Nowadays digital marketing is one of the most effective ways of promoting a brand or product/service. There are plenty of techniques and tools that can help you with that. Fortunately not every solution is paid so that entrepreneurs and marketers involved in developing small businesses can benefit from using them. We all know how challenging it is to manage a small business and that most activities need to be done low-budget. What’s such organisations need is solutions that can be both time and cost-saving.
The market is filled with various platforms designed especially for boosting marketing. Therefore, for sure you can find a suitable e-mail marketing tool which allows for some free activities. In the following article, you’ll find all the essential information that can help you with getting familiar with e-mail marketing subject and choosing the best free solutions to use for that purpose.
The basic way of communication between a company and a customer
E-mail marketing is actually every message send to clients or potential customers. While running a business customer relations are essential. What’s crucial is that sending newsletters should be carefully planned, and it’s supposed to be a part of a holistic marketing strategy. Don’t act ad hoc! You need to think about what information your customers need to get and moreover, what more do you want to pass on – is there any special offer these days, does your company prepared a gift for a customer and so on.
All your marketing activities should be integrated. Among other communication channels could be social media, customer service on the web (live chat or chatbots, phone) or web push notifications. Nevertheless, e-mail is one of the most known and used channels. Thus, you’re not the only one that uses it for marketing purposes. For sure you’ve noticed on your own how quickly your inbox fills with commercial messages. Don’t give up though – if you’ll prepare an outstanding newsletter you can reach your target group.
The power of personalisation
The more personalised the communication with a customer is – the better. We’ve past the time when exactly the same message was sent to hundreds or even more clients. Nowadays Internet users highly value personalised communicates. And it’s not only a matter of putting receivers name in the first line or title. In the more and more demanding market and the era of customer awareness brands and marketers need to face this challenge and improve their communication.
How to achieve that effect? Thanks to marketing automation marketers are able to target their e-mail campaigns to certain groups of customers. Therefore they can recommend specific products or services to the best audience – potentially interested in those products or services. Make the use of your database and from time to time prepare something extraordinary for your customers. It’s really nice to remember about their birthdays and because of that give them some occasional discount and so on. This shows the human side of a company and builds up a relationship with a customer. Moreover, think about the best timing to reach your audience – is it a business mailing? If yes, you can send it during business hours. If not – focus on the after hours, so that your consumers will have time to read it properly.
Is e-mail marketing resultful?
It takes a lot of effort to prepare an excellent e-mail campaign and achieve success in this area. There are many marketing methods to reach customers. Why choose e-mail marketing? Below you can find some numbers that will prove you it’s worth trying for big companies as well as small business:
- in 2017, global e-mail users amounted to 3,7 billion users, and this figure is expected to grow to 4,3, billion in 2022,
- for every $1 spent on e-mail marketing, you can expect an average return of $32,
- 81% of SMBs still rely on e-mail as their primary customer acquisition channel,
- the average one rate for welcome e-mail is 82%,
- e-mails with personalised subject lines generate 50% higher open rates,
- sending 3 abandones cart e-mails results in 69% more orders that a single e-mail,
- 49% of consumers Sid that they would like to receive promotional e-mails from their favourite brands on a weekly basis.
As you can see e-mail is a solid communication channel used not only for personal and business communication but also to send commercial messages. It can be very effective for e-commerce promotion, for example saving abandon carts or welcoming customers. Personalisation also has been proven as a factor that increases the possibility of opening an e-mail by its receiver.
The best free e-mail marketing tools
While planning an e-mail marketing strategy, you also need to think about technical aspects, such as tools that you’ll use for that purpose. Here’s a list of few solutions that we recommend you to consider once you’ll start planning your e-mail marketing activities.
SendinBlue – it’s a solution that allows you to manage marketing campaigns and transactional e-mails efficiently. It provides beautiful, responsive design templates that you can use, as well as several features for transactional and autoresponder e-mails. It has a lot of useful functionalities like contact management, e-mail sending, campaign creation, as well as campaign tracking. You don’t need to have any design skills because it has a template catalogue with drag and drop creator that enables you to design great, mobile-friendly newsletters.
HubSpot CRM – it’s an entirely free solution, so the main advantage is that you get all the features without any limitations and you don’t have to pay at all. Moreover, it even stores up to 1 million contacts and an unlimited number of users. HubSpot is one of the bigger players on the market when it comes to such solutions so you can be sure of its reliability. Thanks to it you can schedule e-mails delivery to your audience for a personalised sequence. What’s more? You can save templates and analyse their performance to optimise your visuals and choose ones that work best for your campaigns.
MailerLite – a platform devoted to e-mail marketing. It has an intuitive drag and drop e-mail builder and a system for sending campaigns. In its free plan, you can send up to 12000 e-mails per month and have a subscribers database for 1000 people. You’ll get all the features without paying, but MailerLite won’t provide premium support and Live Chat Support 24/7. If you don’t need more significant campaigns and subscribers database – this solution is definitely for you, as it offers also marketing automation functions and optimisation, tracking, as well as integrations with several other tools.
Email Elastic – it’s a tool that is awesome for bulk e-mail marketing for any size of the business. If you have coding skills and you wish to have more freedom while customising e-mails and automating your campaigns you might appreciate Elastic Email’s HTTP API and SMTP API services. Moreover, it also provides pre-designed templates that you can freely use and customise, Email Designer, e-mail personalisation options, and autoresponder among other options. The Basic, and therefore free, plan offers its users sending 150 000 e-mails monthly. This amount can be divided for up to 5000 e-mails daily.
Reachmail – an online platform for creating, scheduling, and sending mass e-mail campaigns. It provides hundreds of pre-designed templates to choose from and excellent tools such as transactional emails, social media sharing, autoresponders, message testing, surveys, and API that you can use with no fee. Amongst other options, you can find include A/B testing, SMTP, and spam checker tool. What about the limits? Via free plan at Reachmail, you can have 5000 subscribers and send 15 000 e-mails monthly.
Wix ShoutOut – it’s an e-mail marketing tool designed for small businesses. It doesn’t require designing skills; you can create newsletters in builder with the usage of great templates. You can customise chosen templates by changing text fonts, colours, and backgrounds, and more. Wix ShoutOut will provide you with mobile-friendly and responsive design, so you can be sure that it’s going to look perfect on every device that your target group members use. If you wish to have a look on paid features you can check it out by signing up for a free trial. There are many options that can help you with your marketing activities like social media tools, contact integration, and stats tracker. Are there any limits in the free version? It includes a course of 3 ShoutOuts every month where you can send up to 5000 e-mails.
Zoho Campaigns – it’s a solution that provides e-mail marketing solutions. Thanks to it you can build, send, and track e-mail campaigns. It’s perfect for small and medium-sized businesses. Zoho Campaigns offers free software for 12000 e-mails per month for up to 2 000 subscribers. It has various options for marketing automation so you can send highly personalised campaigns. It’s connected with other applications gathered in the Zoho ecosystem. So if you also need additional tools and apps, like a CRM system, it’s smart to integrate them with e-mail marketing module.
The presented list contains only a few solutions, while there are many more on the market. What you need to do is to test them on your organisation and see if that’s what you and your company need. Moreover, e-mail marketing tools differ when it comes to open rates and defining as spam. That’s why it’s worth trying many platforms and finding out which performs best. At the end of the day, a tool is not what’s responsible for a campaign’s success. Many factors play a huge role there, like text, visuals and so on. Take your time to run the best possible campaigns and get more clients. Good luck!
