MBA2140 Q&A Wednesday: How do I choose an email marketing software for my business?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show Business Simplified every single day 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me. Over at Omar MBA Net, Today's question is from Liam and Liam asks what's up Omar? Love the podcast. I've been listening for the last few months and really enjoyed it. I'm in high school and I started my online business recently selling my digital assets. These are like comic books and graphics that I create. But on the show I hear you say that I need to grow an audience and an email list. My question is how do I choose an email marketing software? I'm not sure what's best for me. I'm still in high school so I don't have much of a budget. What do you recommend? Thanks Liam. Love the question Liam and congrats on your online business having the courage and the will to launch something when you're in High school is pretty incredible, so you should be proud of yourself. And your question about email marketing software is not that uncommon, actually. There are so many options out there, it can get really confusing. So in today's episode, I'm gonna break down what you should start with, what you need, what you don't need, what are some good options if you're on a budget, and what are the things to consider? So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Liam asks which email marketing software is good for him. He's on a budget, he's in high school, he doesn't have much money, but he wants something that is good for him. As he grows his audience. This is really an important question. I'll tell you why. Because switching email marketing providers is a big pain in the rear end. Once you start with one, you kind of don't want to move all off them. Why? Because once you start with one, there's so many things that are connected to it. Like the email forms that are on your website, like the automations you built based on your audiences and your lists and your tagging. How this email marketing software integrates with other tools like webinar software and payment processors. It's really something that's really sticky. So making the right choice in the beginning is a serious concern. Okay, because you don't want to be switching platforms left and right because it's a big time waster. The challenge here is that not every platform is going to solve every problem. Some platforms are great when you're getting started, but they are soon kind of useless once you start growing. Like you need more out of them. Some are great once you get advanced and you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and you need some really fancy stuff to do in your email automation and marketing. But they're really expensive and they're actually too much in the beginning, so why sign up for them now? So, so let me give you what my recommendations are. Our favorite and recommended email marketing software is ConvertKit. They're one of the tools that we recommend on our tools page. If you want to get a free account and get started with a free trial, you can go to100mba.net tools and you could check it out there. Or you could just Simply go to 100mba.net ConvertKit now why do we recommend ConvertKit? I've tried so many different email marketing software and the reason why I recommend it is because it's just enough for what you need when get started and it can grow with you. For most businesses and creators, it's basically what you're going to need for the rest of your business. But it's not intimidating and hard to use when you're getting started. In fact, with ConvertKit you can start with a free plan. I believe you can have up to 2,000 emails. Then from there their plans start at $9 a month. Very, very inexpensive and it's going to do everything you need like collect emails with email forms like creating tags and segments in your lists like sending broadcaster newslet, like creating automations. And then it's going to do other stuff that you might need in the future like Facebook ad integrations or integrating with your payment processor so you know who bought what or even selling products and services with their e commerce tool. So somebody like Liam, this is a perfect kind of place to start and to grow with because it's inexpensive, it's free actually to get started and as his business grows he's not going to be paying an arm and a leg. Like even if you're starting to grow and you have 20, 30, 40,000 subscribers, you're going to pay around $200 at the top end of that. And if you have that many subscribers, that means you're doing pretty well and you're able to afford it. Now if I compare that to some more complex and I would say more advanced software like ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft. These are great software, especially Infusionsoft or what they're called now keep but for a lot of people it's too much to get started with. Another recommendation that you may want to look at is mailchimp. Mailchimp is known to be user friend and easy for people that are getting started. They recently got acquired by Intuit and they started to bloat the system a bit adding websites and e commerce and to be honest with you, it's not the simplest software out there for email marketing. It's not easy to use anymore, it used to be. But having said that, it's still quite affordable and it does the job. But I'm not a big fan of their email editor the way where you actually compose the emails. It's a little bit outdated and to be honest it's a little bit annoying to use. So now that I've given some recommendations Let me give you some guidelines to knowing how to choose your email marketing software. First of all, set a budget for yourself. How much do you want to spend on the software? How much can you afford? Now, email marketing is a big part of your business. It's a place you want to invest some money in, but obviously money that you can afford to lose. Number two, write down all the things you want to do with email marketing. Maybe you just simply want something to collect emails and send a weekly news broadcast or newsletter. That's very simple. You can find pretty much any product out there is going to do that and you can find the lowest price and just go with that. So list all your requirements, what you actually are looking for. Lastly, when you're doing your research, one of the things you need to consider and to look into is deliverability. You need to make sure that these services actually do a good job of delivering your emails to your inbox, just like the real posts. Sometimes people can lose your mail and there's a lot to that, a lot in terms of the technology of making sure it hits the inbox of your subscriber. But you should search and do some, you know, maybe search on reviews of deliverability of all the contenders on your list.

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All right, to wrap up today's lesson, just full disclosure. I know today's episode sounds like some sort of like sponsored episode of ConvertKit, but no, we recommend them because they're actually pretty good. They do the job, they actually deliver on what they say. And on a personal note, I know the founder, Nathan Barry for some years now. I know how hard he's worked on this program on ConvertKit, on the team, on improving the software, and it's gone a long way. I've been following his journey for some time. I wasn't an early adopter. When he launched Convertkey, he asked me, hey, join. And I didn't actually join because I didn't want to deal with the headache of moving over like I said it's super, super time consuming to move from one email marketing provider to the next. But eventually I got frustrated with what I was using and, and I decided to switch. Now, some email marketing providers make this easy for you, like ConvertKit. Well, they'll do the switching for you, they'll actually do the migration for you. I think it only applies depends on the software or the company, but I think it only applies to annual plans in some cases or certain plans. But look into that because that could save you a lot of time and effort. The last thing I want to mention is it's worth going and playing around with a free trial with a free plan. With some of the contenders on your list, you're going to be living in the software for a good amount of time in your working days because email marketing is a time consuming task. You're going to do a lot of it and you need to make sure that you like the ui, the user experience, the UX, and that you can get around easily and it's intuitive to you. Liam, thank you so much for asking today's question on Q and A Wednesday. Hey, if you're listening right now and you got a question that's been nagging you and you want to ask, hey, this is like free coaching, go ahead and email me over at omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with your answer here on Q and A Wednesday. If you love today's episode, if you love the show and you want to pay it forward, go ahead and share it with everybody you know on social media. Let them know that you listened to the $100 NBA show and send them the link 100mba.net so they can subscribe and listen to the show themselves. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. At the end of the day, software is a tool that helps you facilitate an action. Okay? At the end of the day, you got to take action. It's what you do with the tool that's going to matter. So what you need to focus on is will this tool help me do that action easily because if there's less friction, the more often you'll do it, the more you'll get better at it. The more results you're going to get out of it, the more return on investment you're going to get out of this software. So a tool you don't use or doesn't encourage you to use it is useless. Right? It's a big waste of time and money. So make sure you enjoy using the software. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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