What is The Best Free Email Marketing Software For Beginners? If you are starting your online business and brand, then you are also doing your research on which email marketing software is the best.
Considering email is pretty darn important to our day to day businesses, having a feature-rich ESP is a must!
Having worked with just about all ESP’s (Email Service Providers) and helping new Digital Entrepreneurs make the most of their email marketing, One of the most common questions asked is, which is The Best Free Email Marketing Software For Beginners?
The answer depends on the features that are most important to you, your budget, and how well it will integrate with other softwares you use with your business.
Free Email Marketing Software: Mailchimp, Convertkit, MailerLite
Some platforms offer free trials then you decide to upgrade to a paid version, while others just offer a free version until you reach a certain number of subscribers.
While you test drive the platforms, what it comes down to in choosing the The Best Free Email Marketing Software For Beginners is one that grows with them and with the least headaches, and the best value and price while you’re starting your online business.
What it came down to is features, flexibility and user-ability.
Here’s where you find one email marketing software that has one feature but not another. Specifically when it comes to Email Automations or Designing Landing Pages.
When you’ve never made money online, you’re pretty skeptical about signing up for a monthly email marketing subscription without an ROI. In the beginning of starting an online business you’re learning, testing out ideas, gaining momentum and building your audience. It may take some time after you start to actually make money online.
Why Most Influencers Promote One Free Email Marketing Software Over Another
I write this post and tried to be as fair and objective. But I will add a caveat that while I found many Mailchimp vs. Convertkit videos/posts I found most of them in preference towards Convertkit.
As I listened to the reasoning on why they chose one over another, it became obvious that most of them are affiliates for Convertkit and getting a commission for promoting the service.
All the while Mailchimps “affiliate” program is as good as non-existent and doesn’t incentivize anyone enough to want to promote it. Nevertheless, it is one of the oldest, most well-known email marketing service for beginners.
That is why they have 11 million active customers. Chances are, you are using them, have used them or are a subscriber to someone that uses them.
Enter MailerLite
Up until recently, I was not even aware they existed. But when I took MailerLite for a spin, I was impressed it quickly became the Email Marketing Software I recommend if you’re just starting out and on a lean budget.
While not as well known, as you read on, you’ll understand the reasoning on why I still choose to recommend this email marketing software over the other two counterparts.
MailerLite is the best email marketing software for beginners because it has it all and it’s free.
MailerLite is the best email marketing software for beginners because it has it all and it’s free.
Yes FREE. Up to 1,200 subscribers. Their intuitive and very user friendly campaign building feature is one of the best. It also comes with up to 5 free landing pages and customizable templates to choose from.
They offer a Forever Free plan and offer a Free 14-day trial access to premium features that include live chat, template library, auto resend and promotion pop-ups. You can start a free trial here.
And here’s the biggie- it even comes with AUTOMATIONS! (up to 1,200 subscribers)
If you’re just starting an online business and looking for an email marketing software, you may not know much about email automation, but believe me, you will and it will certainly benefit you and your brand long term if you get comfortable using them today.
Email automations are not going anywhere and without them, and the power of audience segmentation, you will never truly maximize the potential to makes sales with your list.
Not offering email automations was the single biggest issue I couldn’t get around with the other two counterparts: Mailchimp and Convertkit. Yes they offer free plans with many features including landing pages, EXCEPT Automations.
You soon begin to realize, as you become savvier in business, and with email marketing, that you must automate or delegate tasks to save time and money.
This is why automation is vital to email marketing.
Because that’s where the money is. For them and for you :).
Learn How To Effectively Use Email Marketing
Show Me The Features
Here’s a breakdown on the features I used to gauge email service providers:
- Email Deliverability
- User interface
- Landing pages
- Automation
- Integrations
I’ve worked on most marketing platforms, but the platform that is most common and well known is Mailchimp.
Unfortunately, it has a bad reputation for delivering the emails and ending up in the promotions inbox or worse, in the spam folder
Some say because it is an image rich platform, others say because Mailchimp is most spammers platform of choice, hence it already sends out flags to email services that filter and marks them as spam.
Either way, if you decide for Mailchimp you need to be prepared to ask your subscribers to mark your emails as important and physically move your email out of that Promotions inbox to the Primary inbox so that next time they’ll see it straightaway.
Convertkit has great deliverability and so does MailerLite.
I have found most welcome messages still get filtered to the promotions inbox sometimes, but subsequent emails find their way in the primary inbox.
User Interface
Mailchimp is clunky.
They have so many great features all available for free, but you have to take multiple steps to get to where you’re trying to get to. You will literally have to Google how to find a feature (many times) because it can take hours if you think you’ll find it on your own.
Trust me I know. It’s like playing hide and seek.
Convertkit is lighter and simpler to use. Not nearly as convoluted as Mailchimp. But it lacks features and flexibility.
Meaning they offer a galore of beautiful templates, for emails, pop-ups and landing pages, but what they offer in quantity it lacks in flexibility to customize.
Landing Pages
For example Convertkit’s landing pages, while great looking, do not offer much in customization. You can make a tweak or two but it’s more of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) situation. Convert kit is not the platform to build something from scratch.
In that sense, it is far easier to use for beginners. Because all you do is choose the template you like best and personalize it with your copy, image, colors and maybe fonts (yes, maybe you can update the font and maybe you can’t) but that’s about it. You will run into setbacks when you try to take it to a designer to make custom changes or try to rebuild from scratch.
Convertkit landing pages, popups are out-of-the-box ready. This includes their email. You will not have the flexibility to design an email template full of images. It is meant to be mostly text.
Mailerlite, is an impressive combination of being feature rich, and flexible to customize both with drag and drop email templates and landing pages. They also offer some of the best, clean modern looking Landing Pages with a galore of customization abilities and features like countdown timers.
Email Automations
Mailerlite wins.
Simply because they offer such an important feature in the free plan and gives you the best chance for success at your online business.
You can map out an entire sales funnel sequence also known as a customer journey using the power of segmentation with Mailerlite.
You’ll have to be on the $29/month plan on Convertkit to use automation and on the Standard plan in Mailchimp starting at $14.99/month. Both of them
do offer one single welcome email automation, Convertkit calls it the “incentive email”, however Mailerlite offers the full version of automations.
Integrations
Many new online businesses overlook or don’t yet understand an important aspect of their email marketing softwares. Integrations. It will be critical to choose one that plays well with other players in your business to avoid headaches of trying to sync information in the future.
Specifically with automation emails such as a welcome series or abandoned cart emails. you need to be able to sync and feed data between platforms to send the appropriate set of emails to the right people.
Integration with a payment processor to take payments directly on your landing pages is also a great feature and you want to be able to do that.
Luckily all three platforms have an integration for most well known softwares. If there is not, there are third party softwares like Zapier that can be used to perform the integration for a monthly fee/subscription.
Is MailerLite Right For You?
If you are a content creator, marketer, author, or coach, or even if you sell products you’ll be happy with the features MailerLite has to offer to get started with email marketing.
The important thing is to get started, hit the ground running while having the best tools to get you from a lean startup at point A to Point B.
If you’d like to take Mailerlite for a spin, you can join for free and enjoy a 30 day free trial on their premium features.
