When you start out in business it’s important to use every tool you have out your disposal to make life easier and to maximise your chances of success. There are several good tools available for business, and depending on your vertical some will be more useful than others. Email marketing tools would be high on that list.
When you’re building a business and brand it’s important that everyone who buys, engages or contacts you is kept up to date with what you’re doing and any promotions, advice or news you want them to know about. The best way to achieve this is through email marketing, building an email list of leads and customers (segmented separately) to grow your business. This also means you can set up lead pages to gather email addresses and run automation sequences to convert sales.
Some businesses rely on their email marketing strategy for a significant proportions of their revenue. Taking this into consideration, you can see why businesses who don’t focus on growing their email list or creating leads through email marketing are missing out on a huge opportunity!
The great thing about email marketing is it’s not expensive, there are free options available and depending which stage you’re at with your business can influence which provider you choose to go with. With this in mind, it’s important to consider which platform will be the best fit for your business growth over the long term. I will discuss two popular options for you to decide which is the best solution for you. I wont go into all the technical details because there are plenty of other blogs which do that, I’m going to simply give you my advice based on personal experience.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a long standing email marketing tool, it offers many features you would expect to find in a modern marketing platform and will likely use while setting up a successful business. Some of the features which I have found very useful is the ability to segment contacts, for example if you have a sign up page on your website, you can ensure that anyone who signs up on that page is segmented accordingly. This means that if you want to send new emails further down the line, you can send them directly to people who signed up on the website rather than say a lead form.
Contacts can be segmented by multiple metrics, for example if they purchased a product on the website or signed up on a lead page. It could be based on demographic data such as gender or age. The more you can communicate a message to your contacts in a way which is personalised to them, the better results you will achieve from marketing activity.
Price
For many people starting out in business, price is important. You will likely be paying for many things each month and so keeping costs low is good. Mailchimp has one of best pricing structures for people just getting started. The reason I say this is because even with the lower end packages you will have access to landing pages and automation. A landing page is an external page hosted by the email platform, designed specifically for you target customer and through running ads or organic posts you will drive traffic to these pages, usually offering something of value in exchange for the visitors email address. Having the freedom to set up multiple pages means you can test which perform best. Mailchimp offers a standard package which allows this for around 15 bucks a month. This is reasonable and will be enough to get things rolling, build momentum and grow your list.
Unfortunately it’s not all sunshine and roses for Mailchimp, because of their price structure, as your list grows so do your costs, and this can quiet quickly start to rack up. What started with a low cost option is suddenly costing allot of money each month and leaving you with the option of moving your contacts to another email provider and having to go through the process of setting up automations, lead magnets and not to mention the amount of time invested in mastering the platform. This can be a considerable upheaval and so I suggest choosing the right solution up front.
Live chat
One thing I really like about MailChimp is with paid packages you get free live chat support, this can be very helpful when your starting out, they will guide you and answer any questions you have. I can say from personal experience it’s good knowing you have the support available if you need it when you’re just learning.
Send In Blue
Next up is Send In Blue, a favourite amongst many entrepreneurs and businesses for it’s modern design and ease of use, not to mention it’s pricing structure.
Many people who have used Send In Blue find it effective, and I have to agree with that. The interface is modern when compared with MailChimp, which despite being targeted for beginners, can be complicated to navigate, for example when designing landing pages you can quickly become overwhelmed. You’re less likely to have these issues with Send In Blue, because of this the need for the live support is less and the level of problems you would need support for such as syncing to a third party software, you can get elsewhere.
Price
Send in Blue has recently increased in package prices, they were around 25 bucks a month and it’s now gone up to over 40. That is a hefty hike, but it’s the result of the popularity of the software and the type of business they are trying to target. This is no longer bottom of the skip pricing, and goes to show the popularity of the software that they feel confident in rolling out the price hike. It should be noted that customers who signed up before the price change will continue to pay the old prices until they cancel their subscription. This price structure is not an equal comparison to Mailchimps pricing, because of the higher volume of contact and email sends of allowed for this cost is significantly more, for just over 40 bucks you can send over 20,000 monthly emails and have an unlimited number of contacts. That is very impressive!
Conculsion
I have intentionally not gone into the technical details because they are easily available elsewhere. What I suggest is you consider is your vision and business plan over the next 6 month, 12 months and even 3 years. If you think email will become an integral tool in your business arsenal then it would be worth starting out how you intend to continue, by learning and setting up a platform which will support the growth of your business and not simply solve a short term problem, and this is why I highly recommend Send In Blue over Mailchimp if this is your plan.
However if you simply want to use email as a way of sending occasional emails then Mailchimp may be enough.
