Are you looking for simple ways to build your email list and engage with your existing coaching clients?

That’s where email marketing apps come in. 

But with so many market options, how can a coach decide? Especially because most email marketing tools aren’t designed with coaches in mind…

That’s why we’ve found the best email platforms for coaches so that you don’t have to search on your own. Keep reading to learn everything about:

• Mailerlite
• Flodesk
• Convertkit
• Moosend
• Campaign Refinery
• ActiveCampaign
• And finally, why you should avoid Mailchimp!

If you want a quick rundown to make a decision, here’s what we suggest:

• Go with MailerLite if: you want a free tool to test the waters.
• Go with Flodesk if: you want beautiful-looking newsletter designs and templates.
• Go with Convertkit if: you want a user-friendly tool specifically designed for coaches and creators. 
• Go with Moosend if: you want a powerful yet affordable tool.
• Go with Campaign Refinery if: you plan on making email your main marketing strategy.
• Go with ActiveCampaign if: you’re tech-savvy and want everything email marketing and sales automation has to offer.

1. Mailerlite 

Mailerlite is a great user-friendly email marketing tool for coaches, consultants, and other small businesses!

Its clean, functional design makes it easy to learn, even if you have no prior experience with email marketing. And it comes fully loaded with plenty of features, such as:

• Email campaigns and automations
• Transactional emails (order confirmations and receipts)
• Website and landing page builder
• Blog builder
• Opt-in forms
• Email cleaning tool to sift out invalid email addresses
• Paid newsletter subscriptions
• Digital product selling

Like most email marketing tools, you can also design your newsletters directly inside Mailerlite. 

Pros and Cons of Mailerlite

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Has a free tier to get started
• Comes fully-loaded with most features a coach will need
• Has excellent email deliverability

Cons:

• Website builder isn’t the best on the market
• Can’t support advanced automations
• No email design templates if you’re using the free plan

Mailerlite Pricing

The pricing for Mailerlite is one of its best features! The Free plan is valid for up to 1000 subscribers and includes:

• 12,000 monthly email sends
• Its signature drag and drop editor
• Basic email automations
• Websites
• 10 landing pages
• Opt-in forms and popups

The Growing and Advanced plans are available starting from $9 and $19 per month respectively. Pricing goes up as you gain more subscribers.

Best For:

Because of its Free Forever plan and its ease of use, Mailerlite is an amazing option for beginning coaches who are only dipping their toes in the world of email marketing.

We recommend this tool over Mailchimp for those who want a free option!

2. Flodesk

Flodesk makes it simple for coaches and business owners to send beautiful emails your subscribers will love to open! 

But in addition to sending emails, you can also:

• Create checkout pages and sales pages
• Instantly deliver digital products or an online course
• Create beautiful opt-in forms and popups
• Build powerful automations

It also has several native integrations with other apps you need to run your business.

Pros and Cons of Flodesk

Pros:

• Flat fee no matter how many subscribers you have or how many emails you send
• Start using it for free and only upgrade to one of the paid plans when you’re ready to send or publish anything
• No checkout fees
• Beautiful templates

Cons:

• Limited font options for your email marketing campaigns
• Can’t fully preview emails when looking at a workflow
• Requires a slight learning curve

Flodesk Pricing

Unlike most email marketing tools, Flodesk provides flat rates for its pricing. You don’t need to pay more if your number of subscribers goes up. 

You can choose between two pricing options:

• Unlimited email marketing and ecommerce tools: $59/month
• Just email marketing (or just ecommerce tools): $35/month

But you can start with a free trial, which will remain free until you want to hit publish or send an email — just like Paperbell’s free plan!

Best for:

Flodesk is perfect for coaches who want something simple but who still have some tech-savvy skills to set everything up. 

3. Convertkit

Convertkit isn’t for everyone — but coaches are one of their ideal clients! According to their home page, they serve creators such as:

• Coaches
• Authors
• Podcasters
• Musicians

With Convertkit, you can grow your email list and segment your audience so you can send personalized content directly to their inbox. 

It has all the tools you need to provide freebies or digital products, such as:

• Easy email broadcasting tool
• Landing pages and forms
• A/b testing for your subject lines
• Robust automations and segmentation
• Reusable snippets to save time on every email you send
• Products and tip jars to sell directly to your audience

The Creator Pro plan also comes with these powerful features:

• Advanced deliverability report
• Newsletter referral system
• Subscriber engagement scoring (and the ability to send emails to subscribers with specific scores)

Pros and Cons of Convertkit

Pros:

• Free plan for your first 300 subscribers
• Advanced features allow you to keep your email list squeaky clean
• Automation workflows are powerful enough for most coaches
• Ability to offer paid newsletters
• Flexible tagging and segmentation system
• Powerful, yet intuitive and easy to use for beginners

Cons:

• Limited reporting and metrics (even on the Creator Pro plan)
• Few email templates available
• Expensive to start if you have more than 300 subscribers

Convertkit Pricing

Convertkit’s pricing plans vary depending on how many subscribers you have — like most email marketing tools. Here are its 3 plans at their starting prices:

• Free: Up to 300 subscribers and doesn’t include email automations 
• Creator: $25 per month for up to 1000 subscribers
• Creator Pro: $50 per month for up to 1000 subscribers

Best for:

If you’re a coach who wants a powerful yet user-friendly email marketing tool, Convertkit is for you! However, because its free plan is so limited, it’s not the best option if you don’t yet have coaching clients to generate revenue.

4. Moosend

Moosend is a user-friendly email marketing automation software. Although it’s simple, it’s still one of the most powerful and flexible autoresponders on the market!

You can do all of the following with Moosend:

• Send emails (with beautiful templates)
• Try A/B testing
• Personalize and segment your subscribers
• Launch landing pages and subscription forms
• Automate your marketing processes
• Manage your coaching clients in a CRM
• Get custom reports to measure your efforts

Because it’s so simple to use, you can send an email with Moosend in as little as 5 minutes!

Pros and Cons of Moosend

Pros:

• Get access to advanced features at an affordable price
• Advanced reporting tools
• Easy to use

Cons:

• Signup forms are limited
• Average deliverability

Moosend Pricing

You can try Moosend for free for 30 days. Afterward, you can access the Pro plan for as little as $7 per month!

This pricing is for the annual price ($84/year) for 0 to 500 subscribers. Pricing goes up to $13 per month for the next tier (501 to 1000 subscribers).

The other pricing tier is for Enterprise clients, which requires a custom quote. But most coaches won’t ever need this plan!

Best For:

If you’re a coach who needs in-depth reports that are easy to use and affordable, consider trying Moosend.

5. Campaign Refinery

Campaign Refinery works differently from other email marketing platforms. Unlike other tools, it’s designed only for sending and automating emails — and doesn’t have functionality for landing pages or CRM.

But it has two advantages you won’t find in other tools!

First, it uses gamification to improve your relationship with your subscribers. Every time a subscriber opens your emails or clicks on your links, they gather points. And you can reward subscribers by offering prizes they can redeem with their points!

For example, you could offer one of your digital products or a complimentary coaching session in exchange for points.

Second, it sends emails directly using your domain. We won’t get into the techy details, but this essentially means you’ll have a higher chance of your emails landing in the primary inbox (instead of the Promotions tab or spam folder).

You can also clean your email list directly from Campaign Refinery! In fact, they automatically clean your list every 180 days to make sure all of your subscribers are still valid and active.

Pros and Cons of Campaign Refinery

Pros:

• Unlimited contacts at every price point
• Built-in email list cleaning
• Extremely high deliverability
• Flexible automations
• Gamification features you won’t find anywhere else
• Clean interface and super-simple email editor

Cons:

• No other marketing features apart from sending emails — that being said, if you have Paperbell, you won’t miss those features thanks to its built-in landing pages, billing, and more!
• Expensive
• Requires advanced tech knowledge to set up a custom domain

Campaign Refinery Pricing

Every Campaign Refinery email marketing service plan comes with a 14-day free trial. And instead of paying for a subscriber count, you use credits each month.

Sending one email costs one credit while cleaning one email address costs 5 credits. 

So, if you’re sending a newsletter to 300 subscribers, that will cost 300 credits. And if you’re cleaning a list of 500 addresses, that will cost 2,500 credits.

• Business Plan: $99/month for 50k credits
• Growth Plan: $299/month for 200k credits
• Additional credits: $1 per thousand credits on the Business Plan and $0.80 per credit on the Growth Plan

They also have an Enterprise plan, which costs $1,000 per month or more — but that requires a consultation with their team

Best For:

Campaign Refinery is best for entrepreneurs and coaches who want to go all-in with email marketing. If you only plan to send one or two emails monthly, you’re better off using another platform. 

6. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is often considered the cream of the crop for email marketing and automation — it’s truly next level.

Why?

Because it’s not just an email marketing tool — it’s a powerful, all-in-one marketing automation platform and CRM. Its feature list is way too long to cover entirely, but here are just a few of the things it can do:

• Tracking your website
• Sales engagement
• Transactional emails
• Advanced email automations and drip campaigns
• Landing pages and forms
• Sms marketing
• Lead scoring

For example, you can create an automation that does the following:

• Someone visits your website
• An hour later, you automatically send them an email
• One day later, you notify your sales team if the person didn’t respond

There’s not a single email automation scenario that ActiveCampaign can’t handle. It has marketing solutions for almost everything you can think of.

The biggest tradeoff? It’s got a steep learning curve!

Pros and Cons of ActiveCampaign

Pros:

• Advanced enough for coaching businesses of all sizes
• More than just email marketing — it has all the automation features you could ever want
• Integrate with social media and your website
• Advanced data to optimize your sales funnels

Cons:

• Steep learning curve
• Complex automations can take a long time to load in the editor

ActiveCampaign Pricing

The pricing for ActiveCampaign is complex. It’s got packages for email and marketing, sales, transactional emails, and combined bundles.

And each plan has several tiers and add-ons!

That being said, you can get started for as little as $29 per month. 

Best For

ActiveCampaign is best for the tech-savvy coach who also wants to make use of other marketing and sales tools. For instance, if you’ve got a sales team, perhaps this could be the platform for you.

Should I Use Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a highly popular email marketing platform that new coaches often turn to because of its free plan. 

However, Mailchimp recently made some changes to its free plan, making it much more limited than before. Now it’s free for up to 500 subscribers — but you can only send 1000 emails per month.

So if you want to send emails each week (or more frequently), you’re out of luck if you have 250 or more subscribers!

Plus, Mailchimp lacks several segmentation and automation tools that make email marketing so profitable for coaches. This means you’re likely to outgrow Mailchimp quickly. And migrating your list is not a fun task.

Instead, if you want a Free Forever plan, we suggest trying out MailerLite. 

What is the Best Email Platform for Coaches?

So which of the above is the best email marketing software?

Here’s the secret — there’s no “perfect” email platform for coaches! While we’ve narrowed it down for you, it ultimately comes down to your personal preferences as well as your business model. 

No matter which email marketing platform you choose, you’ll need a way to keep your clients organized, including:

• Contract signing
• Scheduling coaching sessions
• Handling payments 
• Creating (and sharing!) your coaching packages 

You can do all of that with Paperbell! Grab your free account to test it out for yourself — and only start paying once you get paid by your first client.