Email Marketing Software | MailChimp, ConvertKit, or Flodesk

Over the years I have used MailChimp, ConvertKit, and now Flodesk to market my business online, and in today's post of The Bootstrap Biz Advice Show, I'm going to give you my honest review of these three platforms. If you decide that you want to switch to Flodesk and you want to get 50% off your first year, go ahead and lock in by clicking on this link. Without further ado, let's hop in.

First up is the platform MailChimp. It is free to start using it and they will not charge you until you exceed 2000 subscribers, but a con to using MailChimp is the open rate.

Of the three platforms that I'm reviewing in this post, MailChimp is the only one to directly integrate with Squarespace. What I mean by that is when you go to your Squarespace website, you edit a page and add a newsletter block. Under storage, you'll see Squarespace email campaigns, but if you click on connect other services, MailChimp will appear. You just connect it to your MailChimp account, it pulls in your information from there and it styles your newsletter block to match your other styling on your site.  Another benefit to MailChimp is I’ve used it to style emails for other platforms. I would send a test email to myself and I would copy the HTML source from that email so that it will look like this no matter the platform I was using. So that's a benefit. However, MailChimp does use tiered pricing so let's take a look at the pricing. So here is that free account that I said all the basics to get you started. 

And if you scroll down, you'll see this is the maximum amount of users or contacts you can have on your list to have a free account. So again, under free, there's your 2000 contacts and you only have one audience. If you want more than one audience, you will have to start paying. You can click on Calculate your price and it'll give you kind of an understanding of how much it's going to cost you per month as your list grows. So if you’ve got 10,000 contacts they're estimating you're gonna pay about $74 a month. So if you like MailChimp, but you want to get an idea of what is it going to cost me to move over to this platform. Just check out this little slider and this will give you some estimates. And at the bottom, just remember this price is subject to additional charges. So this may not be the final price but this gives you an estimate of what it's going to cost you to use MailChimp.

ConvertKit has incredible open rates and it's the main reason why I switched from MailChimp and started paying for ConvertKit back in the day but I would say they are the worst when it comes to templates. They have the least selection of the three so if you care about how your emails look that could be a problem with ConvertKit. If I were to be completely honest with you, I have a love-hate relationship with ConvertKit. I have probably signed up and loved the platform three different times simply because I was overwhelmed. Now if you have never used email marketing software and you create a ConvertKit account, I guarantee you your first reaction will be overwhelm because this is an extremely robust program to execute email marketing. However, that's also a big pro. When you scroll down under automation alone, you look at all the different things that you can do on the back end, it may not be the prettiest platform, but it certainly is the most robust of the three that I’m featuring. On top of that, they really do lead the industry when it comes to partnerships. If you click on their integration partners, they integrate with so many different platforms. So if you are selling courses or you’ve built a Wix website or want to just connect it with your stripe payments to grow your list, that's huge. However, they do have to tier pricing as well.

If we to do a side-by-side comparison, if you've got 10,000 folks on your email list and you're paying month to month, you're looking at $119 a month versus MailChimp's $74.99 estimate with the essential plan. So more than likely across the board, ConvertKit is going to be the most expensive option. You can save some money by doing the annual billing so that's something to keep in mind and they also do offer a free trial so you can always just try it to see if you'd like it. Now when you go to create a broadcast within ConvertKit, which is essentially just sending an email to your list, you don't have that many options when it comes to email templates, text only, classic, or modern. However, I will give them credit, they have done a lot of work to try to make this platform prettier. One of which is their new editor. So if you've not clicked on this, they do have a drag-and-drop editor in beta phase where you have a few more options. So you just click the plus sign and you can add some images, dividers, personalize it by putting in your subscribers' names and such. But when it comes to making it look better, I think the best thing they've done recently is create landing pages that are aesthetically pleasing. So if you're into how things look visually, make sure you click on landing page because they’ve put a lot of effort into developing this based on feedback from online entrepreneurs. So you're talking landing page-ready templates, they don’t have that many of them but they do look pretty. So let's give them some credit. ConvertKit this is good, we need some more. So if you are into how things look visually, landing pages are a good option to try to hack ConvertKit you can also code templates for yourself and save them so that when we go to create your broadcast, we will see that option under this drop-down. But that's kind of my honest opinion of ConvertKit. Again, ton of integration partners, great open rate, however, they’re just not the prettiest of the three. So just something to keep in mind.

Flodesk is the newest email marketing platform of the three and what I find very unique about this brand is the same thing that could be a pro for you, could be a con for someone else and that is their unique pricing structure. Whether you have 10 subscribers or 10,000 subscribers, it's the same monthly rate for everyone. Right now that is $38 a month and if you use this link, you'll get it for $19. So if you are a brand new entrepreneur who doesn't want to spend money on emails, this may not be good for you. But if you've got a huge list and you're used to paying more and more and more every month with ConvertKit as your list grows, think about switching. They also have the most beautiful easy-to-use email templates. The pricing structure for Flodesk is cool but the reason that I took the time to move over my subscribers from ConvertKit were the email templates. You can tell just by looking at the homepage it's just a freaking breath of fresh air. To be able to portray your brand in a professional manner was some sense of a design aesthetic, and have it match your branding. That's huge, that's freaking huge. If you scroll through on the homepage, you can get kind of an overview of what they have available, but there are more templates than just this and let's compare you, the last email that I sent through ConvertKit I tried my best God bless me but I had to create some graphics in Canva just to try to add some design aesthetic to my emails and so creating this email took so long, however, I've Eye For Ebony is a stock photo brand featuring African American models. I have to be able to show images in my emails to sell people on why they should use me. And so that is a big, big, big selling point for Flodesk. One thing that I did not expect though, and I'm just gonna be honest with you, I'm gonna go to my emails in Flodesk. I loved conversions on my ConvertKit emails in comparison to MailChimp but the very first email I sent through Flodesk had a 35% open rate. I wasn’t expecting that, I was like ok cool, unlimited everything, low monthly price, beautiful emails, but to see that open rate and compare it to what I was able to get here. I'm just keeping it real guys let's go back and look at that data. Engagement overview, there you go 22%. 22% versus 35% could be thousands of dollars for your business. So just something to keep in mind. It's not just cute, it's effective. If we go to the templates, let's just scroll down and I guarantee there will be more coming because the site is in beta mode but this is a great freaking start, right? Let's just take a look at the emails that I was able to send from the beginning. Look at how beautiful these look. I just feel like immediately this elevated my brand.

Now if I go back to these email templates, let's say we want to start with this one. We'll hit customize and every single thing has options. Here's my logo, if I want to make it bigger, drag and resize. You can duplicate things. You can pull in your images here. You can add overlays in the freaking website builder. I mean let's be honest friends, I mean look at the text options alone. They may not have the exact text style that you use on your website but they have a ton of options and it will continue to grow as time goes on. 

I'm going to do some more videos about Flodesk, little stuff like I can connect it to my Instagram account and this will automatically update every single email that I send out. I just there's so much attention to detail that I am a huge fan. So yeah, it would cause you to have to go through a little bit of work to move your stuff over but little things like you can customize your unsubscribe, that they've got different unsubscribe messages for the bottom of your email. I mean this is huge. I mean they're really going to upset the way that email marketing is being done right now because it's going to force some of these bigger brands to add more features that maybe they would have never thought about otherwise. If you clicked on this link, you're going to get 50% off, that will save you $19 a month so you can get started today for free. Do your free 30-day trial and then after that, just pay $19 a month regardless of how big your list is. 

If after looking at these options, looking at MailChimp, looking at ConvertKit, and now looking at Flodesk, you decide to switch, I hope you would take advantage of this link because that is how I can continue to invest time in creating these posts. So I hope you liked this, I hope this will help you make a decision, and if you have some other videos you would like to make just let me know in the comments because I teach you guys how to grow your biz without breaking the bank.