Why move away from Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is a great space for entrepreneurs to start out, as we discussed in an earlier blog post. It is a leading email marketing platform known for its ease of use and lovely templates. Plus, it is free to get started; one of the very few email marketing software that offers an acceptable free product.
As your business grows and you start to need more than what Mailchimp has to offer there are plenty of alternatives to take a look at. The most important thing to remember is that you are looking for a “best fit” solution. No email marketing platform will be perfect but taking a little time to find a good solution that meets the needs of your business is time well used.
What to look for in an email marketing platform
When comparing email marketing platforms and systems it is important to take a step back and have a good look at your business. It is easy to get dazzled with features and offers when you are looking at changing email marketing system so by distilling what is important to you, your workflows and you customers you are less likely to get distracted by bright and shiny features that you don’t need.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself and your team:
- What is holding you back with your current email marketing system?
- What do you itch to be able to do when it comes to email marketing?
- Where do you see your business in 1, 3 or 5 years?
- Do you get frustrated with multiple systems or are you happy to switch between platforms for different purposes?
- How important is email deliverability control to your business?
Armed with the answers to these questions you are much better able to filter email marketing platforms based on what you need.
A closer look at three platforms:
There are hundreds of options when it comes to email marketing, emailexpert has over 500 listed! In this blog post, we have listed just three options, so not as an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination. The three options highlighted are not even provided as a recommendations, but rather we chose to take a look at three very popular systems and the try and highlight the types of business or organisation they might be best suited to.
Get Response: A Levelled Up Mailchimp Alternative
Get Response is one of the other big players in the email marketing landscape, and with good reason. It has many of the same features as Mailchimp however it has a far more sophisticated contact segmentation and tagging ability. Get Response’s drag and drop visual editor for automations is a step up from Mailchimp as well. It also includes the ability to split automations into multiple paths, something that is sorely lacking in Mailchimp.
Get Response is a great email marketing tool for businesses that have a more complicated customer journey or have a recurring sales cycle. The automation and segmentation tools allow businesses to create powerful marketing automations.
Drip: The E-commerce Email Marketing Specialist
Drip is the go-to tool for e-commerce email marketing. It integrates well with the major e-commerce platforms such as Woo-Commerce and Shopify which is essential for e-commerce communications. Drip can be set up to track and react to not just your customer’s email interactions but to their browsing and purchasing behaviour on your e-commerce website. This means that you can send special discount codes and abandoned cart emails within automations to significantly increase your e-commerce sales.
Infusionsoft by Keap: The All In One Customer Communication & Marketing Platform
Infusionsoft is an all in one marketing platform, perfect for the entrepreneur who hates changing from platform to platform for their marketing tools. It is currently in the process of changing its name to Keap. The Infusionsoft platform is one of the most established all in one marketing platforms. It does what Mailchimp falls short of, providing an integrated system that tracks your contacts through your sales cycle and allows significant automation. If the idea of a landing page builder that integrates with a CRM that then integrates across to an email marketing platform (we could go on here!) makes you sweat, then an all in one marketing platform is a good idea for your business, and Keap is a leader well worth investigating further.
Whilst Mailchimp provides a great place to start your entrepreneurial journey, there are limitations, even within the paid platform. To move your business to the next level you may need to look at some alternative solutions. When assessing the options in the marketplace make sure that you take into account what you need in an email marketing platform and the way you and your team works best, as well as the established customer journey within your business. By doing this you will be able to better see through the dazzling array of features to find what you really need in marketing software to grow your business.
KEYWORDS:
Marketing software, marketing, email marketing, mailchimp, email marketing platform, email marketing solution, email marketing software, Infusionsoft, keap, marketing platform, all in one marketing platform, CRM, CRM software, CRM platform, best email marketing, Drip email marketing, Drip, drip email, mailchimp alternatives, get response, get response email marketing, mailchimp options
