Another Free Alternative to Mailchimp
As a follow-up to my post yesterday where I listed two reasons why Mailchimp deletes your account without warning, I thought I would mention one more free alternative to Mailchimp that I've used for a couple of projects in the past.
I like services and solutions where you get to own your data. This alternative to Mailchimp natively holds your data on your own website, so that is one of the upsides I really like about it.
As a quick disclaimer, I still think you should pay for your email marketing service from the beginning. This creates a little bit of pressure for you to follow through. There are also some logistical problems every time you need to migrate your email list.
For example, if you start for free with one company like Mailchimp and then you want to move to another one because of better features, you'll find that transferring your list successfully doesn't always work.
It's cool when you see a feature in a service you don't have and then you want to move over to it. But when it comes to email lists, you have to consider a lot of factors that can affect you. Email service providers look at opt-in method, frequency of contact, spam reports, and how you built your list. And that's not even going into whether the new service even allows you to import an existing list.
If you want to follow that advice, my go-to email marketing service is Aweber, you can get started for free here using my link. I've been with them for years and never had a problem.
But if you're still looking for free, this alternative to Mailchimp is free for up to 1000 subscribers, and it is highly dependent on your web host.
They work great with most hosts, AND they specifically have GreenGeeks as one of their recommended hosts, so that's a good thing. It is free, for the sites I've used it on, it works great to send out newsletters and updates to your subscribers and you can manage it all within your WordPress dashboard.
The alternative is an email marketing plugin for WordPress
This free alternative to Mailchimp is a plugin, called MailPoet. You install it like a normal plugin, configure the basic options, and voila, you now have an email marketing system within your blog or website. Using it is very easy and intuitive.
The free version allows you to have up to 1000 subscribers, and you get the premium features. After that, the pricing is comparable to other services. They have templates and customization options for your emails and newsletters so everything matches whatever branding you want, and they offer statistics such as open rates, click-through rates, and all that good stuff.
MailPoet form editor video
I'm not going to go into details on how to use it or have a full tutorial about it on this blog post, but here's a very helpful video by the Mailpoet team showing you how easy it is to use it.
