The Ultimate Mailerlite Review Checklist

MailerLite is an email marketing software that was launched in 2010. Unlike other email marketing software MailerLite has placed all of its bets on simplicity and ease-of-use. Since launching the company has grown to gain trust from over 600,000 small and medium-sized businesses. It’s vibrant and straightforward design can be attributed to its youthful staff.

Despite being a simple tool, it does have some advanced features and integration capabilities with third-party software. With all the email marketing software available today, it may be hard to identify the best one for your business but. If you’re looking for an affordable and functional email marketing tool, then MailerLite is worth consideration. Keep reading to find out how you can apply it to your business.

MailerLite Key Features

There are four categories in which MailerLite fulfills its mandate as an email marketing tool. They include;

• Integration
• Managing your mailing list
• Running campaigns
• Market automation
• Building forms

Running Campaigns

Within MailerLite’s dashboard, you’ll find the campaigns option. This feature allows you to create a campaign for any event such as webinars, blog posts, product launches, and many more. Below are some of the campaigns you can select based on the event you would like to promote:

1. Auto-resend – This is an inbuilt feature that allows you to resend your campaign emails to people who didn’t open them. It also allows you to repurpose the content and the subject line to get the attention of different subscribers based on their interests.
2. A/B Split-testing – This feature allows you to test the effectiveness and conversion rates of two email subject lines and formats.
3. RSS Campaign – If you run a blog, you’ll love the RSS campaign since it automatically updates your mailing list when you publish a new post. 
4. Regular Campaign – If your campaign doesn’t fall in RSS, split-testing, or auto-resend ding categories, you can get creative in the option of the regular campaign.

There are four types of editors that you can use;

• New Drag-and-drop editor
• Classic drag-and-drop editor
• Rich-text editor
• Custom HTML editor (available only in the paid package)

You can easily embed Facebook posts, drag images, videos, and signatures, all without leaving the editor. There’s no limit to the size of images you can import. These editors also feature the track-changes, similar to that in Microsoft word, that helps you take note of the changes you made to the original email.

You will need to have some knowledge in HTML for you to use the custom HTML editor. Also, if you don’t want to use the editor, you can always use the available templates. Within campaigns, you’ll find a basic reporting and analysis that gives some insights into the ROI of your campaigns. 

Managing Your Mailing List

MailerLite has two ways of categorizing your subscriber list, segments, and groups. Think of it as the tagging capability in other email marketing software. However, Segments and groups are slightly different. Segments are created based on your predefined criteria or rules. Groups are exactly as tags where you manually assign subscribers to specific groups based on several factors. 

Creating and updating of groups can be done manually or through an automation workflow. Segments and groups allow you to send personalized campaigns, improving your click-through rate, subscriber engagement, and conversion rate.

Besides the segmentation of subscribers, there are three more options to manage your list effectively;

1. Fields – The information that your subscribers filled during registration is categorized into fields. These fields include email, name, country, and company. You can also create new fields for easy categorization of the list. MailerLite also allows you to upload your mailing list in CSV format, whereby it will adopt the fields in the CSV file.
2. Stats – The stats page gives you information about the average open rate per campaign, average click rate per campaign, subscribe rate per month and unsubscribe rate per month. This is a convenient way to track the success of your campaigns. 
3. Clean-up inactive – If you have subscribers who don’t open your emails, they are listed in the clean-up inactive page where you can decide to unsubscribe them or resend your campaigns using a different approach.
4. Bounced emails – Besides some cases where subscribers fail to open your emails, there are situations where they don’t receive the email since their inbox is full, or they made an error when inputting their email address. There’s a bounce folder where you can decide what to do with the emails.

Form Builder

Subscriber engagement can’t get any better since the form builder allows you to create different forms ranging from subscription forms, landing pages, and popups. 

1. Forms

The form builder allows you to select the subscriber group the form appears to, name the form and design it based on its functions. However, there are no templates; you will have to create the forms from scratch.

2. Popups

The form builder also allows you to create popups to invite new visitors to your mailing list by offering a freebie, promising a newsletter, and providing other lead magnets. Luckily, unlike the embedded forms, there are popup templates that you can work with. Through the settings, you can alter the behavior of the popup.

3. Landing pages

If you’d like to create a landing page for your course, eBook, webinar, or new product, MailerLite has made it possible by including templates as well as a landing page editor. And that’s not all; there are several styling options and ways to optimize the pages for search engines, both on the free and paid plans.

4. Marketing Automation

Unlike most email marketing software, MailerLite’s automation process is very straightforward. You have to create a workflow and define the trigger. Automations can be created based on some triggers such as subscribing to a list, unsubscribing, and clicking of links. Automation is also essential in setting up autoresponders for common queries or based on the subscriber’s activities.

5. Integration

MailerLite can also be easily integrated into third-party software from social media accounts like Facebook, CMS, like WordPress, to business solutions like Zendesk. Since they have been operational for at least ten years, they have built credibility to integrate to third-party software. And your emails are less likely to be flagged as spam by Email Service Providers like Gmail and Yahoo.

Other Features

• MailerLite is multilingual. It supports up to 8 languages, allowing it to accommodate people from different regions.
• It provides eCommerce tracking specifically for Shopify and Woocommerce, but it’s not advanced enough for other eCommerce platforms.

Pros

• MailerLite has a free version that gives you access to advanced features, unlike most email marketing software. In the free plan, you can send emails to 100 subscribers, create forms, landing pages, popups, access click maps, set up autoresponders, and create automation workflows.
• The dashboard is not overwhelming. They have made it easy to navigate through the various options. The drag-and-drop editor is also smooth, and all the features you need to design the emails and forms are within the dashboard, you don’t have to switch pages.
• Automation – Automation is key to an email marketing campaign, and MailerLite makes it available even for the free plans. You can easily set-up an RSS update, set-up autoresponders, and even automate sales as your subscriber list grows. 
• The Auto-resend feature is also convenient in reaching out to subscribers who don’t open your emails and don’t click your links. You can even set it up to send a message to the specific subscriber to have a deeper connection with them and build trust.
• MailerLite has different user levels with different roles. This allows you to have different teams work on various aspects of your marketing campaign within the same platform.
• They also have very active customer support through live chat and emails.  
• Their segments and groups system is a bit different, but it’s highly effective in personalized marketing.

Cons

• MailerLite has a rigorous approval process with little to no feedback upon rejection.
• They don’t provide customer support via phone calls.
• The automation and tracking capabilities are very basic; they are not advanced for comprehensive campaigns.
• There are no templates for embedded forms, and those available for landing pages and popups are quite limited.
• You can’t use a custom domain.
• Testing is limited to the email content and subject line; you can’t test the design, or conduct spam testing.
• Your account can be closed as a result of low click rates and subscription rates.
• MailerLite’s emails tend to go to the subscriber’s spam folders, lowering the click rate and conversion rates. 

MailerLite Pricing 

Free – This plan allows you to have up to 1000 subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails per month. The following features are not in this package;

• Live support.
• Templates
• Popups 
• Click mapping
• Auto-resending of campaigns
• Sending emails based on time-zones

Paid – All the features discussed above are available in this package. 

Number of Subscribers	Cost per month
1000	$10
2500	$15
5000	$30
10,000	$50
15,000	$75
50,000	$210
100,000	$360

Final Thoughts

Since MailerLite is a bit limited in terms of automation and customizing campaigns, it works great for beginners since it has an easy to use interface and a free version with some premium features. It’s an affordable email marketing tool that offers more functionality than a basic newsletter service. As discussed above, these features include automation, reporting, templates, split-testing, and contact segmentation. It’s also great for bloggers, and content marketers, for it has an inbuilt RSS campaign and integration with most of the WordPress plugins.

Affiliate Disclaimer: I hope you liked our MailerLite review. Please note that some of the links inside this article may be affiliate links to MailerLite. That means that if you click on one of the links and sign up, I may be compensated for it. If you do happen to click, we really appreciate it! Any money we make keeps this site running smoothly and allows us to keep writing these high-quality reviews.