7 Best Free Email Marketing Services to Grow Your Email List

If you're building an email list, you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars a month to get started. Tons of free email marketing services let you collect subscribers, create newsletters, build signup forms, automate campaigns, and track campaign performance. The catch is that every free plan comes with different limits. Some restrict the number of subscribers you can store, while others limit monthly sends or lock useful automation features behind a paid plan.

That's why choosing the first free email marketing service you find isn't always a good idea. We compared the leading free email marketing services to see what you actually get without paying, including subscriber limits, email sending limits, automation, signup forms, templates, analytics, and the features you'll need as your list grows.

Today, I'll show you the best free email marketing services for different types of users, from beginners and bloggers to creators, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. I'll also explain the major limitations of each free plan so you can choose a service that won't leave you looking for a new platform as your email list grows.

What Makes the Best Free Email Marketing Service?

A free email marketing service should give you enough tools to run real campaigns, not just enough features to send a few test emails. But “free” doesn’t automatically mean “good.” Some platforms offer generous subscriber limits but restrict automation. Others let you store thousands of contacts but limit the number of emails you can send. Some include useful features such as signup forms, landing pages, segmentation, and automation, while others reserve them for paying customers.

To find the best free email marketing services, I looked at the features that matter most to small businesses, bloggers, creators, and entrepreneurs.

Here are the main factors you need to consider:

• Ease of Use

 A good email marketing service should be user-friendly, with an intuitive interface that makes it easy for anyone to create, send, and manage email campaigns.

• Email sending limit

How many emails can you send each month or day? A platform may allow thousands of subscribers but still limit how many messages you can send.

• Email templates and editor

You shouldn't have to design your emails from scratch. The best email marketing service should give you pre-made templates to start your emails. You shouldn’t need to know HTML just to create a decent newsletter.

• Segmentation and personalisation

It's important to send the right emails to the right people. An email marketing service should let you organise your audience into groups and send more relevant emails based on their interests, actions, or other information.

• Automation

Can you create welcome emails, drip campaigns, follow-ups, or other automated workflows? Automation can save you from sending every email manually.

• Integrations

Can you connect the email marketing service to your current tech stack, such as WordPress, ecommerce platforms, CRMs, website forms, or other tools you already use

• Upgrade costs

Eventually, your email list may outgrow the free plan. You also need to consider how much you’ll have to pay when that happens and whether the upgrade provides enough extra value.

Best Free Email Marketing Service for Growing Email Marketing Programs

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing service that allows you to create, send, and manage email campaigns. It offers a range of features, including email templates, audience segmentation, automation, and analytics to help you effectively reach your subscribers and track the performance of your email marketing efforts. Mailchimp also provides tools for managing subscriber lists and integrating with other marketing platforms. It's a popular choice for businesses looking to engage with their customers through email marketing and has been used for various marketing purposes, from newsletters to promotional emails.

Here are the pros and cons of Mailchimp

Mailchimp Pros:

• Easy to use: 

Mailchimp is simple to use and gives you tips on how to do things well.

• Lots of features: 

It lets you do things like planning the path your customers take, segmenting your email list into groups, testing different emails, and more.

• Can grow with you: 

You can start for free, and as your email marketing grows, you can pay more.

Mailchimp Cons:

• Not the best email designs: 

The email template might not serve your purpose.

• No free automation: 

If you want to send emails automatically for free, you can't do that with the Mailchimp free plan.

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing service because it's easy to use and has a friendly style. It's good if you want to grow your email marketing quickly. It has various features like making web pages, planning your customer's journey, and testing different emails, even in the free version. The tool is easy to understand and gives tips on how to do things right. For example, when you make an email subject, it reminds you about how long the subject should be and uses emojis.

If you decide to do even more with your email marketing and are willing to pay, Mailchimp has three different options. It can handle emails for small and big businesses, so you won't have to switch to another tool as you grow. Mailchimp can also work with other tools like WordPress and Mautic, which can help you add new email subscribers automatically from forms or spreadsheets.

Best Free Email Marketing Service for Segmentation

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing service designed to help businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. It offers a suite of marketing, sales, and customer service tools, all integrated into a single platform. HubSpot is known for its user-friendly interface and focus on inbound marketing strategies, which involve creating valuable content to attract and engage potential customers.

HubSpot is good for a few reasons:

Free Plan: They offer a nice free plan.

Segmentation: It's great for organising contacts with HubSpot's CRM features.

However, there are some downsides:

Email Templates: The email templates are not that great.

Costly Upgrades: If you want more features, it can get expensive. Plus, it might be overwhelming to use everything.

HubSpot has all the tools you need in one place. You can use their email marketing for free, sending up to 2,000 emails a month and organising over 100 contact lists. When your business grows, you can add more HubSpot tools for managing customer relationships, marketing, customer service, and sales. The email tool makes it easy to start creating emails right after you sign up. If you're new to HubSpot or email marketing, a user guide explains how to make effective email campaigns.

You can create different contact lists, including 100 static lists and 5 "active" lists that help you quickly group contacts, like people who never receive your emails or those who open them but don't click within your email content.

Best Free Email Marketing Software for Advanced Email Marketers

3. MailerLite

MailerLite is another email marketing service and automation platform that provides tools for businesses and individuals to create, send, and manage email campaigns. It is designed to help users build and grow their email marketing lists, engage with their subscribers, and automate various marketing efforts.

MailerLite Pros

• Quick and easy email creation with pre-made content blocks.
• You can group your email recipients differently and set up automatic actions.
• It's affordable if you have multiple users in your team to manage your email list.

MailerLite Cons

• It doesn't have ready-made email designs.
• But you can still make good-looking emails using the content blocks.
• You can do more than just send plain text and pictures. Add a countdown timer, product info, videos, and other cool stuff to your emails.

In addition to sending emails, MailerLite also lets you set up automatic actions and organise your email list in different groups. It's easy to use and gives you info about how your emails are doing.

Best Free Email Marketing Tool for eCommerce Businesses

4. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing service and automation platform for ecommerce specialising in email and omnichannel marketing for online retailers and e-commerce businesses. Omnisend helps you create and automate your marketing campaigns, primarily focusing on email marketing, SMS marketing, and other channels like push notifications and social media advertising.

Omnisend is a helpful tool for sending emails and messages to online shoppers. Here are its good and not-so-good points:

Pros of Omnisend

• It's made especially for online stores.
• It has features for creating SMS and push notification campaigns.

Cons of Omnisend

• It limits the number of people you can send messages to and how many messages you can send.
• After the free plan, it can get expensive.

Omnisend is one of the best free email marketing services for online stores. The free plan has some limits on how many people you can send messages to and how often, but it gives you access to almost all the features that are great for online stores. When you connect your online store to Omnisend, you have many options for email marketing. You can group your customers based on how they shop and what they buy. For example, you can find people who are likely to buy a lot, people who have looked at a specific product, and more.

If you want to set up automated messages (like welcoming new customers or reminding them about items in their cart), Omnisend has ready-made options for you to choose from. When creating emails, you can use the easy drag-and-drop editor. You can start with templates made for online stores or make your own. You can add blocks for showing your products, offering discounts, suggesting products, and more. Omnisend also lets you send SMS and push notifications, and you can test which messages work best.

Best Email Marketing Tool for Free Email Automation

5. Brevo

Brevo (formerly known as Sendinblue) is an all-in-one marketing platform offering various tools and services for businesses and organisations to manage their marketing and communication efforts. It is known for its email marketing service and automation capabilities, but it also provides features for SMS marketing, transactional email, and more. Brevo aims to help businesses, from small startups to larger enterprises, efficiently create and manage their marketing campaigns.

Advantages of using Brevo

• It comes with ready-made email automation that focuses on specific goals.
• The free plan allows you to use automation quite a lot.
• You can send transactional emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages.

Disadvantage of Brevo

• There is a strict limit to sending only 300 emails daily.

When you use an email marketing service often, you'll want to use automation to make things easier. Brevo is one of the few email marketing services that provide some free automation features. They have ready-made automation setups for different purposes, like engaging people, getting more website visitors, making more money, or building connections. Even though their automation is quite advanced, it's simple to get started. You can set up your account quickly and create emails in just a few clicks. You can use their ready-to-use email templates and a drag-and-drop editor to design your emails. After that, you can send them as newsletters or use Brevo's automation to send them at specific times.

The only limitation is that you can't send as many emails at one time as some other free email marketing services. However, you can manage more contacts and organise them into different groups. If you need to send more emails than the daily limit, you can also buy prepaid credits from Brevo.

Best Free Email Marketing Software with An Affordable Upgrade

6. Zoho Campaign

Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing service and automation platform offered by Zoho Corporation, which is known for providing a wide range of cloud-based software and services for businesses. Zoho Campaigns is designed to help you create, send, and track email marketing campaigns and automate various marketing processes.

Pros of Zoho Campaigns

• You can have a lot of contacts, users, and messages.
• When you need more, it's not too expensive to upgrade.
• You can send text messages and use social media for your campaigns.

Cons of Zoho Campaigns

• There are strict limits on what you can do for free, like using certain templates, automation, and sorting your audience.

Zoho Campaigns' free plan is pretty good. You can start with it and make it bigger later. You can have up to 2,000 contacts, send 6,000 messages monthly, and have 5 users. You can also organise your audience well and use social media and text messages in your campaigns. Zoho campaign editor is easy to use, and you can personalise your content. You can also make automatic responses or create full automation plans. They give you some templates to make it faster. There are templates for welcoming new subscribers, helping them get started, re-engaging them, keeping existing customers, doing e-commerce, and making special plans based on conditions.

You can upgrade to a paid plan when you're ready for more features, like automation, organising your audience, or sending more messages than the free plan allows. It starts at just $3 per month.

Best Free AI Email Marketing Software

7. Benchmark

Benchmark Email is an email marketing service offering various services and tools to help businesses create and send compelling email campaigns, engage subscribers, nurture leads, and track results.

Benchmark Pros

• They have AI features that make your email marketing easier and more efficient.
• They offer lots of ready-made templates for free.
• They have automation sequences that help you achieve your goals.

Benchmark Cons

• The free plan only lets you have up to 500 subscribers.
• You need to upgrade to the more expensive Enterprise plan to access some important features.

Benchmark is a great option because it lets you use fancy AI features for free. With their free plan, you get 25 credits to use the "Smart Content" feature, which uses AI to write your email content. To use it, go to the email editor, click on Smart Content, enter some basic details for your email, and it will generate the content for you.

The free plan also gives you access to Smart Sending, which uses AI to make your emails more engaging and improve your chances of delivering them to your audience. This feature is automatically turned on for every account, so you don't have to do anything to use it. Apart from the AI stuff, Benchmark is a good all-around app. The free plan includes lots of nice email templates, easy-to-use automation, and basic segmentation, and you can choose to edit your emails using drag-and-drop, code, or plain text.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need a large budget to start building an email list. The best free email marketing services can give you the basic tools to collect subscribers, send newsletters, automate follow-ups, and measure campaign performance without adding another monthly bill. However, free doesn’t mean unlimited. Before choosing any email marketing service, check the subscriber and sending limits, automation features, available integrations, branding restrictions, and what happens when your list grows beyond the free plan.

For a beginner, ease of use may matter more than having dozens of advanced features. A growing business may care more about automation, segmentation, and integrations. If you’re building an email list for a blog or affiliate business, your priorities may be different again. That’s why I wouldn’t choose a platform simply because it has the largest free plan. Choose the one that gives you the features you need today while leaving you a sensible upgrade path for tomorrow.

The good news is that you don’t have to get everything perfect from day one. Start with a free email marketing service, build your list, learn what your subscribers respond to, and upgrade when your needs justify the cost. Your email list is an asset you can build over time. The sooner you start collecting subscribers and communicating with them consistently, the sooner you can turn that list into a valuable marketing channel.

Email Marketing Services FAQ

Do you have some questions about choosing the right email marketing service? Here are some common questions people have about how to pick the right email marketing and automation service.