12 free email marketing templates for small businesses

Yes, social media may be attractive, with some smaller brands achieving growth with remarkable ease and speed. But don’t let email marketing fall by the wayside. According to founder of Kissmetrics Neil Patel, there are three times more email accounts then there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined.

Campaign Monitor asserts that the average open rate for email marketing is generally 20% – 30%. Your marketing message is five times more likely to be seen by email than on Facebook. Clickthrough rates from email are around 3%, while clickthrough rates on tweets are roughly 0.5%. Therefore, you’re six times more likely to get a clickthrough from email than you are from Twitter.

Furthermore, email marketing remains the most highly ranked of nine channels when it comes to ROI, according to respondents who participated in our own 2018 Email Marketing Census.

So, there you go – email marketing is the tops. What if you think beautifully designed, responsive email marketing templates are too expensive? They needn’t be, as the below examples will demonstrate…

(For more insight into email marketing strategy, take a look at our Email Marketing Best Practice Guide).

1. MailChimp

MailChimp offers a free service that allows users to send up to 12,000 emails to 2000 subscribers per month. It has limited analytics tools on its free plan but does include a number of easily editable ‘drag and drop’ templates. There’s also a segmentation feature so you can divide your captured email addresses into lists for personalisation.

2. Zoho Campaigns

Similarly, Zoho campaigns allows you to send up to 12,000 emails to 2000 subscribers monthly on its ‘Forever Free’ plan. This tool has hundreds of templates to customise, alongside some great features, including an A/B testing function and clear, concise analytics.

3. EmailOut

EmailOut offers 12,500 emails to 2,500 subscribers per month for free. There are some really slick professionally designed templates to choose from and edit, as well as tools for custom fields and your own HTML design imports.

4. Email Octopus

Email Octopus’ free plan (‘Shrimp’) allows users to send unlimited emails to up to 2500 subscribers. Users can send emails from multiple email addresses and there are still plenty of templates to experiment with, although it does not include any automation functionality (which is reserved for paying subscribers). If you don’t fancy signing up for an account just yet, 11 completely free templates are available to download directly from their website.

5. Benchmark

With Benchmark’s free starter plan, users can send up to 14,000 emails to 2000 subscribers. Note that the plan omits automation features, A/B testing and targeting. If you’re just looking for the basics and some beautifully designed editable templates this one could be for you.

6. Mailjet

Mailjet’s free plan lets users send 6000 emails a month (up to 200 per day) and includes an advanced statistics feature. There are plenty of templates with a focus on photographic elements which you can start experimenting using their take on a ‘drag and drop’ editor.

7. Cakemail

You can find 56 downloadable email templates on Cakemail.com, all of which are responsive and HTML editable. There is also an option to use the Cakemail editor to edit the templates if you are not familiar with code, although this is a paid for subscription service.

8. Freshmail

Freshmail offers several beautifully designed email templates which can be accessed, edited and sent for free under 500 subscribers. The best thing about this tool is its handy mobile app, so you can edit campaigns on the go.

9. Mailerlite

If you have fewer than 1000 subscribers, you’ll be able to send unlimited emails with Mailerlite for free. Mailerlite has a diverse range of template designs to suit many different branding styles. You can deliver emails by timezone, split test and tag subscribers with interests to use in your personalised campaigns, too.

10.  Litmus

Although a paid subscription is required to use Limus’ email builder and support, they offer a starter pack of 5 responsive HTML templates if you have coding experience. These can be downloaded directly from their website and provide a great base on which to build your own branded templates.

11. Email on Acid

Email on Acid provides this free responsive template with variated widths that will adapt to desktop and mobile devices. Alongside the template is a handy blog post with hints and tips if you’re new to email marketing.

12. Zurb

Zurb has some fantastic and easily adaptable templates, all of which are responsive. Make the most of their expert advice by also downloading the 3 free tutorials which can be downloaded via the same web page.