Do you need to learn Email Marketing?

I must admit that I have written a lot about email marketing lately and it’s ever since Intuit bought MailChimp and our monthly bill went up and some of the features were stripped out.

I then heard about Aweber increasing their prices massively and thought there must be something at play in the world of email marketing software.

The most disappointing part about what MailChimp has done is that they’ve stripped back the ability to create more than 4 automations unless you upgrade to a higher plan.

Everything about MailChimp is screaming out MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY!

Even though we’re paying a decent amount each month and have been using the Automations for ages Intuit just turned them off! Yes, that’s right, when we received enquiries from leads they didn’t receive ANYTHING because the Automation attached to it contained more than 4 automations.

Do you know what an Email Marketing automation is?

This is the really crazy thing. An automation is something as simple as sending a message to a lead immediately after they confirm they wanted the information. Automation Campaigns are a way to ping that lead several times over a series of days or weeks or even months and here is where the current limitations are a bit of a joke.

The above image shows a typical example of an Customer Journey or Automation and each step is considered an automation – including “wait one day”!

With the basic MailChimp subscription you can basically send 2 email message – bit of a joke if you ask be. When you see that Aweber allows you to create and send as many as you want you get to see why some businesses are considering a shift to Aweber or Mailer Lite.

The problem with most software programs today is that they are “sticky”! It’s hard to change.

To change email marketing software you’d have to go through the same process of migrating from MYOB to Xero. You’ve have to

• export all your records,
• setup your templates and automations,
• authenticate your domain for sending emails,
• setup different lead capture forms etc

This is a lot of work for the sake of saving $100 or so a month – or is it?

The bigger reason that it’s hard to move away from MailChimp is the number of integrations they have. One of the biggest we use is the one with WooCommerce and the way that MailChimp demonstrates how much money you’ve made from a campaign or from a particular contact.

Learn about our MailChimp Course for Email Marketing