The Best BULK Email Marketing Tools! Full Comparison!
Email marketing is an incredibly effective marketing channel. When applied professionally, businesses across the board can reach a very high 15%-18.6% average conversion rate with an average ROI of 36%!! This number is nothing short than fantastic. It means that for every $1 dollar you spend on email marketing, you can earn $36! However, clearly an essential key to good return on your email marketing investment, is lowering your costs.
Read the article:
Cold Email Deliverability COMPLETE Guide (2023)
If by now you have already shopped for the best free bulk email marketing platform you can use, you may have noticed that the more emails you want to send, the more expensive it gets. Yup, just when you thought that you will end up paying only $8 per month to send 1,000 emails a day, or somehow manage to keep that free plan forever, you realized that those email marketing platforms are not that enthusiastic about it. If you want to send 10,000 emails per day, it’s time to re-think your search. Apparently, it is not only the best email marketing platform you are looking for, but the best bulk emailing software with the best pricing plans you can find.
Jump to table
- The best BULK email marketing platforms with FREE plans
- The best email marketing platform to use to send 1,000 emails per month
- How much will it cost you to send 10,000 emails per month?
- How much will it cost you to send 100,000 emails per month?
- How much does it cost to store 100,000 contacts on email marketing platforms?
What is the best bulk mailing software?
If you are looking for the best free bulk emailing tool to use, comparisons you will find on the web will probably not give you a clear answer. Blogs that compare email marketing platforms usually overlook a very important point: Bulk emailing requires very specific factors that are significantly different from those of conventional email marketing.
The difference between bulk emailing and conventional email marketing
There are two types of businesses that heavily rely on email marketing:
In the first type are businesses that need highly advanced automation features.
The second type on the other hand, consists of businesses that are mostly interested in mass mailing solutions and effective methods of reaching out to as many potential leads as possible. Many times, by means of cold email campaigns.
A good example of the first type are Shopify store owners. Advanced tracking and automation are crucial to their success or the structure of their sales-funnels. Quick auto-responder like a “win-back” email or a proper “abandoned cart” reminder, can save a sale or help maintain instant, targeted, and constant communication with the site’s visitors.
But other businesses, for example financial services & lenders, medical billing companies or affiliate marketers, couldn’t care less about deep automation capacities.
In their email marketing strategy, there are no carts to abandoned. Instead, those businesses are always in the need of effective mass mailing solutions.
What are the best tools to use for B2B cold campaigns?
When clients of the second type reach out to us and ask what are the best tools they can use for cold email campaigns or B2B mass emailing, their first two questions are always:
A. How to ensure email deliverability and reach people’s inboxes?
B. How much will bulk emailing cost per monthly sending?
As far as how to ensure bulk emailing deliverability, we have widely covered this topic on previous posts. This article however focuses on the question of mass-mailing pricing.
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How much does it cost to send mass emails?
In order to answer this question in accordance with the way email marketing platforms structure their pricing models, and since each user has a different size of lists and different desired amount of sending, we divided our survey according to the price you will pay to send a specific amount of emails per month. First, we mapped out all the free options and ranked the email marketing platforms that allow free plans of 1,000 emails per month. Then we listed all the paid options for 1K emails per month. Going forward we ranked your best return on your dollar when sending 10,000 emails per month and 100,000 respectively. In addition when looking at above 50K emails a month, we made a special table and listed the platforms that charge per contact and not per sending.
Therefore you can now see for yourself what will be the best email marketing platform to send 1,000 emails per month, 10,000- 15,000 emails per month, and what will be the best email marketing to send 100,000 emails per month.
Let's jump right into it!
If you don’t feel like scrolling down and you just want a straight answer, here’s a little spoiler for you, it is pretty shocking honestly: Out of all platforms, no matter the size of your lists and the number of emails that you want to send, the best bulk emailing tool you can use is a self-hosted email platform. The platform is yours and ALWAYS FREE regardless of the number of emails you send or contacts you store. It is unlimited, it has all the important features, there are no restrictions and it is way simper to install than you may think.
Scroll down to know which platform is #2
The second-best option, as you will be able to see for yourself, is Mailjet. Hands down, it is hard to beat free 6,000 emails per month, let alone the fact that Mailerlite offers a second tier plan with 15,000 emails per month for only $15! And it doesn’t end there. For only $35/mo you can send as many as 50K emails! No other conventional email platform that we know introduces such compelling offers! Indeed highly attractive in terms of bulk email marketing platforms.
To see the full comparison, continue reading.
The best BULK email marketing platforms with FREE plans
The best email marketing platform to send 1,000 emails per month
All the platforms above are MASS mailing platforms that ALSO offer FREE plans. From this point on we will list the best bulk emailing platforms with paid basic plans. Yes, we did not include excellent platforms like Klaviyo or Omnisend as they are designed to provide sophisticated integration and automation features, that are usually not a high-priority for mass-mailers.
Moving forward, when looking at 1,000- 500,000 emails per month, the pricing plans start to cost money.
With one exception: Acelle Mail. We can’t stretch this enough: how compelling is the option of an email marketing software that has absolutely no costs and no sending limits!? Almost too good to be true. But it is true. You can have your own self-hosted email software, with which you can send literally millions of e-mails every month. No one will limit you sending (unless you spam people which we highly recommend to avoid doing), and you don’t have any extra costs as you increase the sending volume.
Want to see how much you will save? Just keep reading!
* Activecampaign, Constant Contact and Getresponse charge per contacts and not per sending
Compare the best mass mailing platform to send ten thousand emails a month:
* Activecampaign, Constant Contact, Mailerlite and Getresponse charge per contacts and not per sending
How much will it cost you to send 100,000 emails per month?
As we start looking at high volume of e-mail sending per month, the platforms’ pricing plans can be divided into two models:
A. Platforms that charge based on the number of emails that you can send per month.
B. Platforms that charge based on the number of contacts that you can store on their system. One again, your best option is Acelle Mail, where non of that matters. Reviewing the pricing models of all bulk emailing platforms, we came up with the following conclusion:
Sending 100K emails per month with platforms that charge per email sending:
| Rank | Platform | Price/ Month | Email/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Acelle Mail | $0 | 100K |
| #2 | Sendgrid | $34.95 | 100K |
| #3 | Mailjet | $35 | 100K |
| #4 | Mailgun | $75 | 100K |
| #5 | ConvertKit | $100 | 100K |
| #6 | Sendinblue | $124 | 100K |
| #7 | Drip | $154 | 100K |
How much does it cost to store 100,000 contacts on email marketing platforms?
Storing 100K contacts per month with platforms that charge per contact:
If you prefer a “per-contact” pricing model, the email marketing platforms below are the ones to consider. The prices look significantly higher than the “per-sending” pricing model, and frankly usually they are, but keep in mind that those who charge per-sending, will also limit the amount of contacts you can upload (with the ecxeption of platofrms like Sendinblue and Mailgun.
| Rank | Platform | Price/ Month | Contacts |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Acelle Mail | $0 | 100K |
| #2 | Mailerlite | $205.00 | 100K |
| #3 | Constant Contact | Above $300 | 100K |
| #4 | Getresponse | $539.00 | 100K |
| #5 | Activecampaign | $549.00 | 100K |
| #6 | ConvertKit | $566.00 | 100K |
| #7 | Drip | $1,199.00 | 100K |
