Best free and open source email marketing software

The Internet is a dynamic space where things change faster than one can imagine. However, there’s one thing that’s old, yet continues to evolve at a frenetic pace. We’re talking about email marketing, which isn’t new, but continuously adapting to modern trends while being one of the most effective methods of internet marketing. Talk about lead generation, lead nurturing, ROIs or conversions, email marketing still rules the roost.

So, if you are running an internet-based business and not using email marketing as a promotional tool, you are losing a substantial chunk of customers. We’d ask you to start it right away, especially because getting a taste of it wouldn’t cost you a dime. You heard it right. All you need is email IDs of customers or visitors that come to your website, and then reach out to them through the below-mentioned list of the best free and open source email marketing software.

How open-source and free email marketing software work?

Before we talk about the products itself, it’s important to understand the free and open-source concept of email marketing software (or any software for that matter). Sending emails consumes server resources, cost of which needs to be managed either by you or the service provider. And that’s how these two software categories differ:

1. Open-source email marketing software: These software need to be installed on your own server. An open-source email marketing software will always be free to use and you will be able to send unlimited emails, but you will need to buy and manage the server space of your own. Plus, setting up such software on your server needs a steep learning curve. This kind of solution is good for large businesses that need to send email in large volumes.
2. Free email marketing software: Better read it as freemium. In this case, the service provider offers you limited resources for free and expects to convert you into a paid customer when your business grows beyond a certain point. There would be some kind of limit on either the number of emails you can send per month or the number of contacts you can have in your email list. But the benefit here is that you get a plug-and-play solution as there’s no setting up and server management. These software are great for start-ups and small businesses.

Best open-source email marketing software

Mautic

Mautic touts itself as the world’s largest open-source marketing automation project, which is being used by more 200,000 organizations. The project has over 1,000 contributors.

The software has a user-friendly interface that lets you create campaigns, provide detailed analytics of how your email campaigns are performing, and even provide information about your email contacts. It also has a WYSIWG editor to create campaigns as per your liking. It also offers integration functionality to connect with CRMs, cloud service providers, and more.

Along with the open-source version, one can also go for the fully hosted option, dubbed Mautic Cloud Pro.

phpList

As evident from the name, phpList is an email marketing software based on PHP. It uses MySQL database to store the list of subscribers, and this combination makes it quite easy to install and setup.

phpList is a great option if all you need is to send email newsletters to your subscribers. You get all the basic features like Open/View and click Tracking, Template management, Bounce handling, Scheduled Sending etc. However, features like transactional and event-triggered emails are unavailable.

You could opt for the Forever Free plan of phpList which offers most of the functionality that the paid plans offer. There’s also a $1 per month plan that lets you send up to 9,000 emails in a month for up to 3,000 subscribers. There are other plans too which charge on a per message or per subscriber basis.

OpenEMM

An open-source version of the popular E-Marketing Manager (EMM), OpenEMM is a feature-rich email marketing software. It can be used for marketing automation, sending out newsletters, transactional emails, and event/time triggered emails. Event/time-triggered email means you can also run drip campaigns with this software. OpenEMM can also be used to provide support and do follow-ups with your existing customers.

OpenEMM is easy to set up and use. The user interface is smooth, available in multiple languages and the software is very well documented. Above all, in case you want to switch to the paid version – EMM – the transition is exceptionally smooth since UI remains the same.

Odoo Email Marketing

Odoo is among the most popular open-source business software. From CRM to help desk, and from website building software to time tracker, it has it all. It also offers a mass email marketing software.

The software makes it extremely easy to design emails by offering a drag and drop editor and customized themes and templates. You can also segment your users to create custom mailing lists and lets you do A/B testing too. With detailed insights on your campaigns, you can know how to improve your emails.

Available as part of a large software suite, companies can also leverage Odoo’s Email Marketing with its other software. The pricing for just Email Marketing starts at $8 per month.

Best free email marketing software

Gmail

You read it right. The mighty Gmail can very well be used as a free email marketing software, you just need to use its limits in the right way.

A regular free Gmail account has a limit of sending up to 500 emails a day, whereas a Paid Google Apps account can send up to 2000 emails a day. A chrome extension called Mailking from CloudHQ, lets you leverage this limit systematically to run an email campaign efficiently. Say you want to run an email campaign to a list of 1,200 subscribers from a free Gmail account, Mailking will deliver this campaign in batches over a period of three days. It’s that simple.

In addition, you get all the features of a regular email marketing software like Email templates, email and link tracking, mail merge, etc. You can even import templates from MailChimp. Since your emails are being sent from a Gmail server, the deliverability rate is quite high too. Mailking is free for up to 450 emails per day for a regular Gmail account and 1,800 emails per day for Google apps account.

MailChimp

Of all the freemium email marketing software, Mailchimp stands out as the best option. Its forever free plan lets you keep using it for free until you have reached 2,000 subscribers or need to send more than 12,000 email per month. You can use it to send out email newsletters, create marketing automation with trigger-based emails and run drip campaigns. Mailchimp’s deliverability rate is quite high as well. Moreover, a well-equipped dashboard lets you access a wide range of reports and actionable data to help you with optimization.

If you are just starting out with your marketing campaigns or newsletters, and don’t want to dirty your hands with setting up and installation, then you should give Mailchimp a try.

Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is similar to Mailchimp, both in terms of features and free sending limits. However, what sets it apart is the seamless A/B testing feature.  The A/B testing feature lets you send two different versions of your email to different sets of people and analyze which one worked better. Moreover, you get all advanced features like Autoresponders, template management, Real-time analytics, etc.

Of course, you could use Zoho Campaigns for things like newsletters, marketing emails, and more. Just like Mailchimp, it’s free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month

Which one’s your pick?

There are several email marketing software. But one needs to be careful since email deliverability rate matters a lot and ones mentioned here excel in this department. What’s the point of having hundreds of features in your software if the emails are landing in the spam folder of your subscribers? So whichever option you go for, rest assured that these are the best email marketing service that ensure that your campaigns will be delivered successfully.