When choosing your platform for email marketing, your options range far and wide. 

With so many email marketing tools currently offering almost the same standard features, choosing the right one depends on your budget.

There are premium marketing platforms that offer a more powerful set of features, but these come at a hefty price. On the other hand, some platforms are more affordable, but the features they present are rather basic.

The perfect blend would be a mixture of features and affordability, which is precisely what MailerLite sets out to achieve.

What is MailerLite?

MailerLite is a web-based email marketing platform that predominantly caters to freelancers, bloggers, and small to medium-sized businesses ( due to its aforementioned affordability. )  

For more than ten years now – MailerLite has been helping users expand their email contact list, target website visitors with opt-in forms and landing pages, build SEO-optimized email campaigns, engage audiences with automated messages, as well as track the campaign results that follow with in-depth analytics.

These are all great. But then again, in 2022, these features are industry standard. So, what sets MailerLite apart from the rest of your options? 

What makes MailerLite different?

MailerLite recognizes the ocean of options it finds itself in, featuring a pricing strategy that makes it more appealing to smaller businesses. Instead of requiring a paid subscription to begin running campaigns, users can start using all the tools MailerLite provides without paying anything. The catch is, once your email subscriber list crosses 1,000 contacts, you'll have to start paying up.

However, this is where MailerLite shines. Instead of forcing users into an expensive premium plan, their rates are actually very reasonable. You can gain access to all the platform's premium perks & unlimited emails for as low as $10 per month!

This is a massive improvement over other platforms that cater to large businesses, as their prices can get more than 5 times more expensive while still only offering a finite amount of emails per month.

Let's take a closer look at these premium features.

MailerLite Features:

Within the web-based application, you'll find the option to use both a rich text editor, a custom HTML editor, as well as a drag-and-drop email editor. These three options ensure that users of any level of technical proficiency will have a breeze with editing with the ability to introduce text, videos, images, and social media links, as well as allowing more flexibility for more advanced users.

Apart from the editors, users also have access to a vast library of beautiful pre-designed templates, which can serve as inspiration or just be used straight out of the box. MailerLite's landing page builder also features a drag-and-drop style interface, making it very user-friendly and easy to learn.

Other features include email automation tools, embeddable sign-up forms, analytics, a subscriber management interface, third-party integrations, and much more.

Subscriber Management

MailerLite's subscriber management tools help you expand your email subscriber list, as well as help you to keep it organized and optimized. Switching over from another platform is also a breeze since the platform allows imports of existing email contact lists via Excel, TXT, and CSV files.

If you don't have a pre-existing subscriber database – not to worry! MailerLite comes with a handful of tools for building your own list from the ground up and expanding from there. Take advantage of tools like embedded to subscribe buttons, forms, and popups to catch the eye of web visitors. You can also customize these forms and buttons without any prior coding knowledge using pre-built blocks.

To group subscribers, MailerLite uses a functionality called “Segments.” These segments are basically groups, that allow you to divide your subscriber list into smaller subsets. Common groups include age, location, gender, etc. These are really useful in conjunction with the platform's automation workflows, as you can then target specific groups based on their behavior.

Automation

Moving onto automation, MailerLite allows you to personalize emails for specific groups based on tags applied to said groups. Other automation features include abandoned cart follow-up, purchase follow-ups, loyalty rewards, and specific triggers based on the customer's behavior on your website. The platform also comes with a built-in automation editor for creating campaign workflows. The editor itself is engineered to deliver a simplified method of developing and operating your marketing automation. This allows any moderately-experienced user can set up dynamic workflows within minutes.  

The creation process entails creating a series of emails, whose launching sequence depends on a set of rules that you specify. As MailerLite proceeds to deliver everything according to your set of rules, you are able to monitor and adjust your automated campaigns accordingly.

However, the automation does not come without its limitations, as it is missing some features that larger businesses might find desirable, for example, you cannot use if/then/else logic while setting up workflows, which might be a dealbreaker for some.

Analytics

The platform also takes pride in its analytics and reporting tools – allowing you to monitor customer behavior and tendencies, and the general performance of your campaigns. These analytics provide very useful feedback that can help your email marketing skyrocket.

Third-Party Integrations

After over ten years since its inception, MailerLite has built a considerable list of third-party integrations available to effortlessly merge with its already extensive feature list. The MailerLite developers have ensured that their platform integrates with all major CMS and e-commerce platforms, making it a breeze to sync your store and newsletter content.

Social media integrations with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are also available – giving you the opportunity to use your newsletters as a channel to grow your social media presence too.

On the off chance you don't find your platform of choice officially supported by MailerLite, here's a neat trick you can use to integrate with almost anything under the sun. Simply embed MailerLite with Zapier and proceed from there. Zapier basically acts as a pipeline for linking Mailerlite with hundreds of other common applications. Embed MailerLite with Zapier (Which acts as a channel between MailerLite and the unofficial integrations) and enjoy hundreds of additional supported platforms.

Customer Support Review

MailerLite users on the free and premium plan both have access to support-over-email, where you submit a ticket via email and sit tight until an agent answers your request. Premium users gain access to the live chat feature, which is a great help for quick questions (complex problems discussed over live chat will often be redirected to an email ticket.) Sometimes users are also required to wait in a live-chat queue if a heavy workload is being experienced by their support team, but rest assured the wait won't belong.

Both of these support channels are open day and night with no downtime and are even available over the holidays.

However, you should always attempt self-service first, as you will likely find an answer to your problem in their extensive knowledge base.

Pros and Cons

You can compare this list with your requirements and no-no's to see if MailerLite is the right choice for your business.

Pros:

• The platform's design features are by far one of Mailerlite's greatest assets. Users can truly design the campaigns they want and stay on brand with their design software, better than any other email marketing platform. The amount of customization is amazing and it really helps campaigns stand out.
• Another reason Mailerlite is a fan favorite is for its ease of use and silky smooth interface. When you set clients up, you don't have to assist them for very long after getting them going. They find it easy to send emails independently and are empowered to do great things.
• When it comes to features and quality for the price paid, no platform competes with Mailerlite. This tool gives you the most bang for your buck and covers almost all my clients' needs and because of the value, I almost recommend it exclusively. The value for the money is excellent.
• MailerLite's content blocks within the designer are amazing. I especially love the event RSVP module that allows people to respond instantly and segment them based on their response. This is a big one I use for clients as well. There's just so much you can do here it's fantastic.

Cons:

• Mailerlite could use a few more default fields, and more field types within the newsletter editor. This is an area where you can get stuck writing more custom fields than you want to. I want to see a variety of fields, from text box, to radio buttons, drop downs and more date options. This feature is present on most other email marketing platforms.
• Another feature i'm missing dearly is a RESEND option, whether that is to non-openers or people who are new to a list. While you can set up drip campaigns or triggers to send certain emails when people change their status, it is a bit too time consuming.

Conclusion

MailerLite offers a stellar deal at a much lower price than its competitors. This platform is an excellent choice for small to medium-sized businesses, as it treads the line between affordability and functionality with ease. There's no downside to giving it a try, as you gain free access to the tool if you have less than 1000 contacts on your mailing list.

Click here to read about all the new features in the MailerLite 2.0