MBA1050 Q&A Wednesday: Which email marketing software do you recommend?

Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because in business you always have questions and we try to provide some answers with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday epis, I answer a question from one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar00mba.net Today's question is from Pat and Pat asks, which email marketing software provider do you recommend? Not an easy question, but I'm going to give you my answer. I'm going to give you a criteria to use for choosing the right email marketing software for you. Depending on your situation, you may not need to sign up for one. I'll explain in today's episode as well as give you the tips on how to choose the best software for yourself your business. Because the software you don't use is useless. We'll take a quick overview of all the great players in this space and how to choose. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the Hundred Dollar NBA show is supported by Earth Class Mail. If you run a business, you need a business address, but it doesn't mean you need to open up a business office. You can work from Home and Earth ClassMail can hook you up with a business address and scan all your mail and upload it to your account in the cloud so you can check all your physical mail anytime, anywhere. I love it. I love it. I love it. And we use Earth ClassMail because we love it so much. And Earth ClassMail wants to hook you up with a free month to get started. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth again, it's earthclassmail.com mbamanth use coupon code mbamonth so Pat asks, which email marketing software do I recommend? Well, it's hard to say definitively. This is the best one you should use in every situation because every software is catered to every person's needs. And to complicate things even further, there are other softwares that do email marketing, but that's not kind of their primary focus. Things like chat and widget software like Intercom or Sumo, they have email marketing in their software. A lot of people don't know that it's not as full featured and robust as some of the primary Email marketing softwares we'll discuss today. So I'm not going to focus on those, we're going to talk about the main players, the ones if you want to choose to be your main email marketing software, where you do all your promotions via email, where you do all your email automations, where you onboard people, where you communicate with them in their inbox. The first thing I want to say is that switching email providers or email marketing providers is a bit of a pain, it's a bit of a chore. Once you start growing your list and have different campaigns and different automations and different autoresponders, it's hard to migrate that to a new provider. So you want to make the right choice from the start. Having said that, know that you may have to graduate out of a certain email marketing provider at some point. What we're trying to do here is make the right choice for the time being, for a period of time, a couple of years. And as your business changes or evolves, you may need a different tool or a more full featured type of software. If you're new to business, if you're new to online business and you're just trying to grow your audience and grow your email list, there are softwares you just do not need, you don't need to be paying for that type of software at the start. They're great tools later on, but they may be too confusing, too complicated and hard to use at the start. And what you need is a user friendly software. So if you're just a beginner, if you're just getting started, I want you to completely cross off things like infusionsoft and Salesforce and HubSpot. These are great tools, fantastic tools. I know them very well because they integrate with our software Webinar Ninja. Well, Salesforce doesn't, but infusionsoft and HubSpot does. The point I'm making here is that these are really powerful software and these platforms are usually too much when you're just getting started, it's too complicated. In fact there's infusionsoft certified experts, meaning that people hire experts to help them use infusionsoft. It's because it does everything you can ever imagine. So what do I recommend when it comes to if you're just getting started? If you're just trying to build your list, you know, have some great campaigns, have some simple automations, simple, you know, email auto responders or sequences. There are three I would like you to check out or try. The first is Seva or formerly known as ConvertKit. The founder Nathan Barry has done a great job building a great piece of software. I've used it several times and it has a very, very friendly UI. Nathan is actually a UI UX designer prior to starting this company, prior to starting ConvertKit or Seva. Now, if you go to convertkit.com, you can sign up for a free trial and I'm going to encourage you to sign up for free trials for all these applications. Now, I don't want you to do them all at once. I want you to do try one, set up a few campaigns, try to integrate it to your website, see how it feels, see if you like it. These three that I'm going to recommend right now, if you're getting started, all have trials from 30 days to 14 days, something like that. Plenty of time for you to try it out. So the first one is ConvertKit Seva. They just changed their name to Seva, but you can find them@convertkit.com the next one is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is very, very popular, very famous. Mailchimp is a great place to start because it's free to get started if you don't have the budget. Even though a lot of these are super affordable. I think ConvertKit's like at $29 a month for the lowest plan. Very, very cheap. But Mailchimp allows you to have up to 2,000 contacts for free. Now, Mailchimp is a little bit on the confusing side. I know it's supposed to be simple and fun and easy, but I find that it's not as straightforward as ConvertKit. It's still easy to use. It's still. You can get your head around it, but it's not as straightforward, especially when it comes to the email automation process. But it's a great place to start if you want to get started for free. Up to 2,000 contacts. The last one is ActiveCampaign. I really like Active Campaign. It's also very easy to use. It has a lot more tools than you need at the start, but it does things very well at the beginner level and the intermediate level level. In fact, I find ActiveCampaign to be a good compromise between the easier platforms and infusionsoft. So I want you to try all three of these. If you're just getting started, see which one you enjoy using the most and go with that one. You might find that Seva is great. You might enjoy mailchimp and disagree with what I think about their automation. The point is, is that that's the best way to choose. I Want you to choose something that you like to use because you're going to be using it a lot. Now, if you've been doing this for some time, you already have an email marketing software and you want to take the next step, the next leap forward. The two I recommend is ActiveCampaign. Again, ActiveCampaign comes at the top of list because they have a lot of advanced features as well. And infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is actually very, very powerful if you can take the time to learn and get your head around it, or if you can hire somebody to do it for you. Now, I haven't fully tested out Drip. I've used it briefly. Her Drip is pretty good. I know a lot of my friends in the business have been using it recently, so it might be worth checking out. And they have some advanced features. And there's another new player called mailerlite. That's Mailerlite. A lot of our own users at Webinar engineers rave about this and are looking for an integration. So we're working on that. And I checked out their website, I looked at their platform and it looks very easy to use. It might be worth looking at. It might be a good alternative to activecampaign or something like that. And I like their headline on their website. It says advanced email marketing made simple, pretty straightforward. I love that communication style. Now when you're testing out these platforms, depending on where you are in your business and what you need, there are three major areas I want you to test out. Because this is really going to be the bread and butter of your email marketing software. Use where you're going to be using the most. A lot of people worry about a lot of things like opt in forms. Like does it have nice looking opt in forms? Well, that's a plus. It makes it easy. But you can get opt in forms on your website with tools like Sumo or your own website builder or Squarespace has this built in. Or platforms like Podia. The point is, is that the opt in form can be done outside of the email marketing software. So I wouldn't worry about that too much. What I would worry about are these three things. Number one, how does it organize your contacts? Does it just dump them on a list and you create separate lists? Or do you have the ability to tag people? Tagging makes your life a whole lot easier because you can add and remove tags based on actions your contacts do. So say for example, you have somebody who is a contact, they're on trial, so you can tag them as somebody who's on trial, but then they finish a trial and pay for your service. Now they're a paying user, so you want to remove the trial tag and add paying user. So why you want to do this? Well, because you want to make sure that when you send out emails, send out the wrong emails to the wrong people. So, for example, you don't want to send out marketing emails, people that already bought. So tagging allows you to do this with the same contact. So instead of having to put this contact in multiple lists, it's one contact, but you tag them differently. So, number one, does the system allow you to tag people easily? Number two, is it easy to build email automations? Email automation is basically automating the email process. So, for example, when somebody signs up as a customer, they get a series of emails that are automated to build that automation. Those series of emails, is that an easy process where it's like, hey, when they sign up, immediately give them this email and then wait one day and give them this email. And then if they don't open that email, send them this email. But if they do open that email, send them this email. These are automations. These are things that you set up once and then you can modify later. But the point is, is that it makes it a whole lot easier for you to build a great onboarding system for new users or new subscribers to your list to warm them up, to invite them to webinars, to get them to become buyers. So you want to test out tagging, you want to test out the email automation system. And number three is how your campaigns are built. Campaigns are like your broadcast emails, your newsletters, your promotions. Do you find it easy to create a campaign quickly without fiddling with a bunch of features? Is it drag and drop easy? Because you're going to be sending out sales promotions, announcements, that type of thing, blog post updates, all that. You want to make sure that it's easy to whip up an email quickly. So those are the three things. Tagging, email automation, and campaigns. Now you might be thinking, what about integrations? How do I make sure that my email marketing that I choose, my email marketing software integrates with the other tools I use? Well, most of these big players integrate with most of the major other tools, and if they don't, you can always use a Zapier integration. Zapier is a great tool that allows you to integrate pretty much any software with any other software. We have a Zapier integration with Webinar Ninja to kind of COVID all our bases. It's easy to use Zapier and that's spelled Z A P I E R. And they have a free plan that pretty much does everything you need. I got more in today's Q and A Wednesday's episode where I answer the question, what is the email marketing software I recommend? I'll go through a couple more tips to help answer Pat's question. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Are you struggling to get to sleep? 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So to wrap up today's Q and A Wednesdays episode, the question is what email marketing software do I recommend? Well, I gave you my top recommendations. There are other players out there, there are other softwares that you can use. Constant contact, getresponse. There's a whole lot of great players out there. Aweber. Aweber is another one I've used that's really good and it's comparable to something like an active campaign. But my advice is to try them out. Go on trial and test out those three major features. Tagging, email, automation and campaigns. Those are the three going to use the most. Alright, thank you so much for listening and thanks Pat for that great question. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar00mba.net that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Software is just a tool and most of them do everything you pretty much need. How you utilize that tool, your game plan of how to utilize that tool, how efficiently you do it, that's really what matters. That takes planning and maybe just paper and pen sketching out what the journey's like from sign up to customer and beyond. Now, the tool that you choose should be easy to use so you can implement your plan. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.