Email Marketing: Choose the Right Tools to Cut Costs by 30% and Double Customer Retention

Why It’s Harder for SMEs to Do Email Marketing Well

In 2025, for every 100 marketing emails sent by SMEs, only an average of 67 actually reach users’ inboxes—down nearly 18% from 2022 (Source: Litmus 2024 Global Email Deliverability Report). This means that more than 30% of every dollar you invest could simply vanish into spam filters.

ISPs like Gmail and Outlook have fully implemented AI-driven spam detection mechanisms, combined with dynamic user behavior scoring; meanwhile, enforcement of GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and China’s Personal Information Protection Law is tightening—just one violation from mass email campaigns can lead to fines of tens of thousands of yuan. Many businesses are still using free tools that only support basic bulk emailing, mistakenly believing that “being able to send emails” equates to “effective customer engagement.”

Lack of DKIM/SPF authentication means your brand identity cannot be verified,resulting in a delivery rate drop of over 40% (2024 Martech Compliance Report); without IP reputation management, new accounts trigger rate limits within their first week,leading to click-through rate losses as high as 60%; and without behavioral tracking and automated segmentation capabilities, you’re missing out on over 90% of secondary conversion opportunities.

Based on a monthly budget of 3,000 yuan, hidden costs due to low delivery rates and inactive users can add up to 3,200 yuan—this isn’t just a technical flaw; it’s a systemic failure of your growth engine. The real turning point? Professional tools have evolved from mere “email sending channels” into growth hubs that integrate identity verification, intelligent optimization, and data loops.

The core of the next competitive battle is no longer “who sends more,” but “who truly gets seen and responded to.” So, which tools can deliver measurable growth returns while keeping costs under control?

Which Tools Offer True Cost-Effectiveness

After independent evaluations comparing free tiers, cost per 10,000 emails, automation capabilities, integration ecosystems, and compliance support,Mailchimp, Brevo, MailerLite, Zoho Campaigns, and ConvertKit emerged as the five most cost-effective platforms in 2025.

Brevo’s free tier supports API calls and transactional email sending,meaning startups can save at least 15,000 yuan annually in development or third-party service costs, as critical notifications like order confirmations and password resets can be automated directly—no extra coding required.

MailerLite is known for its ultra-simple backend; configuring your first automated email takes just three steps,with new users averaging less than 45 minutes to get started, making it especially ideal for small and micro businesses lacking technical teams to quickly launch private domain operations,compressing deployment time from two weeks to just one day.

Deeper cost-effectiveness lies in their billing models: Brevo and MailerLite charge based on actual email sends rather than total contacts. A business with 10,000 subscribers but only 60% active,can cut ineffective spending by around 40% annually. All recommended platforms support Zapier integrations,saving at least 20 hours each month on manual data transfers, allowing your CRM and e-commerce platform to automatically sync user behaviors.

These tools not only lower the barrier to entry but also turn every dollar invested into traceable customer engagement assets through flexible architectures and precise billing.

How Core Technical Differences Impact Business Outcomes

When choosing a tool, a beautiful interface is just the surface—what truly determines your conversion efficiency are three key technical pillars: the strength of the automation engine, AI-powered content recommendations, and IP reputation management. Ignore these, and even if your monthly fee is only a few dozen yuan, your entire campaign could fail because emails don’t make it into inboxes.

Brevo’s automation engine supports dynamic segmentation based on user open behavior,allowing you to achieve personalized, targeted outreach for thousands of customers, as the system automatically adjusts subsequent content paths according to user interests. After implementing this feature, a cross-border e-commerce SaaS client saw a 47% increase in click-through rates—effectively replicating the behavioral logic of high-performing sales teams with a single system.

Leading AI content recommendation features not only generate subject lines but also suggest topic lines with historically high open rates.AI-assisted emails see an average baseline open rate increase of 12–19%, meaning copywriting teams save over 60% of their time on content trial-and-error, ensuring that every email is built on data-backed, optimal solutions.

What’s often overlooked by low-cost tools is the IP warm-up mechanism—the process of gradually increasing email volume to build trust with email service providers.Businesses lacking this mechanism may see delivery rates drop below 50% in their first week, and long-term damage to reputation directly impacts brand credibility. This shows thatsending 10,000 emails isn’t as effective as sending 1,000 emails into inboxes: trust is the ultimate conversion asset.

Strategic insight: When evaluating tools, prioritize testing algorithm maturity over interface design. The next round of competition won’t be about “can it be used,” but about “how quickly can it deliver results.”

Real-World ROI Performance

A B2B service company with annual revenue of 8 million yuan increased its conversion rate from 1.2% to 3.8% within six months after replacing its previous Excel + SMTP solution,generating over 1.4 million yuan in additional annual revenue—a true ROI leap achieved through MailerLite.

The company started by cleaning its contact list of 5,000 people, completing full-process configuration in just nine hours: establishing a three-tier nurturing path (Welcome → Education → Promotion), enabling personalized tags and intelligent send-time optimization.By week three, open rates surged to 41%, far exceeding the industry average of 22% (2024 China SaaS Marketing Benchmark Report).

• Conversion rate increased by 2.6 percentage points → directly bringing in over 1.4 million yuan in new contract value
• Customer support inquiries dropped by 35% → thanks to upfront information transparency that addressed questions before they arose
• Human resource input was reduced by approximately 70 hours per quarter → tasks previously requiring manual scheduling and tracking were automated

The essence of cost-effectiveness isn’t the lowest price—it’s the greatest customer behavior uplift per unit cost. When a tool can reshape customer communication logic with minimal learning effort, it ceases to be merely an “email platform” and becomes a component of your growth engine.

The question now isn’t “should we switch?” but “how can we quickly deploy a system that fits the pace of SMEs?”

How to Quickly Deploy a Cost-Effective Email System

A properly deployed cost-effective email marketing tool can launch its first automated workflow within 72 hours,turning every email into traceable customer asset accumulation. We’ve distilled five efficient deployment steps:

Step One: Inventory and Clean Existing Customer Data Sources — remove invalid email addresses, duplicate records, and unauthorized contacts,immediately boosting delivery rates by over 15% (according to the 2024 Martech Compliance Report).

Step Two: Choose Tools Based on Growth Stage — startup teams should prioritize MailerLite (free for the first 1,000 contacts), while growing businesses should switch to Brevo, whose automated segmentation and A/B testing support scalable operations.

Step Three: Complete Domain Authentication — configure SPF and DKIM records (technical explanation: verify that you own the domain and prevent spoofing),never use public domains like @qq.com or @163.com to send emails, as these are highly likely to be flagged as spam.

Step Four: Build Basic Automation Flows — for example, a welcome series for new subscribers, where the template structure is best crafted as: pain point resonance → value promise → action guidance, forming a closed-loop conversion path.

Step Five: Set Monthly Optimization Targets — aim for an open rate above 35%, a click-through rate above 8%, and launch scaling plans once these targets are met for two consecutive rounds.

After switching to custom domain sending, a cross-border e-commerce manager saw their weekly open rate jump from 21% to 44%,equivalent to generating 2.3 times more qualified leads for every 10,000 yuan invested. This process isn’t about piling on technology—it’s about systematically building customer trust.

Take action today: clean your data tomorrow, configure automation the day after, and see your first wave of high-quality interactions in just three days. Stop letting inefficient systems drag down your growth—click to start, and turn dormant contacts into active revenue engines.

Once you’ve clearly identified the core criteria for cost-effective tools—IP reputation management, AI-driven precision targeting, compliance guarantees, and real, measurable ROI—the next step is to choose a partner that doesn’t just meet expectations, but consistently exceeds them. Bay Marketing is precisely such an intelligent growth hub tailored for SMEs: it doesn’t just solve the surface-level problem of “emails not being sent”—through global server clusters, dynamic IP maintenance mechanisms, and a proprietary spam ratio scoring tool, it fortifies delivery rate defenses from the source; its AI-powered content generation and interaction capabilities ensure that every cold email becomes a warm, memorable, and feedback-driven customer conversation starter.

Whether you’re deeply engaged in cross-border e-commerce and urgently need efficient outreach to overseas buyers, or expanding into the domestic B2B market and eager to improve lead conversion efficiency, Bay Marketing offers a lightweight, pay-as-you-go model, a real-world delivery rate of over 90%, and a full-link closed loop spanning collection—modeling—sending—tracking—optimization, helping you turn every dollar of marketing budget into verifiable growth momentum. Visit the Bay Marketing official website now and begin your journey toward smarter email marketing—make being seen the starting point of every communication; make being responded to the inevitable outcome of every growth initiative.