Newsletters are a great way to reach your customers and build an audience of potential clients. According to statistics released by Mailchimp, the average open rate for newsletters is 21.33%, or roughly one in five people. Just starting out? Try some of these free newsletter options to get your feet in the water and start building your first email.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is primarily email-based software that offers a lot of different customization options for automation and text marketing. With a free account, you can add an unlimited number of contacts to your audience and send 300 emails per day. Their pricing plans – the Lite, Premium and Enterprise – adjust and scale depending on how many emails you need to send per day. As an example, their Lite plan starts at 10,000 emails and moves up to 100,000 emails. This may be a good option for gradually increasing your emails over time or hitting an exact price point for the number of emails you need to send per day.
Sender
Sender boasts a low-cost model to make email marketing more accessible. All the company’s features are available in the free plan, including increased deliverability against spam filters, instant notifications and analytics. You can have 2,500 subscribers and send up to 15,000 emails per month. The monthly subscription scales up depending on the size of the audience, but there are also prepaid credits available if you only intend on sending a few emails.
HubSpot
The marketing platform HubSpot has a wide variety of services for online marketing, sales, customer service and content management. They offer free versions of all their products, including email creation. Their free account allows you to send up to 2000 emails a month and manage five active and 25 inactive lists. Active lists update and remove members if they no longer fit the original placement criteria. Inactive lists are static, and remain the same as when you originally added them.
HubSpot offers different plans depending on company size: a Starter plan, a Professional plan and an Enterprise plan. Each plan has a set price, though there is a discount if you pay a year’s worth of fees up front. The number of emails available per month is lower than some options, but the flexibility of lists may be appealing to you.
Mailjet
This email company’s program is a good fit for developers. It’s built from the ground up to be customizable. Still, they have an email editor that’s accessible for those new to creating newsletters. Their ‘pay as you grow’ model allows you to add an unlimited number of contacts and increase your plan as you need to send more emails. With the free plan, you can send 6000 emails per month. That can increase to 900,000 – or over, with the Enterprise plan. Their Basic, Premium and Enterprise plans also offer individual perks such as customer support or automation. In terms of potential customization, Mailjet is one of the top choices.
ConverKit
This platform is geared towards online creators like influencers, bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters. If content creation is part of your business, or if you publish something as a side hustle, this could be useful. On their free plan, you can manage 1,000 subscribers and have access to features like landing pages and personalized content — components usually associated with paid plans on other services.
You can pay to increase the number of subscribers or create more automation and referral systems.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most well-known names in the marketing industry, and they offer a good option for creating newsletters. You can send an unlimited number of emails to an audience of 2,000 contacts for free. The higher-priced plans scale depending on the number of people – 50,000, 100,000 and over 200,000. You can mix and match the features of their Essential, Standard and Premium plans to your specific requirements, so there’s some room to play around. Mailchimp also has a transactional email model where you estimate the number of emails sent and receive a credit. If you want a platform many people will know, this could be a good option. If you ever have a question about a function on Mailchimp, you’ll most likely be able to find a guide for it.
Zoho
Zoho is primarily a customer management system that offers a variety of services – app development, project management, customer service, accounting, and email marketing. They have a “Forever Free Plan” that allows you to send 12,000 emails to an audience of 2,000. They have unique pricing options. Their email-based plan starts at $2/month for 500 emails and scales up depending on the number of emails sent. The subscriber-based plan starts at $4/month for 500 subscribers and grows as the audience increases. You can also do pay-as-you-go credits if you only need to send a few emails. Overall, their prices are relatively low compared to some of the other free newsletter services.
Benchmark
At 250 emails a month, Benchmark’s free plan isn’t as high on the list as some of the other options. The platform does stand out because of its simple, drag-and-drop style. It creates simplified newsletters quickly without too many frills or hurdles. This could be a good option for a smaller business using an email builder for the first time.
Other options
While we’ve discussed several options here, there are plenty of excellent newsletter tools that offer a trial instead of a simplified free plan. One example is Constant Contact, which gives you 60 days to try out their platform for free.
Ultimately, the most important feature of any newsletter service is how well it fits your business and workflow. That’s hard to quantify in numbers and features. It may take some time to find your ideal platform. Instead of shelling out money for a program you’ll end up hating, try some of these free newsletter options to see what works best for you.
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