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The 6 best free email marketing services in 2024





When you don't own the channels where you reach customers, the ground can always shift beneath you. That's where email marketing shines.

The good news: there's an entire ecosystem of free email marketing tools available, and they have all the features you'll need to build out your email marketing (and then some).

I researched and tested more than 60 email marketing apps with free plans to find the best ones for a variety of use cases and business types. Here are the six best free email marketing apps.
The best free email marketing apps

  • MailerLite for advanced email marketers
  • HubSpot for segmentation
  • Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) for all-in-one marketing and sales features
  • Mailchimp for a growing email marketing program
  • Sender for the most generous free plan
  • Loops for email marketing automation
What makes the best free email marketing service?

Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. 

Full-featured email marketing apps and free ones are far from mutually exclusive. There are tons of options that offer flexible subscriber and send thresholds along with the robust features small businesses need—for free. If you're just getting started with free marketing tools or want to try out a few options before committing to a paid plan, you have plenty of choices.

Here's what I looked for when testing free email marketing services:

The number of subscribers and sends included for free. Some free email marketing platforms are generous in this regard, offering thousands of free sends per month, while others include low caps that mean your "free" platform isn't free for very long. I kept this in mind while testing.

Email templates and customization. You shouldn't have to start your email marketing operation from scratch. The best options come with at least a few fully-designed and professional templates to get your free email campaign started. And in cases where there aren't any free templates, the email editor needs to really shine in ease of use.

Audience segmentation. Success with email relies on being able to deliver the right emails to the right people at the right time. For growing businesses, that means you need capable audience segmentation features with any free email campaign software you choose.

Automation. From transactional emails to triggered campaigns and more, a growing business needs to be able to automate email marketing as your efforts scale.

Scalability. Speaking of, just because you're starting by doing your email marketing for free, it doesn't mean you won't grow out of it. The best free email marketing software can grow with your business—from free to paid when necessary, adding more features and higher limits as you go.

Full email marketing features. There are plenty of capable apps designed for one particular type of email (like newsletters, for example, or transactional emails), but for our purposes here, I focused on full-featured apps you can use across your email marketing operation.

After narrowing down the list based on those criteria, I ran each of the remaining contenders through an extensive testing workflow that included:

Creating an account and completing any onboarding offered by the app.

Looking at core features like the drag-and-drop editor, template library, and overall campaign creation flow.

Testing out additional features like automation, customer segmentation, and alternative editors (like HTML or plain text), along with determining any applicable limits for these features on the free plan.

Where available, I tested out niche features for eCommerce, universal branding, broader marketing automation, and AI, among others.

Lastly, I looked into how costs for each app scale as you outgrow the free plan and move to paid.

Along with each step, I considered the ease of use for core and ancillary features—because with all the options available today, "free" shouldn't have to mean hard to use.

With those criteria in mind, here's the best free software for email marketing.
The best free email marketing platforms at a glance


Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite


MailerLite pros:

Pre-built content blocks make building emails super quick

Generous allotments for segmentation and automation

Affordable upgrade for unlimited users

MailerLite cons:

No pre-made email templates on the free plan

MailerLite doesn't offer pre-made templates for its free newsletter service, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than make up for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.

Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There's a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It's a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.

Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows—or you can hit the ground running with one of the 15 new pre-built flows. Create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.

Plus, MailerLite integrates with Zapier—meaning you can automate things like adding new MailerLite subscribers from Google Sheets and sending Mailchimp subscribers to MailerLite. Here are more ideas for how to automate MailerLite, plus some pre-made workflows to get you started.

Best free email marketing software for segmentation
HubSpot


HubSpot pros:

Generous free plan

Great for segmentation with HubSpot CRM features

HubSpot cons:

Sub-par email templates

Expensive upgrade and the full suite can be overwhelming

HubSpot has everything you need under one roof. The email marketing features are well-rounded and offer a lot for free: up to 2,000 emails per month, 10 active lists, and reporting. When you're ready to scale, you can add additional HubSpot tools for CRM, full marketing automation, customer service, sales, and more.

The email tool throws you into the editor as soon as signup is finished, so you can get moving quickly. For those new to HubSpot or email marketing more broadly, the next stop is the user guide, detailing everything you need to know to build beautiful, effective campaigns in HubSpot. With HubSpot's new AI features, things get even easier.

Included in the free plan are 1,000 static lists and 10 "active" lists, which include super quick options to segment, say, hard-bouncers or recipients who open but don't click.

While HubSpot offers a generous free plan, costs can scale quickly as you outgrow it. Pricing for the full Marketing Hub starts out reasonably at $18 per month, but if you need a lot of contacts or features like omnichannel marketing automation, A/B testing, or custom reporting, you'll need to be prepared to pay up.

Plus, HubSpot integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically create and update HubSpot contacts from your contact management tool and copy new leads from your ads into HubSpot. Here are more ideas for how to automate HubSpot, plus some pre-made workflows to inspire you.

Best email marketing tool for all-in-one marketing and sales
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)


Brevo pros:

Pre-built, goal-oriented email automation

Generous automation limits on the free plan

Broad marketing and sales feature set

Brevo cons:

Strict 300 email/day send limit

If you're looking for one tool to handle all your marketing and sales needs, Brevo is a great option. Since rebranding from Sendinblue to Brevo, they've added several new features like a full-featured CRM, centralized solutions for sales meetings, calls, and chat, and streamlined deal tracking.

On top of these, the app still offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.

You can get from account setup to actually editing emails in just a few clicks, and the streamlined campaign creation flow keeps the breadth of available campaign types (Brevo supports email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, and Facebook Ads campaigns) from feeling overwhelming. From there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Then, either send them as email newsletters or use Brevo's automation workflows to send them on a schedule.

You can't send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts—the free plan comes with unlimited contacts—and split them into focused lists. Brevo also lets you buy pre-paid credits to send more than your daily email limit and offers an affordable $12 whitelabeling add-on that's available with any plan.

Expand Brevo's capabilities by integrating it with Zapier to automatically create new Brevo subscribers from new Google Contacts, Mailchimp subscribers, Facebook Lead Ads leads, and more. Discover more popular ways to automate Brevo with Zapier, or take a look at these ideas to get you started.

Best free email marketing service for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp


Mailchimp pros:

User-friendly UI with helpful tips and best practices

Includes customer journey mapping, list segmenting, A/B testing, and more

Scalable pricing

Mailchimp cons:

Relatively limited free plan compared to the other options on this list

One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you're planning to scale it quickly past newsletters. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.

An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.

Once you're ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you'll never have to switch to another app.



If you love Mailchimp but just need a super simple, bare-bones option for email newsletters, the brand also offers TinyLetter.

Best free email marketing software for a generous free plan
Sender


Sender pros:

Super generous subscriber and send limits

Full access to automation and segmentation

Reasonable upgrade costs

Sender cons:

Clunky drag-and-drop editor

If you're looking to get a whole lot of value for free, Sender is your best bet. The ultra-generous free plan includes 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails each month, and full access to more advanced features like automation and audience segmentation. At a time when most email marketing apps are reining in their free plans, Sender's really stands out.

You won't get a lot of fancy email templates here, but the app does offer nearly 40, most of which are of passable quality. The drag-and-drop editor isn't my favorite, but it works. The automation feature doesn't include any pre-built workflows, but it's easy to use and includes 11 standard triggers. You can build audience segments based on all the standard dimensions you expect, along with a number of eCommerce-specific ones.

Speaking of which, if you're looking to use Sender for eCommerce, you'll probably have to upgrade eventually, but the paid plans are super affordable, too—just $47.50 per month gets you 10,000 subscribers, 120,000 email sends, SMS features, whitelabeling, and up to three users.

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