For you as an online business owner it’s not so easy to find the best email marketing platform. There are so many services and each of them has a different feature set and of course a different pricing. If someone asked me in the past which tool you should use to get started, my answer was often “Mailchimp”.
The popular email marketing platform Mailchimp has a lot of features, is easy to use and most of all they offer a free plan for the first 2000 subscribers.
So why is it so difficult to choose a platform if there is a huge player with a free plan? Keep reading, I will tell you why I quit using Mailchimp and which tools I use instead!
Why is Mailchimp not the right email marketing platform (anymore)?
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform with a great reputation and some nice tools. Like many other good products, Mailchimp has also a “higher” price. Sure the free version is for a lot of users “complete” enough to start, but what happens if the mailing list (audience) becomes bigger? The monthly costs for a bigger mailing list at Mailchimp was always more expensive than for most other services. You have to pay a high price just for saving your mailing list on the Mailchimp servers!
Besides the higher price, the user has faced earlier this year another disadvantage, they changed the rules or the feature set for the free plan. In the past it was possible to use many premium features in the free plan. Today you can’t upload your own email templates anymore and the maximum number of mailing lists is set from many to ONE.
There are not only changes for the free version, there are several modifications which makes it less attractive to use Mailchimp these days. For example, you need to upgrade to the standard plan to make use of all automation features.
Most people (including me) don’t need so much advanced features if they do email marketing. That’s why I use for many cases a more simple tool for a much lower price. However, if you need more features, there are also much better Mailchimp Alternatives.
Most important features and requirements
Before we look for other platforms we need to check what kind of email marketing features we really need:
- A template builder or templates gallery for quick and easy email creations.
Two features are important here: a powerful and user friendly drag & drop editor and a function to import your own HTML email templates. - No (hard) limit for the number of subscribers.
Actually none of the well known systems has really a subscriber limit, but it’s important that you can keep a list inside the system database without paying a lot of money. - The possibility to choose Amazon SES as an email service provider.
Sending emails via Amazon SES is cheap, fast and reliable. Many professional email services are using the Amazon SES to deliver all their messages. So why using the email servers from some other party? - An API, WordPress plugins and integrations with other systems like Zapier.
To get more subscribers you need to integrate your email marketing system with your WordPress website and other applications. A strong integration via Zapier is an important requirement. The API is important to program functions which are not possible with the existing integration options. - Automatic responders and “Drip” campaigns.
Beside regular email campaigns automatic campaigns and responders are important ingredients to grow your mailing list.
As you might have noticed, this list of requirements doesn’t include any fancy features like A/B testing. While our selected systems should offer at least some of them, we believe they are not a hard requirement. Check the MailChimp competitors we suggest in the later section.
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