MailerLite Review, Save Time with Simple Email Marketing

I work for a magazine publishing company with a very small staff. We use email marketing to let our advertisers know what is coming up in future issues, enticing them to advertise. There is no way our sales team can personally call and visit each and every one of their hundreds of clients, so email marketing is extremely important to us.

When I first started at this company, they tried to put me in charge of our Constant Contact account. I know its supposed to be easy, but it wasnt. I was extremely overwhelmed by my choices (400 templates? Really?) and I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just learning how to use the program. I nearly had a mental breakdown.

Thankfully they reassigned that task to the art director, who, in her infinite wisdom of PhotoShop and InDesign, created the most beautiful template of our very own to use each month.

Im not a stupid person. But Constant Contact got the best of me!

There had to be an easier way to send out mass emails from a third party account. I finally found MailerLite, and my email marketing stress melted away like a chocolate bar left out in the sun.

MailerLite Functionality

Their slogan, Simple Email Marketing for Small Business, is a six-word godsend to the smart people out there that dont want to take a class on how to use email marketing software.

It takes a special kind of person to find actual fun in creating marketing emails. I didnt think I was that personbut MailerLite is, actually, fun! And you dont even need any HTML skills to make something that looks great. All you need to be able to do is drag and drop, and maybe some photo resizing skills, but nothing too major.

What I really love about it is the simple, clean design of the interface. There are no fancy graphics, loud colors, or lots of buttons to distract you from what you really want to docreate an email newsletter. Its also really easy to find out the percentage of people who opened your email and how many clicked through it. All the info is right there after you log in.

Creating your email newsletter is simple, too. They even have a bunch of examples in their gallery for you to look at (and copy if you are creatively challenged). The set up looks like this:

All of your content blocks are right there on the left hand side of your screen. I like that it uses an icon to show you exactly what each choice looks like. All you have to do is drag and drop. And if you dont like it, the boxes are simple to delete or to shift around. On the right hand side of your screen are your design elementscolors, borders, and fonts. In the middle is your email newsletter. So simple.

There is even a video for those of you who learn better by watching. It’s a measly four minutes longthats how easy this program is!

Getting Started with MailerLite

A yearly membership is $99 (a year membership to Constant Contactis $180, in case you were wondering). For less than $10 a month, you can create great looking email newsletters and get analyzed reports on how well they worked.

MailerLite has charts to show you how many people opened your message, how many bounced, and the percentage of people who unsubscribed. You can also see who opened your email and who clicked through it, in case you wanted to send them a follow up message.

One of my favorite reports is the graph showing opens and clicks over time. If you sent your email out first thing Monday morning, how long did it take recipients to open your email? Its easy to import emails into MailerLite, and the program automatically handles duplicates, bounced emails, and unsubscribers. Thats three more things you can scratch off your to-do list.

Freelancers are busy people without a lot of support staff to handle their marketing efforts. They want the most efficient, easy to use, no-brainer tools out there. All it took to sell me on MailerLite was a demo trial. From one busy, overwhelmed writer who doesnt want to take lots of time out of her day to learn something new, I say give this easy email marketing tool a shot. You wont be sorry.