I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that you have a lovely business idea and are looking for the perfect tool to jumpstart it with a robust email marketing campaign.
That's probably why you clicked on this blog in the first place.
I know, in today’s digital era, your email marketing strategies need to be spot on. You can’t be second guessing anymore. Your emails have to:
- build relationships with leads and customers
- convey the right message to the right person at the right time
- reach recipients when they are more likely to engage with your emails
And that’s why so many marketers are investing in email marketing tools.
But with so many options on the market, how do you know you’re investing in the right one? Been there and back. 🙂
Enter MailerLite.
MailerLite is an affordable, easy-to-use email service provider full of features to help grow your business.
But is it the right tool for you?
That’s what you need to decide. And I can help.
This review takes a closer look at MailerLite’s features, who should and shouldn’t use it, pricing plans, and its pros and cons.
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s start.
Our Verdict – The Lowdown on MailerLite
If you want a quick answer to whether you’re making the right decision, you need to understand everything that MailerLite has to offer.
MailerLite is an email marketing software that promises to help:
- create dynamic emails and newsletters quickly with the drag-and-drop editor
- build amazing email campaigns
- optimize content
- subscriber management
- automate tasks
- track results
- build websites, landing pages, pop-ups, and embedded forms
and much, much more. (I’ll be discussing all its features in more detail shortly.)
MailerLite focuses on simplicity, from its intuitive user interface to straightforward solutions. So growing your mailing list – and your business – couldn't be easier.
MailerLite is just as effective as its competitors, and it’s also comparatively cheaper than popular platforms like MailChimp and ConvertKit.
However, you may find that it doesn't offer a huge collection of templates and the automation isn’t as elaborate as ActiveCampaign, another email provider I’ve used.
But overall, MailerLite is a good choice for many online small business owners, especially since it offers a 14-day free trial. More importantly, it allows these free users access to all its features.
Go ahead and check out everything MailerLite has to offer.
Who Should Use MailerLite
I’m sure by now you’re wondering which kinds of users will love MailerLite and get the most benefits and value.
You should use MailerLite if:
- You need premium email marketing features with an affordable price tag
- You’re a small company with few resources
- You’re just considering adding email to your marketing efforts for your own online business
- You’re a small business owner, blogger, or freelance marketer interested in bulk email software
But, as with any digital marketing tool, what’s best for one company may not be the best solution for you.
Consider another tool if:
- You need email marketing platforms with more powerful features, such as sequence funnel builder or complex automations
- You need comprehensive reporting
- You don’t have a website. You’ll need a domain email address to use this email marketing provider.
In such cases, you may find MailerLite’s email marketing service a little limiting. In that case, you may need to try different email marketing platforms, like Sendinblue, GetResponse (my review), ActiveCampaign (review here), or Moosend, especially since they all offer a free version.
MailerLite Features
It’s time to go into some detail about all the features offered by MailerLite and see how they can help fulfill your various marketing and outreach goals.
Email Editor
MailerLite can help you create professional-looking and engaging emails within minutes – and that too without any coding. Its intuitive drag-and-drop email builder comes with pre-built blocks that makes customization a breeze.
You can design and customize your entire email using any of the 20+ pre-built modules, from layout to text and add various elements such as images, social media links, Facebook posts, videos, RSS feeds, buttons, etc.
So for instance, if you click on the header block, more options like ones seen below will show up.
You can also switch to the custom HTML editor.
Email Templates
MailerLite has a variety of responsive templates to help you build websites, landing pages, and newsletters.
But when it comes to email templates, MailerLite has the perfect solution. You can either create an email template from scratch, reuse recently curated email, or select one from their gallery of professionally pre-made templates.
If you’re interested in pre-designed templates, simply browse through the categories and pick the one that’s ideal for your campaign. You can easily edit any template for custom branding requirements.
This is what makes MailerLite ideal for beginners – absolutely no coding experience required! All you need to do is use the email editor and quickly make the changes you need.
However, keep in mind that pre-designed templates are only available for MailerLite’s premium plan subscribers or for a new user signing up for the free 14-day trial.
Moreover, you can also import custom HTML emails and use them as a template for future campaigns.
Email Recipient Personalization
Personalized emails are a great way to make an email recipient feel special. More importantly, it improves open and click-through rates.
Personalization stems from segmenting your subscriber list, allowing you to interact with each recipient on a more personal level. (More on this later.)
So how can you personalize your emails using MailerLite?
Actually, there are several ways this email marketing service does that.
For starters, it helps insert personal touches to
- Preheader text
- Subject line
- Email copy
Furthermore, you can personalize messages by:
- Incorporating their name, birth date, or hometown
- Adding custom fields
- Sending emails at the right time based on a subscriber’s time zone
- Using your name in the sender address instead of a generic company email address
Wait, there’s more.
MailerLite also allows you to create emails with personalized blocks that are visible to only certain people. You can decide who can see it, such as:
- All your recipients
- Specified recipients
- Recipients who match a particular criteria
With MailerLite, you can automate all kinds of personal emails, such as welcome series, birthday greetings, date-based personal reminders, and re-engagement emails based on a customer’s behavior.
Email Types
MailerLite allows you to create all types of emails, including:
- Classic broadcast email
- Newsletters
- Autoresponders e.g., welcome emails to first-time customers or reward loyal customers whenever they make a purchase
- Follow-up emails, e.g., abandoned cart emails or sending incentives to re-engage with inactive customers
- Date-based emails, e.g., anniversary, birthday emails
- Reminders
- Announcements
- E-commerce emails, e.g., launching new products, promotional offers, etc.
Again, you’ll find a lot of tools to help with these various emails. For instance, there’s a collection of newsletter templates to help business in different industries.
Email Automation
Like other email marketing services, MailerLite has an advanced email automation feature – but at a considerably cheaper price.
You can set up predefined marketing automation workflows based on user habit so that they receive the right message at the right time. This can guide them deeper into your sales funnel.
For instance, with MailerLite, you can instantly send triggered emails to:
- Welcome new subscribers
- Deliver lead magnets
- Celebrate milestone dates, such as birthdays and anniversaries
- Follow up after they click on a link
Triggers facilitate segmentation, allowing you to understand your audience better and cater to their preferences. MailerLite helps automate workflows through a variety of email triggers, such as:
Marketing Automation
Besides being a great email marketing tool, MailerLite also offers other automations. As a small business owner, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the additional hustle and bustle of the marketing world. So the e-commerce marketing automation feature can be a Godsend, helping to nurture your leads.
For instance, you could send perfectly-timed emails to:
- Potential customers who have abandoned their carts
- Follow up with customers who have recently made a purchase
- Reward loyal customers for making another purchase
- Send discount codes to give inactive customers an incentive to re-engage with your brand
- To offer personalized product recommendations through upselling and cross-selling
- Ask for reviews
Furthermore, you can segment subscribers depending on their purchasing behavior and feedback data or utilize information gathered from custom fields. This not only allows you to send personalized content but also develop more advanced automations.
List Management
Growing an email list is crucial for many online business owners, but managing it is even more important.
With MailerLite, list management is simple and straightforward.
You can:
- Export and import your subscriber list
- Edit personal details about a subscriber
- Remove inactive subscribers and clean up your email list
- Block certain email addresses from joining your list
- Receive notifications whenever someone joins your list
- Organize email recipients into groups and segment
Subscriber Segmentation
Segmentation allows you to organize email recipients into segments and groups. This allows you to create highly-targeted, personalized campaigns and build a stronger, more personal bond with your target audience.
Segmentation separates subscribers with common traits from others on your email list. Segments are created when a rule or condition is met. For instance, when a subscriber joins your list by signing up for a course, they are placed into an active subscriber segment. Now they’ll receive relevant content and emails, resulting in more clicks and conversions. Moreover, it keeps your marketing campaigns stay on target.
All you have to do is create the conditions or rules. When they are fulfilled, subscribers are automatically added to the appropriate segment. MailerLite helps filter them out so that you interact with them better. You can create segments based on characteristics (age, gender, location) or activities (emails clicked, opened).
However, with groups, there are no conditions or rules, and lists aren’t updated automatically. So you can add custom labels or tags based on these subscribers actions or interests. That also means that you have access to a list which you can change. In fact, subscribers in a group can only be moved manually by you or by a third-party app.
Signup Forms and Popups
Sign up forms are a great way to grow your mailing list. So like many email marketing services, MailerLite offers this feature too.
There are three ways you can create sign up forms:
Popup Forms
Popups can encourage visitors to offer their email address. But a timely displayed popup can complement your message and convince them to take action. MailerLite helps you create different kinds of popup forms, including Featured, Floating Bar, Slidebox, Half Screen, Full Screen, Exit Intent, or Scroll Popup.
Simply choose a popup template you like and customize it using the drag-and-drop editor.
More importantly, you can set the behavior of the popup, such as when you want the popup to appear, it’s schedule, and frequency.
Embedded Forms
You can create embedded forms as well. Unlike popups, these forms are available on your website and don’t appear on top of the content.
MailerLite doesn’t provide any templates for website embedded forms. However, you can still use the drag-and-drop builder to create simple forms.
Additionally, you can design professional-looking surveys embedded in email. Create custom surveys with pre-built blocks, design settings, and templates.
Promotions Forms
If you’re considering making popup promotional ads, MailerLite has your back. You can use countdown popup to create a sense of urgency, offer a promo code, promote best-selling products, encourage social engagement, and more.
There are 8 templates to choose from which you can customize. Then you can decide where you want the popup to appear.
But one of the features that I really like is tracking popup performance. By tracking conversions and impressions tracking, you can identify which popups are your best promotional ads.
Note that promotional forms are only available for premium users.
Creating a form on MailerLite is straightforward and easy. Moreover, all forms are GDPR compliant and follow EU data protection laws.
Reports and Analytics
I’ll be honest, MailerLite does offer some valuable insights about your email campaigns and subscribers, but not as much as another major email service provider I have used in the past.
For instance, you can monitor campaign activity and subscriber engagement through metrics such as clicks, opens, opens by location, link activity, unsubscribe count, spam complaints, bounces, devices subscribers are using, etc. You can also analyze survey and poll results.
And while MailerLite does offer click-mapping, it doesn’t have social tracking as well as limited e-commerce tracking, a drawback for WooCommerce and Shopify users.
But overall, the campaign impact assessment results are enough to give you an idea of how things are performing.
Bounce Management
Bounce management is crucial for email delivery health. Sending emails to an email address that keeps bouncing will make you look spammy. And MailerLite knows how serious this can be for small business owners.
So if an email has:
- one hard bounce (invalid email address)
Or
- five soft bounces (subscriber’s inbox is full)
it’s automatically moved to a bounce folder where you can deal with them later.
Recipient Blacklists
Sometimes you will need to exclude, or blacklist, segments or groups of subscribers from receiving your emails. For instance, you don’t want to send a newsletter to someone that won’t benefit from it because of their age or location. This ensures your emails reach the right people.
Moreover, if you plan on sending an email to multiple segments and the same subscriber is in both of them, this feature makes sure that person only receives the email once.
Third-Party Integrations
Like many email marketing services, MailerLite integrates with several popular web services – 128 to be exact.
So now you can continue to use the platforms you already do, such as PayPal, Stripe, Zapier, Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, ClickFunnels, Slack, Trello, Facebook, Instagram, and more.
Spam Testing
While MailerLite can help the number of spam complaints, there is no spam testing feature.
Landing Page Editor
Landing pages are important for list-building, gathering visitor feedback, driving traffic to a particular page, and selling products. To help create the great landing pages, MailerLite offers full customization capabilities.
You can:
- Use the drag-and-drop landing page builder
- Construct a landing page using pre-built templates and specialized content blocks (30+ blocks available)
- Hire experienced MailerLite designers to build landing pages for you from scratch (this option is available for MailerPro subscribers)
The landing pages can be hosted by MailerLite or on your own domain.
But one of the best things about the landing page editor is that MailerLite makes sure you use only the best landing pages. You can A/B test landing pages with up to 5 different content combinations to find the version that has the best click-through and conversion rates.
Website Editor
Websites are the modern way to do business. So I guess you’ll have to build a website too. And this couldn't be simpler with MailerLite.
With the drag-and-drop website builder, you can easily design the layout and web pages by customizing aspects of the pre-built templates. In fact, it’s a lot like creating a newsletter and landing pages, so yes, it’s quite easy to use.
You can use any of the 20+ content blocks and edit them, create a blog, optimize for search engines and social sharing, add password protection, monitor website analytics, and more.
More importantly, you can preview your website before publishing.
Just keep in mind that if you want to host the website on a custom domain, you cannot do so with the free plan.
Email Campaign Types
Being able to create various email campaigns is the star feature of MailerLite.
You can create four different types of campaigns:
- Regular: This is your classic email campaign. Much of its features have already been discussed above.
- A/B split: Once you create a campaign, you should test it with A/B split testing. Using different variables, you can identify which aspects generate better results. Now you can optimize your campaigns and improve conversions.
- Auto-resend: If a subscriber didn’t open or click on your email the first time, you need to try again. This type of email campaign allows you to reconnect with by resending previous emails. Often different aspects like the subject line are personalized to motivate the recipient to open it.
- RSS campaign: Whenever you publish a new post or blog, you can automatically pull it into your email. This automatic sending enhances your marketing automation capabilities and ensures your company connects with the target audience and remains competitive.
Send Preview
It’s important to preview your email before sending it to your subscriber list to ensure all the various email elements look fine and the email loads properly on different devices. To check your email, simply:
- Preview the content within the MailerLite dashboard
- Send it to your inbox or a colleague
Campaign Scheduling
In order to engage with the recipient, you need to schedule your emails so that they are delivered at the right time. MailerLite allows you to send emails immediately or schedule them for a later date.
However, if you have subscribers in different timezones, this means some will receive in the middle of the night. To ensure everyone receives your messages at a time they are more likely to open and click on it, you may want to use MailerLite’s premium plan. Now all your subscribers can get their emails at the same local time.
Embed YouTube Videos
Video is one of the emerging forms of marketing. So yes, your emails will need to have them. And yes, MailerLite can help.
The drag-and-drop editor allows you to embed your videos. Simply drop the Video block into the body of your email, click on the block, and enter the URL of the video. Note that the video block is designed to support Youtube and Vimeo videos only.
Now select whether you want the video to be displayed as a static image or an animated GIF in the email, or change the color of the play button if you want to.
And you’re all done.
Using MailerLite
Now that you know everything about all the features, let’s take a closer look at the UX. by sharing such a detailed experience with you, I hope that you’ll have a more clear picture of MailerLite.
The MailerLite Approval Process
One of the first things I want to highlight about my experience with MailerLite is the approval process.
It was unexpectedly frustrating!
MailerLite has a strict approval process. To start the process, you need to have an email address with a domain name. In other words, you cannot submit an application with an email ID on Gmail or Yahoo.
While the approval process may just take one day, if your account is not approved, MailerLite will not provide any explanation for the disapproval.
While I understand that this may be because MailerLite wants to maintain good deliverability and keep spamming to a minimum, there has got to be a better way to allow new users to sign up.
But what really surprises me is that MailerLite will reject your application without explaining why. Moreover, once your application has been rejected, it’s nearly impossible to apply again with the same email address.
Deliverability
Successful deliverability means successful email marketing. So it’s not something you want to compromise on.
How does MailerLite compare with other major email providers?
MailerLite tops the charts when it comes to mail deliverability. And it takes this aspect very seriously. If your open rates drop to lower than 0.02% or a lot of your emails are getting marked as spam, your account could get suspended.
To ensure you maintain your deliverability rate, MailerLite prevents you from sending emails to inactive customers (which damages your deliverability rate).
MailerLite can clean up inactive subscribers from your list. It identifies everyone who hasn’t opened your emails in the past 6 months, allowing you to engage with only those who want to hear from you.
This not only improves deliverability but also reduces the chance of your emails landing in the dreaded spam folder. So it’s a win-win situation.
Ease of Use
One of the best MailerLite features is it has an easy-to-use interface. It’s so clear and intuitive that even beginners can get a hang of things in no time at all – no HTML code issues!
MailerLite offers a boatload of user-friendly features such as built-in templates, drag-and-drop editors, subscriber management, newsletter generation, etc.
Language Support
You can change the language for your email. Moreover, the language you choose will be used on the unsubscribe page as well.
Media Storage
You have access to unlimited storage for data and images.
Custom Domains
Once you create your website or landing pages, you can easily add them to your custom domain. Simply navigate Account Settings -> Domains -> Sites -> Add Domain.
Yep, that’s all there is to it.
User Permissions and Access
Different team members need to access the platform in order to collaborate and create successful marketing campaigns. MailerLite helps manage user permissions so that you always have uninterrupted, organized workflows within the company.
MailerLite offers 4 user types, each with a different permission level. Simply customize your user permissions to match your management needs.
Customer Support
Need help? MailerLite is just a click away.
You can reach out to a customer support representative:
- via email ticket
- live chat
But there are several online resources to help you as well. You’ll find:
- Getting started guide explaining all the MailerLite features
- FAQ Knowledge base
- Video tutorials
- Industry best practices
- MailerLite Academy
- Webinars
And if you need additional support and guidance, you can reach out to anyone of the pre-approved experts listed on the directory.
MailerLite Pricing
MailerLite offers several plans to put any business owner at ease. The following is the monthly cost:
If you sign for the annual plans, you can avail a 30% discount.
The free plan is limited.
- Only 12,000 emails per month
- No 24/7 live chat support, can only contact customer service via email
- No newsletter templates
- Cannot use custom domains
- No promotional pop-ups
- Cannot create auto resend campaigns, deliver emails by timezones, or have a dedicated IP
- No access to additional analytics such as click maps or opens by location
On the other hand, all the premium plans offer unlimited emails and user accounts, and access to all the MailerLite features. The only difference is the number of subscribers, and that determines the cost of your plan.
MailerLite Pros and Cons
Pros
- Affordable email marketing provider with advanced features
- Drag-and-drop editor
- List management protocols offer easy access to important subscribers
- Nice sign up forms
- Advanced embedded tracking features
- Responsive customer service and support team
- Short learning curve
- Offers free plan
Cons
- Does not offer a lot of very valuable insights about about email campaigns and subscribers
- Strict approval process
- No spam testing capabilities
Should You Run Your Next Email Marketing Campaign With MailerLite?
MailerLite is an ideal solution for small businesses, especially with its free plan. But as you grow, you will eventually need more features. With MailerLite’s flexible pricing plans, you can easily upgrade to the premium version. You’re sure to find something that fits into your budget and help you manage your subscribers.
However, if you need more comprehensive automation or reporting features, you’re better off using another platform.
But for now, it’s time to make email the most impactful channel in your digital marketing campaigns!
After reading this MailerLite review, you may find that this is exactly what your business friends have been looking for as well. So don’t forget to recommend it to them.