While establishing your own brand on the internet, strategical planning and marketing play an important role to generate the much need traffic for your venture. Email marketing is probably one of the best and highly effective methods of reaching out to people and making your presence evident.
In order to make one of the protocols easier, Mailerlite comes into play. In the world of heavy competition in the field of digital marketing, Mailerlite seems to be a blessing for small business owners or bloggers.
But is Mailerlite that effective as it markets itself to be? Let’s find out.
What is Mailerlite?
It is an email marketing software that regulates, automates, and organizes your emails. This software apparently does automated email marketing without any effort from the owner’s side.
It was the time when small business owners were struggling with the marketing online and Mailerlite, in 2010, started with the aim of helping small established businesses to set a digital footprint.
Since, Mailerlite targets small business owners, entrepreneurs, and bloggers, it kept its service fee affordable. Due to their affordability, it has grown exponentially and established its market quite firmly in the digital world.
Being an entrepreneur myself, I was intrigued by the features they offered and went in-depth to understand whether Mailerlite is in fact, what it claims to be.
Basic features:
This software boasts of providing an array of other functionalities that are required for any digital blog or business to function and survive the internet market. Let’s discuss some of its basic features in detail.
1. Creating ad campaigns:
With Mailerlite, the need to hire any designer to create custom newsletters and ads has become a thing of the past. It comes with a set of pre-sets that any person can use to create their very own newsletters and ad banners. The pre-sets include:
- Drag & drop editor
- Rich text editor
- Custom HTML editor
- Newsletter templates
The best part is, you don’t need to know HTML in order to start designing
2. E-commerce campaigns:
A lot of high-end E-commerce brands use email marketing to convey offers and announce sales. Mailerlite can be integrated with your Shopify or WooCommerce platform/store to create and send email ad campaigns.
- Shopify/WooCommerce platform integration
- Data synchronization
- Predict customer buying behaviors
- Create custom sale ads
3. Build and grow your brand:
Mailerlite uses various features such as pop-up mailers, forms, and landing pages to manage and increase the number of subscribers coming to your page.
- Website builder
- Subscriber tracking and management
- Create Landing pages
- Oversee Embedded forms
- Create and manage Pop-ups
4. Email automation and marketing:
The primary function of this software is email marketing. Hence, Mailerlite displays some premium features to ensure smooth email marketing.
- Email automation
- Tagging feature for Interest groups
- Customization of the email to suit the brand
- Promotional pop-ups
There were other features that we liked other than the ones mentioned above.
- Affordable pricing and plans – The best part about Mailerlite is that its free for people with subscribers below 1000. For people above 1000, there are affordable plans set up, starting from $10 per month. Hence, it’s not going to cost you a thing to set up an account with them.
- Easy to use features – once your account is set up, you are provided with access to certain exclusive features such as landing pages, embedded forms, and pop-ups for your site.
- Free autoresponders and tagging features – Mailerlite brings in various premium automation features such as connecting with autoresponders, bulk tagging, etc for free, thus empowering people with good features for free.
- Neat dashboard – with complicated dashboard comes to a lot of confusion in navigation. Mailerlite has gone a step ahead by creating a highly interactive yet easily accessible neat dashboard for its users.
- Click maps – with this feature onboard, you can track how your newsletters are handled by the audience. it gives you a clear insight into the interaction between the audience and your email. Once you know what your audience tend to click more (whether its picture or video or link), you can improvise accordingly.
- Inclusion of A/B split testing feature – if you are unsure of how to create your newsletter in order for it to perform better, A/B split testing is going to make it easier for you to decide. It allows you to create two variations of your email and send the samples to a group of audience and track which email performs better.
In that way, figuring out the basic algorithm of marketing get easier for a user.
- Division/segmentation – this feature allows you to segregate your audience as per certain criteria set you, for example, location, age group, occupation, etc., this segregation of audience will allow you to send targeted emails to any particular group and reach gain views of more audience.
- RSS emails – with this feature, you can automatically send RSS emails to your audience anytime you update or add new content to your website. In that way, your audience will be kept updated every time you have something new to display on your site.
- Opens by location – this feature can be seen in your campaign reports tabs where you can see your audience engagement according to their geo-location.
This gives you an insight into building your target audience.
- Mobile/device optimization – another intriguing feature that is noticed about Mailerlite is the auto-optimization of the email for any mobile device such as smartphones or tablets. Since maximum people use a handheld device more than a laptop or desktop, Mailerlite seamlessly optimizes your email so that, irrespective of the device, your newsletter appears intact and perfect to be viewed by the audience.
- Custom handling and user permissions – this unique feature allow the main admin to create a hierarchy of team under him for proper management of the business or website. Either you can use the preset usernames or create your own custom job type. Each person can navigate through and access as much as the admin directs.
- Plugin/ integration feature – Mailerlite allows a person to integrate into various other apps in order to direct the audience from that app to your website. Some of the supported platforms are:
- Shopify
- WordPress
- Mailercheck
- Optinmonster
- Privy
- Zapier
- Ninja popups
- Squarespace
- WooCommerce
- Card
- Gleam
- Sendowl
- Easystore
- Kickbox
And the list goes on.
In case you are using some discreet platform, there is a high chance that it supports Mailerlite integration.
MailerLite Pros:
1. Wide range of available features:
From funneling to app integration, Mailerlite is a plethora of great features
2. Ease of access for first-time users:
Due to the neat and clean interface, navigating through various menu becomes easier. Due to this user-friendly navigation, Mailerlite is at a great advantage for first time users and bloggers.
3. Great tracking features:
From by-location tracking to segmentation and click mapping, Mailerlite offers premium features at your disposal. These features can greatly enhance your overall ability to map audience, grade them and send targeted emails according to their classification
4. Generally affordable:
If your subscriber count is less than 1000, you can use the premium features of Mailerlite for free. In case you have more than 1000 subscribers, you must pay a minimal amount of $10 and onwards in order to use the features.
Considering the benefits, the pricing quotes are not huge, hence, any small business owner or blogger can afford the features of Mailerlite.
5. Huge integration options:
The platforms that support Mailerlite are numerous. Starting from Facebook to Squarespace you can integrate the plugin and use it to send newsletters to your audience.
People having eCommerce shops in Shopify or WooCommerce can use this to their advantage and connect with their customers by sending them coupons, deals, and sales news, referral program announcements, flash sales, etc. such mail letters can bring in more customers to their site.
6. Target-based mailing:
you have the option to segregate your audience and send a targeted mail to groups that would ensure they view what is relevant to them. What’s more! With the A/B split testing you can even narrow it further down to which type of mailing your audience prefers. So, it is an added advantage.
7. Reliable support:
Team Mailerlite has some great support systems rolled out for its users. Your queries can be easily resolved by contacting them.
MailerLite Cons:
1. Lengthy approval process:
No doubt the features available are quite promising and free, but the process of approval is highly exhausting and pathetic. The process involves:
Mailerlite will ask you to fill in your details that include your website domain and mailing address
After filling in all the details you must wait until they approve your application, and that takes a lot of time and requires an immense amount of luck in order to get approved.
2. No approval issues:
A lot of users complain of non-approval of their application with no valid reason stated as why their application went unapproved. This creates an air of frustration for first-time users.
3. No proper back-end support:
It may happen that at any point a user may face some troubles regarding the software. Their sub-par back-end support sometimes doubles a user’s woes.
4. Limited features:
Although we have discussed of wide-range of features that Mailerlite has to offer, it is yet to come up with more advanced and reliable features that we see in other high-end or paid software of similar niche.
5. Lack of professional tools:
All the features mentioned above can empower a beginner, but the software lacks some professional tools like international tag funneling which can empower some moderate to high-end enterprises.
Although the question of affordability rises, yet the addition of certain features can make the software even more reliable.
Bottom line:
Even if the pros outweigh the cons by a definite margin, yet not being approved stands as the biggest threat for the software. We are yet to know the main reason behind such a pathetic approval process. It can be due to many facts based on our observations
- Account Detection as spam
- Before-hand prediction as not a profitable use for the entity.
- Incomplete application details
Although the third point is a valid reason for non-approval in any case, the team doesn’t reveal on what grounds they have rejected the certain application.
This creates an air of mystery and frustration due to which a lot of users have switched to other alternatives.
MailerLite Plans and pricing:
The plans and pricing of Mailerlite is quite straightforward.
For 1-1000 subscribers, the account is free and a total of 12000 emails can be sent per month. If subscribed for $10, the number of emails becomes unlimited for the user.
For up to 2500 subscribers, it is $15. From 2501 to 5000 its $30 and the pricing increases accordingly.
Mailerlite offers a trial period of 14 days for its premium features in case a user wishes to try first.
Can mailer lite be classified as the ultimate email marketing software?
Mailerlite established in the year 2010 and have done great progress owing to its amazing features and pricing. It certainly puts Mailerlite on top of such software, but it is too early to decide the winner.
What puts Mailerlite at an advantageous position is its user-friendly interface, some premium-rated features, and pricing, but its below-average back-end support and tedious approval process turn many customers to choose some of its rivals such as convertkit or MailChimp which also offers similar features and are quite customer-friendly.
Is mailerlite good enough for first-time users?
Mailerlite has a neat interface and dashboard which can be easily read and followed without support. Any first-time user can find navigating and understanding Mailerlite easy.
The features of Mailerlite are certainly game-changers, but there are a lot of other alternatives in the market which do provide better back-end support and comes with good features. It can be a hassle if your account gets suspended by Mailerlite without any reason. Chances of any such mishap are less with other software. A user can certainly try for approval from mailerlist as their features and quite promising as compared to other alternatives. But in case, the approval didn’t go through, the user can switch over to other and better alternatives available in the market.