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.
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.