When it comes to growing your audience as an indie writer, offering an email newsletter is a must. There’s no doubt about it.
If there are two things you must absolutely invest in, those are a custom domain and a solid email marketing provider.
Now, I’ve tried quite a few different options before deciding to go with MailerLite, and the truth is that, at least in my case, I’ve been looking for that balance between features and pricing.
Is MailerLite the best email marketing provider for beginners? Let’s find out.
Since MailerLite is one of the tools I use, and it’s a platform I’ve been using for well over a year, I’m going to do this review a bit differently.
We’re going to focus on the features that are most important to an indie author.
Unlimited Emails
Whether it’s sending out a weekly digest, updates on new articles going live, and book sales campaigns, it’s important that you are not limited in any way as to how many emails you can send to your subscribers on a monthly basis.
While MailerLite offers a great free plan, which gives you the ability to send up to 12,000 emails per month to a maximum of 1,000 subscribers, a great alternative to Mailchimp’s free plan, the truth is that MailerLite’s paid plans are the most affordable “unlimited emails” plans you can find. For as low as $10/mo you get all the bells and whistles, all the features, all the integrations, and the ability to send unlimited emails to your subscribers.
That’s the best deal out there, especially if you’re just starting out.
Beginner Friendly
The platform takes less than a day to get used to, especially if you’ve used other Email Service Providers in the past.
The navigation at the top just makes sense, and you can easily access your campaigns, view your subscriber lists and groups or your subscribe forms.
The drag-and-drop builder also works as advertised.
This is one of the reasons I gave up on Mailchimp. Its builder seems unnecessarily complicated and, at times, is riddled with bugs and errors.
I’ve created tens of email campaigns, pop-ups, landing pages, and even websites, and I haven’t had an issue yet with MailerLite’s builder.
A Plethora of Integrations
MailerLite is one of the two email tools that have out-of-the-box integration with WordPress.com blogs, allowing you to effortlessly add signup forms or pop-ups.
They also have a plugin available, in case you are on the Business Plan or have a self-hosted WordPress blog.
There are, of course, a ton of other integrations. 118, to be exact. Some of the most notable are Shopify (with a Shopify app that allows you to send abandoned cart emails and allow customers to subscribe to your newsletter from your e-store), all social media profiles (and you can pull social media posts and add them to your newsletter campaigns), Squarespace, Woocommerce, Landingi, and many others.
In fact, there are few tools out there that don’t integrate with MailerLite out of the box, and those who don’t have such integrations, you can always link via Zapier.
Pop-Ups, Landing Pages, Websites
I wasn’t expecting this, to be honest, but MailerLite offers a much stronger feature-set when it comes to pop-ups than other competitors… let’s say Mailchimp, for instance.
Also, there’s a lot of customization options that go beyond the mere aspect of your pop-ups. You can, for instance, create exit-intent pop-ups, or you can set custom timelines for your pop-ups, or you can even set your pop-ups to appear on just a certain page or post, and coupled with the advanced automations that come included in the box with any paid plan, this enables you to do some genius marketing tricks, such as offering the article as a free PDF download, like I do on some of my articles.
Of course, you can also create some pretty cool landing pages, and there are over 50 different templates to choose from.
You can also design an entire website if you want, and you can even sell digital products and memberships through Stripe directly from such a website.
There are a lot of other customizations you can do, of course, such as adding a custom domain to your landing pages, adding SEO information, favicons, and a ton more.
Automations
What’s the deal with these automations?
Well, for once, they allow you to create custom workflows, such as sending a welcome series of emails to your new subscribers, sharing with them some of your best content.
Or you can create an email course to entice your readers to subscribe, sending them one email per week (w hat some call a drip campaign.)
The Mobile App
MailerLite even has a mobile app, which is quite rare in the world of ESPs (right now I can only think of Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign who offer mobile apps.)
You can check your campaigns, see how many subscribers you have, and get a sense of your newsletter’s growth.
Now, the one thing I think is missing from this mobile app is the ability to create campaigns. Mailchimp’s app allows you to do that, but the truth is that creating email campaigns and sending them on the go has limited appeal, especially if you want to do more than just write a few lines of text (and even that is often a hassle on a mobile device.)
Overall, MailerLite’s mobile app is a nice feature and it often comes in handy, especially if you want to check out your latest campaigns statistics or see how a certain automation is performing.
The Customer Support
After I’ve struggled for nearly a month with Adobe, trying to figure out why they were trying to bill me twice for the same service, I’ve started to pay a lot more attention to the customer support of the apps and platforms I use.
MailerLite has some top-notch customer support, and whenever I required assistance, they were fast to respond and, well, knowledgeable about the platform to be genuinely helpful.
That’s a big bonus, at least in my opinion.
The Downsides
Even though there’s a lot of like about this platform, especially given its pricing, there are some cons as well.
MailerLite is one of the fastest growing email providers out there, and sometimes the platform is not quite as responsive as it should be. Yes, sometimes there are errors, but they are not persistent, and they never last more than an hour at worst.
Their deliverability rates are fine, but nothing to brag about.
There were times when it took a while for the campaign to start propagating through the network, and it made me wonder what was going on.
Overall, MailerLite is one of the most affordable complete solutions out there. For as low as $10 per month, you get all the features, integrations, and tools you need to start growing a proper email list.
More than that, it’s one of the most beginner-friendly email platforms out there, and it makes for a very enjoyable experience, especially if you’re just starting out.
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