As a blogger, you must have heard of the importance of collecting emails. Indeed, there’s a saying that the money is on the mailing list. In this article, we’ll go over some of the best email marketing services out there, and at the end of the post, you’ll know which email marketing service to go with.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the act of marketing your content or brand via email. In order to get people on your mailing list, you need to give them a reason to sign up.
This could be in the form of providing a freebie in exchange for instance.
Why should you collect emails as a blogger?
You should collect email addresses as a blogger because it allows you to reach out to people who visited your blog before and remind them of reasons to visit your site again. You can also include affiliate links in the email you send out. If only a small fraction of them click on it you may still make quite a bit of money.
Similarly, you can reach out to people directly through their email when you have a product to sell. For instance, say you created a course, you can market your course directly to your audience via their email addresses which is a lot more personal than announcing your product on social media. Yes, in turn, you’ll get more sales.
Some criteria we’ll be assessing
To determine the best email marketing service for you, we’ll be assessing the following criteria.
- Price
- Presence of a free plan
- Max sign up before having to pay a fee
- Free trial length
- Customer support
- Features
What are the best email marketing platforms for bloggers?
1. Mailerlite
Price: $15/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Free plan: Free until 1000+ contacts
Customer support: 24/7 with a score of 95%
- The only free sign up on the list that you can use to build an entire email automation sequences
- Has the easiest and most intuitive interface so you won’t need to spend a lot of time learning how to use it
- Low maintenance and great for beginners
2. Convertkit
Price: $49/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Free plan: Free until 1000+ contacts
Customer support: 8 am — 8 pm EST with a score of 85%
3. Mailchimp
Price: $31/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Free plan: Free until 2000+ contacts
Customer support: 24 hour Monday — Friday with a score of 70%
- Lots of YouTube tutorials on Mailchimp because it may quite likely be the most popular email marketing service out there
4. GetResponse
Price: $25/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Free plan: No free plan. 30 Days free trial.
Customer support: 24/7 with a score of 99%
- Has a pretty good email automation feature although not as extensive as ActiveCampaign
- Webinar option
- Integration with Facebook ads
- eCommerce integration
- Has a payment gateway
- Great customer support
5. SendInBlue
Price: $25/m for the lowest tier plan and 10,000 emails limit.
Free plan: Free for unlimited contacts. Free to send out 300 emails per day.
Customer support: Standard with a score of 80%
- Charged based on how many emails have been sent out rather than the number of people on your mailing list
6. AWeber
Price: $29/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Free plan: Free until 500+ contacts
Customer support: 24/7 with a score of 80%
7. ActiveCampaign
Price: $55/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Free plan: No free plan. 14 days of free trial.
Customer support: 8 AM — 11 PM CST with a score of 95%
- Best email marketing service out there but also the most expensive. If you just need to send basic emails, you don’t need ActiveCampaign for that.
- Has a feature that allows you to send automatic text messages
- Highly in-depth reporting
8. Constant Contact
Price: $45/m for the lowest tier plan and 2500 contacts
Freedom plan: No free plan. 60 days of free trial for those in USA and Canada. 30 days free trial for the rest of the world.
Customer support: 8 AM — 8 PM EST with a score of 70%
Which email marketing platform should you choose?
- Mailerlite (simple, basic, high-quality, cheapest)
If you just want to send simple emails and maybe dabble in some email automation (for instance, someone signs up for a freebie and the platform automatically sends them the freebie after they sign up) then go with Mailerlite
Mailer lite is the easiest to use out of everything else on the list, the free version already has everything you need. There’s no need to get a paid version unless you have more than 1000 contacts.
For other email marketing platforms, you may need to pay to get functions that you may need such as email automation.
On top of everything, Mailerlite has the cheapest option after you pass the 1000 contacts.
- ActiveCampaign (Best overall, the most expensive)
If you want to get the tool that has the most comprehensive list of marketing options and if you have a lot of budgets to blow, the best software for email marketing would be ActiveCampaign.
- GetResponse (Lots more features than Mailerlite but not the most expensive)
One tier down would be GetResponse. For those who are looking for a bit more features other than the most basic and the cheapest while not blowing your budget, you should get GetResponse. It’s not completely free to start but if you already have a list of contacts, you can definitely switch to GetResponse for a try. They are available to be reached within a few tabs.
How to get people on your list?
This is a question that a lot of mailing service providers have in the beginning after they set up their email marketing service and see no subscribers.
In order to get people on your mailing list, you can do the following things:
- Pop up opt-in upon exiting the site
- Pop up opt-in when they scroll to the middle of the page
- Pop up freebie (could be a free ebook, free PDF, etc) when they land on the site
- Standard opt-in form at the footer
- Standard opt-in form on the sidebar
Final thought
So here we are at the end of the list. It’s actually not too difficult to set up an automatic email marketing campaign and once you have chosen which mailing service provider to go with, everything will go by quickly. I know it can seem very daunting when you don’t know where to begin. Just take it one step at a time.
Good luck!
