The Pros and Cons of Free Email Marketing Software — Top 5 Tools

Image source: Pexels

Back in the day, email marketing software consisted of simple tools that helped marketers and salespeople generate prospect lists. Since then, the technology and tools have evolved. Today, we have got solutions for creating actionable lists of highly-targeted contacts. A wide variety of features have been introduced, including segmentation, reporting, lead generation, integration, and many more.

Contemporary marketing campaigns primarily focus on the customer journey. To create the perfect customer experience, email marketing tools have become a fusion of different solutions, such as CRM, automation, and sales management software.

The market is now saturated with an expansive range of options — from paid to free email marketing software. The million-dollar question is — which solution should you choose for your business purposes?

You can opt for some of the leading software in the industry, but if you are looking for free email campaign tools, you have to search harder. The problem is that a lot of free email marketing tools are either limited in terms of features or have restricted options because the company expects you to subscribe to a paid plan. Still, that doesn’t mean that there are no free tools that can be worth your time.

Before we take a look at some of the best free tools on the market, let us overview some of the benefits of email marketing software, as well as the vital factors that you should consider when choosing the right solution.

Benefits of Email Marketing Software

Email marketing software can provide various benefits that affect essential marketing aspects. This includes finding and verifying prospect email addresses, organizing and managing campaigns, and gaining insight from relevant reports and metrics. Some of these features can be found in free email marketing tools.

Some of the essential benefits of email software include:

1. Streamlining processes

2. Targeting and personalization

3. Building a loyal customer base

4. Boosting your ROI

Streamlining Processes

Email marketing tools focus on streamlining the processes associated with creating a successful email marketing campaign. Prospecting apps enable you to find hundreds of addresses in a couple of seconds. They often include an email verification feature, or you can get a tool specifically for that purpose. This enables you to create actionable lists of contacts with a high deliverability rate.

Outreach tools enable you to automate personalized messages and responses. You can create or use predefined templates and send them to a targeted list of recipients. If the software has a reporting feature, your campaign results will automatically get translated into organized metrics that you can use to evaluate the performance of your marketing efforts. There are also tools that enable you to track and manage your teams, as well as to improve their communication and collaboration.

Targeting and Personalization

You are not the only one trying to reach out to a particular audience with your email campaign. With so many businesses bombarding them with a variety of offers, a highly personalized approach is required. Recipients want to be treated as individuals with specific needs and problems that you are supposed to target. The benefit of using email marketing software is that you can segment your contact lists in line with many essential factors, such as:

Based on this information, you can create personalized messages for every group. 

Building a Loyal Customer Base

Email marketing tools can help you identify, attract, and retain potential customers who can benefit from using your product or service. By using these tools, you can easily transform a list of prospects into a loyal customer base.

Creating personalized emails with strategically placed CTAs and links will draw many parties to subscribe to your mailing list. You can track the customers on your list and inform them about your best offers, events, new products, etc.

Boosting Your ROI

Using email marketing programs to create highly-successful campaigns can boost your return on investment. According to HubSpot’s list of email marketing stats for 2020, for every $1 spent, you can generate $38. We are talking about a 3,800% ROI, which makes email marketing one of the best sales channels for businesses. 

Email marketing software enables you to create, test, and improve campaigns efficiently. This increases the chances of them being successful and helps you achieve lucrative results faster. 

Vital Factors to Consider When Choosing an Email Marketing Tool

Image source: Pixabay

Plenty of email tools are available on the market. To determine whether choosing free email marketing software is enough for your business purposes, or if you need to invest in a more extensive solution, you should consider these vital factors:

1. Email deliverability

2. Requirements and preferences

3. Industry and type of business

4. Technical abilities

Email Deliverability

Email deliverability can be considered the foundation of email marketing. The success of your campaign hinges upon it. If not enough people receive your emails, you are wasting your time and effort.

The majority of ESPs have rigid spam filters that check your IP’s reputation. If it is too low, your emails will be marked as spam. 

When you opt for an email marketing tool, you depend on the provider’s shared IP address. This is why you must first check their reputation and see if they are using any features to uphold it. Some tools include email verification, enabling you to get rid of any spam traps and unused addresses in your contact lists. You can also find solutions with more extensive email monitoring features that provide regular reports on deliverability, unsubscribes, and suspicious activity.

Requirements and Preferences

What kind of solution does your business need? This is the first question you need to ask before opting for any marketing tool. You should take into consideration factors such as:

• How big your contact list is

• What kind of messages you will be sending

• What sort of automation features your marketing efforts need

• Which metrics you will use to determine if a campaign is successful

• What your preferred style of email designs and templates is

By having the answers to these questions, you can narrow down your options more easily. 

Industry and Type of Business

When it comes to email marketing tools, there are more universal solutions and those that focus on specific industries and business types.

Do your research and read every provider’s terms and conditions carefully before settling for a solution. Most tools have an acceptable use policy that underlines industries that the company doesn’t want to work with. The list most commonly includes businesses that deal in:

• Pharmaceutical products

• Affiliate and multi-level marketing

• Social media likes and followers sales

• Escort and hookup services

• Gambling services and products

Technical Abilities

You should find a software solution that fits your technical abilities. Not everyone is well-versed in the more high-tech side of marketing software. If that is the case, you will want to look for a tool that has a simple interface with drag-and-drop features and doesn’t require any coding.

There is also a large selection of tools made exclusively for developers. They enable you to have full control over your email settings. Many companies provide API integrations that boost the tool’s capabilities and make it more applicable for technologically adept users.

Top 5 Free Email Marketing Tools — Why You Should Trust Us

We at Sell SaaS are far from rookies when it comes to email marketing software. Our company was founded by Mathieu Picard, who has had immense success with his business venture — AnyLeads. Thanks to his software, industry giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have generated over 10,000,000 leads.

“Check out fantastic white-label email software and launch a successful SaaS business".

It isn’t easy to find free email marketing tools with features that aren’t restricted or significantly capped. We managed to get a hold of five apps with free versions that are worth trying out. We reviewed each of them according to their type. The tools that made it to our list are:

The Best Free Autoresponder Tool — Sendinblue

Sendinblue Homepage

Sendinblue is a marketing platform that enables you to automate both email and SMS responses. With the free version, you get the majority of the features the tool has to offer. The only significant cap is that you can send 300 emails per day. This isn’t necessarily a problem for SMBs and bloggers, but if you are running a larger company, you will probably spend those emails quickly. The good news is that your contact list can be as extensive as you need it to be.

The primary feature of Sendinblue is marketing automation, which enables you to create sequences by using a simple drag-and-drop menu. The tool comes with a variety of templates you can choose from. You can also create templates yourself — just drag the elements around to arrange them to your liking. If you have a premade HTML template, you can upload and use it.

Even if you stick to the free version, you can get customer support for any issue you might encounter.

If you need to use more emails, you can subscribe to the Lite paid plan. You will get 40.000 emails for $25 per month. The more expensive pricing plans offer additional features such as reporting, A/B testing, and landing page building.

If the restriction on how many emails you can send daily isn’t a problem, the tool works perfectly as a free autoresponder.

The Best Free Email Lookup Tool — Hunter

Hunter Homepage

Hunter is a fast email lookup and verification tool. It is one of the best lead generation solutions on the market. Its Domain Search feature requires that you input a specific domain, and it will collect any associated email addresses. You will also receive other essential information, such as 

• Names

• Job titles

• Phone numbers

• Social media URLs. 

The tool’s Email Finder function enables you to search for particular prospects. What you need to do is:

1. Insert the first and last name of the prospect in the left field

2. Insert the website of the company they are working at in the right field

3. Click the magnifying glass icon 

The third feature is the Email Verifier. Type in any email address, and it will get verified according to several parameters — including format, comparison, domain information, and mail server response.

The only significant restriction that Hunter has as a free email lookup tool is that you get 50 searches per month. If you need more, you can subscribe to one of the paid plans, ranging from €49 to €399 — that is roughly $58 to $468 per month.

You can use Hunter as a web app or download it as a Chrome extension.

The Best Free Email Newsletter Tool — Benchmark

Benchmark Homepage

Benchmark is an efficient and user-friendly email newsletter tool. It provides a simple drag-and-drop editor that makes creating newsletter campaigns easy for users who aren’t tech-savvy. Developers won’t be disappointed either, because the tool also includes the option for custom coding. If you are still unsure about how to organize the perfect design for your marketing efforts, the template library holds a wide range of choices. 

When it comes to automation, you can create welcome, follow-up, and abandoned cart emails. It is also possible to include surveys and polls.

Benchmark includes additional features that can improve your newsletter campaigns. You can overview the extensive analytics on every campaign’s performance. The A/B testing feature enables you to determine which version of your newsletter works the best. The tool also features responsive design, which is invaluable. You have to optimize your campaign for all the devices — especially mobile.

The free version includes all of the essential features. You get to send 250 emails per month. If you need more, you can subscribe to a paid plan, starting at $15 per month. You can also negotiate a custom plan.

Benchmark has one of the best free plans that you can find. It is most commonly used by eCommerce businesses and bloggers.

The Best Free Email Verification Tool — NeverBounce

NeverBounce Homepage

NeverBounce is an email verification tool that you can use both for single addresses and bulk lists. It pings mail servers to see if they are valid. Any emails that are duplicates or have a syntax error are automatically removed from the list. 

The free version of the tool provides you with 1,000 verifications per month. If you need more, you can use the pay-as-you-go billing option, costing you $0.003 per email.

With the bulk email list verification feature, you just need to upload the sheet with all your contacts. Once the tool is done analyzing, you can export a clean list that has — as the developers claim — a 99.9% deliverability rate. NeverBounce will let you know whether a domain is still active or if an address is blacklisted. 

Every account also gets the instant bounce analysis feature for free. It enables you to check whether your list needs a cleanup before you use it for a marketing campaign.

You can integrate the tool with other email marketing solutions. This includes Zapier, enabling you to connect with almost any app you need. Developers can use the NeverBounce API with 1,000 verifications per month. 

You can choose to pay for more emails if you are running a larger business. In case you need to verify more than a million emails, you can contact the company and negotiate a paid plan.

The Best Free Transactional Email Tool — Mailjet

Mailjet Homepage

Mailjet is primarily a transactional email service. It generates customized receipts, confirmation emails, automated support replies, account creation notifications, etc. It is simple to use thanks to its intuitive dashboard and user-friendly menu. 

Mailjet also has the feature to create newsletter campaigns. There is a wide variety of templates that you can customize to your liking. You can also use the integrated APIs and get an overview of how your emails are performing via the advanced statistics feature.

The free version enables you to send up to 6,000 emails per month. You can import an unlimited number of contacts. The advanced email editor and reporting feature are also included. For transactional email and newsletter campaign purposes, the free version of Mailjet is a complete tool. 

If you need additional features, such as A/B testing and list segmentation, you need to subscribe to one of the pricing plans, ranging from $9.65 to $20.65 per month. 

Best Free Email Marketing Software — What’s The Verdict?

All of the tools on our list can be effective free email marketing solutions. The problem is that most of them are restricted in one way or another. They can be valuable if you intend to use them for the purpose that we’ve highlighted, but if you want to make the most of their other features, you need to invest in them. Some of them can be used for a number of times that might not be enough for your business needs. 

You should also keep in mind that their pricing plans are prone to change in time. A company can determine that it is no longer lucrative to offer a free plan and decide to change it to a limited free trial.

The best course of action would be to use these tools as a temporary solution.