Marketing trends and channels emerge over time. While some trends come and go quickly, one of the channels that have remained more or less the same is email. Email continues to be the top channel for content marketing with both B2C and B2B marketers. Almost 85% of B2B marketers and around 75% of B2C marketers use it to sustain their audience.
It can even help you increase your other marketing channels such as social. With that said, marketers still face a ton of challenges in their email marketing attempts. One of these key challenges is solely the amount of time it takes to build a great-looking email from scratch. Without effective tools, marketers may end up spending a lot of time creating and sending out emails that don’t exactly look stunning. This hinders productivity while dragging down your email marketing ROI.
A lot of companies settle for this situation because they’re not ready to invest in a tool to simplify the process. However, email marketing tools don’t necessarily have to be expensive. You can find lots of free email marketing tools that can help you save time and money.
Read on for our list of the top free email marketing tools:
1. HubSpot Email Marketing
HubSpot, apparently best known for its marketing automation platform, recently launched a free email marketing tool that can support a lot of a small business’s transactional email needs.
Whether you require to send kickback emails from lead offers, thank you emails after purchase, or just promote current campaigns, HubSpot Email Marketing’s free version can do that. One of the best parts of HubSpot’s free email tool is its ease of use. The tool features a handy drag-and-drop visual editor, and it also comes equipped with ready-made templates to get you up and running quickly.
What makes HubSpot Email Marketing stand out is, of course, its native integration with other HubSpot tools, such as the free-forever CRM. Once you start an account, you get access to both tools so you can create a centralized contacts database, organize it in lists, and manage and track email performance.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a leader in email marketing tools that you’ve heard of. Their free plan gives you basic email marketing features such as email creation and scheduling. What makes this a great email marketing tool is its smart recommendations feature, which provides you with valuable audience insights to optimize your marketing efforts.
Designing emails on the platform is easy using the Content Manager, where you can store your images and files for easy access. Mailchimp lets you automate your emails at crucial steps of the buyer journey, so you can easily send out welcome emails, order confirmations, abandoned cart reminders, and more.
3. Sender
Sender is one of the best free email marketing tools in the market with features to ensure deliverability. It lets you create stunning newsletters without any HTML knowledge. Just pick from a template and customize it with elements like images, videos, and text. You can even personalize your newsletters for each recipient to create an even bigger impact.
Sender’s strong analytics feature is one of the top reasons why it’s on our list. It lets you track who opened your emails and clicked on the links, when they were opened, and more. It even helps you build accurate buyer profiles based on your subscriber actions, so you’ll be able to optimize your existing email strategy and craft compelling offers.
4. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a marketing communication platform that emphasizes both email marketing tools and additional functions such as customer relationship management and landing page creation. With over 70 design templates, Sendinblue’s email design functions make it easy to create a great-looking email. Plus, all of these templates are responsive, and you can preview your results to can ensure your design looks the way you want on any screen format.
After you design your email, you can apply features like A/B testing and segmented recipient lists to take the manual effort and guesswork out of optimizing your campaigns and targeting your perfect audiences.
5. Omnisend
Omnisend is a sophisticated eCommerce marketing platform that integrates all your communication platforms in one place. Its free plan includes the only email, but it’s more than enough to support the email marketing efforts of small and medium businesses. It enables you to automate your email delivery using behavioral triggers and easily time your communications based on your customers’ satisfaction.
You can use its comprehensive audience insights to send out more relevant email marketing messages. Design engaging newsletters using time-saving features like the Product Picker, which lets you select all the products you want to include in your email. You can also include scratch cards, discount coupon codes, and gift boxes to further optimize your email production.
6. SendPulse
SendPulse proclaims itself as a multi-channel marketing platform, but its email marketing feature is the most popular. It comes with a ton of professionally designed email templates that you can easily customize using a drag-and-drop editor. You can then set up these customized emails to be automatically sent out at the best time based on user behavior, event trigger, and other variables.
SendPulse’s subscriber rating feature is an excellent way to identify your most important subscribers. It lets you examine the open and click rates as well as the read and unread rate of each subscriber. You can even set replaceable text fields to personalize your emails by name, gender, date of birth, age, and job role.
7. Benchmark Email
Benchmark Email is a great option for an email marketing tool to design responsive emails that look great no matter which device they’re viewed on. If you need to add images to your email, you can even edit the image right on the platform. The email editor lets you add effects, stickers, and text to effectively send across your message.
You have the option to choose from tons of pre-designed templates based on industry, type, and occasion. For the more HTML savvy, you can even use the code editor to build emails from scratch. The dual-view feature lets you see your email design as you’re editing it, which simplifies the whole email creation process.
8. MailerLite
Advanced features like the landing page builder and the pop-up customizer make MailerLite stand out among free email tools in the market. In addition to the basics like the drag-and-drop email builder, the tool comes with a rich text editor and a built-in photo editor to design stunning emails.
You can create responsive landing pages to match the emails that you send, which will grow your chances of driving conversions. You can run split tests on different variations of your email to see what works best to drive clicks and conversions. MailerLite also presents you with a comprehensive campaign report that contains important stats like click rate, unsubscribe rate, open rate, and more.
9. Moosend
Moosend is an exceptional email marketing tool that lets you automate repetitive tasks and saves you time. You can create behavioral email campaigns based on your subscribers’ information and/or activities. You can use its advanced segmentation feature to send highly accurate emails to each recipient, increasing open rate and click-through rate as well as ROI.
This tool provides you with a detailed campaign performance report so you know precisely how to optimize your campaigns and get even better results. You can even integrate it with some of your favorite apps to seamlessly pass on vital information between different tools. It’s also one of the only free email marketing tools that won’t include its logo in your emails.
10. EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a simple email marketing tool that runs on the Amazon SES infrastructure. While the free plan doesn’t offer as many features as some of the other free email marketing tools on this list, it does allow a lot more emails per month than most of them.
You can send out unlimited emails from as many email addresses as you like. This makes it the perfect solution for a small agency or entrepreneur representing other brands. It also integrates with third-party apps like MailOptin, WordPress, and Zapier so you can seamlessly exchange customer data between different tools.
Bottom line
Most of these free email marketing tools come with advanced features even without the need to upgrade to a paid plan. Small businesses and marketers should be able to make the most of them while saving time and money. Even if you need to upgrade to accommodate your business needs, you’ll find that many of the paid plans are affordable and flexible enough to meet your budget.
Which email marketing tools have you used before and which ones would you suggest? Let us know in the comments.
