Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience and build a relationship with them. It’s a great way to connect with your audience and tell them about all the great things you have going on.
Nowadays, email marketing is an essential part of every business’s marketing strategy. You can use it to promote your products or services, share valuable information with your customers, and drive sales. However, it’s not as simple as just sending emails from your personal account to all your subscribers. If you want to see results from email marketing campaigns, you need tools that will help you create better content and automate tedious tasks like sending newsletters or sending emails based on certain events (like birthdays).
That’s where free online email marketing tools come in handy! They make it easy for anyone who wants to start their own campaign regardless of their experience level with digital marketing techniques such as SEO or PPC advertising campaigns. Here are some resources that will help you find the right tool for your needs:
Free Online Email Marketing Tools
Marketing trends and channels evolve over time. While some trends come and go quickly, one of the channels that has remained more or less the same is email. In fact, email continues to be the top channel for content marketing with both B2C and B2B marketers. 87% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers use it to nurture their audience.
It can even help you amplify your other marketing channels such as social. With that said, marketers still face a ton of challenges in their email marketing efforts. One of these key challenges is simply the amount of time it takes to create a great looking email from scratch. Without efficient 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 plenty of free email marketing tools that can help you save time and money.
If you’re looking for a social management solution to complement your email marketing, test out a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social:
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Read on for our list of the top free email marketing tools:
- HubSpot Email Marketing
HubSpot, probably best known for their marketing automation platform, recently launched a free email marketing tool that can support a lot of a small business’ transactional email needs.
Whether you need 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 immediately.
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.
hubspot email marketing tool
- 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 choose 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 dashboard screenshot
Sender’s robust 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.
- Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a marketing communication platform that features 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 use features like A/B testing and segmented recipient lists to take the manual effort and guesswork out of optimizing your campaigns and targeting your ideal audiences.
sendinblue email editor
- Omnisend
Omnisend is a sophisticated ecommerce marketing platform that integrates all your communication platforms in one place. Its free plan includes only email, but it’s more than enough to support the email marketing efforts of small and medium businesses. It allows you to automate your email delivery using behavioral triggers and easily time your communications based on your customers’ convenience.
You can utilize its comprehensive audience insights to send out more relevant email marketing messages. Design attractive 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 performance.
Omnisend dashboard screenshot
- SendPulse
SendPulse advertises 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 right time based on user behavior, event trigger and other variables.
SendPulse’s subscriber rating feature is an excellent way to identify your most valuable subscribers. It lets you analyze 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.
SendPulse subscriber rating
- 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.
Benchmark Email responsive design templates
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- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a leader in email marketing tools that you’ve probably heard of. Their free plan provides you with 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.
Mailchimp content manager screenshot
- MailerLite
Sophisticated 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 create stunning emails.
MailerLite email customizer
You can create responsive landing pages to match the emails that you send, which will improve 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 provides you with a comprehensive campaign report that contains important stats like click rate, unsubscribe rate, open rate and more.
- Mailjet
Mailjet comes with intuitive and collaborative tools to help you build effective email marketing campaigns. Customize any of the pre-designed templates and create responsive emails to impress any recipient no matter which device they’re using. If you work with a team, you’ll love the platform’s real-time collaboration feature that allows for seamless collaboration.
This email marketing tool also lets you add dynamic content so you can create personalized and relevant emails for each recipient. This helps you get much better results out of your email marketing campaigns. You can also integrate the platform into your CRM and easily manage your mailing list through a single dashboard.
Mailjet contact statistics
- Moosend
Moosend is an excellent email marketing tool that lets you automate repetitive tasks and saves you time. You can design 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 exactly 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.
Moosend email performance report
- 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.
EmailOctopus email performance report
Bottom line
Most of these free email marketing tools come with robust 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 fit your budget.
free email marketing tools for small business
Your content dropped in the search rankings thanks to a new Google update, or maybe your Facebook ads aren’t generating leads like they used to. Either way, one thing is clear: when you don’t own the channels where you reach customers, the ground can always shift beneath you. That’s where email marketing shines.
Maybe you’ve been sending customers emails via bcc in Gmail, and now you’re ready to find a better solution—something actually built for businesses.
Automate your email marketing
Reach your audience
Better often means more expensive, but there’s an entire ecosystem of free email marketing tools available, and they have all the features you’ll need to build out your email marketing (and then some).
We researched and tested dozens of free email marketing apps to find the best ones for a variety of use cases and business types. Here are the seven best free email newsletter services.
The best free email marketing apps
Mailchimp for a growing email marketing program
HubSpot for scalability
MailerLite for advanced email marketers
Moosend for eCommerce businesses
Sendinblue for building automated workflows
Mailjet for collaborating with developers
Zoho Campaigns for the most generous free plan
What to look for in a free email marketing service
How we evaluate and test apps
All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
Full-featured email marketing apps and free ones are far from mutually exclusive. There are tons of options that offer flexible subscriber and send thresholds along with the robust features small businesses need—for free. If you’re just getting started or want to try out a few options before committing to a paid plan, you have plenty of choices.
Here’s what we looked for when testing free email marketing software:
The number of subscribers and sends included for free. Some apps are generous in this regard, offering thousands of free sends per month, while others include low caps that mean your “free” platform isn’t free for very long. We kept this in mind while testing.
Email templates and customization. You shouldn’t have to start your email marketing operation from scratch. The best free options come with at least a few fully-designed and professional templates to get your campaigns started.
Audience segmentation. Success with email relies on being able to deliver the right emails to the right people at the right time. For growing businesses, that means you need capable audience segmentation features with any email marketing app you choose.
Automation. From transactional emails to triggered campaigns and more, a growing business needs to be able to automate email marketing as your efforts scale.
Scalability. Speaking of, the best free email app can grow with your business—from free to paid when necessary, adding more features and higher limits as you go.
Full email marketing features. There are plenty of capable apps designed for one particular type of email (like newsletters, for example), but for our purposes here, we focused on full-featured apps you can use across your email marketing operation.
With those criteria in mind, here are the best free email marketing apps.
Best free email marketing software for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp
Mailchimp screenshot
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you’re planning to scale it quickly. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, marketing automation, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.
An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.
Once you’re ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you’ll never have to switch to another app.
Mailchimp integrates with Zapier, allowing you to do things like automatically subscribe new form responders, leads, or spreadsheet entries to a Mailchimp list.
Subscribe new Facebook Lead Ad leads to a Mailchimp list
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Facebook Lead Ads, Mailchimp
Facebook Lead Ads + Mailchimp
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Create Mailchimp subscribers from new Typeform responses
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Mailchimp, Typeform
Mailchimp + Typeform
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Add subscribers to Mailchimp for new Google Sheets rows
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Google Sheets, Mailchimp
Google Sheets + Mailchimp
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Mailchimp pricing: Free for up to 2,000 contacts and 10,000 sends per month
If you choose Mailchimp, here are 6 ways to automate your email marketing with Mailchimp. And if you love Mailchimp but just need a super simple, bare-bones option for email newsletters, the brand also offers TinyLetter.
Best free email marketing software for scalability across teams
HubSpot
HubSpot email editor screenshot
HubSpot has everything you need under one roof. The email marketing features are well-rounded and offer a lot for free: up to 2,000 emails per month, over 100 lists, and reporting. When you’re ready to scale, you can add additional HubSpot tools for CRM, full marketing automation, customer service, sales, and more.
The email tool throws you into the editor as soon as signup is finished, so you can get moving quickly. For those new to HubSpot or email marketing more broadly, the next stop is the user guide, detailing everything you need to know to build beautiful, effective campaigns in HubSpot.
Included in your 105 lists are 100 static and 5 “active” lists, which include super quick options to segment, say, hard-bouncers or recipients who open but don’t click.
Plus, HubSpot integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically create and update HubSpot contacts from new form entries and copy new leads from your ads into HubSpot.
Copy new lead responses from Facebook Lead Ads to a HubSpot form
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Facebook Lead Ads, HubSpot
Facebook Lead Ads + HubSpot
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Create or update HubSpot contacts from new entries on Typeform
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HubSpot, Typeform
HubSpot + Typeform
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HubSpot pricing: Free for up to 2,000 emails per month, 100 static contact lists, and 5 “active” contact lists
Take a look at 5 ways to automate business operations in HubSpot to make the most of your email marketing.
Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite
MailerLite screenshot
MailerLite doesn’t offer pre-made templates on its free plan, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than make up for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.
Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There’s a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It’s a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.
Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows. You can create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.
Plus, MailerLite integrates with Zapier—meaning you can automate things like adding new MailerLite subscribers from Google Sheets and sending Gumroad customers to MailerLite.
Add subscribers to MailerLite from updated rows on Google Sheets
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Google Sheets, MailerLite Classic
Google Sheets + MailerLite Classic
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Send Gumroad customers to MailerLite
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Gumroad, MailerLite Classic
Gumroad + MailerLite Classic
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MailerLite pricing: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month
Best free email marketing software for eCommerce businesses
Moosend
Screenshot of the Moosend editor
Moosend isn’t the most streamlined email marketing app we tested, but it makes up for that with generous allowances on the free plan and powerful segmentation options for eCommerce businesses.
The email builder works as you expect with drag-and-drop functionality to add elements and a rich text editor. Once you connect your eCommerce site, click over to the Revenue Dashboard tab to see an overview of exactly how your email marketing efforts lead to sales.
Compared to other apps we tested, it takes a few extra clicks to build a new segment. But even free users can segment lists by crucial eCommerce dimensions like average order value, subscribers who add a particular product to their cart, total spending, and more. Moosend also includes automation features with its free plan: over a dozen automated “recipes,” including sequences for abandoned carts, upsells, and customer loyalty.
Moosend integrates with Zapier, opening up connections with tons of other apps and automated workflows for things like adding new Moosend subscribers from new leads and verifying email addresses for new Moosend subscribers.
Verify new Moosend subscriber email addresses with QuickEmailVerification
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Filter by Zapier, Moosend, QuickEmailVerification
Filter by Zapier + Moosend + QuickEmailVerification
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Create subscribers on Moosend for new Google Ads leads
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Google Ads, Moosend
Google Ads + Moosend
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Moosend pricing: Free for up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails
Best free email marketing software for building automated workflows
Sendinblue
Sendinblue screenshot
The more you use your email marketing tool, the more you’ll need to rely on automation. And Sendinblue offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.
Even with this kind of advanced automation, you can get from account setup to actually editing emails in just a few clicks. Once you’re there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Then, either send them as email newsletters or use Sendinblue’s automation workflows to send them on a schedule.
You can’t send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts and split them into focused lists. Sendinblue also lets you buy pre-paid credits to send more than your daily email limit.
Expand Sendinblue’s capabilities by integrating it with Zapier to automatically create new Sendinblue subscribers from new Google Contacts, Typeform submissions, and more.
Create SendinBlue subscribers from new or updated Google Contacts
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Google Contacts, Sendinblue
Google Contacts + Sendinblue
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Create SendinBlue contacts from new Typeform submissions
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Sendinblue, Typeform
Sendinblue + Typeform
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Sendinblue pricing: Free for up 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts
Best free email marketing software for collaborating with developers
Mailjet
Mailjet screenshot
At first glance, Mailjet is a perfectly capable email marketing service. It offers several dozen fully-designed email templates, the drag-and-drop editor you expect, and support for transactional emails. Its free account is a great way to start your email strategy.
But during setup, Mailjet offers a choice between its Marketer and Developer interfaces. In Developer mode, you can hand-code emails or customize pre-made designs, then create separate versions to A/B test. You can plug Mailjet into your app or eCommerce store and set up transactional emails, too.
If you move to Mailjet’s paid plans, you can add anywhere from five to more than 15 user accounts, so marketers and developers can easily collaborate on your email marketing. Plus, Mailjet integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically send emails to people who complete your Typeform or create Mailjet subscribers from new Facebook lead ads leads.
Create Mailjet subscribers from new leads in Facebook Lead Ads
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Facebook Lead Ads, Mailjet
Facebook Lead Ads + Mailjet
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Send Mailjet emails for new Typeform entries
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Mailjet, Typeform
Mailjet + Typeform
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Mailjet pricing: Free for unlimited contacts and up to 6,000 emails per month
Best free email marketing software to get the most out of your free plan
Zoho Campaigns editor screenshot
Zoho Campaigns offers the most flexible, generous free plan of all the apps we tested. The subscriber and email sending limits aren’t crazy—you get 2,000 contacts and 12,000 sends per month—but the free plan also includes full automation capabilities, robust audience segmentation, and tons of beautifully-designed and professional templates.
The drag-and-drop editor works how you expect and includes support for dynamic content blocks. You can even personalize dynamic blocks based on your customer segments.
When it comes to automation, you’ll choose from autoresponders (one-email triggered sequences) or fully automated workflows. Both are available on the free plan and include several workflow templates to help you build out automations faster. When you create a workflow, you can choose from templates for welcome and onboarding, nurture series, re-engagement, customer retention, eCommerce, and conditional workflows.
When you’re ready to scale, you can connect with any of Zoho’s other apps, so you have a whole suite of tools at your fingertips. You can also connect Zoho Campaigns with thousands of other tools via Zapier, allowing you to automate workflows like adding new form responses to your email lists or verifying subscriber email addresses.
Add/update contacts in Zoho Campaigns for new form submissions in Squarespace
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Squarespace, Zoho Campaigns
Squarespace + Zoho Campaigns
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Verify and unsubscribe invalid email addresses in Zoho Campaigns with Clearout
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Clearout, Filter by Zapier, Zoho Campaigns
Clearout + Filter by Zapier + Zoho Campaigns
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Zoho Campaigns pricing: Free for up to 2,000 contacts, 12,000 emails per month, and 5 users
Automate your email marketing tool
Once you’ve picked your app, here are a few ideas for how to automate your email marketing tool. Then take a look at 4 ways to use marketing automation to grow your business.
Conclusion
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