Email marketing not only helps attract and retain customers, but also significantly increases brand awareness and loyalty.
Mass emailing tools help you accomplish these tasks. Without them, it is impossible to integrate a campaign into your marketing strategy, even at its initial stage.
There are standalone and professional solutions for mass mailings.
A well-thought-out email marketing strategy solves such key tasks as:
- increasing sales;
- increasing brand awareness;
- increasing traffic;
- increasing trust in the product;
- automating tasks.
It’s hard to imagine how many marketers would have to work on a single campaign if they had to create and send all the emails manually to each subscriber. They would certainly have no time for anything else, and the effectiveness of such work would hardly be high.
Regular mass mailings are routine and very tedious work. It is worth choosing tools for automating this process right away. Thanks to them, you can increase your audience reach to thousands of subscribers, while significantly reducing the cost per email.
There are different types of mass mailing services, but they are all designed to send emails to lists of recipients at a specified time. With their help, you can send both a single message to thousands of customers and personalized emails to each recipient.
There are two types of mailing solutions:
- Standalone services designed only for sending emails.
- Professional tools that are part of an email service with broader capabilities.
The marketer or business owner decides which option to choose.
Standalone programs for email campaigns
These are programs such as Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. They are suitable for beginners: they have a simple and intuitive interface, are easy to launch and configure.
Standalone programs are not always effective and reliable. They lack tools for checking email, without which there is a high risk of becoming a spammer, there is no way to segment subscribers and personalize emails, and there are no mailing statistics.
In addition, most of the settings and contact database preparation are done manually, which takes a lot of time.
Professional tools for email marketing
To avoid the above problems, it is worth using professional tools for mailings. Email services open up many more opportunities for the user.
Thanks to professional tools, you can avoid ending up in spam, receive statistics to improve the effectiveness of mailings, and automate many processes.
Comparing basic parameters such as the following will help you find the right service:
- price,
- reputation,
- mailing list management,
- email address validator,
- availability of templates,
- process automation,
- customer base segmentation,
- A/B testing.
We will talk more about which free mailing services can provide all of this later.
More and more services and programs are appearing that make life easier for marketers. At the same time, they usually request bank card details so that the user can choose the best paid plan. However, the selected paid service may not be suitable for the business or may not perform the promised functions.
Therefore, it is logical to try the free option first. And if we are talking about small volumes of work — for example, lists of up to 100 addresses — then free services can handle them perfectly well. There is no need to switch to a paid plan.
There are quite a few nuances that distinguish email marketing tools, so it is worth clearly defining your marketing goals and plans in order to choose the best option. For example, consider the limits on the number of addresses, daily emails sent, and personalization features.
The optimal option should be selected based on the size of your contact database and the approximate number of emails sent daily.
The main advantage of free services is obvious from their name — the ability to start sending emails without any financial investment. The main disadvantage is the limitations on the number of emails sent or addresses.
GBlast: unlimited recipients and emails
With this Chrome extension from Snov.io, you can easily turn Gmail into a powerful tool for mass mailings. The extension not only allows you to add an unlimited number of recipients, but also to create personalized emails using variables.
GBlast is easy to use because it integrates seamlessly with your Gmail account. You need to allow the GBlast extension to connect to your Google account.
Users have complete control over their mailings and can edit them even after they have been sent.
Free services for email campaigns
Changing campaign settings
- Setting the interval between sending messages.
- Selecting the number of messages sent daily.
- Campaign statistics for the past day
Another plus is that it’s easy to view the status of the campaign and make changes directly in Gmail.
It is worth remembering that Gmail itself limits the number of emails sent per day. These limits are individual for each account and depend on the sender’s reputation.
And while there is no option to launch follow-ups — chains of emails that gradually lead leads to target actions, such as a purchase, subscription, or collaboration.
Mail365: limited to 2,000 subscribers, but no limits on the number of emails
When using the free plan, this service has its own nuances. For example, you can only send emails to contacts who have subscribed via a special form on the service.
This is a special case of double subscription authentication, where recipients must confirm their willingness to receive emails each time. According to the developers, these restrictions are in place to prevent users from spamming and to ensure that they adhere to the established mailing conditions.
This solution may be suitable for companies without their own subscriber base that are just starting to build one. More specifically, the application is geared toward online commerce.
Contacts can be added manually or via a CSV file. This is a convenient solution for salespeople who already have customer databases and established communication channels.
