Collecting subscribers and running email marketing campaigns is a great way to build a strong relationship with the blog audience and monetize it. The question of which email marketing service to use is very common among the new bloggers, and those who are planning to switch from an existing tool to the more optimized one.
Read on if you’re among those wondering which service will suit all your diverse blog marketing needs. I have tried to list the most popular services and outline what they offer, how much they cost, and how to choose the one that’s right for you.
What to Should a Good Email Marketing Service Be Like?
When you’re choosing among many options, remember a few things: a good tool for email marketing should have a user-friendly interface, easy to navigate. It should allow you to create engaging email newsletters and have enough templates and customizable elements. The majority of the services have a drag-and-drop interface, which I think is the most convenient option.
The service should have marketing automation features, and allow you to create and send bulk emails to the audience. Contact list management is also important, a good tool will allow you to segment subscribers into groups, tag them, and manage them separately.
Aside from that, a good email marketing service must have a high deliverability and make sure that your letters don’t end up in a spam folder.
Mailerlite
This service is a great budget-friendly solution, perfect even for a tight budget. It has the best functionality for the free plan. The platform is user-friendly and provides a drag-and-drop email building tool, so you can easily create landing pages, emails for newsletters, and popup forms. It’s easy to use and good for beginners with little to no email marketing experience.
Mailerlite has a lot of free templates you can use to save time, so no coding skills are needed. Plus, it has a double-opt-in option, so if you wish, your contacts will receive an extra email to confirm their subscription. This option is great for minimizing the spam score and securing subscriber consent.
Free plan: forever free, up to 1000 subscribers, 12,000 emails/month.
Pricing: paid plans start at $10, the price increases as the number of contacts increases.
ConvertKit
This email marketing solution has the best landing pages. You can create them easily in a builder, and run a/b testing, use smart workflows, and even set up autoresponders. What I found most interesting about it, is the option to sell your own products via their platform.
It’s more of a professional solution for seasoned bloggers, who wish to use all the advanced features. In ConvertKit, you can easily sort and segment your list of subscribers into the interested and those who have already made a purchase. A good personalization of emails will make your work with the subscriber base most effective.
Free plan: totally free for up to 1,000 subscribers. Plus, they have a 14-day free trial for the paid plans.
Pricing: starts at $29/month.
ActiveCampaign
Another powerful email marketing tool that is widely chosen by travel bloggers. It is more expensive compared to the alternatives, but it’s worth every penny. It’s recommended for the more complex businesses and audiences. With its help, you can effectively manage multiple sales funnels and deliver only the relevant content to the appropriate audience segment.
It has almost no limitations to what you can do – use a drag-and-drop interface, run split tests, personalize all the fields, set up email funnels and autoresponders, work together with your team on the same project, and even check the editing history, to control all the changes and revisions.
It is most feature-rich and powerful.
Free plan: 14-day free trial.
Pricing: starts at $7.50 for the 500 subscribers in Lite plan.
Mailchimp
MailChimp is another favorite email newsletter service platform chosen by thousands of businesses of different sizes, from bloggers to retailers. But MailChimp is more than just an email newsletter service. MailChimp is a lead-generating tool to turn your site visitors to subscribers and eventually leads.
It is very easy to integrate your website with Mailchimp, and you can use hundreds of applications you already use for your blog. The dashboard displays real-time statistics and you can track your email ROI with detailed earnings reports.
Like in other services, you can send targeted emails to different subscriber list segments. MailChimp also includes autoresponders to generate automatic emails dynamically based on user behavior.
If you wish to save time, use one of the pre-designed templates to create an email newsletter.
Unfortunately, many bloggers find it difficult to navigate. Truth be told, the interface is not very intuitive.
Free plan: up to 2000 contacts.
Pricing: paid plans start at $11.08/month.
GetResponse
GetResponse is a popular email marketing service that is very popular among travel bloggers and is easy to use. Its user interface is functional and sleek, making the email marketing creation process easy for inexperienced newbies.
The drag-and-drop email designer makes it easy to create email campaigns. Moreover, in GetResponse, you can segment your contacts to send emails to the select subscribers at the right time. This increases the chances that these people will become paying customers. Other great features of GetResponse include using contact behavior in marketing automation, the ability to run a/b tests, integration with Salesforce, and Optimonster. Plus, you can even use it for hosting webinars.
Free plan: free trial for 30 days.
Pricing: starting at $15/month for 1000 subscribers.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a universal email marketing tool that combines features for all your email marketing requirements.
It is cheaper compared to Mailchimp and surprisingly has more features in it.
You can use it for email marketing automation, transactional emails, sending SMS, and even social media marketing.
The platform has everything you’d expect to find here: you can build an email blast and send it to the subscribers. There is an easy-to-use email generator and a convenient visual interface which makes email newsletter creation a lot easier.
Free plan: up to 300 emails per day.
Pricing: starts at $25 per month.
