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Email has long been one of the most effective marketing channels for businesses of all sizes. But finding an email service provider that can keep up with the number of emails you need to send can be a challenge — especially if you don't have much of a budget (or no budget at all). Sending bulk emails is important to reach large audiences with your newsletters, promotional emails, and basically just communicating with your list in general. But you don't just want to send emails without being able to understand how those emails are performing, right? That's why we've put together this list of free bulk email marketing services so you can compare the features and find the right one for your business.
What Is a Bulk Email Service?
A bulk email service is an email service capable of sending emails to a large number of recipients at once. Bulk emails are generally used for advertising or marketing campaigns as well as to send out updates to your email list. The types of emails you might send include newsletters, promotional emails, transactional emails, shipping notifications, reports, password resets, and more.
You need a reliable bulk email service provider to send emails at this volume because doing it from your own email server is likely to get you flagged as a spammer. Bulk email services are specifically built with large volumes of email in mind and know how to send your emails so your sender reputation remains intact and so you don't find yourself on the wrong side of the email gods.
What to Look for in a Bulk Email Service
There are a few key features that you'll want to look for in a bulk email service before committing:
- Security and reliability
- Email tracking
- List management
- Email design
- Price
Security and Reliability
Security and reliability are hands down the most important feature to look for in your bulk email service. When you're sending out a large volume of emails in a short amount of time, you need to be able to do it without triggering any spam filters. Your bulk email provider should give you the option to choose an SMTP server and use batching (sending emails out in smaller batches) to send out your bulk emails instead of sending them out all at once.
Email Tracking
Most bulk email services will give you at least some basic email tracking tools so you can check open and click rates, deliverability, and other common email marketing benchmarks and metrics. Some of the more powerful tools will offer in-depth analytics.
List Management
The bulk email service you choose should give you the option to add and manage your email marketing list. This includes features that will help you segment your list and keep your list clean and free from duplicates and inactive emails.
Email Design
Typically, a bulk email service isn't going to include as many design options as the average email marketing service provider, but it should include at least some basic design tools. If there aren't any design tools available, the platform should at least give you the option to import your own design or paste an HTML email template.
Price
Cost is going to be a factor for some businesses. On our list, we've included free bulk email marketing services that include additional features and functionality on their paid plans. No matter your budget, you'll be able to find a bulk email marketing service for you on this list.
Free Bulk Email Marketing Services
As we mentioned, bulk email marketing services are used to send a large volume of emails via SMTP, API, or a web interface. These tools are generally less expensive than marketing email services, but that's because they tend to have fewer bells and whistles. Here are over 10+ free bulk email marketing services we’re loving right now.
Campaigner is a powerful tool for marketing automation and offers solutions for both email and SMS marketing. It offers a number of solutions, such as segmentation, geolocation, and localization, that let you create personalized, targeted campaigns. With Campaigner, you can build email and SMS automation workflows that can help you create more compelling campaigns. This email marketing service also lets you nurture your contacts and turn them into loyal customers by sending customized messages that match your audience’s buying stage. Despite its wealth of features for email marketing, there is one drawback. Campaigner doesn’t have a free version, but it does offer a free 30-day trial that lets you test drive its more than 60 advanced features. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Pricing for Campaigner is divided into two segments: Email Email and SMS Bundle Brevo is a bulk email marketing service that includes automation, email templates, and more with a drag-and-drop interface. You can use it to segment your email marketing list based on demographics and interests and use that information, along with contact information, to personalize your email marketing. We especially like the send time optimization feature (available on higher-level paid plans) that lets you send your emails at just the right time for each contact. 💡 Features Base features: Higher-level plan features: ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing While SMTP doesn’t have a free plan, it does offer a very generous free trial of a month. It offers email delivery services at an affordable price that you can rely on, making it a must-have tool if you’ll be sending high-volume emails and a useful solution to have if you regularly need to send transactional emails. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing *It also includes an optional Reputation Defender add-on feature at 20% of the plan’s price. Omnisend‘s bulk email marketing services are perfect for eCommerce business owners and others. It includes preset automations, integrates with your shop to give you better customer targeting and key insights into shopping behavior, and offers multiple marketing channels (email, SSM, and MMS) so you can reach your customers wherever they are. Omnisend offers up a template library, automations, product analytics, and funnels with easy-to-use drag-and-drop control. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Elastic Email is a free bulk email marketing service that’s easy to use. You can manage your recipient list for each marketing campaign and the platform includes autoresponders. The platform also includes web forms that you can add to your emails as well as a WordPress plugin for the WordPress users out there. Since Elastic Email offers API access, you can integrate the platform with the apps you already use. In addition, Elastic Email allows for sub-accounts and includes A/X testing features. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Mailgun is another bulk email marketing service that has a robust API for sending, receiving, and tracking emails. It also offers SMTP integration for easy sending of bulk transactional emails, email validation in real-time, advanced email analytics, tracking engagement metrics, and more. 💡 Features Base features: Higher-level plan features: ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Amazon SES is a bit complicated to get set up, but once that’s done, it’s an easy-to-use bulk email marketing service. It includes tons of features like tracking and mass mail. Amazon SES offers detailed reports so you can monitor the performance of your account, get anti-spam feedback, and track tons of email marketing metrics. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing SendPulse is less a bulk email marketing service and more of an all-in-one communication platform. It lands on our list because it also includes a bulk email sender tool. SendPulse’s free bulk email sender includes automated chatbot campaigns and push notifications. The platform has free email templates, event-triggered emails, and more. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Sender is another of our favorite free bulk email marketing services that also has great paid plans, too. With Sender, you can send emails using customizable templates or use the drag-and-drop building to create your own newsletters and emails. There’s also a custom HTML editor for coding your own email templates. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing MailerLite is one of the free bulk email marketing services on our list that is great for beginners. It has drag-and-drop functionality that makes it really easy to create awesome newsletters as well as an easy way for eCommerce businesses to add product listings. With the bulk email sender, you can send automated emails and even make certain sections of your newsletters visible only to certain subscribers. This is called dynamic content and is absolutely great for providing relevant information to your segments without having to create an entirely separate email for each of those segments. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Mailjet is a bulk email marketing service that supports real-time collaboration between team members. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to create great mail layouts, add image and text blocks, and even buttons for social media sharing. Mailjet also has subscription forms to help you grow your email list as well as an SMTP server and quite extensive documentation. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing Mailchimp is one of the more popular bulk email marketing services on our list. It offers inbuilt marketing tools, a bulk email verifier, and custom domains for increasing sales. You’ll also be able to use Mailchimp to create and share social ads, emails, landing pages, and even postcards (yep, actual postcards). Mailchimp has behavioral targeting and predicted demographics features to help you reach the right people at the right time as well as a subject line helper, real-time marketing automation, and A/B testing. 💡 Features ✔️ Pros and Cons 💰 Pricing
1. Campaigner
2. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
3. SMTP
4. Omnisend
5. Elastic Email
6. Mailgun
7. Amazon SES
8. SendPulse
9. Sender
10. MailerLite
11. Mailjet
12. Mailchimp
Choose From the Best Free Bulk Email Marketing Services
Each of the free bulk email marketing services on our list will meet your needs. The tool you choose will depend on various factors like your budget, the features you need, and who is going to be using the tool in your business (developers will gravitate towards a different tool than bloggers, for example). As long as the bulk email marketing service you choose is reliable and has good deliverability, you'll see improvements in your email marketing strategy and be able to meet your marketing goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is bulk emailing?
Bulk emailing is the process of sending a large volume of emails at once. This should happen with the aid of one of the free bulk email marketing services on our list in order to reduce time, cost, and improve deliverability. You should not use your own email service to send large quantities of emails.
How do I send bulk emails?
Sending bulk emails is easy when you have the right bulk email marketing service to help you. With most of the tools on our list, you just prepare your email, choose the segments you want to send it to, and either schedule your email or click send. It's as easy as that.
What are the best free bulk email marketing services?
We've included 10+ of the best free bulk email marketing services on our list:
Elastic Email
Mailgun
Amazon SES
SendPulse
Brevo
Sender
MailerLite
Omnisend
Mailjet
Mailchimp
SMTP
In addition to the free bulk email marketing services we've featured here, there are several other bulk email marketing services to choose from:
ActiveCampaign
Constant Contact
Moosend
ConvertKit
SendGrid
Drip
GetResponse
What is a bulk email service?
A bulk email marketing service makes it easy for users to send the same email to thousands of recipients at the same time instead of manually sending emails to every person on your email list. Many of these services offer features that allow users to create customized and personalized emails using HTML email templates, templates, or drag-and-drop email builders. These tools can provide high deliverability because they've been built to send this type of email communication and understand how to send the emails without running afoul of spamming rules.
Is it legal to send bulk emails?
Yes, sending bulk emails is perfectly legal but there are some laws around email marketing that email marketers should be aware of. Laws can vary from country to country, so it's important to check the email marketing laws in place in both your country and those to which you're sending emails. For example, there's the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, CASL laws in Canada, and the UK has electronic communication regulations. Best practices are to always have permission to email the people on your list, be honest in your communications, and always provide an option for users to unsubscribe from your list.
