3 small business email marketing platforms for under £30 per month

email marketing

22 Jan

There are so many options available when it comes to email marketing platforms for small businesses. If you want to up your email marketing game, I've picked out three of the front-runners when it comes to functionality, ease of use and price. The pricing presented is based on a list with 1000 contacts.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the market leader in small business email marketing services - hundreds of thousands of SMEs use its services - and it's easy to understand why. It uses a drag and drop builder to create email templates and has useful user guides, a good reporting and analytics function. It tends to be focussed on e-commerce businesses with a decent reporting suite for revenue statistics, so it has a fantastic raft of integration partners.

However, it is not always straightforward for beginners in terms of creating segmentations and groups, so that needs a bit of getting used to. Their technical support can be lacking on the free version.

Cost: Free up to 2000 contacts, for one audience. Starts from £7.38 per month for 2000 contacts with maximum of three audiences

MailerLite

A good alternative to Mailchimp for beginners, MailerLite allows you to do more than Mailchimp for the same price and its pricing structure is straightforward. It has decent segmentation capability, a simple email editor, and is all round good value for money. MailerLite integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Hubspot CRM and lots of other platforms.

It doesn't include any templates with its free plan so you have to design and build these yourself (not necessarily a bad thing if you have more time). Your business also has to be approved to sign up which can take a little while. They also only offer payment in Euros or USD which might be an issue for some.

Cost: Free 9 Euros per month, to send 12,000 emails per month to up to 1,000 subscribers

Campaign Monitor

After using Campaign Monitor for years in various jobs, it has always been one of my favourite email platforms for its great functionality and clear design which is easy for beginners and more experienced marketers. It has great testing, automation and transactional email features and once again, an easy drag and drop email builder.

You can't get technical support on live chat with Campaign Monitor which is a big miss, but because the platform is so straightforward (everything is named in a clear way), it's not as needed as if you were using Mailchimp for example. It is pricier than Mailchimp and MailerLite so if you have a little bit more money to spend each month I would recommend it.

Cost: £29 per month to send up to 12500 emails to a list of 1000 contacts