Email marketing software is an essential tool for businesses to build and maintain relationships with their customers. The best email marketing software allows you to send bulk emails to your customers, track the results of your campaigns, and manage your email list.
There are a lot of different options for email marketing software, so it can be hard to find the right one for your business. That’s why we’ve reviewed dozens of the top programs on the market and come up with this list of our favorites. We’ve also included everything you need to know about finding the best email marketing software for you and making that program work for you.
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Bulk email marketing software free
Email has long been one of the most effective marketing channels for businesses of all sizes. But finding an email service provider that can keep up with the number of emails you need to send can be a challenge — especially if you don’t have much of a budget (or no budget at all). Sending bulk emails is important to reach large audiences with your newsletters, promotional emails, and basically just communicating with your list in general. But you don’t just want to send emails without being able to understand how those emails are performing, right? That’s why we’ve put together this list of free bulk email marketing services so you can compare the features and find the right one for your business. Compare email marketing software best for features pricing rating
EmailOctopus: EmailOctopus is an email marketing software solution for anyone who’s ever wanted simplicity and performance. Small to large businesses.Auto-Responders, Campaign Analytics, Drip Campaigns, Dynamic Content$24.00 /month (free starter package)
Convertkit: Convertkit gives you the fluidity and flexibility desired in email campaign creation and execution. Creators, bloggers and podcasters.Landing Pages/Web Forms, Marketing Automation, Mobile Optimized Emails, AB Testing$29.00 /month (free trial)
Sendinblue: Sendinblue is the quintessential business marketing platform. It’s more than email and SMS marketing. Companies of all sizes. Content Management, Customizable CTAs, Analytics/ROI Tracking, Campaign Analytics, Drip Campaigns$25.00/month (free trial)
UAB Omnisend: Omnisend is an all-in-one email marketing automation platform.High-growth eCommerce businesses.$16/month (free trial)
EngageBay Inc: EngageBay offers software for businesses that want all the benefits of a suite of tools without worrying how they integrate with each other.Small to medium size businesses.AB Testing, Audience Targeting, Account Management, Automated Scheduling, Activity Tracking$10.79/month (free starter package)
Visit our in-depth comparisons and reviews for all solutions on offer in this category
10 Free Bulk Email Marketing Services Rated and Compared (2022):
- 1. Elastic Email
- 2. Mailgun
- 3. Amazon SES
- 4. SendPulse
- 5. Sendinblue
- 6. Sender
- 7. MailerLite
- 8. Omnisend
- 9. Mailjet
- 10. Mailchimp
What Is a Bulk Email Service?
A bulk email service is an email service capable of sending emails to a large number of recipients at once. Bulk emails are generally used for advertising or marketing campaigns as well as to send out updates to your email list. The types of emails you might send include newsletters, promotional emails, transactional emails, shipping notifications, reports, password resets, and more.
You need a reliable bulk email service provider to send emails at this volume because doing it from your own email server is likely to get you flagged as a spammer. Bulk email services are specifically built with large volumes of email in mind and know how to send your emails so your sender reputation remains intact and so you don’t find yourself on the wrong side of the email gods.
What to Look for in a Bulk Email Service
There are a few key features that you’ll want to look for in a bulk email service before committing:
- Security and reliability
- Email tracking
- List management
- Email design
- Price
Security and Reliability
Security and reliability are hands down the most important feature to look for in your bulk email service. When you’re sending out a large volume of emails in a short amount of time, you need to be able to do it without triggering any spam filters. Your bulk email provider should give you the option to choose an SMTP server and use batching (sending emails out in smaller batches) to send out your bulk emails instead of sending them out all at once.
Email Tracking
Most bulk email services will give you at least some basic email tracking tools so you can check open and click rates, deliverability, and other common email marketing benchmarks and metrics. Some of the more powerful tools will offer in-depth analytics.
List Management
The bulk email service you choose should give you the option to add and manage your email marketing list. This includes features that will help you segment your list and keep your list clean and free from duplicates and inactive emails.
Email Design
Typically, a bulk email service isn’t going to include as many design options as the average email marketing service provider, but it should include at least some basic design tools. If there aren’t any design tools available, the platform should at least give you the option to import your own design or paste an HTML email template.
Price
Cost is going to be a factor for some businesses. On our list, we’ve included free bulk email marketing services that include additional features and functionality on their paid plans. No matter your budget, you’ll be able to find a bulk email marketing service for you on this list.
10 Free Bulk Email Marketing Services
As we mentioned, bulk email marketing services are used to send a large volume of emails via SMTP, API, or a web interface. These tools are generally less expensive than marketing email services, but that’s because they tend to have fewer bells and whistles. Here are the 10 free bulk email marketing services we’re loving right now.
1. Elastic Email
Elastic Email is a free bulk email marketing service that’s easy to use. You can manage your recipient list for each marketing campaign and the platform includes autoresponders. The platform also includes web forms that you can add to your emails as well as a WordPress plugin for the WordPress users out there. Since Elastic Email offers API access, you can integrate the platform with the apps you already use. In addition, Elastic Email allows for sub-accounts and includes A/X testing features.
💡 Features
- Email designer or upload your own HTML email template
- List management
- Sending and scheduling options
- Autoresponders
- Unlimited web forms
- Subscriber form WordPress plugin
- Landing pages
- Tags and custom fields
- Segmentation functionality
- Unlimited sub-accounts
- Email automations and workflows
- A/X testing
- Detailed reporting
- Email verification
- 24/7 support
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Web forms and landing pages for lead generation
- 😊 Less expensive than other options
- 😊 Tracking and dashboards have lots of info
- 😊 Great support
- 😩 Emails might end up in spam
- 😩 Reputation can drop quickly if you’re not using the platform correctly
- 😩 Some users reported that their accounts were closed for sending phishing emails
💰 Pricing
- Free plan allows you to send up to 100 emails per day
- Unlimited: $15/month for up to 5,000 contacts
- Unlimited Pro: $30/month for up to 5,000 contacts
- Email API: $0.10/1000 emails + $0.40/day
- Email API Pro: $0.12/1000/emails + $1/day
2. Mailgun
Mailgun is another bulk email marketing service that has a robust API for sending, receiving, and tracking emails. It also offers SMTP integration for easy sending of bulk transactional emails, email validation in real-time, advanced email analytics, tracking engagement metrics, and more.
💡 Features
Base features:
- Email APIs, SMTP relay, and webhooks
- Suppression management
- Email tracking and analytics
- 99.99% guaranteed uptime SLA
- 5 days of log retention (15 days with Growth, 30 days with Scale)
- Detailed documentation
- Limited 24/7 ticket support
Higher-level plan features:
- Inbound email routing
- 1 dedicated IP (foundation 100k and up)
- Email address validations
- Inbox placement tests
- 1-day message retention (3-day with Growth, up to 7 days with Scale)
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Can set up alias emails without needing to set up new email accounts
- 😊 Easy to set up and use in WHM
- 😊 Clean and useful dashboard
- 😩 Not the easiest interface to customize messages
- 😩 More expensive compared to other bulk email marketing services
- 😩 Some users experienced downtime of system servers
💰 Pricing
- Pay As You Grow: 5,000 free emails/month for three months, then pay only for what you send
- Foundation: $35/month up to 50,000 emails (additional emails charged at $0.80/1000 emails)
- Growth: $80/month up to 100,000 emails (additional emails charged at $0.80/1000 emails)
- Scale: $90/month up to 100,000 emails (additional emails charged at $0.80/1000 emails)
3. Amazon SES
Amazon SES is a bit complicated to get set up, but once that’s done, it’s an easy-to-use bulk email marketing service. It includes tons of features like tracking and mass mail. Amazon SES offers detailed reports so you can monitor the performance of your account, get anti-spam feedback, and track tons of email marketing metrics.
💡 Features
- Multiple ways to send emails — the Amazon SES console, SMTP interface, and the Amazon SES API
- Shared IP addresses are monitored to ensure high deliverability
- Users can lease dedicated IP addresses or set up dedicated IP pools
- Users can bring their own IP addresses to use with the service
- Supports all industry-standard authentication mechanisms — DKIM, SPF, and DMARC
- Access SMTP endpoint without requiring an internet gateway in a VPC
- Captures information about the entire email response funnel — numbers of sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, and rejections
- Use the Global suppression list to remove bounced emails from your sending list
- Reputation dashboard to track issues that could impact the delivery of your emails
- Use CloudWatch to create alarms that notify you when your bounce or complaint rates reach certain thresholds
- Deliverability Dashboard helps you understand and remediate issues that could impact the delivery of your emails (like suboptimal email content or attempting to email users who have unsubscribed or bounced in the past)
- Accept or reject email based on the email address, IP address, or domain of the sender
- Mailbox simulator to test how your application handles certain scenarios (like bounces or complaints) without impacting your sender reputation
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 First 62,000 emails are free to send
- 😊 Has great deliverability
- 😊 Easy to use after initial setup
- 😩 Support is slow
- 😩 Configuration settings are complicated
💰 Pricing
- First 62,000 emails are free to send from applications hosted in EC2
- Sending email from an email client or other software package: $0.10/1,000 emails + $0.12/GB of attachments
- Receiving email: $0 for the first 1,000 emails you receive, $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you receive after that + $0.09 for every 1,000 incoming email chunks
Related Content:
- 23 Best Email Marketing Software Platforms for 2022
- Email Marketing Best Practices
- 10 Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing Lists
4. SendPulse
SendPulse is less a bulk email marketing service and more of an all-in-one communication platform. It lands on our list because it also includes a bulk email sender tool. SendPulse’s free bulk email sender includes automated chatbot campaigns and push notifications. The platform has free email templates, event-triggered emails, and more.
💡 Features
- Resend to unopened with a new subject line
- Segment recipients based on interests and demographics
- A/B testing
- Set user access levels
- Integrate with your CRM or CMS
- Mobile app
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Analytics are good
- 😊 Easy to use
- 😊 Nice backend site
- 😩 Filters are quite finicky
- 😩 Support isn’t great
💰 Pricing
- Free plan up to 500 subscribers and 15,000 emails
- Standard: $8/month up to 500 subscribers or $76.80/year
- Pro: $9.60/month up to 500 subscribers or $92.16/year
- Enterprise: $13.44/month up to 500 subscribers or $129.02/year
5. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a bulk email marketing service that includes automation, email templates, and more with a drag-and-drop interface. You can use it to segment your email marketing list based on demographics and interests and use that information, along with contact information, to personalize your email marketing. We especially like the send time optimization feature (available on higher-level paid plans) that lets you send your emails at just the right time for each contact.
💡 Features
Base features:
- Email campaign designer (mobile-friendly designer)
- Email template library
- SMS marketing
- Email and SMS personalization
- Chat
Higher-level plan features:
- A/B testing
- Remove Sendinblue logo
- Send time optimization
- Landing page builder
- Facebook Ads
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Great contact management, filtering, and segmentation
- 😊 Modern web-tracking and lead-scoring functionality
- 😊 Templates are nice looking and easy to use
- 😩 Transition between drag-and-drop and HTML isn’t great
- 😩 Might be hard to configure with dedicated IP
- 😩 CRM functions might be a bit limited
💰 Pricing
- Free plan for unlimited contacts and up to 300 email sends per day
- Lite: $25/month for up to 10,000
- Premium: $65/month
- Enterprise: By quote
6. Sender
Sender is another of our favorite free bulk email marketing services that also has great paid plans, too. With Sender, you can send emails using customizable templates or use the drag-and-drop building to create your own newsletters and emails. There’s also a custom HTML editor for coding your own email templates.
💡 Features
- High email deliverability
- Smart automations
- Library of templates to choose from (or build your own)
- Personalize your messages
- Advanced analytics tools
- Advanced email delivery infrastructure
- Plugins for popular content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and more
- Landing pages
- SMS marketing
- Push notifications
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Support is great
- 😊 Strong deliverability
- 😩 No image library to store used images
- 😩 Can be difficult to navigate
💰 Pricing
- Free plan for up to 2500 subscribers and 15,000 emails/month
- Monthly Subscription: starts at $11/month for up to 5,000 subscribers and 60,000 emails/month
- Prepaid Credits: $35 for 10,000 credits; cost per credit goes down as you buy more
7. MailerLite
MailerLite is one of the free bulk email marketing services on our list that is great for beginners. It has drag-and-drop functionality that makes it really easy to create awesome newsletters as well as an easy way for eCommerce businesses to add product listings. With the bulk email sender, you can send automated emails and even make certain sections of your newsletters visible only to certain subscribers. This is called dynamic content and is absolutely great for providing relevant information to your segments without having to create an entirely separate email for each of those segments.
💡 Features
- Create your emails from templates, a custom HTML editor, rich text editor, or the drag-and-drop tool
- Built-in photo editor
- Includes a website builder, landing pages, popups, and embedded forms
- Subscriber management
- Advanced targeting features
- Email automation
- Personalization and segmentation
- A/B split testing
- Deliver by time zone
- Auto resend
- RSS campaigns
- Tracking and analytics including campaign reports, surveys, click maps, and opens by location
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Free plan includes automation features
- 😊 Easy to use
- 😊 Landing page editor
- 😩 No CRM features
- 😩 Limited reporting
- 😩 No advanced automations
💰 Pricing
- Free up to 1,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month
- Paid plans start at $10/month for unlimited emails per month
- Pricing is based on the number of subscribers
- Sites Pro Add-on: $10/month to create as many web pages and landing pages as you want
- MailerPro Add-on: $100/month for priority support
- Dedicated IP Add-on: $50/month and recommended if you’re sending more than 50,000 emails/week
8. Omnisend
Omnisend‘s bulk email marketing services are perfect for eCommerce business owners and others. It includes preset automations, integrates with your shop to give you better customer targeting and key insights into shopping behavior, and offers multiple marketing channels (email, SSM, and MMS) so you can reach your customers wherever they are. Omnisend offers up a template library, automations, product analytics, and funnels with easy-to-use drag-and-drop control.
💡 Features
- Library of templates
- Customize emails to fit your brand — add products, dynamic discount codes, and save them as presets
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Dynamic discount codes
- Automations Library has pre-built workflows
- Drag-and-drop workflow editing
- AI-driven customer analytics, segmentation, and insights
- Customizable, TCPA, and GDPR compliant forms and automated messages
- Aggregate sales and performance metrics as well as detailed campaign and automation reports
- Omnichannel customer experience with email, SMS, and more channels in one platform
- Migration tools
- Multi-store accounts
- Tons of integrations
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Product picker lets you add products to your emails easily
- 😊 Templates look great
- 😊 Great customer service
- 😊 Easy to track performance of newsletters and automations
- 😩 Can’t integrate multiple shops
- 😩 Monthly fees vary
- 😩 Email designers might find the templated system frustrating
💰 Pricing
- Free plan for up to 15,000 emails/month
- Standard: $16/month or $156/year
- Pro: $99/month or $960/year
- Enterprise: By quote
- SMS: $0.015 each
- MMS: $0.045 each
9. Mailjet
Mailjet is a bulk email marketing service that supports real-time collaboration between team members. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to create great mail layouts, add image and text blocks, and even buttons for social media sharing. Mailjet also has subscription forms to help you grow your email list as well as an SMTP server and quite extensive documentation.
💡 Features
- Intuitive drag-and-drop editor
- Responsive email newsletter templates
- Real-time team collaboration
- Inbox Preview tool, so you can see exactly how your email will display
- Native WordPress plugin
- A/B testing tool
- Marketing automation tools
- Advanced statistics
- Integrate Mailgun to schedule, send, and track emails using SMTP server or RESTful API
- Subscription forms
- Contact management to organize and segment subscribers
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Great deliverability reputation
- 😊 Easy to configure website to send emails from there
- 😊 Useful dashboard and reporting
- 😩 Customer service doesn’t exactly “wow” users
- 😩 System sometimes lags
- 😩 Lack of re-engagement campaign functionality
💰 Pricing
- Free plan for 200 emails/day (6,000/month)
- Essential: $15/month or $162/year
- Premium: $25/month or $270/year
- Custom: By quote
10. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the more popular bulk email marketing services on our list. It offers inbuilt marketing tools, a bulk email verifier, and custom domains for increasing sales. You’ll also be able to use Mailchimp to create and share social ads, emails, landing pages, and even postcards (yep, actual postcards). Mailchimp has behavioral targeting and predicted demographics features to help you reach the right people at the right time as well as a subject line helper, real-time marketing automation, and A/B testing.
💡 Features
- Build a website with a custom domain
- Signup forms, landing pages, social posts and ads, and a lookalike audience finder
- Customer dashboards
- Segmentation tools
- Integrates with the tools you probably already use
- Pre-built segments, tags, behavioral targeting, and predicted demographics
- Award-winning support
✔️ Pros and Cons
- 😊 Thorough reporting tools
- 😊 Simple and easy-to-use email editor
- 😊 Includes an online store builder (US and UK users)
- 😩 Plans can get expensive, fast
💰 Pricing
- Free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers
- Essentials: $9.99/month
- Standard: $14.99/month
- Premium: $299/month
- Plans vary depending on the number of subscribers
Choose From the Best Free Bulk Email Marketing Services
Each of the free bulk email marketing services on our list will meet your needs. The tool you choose will depend on various factors like your budget, the features you need, and who is going to be using the tool in your business (developers will gravitate towards a different tool than bloggers, for example). As long as the bulk email marketing service you choose is reliable and has good deliverability, you’ll see improvements in your email marketing strategy and be able to meet your marketing goals.
Best mass mailing software
A bulk email is the process of sending one email template to a large number of addresses at once. This can be a powerful marketing tool, allowing you to semi-personalise emails with marketing information, promotions, campaigns, or other news. But first, you need to decide which platform to use.
With so many email marketing platforms on the market these days, picking the right one for your needs can be tricky. When it comes to sending emails in bulk, quantity is obviously going to be a key consideration. You want to be able to send as many emails as you need – without restrictions – for the lowest possible price.
That’s not the only thing you need to consider, though.
What makes a good mass email sender?
Simply blasting emails at everyone you can doesn’t count as a marketing strategy – nor is it very legal, for that matter.
You also need to think about how you’re going to track those emails, check how users engage with them and automate your follow up email, depending on how people respond (if at all).
1: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign’s newsletter editor
ActiveCampaign is arguably one of the best email marketing tools on the market right. With over 130,000 small business customers, they came out #1 in our annual study of 100+ email platforms.
Sending bulk emails is just one of the many things you can achieve with ActiveCampaign. This platform is designed for businesses looking for an all-in-one CRM, email marketing and automation system.
You can send unlimited emails on every plan with pricing based on the number of contacts you need to manage and the number of user accounts you need. More expensive plans also get you access to more advanced features like A/B testing, machine-learning and dedicated support.
For 500 contacts, pricing starts as low as $9/monthfor up to three users while the $49/monthversion. At 10,000 contacts, ActiveCampaig remains highly competitive with prices ranging between $111/monthand $399/mo.
At $199/mo, ActiveCampaign’s Plus package covers you for 10,000 contacts, unlimited emails and up to 25 user accounts – plus a lot more marketing and automation features that you’ll get from most platforms in this price bracket.
As you’ll see, you’ll get more mass email power for your money from some of the other options we’ve looked at in this list, but ActiveCampaign is the platform for businesses who want a complete email marketing, automation and CRM platform.
You won’t find better automation features, sales tracking, reporting or integrations from any of the other providers we’ve looked at and you’ll ultimately save yourself a lot of money on additional marketing software by getting everything from ActiveCampaign.
2: Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a truly sophisticated piece of email marketing software offering one of the best email builders on the market. Aside from editing templates, you can create your own design from scratch, using its drag-and-drop builder.
Sendinblue’s pricing is unique, too. Instead of charging you based on the number of contacts you’re sending to, Sendinblue sets its prices based on the number of emails you’re sending.
So you can send up to 300 emails every day for free, Sendinblue Lite starts at 10,000 emails per month for £16.5/monthup to 100,000 emails per month for £59.5/mo. Sendinblue Premium starts at 20,000 emails per month for £41.5/monthup to 1,000,000 emails per month for £424.15/mo. All plans come with unlimited contact storage
Once again, custom pricing plans are available if you need to send higher volumes.
Those prices are incredibly competitive and you’re getting a lot of additional email marketing features in terms of automation, contact segmentation and reporting. Sendinblue also has some of the best transactional email features we’ve come across, which we’re still using today here at Venture Harbour.
Sendinblue isn’t only there to help you send emails, either; it’s packed full of features to help you generate more leads and increase your email marketing list. Its form builder aims to turn your website into a stronger lead gen tool and improve the results of your inbound marketing efforts.
This is also the first platform we’ve looked at that offers serious reporting tools – crucial for gauging the performance of your emails after they’re sent out and optimising campaigns for better results.
Sendinblue still has its limitations, though.
While it offers some great automation and lead generation features, it doesn’t match the industry leaders on this front. For example, there’s no customer relationship management (CMS) platform included and its lead tracking capabilities aren’t as advanced as some of its competitors (most of which are more expensive, though).
3: Moosend
Moosend is a beginner-friendly bulk email sender.
While not nearly as powerful as ActiveCampaign on features, what I do like about Moosend is that you can access all of their features from as little as $10/month. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, separates their more advanced features onto higher-priced plans.
Moosend also offers unlimited email sending regardless of which plan you’re on.
Moosend Pricing
Their platform is extremely easy-to-use, albeit has a slightly dated feeling to it. That said, your email recipients will never see this platform, so it’s debatable how much of an issue this is.
Moosend newsletter templates
A major benefit with Moosend (right now) is that they offer each customer agency-level support, to help you with anything from strategy to delivery optimisation.
They’ve advised me that this may not always be the case, but for the time being it’s a major perk that other bulk email tools charge a hefty fee for.
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4: ConvertKit
ConvertKit is the bulk email sender for individuals in creative industries, such as authors, teachers, and bloggers.
With ConvertKit, do not expect any fancy features. There is no predictive sending, split test A/B testing, and the reporting is bare-bones. For those who just need an easy-to-use tool to send emails to a large list, it’s perfect.
ConvertKit’s email editor is a simple drag-and-drop editor, with few bells and whistles. One major difference compared to ActiveCampaign and Moosend, is that ConvertKit does not offer email templates – as they encourage users to send plain text emails.
ConvertKit’s editor
Similar to both of the tools above, ConvertKit’s pricing allows for unlimited email sends, but the price is based on the number of contacts on your list. Overall, their pricing is very reasonable – though not too dissimilar to ActiveCampaign’s, which we felt generally offers more bang for its buck.
ConvertKit’s pricing
5: MailerLite
MailerLite is hands-down the most affordable bulk email sender for smaller list sizes. If you have less than 1,000 contacts, MailerLite is free to send up to 12,000 emails a month.
Starting at $15 for 2,500 contacts, it’s one of the most affordable email marketing tools out of over 100 email marketing tools that we analysed. More importantly, their software is also very easy to use and has a good set of features.
Mailerlite newsletter campaign builder
While nowhere near as powerful as ActiveCampaign from a feature standpoint, MailerLite does have all of the basic features you’d expect of a bulk email sender – from personalisation tags to sending by time-zone, and A/B testing.
Ultimately, if you’re a business looking for an all-in-one email marketing solution, I would still err towards ActiveCampaign. But if it’s a personal or side project you’re looking to send bulk emails for, where affordability trumps potential for growth, MailerLite is a brilliant option to consider.
Which is the best bulk email sender?
Each of the bulk email senders we’ve looked at in this article has strengths in their own right. MailerLite gives you free bulk email sending to 1,000 contacts, while ActiveCampaign gives you a complete all-in-one sales and marketing platform.
Conclusion
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