Which email marketing product have the best free plan?

I'm planning to add an email form to my newly created blog #overcompiled.

So I checked out a couple of options like Mailchimp, Convertkit, Moosend, etc.

They all have compelling free plans.

Which one would you all suggest for this?

Invoking @jamesmkenny because he's building Audience, an app in this niche.

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James Kenny

You summon! I come! I answer! :)

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Ivan Mir

At least a few years ago, the free Moosend plan put me on their "free" server and my first newsletter went to spam on Gmail. But I still used them because of the super affordable pay-as-you-go plans.

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Carl Poppa πŸ›Έ

re: going to spam, i recall @geetfun talking about something like "warming up" your domain so that this doesn't happen. Care to share again, Simon?

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Ivan Mir

@poppacalypse iirc it wasn't the domain, the IP for free plans had a bad reputation

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Carl Poppa πŸ›Έ

@ivmirx ah okay

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Simon Chiu

@poppacalypse

Yup, a variety of causes. IP is a common one for the free plans.

Can also send an email to mail-tester.com (free for up to 4-5 emails per day, I think) and they'll run a bunch of diagnostics on it really quickly for you.

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James Kenny

It depends on what you are after out of an email marketing tool.

Do you want to send a weekly, monthly?

Are you going to use drip marketing?

Is it something more casual that you just want to send an odd update here or there whenever you have a new post?

They all have different niches they serve.

Mailchimp is kind of the all-rounder that does everything but isn't really great at anything. Could be really great for just the monthly, casual, etc. It does have an RSS importer to pull in posts from your feed and send them.

Mailerlite is something you should check out. It has a smaller amount of free subscribers but it has an awesome builder for newsletters that makes it really easy to send them out. It also has drip marketing support in the free plan.

Convertkit is more aimed at freelancers but its free plan is generous in subscribers but limited in features.

If you are looking for something for the casual email every few months to get them updated you could look at Mailerlite, it's a really nice experience and quick and easy to build emails.

One of the things to keep in mind is how complicated they make the process of subscribing users from your blog and then how long it takes you to send the email.

What I have done is sign up for a lot of them and gave them a spin to get an idea of how they are and what I liked about them.

Now for my shameless plug bit :)

I'm building Audience which is an email marketing tool aimed at bloggers and indie hackers but it won't have a free plan.

It uses your existing email provider (Mailgun, AWS SES, Sendgrid) to send the emails.

Now the Self-hosted Options:

But there are also a couple of others to try

sendy.co Not free, one time fee sendportal OSS

Both of those options are self-hosted and use MailGun / SES to send the emails.

Hope that helps in some way!

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Carl Poppa πŸ›Έ

i've learned a lot from this, James. Thanks! 5 stars

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Nikit Singh Author

Woh, thanks for this amazing post. Right now my plan is to send a weekly newsletter with all my published posts in that week. Considering free plans right now as it will take a while to even get 1000 subscribers. Once I'm near that threshold I will start considering other options. I Will be frank with you, your product is somewhat costly for me. But I also know that it is fairly priced considering all the features and time put into it. Again, thanks for your time :D

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James Kenny

@nikitskulhari In that case I would take a good look at mailerlite. it has a really good email builder and is pretty easy and friendly to use for the kind of emails you are looking to send.

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Nikit Singh Author

@jamesmkenny It looks like a perfect option for me. Thanks for recommending.

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