Newsletters have been all the rage for media organizations — indeed, what initially proved to be among the most effective tools to engage your audience. And the market offers quite a variety of tools for this matter. 

Here is the list of the most reliable newsletter services selected by The Fix, the overview of their advantages, disadvantages and prices.  

MailChimp

MailChimp is the world’s leading marketing service with over 1 billion emails sent daily. And the primary newsletter tool for creating branded emails. 

MailChimp provides several pricing options, depending on your campaign’s capacity and interests. There is a forever free plan covering up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. Also, this plan includes basic templates, marketing CRM, behavioural targeting, custom domains, etc. However, there is no access to advanced features as well as to support channels — emails and chats in this plan. Also, the Mailchimp footer will be appearing in the emails.

Besides the free plan, MailChimp offers several paid options such as Essentials, Standard and Premium plans with a growing fee depending on the subscribers’ number and including features. 

Besides free and growing business plans, they offer a pay-as-you-go alternative. Instead of paying monthly regular, they provide a possibility to buy email credits as needed. This option might be the most suitable for clients with low-volume or conversely— with high-volume potentials.

Although MailChimp offers high-cost subscription plans, the service itself is simple and user-friendly providing everything you need to know and have, including an audience engagement tracking system; many branded features, diverse base of email templates etc. 

SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a young, mission-driven Parisian email marketing platform designed to the needs of low-budget growing businesses. The platform’s focus is on mass emails and SMS. Now the platform provides marketing tools to over 80,000 growing companies, sending around 30 million emails and SMS daily in more than 14 countries around the world. 

SendinBlue provides a generous free plan with unlimited contact storage, up to 9,000 emails a month and unlimited contacts. The free offer also includes advanced segmentation and more than 70 email templates.

For the paying customers there are several pricing options such as Lite, Essential, Premium, Enterprise as well as Pay-as-you-go plan starting at $25 to $65. The platform offers a fully-kitted, workflow-based automation feature; diverse set of modern template options (only on the Premium/Enterprise plans); SMS marketing tool, etc. 

However, now the system operates a limited number of support and integration options (Phone support, dedicated account manager, multi-user access, SSO & SAML, service Level Agreement (SLA) in the low-fee plans and has a limited number of a daily sending emails in the free plan – up to 300 emails.

Newsletter2Go 

Newsletter2Go is a young German email service with a mission to improve the quality of email marketing everywhere. The service is designed to serve small and middle-sized businesses. It offers templates with the drag-and-drop editor function for a content organization to create simple, smart and professional emails. Besides, their marketing software helps automatically identify the best-performing option for customers’ needs.

Newsletter2Go offers three different pricing options — Lite, Standard, and Pro. The price is determined by different features, but contrary to other systems, it depends on the number of emails sent per month, rather than numbers of subscribers.

Like the two above systems, Newsletter2Go provides a free plan with a coverage up to 1,000 emails per month. 

The Standard package provides the address book feature, a 1GB media library, the option to send files as email attachments, etc, while the PRO plan gives unlimited options. 

Newsletter2Go has a unique rewarding “Credit Payback” system. The idea of the rewarding concept is simple: the better your emails perform, the more credits you’ll receive. The credit payback is based on the open and clicks rates. If both open and click are above average for the industry, Newsletter2Go will credit with a portion of costs. 

Newsletter2Go is a young, but fast developing platform. So features like  — new template designs, email autoresponders, tools for recipient management, are being added all the time. Besides that the platform provides high data protection standards that are complying with the European data protection regulations. 

However, the service still operates only with basic autoresponder features and has no unlimited pricing plan – one would have to change the plans as the business grows. 

GetResponse

GetResponse is a Polish-based company with a solid reputation in over 180 countries claiming to engage over 1 billion subscribers every month. The platform provides dozens of template designs and user-friendly newsletter tools as well as many advanced options. Besides email marketing, GetResponse specializes in A/B testing (a user experience research methodology), custom landing pages; comprehensive design testing to video email marketing.

GetResponse offers four different pricing options with different features starting from $25 to $145 per month. The company does not have a free plan, only a free trial of 30 days. Meanwhile, their services are reasonably priced and they do offer a generous discount to NGOs.

Compared to previously mentioned services, GetResponse provides the most powerful automation tools aiming to help segment the subscribers’ list automatically. The services has a user-friendly design and spam testing tools.

Constant Contact 

Constant Contact has been providing email marketing services since 1995. The company is committed to helping small businesses and nonprofits succeed. Constant Contact describes itself as a powerful, result-driven platform with modern template designs, easy drag-and-drop editing tools, unlimited emails, etc. 

One of this platform’s biggest advantages is the utter simplicity of email marketing processes. 

The company provides a free trial month to get acquainted with Constant Contact’s services. However, to go beyond the inbox and discover all the features, you need to pay.  They offer 4 pricing options with different coverage plans from 20$ to 90$ per month. Constant Contact also offers 6 and 12 months prepayment discounts as well as discounts for non-profit organizations. 

The service constantly refreshes feature tools and adds new email options to devise list to automation and recurring newsletters. 

Revue

Revue is a relatively young service launched in 2015. The company is based in the Netherlands. This is a professional editorial newsletter service for writers and publishers. Revue is designed to make personalized newsletters just in a few clicks. The service also helps build a loyal audience, keep track of articles’ popularity, manage subscribers, control the workflow, implement a custom design, etc. 

Revue offers one pricing option and a free plan for up to 50 subscribers. However there is no such thing as free trial with this service.

Pro is the only available paid option, it costs between $5 to $135 per month depending on the number of subscribers. You can customize your newsletter by setting your own color scheme, use a custom email address and domain and add unlimited additional team members in the pricing plan. Besides, it has a Publisher plan, but the costs for the Publisher plan depend on many things.

Revue also allowes to send paid newsletters with a 6% transaction fee.

Substack

Substack combines both web and newsletter publishing for content creators. The company is a startup aiming to make the publishing process as simple and fast as possible. With its help, creators can launch a newsletter campaign and send the first email just in under 5 minutes.

An interesting feature of Substack platform is the opportunity to monetize newsletter by asking loyal readers for support. Publishing on the platform is absolutely free, and there is no limitation for publishing free before starting asking the audience for support. Once you are starting using this business model Substack is asking for a 10% cut from charging subscribers. 

The company also offers user-friendly tools to manage an email list, various newsletters’ templates, analytics of readers engagement and activity as well as customer support service. 

Bonus mention: the open Google Doc

If you can’t pick any of the above but still want to get your content out there – consider just opening up a Google Doc and making it accessible to anyone with the link. 

A growing number of mailing maniacs are opting for this simple solution, including Not A Newsletter, which focuses on email/ newsletter hacks and solutions.

The only downside is the analytics, which are not custom-made for such docs. You can try to get around it by tracking the page or social media post that you use to distribute the newsletter, but this is a very limited workaround and you might want to use one of the tools above to send your link out!