How To Start Your Email List With MailerLite

I admit, I procrastinated. I thought starting and managing an email list would be way too much work with very little gain.

Boy, was I wrong!

(This post includes affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, I may make a small commission.)

Why you need an email list

There are multiple reasons you should build a mailing list for your blog. All of which are beneficial to your blog’s growth.

• It’s a great way to grow your readership and ultimately drive consistent traffic to your blog
• You have control over when your emails are sent, the content that is in them, and who receives them
• It’s a great way to be more personal and engage with your readers and followers.
• If you sell a product or service, it’s easier to get your subscribers to convert because they have a relationship with you.

Related read: 30 Free Resources For Blogging On A Budget

How to get your email list started

Now that I’ve convinced you to start building an email list, I’m going to share with you how you can start one. 

First, you need to figure out what email service you want to use. There are many out there, with the main ones that bloggers gravitate to being Kit, MailerLite, and MailChimp.

In this article, though, we’re going to focus on getting an email list started with MailerLite since that’s the email marketing service I started with.

I dabbled with MailChimp in the past and didn’t like it, and at the time Kit was the dream, I chose MailerLite because of the multiple features I was able to get under their free plan. Now, as of July 2026, MailerLite has changed their free plan so you don't get as much as you used to.

With MailerLite’s free plan, you get

• Up to 250 subscribers on your list
• 2,500 email sends a month
• Drag & drop, Simple, and Custom HTML editors
• 3 visual automations
• 1 website & 1 landing page
• 1 digital product or booking
• 3 sign-up forms & pop-ups
• A/B testing
• Comparative reporting

While you do get a lot with the free plan, some features can help content creators be more efficient with creating email campaigns or even make money that only come with the paid plans

• 5,000 to unlimited email sends
• More visual automations, websites, landing pages, digital products and bookings, sign-up forms and pop-ups
• Unlimited newsletter templates
• Subject line generator
• AI writing assistant
• Unsubscribe page builder

Related read: 7 Reasons I Switched My Email Marketing To Kit

How to get set up with MailerLite

1. Create an account

You'll need to provide your company name, email address, and password. If you would like to create an account now, you can use my affiliate link.

After setting up your account, you’ll need to verify it.

2. Get your account approved

Complete your profile telling MailerLite about your business or blog

You’ll also need to verify the domain for your blog and provide a custom or domain email.

To send any emails with MailerLite, you’ll need a customized email instead of a Gmail or Yahoo email account. This is basically to help keep your emails from being blocked by your subscribers' email providers.

3. Start building your list

Once your account is approved by MailerLite, it’s time to start building your list. There are a few features you'll need to use to do this.

Set up your Groups

This is your email list - the group of people who have opted to receive emails from you.

You can create as many Groups as you like to help you segment your subscribers. Or you can have one big group. It just depends on how you plan to communicate with your list.

I had two different Groups based on the type of communication that I sent out. One group is for automatic emails when a new post goes live. The other is for a monthly newsletter that I send out with a recap of my monthly content, behind-the-scenes info, and other things that I want to share with my subscribers.

Design sign-up forms

There are three form types available in MailerLite

• Popups: I didn't use this type of form because I’m not a fan of pop-ups on the sites I frequent. So I couldn’t bring myself to do that to my readers.
• Embedded forms: I used this type of form the most because I could place it anywhere on my blog. I had a form that showed up on my homepage and another one in my sidebar. 
• Promotion pop-ups: These seemed to be mostly used to deliver important and timely messages to your site visitors. These seem more like pop-up ads than anything else. I didn't use them.

When designing your forms, try to use your brand colors and fonts so that they integrate well into your blog. Also, make sure your forms are GDPR compliant. You can find out more about what this means on the MailerLite blog.

To add forms to your blog, you can use plugins or manually add the code to each place you want your form to show up.

If you’re sharing on your social channels, you can use a link to the form instead of the code.

4. Set up automation

Once you’ve captured subscribers, you’ll want to welcome them to your list and give them more details on what they can expect from you and what help or information you’ll be providing in your newsletter.

MailerLite makes it easy to create an automated workflow.

• You’ll need to create and name your workflow
• Next, select a trigger. This is the action that needs to happen for the workflow to start. MailerLite provides lots of options such as joining a subscriber list, opening an email, and clicking a link.
• In addition to selecting the trigger, you can determine how quickly after that trigger happens the email is sent.
• After setting the initial trigger, it’s time to create that first email.
• From there, you can continue to build out the workflow with additional triggers and emails.

Related read: 7 Tips For Starting The Blog You've Always Dreamed About

5. Create your newsletter

To begin designing and writing your newsletter emails, go to the Campaign section. There you’ll find these four options

1. Regular campaign: A regular email newsletter.
2. A/B Split campaign: This option lets you test two different emails to see which one performs better. Elements that you can test in your emails are different subject lines, sender details, email content, or email design.
3. RSS campaign: An email that’s sent out every time you publish a new article on your blog.
4. Auto Resend: This automatically sends your email again to subscribers who didn’t perform the action you wanted them to take, such as opening the email or clicking a specific link. You have the option of changing the email content or subject line of the resent email. This is only available for paid plans, not the free plan that I use.

Once you’ve selected your Campaign type, you’ll need to build your email. You create your own email using the HTML editor, drag & drop editor, and rich text editor. Those with a paid plan have access to the MailerLite newsletter templates.

I prefer using the drag-and-drop editor because it’s easy to use and I can more easily customize my email with my own brand colors and images.

If you’d like to give MailerLite a try, you can sign up here. Once you’ve signed up, come back and share in the comments below your MailerLite experience.

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