may not wish to spend $50-$100 per month on email campaigns but again you cannot leave that either, since that is a major re-targeting option. In this post, we will discuss about some free email marketing software and so cost effective email marketing software for sending bulk emails.
Top 6 Free Email Marketing Software for Startups
In this list, I will be discussing a few email marketing tools that can get you started for free and a few cheaper alternatives to subscription based email marketing services.
1. Mailchimp: Free Email Marketing for Startups
Mailchimp’s forever free plan is good for a head start upto 12000 emails a month. The list volume is capped at 2,000 subscribers. I must say, a pretty decent plan to get started for small businesses and entrepreneurs. You have the options to segment your list, auto-schedule and other power packed features from this giant to get you a good start.
2. eFlyerMaker: Affordable and free Email Marketing
The free plan lets you have 2500 subscribers and you can send upto 15,000 emails per day. Their design and everything seems modern and sleek. If you have close to 5000 subscribers, you can divide your list into two and get started with Mailchimp and eFlyerMarker. A little effort if you’re willing to save $10-$20 per month.
Reachmail: This service offers a free plan upto 5,000 subscribers and you can send upto 15,000 emails a month. However, at the time of writing the article I found they are not accepting new signups. I will update this once they start accepting new signups again.
3. Benchmarkemail: A Mailchimp alternative will less free emails
Benchmarkemail does provide a free tier which varies from country to country. However, they don’t offer anything more than Mailchimp, so nothing fancy here.
4. Mailrelay: Free Email Marketing Software till 75,000 emails
Mailrelay is perhaps the only service that can let you send 75,000 emails a month to a 15,000 subscriber list. You need to like their social media pages like Facebook if you want to avail the free 15,000 subscriber list offer. Now this is something that can go for quite some time. 75,000 email is a good number and so is 15,000. However, to get started with this offer, you need to have your own mail professional mail id, i.e. not gmail, yahoomail id, but @yourcompany mail id. I think most of us have this or you can create a new one via Google Apps for Work. Mailrelay is definitely worth a try.
I have discussed about these freemium email marketing services which will cost your pockets if your list of subscribers is more than 50,000 or even more. While a lot of us have that many subscribers, and we simply don’t target the list just because these services end up being too costly and not a good ROI.
There are some tool which can do exactly the same thing as these email services do. I have found two such good tool/plugin which does the work seamlessly.
5. MyMail WordPress Plugin: Low Cost Email Marketing Plugin for Unlimited Mails
WordPress powers a hell number of blogs and sites, be it professional or amateur. MyMail plugin allows you to do everything a email marketing service offers right from your WordPress admin dashboard. With over 12,000 buyers and an average rating of 4.6 based on 1366 rating, you’re sure to be in good company. It provides absolute integration with Amazon SES, Sengrid, Mandrill, Google Analytics and more. If you’re using WordPress, and has a lot of subscribers or anticipating a lot of subscribers for your blog, head nowhere except this amazing plugin. It would cost you $40 for a lifetime and you can use the plugin on as many sites as you want. This would actually end up saving $1000s a year and that’s what customers have shared in the review section. Go ahead and try this plugin.
However, the plugin would not work for normal sites and I had to send an email campaign to my 10,000 subscribers lately and I found another interesting tool.
6. MailWizz: Cheap Email Marketing Alternative
MailWizz EMA is a simple to use, efficient and full-featured email marketing application with an impressive features set. With MailWizz not only that you will be able to properly handle email marketing for your own purposes but you can also become an Email Service Provider for your customers, since MailWizz integrates easily with payment gateways like Paypal and it offers all the needed tools to create pricing plans, promotional codes and to manage orders and transactions created by your customers. With elegant design, great auto responders, Amazon SES + Sendmail compatible, multi-lingual ready, MailWizz is one stop for all those who are trying to send unlimited campaigns on the go. With almost 3500 plus sales and a 4.9 rating, you’re in the hands of good peers. Try MailWizz here.
Both MyMail and MailWizz are excellent options for WordPress and custom sites and are available for download from Codecanyon. Codecanyon is a Themeforest child site which hosts the world’s largest database to custom themes, plugins, marketing, design and business tools.
I have been a regular buyer at Themeforest.net and those who are buying from Themeforest.net or thinking to buy for the first time, let me assure you of the quality and the promised made by the sellers. All of them are professional developers and are quite successful and reputed on their respective fields, so you won’t ever get cheated.
Normally, software prices increase as the number of sales increases and also because of the latest developments and feature updates. So, if you buy now, you will get all the feature updates and you don’t have to spend anything extra. If you plan to buy it later, the price might increase a bit!
I hope this article provides you an ample option to choose your preferred email marketing service/plugin/tool. Go ahead with your choice depending upon the need of your business. If you want to recommend anything similar and worth adding to the list above, feel free to mention that in the comments and I will update the list. So which free email marketing service you gonna use?