The top 7 Email Marketing Platforms Free for businesses in 2024

While writing this free blog post, I included a few affiliate links.  This means that I, Jacinta Thomas from ‘Jump Start your Biz’ will get a small commission from any purchases made via these links. This is one of the ways you make money blogging, so if you click and purchase I thank you for helping me pay my bills.

Having a lead magnet/ opt-in is a priority for any business as part of their marketing campaign. You need a marketing platform to run your lead magnets and collect your subscriber’s details. A marketing platform will allow you to send emails that you can set up to go automatically each day, week, month etc, to those customers that have signed up to you rather than trying to email hundreds of people separately.

Let’s go ahead and take a look 7 top email marketing platform for 2017.

I personally use Mailerlite, but a review from a lot of other business owners say that Convertkit is the best. They all do great jobs so it’s completely up to you and your budget. All of them have great setup guides and support. Once you decide on the best one to fit your needs then go ahead and join up or trial one.

1. Mailerlite

3. Convertkit

A marketing tool built for bloggers. A simple easy to use email marketing service. A no fuss no hacking, simple platform to help grow your blog. Very simple email designs however one of the best and most simple to use marketing tools with fantastic automation. Prices starting from $29 per month.

4. Mailchimp

MailChimp is one of the world’s leading email marketing platforms with over 15 million customers from small e-commerce shops to big online retailers. That said have heard many people say things like email automation not always being sent but very basic to use with nice designs.  It’s free to join up to 2000 subscribers and from only $10 per month after this.

5. GetResponse

An all-In-One Online Marketing Platform to Grow Your Business. Grow your lists, increase conversions, and optimise your audience engagement with beautiful emails and autoresponders. OK designs and simple automatons. Priced from $15 per month.

6. Active Campaign

All-in-one marketing platform.Grow your business and save time with a seamless experience. Distributed team spanning three continents. Basic automation and designs but pretty easy to use. Prices starting at $29 per month.

7. Madmini

Mad Mimi is one of the easiest ways to create, send, share and track email newsletters online. With over 40 million email sent each day. Fantastic automation, simple to use with fun designs. Pricing from $10 per month.

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Setting up a website is a must for any business and if you are selling a product or a service to your customers then you will require an eCommerce website. 

A Shopping cart website allows you to sell your products to your customers directly from your website. If you were to get a web designer to set this up for you then the cost can be anywhere upwards of a few thousand dollars.

In this guide, I will walk you through how to set up your own eCommerce website for a fraction of that cost.

Website Requirements

To set up an eCommerce website you will firstly require a website. There are a number of website platforms available to set up an eCommerce website including Shopify, Wix, Bigcommerce, Magento, Salesforce Demandware or even a custom built online shop. However, I recommend a self managed WordPress website. I use this option for my own website and I design all my clients websites using WordPress. 

To get an idea of how a successful self managed WordPress eCommerce business looks, click on the following businesses that I have designed including Bush Babies Down Under, Naturally Goat, Anthony’s Sauces, Exotic Gemstone Jewellery, Voya Beauty, and Chris Christensen Australia to name a few.

If you do not have a website already set up using self managed WordPress then jump on over and download my free 7 day Build a Website Guide to set up your website.  

WooCommerce Plugin

To convert your standard website into an eCommerce Website you will need to install the plugin WooCommerce.

Login to your WordPress dashboard backend,

Click on Plugins > Add New > Search > type Woocommerce > click Install Now and once  installed you will need to click Activate Now. 

Once Woocommerce is activated you will be taken to the setup wizard, which will step you through how to set up WooCommerce.

Store Details

Start by entering your details as shown below. The Continue

A pop up will appear “Build a better WooCommerce”. 

Feel free to select Yes or No.

Industry

In which Industry does your store operate?

Select the option that applies

Product Types

What type of products will be listed?

Select the option that suits. There may be a fee depending on your selection.

Business Details

Tell us about your business

Select on how many products you plan on selling and whether you will be selling elsewhere.

Once you have selected about click on the Free features to see what you may wish to include

From here click on the drop down menu and pick the options you wish to continue with. However I have a few recommendations as mentioned below.

Jetpack is an option for security, you can choose this option however I recommend you use Wordfence instead as outlined in my 7 day website guide. 

Level up your email marketing with MailPoet, which you can choose however I use and recommend Mailierlite. 

The other options you can choose or leave at this stage depending on your needs.

Click on continue which may take a few minutes to complete.

Theme

WooCommerce has its own Theme however you will want to continue with your active theme for your website unless you are planning on redesigning your website at the same time.

Let’s Get Started 

Depending on the option you selected in the product type you will have a number of options.

As a quick side note you will now notice there is a new heading on the left hand sidebar of your wordpress dashboard. 

• Woocommerce
• Products
• Payments
• Analytics
• Marketing. 

You can get back to these at any time by clicking on WooCommerce then home.

Add Products to Sell

When adding products to your Ecommerce website you need to include some information about the product, a photo of it, the price, how many of each item you actually have in stock.

Woocommerce will allow you to add drop downs so your customer can pick a certain product colour, size, etc as well. You can import products, template designs, and even migrate from another program so have a look around. 

Set up WooCommerce Payments

There are a number of different ways that you can accept payments from customers. From Cash on Delivery, Cheque, Direct Transfer, Credit Card Payments, Stripe, PayPal etc. Depending on your option you may need to speak to your bank for things like a Credit Card machine or how to accept payments.

Add tax rate

Within Australia this tax relates to the Goods and service tax. If your gross income is less than $75,000 then it’s optional to register for GST. As a small business owner myself I chose not to register for GST for many years until my income got higher then I registered for GST. I also add GST into my pricing but you can add GST on top of your pricing, it’s completely up to you. 

Add shipping costs

If you will be posting your products you will need to work out a cost effective price for both yourself and your customers. You don’t want to charge someone $15 for postage if it only actually costs $8 as this is unfair to have the customer pay $7 for handling. However, only charging $8 to the customer where a parcel might cost you $15 to post is not fair for you as you lose $7 in profits. The best thing to do is actually go down to your local Australia post and talk to one of the staff, if you’re able, take a product or two down with you. They will give you some advice about the best way to send your items. 

If you have standard size items then a pre-paid satchel may be the way to go. 

These are great but for smaller items. However if you have larger or heavier items you will have to go with other options of boxes, larger satchels etc

Depending on where you are located there may also be additional costs if you live in a rural location, and some states such as WA, NT, SA are slightly more expensive in my experience.

It may be an option to see what prices similar businesses to yourself are charging.

Get more sales

There are a number of options you can continue with when it comes to marketing your eCommerce website. Options include creating a Google merchant account to share your products to Google searches, integrating your website to your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and other social media accounts and setting up email marketing. By setting all these up you can start selling your products to your target audience.

Need help creating your own eCommerce Website?

This guide is a simple step by step guide on how to set up an eCommerce website. However there are so many options to get your own up and running. If you need any help on your eCommerce website, I have a number of different packages to suit your needs.

Don’t forget to share this post!

Have a great day

Cheers

Jacinta

Hi there, I’m Jacinta, Australian web designer, digital marketer, mocha lover, mother, wannabe digital nomad, and an introvert at heart.

We help small & medium-sized business owners like me, in Australia and New Zealand by providing affordable website and digital marketing solutions and help them conquer their website worries and turn them into secure money-generating machines.

We aim to work with our clients in an encouraging and supportive way.

We start by sending you a list of things we need to start your website or by doing an audit on your website and breaking it down into actionable steps to make it secure and start earning you more money than ever before.

Work with us Today.

I love working with WordPress as a Website design platform as it offers so many easy functions, however, it can be a tricky job to keep WordPress websites secure. Many statistics have proved that hackers target WordPress websites more, and many WordPress website developers or owners aren’t aware of its security measures. It means WordPress gets vulnerable attacks if you don’t have proper security measures hence why my team and I have pulled together some useful security tips for making your website more secure and stable.  

Below are some important tips for your wordpress website security and safety.

1. Set up Website Lockdown

This security feature is very important, if you fear your website of getting vulnerable attacks from hackers or competitors. This Lockdown feature can solve a huge problem of login failure attempts.  It means, whenever there’s a repetitive hacking attempt with wrong passwords, the website will get locked and the owner will get notification for this unauthorized forceful login activity, i.e. no more continuous forceful attempts. Wordfence or iThemes Security plugin can be best for security measures since it prevents forceful login attempt attacks. By using this plugin you can specify a certain number of failed login attempts, after which the plugin bans the attacker’s IP address.

2. Using 2-Factor Authentication Feature

At the login page, using a 2-factor authentication (2FA) feature is also good for security measure. This is one of the lost secure forms of authentication as the attacker would need to know your username, password and have access to your mobile phone to receive the code or be able to answer secret question etc to login.  The Wordfence Premium or Itheme Premium plugins can use this.

3. Using a hard Login Username

Using a hard to guess username is a more secure approach. The reasons are quite obvious, as user names can be easily predicted, if it’s something like admin, administrator or a domain email address. Using your name or you name with middle name or surname and year of birth or a personal email as you’re username can be beneficial for this purpose and stops people from easily guessing.

4.Login Page URL Renaming

When attackers or hackers know your website login page direct URL, they can try to brute force. They attack by trying to log in with their GWD (Guess Work Database, i.e. a database of guessed usernames and passwords, (e.g. username: admin and password: p@ssword and billions of such passwords). By default, the WordPress login page can be accessed easily via wp-login.php or wp-admin added to the site’s main URL. Changing the login URL is an easy thing to do therefore you should replace the login URL and get rid of 99% of direct brute force attacks.

5. Change Your Passwords Frequently

Always keep a habit to change the website’s passwords regularly, Always use strong passwords by adding uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers or special characters. Password generator is a useful resource to get variations of strong passwords. This helps to secure your website and avoid harmful attacks from hackers.

6. WP-Admin Directory Protection

The heart of any word press website is wp-admin directory, so if this part of your website gets attacked then the entire website can be damaged badly. The best possible way to avoid attacker is to have the wp-admin directory password protected. Whenever any changes is need to the wp-admin directory you can access it with the password you have assigned for that protection. You can either manually code the .htaccess file or get hold of the AskApache Password Protect Plugin for securing complete admin area. It auto generates a .htpasswd file, which can be configured for password permissions.

7.Using SSL to Encrypt Data

One of the smart moves is to secure your admin panel by using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. This helps to secure data transfer between server and the browser, which makes very hard for an attacker to hack the connection. You can purchase SSL certificate for your word press website from dedicated hosting companies. SSL certificate also gives better ranking in search engines as such web sites should be secure to visit.

8.Secure Your Files and Data Base from Threats

Most of the threats attack website’s data base and files therefore you have to use extra security to avoid such attacks by monitoring everything.  This can be easily done with the Wordfence or the Ithemes premium security plugin. This plugin gives protection from all the latest threats and guards the data base and files from malicious attacks done by hackers. Wordfence plugin also provides firewall and scan option.

9.Take Regular Back Ups

Always have a habit to take complete website back up, no matter how much secure is your word press website is. Keeping an off-site complete backup always benefits you to restore your word press website and keep it in a working state any time. There is an inbuilt option in word press for back up of the data base and files. But you can also have plugin to backup and restore them back to the website. My personal favourite plugin is UpdraftPlus Backups.

10.Update Plugins Regularly

Serious troubles can occur if you aren’t updating your word press theme or plug in. Remember updates are to fix bugs and security threats. Every software product gets supported by the developers and gets updated now and then, but word press gets updated frequently. These updates fix bugs and also have important security patches. Hackers usually target websites that aren’t updated on a regular basis. So get serious and start updating your word press, but be careful of badly coded plugins when updating as this can cause your website to crash, so if you don’t feel comfortable, get your website tech person to manage these updates.

11. Remove Word Press Version Details

Anybody can easily find your word press website version number, as it can be viewed in source code of the website. Hiding it can prevent the hacker to attack the website. So you can use security plug-in that will hide your word press version details or add some code to remove it.

Conclusion

Everything mentioned in this article will help to secure your word press website, if you follow them correctly and take right measures you will always get benefited and make it tricky for a hacker to attack your website.

I’m Jacinta Thomas, also known as your humble wordpress web design tech whiz and online marketing consultant.

I’m a reserved yet highly motivated and adaptable digital marketing expert ready to use my online marketing knowledge to help your business be seen online and ramp up your sales. I love horses, dogs, cats, country music, chocolate and most of all helping people.

I help family focused entrepreneurs build top ranking, self-managed websites, help work through any wordpress tech issues and get set up with hosting, blogging, SEO and social media, so they can earn more money and live their dream life.

If you’re ready to get your business online, and seen on social media and all search engines then check out my blog, biz resources, jump into my free Facebook group and of course contact me at any time.

I love working with WordPress as a Website design platform as it offers so many easy functions, however, it can be a tricky job to keep WordPress websites secure. Many statistics have proved that hackers target WordPress websites more, and many WordPress website developers or owners aren’t aware of its security measures. It means WordPress gets vulnerable attacks if you don’t have proper security measures hence why my team and I have pulled together some useful security tips for making your website more secure and stable.  

Below are some important tips for your wordpress website security and safety.

1. Set up Website Lockdown

This security feature is very important, if you fear your website of getting vulnerable attacks from hackers or competitors. This Lockdown feature can solve a huge problem of login failure attempts.  It means, whenever there’s a repetitive hacking attempt with wrong passwords, the website will get locked and the owner will get notification for this unauthorized forceful login activity, i.e. no more continuous forceful attempts. Wordfence or iThemes Security plugin can be best for security measures since it prevents forceful login attempt attacks. By using this plugin you can specify a certain number of failed login attempts, after which the plugin bans the attacker’s IP address.

2. Using 2-Factor Authentication Feature

At the login page, using a 2-factor authentication (2FA) feature is also good for security measure. This is one of the lost secure forms of authentication as the attacker would need to know your username, password and have access to your mobile phone to receive the code or be able to answer secret question etc to login.  The Wordfence Premium or Itheme Premium plugins can use this.

3. Using a hard Login Username

Using a hard to guess username is a more secure approach. The reasons are quite obvious, as user names can be easily predicted, if it’s something like admin, administrator or a domain email address. Using your name or you name with middle name or surname and year of birth or a personal email as you’re username can be beneficial for this purpose and stops people from easily guessing.

4.Login Page URL Renaming

When attackers or hackers know your website login page direct URL, they can try to brute force. They attack by trying to log in with their GWD (Guess Work Database, i.e. a database of guessed usernames and passwords, (e.g. username: admin and password: p@ssword and billions of such passwords). By default, the WordPress login page can be accessed easily via wp-login.php or wp-admin added to the site’s main URL. Changing the login URL is an easy thing to do therefore you should replace the login URL and get rid of 99% of direct brute force attacks.

5. Change Your Passwords Frequently

Always keep a habit to change the website’s passwords regularly, Always use strong passwords by adding uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers or special characters. Password generator is a useful resource to get variations of strong passwords. This helps to secure your website and avoid harmful attacks from hackers.

6. WP-Admin Directory Protection

The heart of any word press website is wp-admin directory, so if this part of your website gets attacked then the entire website can be damaged badly. The best possible way to avoid attacker is to have the wp-admin directory password protected. Whenever any changes is need to the wp-admin directory you can access it with the password you have assigned for that protection. You can either manually code the .htaccess file or get hold of the AskApache Password Protect Plugin for securing complete admin area. It auto generates a .htpasswd file, which can be configured for password permissions.

7.Using SSL to Encrypt Data

One of the smart moves is to secure your admin panel by using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. This helps to secure data transfer between server and the browser, which makes very hard for an attacker to hack the connection. You can purchase SSL certificate for your word press website from dedicated hosting companies. SSL certificate also gives better ranking in search engines as such web sites should be secure to visit.

8.Secure Your Files and Data Base from Threats

Most of the threats attack website’s data base and files therefore you have to use extra security to avoid such attacks by monitoring everything.  This can be easily done with the Wordfence or the Ithemes premium security plugin. This plugin gives protection from all the latest threats and guards the data base and files from malicious attacks done by hackers. Wordfence plugin also provides firewall and scan option.

9.Take Regular Back Ups

Always have a habit to take complete website back up, no matter how much secure is your word press website is. Keeping an off-site complete backup always benefits you to restore your word press website and keep it in a working state any time. There is an inbuilt option in word press for back up of the data base and files. But you can also have plugin to backup and restore them back to the website. My personal favourite plugin is UpdraftPlus Backups.

10.Update Plugins Regularly

Serious troubles can occur if you aren’t updating your word press theme or plug in. Remember updates are to fix bugs and security threats. Every software product gets supported by the developers and gets updated now and then, but word press gets updated frequently. These updates fix bugs and also have important security patches. Hackers usually target websites that aren’t updated on a regular basis. So get serious and start updating your word press, but be careful of badly coded plugins when updating as this can cause your website to crash, so if you don’t feel comfortable, get your website tech person to manage these updates.

11. Remove Word Press Version Details

Anybody can easily find your word press website version number, as it can be viewed in source code of the website. Hiding it can prevent the hacker to attack the website. So you can use security plug-in that will hide your word press version details or add some code to remove it.

Conclusion

Everything mentioned in this article will help to secure your word press website, if you follow them correctly and take right measures you will always get benefited and make it tricky for a hacker to attack your website.

I’m Jacinta Thomas, also known as your humble wordpress web design tech whiz and online marketing consultant.

I’m a reserved yet highly motivated and adaptable digital marketing expert ready to use my online marketing knowledge to help your business be seen online and ramp up your sales. I love horses, dogs, cats, country music, chocolate and most of all helping people.

I help family focused entrepreneurs build top ranking, self-managed websites, help work through any wordpress tech issues and get set up with hosting, blogging, SEO and social media, so they can earn more money and live their dream life.

If you’re ready to get your business online, and seen on social media and all search engines then check out my blog, biz resources, jump into my free Facebook group and of course contact me at any time.