MailerLite Review
Affordable email marketing with powerful new features
Who said you have to spend an arm and a leg to get top tier email marketing features? Is MailerLite the ultimate solution for the bootstrapped startup? Let's dig in deeper to see.
MailerLite Scores
Design Flair
Features
UI / UX
Pricing
Support / Updates
Final Score
Are you ready to email with MailerLite?
Free plan allows for 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails p/m.
Introducing MailerLite
This MailerLite review will discuss why I think it's one of the best services for any bootstrapped startup. It will also take an in-depth comparison between it and MailChimp, which is arguably its better known and direct rival.
And if you are looking to get the best deal on MailerLite, I will let you know on what to expect in the way of MailerLite coupon codes.
What is MailerLite?
MailerLite is an email marketing service for sending emails in bulk to your audience.Â
There are so many companies in this space that the next logical question is what makes MailerLite different from the myriad of other options most notably MailChimp? And the answer to this we will use a direct comparison chart later on in this article but also in the words of MailerLite they focus on providing the easiest to use of all the email marketing apps. This is very important because if you have a cumbersome tool, you not going to email and you not get the truly staggering returns on investment some email marketers are making.Â
It has been said that for every $1 you spend on email marketing you can make back $38. But you not going to make a cent if you don't send any emails which is why I'm glad to see MailerLite tackle this well known issue when it comes to email marketing platforms.
The fact that they are also cheap helps tremendously too.
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Who is the founder of MailerLite?
CEO – Founder
MailerLite was born out of a first website agency company started in 2005. Through that process they discovered they really liked email marketing and MailerLite was born in 2010Â apparently after the founders read the book Rework (A Basecamp project).
Their offices are in Vilnius, Lithuania and their small team has now grown to 39 employees covering areas like design, developers, writers and customer support.
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How to use MailerLite?
For a company that focuses on ease of use this is an important thing to see before making an investment. To best illustrate this see the video below.
MailerLite Key Features
- Generous free account with up to 1,000 subscribers
- Affordable pricing from $10 per month or $84 per year
- Drag and drop email builder
- Rich text editor
- HTML editor
- Beautifully designed email templates
- Marketing tools like pop-ups and embeds included
- Email automation and subscriber tagging
-
A/B
split testing - Advanced reporting and click maps
- Built in photo editing
- eCommerce campaigns
MailerLite vs MailChimp
For the purpose of this comparison I decided to use the base level of pricing for 1,000 subscribers.
A few thoughts on the above
The pricing table doesn't fully reflect the value proposition of MailerLite because $10 vs $15 per month sounds like nothing but where it really starts to pinch the wallets is when you add more subscribers and MailChimp can become costly.
The best advice is to play around with the pricing sliders at MailChimp and MailerLite for the amount of subscribers you have and do your sums from that.
However if we take pricing out of the equation for the minute it is still 100% my recommendation to use MailerLite over Mailchimp because of the user experience you will enjoy and the larger set of customization control you will have over your email marketing campaigns with MailerLite.
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MailerLite Pros
- Affordable pricing
- Incredibly easy to use drag and drop editor
- Beautiful templates
MailerLite Cons
- Free plan doesn't contain all features to test
- Less free subscribers than MailChimp
Are there Up-sells?
There is no upsell with MailerLite – as soon as you choose your plan you are taken to an onboarding process to setup your first campaign.
The closest thing to an upsell is when you are reaching the limits of your plan and you won't be able to send any emails until you have upgraded. Idon't consider this an upsell though just industry standard practice.
MailerLite Alternatives?
There are many alternatives to MailerLite apart from MailChimp already mentioned – options include
- ActiveCampaign (best for professional email marketers)
- ConvertKit
- Drip Email Marketing (Now owned by the LeadPages team)
Do I recommend MailerLite?
I feel MailerLite get a lot of things right so yes I do recommend especially because they are head and shoulders above MailChimp and to get a similar feature set and user experience you have to go to the likes of ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit who certainly won't offer you a free plan.
So yes two thumbs up from me!
Are you ready to email with MailerLite?
Free plan allows for 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails p/m.
