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What is the best email marketing software ?
Would like to see what you guys use for email marketing. I'm gonna use it to sell digital product and provide automation service for my clients.
For now tested Convertkit / Mailchimp / Activecampaign and all of them pretty much get the job done.
Are there any criteria that I should know when compare these tools ?
For now tested Convertkit / Mailchimp / Activecampaign and all of them pretty much get the job done.
Are there any criteria that I should know when compare these tools ?
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We’re about to ship one on saasco. Works out at .25c/1k emails for members. No per subscriber or monthly commitments. LMK if you’re keen to check it out [email protected]
Looks great Tim, will check it out.
I started with Active Campaign (since that's what all my clients used and I was most familiar using to write their emails), but I switched to Convert Kit and still use them.
I recommend against MailChimp because most people find it unprofessional (newbie-ish) and it costs a lot more as you grow your list.
I was grandfathered in with AC from back in 2017, so I didn't pay a lot then but it's more expensive now. CK is fairly inexpensive to start and scale.
What you need is fairly basic, so I'd look for:
price (starting now and as you grow your list). I always factor in future situations since it's a nightmare to constantly switch. (I do this for my clients to save them a headache. Trust me, you'll want to save yourself the hassle by doing your due diligence upfront.)
check out their UX. User-friendliness and aesthetics are important to me, so I check out their landing page templates (if you have your LPs on your website, you won't need this though).
segmentation to fit your needs (I obsessively segment and create automations for each segment based on subscriber behavior, and both AC and CK do this). Also check out the reports you may need as well.
figure out your client workflow needs and make sure you can trigger those events to automate (for ex: my new consulting clients get an onboarding sequence where they get 1 email to do 1 action step a day, and CK allows me to have a trigger event to set this up). You can also set up landing pages and sell directly through CK (probably AC and MC too), if you'd like.
The cool thing is Zapier integrates with basically everything, so if you sell digital products on something like Gumroad or Podia, you can integrate it with whichever you choose.
A big reason why I love CK is they introduced a near-native integration with Mighty Networks (where I host my membership), so no Zapier needed.
Also, CK has the Creator Network, so think Substack (where there's a bunch of creators who can follow and promo each other) but for CK. I've gotten a substantial amount of subscribers from the Creator Network, so it's useful if you enjoy creating content.
Since you used all 3, you can choose which one was most intuitive for you to use and which fits your present and future needs best while staying in your budget.
Thank you so much Cat for the clear and elaborate advices. I think i will need to test out building more complex segmentation to fully see these tools capabilities.
One quick question, have you tried bentonow.com/ before ? It caught my interest since they got integration with LINE which most Thai customer used. Maybe I can build Chat + Email system from it.
Ooh no, I haven't heard of them.
I'll have to check them out (and add them to my list of martech companies to cold email to write content for 😹).
Since they integrate with LINE, it's definitely worth testing them out.
Testing it out right now whether it can replace CK or not. First EMS I saw so far that integrated with LINE.
If you're one for self-hosting it; Sendy ( sendy.co/ ) is pretty awesome. Once-time fee for the app, just need to add a SMTP service (where you pay per email).
I've switched to it after my bills got out of hand for what I send (a few huge lists, but 1x month email), and not looking back. 😊
First time I heard of it. Look pretty awesome, will try test it out. Thanks a lot.
Check out Mailerlite.
I just noticed that www.beehiiv.com/ has better pricing now, so I think that's a really good option.
Thank you Szymon. Their new pricing suit my needs more since I'm under 10k email subs. Now it pretty affordable.
I'm currently using Convertkit and find it very limiting / frustrating. In particular, the Zapier integration is terrible. I'm also using Mailersend for transactional emails and absolutely hate it. So buggy.
I'm not in a rush but soon I'd like to switch to either: bentonow, or customer.io. I've used customer.io for years in the past and absolutely love it, but it's the most expensive option. Bentonow might be a cheaper alternative.
I used Mailersend for transactional email as well. It is indeed buggy. Customer.io I never try it but it seem like an enterprise solutions. What do you think about learning curve of it ? Do you find it easy to get start.
In Convertkit I use Typeform + Zapier to survey and apply tag to my subscriber. If my workflow going to be more complex, this can be very tiring.
I think the customer.io UX is the best in the business so I find the learning curve to be quite low.
How do you use Zapier to apply a tag dynamically based on the survey response? E.g. if the respondent responds with answer choice C for a multiple choice question, how do you tag them with "C"? I can't find a way to dynamically set this (instead of just always setting C every time the zap fires, with C just being hardcoded in).
TBH I avoided using multi-select field for my personal business on Zapier since it giving me headache like the case you mentioned lol.
But for some clients, I use Make.com for that case. The way It work is kinda painful though. Here how I set it up.
I received a response from multi-select field, Let say the field called "interest" and user fill in option A and B.
It depend on the form you use, Some you will got Array value > you will need to use text aggregator to turn it into String [A,B]. If it Jotform, it give you string value so you don't need to do anything further.
Back to Convertkit, Instead of using tag, I use custom field. I created a custom field called "interest_fillout" then use make.com to add string A,B into the custom field.
Set up automation in Convertkit ( the visual one ), set up When custom field contain A > Add tag A, When contain B > Add Tag B
I find it easier to work with complex stuff on Make.com. I only use Zapier when I want to finish things quickly without headache.
Thanks so much, makes a lot of sense. A headache whatever way you approach it 😂
loops.so is another option. super easy to use and i've had no issues yet