MailerLite Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

With so many alternatives for email marketing software available today, you need to choose the right one wisely based on your company’s needs.

Whether you’re new to email marketing or searching for a more user-friendly and reasonably priced solution, you ought to weigh your options.

MailerLite is a well-known email marketing solution that you may have heard of. With capabilities like newsletter production, website and landing page construction, and e-commerce product selling, it is one of the best and most user-friendly email marketing tools available.

In this article, we’ll look at MailerLite’s advantages and disadvantages, features, and top alternatives to help you decide if it’s the right fit for your marketing requirements.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for MailerLite

SMB Guide’s overall rating for MailerLite is 8.2 out of 10.

MailerLite is distinguished by its competitively priced plans and special features, like its integration with Facebook for sophisticated targeting and its capacity to offer paid or digital subscriptions. 

The platform also offers a feature-rich free forever plan and affordable paid options that allow for unlimited monthly email sends.

Here’s the detailed breakdown of the scoring for each factor:

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	9
Marketing Automation Capabilities	8
Email Builder	8.5
Personalization & Customization	8
Campaign Performance Tracking	7.5
User Interface and User Experience	8
Integrations and Compatibility	8
Customer Support	8.5
SMB Guide Rating	8.2

In this review of MailerLite, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating the email marketing software.

Pricing & Plans

MailerLite offers three different plans: Free, Growing Business, and Advanced. The platform bases its pricing on subscribers.

MailerLite also offers a custom plan for enterprises with bigger and unique requirements.

Free

This is the basic plan that offers all the essential and basic features offered by the platform.

Price

• Free

Features

• 12,000 monthly emails
• 1 user
• 24/7 Email & Chat Support for the first 30 days
• Drag and drop email editor
• Email automation builder
• Websites
• 10 landing pages
• Signup forms and pop-ups
• 24/7 Email and chat Support for 30 days

Who it’s for: Solopreneurs or users who want to test the platform before committing to a paid plan.

Growing business

This plan offers unlimited monthly emails and unlocks certain advanced features not included in the free plan.

Price

• $10 per month
• $108 per year

Features

• Unlimited monthly emails
• 3 users
• 24/7 Email support
• Digital products
• Unlimited templates
• Dynamic email campaigns
• Auto resend campaign
• Unlimited pages
• Unsubscribe page builder

Who it’s for: Beginners, small businesses with basic requirements and are trying to grow their business.

Advanced

The Advanced plan unlocks maximum capabilities offered by the platform with unlimited emails, and users.

Price

• $20 per month
• $216 per year

Features

• Unlimited monthly emails
• Unlimited users
• 24/7 Live chat & email support
• Custom HTML editor
• Promotion pop-ups
• Multiple triggers in automations
• Preference center
• Facebook integration

Who it’s for: Companies that are more committed to email marketing.

Enterprise

This unique price structure is intended for businesses with more than 100,000 contacts. In addition to limitless monthly emails and users, this platform offers round-the-clock email and live chat assistance.

Price

• Custom pricing

Features

• Unlimited monthly emails
• Unlimited user seats
• 24/7 live chat & email support
• Dedicated success manager
• Dedicated IP & deliverability consultation
• Onboarding consultation and training
• Account audit and performance improvements

Who it’s for: Businesses and enterprises with longer lists and more sophisticated requirements.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

MailerLite offers several automation capabilities, making email marketing easier for businesses. The automation options are quite basic, making the program excellent for beginners and small-business owners.

One of the platform’s unique features is its selection of pre-made workflows. These workflows operate as the framework for automations that use certain triggers based on actions or durations of time.

MailerLite offers several workflows for various things raging from basic welcome emails to abandoned cart emails. The platform also allows users to create unique workflows, but the availability of workflow templates streamlines the process and helps in saving time.

You can generate distinct email series based on several triggers with MailerLite’s email automation journey builder.

Email automation with multiple triggers, which is restricted to experienced users, allows users to set up several triggers for a single or multiple email workflow.

MailerLite offers six choices for automated triggers including when a new subscriber joins a group, when a member clicks on one of the links, when a subscriber fills out a form, when a field is updated, anniversary or certain dates, and the exact match of a specific date.

Additionally, you get pre-made email series templates that are centered on five distinct use cases: e-commerce, events and special discounts, lead nurturing, promotions, retarget subscribers, and welcome emails.

Email Builder

MailerLite offers great email-building capabilities. With MailerLite, you can create a variety of email formats, including eCommerce offers with countdown timers, product blocks, polls, and quizzes.

You can choose the builder best suited to your requirements. The platform offers three options for email building including an editor with drag-and-drop functionality, a rich-text editor, and an exclusive HTML editor for members of the Advanced plan.

There are many customization options available with MailerLite’s excellent drag-and-drop email editor. You can use its HTML editor to code your email, make a visually appealing email, or choose an email that is only text-based.

However, you must first authenticate and verify your domain through your account settings in order to access the email and form builders.

The platform offers pre-made templates and blocks available for headers, buttons, quizzes, surveys, and footers. It also enables you to send your recipient the most recent email content by retrieving content from your RSS feed, such as podcasts, blog posts, news, or videos.

Additionally, you can set the visibility of specific email content blocks so the recipient that you selected can see them.

MailerLite allows you to produce interactive emails with 5 AMP email widgets including Quiz, Accordion, Image Carousel, Forms, and Basic Event invitation, and embed YouTube video when you attach a video URL to an email with MailerLite.

The platform lets you easily fetch photos and GIFs using integrations with Unsplash and Giphy and even offers image editing software, so you can alter these photos.

It also lets you integrate Facebook and Instagram posts in addition to social buttons. This unique feature can particularly help eCommerce businesses to cross-promote content and exhibit products and social media material via email.

Personalization & Customization

MailerLite’s platform offers segmentation and personalization.

While there is no built-in CRM solution, you can make use of the options that are available to segment your audience based on a variety of variables such as region and age. You need to add contacts before you can group them by importing your subscribers.

MailerLite enables you to add dynamic content blocks to your campaigns and customize your subject lines to offer your clients with more individualized deals.

You can also exclude specific subscribers and choose who can view your material with a variety of choices in MailerLite.

With MailerLite, you can create highly focused campaigns by sending emails to particular audience segments. You can create audience segments and when creating your campaign, you can select which segments to include or leave out or use Filters under the Advanced tab to target recipients.

Campaign Performance Tracking

MailerLite’s reports and analytics are useful for monitoring the performance of your webpage, subscribers, and emails. However, MailerLite lacks a dedicated analytics page and offers limited reporting capabilities. 

You will need to send your email and then monitor its performance in order to receive access to detailed reports for every campaign.

To obtain a summary of a campaign, you will have to check your dashboard and select the Campaigns option where you can see the click-through rate, open rate, and click-to-open rate (CTOR).

Additionally, MailerLite offers eCommerce tracking but just for Shopify and Woocommerce sites.

User Interface and User Experience

MailerLite is an easy-to-use platform for beginners. It has a sleek, contemporary dashboard that is generally quite straightforward. The platform does an excellent job of guiding users through the process, regardless of what you’re trying to build.

When you create an email, it asks you first what kind of email you want to send, then it asks you to fill in all the campaign details, after which you can add content and schedule the email to go out at a specific time.

You can find everything you require easily on MailerLite’s well-organized dashboard. The MailerLite dashboard features an intuitive layout with a left-side menu that makes it simple to navigate and access a variety of programs and builders, as well as customize themes.

The platform provides quick and simple navigation, ensuring a uniform user experience for every user. MailerLite has two modes: light and dark. The auto option will automatically adjust to your default choices.

The interface can be customized to the user’s preset preferences by allowing them to switch between light and dark modes or auto mode on their dashboard.

You can focus on creating compelling content and connecting with your target audience by using MailerLite’s dashboard and navigation tools, which make managing email campaigns, lists, and automations easier.

Integrations and Compatibility

MailerLite offers over 140 integrations with prominent third-party software including WordPress, Shopify, Stripe, and social media networks.

These integrations allow users to increase the scope of their email marketing campaigns by automatically syncing their website to MailerLite, enabling payment for online subscriptions, syncing with Facebook segments, and more.

Some of the featured integrations of MailerLite include:

• BigCommerce
• Canva
• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• WordPress
• MailerCheck
• Stripe
• Zapier
• Facebook Audiences

Apart from the more than a hundred apps and integrations, it features an exclusive API and developers can easily integrate with other apps to increase their capabilities.

MailerLite also has a mobile app, which is currently only available for iOS. You can track the statistics of your campaign and generate and schedule mailings using the mobile application.

Customer Support

In general, MailerLite offers 24/7 email assistance for free plan users and live chat help for subscription plans. However, it doesn’t offer phone assistance which may be an issue for some users who want more personalized support methods.

The live chat assistance has a short response time and offers informative responses.

The platform offers different support options for different subscription plans. With the Free plan, you can get 24/7 assistance through live chat and email for the first 30 days only, while the Growing Business plan allows 24/7 Email Support and the Advance plan allows 24/7 assistance via email and live chat.

The platform also offers MailerPro, a service for consumers who require more support or faster response times, for an additional $100 per month. This service offers faster response times via email and live chat, and a dedicated MailerLite manager to help with performance analysis and campaign planning.

The platform also offers self-help resources including a knowledge base, academy, and community to help users discover answers to their questions.  The unique feature of asking the community via its community forum is useful for strategy-related queries.

These resources offer helpful advice and information that helps users get the most out of the platform and fix any problems they may run into.

MailerLite — Unique Features

Want to know what makes MailerLite stand out above the rest? Here are some unique features the platform provides that I loved.

Landing page builder

MailerLite features an intuitive landing page builder that is ideal for beginners. It offers a big template collection of well-constructed landing pages that appear professional and trendy.

The editor is intuitive, with a simple drag-and-drop interface. To personalize your selected template, simply tap on the elements you want to change and alter text blocks, images, buttons, and other elements.

You can also change the URL of your landing page if you have the Growing Business or Advanced plan.

Although MailerLite performs a decent job of guiding customers through the domain connection procedure, it does need manual DNS management and CNAME updates, which may be too complicated for some users.

List management

MailerLite doesn’t have a limit on the amount of lists that you can have. You can also create groups and segments for your lists.

The Groups list is static where contacts can be manually added or removed. They are not subject to any form of requirement and you can add one subscriber to various groups.

On the other hand, subscribers must fulfill at least one of the requirements for each segment to be included in the Segments list. They are then immediately included in the section after the rule is fulfilled.

This enables you to send communications that are specifically tailored to the contacts for whom they are most relevant.

What the Experts Say About MailerLite

MailerLite has a 4.6 rating on G2 with 921 reviews and a 4.7 rating on Capterra with over 2,058 votes. It is praised for its user-friendliness and customer support.

My overall experience with MailerLite has been positive so far, and has allowed me to streamline my email marketing efforts and achieve impressive results. Their response times have been consistently prompt, and their willingness to assist with any queries or issues is commendable.

Sian, Event Manager – Verified Capterra review

In addition to its low price relative to its features, what I appreciate most about MailerLite is its customer service. As I mentioned earlier, I have yet to come across a problem that someone on the MailerLite team wasn’t able to help me solve. I love that they use screenshots to show me exactly how I can fix a problem. Also, they are FAST. I think the longest I have ever had to wait for an answer to one of my questions is an hour. More often, they respond in ten minutes or less. They are amazing!

Nicole, Owner – Verified Capterra review

MailerLite Alternatives

MailerLite provides high-quality email marketing solutions at an affordable price. However, it may not be the greatest option for every organization, as each has unique requirements.

If you have more specific requirements, check out the best MailerLite alternatives.

Here are three good MailerLite options you should look at.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a comprehensive marketing platform that enables you to manage and communicate with your customers, prospects, and other interested parties. It focuses on excellent contact management, visually appealing emails, unique automated workflows, and advanced data analysis.

Start your free trial of Mailchimp today

GetResponse

GetResponse is a feature-rich online marketing platform that provides a variety of tools to help businesses plan, organize, and implement successful digital marketing campaigns.

The platform’s features can help you communicate with your audience, create your brand, increase website traffic, and finally grow your business.

Try GetResponse for free

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides a wide range of email marketing alternatives. This platform differentiates itself as one of the solutions with exceptional automation capabilities. They are not only simple to use, but also extremely effective.

ActiveCampaign stands out as one of the platforms with smarter automations as the possibilities offered are far more extensive than in MailerLite.

Sign up for your free trial of ActiveCampaign

Other options: Best MailerLite alternatives

Getting Started with MailerLite

MailerLite is an easy-to-use email marketing tool with several capabilities.  It is feature-rich, powerful, dependable, and offers excellent value for money.

The software is ideal for meeting your email marketing demands, particularly for small firms and beginners. Its ease of use and simplicity make it ideal for getting started with email marketing, picking up the fundamentals, making use of the vast knowledge base, and maintaining audience engagement.

Sign up for MailerLite for free today!

FAQs

Related reading:

• MailerLite vs. Mailchimp
• MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign
• MailerLite vs. Kit