Our Recommended Email Marketing Platforms
As you likely know, here at BizMagic we help clients with all sorts of things when running the back-end of their businesses. We support people with everything from website design and maintenance, to audio editing to general admin, to social media. And this includes email marketing support.
In fact, we do A LOT of email marketing support for our clients. We help with the most basic tasks of sending out emails to their lists, creating opt-in forms and landing pages, setting up automations, adding in email sequences, and managing tags and lists. We even do a full email marketing set up where we either transfer them from their current platform into a new one or set them up brand new with everything they need to hit the ground running including strategy and video tutorials!
There is so much more to do inside email marketing platform management than just send emails.
And since I head up this fun BizMagic team, I have worked with a whole lot of email marketing platforms and have therefore formed some opinions and developed some favorites for my clients.
So today, I want to share the top email marketing platforms that I recommend, most specifically, for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs.
Before you get started, it’s important to remember that each person and business are different. What works for me might not work for you, might not work for the next person. Check out our blog post on How to Find the Right Systems and Tools For You so that you can think about which of the platforms I recommend might be the best fit for you.
When thinking about choosing an email marketing platform, it’s important for you to consider a few things:
How do you want to use your platform (i.e. just sending emails or using it to really up your marketing)?
How are you going to organize your contacts?
Will you be using opt-in forms? If so, do you want them to be embedded on your website?
Will you have email sequences (or nurture sequences)?
How detailed will you want to be when sending out emails (will you want to always just send them to everyone on your lists or will you want to narrow it down by what they have purchased, clicked on, what their interests are, etc.)?
I think you get the idea.
Knowing a little bit about how you might use your email platform will help inform the platform you choose.
Now, before I dive into the email platforms I do recommend, I’m going to spend a minute talking about one of the most well-known and highly recommended email platforms in the solopreneur world, and why I actually don’t recommend it (and in fact, can’t stand it).
*Stepping up on soapbox*
Ahem.
MailChimp is not all it’s cracked up to be, everyone! Run far away from it.
The biggest reason I don’t like MailChimp: It does not grow well with your business.
With MailChimp, in order for you to be able to track where your audience comes from and what they might like from you, you need multiple lists, which costs more money, and it is difficult to send emails to multiple lists without sending duplicate emails to people who might be on more than one list. This alone, in my opinion, is enough of a reason to ditch MailChimp.
Why might you want to track people coming onto your list? So they stay on your list!
When someone signs up for your list, knowing whether they joined your list from your website footer form, website pop-up, Facebook button, online course, product purchase, etc., immediately allows you to give them information and value that is more relevant to them. Curating the content they receive keeps them on your list longer, therefore creating more of an opportunity for them to buy from you, refer you, or become a client of yours in some other way.
If this is not something your email platform allows you to easily do, I don’t really think it is worth your time (or money, if you’re paying for it).
Therefore, I really don’t think MailChimp is the best option for people who want to grow their business and be able to keep up with how people arrive on their list and make sure they receive the information that matters most to them.
*Stepping off soapbox*
So if I don’t recommend MailChimp, then what do I recommend?
I’m going to share 3 platforms that I recommend the most and then give you a few quick reasons why I like them and why they might work well for you.
Note: Two of the links are affiliate links, and if you sign up for them through my link, I will get a little reward. But I only have affiliate links for them because I’ve used them so much and have referred our clients to them for so long that I figured maybe it was time to grab that affiliate link.
First Recommendation: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an incredibly robust email marketing platform that most of our clients find easy to use. While it can take a minute to get the hang of, it is overall pretty intuitive. And even though it has so many features to offer, you don’t feel lost and overwhelmed when you are only using what you need. This means that it grows incredibly well with your business, and when you are ready for stronger features, they are there waiting for you.
The one thing I will honestly say I don’t love about ActiveCampaign is that their forms are not very pretty and you can’t do a ton of customization with them. But there are some workarounds you can find, and considering all of the benefits it has to offer, it’s easy to look past this.
Some details about ActiveCampaign and why I recommend it:
You can have multiple lists and multiple tags without paying more money and all contacts are automatically deduped so no one will ever receive the same email more than once no matter how many lists they are on or how many tags they have.
You are able to add pretty much endless custom fields to your contacts’ info and you are able to see a lot of information on the activities each of your contacts do with regard to your list, forms, and emails.
You can get incredibly detailed with the targeting in your email
This means you can tag people on your list according to links they click, emails they open, when they are or are not active, etc.
You can create insanely in-depth automations to filter your content to hit the right people.
You can create conditional content
This means that in a single email, you can have a paragraph that will show up for someone if they have a specific tag, and a paragraph that will show up for someone else with a different tag. This allows your emails to become even more powerful
You can create landing pages that convert well right inside ActiveCampaign
They have thorough reporting
They have a lot of integration options
You can have as many opt-in forms as you’d like and each one can have as many tags and lists associated with them as you’d like.
They have CRM functionality if you pay for that
They have live chat functionality if you pay for that
There is SO MUCH MORE that ActiveCampaign can do — this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
But again, if all you use it for is to send emails and keep your lists well organized, you don’t get lost in all of the additional features. You can use it however you want for whatever you want.
Second Recommendation: ConvertKit
ConvertKit was the first email platform I really fell in love with and BizMagic still uses it for our email marketing. While we will be switching to ActiveCampaign in the future, ConvertKit has had everything we’ve needed to grow our list and show up however we wanted.
One of the things I like about ConvertKit is that it is very clean and easy to use. It is not as robust as ActiveCampaign, but for smaller businesses that aren’t currently and/or don’t plan to be in the future, doing in-depth targeting of their audiences and needing a ton of detailed tagging options, ConvertKit is perfect.
Another big difference between the two is that while in ActiveCampaign you can use multiple lists and tags to organize your contacts, in ConvertKit everyone goes on one single list and get fully organized by tags.
Aside from that, here are all of the things you can do in ConvertKit
As many tags as you want
Clean and easy-to-create emails
As many opt-in forms and landing pages as you want
Email sequences with unlimited emails in them
Rules to connect opt-in forms and landing pages to email sequences and tags
Automations to build out more detailed funnels
Sell products or services with ConvertKit and put people immediately into a sequences or funnel upon purchase
Like ActiveCampaign, there is quite a bit more that you can do with ConvertKit. Again, I recommend ConvertKit to people who are looking for a lot fewer bells and whistles. It gives you a lot of functionality and though you can’t get nearly as detailed with your contact organization and targeting, for a small business that has one or two offerings and plans on staying that way, it should do everything you want it to do!
Now, there is a free version of ConvertKit, but at this point, it’s useless as far as I’m concerned. One of the most valuable things about having an email platform is that when someone signs up to your list, you can automatically tag them and send them a welcome email, plus any nurture sequences you might want. The free version of ConvertKit doesn’t allow for any automating, so all you can really do with that version is send emails and add people to your list through forms, and you can get much more than that with other free options.
Final Recommendation: Mailerlite
One of the biggest draws to MailChimp is that they have a free version. But guess what? So does Mailerlite, and it offers much more than MailChimp’s free version does!
For people and businesses who are not yet ready or able to financially invest in their email platform, I always recommend Mailerlite. It has pretty much everything ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit has. It’s not as pretty or as robust and some of it can be a little less intuitive, but overall, it is incredibly functional, and if you decide to stay with them when you are ready to start paying, there is space there for you to grow with them.
Of course, you can switch away from it pretty easily whenever you are ready so it’s a great place to simply get started.
There is clearly no shortage of email marketing platforms out there. Everyone has their opinions of them and, as I mentioned before, everyone’s needs are different. So is each person’s process of thinking and taking in information. The email platforms I’ve listed here tend to work very well for me and for most of my clients.
But there are so many more out there that are also great and meet you where you are and offer you exactly what you need.
So I always recommend you do your own research and figure out what platform feels best for you.
If you want some help deciding, you can always schedule a consult with me and I would be more than happy to talk through your wants and needs and help you choose the right platform for you. Or if you’re ready to switch over to a new platform or are just getting started in setting up your email marketing, we can help there too! As I mentioned earlier, we offer a full email marketing platform setup that gives you strategy, set-up, and tutorials so all you have to do is start sending out emails! Click here to learn more about that service.
Thanks for reading!
