I have been an active user of email for marketing for as long as I remember. I have seen how powerful email is for businesses big and small. But when you are a small business and you are on a shoestring budget it can be hard to priorities email marketing. Well, you are in luck! Today I am going to share with you free email marketing tools you can use to build your list, create lead magnets and send out those emails.
Email Service Provider — Grab A 100% Free Step By Step Guide
The first things we will start with is the actual Email Service Provider (ESP). You need something that can send emails out to a larger number of people simultaneously and you will want it to look good. And while you might be thinking you can get away with your Gmail account or your own email server, this is not exactly a good idea.
- You need to adhere to the laws of the land. If you are in the USA you will be governed by the Anti Can-Spam Act. In Canada, it is the CASL (Canadian Anti Spam Legislation) and in the EU starting in May 2018 you will be governed by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). All have rules around what needs to be included in your email, how quickly you remove someone from your list after they unsubscribe, and how you can add people to your list. My advice is to get familiar with these rules before you start, but to save you time a good Email Marketing Service should do a lot of the grunt work for you in keeping you compliant.
- When you send out an email to a lot of people at the same time from your regular email (ISP) you risk being flagged as spam. Whereas using an ESP you will help you avoid this because they ration out your emails over the course of several minutes to an hour so that nothing gets flagged or overwhelms the system.
- Also, you really shouldn’t even waste your time doing email marketing if you cannot look at the analytics and see how you are doing. An ESP will give you this data while Gmail, AOL, or even your own server email will not, at least not to the extent that you need.
So now that we covered the crash course of why you will want a good ESP let’s discuss the one you need.
MailChimp:
MailChimp is considered the gold standard of free email marketing tools. It is certainly the most popular. And for good reason. Their free account allows you to send out up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers. Their tools are pretty robust, even for a free user. You are able to organize contacts into lists, set up auto-response emails and create tags and campaigns that are highly targeted. Another perk of using MailChimp is that it integrates with so many tools and software on the market today. While there are a plethora of wonderful email marketing services out there, MailChimp is a fantastic place to start for any small business on a tight budget with less than 2000 people on their list.
Tools to Capture Emails
Now that you have an idea of a good tool you can use to send out your emails you will need to build a list. There are a ton of options out there but today’s is free so the tool I not only suggest but I use myself is called Sumome.
Sumome
Sumome offers a great deal of list building tools for free and they have some pretty stellar premium tools too. All the tools integrated seamlessly with MailChimp making the whole process super easy PLUS it gives you the added benefit to set up an autoresponse series that will automatically trigger.
Explore tools: https://sumo.com/examples
Sign up: http://sumo.ly/HwVH
List Builder is a free tool using which you can add popups to your website. It offers several options and trigger types so you can customize how you want the builder to act when someone comes to your site or to a specific page.
Smart Bar — Smart Bar is a tool that typically runs across the top or bottom of your screen making it less intrusive and annoying.
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