MailerLite Review

This is my honest review of MailerLite. Full disclosure, if you choose to sign up with them I do get a credit to my account.

As a blogger I know that mail marketing is really important because its the one thing you own.

Google can change it’s algorithm and one morning you wake up and your traffic is down 20% because you lost your rankings for some of your top posts.

That is a little extreme, but I’ve heard of worse happening because of a Google algorithm shift.

I remember one year that Google decided to do a big update right before the holidays and my Q4 was not so cheery.

I was just glad they waited until after Thanksgiving.

Or, Pinterest changes their algorithm and poof, your pins aren’t bringing you nearly the traffic they once were.

This happened and hit a lot of bloggers hard. Yours truly felt it too but luckily I was only getting a lot of traffic from one pin and the rest was from Google.

Don’t even get me started on what social media like Facebook and Instagram (looking at you Meta – or whatever Facebook is calling itself these days).

I quit Instagram back after the 2019 algorithm shift when growth became a trickle and a lot more creators quit it in 2022 when they were losing more followers than they were gaining.

E-mail on the other hand is yours.

No one can decide to stop showing your emails to your subscriber so they can sell more ad space.

No one algorithm can decide that since your evergreen content has not been updated recently enough it is probably not all that relevant.

Can someone please tell a great chocolate chip cookie recipe doesn’t become outdated?

E-mail is your direct line of communication between you and your audience that no one can take away from you.

I really can’t stress that enough!

Email Providers – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Now, comes the big question.

Which email service provider do you use?

I used to use MailChimp because it was free for up to 500 subscribers.

Overtime though it became more and more irritating to use and dropped some of it’s good features – at least for the free version but maybe paid as well.

After a while I couldn’t take it anymore so I decided to switch.

I had my eyes on one day being name like Convert Kit because of their option for more complex email sequences.

Though as a small blogger at the time I couldn’t afford the price tag that came with it so it was little more than a pipe dream.

At the time there was no free option. Then later it was 100 subscribers but I had already out grew that. At the writing of this post it is 300 subscribers but that won’t get you very far.

So I tried Send in Blue, MailJet, and I forget what else but I’d be surprised if they were still around.

Within just a few months I went through something like four mail marketing plat forms.

I don’t remember anymore which was which but it was all terrible.

One locked me out because of a glitch on their end decided I was spam and their horrible customer service brushed me off when I asked them to fix it.

Another one I couldn’t even get that far in because it was so stupidly complicated.

The last kept being buggy and their customer service was nice but useless.

Now mind you, every time I moved I had to recreate my whole automations and move all my subscribers over.

Also, keep in mind that you can’t move subscribers over to where they were in the sequence…

So I am not sure how many times some of some of my subscribers ended up getting the same emails sent to them.

Needless to say it was a nightmare and a half.

Not just any nightmare though, one of those really embarrassing ones…

So, I turned to the best place I knew to get help from other bloggers: the Mediavine Facebook Group.

Enter MailerLite.

MailerLite – What’s the Catch?

One of my fellow Mediavine bloggers recommended MailerLite.

Honestly, at this point I was pretty jaded and didn’t expect much.

Actually that is not true. I expected a lot of aggravation and to move again after a few weeks.

To tell you the complete truth, I was so fed up that I skipped over them the first time they came recommended to me, and that became a huge regret in the following months.

When I did finally give them a try I could practically hear the angels singing.

Their customer service was super helpful, they had tutorials on how to use their platform, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw they had the same kind of email sequencing as Convert Kit!

So what’s the catch right?

50 subscribers free and then $50 a month?

I am sure I was glaring suspiciously at my computer when I saw it was free for 1000 subscribers – no catch.

My inner New Yorker (15 years in Queens thank you very much) came out and I questioned the customer service rep on chat trying to trip them up.

I mean really… email service with chat customer support (which used to come with the free plan for the first month)… there had to be a catch!

Anyone whose walked the streets of the City (i.e. Manhattan) and ridden the train (translation: subway) as much as I have will tell you if someone’s trying to hand you something for free, it ain’t free.

MailerLite – My Hero

In the end this jaded semi-New Yorker (moved there when I was 11 so not born and bread) was proven wrong.

There actually was no catch.

The customer service is really good, it is actually free until 1000 subscribers, and it’s sequencing is drool worthy.

Once you pass the free 1000 the prices don’t break the bank either.

Just to give you an idea of what I did…

I created a sequence that went out to new subscribers every day for five days.

In my first email, I ask them to click a button to categorize themselves which makes it easier to send them random emails they may like later.

If they didn’t open any of the emails after five days, they were unsubscribed – I do this instead of a double opt in.

If they did open any of the emails, they moved on to the next level – eh hem, I mean sequence.

There, I have it that they get an email from me once a week and if they don’t open any of the emails for three months, they are unsubscribed.

This step repeats itself with different emails every three months.

Once I used up my 100 steps for that sequence, I had whoever was still around be moved on to the next sequence and did the same there too.

Thanks to MailerLite, I am able to completely ignore my email list indefinitely as long as I make sure to keep adding evergreen content so my readers never stop hearing from me as long as they are active.

So, that’s my review. I love MailerLite and I don’t plan on switching as long as they keep providing the same high quality.

By the way, if you decide to go with MailerLite because you found this review helpful, I’d appreciate if you use the link above to sign up. It’s no cost to you but I get a small credit to my account which is always nice to have.