Choosing the right email platform for your business
it's worth thinking about your business needs
If you are like me and tend to go down the rabbit hole of research when faced with a decision to choose a software tool, the best advice for you is to pick one of these with a free account option:
MailerLite - designed for ease of use
Sender - up to 2,500 subscribers for free
Brevo - includes SMS & WhatsApp campaigns
ConvertKit - can sell digital products & subscriptions
Hubspot - complex CRM & more capabilities
Give yourself 30-45min to go through their features and pick one. You’re done, skip the rest of the article ;)
If you have some self-control and have specific requirements for your future email marketing platform, here’s how I’d recommend you approach your decision-making.
Choosing the right email marketing platform for you
What functions are critical to you?
List all of the functions that you think you’ll need in your email marketing. Ideally, do this without looking a list of features, this should be closely linked to your business needs, for example:
If you are design focused and want to have the power to customise to fit your look and feel - then look for different types of design editors, customisation functions and more.
If you want to be able to send text messages to your subscribers, as a way to remind them of their appointments or just a more personal touch, then look out for that.
If you like to bundle as many functionalities and tools under one roof as possible, then you’re looking for a larger tool that provides them all or easily integrates with other systems.
If you think you will launch an online shop later on, you might want to look out for eCommerce tools or those that specifically support transactional emails.
If you will have multiple audience groups with different content, then segmentation capacity is crucial to have from the start and not just in the upgrade features.
And so on. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of ease of functionality that’s important to you and so then set up a free account, play around, and see if you like it.
What’s your budget?
The second step is ofc to look at the budget. If you are starting with a free account, you are limited to a selection of tools that offer that, but if you are open to paying from the get-go, your options are pretty much endless.
Just because it’s cheaper, doesn’t mean it’s better.
Ofc you need to consider price, it varies between different providers and sometimes makes no sense. There are so many more affordable options out there but just make sure you are paying for all the features you need with enough subscribers.
Think about their payment model - how does the price scale as the number of subscribers goes up? Is it a higher price but it stays the same regardless of the number of subscribers? (Flodesk is a brilliant example of that)
Don’t accidentally miss out on support and critical features because of the price.
If you are paying upfront straight away, I’d base most of your decision on features, functions, and integrations and much less on price, as long as the price is comparable to the competition within $5-10.
Does it connect to all your other tools?
You’d be surprised, but sometimes we expect there to be a direct integration from one software to another, just to be surprised when it’s not there.
You may think it’s common sense integration to have, but the developers may not.
Just make sure your tool of choice connects easily, or at least via Zapier, to the rest of your software pool so you can automate your work seamlessly.
Don’t rush it, but don’t procrastinate on it
Easier said than done, I know.
Spend some time carefully choosing your email marketing providers, because when the time comes to scale, you want to just be able to upgrade and get the features easily.
You don’t want to have to do the research all over again, set up a new account, redo all your forms, recreate automations, templates and subscribers. It’s a huge process that can have an impact on your deliverability.
Choose wisely.
Just don’t procrastinate on it and make a call to stick to soon enough.
P.S. This article does not include tools like Substack, Beehiv, Ghost etc. They are a very different system for blogging/publishing articles. I might write about them one day.
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Have a fab weekend!
Maria Malaniia 🐞
email marketing for nice people with small businesses