Email is still a very powerful tool to keep in touch with your clients and to capture new leads in 2020. If you need to send newsletters or you do remarketing using email you need reliable email marketing softwares and platforms. This article is also useful for people already using an email marketing tool as new players arrived with competitive prices.
There are free email marketing tools, but…
When you are at the very begging of your business and every penny counts it’s natural to search for free tools. There are free email marketing tools, but as you can imagine there are also various limitations such as emails and users amounts or/ and time limitation, such us one month trial. Let’s visit together some email platforms and analyze pros and cons.
Benchmark
We like this platform because of his assets: many custom templates, easy to design emails by drag and drop, live editing, web responsive emails… Benchmark has a beautiful photo editor and this is very useful if you need to improve your images and you don’t have Adobe Photoshop. If you’re a tech geek, code editor function was built for you: use dual view to see the design of your email while you're editing it. Regarding the prices, Benchmark isn’t cheap, but there is a free plan allowing you to test the platform. Upload up to 2,000 subscribers and send up to 14,000 emails per month for free. You’ll also find for price categories: Medium, Large, Extra large and Massive where you can use a tool to increase or decrease estimated subscribers to get monthly cost. If we want to criticize Benchmark, we need to caution that you are only allowed to build contacts list with users who subscribe through your signup form.
MailChimp
This is one of the most popular email platforms, maybe more in United States rather than in Europe. You can choose between many templates, where you can find layouts: Sell Products (market a line of products or promote seasonal items), Make an Announcement (share details about a sale, event, or other big news), Tell A Story (send a newsletter to let people know what you've been up to), Follow Up (send a tailored email to people who have engaged with you), Educate (explain your products or share knowledge about a topic) or Send a Survey (Ask people for feedback to improve your products or services). Get inspired by MailChimp themes, structured in Featured, E-commerce, Events, Holiday, Newsletters or code your own email copy pasting your snippet, importing an html or zip file. MailChimp has a free plan for less than 2,000 contacts and allows you to send 12,000 emails per month without credit card required to sign up. If you have a small subscriber list, you should test MailChimp. For more advanced functions it’s necessary to get a paid subscription. For example, let’s suppose that you need to automatize your emails, useful if you run an e-commerce. MailChimp Automation allows you to create a targeted series of emails that send when triggered by a specific date, event, or subscriber’s activity. MailChimp proposes 3 prices plans: New Business (forever free; create beautiful, professional campaigns for free—no design or coding experience necessary), Growing Business (starting at $10 per month; level up with automation workflows, e-commerce-focused features, and more tools that will refine your marketing strategy) and Pro Marketer (additional $199 per month; Improve performance with enterprise-level features for high-volume senders like multivariate testing, comparative reports, and much more). If you choose the free plan, MailChimp logo will be present at the end of your sent emails.
Vertical Response
We introduce you another popular email marketing platform, with an upgraded editor offering time-saving templates, flexible layout and pre-formatted content blocks. Vertical Response has free templates, responsive designed, build sign up forms to grow your list and autoresponders that will save your time (thank new sales leads, customers, or members for joining with a discount or promotion and tell them what to expect next). Regarding pricing plans, Vertical Response free use allows sending up to 4000 monthly emails to 300 users, with no credit card required and no time limit. Obviously, it’s less than other competitors, but for small blogs and for comparing tests it’s a fair offer. If you already are convinced by this platform choose between Basic plan (designed for new comers, starting at $11/month; features: send unlimited emails, remove VerticalResponse branding, automated follow-up emails), Pro (for savvy users, starting at $16/month; features: advanced reporting, delivery rate review, professionally designed email template) or the new Pro+ plan (starting at $196/month; features: full service email marketing, email campaign strategist, 1 promotional email/month, 1 newsletter email/ month, 8 social posts/ month). Vertical Response badge will be automatically adding at the end of your emails, when you work with free plan.
Sendinblue
We discovered few months ago this French email marketing platform and we enjoy it. No design skills are required, emails are built easily by drag & drop design, there is a rich template gallery and your sent emails are mobile-friendly. We also like their Contact management tools where we can use advanced search & segmentation (use simple or advanced search criteria to sort, filter and segment contacts for perfectly targeted email campaigns), list management (group your contacts into folders and lists for quick and easy organization) and dynamic lists (create lists that update automatically based on your criteria). Sendinblue has an interesting tool called Deliverability where you can manage IPs: Shared & Dedicated IP Options (choose the right-fit IP solution for your needs); IP Pool Management (manage large volume sending by creating and managing dedicated IP pools). Their free plan allows you to send up to 9000 emails monthly to unlimited contacts with one restriction: sending maximum 300 emails daily. Or you can select one of the other eight Sendinblue plans: micro (5,49€/mo., 40,000 emails/ mo., unlimited Contacts, no daily marketing sending limit), bronze (29€/ mo., 60,000 emails/ mo., unlimited contacts, no daily marketing sending limit, SendinBlue branding removed and advanced reporting), silver (49€/ mo., 120,000 emails/ mo., unlimited contacts, no daily marketing sending limit, SendinBlue branding removed and advanced reporting), gold (129€/ mo., 350,000 emails/ mo., unlimited contacts, no daily marketing sending limit, SendinBlue branding removed and advanced reporting, free dedicated IP), platinum (249€/ mo., 750,000 emails / mo., unlimited contacts, no daily marketing sending limit, SendinBlue branding removed and advanced reporting, free dedicated IP), diamond (449€ / mo., 3,000,000 emails / mo, unlimited contacts, no daily marketing sending limit, SendinBlue branding removed and advanced reporting, free dedicated IP) and the most comprehensive email plan atomic (1 449€ / mo. 15,000,000 emails / mo., unlimited contacts, no daily marketing sending limit, SendinBlue branding removed and advanced reporting, free dedicated IP). Even that Micro plan is… micro, still, is a paid one and introducing SendinBlue badge at the end of the email is annoying.
In conclusion, regarding your budget and email marketing tools that you need one of these 4 marketing software and platforms to use in 2020 will perfectly fit your business. Always pay attention to your leads because if emails aren't qualitative email marketing platforms could block your campaign and including your account. Therefore, these marketing tools cannot be used to send spam emails and the platforms are build to reject any spam attempt in order to protect users and also themselves.
Ovidiu Draghia
Updated: 10.03.2022
