MailerLite Tutorial: Set Up, First Campaign, and the Rules That Cost Money

This is a practical guide to setting up MailerLite and sending your first campaign without tripping over the rules that cost money or pause an account. People search mailerlite tutorial about 70 times a month in the United States and how to use mailerlite about 40. Most tutorials cover the editor. This one covers the editor and the five decisions around it that matter more.

It follows the order you will actually work in: account, plan, subscribers, forms, first campaign, automation, pages, products, and the settings worth checking once a month.

Step 1: Create the account on the free plan

Sign up on the free plan. It needs no card and covers up to 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with two user seats ^[5]. Every new account also gets a 14-day trial of premium features ^[2].

Use the trial to look, not to build. When it ends, premium features "will no longer be available unless the account is upgraded" ^[2]. Your data stays, but anything you built with a premium feature stops being editable. If you build your welcome automation with a premium trigger in the first week, it will stop working in the third.

Set up the basics while the account is empty. Add your company name and address, which every campaign needs in its footer for anti-spam compliance. Add a second user if someone else will work on the list; Free allows two.

If you are not the only person who will run the account, make the organisation's shared address the owner rather than a personal one. Removing a person later is easy with the Forget me option; transferring ownership away from a departed employee is harder.

## Step 2: Decide your plan before you import

Most guides leave plans to the end. On MailerLite the plan should come before the first import, because the import sets your billable count.

MailerLite counts "any email address that was Active at any point during the cycle", including addresses deleted later ^[3]. On a paid plan, crossing the top of your band upgrades the plan automatically and charges pro rata ^[3]. On the free plan, crossing 250 stops sending.

So count first. How many subscribers will you import, and how many will you clean out afterwards? Use the larger number. If it is under 250, stay on Free. If it is between 251 and 500, Comfort costs $12 a month ^[2]. If it is higher, find your band in the published ladder: $19 at 1,000, $33 at 2,500, $49 at 5,000.

Choose monthly billing at first. The pricing page opens on "Billed yearly" ^[2], but an upgrade during an annual plan is charged on the annual price, and downgrades wait for the anniversary.

Step 3: Import subscribers the safe way

Bring in only people who agreed to hear from you, and keep the evidence: the form or page they used and the date.

This matters more on MailerLite than the import screen suggests. Accounts are reviewed for spam risk, and during a review "core operational functionalities, including, but not limited to, email sending and landing page publishing, will be temporarily paused" ^[8]. Several reviewers describe a review on their first or third campaign ^[12].

Practical rules for the first import:

• Leave out unsubscribed and bounced addresses. They do not count toward your bill, and importing them as active is both a legal problem and a review trigger.
• Leave out anyone who has not opened anything from you in a year.
• Import in groups by source, so you can send to the most recent and most engaged first.
• Never delete and re-import to stay under a band; the vendor calls that a terms violation ^[3].

If you are coming from Mailchimp, MailerLite's importer brings subscribers, custom fields and segments across ^[9].

## Step 4: Groups or segments?

MailerLite has two ways to organise people, and both are unlimited on every plan ^[2].

Groups are labels you apply: newsletter, customers, webinar March. Someone joins a group through a form, an import, an automation or by hand. Groups work like tags.

Segments are rules that update themselves: everyone who opened one of the last three campaigns, everyone in the customers group who has not bought in six months, everyone with a given field value. You never add people to a segment; they match it or not.

The rule of thumb: use groups for how someone arrived and what they asked for, and segments for how they behave. Send campaigns to segments when you want to target engagement, and to groups when you want to honour a choice someone made.

A subscriber in several groups and segments is still one subscriber. The vendor's free-plan FAQ is explicit: "We don’t count subscribers more than once, even if they appear in multiple groups or segments." ^[5]

Step 5: Add a signup form

Forms come in three kinds: embedded forms that sit in a page, pop-ups, and the forms built into landing pages. Free allows three active forms; Comfort allows ten; Power is unlimited ^[3].

Build one embedded form first, for your website, connected to a newsletter group. Then decide whether you need a pop-up. Pop-ups convert better and annoy more; MailerLite offers teaser pop-ups, promotion pop-ups and a spin-the-wheel format ^[10].

Check two things before you publish. That the form adds people to the right group, because that is what starts your welcome automation. And whether you want double opt-in, which asks new subscribers to confirm by email. It lowers your count and raises its quality, and a list built that way is the best defence against an account review.

If you are on WordPress, the official plugin connects forms to your site. It scores 3.0 from 40 reviews on WordPress.org ^[14], with more one-star reviews than five-star, so test it on a staging site or use the embed code instead.

## Step 6: Write and send your first campaign

MailerLite has three editors: drag and drop, a custom HTML editor and a simple text-like editor ^[2]. Use drag and drop unless you already have HTML templates.

A first campaign checklist:

1. Choose the recipients: one group or segment, ideally your most recent and engaged subscribers.
2. Write a plain subject line. The subject line generator is limited on Free.
3. Set a recognisable sender name and a reply-to address you read.
4. Build the email from blocks. There are about 70 content blocks, including surveys, countdown timers and coupons ^[10].
5. Preview on mobile, and send a test to yourself.
6. Send, or schedule.

Keep the first campaign small and recent. If your list has 2,000 people from three sources, send to the 300 who joined last month first, wait a day, then widen. That warms up the account's sending history and gives you a clean first report.

Step 7: Watch the sending allowance

Every email to every person counts as a send. "A single campaign sent to 500 people uses 500 of your monthly sending allowance." ^[3]

On Free, the allowance is 2,500 a month. On Comfort, it is ten times the top of your subscriber band: "The multiplier is based on the top of your tier, not your exact subscriber count." ^[2] On Power, it is unlimited under a fair use policy.

Automations count too. A five-email welcome sequence for 200 new subscribers is 1,000 sends.

On Comfort, exceeding the allowance upgrades the plan by one band for the rest of the cycle and moves it back at renewal ^[3]. On Free, sending pauses until the allowance resets.

Check the sending summary in your account once a week for the first month, until you know your real rhythm. If you are regularly above eight times your list on Comfort, compare Power; on several bands a month over the cap costs exactly the Power price.

## Step 8: Build a welcome automation

Your first automation should be a welcome sequence. It runs whenever someone joins the newsletter group.

A sensible first version:

1. Immediately: a welcome email with what to expect and one useful link.
2. Two days later: your best piece of content.
3. Five days later: a short question, asking what they want from you.

Free allows three active automations with five steps each. Comfort allows 50 with up to 100 steps ^[2]. Power is unlimited and adds multiple triggers per automation.

Pause and resume automations from the automation Overview with the Pause button ^[5]. On a plan with limits, remember that an automation you deactivate while over the limit cannot be switched back on until you are under it again ^[4].

Test the automation by joining the group with a second email address of your own. Read every email as a new subscriber would.

Step 9: Publish a landing page

Landing pages are where most MailerLite accounts grow. Free includes one website of up to five pages and one landing page; Comfort allows ten sites and landing pages combined ^[3].

Build a single landing page for one offer, usually a lead magnet. Keep the form on it connected to a group that starts a specific automation, so people who download the guide receive the guide.

You can publish on a MailerLite address or on your own domain. Custom domains are a paid feature, and they come with a condition worth knowing at the start: to cancel a paid plan later, "any existing custom domains need to be disconnected/removed from landing pages and websites first to successfully initiate the plan cancellation" ^[7].

Pages stay live when you are over a plan limit, but you cannot publish new ones or edit existing ones until you are back under it. Unpublish pages you no longer need from the Overview page with the Unpublish button ^[5], so they stop counting.

## Step 10: Sell something, if you want to

MailerLite sells digital products, bookings, paid newsletters and recurring subscriptions through a Stripe connection, and the vendor says it does so "without paying us a commission" ^[10]. Stripe's own fees still apply.

Free allows one active digital product or booking, Comfort five and Power unlimited ^[3].

The pattern that works for most creators: a landing page for the product, Stripe checkout on the page, a purchase that adds the buyer to a customers group, and an automation that delivers the product and follows up. Paid newsletters work the same way, with personalised emails sent automatically "whenever someone signs up, changes or cancels their subscription" ^[17].

Start with one product. The products cap on Comfort is five, and it counts active products, so retire old ones rather than leaving them live.

Step 11: Read the reports that matter

Four numbers matter in the first months.

Opens and clicks per campaign, compared with your previous campaigns rather than with industry averages. MailerLite offers comparative reporting for exactly that ^[2].

Click maps, which show where people clicked inside an email. They tell you which link placement works.

List growth, from the subscriber reports: new subscribers, unsubscribes and the net change.

Automation reports, which show where people drop out of a sequence.

Look at unsubscribes per campaign, not in total. A campaign that loses three times the usual number is telling you something about its topic or its timing.

Ignore vanity numbers. A high open rate on a list of 40 friends says little about a list of 4,000 strangers.

Step 12: Check billing once a month

Once a month, open Account settings and then Plan and billing. Check four things.

The plan and band, against your current active count. If your list has grown into the next band, the plan will already have moved; check the charge.

Any scheduled upgrade. The vendor documents a control for it: "Click Cancel scheduled upgrade." ^[3] Use it if a spike was temporary.

The payment method. A failed card stops an automatic upgrade and can pause sending.

The renewal date. Clean your list in the days before it, not after, because deleted subscribers count until the cycle resets ^[3].

If your list is seasonal, note the pause option: two months without charges, once per calendar year ^[3].

Step 13: Keep the list healthy

A clean list costs less, sends better and keeps the account out of review. MailerLite gives you three tools for it.

Clean up inactive. In the Subscribers section, the Clean up inactive tab finds subscribers who no longer open your campaigns, so you can remove them in one step ^[5]. Do this every quarter.

MailerCheck. The vendor's verification service flags role-based accounts, disposable addresses and typos. It checks ten addresses free ^[5], which is enough to see whether your list has a problem worth paying to fix.

Restore by mistake. If you delete subscribers you meant to keep, the vendor documents a way back. Open a sent campaign's report, go to the Subscriber activity tab, choose Select all, then Actions and Export CSV, and re-import the file ^[5]. That works only for people who received that campaign, so it is a reason to keep at least one recent campaign sent to your whole list.

Time the clean-up to your billing date. MailerLite counts every address that was active at any point in the cycle, so a clean-up the day before your billing date lowers the next cycle's band, while the same clean-up the day after changes nothing for a month ^[3].

Step 14: Know when to move from Free to Comfort

Three signals say it is time.

Your list is within about 50 of 250. A single busy week can push you over, and over the line sending stops while forms keep collecting ^[5].

You need more than three automations, three forms or one landing page. Over a feature limit on Free, you cannot create, activate or edit those items, and sending and imports are disabled too ^[5].

You want the AI writing assistant, smart sending, logo removal or sending through the API. All start at Comfort.

Comfort is $12 a month for up to 500 subscribers, and doubles the subscriber limit and the sending allowance ^[2]. Upgrade by hand from Plan and billing before you hit the line, rather than after your welcome sequence has gone quiet.

## Common first-month mistakes

Five mistakes account for most early problems.

Importing an old list on day one. It is the most common route to an account review.

Building on trial features. They stop working after 14 days on Free.

Ignoring the free plan's line. At 251 subscribers sending stops while forms keep collecting, so new people receive nothing ^[5].

Cleaning the list after the billing date. Deleted subscribers still count until the next reset.

Choosing annual billing too early. An upgrade during the year is charged on the annual price, and the money is not refundable except when MailerLite ends the service without cause ^[6].

Avoid those five and MailerLite is one of the easiest platforms in this category to run. Its billing help is the clearest we have read; when something behaves unexpectedly, read that page first.