Best Free Email Marketing Tool
Introduction
I’m doing research on what email marketing tools have a decent free tier, that also have good deliverability (gets to the inbox instead of spam).
I’m all about spending $0 and free tools until you can justify spending $x.xx amount of dollars and get an immediate return.
People setting up their first venture too often get trapped / marketed into paying for monthly tools that can quite easily be replaced with manual tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Powerpoint, etc.
The problem with that is down the line, maybe you’re still not making money, or have a financial crisis (almost every business does), or you’re in the red… and you look at your bills and see all these monthly charges for stuff you don’t really need.
At one point I was paying probably $300 in monthly subscription fees, while going through a financial crisis, and I hated paying for those tools. I needed them to run my business, but if I had taken the time to just create free tools with Excel, or just done 5 min extra work a week, I could erase a bunch of $20 – $50 / mo subscriptions. AND have control over my data! (another topic…)
Anyways, in my quest for free email tools, here’s what I’ve found.
No Totally Free Options
There are a bunch of email tools with free tiers (pretty much each one has one), ranging from 500 – 2,500 subscribers for free you can email. (With a limit of 300 – unlimited emails per month).
The kicker is… you want to set yourself up for long-term success. Meaning… if you choose an email tool that doesn’t have good deliverability (meaning your email actually gets to their inbox, and not re-routed to a Promotions, or even worse, Spam folder) then nobody is going to see your emails anyway.
I’m big on doing stuff right the first time… so I’ll heavily be looking at deliverability as the most important feature in a email tool.
Best Free Email Marketing Tools
After a ton of reading forums, I came down to two final options: Beehiiv and ConvertKit.
Beehiiv Pros / Features
- Great community
- Best option for a newsletter
- Founded by three former Morning Brew staffers – so they know newsletters very well
- Free for up to 2,500 subscribers
- API Access (ie. Zapier)
- Good for building a membership model business where you give up 0% of the membership revenue
- Built-in referral program for your membership / newsletter (your readers can share your newsletter with friends, in exchange for rewards you set)
- Can run polls and surveys with your newsletter
- As long as you have less than 100,000 subscribers, you pay the same annual flat rate!
- WAY cheaper than ConvertKit. For 100,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $1,008 / yr with Beehiiv, but with ConvertKit, 100,000 subscribers will cost you about $7,000-$9,000 per year, depending on what plan you choose.
Beehiiv Cons
- More of a newsletter platform / website (like Substack) vs an ESP (Email Service Provider)
- Platform Risk: Beehiiv (like Substack) depend on Sendgrid for sending the actual emails. This is risky, because like with Reddit or Amazon, if they change their rules, you are forced to change with them. This is a huge no for me… it’s caused many small-business Amazon stores to shut down, and most recently (2023) the Apollo-Reddit fiasco due to Reddit changing it’s rules. It’s just never a good idea to build your business on someone else’s platform (like Amazon or Reddit)
- You can’t display your brand logo in it, since the emails are not actually being sent from a inbox. (Remember, Beehiiv is more of a newsletter platform / website than an Email Service Provider)
- Much less features and customizations than ConvertKit. It’s more just for sending a simple newsletter. ConvertKit is much more about controlling the customer journey and creating custom funnels
ConvertKit Pros / Features
- Created with independent online businesses in mind
- Great deliverability. Neville Medhora uses ConvertKit. And I read his weekly email. Both because it’s interesting, useful, and entertaining… but because it also gets to my Gmail Inbox! I was kind of surprised it so consistently did. And decided to see what tool he used for email. If it’s good enough for Neville (who runs a great course on email marketing and copywriting) then it’s good enough for me.
- Easiest to use of all the tools, per some reviews
- Best for selling products and eCommerce, like a subscription, eBooks, workshops, classes, etc.)
- Great user-friendly landing pages – create landing pages to sell things easily. Big plus!
- Segmenting and Link-Tagging – Segment your audience based on links they click
- Build-in Payment Processor – much better option than Gumroad, which takes 9% + $0.30 per transaction. ConvertKit only takes 3.5% + $0.30
- Referral program built into their tool – so you can set up your own referral program without paying for 3rd party tools
- Access to very advanced automations for custom email sequences and how you guide your customers to buying your product
- Content (not design) focused
- Tons of great email templates
ConvertKit Cons
- Reporting is nowhere nearly as good as with Mailchimp
- SEO isn’t as good for your newsletter archive. Beehiiv (or Substack) is much better
- Harder to get into their ad-network, vs Beehiiv
Note: Both Beehiiv and ConvertKit have a network to help you find sponsors for your newsletter. To be accepted, you need 1,000 subscribers for Beehiiv, and 10,000 subscribers for ConvertKit.
Conclusion
I’m heavily leaning towards ConvertKit, for the following reason:
Beehiiv depends on Sendgrid, which creates a huge risk in the future, since you are building your business on someone elses platform.
While it’s easier in the beginning, building your business on a platform provides the benefits of earning money faster (ie. selling on Amazon vs. opening your own WordPress eCommerce store and driving traffic there) BUT… if Amazon (or Sendgrid) decide to change the rules, or that you don’t comply with their TOS, etc. – then you are out of luck, and might have to close your business down. Or drastically cut your profit margins to the point it’s not profitable anymore.
I did that once already (opening an Amazon business and losing all my inventory over a false IP claim). It was extremely frustrating having my whole life in the hands of some Amazon rep on the other side of the world, I couldn’t even call, who would just send canned responses, while my business was going under.
Being independent is the way to go, and for that reason, I’m going with ConvertKit.
It’s more expensive, but it also has many more features, and I hear that selling your own products is much more profitable (think 100x) vs. sponsorships from a newsletter.
I can still seek sponsorships for my email list with ConvertKit, it’s not off the table – I realized it’s just more of a extra income stream, and not something you should build your business around.
Resources
Looking for the most cost-effective, user-friendly, bulk/mass email sender with good deliverability and open rates. One-time, 100,000+ emails per month, 3-4k/day.
https://github.com/cemhurturk/the-best-email-marketing-services-and-tools-for-marketers