MailerLite Review 2024: Pros And Cons You Need To Know

Welcome to our MailerLite review.

MailerLite is one of our top recommendations when it comes to email newsletter software—but that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for everyone.

To help you figure out whether or not it’s the right platform for you, I’ve put together an in-depth, honest review of MailerLite, with everything you need to know.

In this review, I’ll take a first-hand look at all MailerLite’s main features, discuss pricing, reveal what I think its biggest pros and cons are, and much more.

By the time you’re finished reading, you’ll have all the information you need to work out whether it’s a good fit for your needs. And if not, I’ll also suggest some alternatives you can try instead.

What is MailerLite?

MailerLite is advertised as an email marketing solution. But in reality, it’s much more than that.

Like most email marketing services, it gives you everything you need to run sophisticated email campaigns in one place.

You can use it to craft beautiful email newsletters, build marketing workflows, manage and segment your subscribers, clean and optimize your lists, etc.

But that’s not all.

Aside from running email campaigns, you can also use MailerLite to create landing pages, signup forms, interactive content, and all the other stuff you need to collect leads.

If you wanted to, you could even use it to build your entire website (complete with its own blog) from scratch. 

And you could sell digital products and subscriptions through that website thanks to MailerLite’s built-in ecommerce features.

At this point, then, MailerLite is more of an all-in-one marketing solution than anything else. And the platform is constantly releasing new features that extend its functionality even further. 

For example, they also offer an AI writing assistant to help you craft copy for your emails with the click of a button.

We’ll take a closer look at all the things you can do with MailerLite next as we explore its features.

What features does MailerLite offer?

MailerLite comes with a ton of features, including:

• Drag and drop email builder
• Email templates
• Automations
• Transactional emails
• Landing pages
• Forms
• Website builder
• Blogging tool
• List management
• Analytics
• Email verifier
• Ecommerce features
• Integrations

Some features are only included in specific plans. For this review, we’ll mainly be focusing on the core features that come with every plan, including the free version (see our pricing section for more details).

Getting started

When you first log in to MailerLite, you’ll be brought to your account dashboard:

Here, under Performance Overview, you can see a snapshot of the most critical metrics and KPIs related to your ongoing campaigns, like subscriber counts, email opens and clicks, form signups, etc.

You can access all of MailerLite’s features through the sidebar on the left. They’re grouped into five main apps: Campaigns, Subscribers, Forms, Sites, and Automation.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Campaigns

The Campaigns app is where most of the fun stuff happens in MailerLite. 

You can use it to design and send out newsletters, run A/B tests, and set up RSS and auto-resend campaigns.

To get started, click Campaigns > Create new campaign.

Then, choose what type of campaign you want to create and enter a name for it.

On the next window, you’ll be prompted to fill out the basic details for your email, including the subject line.

MailerLite makes it easy to personalize your subject lines using custom fields and increase their clickability with emojis

If you’re setting up an A/B test, you can add two variations of your subject line to compare them and see which one has a better open/click rate. Alternatively, you can also compare different versions of your email content or From name.

The next step is to design the body of the email. Fortunately, this is easy on MailerLite thanks to the…

Template gallery

MailerLite has 43 templates in its template gallery for you to choose from, making it quick and easy to build professional-looking newsletters without having to design them from scratch.

The available templates are varied and cover lots of different niches and use cases.

For example, if you want to send out an email to get feedback from your subscribers, there’s a template for that. Or you want to send out an email promoting a new sale, there’s a template for that too.

The only problem is that MailerLite’s templates are only available to users on paid plans. If you’re using the free plan, you’ll need to start from scratch.

Once you’ve chosen a template, you can customize it in the…

Email editor

MailerLite lets you choose how you want to design the body of your emails.

There are three editors to choose from: the drag & drop editor, the rich-text editor, and the custom HTML editor.

The drag-and-drop editor gives you more design flexibility and lets you craft your emails, entirely on the front end, with a real-time preview of how it’ll look:

From the left-hand side, you can drag in premade content blocks.

Then in the main window, you can rearrange blocks, change their settings and styling, and enter your own text.

There are lots of cool blocks to choose from, like countdown timers, image galleries, social links, sharing buttons, product blocks, etc.

I really like how easy MailerLite’s drag-and-drop editor is to use. The interface is clean and simple, and everything feels intuitive. 

Once you’ve finished designing your email in the editor, you can click Preview and test to view a full-size preview or send out a test email.

In the preview window, you can switch between mobile and desktop views to see how it’ll look on different devices. The editor utilizes responsive design so your emails should look good on any screen size.

When you’re happy with it, click Done editing to move on to the next step.

Segmentation

MailerLite lets you send emails to specific audience segments for highly targeted campaigns.

You can create audience segments from the Subscribers app (more on this later), and then choose to target or exclude these segments under Recipients when building your campaign.

Alternatively, under the Advanced tab, you can target recipients using Filters.

For example, let’s imagine you want to send out a 4th of July promotional email, but you only want it to go out to subscribers in the US.

In that case, you can choose the Location filter. Then, select Is > United States of America.

Now let’s say you decide that you also only want to send the offer out to re-engage subscribers that haven’t opened or clicked your emails in a while. 

In that case, you’d want to add another AND condition. And this time, you’d select the Time inactive filter:

You can use AND/OR conditions and filters in this way to set up highly sophisticated, highly targeted campaigns, which is one of the things that makes MailerLite so powerful.

Scheduling

The Schedule window is the final step in setting up your campaign.

Here, you can choose when you want the email to go out. 

If you want it to go out immediately, click Send now. Otherwise, click Send later to choose a specific time/date, and MailerLite will send it out automatically at that time.

There’s also a really neat Deliver based on timezones feature. If you select this option, MailerLite will automatically adjust the sending time for each recipient based on their timezone. 

Subscribers

The Subscribers app is where you manage your list in MailerLite.

Under All Subscribers, you can add subscribers manually or by importing them from  CSV/TXT file or from Mailchimp.

You can also view a running list of your subscribers here, alongside basic information like the date they subscribed, their location, and the number of sent emails, opens, and clicks.

To sort through them, you can use filters. And you can click on any subscriber in your list to view detailed information about them and perform actions on their account. For example, you can manually unsubscribe them, add notes to their file, or export them as a JSON file.

Under Segments and Groups, you can split up your list based on shared attributes, and then target these segments individually in your campaigns.

Under the Clean up inactive tab, you can remove inactive subscribers from your list automatically. These are subscribers that have either never opened your emails or haven’t opened one in a specified duration (e.g. 6 months).

It’s worth cleaning up inactive subscribers at least once a year as this will help to ensure you continue to get good deliverability on your email campaigns.

Forms

To build your email list, you can use MailerLite’s Forms app. Just click Forms > Create form to get started.

There are three different types of forms you can build with MailerLite: Pop-ups, Embedded forms, and Promotions (advanced plan only).

Choose the type you want to make and name your form, then click Save and continue.

Next, you’ll need to choose what subscriber groups you want to link your form to. And after that, you can select a template.

There are two dozen form templates to choose from, and they all look great:

Once you’ve chosen a template, you can open it up in the drag-and-drop editor.

As with the email editor, it’s super simple to work with. You can drag blocks for things like text, images, countdown timers, and social links from the right, and customize the font, background, etc. in the Design tab.

You’ll also be able to design both the popup form and the success window from the same page.

When you’re finished, click Preview to see how it looks or Done editing to move on.

In the final window, you can choose when you want the pop-up form to appear.

For example, if you want to create an exit-intent triggered pop-up, select the Show before closing page trigger.

If you want your pop-up to appear when the user scrolls below the fold, click the Show when user scrolls to… box and then select the desired percentage from the dropdown box.

You can also change the visibility settings, schedule, and frequency. Once you’re done, click Save changes, and copy-paste the tracking code snippet over to your website.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to mess around with code, you can use MailerLite’s native Shopify or WordPress plugins to add the snippets from your account automatically.

Sites

It’s not just forms that you can build with MailerLite. Their landing page builder can also create entire websites.

To do so, open up the Sites app and then click Create site.

Then, choose whether you want to create a single page or a website (a collection of pages with a navigation menu).

Again, there are a bunch of well-designed templates to choose from, which you can open up in the drag-and-drop editor (or just start from scratch).

The page/site editor uses the same straightforward interface as the email and form editor: drag in blocks and layout options, rearrange and edit them in the main window, and change your setting, navigation, headers, footers, etc. in the sidebar.

If you’re building a site, you can add new pages and rearrange your navigation bar under the Pages tab. You can then shift between pages to edit them individually using the Active page dropdown at the top of the page. It’s all very straightforward.

Once you’ve finished designing your site, the last step is to change the website settings.

You can publish the site/page to a Mailerpage.io subdomain, or connect your own custom domain to create a personal URL (paid plans only).

There are also some very basic SEO settings that you can change here. For example, you can change the page’s SEO title and description, set up redirects, and turn Sitemap on to help with indexing.

Blogging

Before we move on, there’s one specific feature of MailerLite’s website builder that we want to take a closer look at, and that’s the ability to add a blog to your site.

This is a really neat feature as adding a blog to your site is a great way to drive organic search traffic and grow your mailing list faster.

Here’s how to do it.

First, open up the website builder as we outlined above.

Then in the sidebar, click Pages > Create new.

You’ll see a dropdown list of page types: select Blog.

This’ll create an archive page on your site with a running list of all your blog posts. Every site can have one blog archive page.

You can change the page settings to specify how many blog posts to feature per row, and per page. Plus, change other options like whether or not to show featured images, publish dates, etc.

To add individual blog posts, go back to the main dashboard and open up the Sites app again, then click the Blog tab.

Next, click Create a post to start writing. You can add your own post title, excerpt, featured image, etc. And you even have the option of turning on the Clicks heatmap option to track where your blog readers click within the page (this can help with conversion rate optimization).

You’ll write the blog content itself in the editor. There are a dozen or so blocks to choose from, including text blocks, image blocks, dividers, tables, videos, columns, etc.

Once you’ve finished writing it, click Save and publish to publish it immediately. Or alternatively, click the drop-down arrow and save it as a draft, or schedule it for later.

Automation

MailerLite’s Automation app makes it easy to build sophisticated email marketing workflows.

To get started, click Automation in the sidebar, then select New automation.

There are pre-made templates for all the most commonly-used workflows, like welcome email sequences that greet and nurture your new subscribers, win-back sequences that re-engage lapsed subscribers, online course campaigns that drip out lessons at regular intervals, abandoned cart automations that automatically remind customers who don’t complete the checkout process on your site to finish making their purchase, and much more.

You can select any of these templates to open them up in the workflow builder. Or if you can’t find a template that does what you want it to do, you can just start from scratch.

If you’ve ever built automations before, you should find MailerLite’s workflow builder easy to get the hang of.

You start by choosing a trigger: the thing that you want to start the automation. 

For example, you might choose to trigger the workflow to start when a subscriber completes a form or clicks a link.

Then, you add steps to your workflow to decide what happens next. These steps can be actions, conditions, delays, or emails.

For example, your first step when someone completes a form could be to send them a pre-made welcome email. And at the same time, you could also set up the workflow to automatically move them to a specific group.

Conditions allow you to set up branching logic and send different subscribers down different workflow paths depending on whether or not they meet certain conditions. 

In doing so, you can create very complex and advanced automations fairly easily.

Integrations

MailerLite integrates well with lots of other platforms and tools.

That includes all the most popular CMS and website builders, like:

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Shopify
• BigCommerce

You can also connect MailerLite to Facebook to sync up your mailing list with Facebook Audience, and with Zapier to connect it to all the other tools, apps, and services you use to manage your business.

If you plan on selling digital products through your MailerLite landing pages and websites, you’ll need to connect your Stripe account too so that you can start taking payments, which brings us onto…

Ecommerce

We’ve already covered how you can use MailerLite to build landing pages and websites. But if you want, you can go even further than that and use it to build a functioning ecommerce store, then start selling digital products and subscriptions.

To do so, you’ll need to start by creating a product page/store using the Sites app in the same way that you’d build any other type of website or landing page.

Then, to add a product, you can use the One-time purchase block. You can find it in the Blocks tab at the bottom of the sidebar in the drag-and-drop editor.

If you’ve already connected Stripe to MailerLite, your Stripe product list should automatically appear inside the one-time purchase content block, and you can then choose your product to add it to the page. 

After that, you can select the action that you want to happen after the customer makes a purchase. For example, you can add a post-purchase action to add the customer to a specific subscriber group for future targeting.

Aside from one-off purchases, you can also sell recurring subscriptions for things like online courses, or even paid newsletter subscriptions.

To do so, instead of adding a one-time purchase block, you’ll need to drag in the Recurring purchase block to the page in the editor.

The settings are the same as the one-time purchase block. But you’ll also need to specify what action happens after successful checkout, and after cancellation of the subscription.

If you’re selling a paid newsletter subscription, you’ll probably want the after-purchase action to be to add them to a specific group/segment, which you can then send premium email content to via automation sequences. And the post-cancellation action may be to remove them from that group and the automation.

File manager

MailerLite also has its own built-in File manager that you can use to manage all the visual assets you use in your emails, landing pages, and websites. You can access it at the bottom of the sidebar.

From here, you can upload images from your computer, or import them from a URL, Google Drive, Giphy, Unsplash, or Iconfinder.

Then, you can click any image in the file manager to edit it in MailerLite’s built-in design tools.

The image editor is actually surprisingly sophisticated. You can use it to add filters to your images, adjust the levels (brightness, clarity, exposure, etc.), change the focus, add text, overlays, and frames; and much more.

Other features

We’ve covered most of the most important MailerLite features so far, but there’s still more you can do with it. 

Here’s an overview of some of the other features I didn’t have time to cover in depth (note that some may only be available on certain plans):

• Dynamic content. This feature allows you to personalize your emails to show different content to different subscribers based on attributes in their subscriber profiles. For example, you might choose to show a certain block to recipients from a particular country or industry.
• Preference center. Advanced plan users can target their campaigns based on subscriber preferences with the preference center feature. You can let your subscribers select their own interests and preferred cadence/email frequency, enabling you to send relevant content to each interest group at a time that they prefer.
• AI writing assistant. MailerLite’s AI writing assistant uses the power of machine learning to automatically generate copy for your campaigns at the click of a button. You just choose your preferred tone and enter some initial prompts, and the AI will do the rest.

Now that we’ve explored the platform, let’s talk about pricing.

How much does MailerLite cost?

There are three MailerLite plans to choose from: Free, Growing Business, and Advanced. Let’s look at each of them.

The Free plan won’t cost you anything, but it’s capped at 1,000 subscribers, 1 user, and 12,000 monthly emails. It comes with most of the key features including the drag-and-drop editor, automation builder, websites, landing pages, and forms.

The Growing Business plan starts from $10/month. It comes with unlimited monthly emails, unlimited websites and blogs, and 3 users. You get all the features included in the Free plan plus templates, dynamic emails, auto-resend campaigns, the unsubscribe page builder, and the ability to sell digital products.

The Advanced plan starts from $20/month and comes with all the stuff you get on the Growing Business plan, plus unlimited users, 24/7 live chat support, Facebook integration, custom HTML editor, promotion pop-ups, multiple triggers in automations, AI writing assistant, and more.

Keep in mind that MailerLite uses a subscriber-based pricing model. The cost of each plan depends on the number of subscribers in your list. The prices discussed above are based on 500 subscribers but you’ll pay more if the number of active subscribers in your list exceeds this limit, and overages are charged automatically. 

Aside from the above plans, MailerLite also offers a transactional email and SMS Service, called Mailersend. This is priced separately. Annual discounts available.

There’s a Free Mailersend plan for up to 3,000 emails and a Premium plan that starts from $30/month (or $24/month billed annually).

MailerLite pros and cons

After trying out everything MailerLite has to offer, I can tell you that like any platform, it isn’t perfect.

But of all the email platforms I’ve tested, it ticks more boxes than any other.

Here are the biggest pros and cons that stood out during my tests for this review:

MailerLite pros

• Broad feature set. MailerLite offers more features out of the box than most other email marketing tools, which makes it excellent value. You get a lot for your money and could use it to manage your entire online business if you were so inclined. 
• Feature-rich free account. The free account supports up to 1,000 subscribers. If you’re new to email marketing, that will be more than enough to get you started. And most features are available on the free plan.
• Excellent templates. MailerLite gives you a ton of templates for everything: landing pages, emails, automations, etc. And they’re all great.
• Easy to use. MailerLite is a very beginner-friendly platform. It’s easier to work with than most of its competitors, and you don’t need any technical skills or coding knowledge to get started.
• Powerful automations builder. MailerLite’s automation builder is one of its biggest strengths. You can use it to set up really sophisticated campaigns with ease.
• Industry-leading email deliverability. MailerLite takes a lot of steps to improve its sender reputation, so you can expect excellent deliverability on all your campaigns. For example, all accounts have to be approved in order to send emails. This helps to stop spammers from ruining everyone else’s email delivery rates.
• Lots of integrations with third-party tools. It doesn’t matter how good an email platform is if you can’t integrate it with your landing page & opt-in form tools. Fortunately, many third-party tools offer API integrations with MailerLite.

MailerLite cons

• Ecommerce features are very basic. MailerLite is still no replacement for a real ecommerce solution like Shopify or WooCommerce. You can use the purchase blocks and Stripe integration to sell products, but it’s not very intuitive and lacks sophisticated selling tools like order management, coupon code generation, shipping/tax tools, etc. However, it’s worth remembering that MailerLite is primarily an email newsletter tool, not an ecommerce platform.
• Landing page and site builders limitations. MailerLite’s landing page and site builder isn’t as flexible as some other tools. It uses a grid-based system so you can’t move elements around freely, and customization options are limited compared to ‘real’ website builders/CMS platforms like WordPress.

MailerLite alternatives

MailerLite isn’t the only email marketing software out there. If you don’t think it’s the right choice for you, here are some other email marketing platforms you might want to try instead:

• Moosend | Our review — An email marketing service that stands out for its ease of use and affordability
• ConvertKit | Our review — An all-in-one marketing toolkit designed for creators. Use it to design emails, build landing pages and forms, create automations, and sell products.
• ActiveCampaign | Our review — An advanced email marketing platform and CRM. The starting price is a little higher than MailerLite, but you get what you pay for—it’s one of the most powerful platforms on the market.

Final thoughts on MailerLite

That concludes our MailerLite review.

Overall, I couldn’t be more impressed with MailerLite.

It gets top marks across the board: It’s easy to use, incredibly feature-rich, powerful, reliable, and great value for money.

I really like MailerLite’s professionally-designed templates and beginner-friendly email editor.

And, most importantly, their email delivery rates are one of the best in the industry. This is based on my own tests and third-party testing data that I’ve gathered from numerous sources.

However, despite the fact that it now offers an all-in-one feature set, it’s still an email marketing platform at its core. While it does offer a site builder and selling tools, these aren’t a true replacement for a dedicated CMS or ecommerce platform just yet.

If you want to check MailerLite out for yourself, you can click the button below to sign up for a free plan.

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