Free Autoresponder: Great Email Marketing Tools to Use
Hundreds and thousands of marketing and personal emails are sent out daily. They crisscross between bosses, employees, businesses, customers, and more just to make the connections and relationships that we need to keep our businesses and our personal lives thriving.
Many of the emails that are sent out, though, are not sent out by a person at that moment. Instead, they are scheduled and sent out by an autoresponder.
As an overview, an autoresponder is a program that sends out messages automatically after a subscriber signs up for your email list or otherwise interacts with your content in a regular, predictable way.
While many businesses might not think that they can afford to use this technology, there are a lot of great autoresponder options that are free. Today, we’ll take a look at those.
When You Might Use an Autoresponder
Before we get into the details of the best free autoresponders, let’s talk about when you might use these autoresponder tools. These are some of the most common situations when you might use this tool:
- Welcome email when someone joins your newsletter list
- Welcome email when someone signs up for membership on your website
- When a subscriber signs up to your free trial or for a service
- When it is a subscriber's birthday
- When a subscription period is ending
In all honesty, there are hundreds of reasons that you might need and want to set up an autoresponder. Using this tool creatively can ensure that you are connecting with your subscribers in meaningful ways in every possible situation.
1. MailChimp
One of the most commonly known autoresponder technologies that you can get for free is MailChimp. With the free tools that it has available, MailChimp is one of the most widely used email marketing software currently.
With MailChimp, you can create multiple lists of up to 2,000 subscribers for free. During a month, you can send up to 12,000 emails to those subscribers. There are very basic responders that most people will need like welcome, date-based, and RSS responders. Again, these are all free!
If you are ready to upgrade to more advanced autoresponder options, you can invest in their PRO options. These paid subscriptions will allow you to make the most of every part of their tools.
2. SendGrid
In terms of worldwide popularity, SendGrid is ranked very high on the list. This is probably because they have easy to use autoresponder tools that make it simple to set-up the different type of responses.
Still, the limitations of SendGrid lie in the number of free subscribers and emails that are available to you. You can only send up to 3,000 emails a month, which total to up to 1,000 subscribers. Even for small and growing businesses, this can become quite limited in a short amount of time.
3. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a comprehensive email marketing service that you can use to do more than just autoresponder work. This site offers lots of detailed email editing, complete list management, real-time reporting, and social stats reporting tools and more.
While Constant Contact is not a free tool, you can use it for a full month for free. This free trial is fully unlocked, so you can test the tools and find out if they are worth the investment for an autoresponder during that period.
4. MailerLite
MailerLite is an aptly named lite tool for basic email marketing needs including autoresponder features. With this tool, you can send out subscription-based responses, birthday messages, messages when information is updated, and other date-based emails.
When using MailerLite, you can have lists of up to 1,000 subscribers in total. One huge bonus of this service is that you can send out as many emails as you want to; there’s no monthly limit!
5. Drip
This is a very advanced tool in terms of autoresponder options. From the basic autoresponders that most sites will provide to the more advanced e-commerce options that can be harder to find for free, Drip has it all. It is even possible to use some autoresponders that are linked to integrated apps like PayPal.
While you can use all of these tools for free, you are limited to up to 100 users with a free account at Drip. This means that it is a great tool for learning about the benefits of autoresponder tools, but it might not be a great long-term solution.
6. SendPulse
SendPulse is an email marketing service that offers many of the same autoresponder features as the other free services mentioned here, but it has a slightly higher subscriber limit. You can have up to 2,500 subscribers, and it is possible to send up to 15,000 emails a month.
While on the free plan, though, you are limited to using the more basic autoresponse tools. More advanced tools can be used on their premium plans.
Use Your Free Autoresponder Wisely
While there are many options for using limited amounts of free autoresponder tools on the internet, most of them have limitations on the number of subscribers or the number of emails that you can use monthly.
Even so, it is great to be able to try out this technique as you are growing with free services before you invest in something more permanent!