đź’Ś Top email marketing platforms for indie hackers
I've spent the last few weeks trying out and comparing various email marketing platforms. I don't see a similar resource anywhere on indie hackers so I want to share what I've learned.
Context
My product is a chrome extension that helps people find Airbnbs with fast WiFi. I capture emails after people have installed the extension. My email list currently has 500 subscribers.
My Requirements
-Easy to send an automated text email that looks natural
-Easy to build out an automated welcome series with split testing
-No provider branding or watermarks
Providers
Mailchimp
Likes:
-Great name recognition. Recommended to me by many people.
-Integration with UMSO (the website builder that I use)
Dislikes:
-Bloated and confusing UX. Yellow color scheme is hard on the eyes.
-Did not enjoy using the email builder or automation tools (hard to do basic split testing)
-Challenging to send a plain text email that looks natural
Cost for 1k contacts: $21/month
Convertkit
Likes:
-Simple and intuitive UX. Easy to find what you are looking for without feeling overwhelmed.
-Easy to send basic text emails that look great.
-Sent me a free t-shirt
Dislikes:
-Marketing/positioning is for them to be the platform of choice for artistic creators (musicians, writers, etc.)
-Once I started trying to build out an automated welcome series I noticed a lot of shortcomings in their feature set.
-platform felt a little glitchy. Some popups would not go away even after clicking exit.
Cost for 1k contacts: $29/month
Active Campaign (Best overall option)
Likes:
-By far the most intuitive UX. Building emails and automated workflows feels like fun instead of a chore.
-Easy to preview what emails will look like on desktop and mobile
-Cool CRM component. They automatically search twitter and linkedin for profiles that match your uploaded email addresses. This could be very useful if your business is B2B.
Dislikes:
-Active/pushy sales team? They called, texted, and emailed me many times during the first week asking if I needed any help getting started. These died down after two weeks.
Cost for 1k contacts: $29/month
Mailer Lite (Best budget option)
Likes:
-Clean dashboard and comprehensive analytics
Dislikes:
-Challenging to send a plain text email that looks natural
-Challenging to build out split testing in their automation tool
Cost for 1k contacts: $10/month
My Decision
Ultimately I've decided to go with Active Campaign for now so that I can rapidly test different elements in my welcome series. If I get to a point where I've got things "dialed in" I may want to switch to a cheaper option (Mailer Lite).
What do you use? Is there anything useful that I've missed in my research?
ActiveCampaign has a pricing modal based on the size of your contact list. It’s really pricy compared to competition.
I’ve been doing similar research recently. I had additional requirement to be able to run proper AB tests within automations.
There are two providers that have similar features to Activate Campaign but are cheaper:
Great summary!
For onboarding emails I usually use transactional email service like Postmark but I've also used EmailOctopus for this in the past.
I use my own system (Wobaka.com) to handle things like outreach campaigns and following up with signups. It focuses on simplicity so there's no footprint in emails or anything, just plain text with some html sprinkled to make links look nicer in your emails.
You missed many other great tools :)
You can try : sendgrid, sendinblue,mailijet for example.
There are few other dozens, but those are great
I had no idea it was such a crowded space until I dove in! Thanks, I'll take a look at these as well.
What you need is not marketing platform but a transactional email platform like send grid, amazon ses, etc. My suggestion is to go with Amazon SES.
It doesn’t even have a template editor. Amazon SES is much lower level solution compared to most ESPs on the market. I would use it only if the core of my business was about sending emails. Otherwise it’s like writing a web app on C.
Yes. Its not for campaigns. If you want a transactional email Amazon is cheap. Transactional means no marketing email. Use cases
Invoice Email
Notification Emails
Password reset email
any other routine emails related to customers.
Not for newsletters email or marketing campaigns.
Why amazon SES: if you have a freemium plan and have a large free users, normally none of the other solution provides you a cost effective way to manage transactional email.
I have a freemium model with many free users. I use my own server to send transactional emails. But I use a 3rd party site to send newsletters, but the cost can add up. Luckily I am grandfathered in to an older pricing plan, but I will look for a better and more long-term solution.
Yeah that is the best way. Amazon SES is good for transactional email and if you are with AWS they offer free tier upto 60K email per month.
Thank you for the suggestion. For additional context, my coding abilities are limited and my co-founder spends most of his time on our actual product. Do you feel these transactional tools are sufficiently "no-code" friendly in order for me to run autonomously?
I’ve spent a day trying to onboard myself with it. It’s a great product, but it will cost you a lot of dev time to use it. Save yourself some time and use an ESP.
You may need to integrate the API. Or else try Crisp, they have a email solution that can trigger based on events. You can use it for support and live chat too.
Superb breakdown!
One framework that has caught my attention recently AMP for email - which lets us add interactive widgets inside the email. I am planning to use it for welcome emails as a start. Will keep you posted.
The early adopters are seeing a phenomenal 250% increase in email response. (https://amp.dev/success-stories/razorpay)
Great list! Thanks for sharing. I'd suggest Intercom, it's more of a customer management platform but it provides great marketing automation. It's a good tool to engage with the users (with emails, chatbots, posts, and product tours). We do our onboarding email series based on user actions and Intercom fetches these actions seamlessly.
Another tool worth mentioning is: https://www.apollo.io/
It really does the trick.
I was looking for a teardown like this. Thank you.
MailBluster is nice too!!