In this episode of Moni Talks Tech, Moni helps you decide on the best email marketing tool for your business.
Moni Talks Tech (and other things) is a show hosted by Monika Rabensteiner, a weird Austrian lady, who went on the journey to start her own business and is now here to tell the tale. But not only that: she will be caressing your earbuds with tips and tricks around tech tools and design - everything you need to make your online business work smarter not harder - and look better in the process.
Welcome to Moni Talks Tech and Other Things, the podcast where service based business owners and coaches like you can walk away with simple tips and tricks to level up your business and defeat the ultimate end boss, your dreaded tech set up. Are you ready for this then? Let's go.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Moni Talks Tech. In this episode today we are going to talk about email marketing and email marketing tools. And if you are an online business owner, you know that having an email marketing tool and having an email list is the core of your business at times. Like it's that one place where you have control over everything that's going on. While social media can ban your account tomorrow or I don't know, Facebook can shut down it its entirety. Your email list is the one thing that you have that is yours that you have control over and where you can reach out to people.
So very quickly when you start your business, people will suggest that you start an email list and probably your business is set out like this anyway. So you have challenges, you have freebies, you have master classes, you create a lot of things with a goal of getting what people on your email list and then marketing to them from there.
Now when you start out, it's really hard to decide what tool to go with in the first place and especially in the very beginning, a lot of people really want to start with something that's free because they don't wanna invest into a lot of things right from the start and there are free options out there, so why immediately drop a lot of money for something that you potentially not even fully need or not even fully used to in its entirety. But here is where the problem comes in and I've been guilty of that as well because a lot of people then start out with a tool like MailChimp and MailChimp is great for certain things but not very great for other things.
As soon as your business becomes more complex, as soon as you start to do a lot of different things, MailChimp will quickly become a really expensive and be too bulky and too complicated to do what you want to do in a nice and simple and smooth way. You will spend a lot of time trying to create workarounds for something that other tools can create really simply. But let me start right from the beginning. So as I mentioned, you'll probably start out and you'll probably go ahead and use something like MailChimp or MailerLite. MailChimp in itself is like most of the tools to be honest, is set around creating a specific list for a specific audience for yourself. MailChimp itself is separating your account based on the audiences that you have. So you pay for one audience, you don't pay for multiple audiences and those lists don't talk to each other.
So let's say you have one list that's your, where you put all your clients and the other list is one where you have people that are interested in your challenge. You can't speak with this other list in MailChimp. You can't exclude one list from the other, which might not seem like the biggest problem to begin with, but if you think about it a bit deeper than you are now, clients probably previously downloaded one of your freebies so they are also on the double list. But you want to, when you do email marketing, have really specific and really good and niche lists that you target and really targeted lists, that's the word where people that don't need your email should not get your email because then it just feels like spam and not something that's specifically for them. And you want to speak specifically to the people that are interested and to the people.
It concerns also with your email marketing. So exclusions and cemented lists are necessary and really I importance to increase your open rates and click through rates. So you really want to be very specific about this, but it's complicated if you create a separate list in MailChimp for example. So there is a way around this by working with groups, but if you had a look at how MailChimp handles this, it immediately gets quite confusing and especially if you're not very tech savvy, it will feel like you hit some barriers and questioned your own ability because everything is so confusing when in fact the tool itself just created it in a really confusing way that is not very smooth and very simple and is also if you connect it to other things, can all of a sudden be really difficult to do, right? So because not all the forms that you create, well , the thing is you can create only one form in MailChimp, not multiple forms.
So how are you gonna distinguish this now how are you gonna distinguish the form that goes for the challenge with a form that goes with your freebie? And do you really want to embed massive form that has like the checkbox options where you say I want the freebie, I want the other thing. You want this to be really simple for the people that are signing up and when your form is way too complex, then it really also immediately influences how people sign up and what they do with it. Like yes, there are ways where it's really nice to have the option to sign up for the newsletter, sign up for this freebie, sign up for that freebie. But on the other hand, you want to target in your freebie campaigns and your challenge campaigns, you want them to be really targeted. So giving them other options is just causing more confusion than it helps you and you will also end up thinking that you are not capable of doing this when in fact it's not really a problem that you have.
This is just unnecessarily complicated for people that are not very techy to set up at times. So it's not a you problem, it's an them problem. And while MailChimp is super popular and totally valid in a lot of areas, if you are an organization that just like literally sends out newsletters in a this is what we have and things like that, then it makes a lot of sense to use that. It's totally fine to use that, but you and your business are way more flexible in what you are doing on a day-to-day basis, which makes it really not a nice experience. If you are an online business owner and have like a fast moving business with a lot of launches and a lot of different things, MailChimp will give you more headache than it's worth. And even though I feel a bit guilty even saying this because I like the marketing, I like the language, I like the branding, I like it all right?
And the emails you can make really pretty and nice emails and that's all really cool. But on the user side of things, based on all the things that you would need in your business when you do a lot of launches, you will hate it more than you can ever imagine. And I'm also not the only person saying this talk to a lot of tech people. They all really will not be very excited when you bring up that you have MailChimp email marketing tool. There is another nice and free alternative which is MailerLite, which doesn't mean that it's obviously always free, but there is a free plan with it. I think it's a nice alternative to start out with and an alternative to MailChimp and it's not one that you immediately have to pay, it's also set in Europe. So if you have concerns about GDPR, it's a Lithuanian company, so, so it's within the jurisdiction of Europe as well, which is kind of nice.
And they also have a nice automation set up and also work with groups and it also connects to a lot of tools already as well. Now like there is native integration within Elementor when you create WordPress and I've seen it in a lot of other places as well where by now MailerLite also natively integrates with tools, which is amazing and incredible and something that is really helpful when you don't need a third party tool like Zapier to help you with your email marketing as well. Then there are obviously the big, the big guns like, Infusionsoft, which is not called Infusionsoft anymore, but Keap (K E A P) and they're massive and honestly sometimes really confusing. I think when you're not techy, it doesn't, it won't make you feel comfortable. I've been in an entreport at the backend, it's not smooth, at all even I had to take a while to find everything because it's really a massive and complex tool and something that does a lot together and the same with Infusionsoft those are these one tool can do all situations that are a) really expensive and b) probably, uh, overkill when you are doing your business, unless you are like massive and really big and really have someone that wants to focus on Ontraport I don't think if you start out and a) you should immediately go with it because it's expensive, that's not a great idea.
And b), if you're not at a certain size where you then have somebody who's really a professional in Ontraport Infusionsoft that it's worth taking this in general, that leaves me with my two favorite ones, which is ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign and there are pros and cons for both of them to be honest, but I don't think you can go massively wrong with either of them. They are quite affordable on a cheaper plan on the lite plans that they have and I definitely think that you would be fine with either of them. That being said, the automations that you can set up with Active campaign are really next level, there is an automation tool in in ConvertKit as well, but not to the degree that, ActiveCampaign has one set up now. You can create really complex things with it that I personally haven't seen in any other tool yet.
This is really something where you want to create really specific and really complex funnels, excluding people or checking things or seeing if somebody has clicked something and then reacting or sending them to a separate string of an automation. Those are all things that you can do with ActiveCampaign and it's incredible. Personally, I'm not a massive fan of the user interface, which is a crux of mine that I sometimes am very impacted by that because part of me is not only tech but also design. So how something looks really, really winds me up at times and I need a nice user interface that suits me and that I like to really enjoy using it. And ActiveCampaign is not pushing my buttons there, it really isn't. They have been changing how their email, um, setting up the emails is working now with a new builder, which is okay, but also I'm like, ugh, it's not really, I struggle a bit with it .
So, so this is why I personally went with ConvertKit even though I know that the automations are a bit inferior, but I'm on the one hand a bit trusting that this will happen eventually because I do think they want to expand on that because they already created Visual Automations and I think it's just a matter of time until ConvertKit will also be able to have more complex automations compared to ActiveCampaign. The thing I really love about ConvertKit is that all your contacts are all in one big list and based on the forms that you use and the tags that you use, you can address everyone individually. You can create your own segments based on tags that you have, based on forms people have signed up to. So it can be really, really specific who you email and it's so simple to create these different kinds of segments and it's not separated in lists like it is with with ActiveCampaign or MailChimp, even though ActiveCampaign also works with lists, they work very differently to the ones in MailChimp.
You are able to combine them. You can, you are able to exclude one list from the other. You are able to speak to all of the lists if you want to. So it's not something that is as separate as it is in MailChimp for example. Overall, I do think active Campaign is really, really, really powerful, especially if you want to get more niche and more specific and more advanced with your funnels. I think ActiveCampaign will be the way to go. I personally love ConvertKit just from the looks of it. It makes me happy using it. I think the way the tag system works and the way the forms and the automations work is really something that works for me very well. So that's why I chose to go with that. But again, ActiveCampaign at the same time is also really nice.
One thing that is really, really trending right now is Flowdesk and that's based on the fact that the emails and everything is really, really, really pretty. It's based to woo you away and the people who read your emails, it's based to woo them away on how wonderful the emails look. However, not a lot of tools are yet connected to that and there are certain things that you will probably need a third party tool like Zapier to integrate with each other. For example, ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit. Both are able to speak with ThriveCart natively, so you wouldn't need a third party tool if you have things that you sell via ThriveCart with Flowdesk, you need Zapier for it and you will need a paid plan for it. So , you immediately pay more for things like that even though the emails are incredibly pretty and they also I think in my opinion are quite expensive, because it's almost $40 I think per month because they only have one plan and no stages and no nothing.
So yeah, that's if you like it, a lot of people really love it. I don't know if I would suggest it based on how people are using it just because it's really pretty. She says that even though she chooses ConvertKit because it's pretty, I see the irony of that . But the thing is that ConvertKit also has a lot of functionalities that are really simple to use. It's done in no time to set up a form, make it look nice, embed the form and then connect everything in the back. It's simple, it's smooth and there's no faffing around with it and a lot of it can happen already in ConvertKit without making you feel like the dumbest person on the planet because you feel like you don't understand tech once again. So yes, there are some things that need to be learned, but I think there are tools out there that make it easier than others.
And I think ConvertKit makes it really simple for people to use. And also what I think often people are not aware of is that if you pack too many images and style your emails too much, they might not even convert, convert that well because it's been proven often already that simple emails that look like a friend has written them are often way better converting than anything fancy that you ever get in your inbox. So maybe it being a wonderful piece of art is not even the thing that you wanna go with. This was my rant on email marketing tools this week. I hope it helped you in your decision making process. If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on Instagram and slide into my dms at monirocksyoursocks, or slide me over a message on my website at monirockyoursocks.com. I am happy to help whenever you need it and have a good rest of your day.