Free online mailing for businesses, resources, and tools for increasing effectiveness

Micheli , Invited guest @ Mailrelay

Online mailing continues to be one of the preferred strategies of companies that want to increase their sales and retain their customers.

Of all the digital marketing tools (Social media, Google Ads, content marketing… ) Email is what tend to deliver the best sales results and a higher return on investment.

In some cases, in fact, you can use a free online mailing service and send a newsletter without paying anything, so you will be saving money that you can use on other actions.

That’s precisely what we’re going to see in this article, so you can reduce your digital marketing costs while increasing your sales opportunities.

A very interesting way to reduce the financial risk of these marketing investments, right?

· What is online mailing, and why is it such an effective strategy for increasing online sales?

The most common definition says that online mailing is the sending of advertising through email to a large number of contacts.

It is not that this definition is wrong, but perhaps it would be necessary to add some more information.

It is true that when we send a mailing campaign, normally we are sending advertising, as we are trying to sell more. However, these messages can be used for much more:

  1. Improving brand image
  2. Promote loyalty and direct contact with customers
  3. Create up-selling and cross-selling strategies
  4. As well as encouraging recursive purchases

In short, not only does it allow us to sell more, much more, it can also be used for keeping in touch with our customers, to better understand their needs, their objections, and retain them longer.

¿Por qué es tan útil el mailing online para las empresas?

· Why is mailing so useful for businesses?

In the previous point, we already started to see what online mailing is and some reasons for companies to use this strategy. Because it remains a current and effective strategy.

The reasons are quite clear:

  1. It allows direct 1-to-1 communication
  2. It avoids noise from other media (as in social media)
  3. As well as interference from competitors (ads)
  4. And changes to third-party systems (algorithm modifications)

That is, we can maintain private contact with each client; we are in control of the situation.

Something other marketing channels won’t offer us.

► We can also take advantage of the money invested in other campaigns.

If you create an ad on Google Ads to drive traffic to your website, this traffic may or may not lead to first-visit conversions.

But if before the visitor leaves, you show them a popup and get their email address; you will have more opportunities to sell in the future.

Another example.

If a visitor buys from you, and in the buying process, you offer an option to subscribe to your newsletter, you can create processes to convince these customers to buy from you again.

Thus, we increase the profitability of all our digital marketing actions.

Now that you understand its relevance let’s see which tools can be used to create a newsletter.

· Free online mailing services

Having seen the usefulness of emailing, the next step will be to see how our company can send a newsletter for free.

We have several options; let’s review some of the main ones:

► Sending emails from Outlook or Gmail

These are the options that many companies often use When they need to send a mailing for free, mainly because they already know how to use these services.

The problem is that these tools were not designed to send a newsletter and, therefore, they don’t have all the features necessary for the management of campaigns, such as managing unsubscribes and incorrect email addresses.

They also don’t allow a large number of emails, Gmail for example has a limit of a few hundred emails per day, which means that, as your demand increases, you will have to look for other options.

► Plugins added to WordPress for sending a mailing

The next option, for many companies, is to install a plugin on their WordPress or website to send mailing campaigns.  It also seems like a good option initially because you can continue to work in a more or less familiar environment, usually with low cost.

The problem is that these tools use the hosting infrastructure where the website is hosted, infrastructure which is prepared to maintain a website, not to send a newsletter to an email list.

And therefore, they will present limitations for campaigns with more subscribers, as well as delivery issues across different ISPs.

The logical evolution is toward the last point.

► Professional email tools

As would be the case with Mailrelay.

Although they are professional tools, in many cases, they offer free options for testing the system, or as in the case of Mailrelay, some services offer a free emailing platform for as long as you like.

Undoubtedly, these mailing services are the best option as These are tools designed and developed precisely for this purpose.

If we take the case of Mailrelay, for example, when the system offers a fully functional free account, the company that wants to use the service can do so without any financial risk, thus increasing the return of the investment since it will be zero to begin with. That is, you will only gain.

Now we’ll look at some cool features for your marketing campaigns.

Recursos y herramientas gratuitos para tus campañas de mailing online

· Free resources and tools for your email marketing campaigns

In this section, we will see some options and services that will help you to design your emails, starting with the most obvious one:

► Email marketing editor

If we use Gmail or Outlook to send our emails or even one of the WordPress plugins, it is almost certain that we will not have a powerful newsletter editor. However, most email marketing software includes some type of editor.

In the case of Mailrelay, you have a completely free drag & drop newsletter editor with advanced features for designing professional campaigns.

Most importantly, using this editor doesn’t need any technical knowledge.

► Free Image stock

For sure, to create a mailing campaign, you will want to use animage.

It is advisable not to use too many images, although you can use a few to emphasize a point or capture subscribers’ attention. the key is not to exaggerate and use illustrative images only.

I can recommend some free image stocks:

  1. Unsplash
  2. Pexels
  3. Pixabay

Of course, there are many more, but in these, you will find many images that you can use for free, that you can use commercially.

They are a good place to start looking for the image you need for your next mailing campaign.

►  Tool for reducing the size of images

You should never include large images in your newsletters, as they increase the message size and take more time to load. That is why it is advisable to reduce the file sizes before importing images into the newsletter editor.

There are many tools for doing this, but I use a very simple one

I would like to recommend to you:

  1. Squoosh

You almost only have to upload the image and download the optimized version.

It is very easy to use and, like I said, highly recommended.

► Emoticons

To differentiate our mailing from other campaigns, we could add emoticons or emojis in the subject line to get the readers’ attention.

There are several options that you can find online, however,

I recommend:

  1.    Emojipedia

This site presents many options compatible with different email clients.

► Animated gifs

I’m not a big fan of GIFs in emails, but if you think they might be interesting to your audience, you can find many at:

  1. Giphy

Remember to use them primarily to get attention, boost engagement or add a funny touch to the email. However, you should

Be careful not to abuse this type of resource. As with images, you need to find the right proportion or the message will not be delivered to the inbox.

via GIPHY

► Image editor

Before, we mentioned some free image stocks where you can find images for your mailing campaigns. But other than that, maybe you want to prepare a banner or some element that includes images and text.

For that, we can use:

  1. Canva

This tool allows us to upload our own images or use the ones that are available on the platform to make compositions, banners, etc.

Ejemplo Canva

It’s a simple-to-use and free tool.

► Videos

The advantages of videos in any digital marketing strategy are varied.

The problem is that videos don’t usually play very well in emails, in fact, most of the time, they don’t work.

However, Mailrelay’s new newsletter editor allows you to create a link to a Youtube video, enter the URL, and Mailrelay generates an image with a direct link to the video.

Currently, it is the option that works best.

And to prepare your videos, I recommend Lumen5 as a free option, as it allows you to create videos from your blog’s text articles.

A very interesting option.

► Mail-tester

I left a tool for last that you should definitely use before sending a newsletter. It’s about:

  1. Mail-tester

This tool will allow you to send a test email and will offer a rate from 1 to 10. Evaluating aspects that will help to improve the delivery rate of your emails.

In addition to sending the message to this tool, you must also send it to your own email accounts to make sure everything is correct.

· Email marketing

It continues to be a very useful tool in our digital marketing strategies, which, in many cases, we can use for free.

With Mailrelay, you have a free account with which you can:

  1. Send up to 80,000 emails per month
  2. Manage up to 20,000 contacts
  3. No ads
  4. No feature limitations
  5. No daily limit
  6. And with technical support

Mailrelay includes the necessary tools for designing and sending your mailing campaigns, such as visual graphic editor, email scheduler, newsletter templates, contact segmentation system, etc.

Among many other features that you can discover using the tool and create your emails to sell more.

To complete what would be the newsletter design process, we saw some tools that allow us to obtain images, edit them, prepare banners, and even test and verify that the emails are correct.

Now you just need to take the next step, create your free account at Mailrelay, prepare and send your email marketing campaign for free.

Translated by Micheli.

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