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The options you have these days for bulk email senders are pretty expansive. You could spend several months testing out different providers to learn the ins and outs of how things work.
Each provider has its own special nuances, strengths and weaknesses. Each platform has its own learning curve depending on how feature rich it is.
Just like the title says, I will be giving you some important things to consider before you dig yourself a hole, time and money-wise, into a platform. Then I’ll give you some special tips to save you time in figuring out suitability faster.
It might be months before you realize you can’t do something you need to do, after you’ve already paid for a year up front (to save money, right?).
I myself have tested out several and found the experience to be time consuming and aggravating.
Testing out a new company requires you to add subscribers. Then you have to go through each and every setting to customize your emails and learn just how the system will actually let you customize.
I’m going to give you some under the hood details that will help you decide which provider might be best for you in your current state of affairs.
This isn’t a top five post and I won’t be selling you or telling you which one you should join.
That being said, this post contains affiliate links which support my writing. If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and tools, processes, mindset, and productivity in content production, join me here.
Bulk Email Automation Sender Services Important Features Quick List
Here’s the list of the 11 features we’re going to talk about in this article which you will strongly want to consider before investing time and money into a bulk email sender and/or email automations provider.
These are not listed in order of importance. The importance of each feature depends on you.
- Pricing and plan structures
- Ease of Use and Learning Curve
- DIY or Done For You
- Number of email sends and subscribers
- RSS features
- Design tools, templates, landing pages, lead forms
- Scheduling settings
- Personalities and alter egos (can you have them?)
- Stats and click/behavior tracking
- Automations, email drip feeds, tagging and segmenting
- Integrations (can you connect to other apps)
Let’s start with price point
Growing an email list can take some time. While you’re growing, you’re not necessarily making a lot of money.
Most of the providers offer some sort of free plan up to a certain number of subscribers. But then, watch out- those numbers change pretty drastically once you move up a tier.
It’s so easy to ignore the plan that’s listed to the right of the free plan. Am I right?
When you’re new, please make sure you are comfortable with Tier 2 (and Tier 3) pricing and look at your expected ROI to see if once you hit that next level of subscribers, if you will be generating the income you need to support the service.
Otherwise you’ll be starting from scratch with another provider, which is a cog in the wheel of flow.
Depending on your niche and your list, you may need thousands or even tens of thousands of subscribers to generate the income that supports the platform’s costs. Subscribers cost you money, so you’ll have to keep your list tight, or keep your ROI high enough to support them.
Also, some of the providers have a cost that’s based on “emails sent”, not necessarily subscribers. So, hidden deep in their features list, you’ll say, “Oh boy I can have so many subscribers!” but alas you can only send a certain amount of emails to them in total per month.
Let’s talk about some features now
Do you have a full time staff person who will be hand crafting a newsletter every month and creating beautiful graphics and layouts for each and every newsletter?
Or will you be expecting to send emails to your subscribers when you post new content which will be delivered in a gorgeous, magazine-worthy template you’ve pre-designed? Will you need custom content for frequent sends or will they just be text emails (sometimes better converting)?
Will you want to schedule those emails, say twice per month and have them be auto-populated with content from your blog? How many times per week do you want to email your base?
Sending beautifully formatted emails that auto-populate images and titles from your blog requires you have your RSS set up and working and then the provider software hooks in to your blog and pulls content from your rss feed.
You might not be surprised to know this feature is usually a paid feature, so if you need this functionality, expect to be paying Tier 2 and up.
In addition, the scheduling feature varies by provider. Some let you customize the sending days down to the day, minute, and hour, while some others require you to pick from a drop down of selections.
The ones that give you more customization also have a higher learning curve. That’s because more features = more to learn.
Bulk emailing for sales funnels
Some people use their bulk email sender as a sales funnel and need it to do automations, which are much more complex than say, an autoresponder.
They need to track customer clicks and they want to tag specific customers and move them into new sequences of emails based on their behavior.
This helps avoid things like, the customer getting more pitch emails about a product they have already purchased.
Anyone who is doing affiliate marketing and email sales funnels must have tools built in that put the new subscriber on an auto drip of content until they convert (hopefully).
An example of this is a 14 day automatic sequence that builds value and then converts a subscriber to a paying customer. Then another set of sequences for an upsell.
This functionality has become the automatic seat belt feature of bulk email senders. Once one company had them, the others built them in to varying degrees. But some definitely make it easier than others. And some make it a lot more expensive.
For instance, Mailerlite, in my opinion, has a very well designed user-interface for creating these sequences. So simple. So effortless. Plan wise, their Tier 2, Tier 3, and up, are softly graded which allows you to grow your list without hitting a bill cliff.
ConvertKit is a platform that has somehow made sales funnels fun, for the most part, with even some added joyful quirks. ConvertKit has a lot of built in extra features which reduce the simplicity a bit, but they do a lot of specific things for increasing conversions at a fraction of the cost of ClickFunnels.
A few thoughts on design
Mailchimp, to me at least, has the UI of a plate of spaghetti. A beautiful plate of spaghetti, but they make extra clicks and deep menu settings almost like a personality characteristic.
To their well-deserved credit, Mailchimp does the landing pages, email, and forms design WSIWG and customization part so well, that their competitors in the space struggle to keep up.
You can also create a fully functioning store right within MailChimp with little to no experience whatsoever. And they have a free starter plan that is highly functional.
But not everyone needs their email sender to have the Van Gogh set of design tools. Sometimes analytics and ease of use matter more.
The Tier 1 paid plan on Mailerlite is extremely effective for most of the tasks you might need as a starter plan in MailChimp without all the gloss, and you won’t have a cost increase of $250+/m once you go past 500 subscribers.
Let’s look at stats
What do you need to know about your customers’ behaviors? Do you want to know how many times they opened an email? Do you want to see beautiful reports and analytics?
This is an important consideration and one that’s often overlooked by newbies since they often haven’t nailed down their process yet and don’t know what they don’t know about how important these stats are for future scaling of business.
The ability to extrapolate customer behaviors which result in sales is essential to duplicating results and growing your profits. More stats is good.
More on affiliate marketing
If you’re doing affiliate marketing and say, testing various products with various domains and brands, you may be looking for a provider that is built for the kind of alter egos your business is stacking.
What does that mean? Well, some providers only let you connect a single domain and company profile per account and that’s the account you pay for.
Others let you have multiple personalities and multiple domains so you can do email sales funnels for multiple niches, all under one account, all for one monthly fee.
ConvertKit had a great feature where for your company address you can use their address and they essentially accept mail for you and forward it to you. I think that’s really cool and it saves money on having to buy a PO Box and avoids having to set up a business address when you’re testing strategies.
Not that you would be trying to hide from your customers, but when you’re testing out branding, domains, products, and funnels, ie: personalities, it might be nice to not have to purchase a mailing address for each of them or somehow link all those personalities to one box via getting owned by the internet.
Bulk Email Sender Integrations
God willing, one day, all apps will be connected to Zapier and Integromat.
Make sure the bulk email provider you use can integrate with them so that when you’re ready you have create little robots that do the work of repetitive tasks for you.
There are very few companies that can get away with not having integrations set up these days but I do come across them every now and again (usually with fury).
This is usually a Tier 2+ feature.
DIY or done for you
So, some people have tens of thousands of customers in their list because their focus is affiliate email marketing and/or run a business around Solo Ads, etc.
There’s a product called Sendy that is a self hosted bulk email provider. I happen to use it as well as using Mailerlite. Why? Because I have a lot of emails and subscribers and some of those emails are mostly text based.
I pay next to nothing to send them and I can keep all my contacts connected to their brands and personalities without having to maintain paid accounts for them or have them count against my subscriber list.
Sendy isn’t great at design and the whole self hosted aspect opens itself to many problems like breaking my own database and the work of updating and keeping the software running properly.
But Sendy is probably the only out of the box self hosted product I found that was a very good price and came with a good set of basics, including now even, some automations. It does also integrate with Integromat which is very helpful.
With any of the “done for you” apps, you won’t need to worry about managing the software or the way they work at all.
Companies to consider
Here’s an easy reference list of the companies I talked about here and a few others that I have also looked at in depth and have various pricing structures or features that may matter to you.
Keap (which used to be InfusionSoft), GetResponse and ActiveCampaign are three other giants in the email automation space and have a lot of features with various pricing and plan structures that might work best for you.
At the beginning of this article I promised you I would give you some extra tips on figuring out suitability.
This is the best way.
Imagine you are your customer visiting your top level content for the first time. Now, write down all the steps they take between that visit and their final conversion.
This exercise looks a lot like building a sale funnel. So, if you already have one, this will be very easy. If you don’t have one yet, this will be a great tool for helping you map out the steps.
Once you have the basic outline, write out an outline of the emails and communication they will receive. You can put this info in a section near each step in your sales funnel.
To make this very easy you can use a mind mapping tool. I happen to use Mindomo but there are many others (will be writing more about that soon).
I love tools and have a passion for productivity and automation and even though I consider myself somewhat of a mad scientist when it comes to learning, I know that the right tools can become some of the best friends we’ll ever have.
Map out your communications process from start to finish. If you are so new that you don’t know what you don’t know, then this step will take longer. But it will empower you to imagine every ideal scenario and action your user can take. Chances are if you can dream it, it can be done.
Finding out early on the strengths and limitations of your tools early on is going to let you stay in the flow longer and scale up faster once you are succeeding.
I wish someone had given me this list when I was first starting out. It would have saved me a lot of the time I wasted learning apps that ultimately lacked the functionality I needed. I wasted money too, but the time loss was worse.
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