Are you looking for simple ways to build your email list and engage with your existing and potential clients?
Then it’s time to look for an email marketing app designed with coaches in mind.
With so many different tools, it may be difficult to tell which one is best for your business—that’s why we’ve created this simple guide for you. Read on to learn about the following tools:
- Mailerlite
- Flodesk
- Convertkit
- Moosend
- Campaign Refinery
- ActiveCampaign
…And why you should avoid tools like Mailchimp.
If you want a quick rundown to make a decision, here’s what we suggest:
- For testing the waters: Go with MailerLite if you want a free tool.
- For beautiful designs: Go with Flodesk if your priority is attractive newsletter designs and templates.
- For creators and coaches: Go with Convertkit if you need a user-friendly tool designed for you.
- For cost-effectiveness: Go with Moosend if you seek a powerful yet affordable tool.
- For email-focused marketing: Go with Campaign Refinery if you plan to make email your primary marketing strategy.
- For comprehensive tools: Go with ActiveCampaign if you’re tech-savvy and require extensive email marketing and sales automation features.
Let’s dive into how these platforms make email marketing for coaches a breeze.
1. Mailerlite
Mailerlite is a user-friendly email marketing tool for coaches, consultants, and small businesses.
Its clean, functional design makes it easy to learn, even without prior experience with email marketing. It comes fully loaded with plenty of features, such as:
- Email campaigns and automation
- Transactional emails (like order confirmations and receipts)
- A website and landing page builder
- A blog builder
- Opt-in forms
- An email cleaning tool to sift out invalid email addresses
- Paid newsletter subscriptions
- Digital product selling
Like most email marketing tools, you can design newsletters directly inside Mailerlite.
The 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:
- Its website builder isn’t the best on the market
- Can’t support advanced automation
- No email design templates on 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 automation
- Websites
- Ten landing pages
- Opt-in forms and popups
So, if you’re looking for a tool that enables free email marketing for coaches, start with Mailerlite.
The Growing and Advanced plans are available starting from $9 and $18 per month. Pricing goes up as you gain more subscribers.
Best For:
Because of its Free Forever plan and ease of use, Mailerlite is a fantastic option for beginning coaches who are just getting started with 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 check-out pages and sales pages
- Instantly deliver digital products or an online course
- Create beautiful opt-in forms and popups
- Build powerful automation
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
- Free starting price—only upgrade to one of the paid plans when you’re ready to send or publish anything
- No check-out 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 charges a flat monthly rate of $35. You don’t need to pay more if your number of subscribers increases.
You can start with a free trial, which will remain free until you want to hit publish or send an email.
Best for:
Flodesk is perfect for coaches who want something simple but 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 this platform, grow your email list and segment your audience to send personalized content directly to their inbox.
It has all the tools you need to provide freebies or digital products, such as:
- An easy email broadcasting tool
- Landing pages and forms
- A/B testing for your subject lines
- Robust automation 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 three plans at their starting prices:
- Free: Up to 1,000 subscribers and doesn’t include email automation
- Creator: $29 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers
- Creator Pro: $59 per month for up to 1,000 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 limited, it’s not the best option if you don’t have coaching clients to generate revenue.
4. Moosend
Moosend is a user-friendly email marketing automation software. Although simple, it’s still one of the market’s most powerful and flexible autoresponders.
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 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 monthly.
This pricing is for the annual price ($84/year) for 0 to 500 subscribers. It goes up to $16 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 easy-to-use and affordable in-depth reports, consider trying Moosend.
5. Campaign Refinery
Campaign Refinery works differently from other email marketing platforms. 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 subscribers open your emails or click on your links, they gather points. You can reward your subscribers by offering prizes they can redeem with these 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 your emails will most likely land in the primary inbox (instead of the Promotions tab or spam folder). Of course, you still need to check your email security settings and make sure you have set up DMARC correctly.
You can also clean your email list directly from Campaign Refinery. They automatically clean your list every 180 days to ensure all your subscribers remain 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 automation
- 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 five credits.
So, sending a newsletter to 300 subscribers will cost 300 credits, and cleaning a list of 500 addresses 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 monthly or more but 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 best in 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 automation 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
ActiveCampaign can handle almost any email automation scenario. It offers marketing solutions for nearly anything.
The biggest trade-off? 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
- Integrates with social media and your website
- Advanced data to optimize your sales funnels
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Complex automation 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. Each plan has several tiers and add-ons.
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 use other marketing and sales tools. If you have a sales team, this could be the platform for you.
FAQs About Email Marketing for Coaches
Should I Use Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is a viral email marketing platform for new coaches because of its free plan.
However, Mailchimp recently changed its free plan, making it much more limited. It’s free for up to 500 subscribers, but you can only send 1000 emails monthly.
So, if you want to send emails each week (or more frequently), you’re out of luck if you have 250 or more subscribers.
Mailchimp lacks several segmentation and automation tools that make email marketing profitable for coaches. This means you’re likely to outgrow Mailchimp quickly, and migrating your list is not fun.
What’s the Best Email Marketing Tool for Coaches?
It depends on your business needs and preferences. Some popular options reviewed in this article are MailerLite, Flodesk, ConvertKit, Moosend, Campaign Refinery, and ActiveCampaign. If you’re looking for a Free Forever plan, we suggest trying out MailerLite.
What Types of Email Should I Send as a Coach?
You can send different types of emails to your list, including:
- Newsletters with content related to your coaching services
- Updates on your programs and events
- Personalized messages to clients
- Automated sequences for onboarding or nurturing leads
Keeping your email list engaged will help you stay connected and increase the likelihood of potential clients buying from you in the future.
How Much Does an Email Marketing Tool Cost?
Email marketing app subscriptions usually depend on the size of your list, the number of emails you send out a month, and the additional features you need.
Several providers in this guide provide free plans with basic features.
Create a Thriving Coaching Practice
You’ll need a way to keep your business organized to build your dream coaching practice. This includes:
- Contract signing
- Scheduling coaching sessions
- Handling payments
- Designing your coaching packages
The good news is that Paperbell does all of this for you. Grab your free account to try all the features with your first client.
Editor’s Note: This post was published in February 2023 and has since been updated for accuracy.
