Best Cheap Email Marketing Software

Different software tools serve different purposes. In some cases, you might be willing to take a financial hit in the short term to make your team's life easier in the long run. In others, the main goal is to turn a profit. Email marketing software belongs to the latter category. When faced with the challenge of selecting email marketing software, price is often a primary consideration.

After all, an email marketing campaign aims to make money. There's no sense in spending more than necessary to get the job done. While some businesses — usually the established ones — can afford to drop top dollar on the best of the best, most businesses are aiming for budget-friendly and reliable services with basic functionality.

To help you find the cheapest options on the market, we have created this dedicated criterion for you.

What Makes the Cheapest Email Marketing Software?

Our research process consists of rigorous evaluations and custom criteria that determine the best email marketing software in terms of everything resulting in our overall Best Picks. Through a mix of interviews, comprehensive reviews, and analysis, we can score each provider against a set of criteria with specific weight.

The pricing criterion is part of it where we look at, well, the cheapest pricing structures. The most cost-effective solutions are usually those that offer less advanced features and are thus optimal for businesses with basic needs.

But the price is not just the price you pay for functionalities, because email marketing software is usually directly related to the emails you can send per month and/or the number of contacts you can have.

Average cost per 100 contacts

Since pricing structures vary, it's challenging to quantify affordability without considering the size of the audience and contact list. Most providers will charge a different price for a user who has 500 contacts than for a user who has 5,000 contacts.

In order to make a fair comparison among email marketing software based on their pricing models, we have calculated the average cost per 100 contacts. We consider all pricing plans and use this metric to determine the most budget-friendly solutions. In the end, a provider might have a low basic plan, but the cost of that same plan gets exponentially higher with an increase in contact list size.

With the average price per 100 contacts in mind, we get a clear picture of how much the provider charges concerning any audience size.

Monthly pricing

We use the monthly price per plan as a comparable basis for evaluating prices. For each plan, we issue a score and then combine them into one total score. The base plan has the largest weighting with descending weighting for higher plans. While higher plans may lower the score, we also take into account the positive fact that multiple plans are available, giving the customer more flexibility.

If monthly rates are not available, we break the annual rate down to the monthly cost and factor this negatively due to the flexibility disadvantage.

Free plan

Nothing says "saving money" like a free plan. Many email marketing software offers some type of free plan to get you started. This is especially useful for small businesses or startups that want to explore the features without having to spend money upfront.

However, most free plans are limited in terms of features. It would be unwise to choose a provider long term based on its free plan since you will likely need more than what it offers as your business grows.

If you are just looking for a forever free software that not necessarily remains the cheap option once you upgrade, check our free plan ranking here. And if want to get the full experience without committing financially, look for free trials or demo plans instead, which almost all providers offer.

10 Best Cheap Email Marketing Software

How to Choose a Cheap Email Marketing Software for Your Needs

At the end of the day, selecting email marketing software is a highly individual decision that requires weighing both cost-effectiveness and performance. If pricing isn't your only concern, we suggest checking our overall Best Picks to help you identify the most well-rounded email marketing software on the market.

If the price is at the top of your mind, start by assessing your needs and deciding what features you need from the service. Based on this, you can then match the providers above with your requirements to find the cheapest software for you. You can also use our Comparison Tool to view different providers and what they can and can’t do for you side-by-side.

If you end up standing between two providers, you can always check if they offer an annual plan. These often provide a great opportunity to save a lot of money if you want to use the software in the long term. Here it is recommended to test the email marketing tools extensively before you commit.