Flodesk vs. Mailchimp vs. Mailerlite vs. Convertkit

Email marketing – you’ve decided its the strategy for you?

I hope that is a big resounding yes!! Email marketing works for two goals: getting closer relationally to your existing audience and for selling.

Content Creators, in particular, need email lists so that if any social media account goes down, you can get in touch with your followers for updates. And subscribers need to hear from you regularly so you earn brand recognition and positive perception.

If you’re not clear on the difference between newsletters, rss and email this will help put it all into perspective.

One little caveat: Texting is becoming a marketing thing. But I cringe at that!! How is that different than the old cold sales call at dinner time on the family phone? It feels just as icky to me. So I wont be writing tutorials on that.

Do not use Email to Mass Email

If you didn’t know – you cannot use Gmail/ Yahoo / Your Email to send mass emails. If you do this, you will earn yourself a terrible reputation which means death to your deliverability.

Deliverability is the gold star metric that everyone covets. It’s the Academy Awards of Email.

Poor deliverability means no one will actually GET your email. Much less read it.

Good deliverability doesn’t happen by accident. It is the primary reason you pay the price tag for the email marketing serviced providers we are reviewing today.

The point – do not use your regular email to send mass or marketing emails. And here’s more information on what email to use.

The Buzz around Flodesk in Creator Circles

I know there has been a lot of buzz lately for Flodesk and I naturally get my mama bear mode tickled when that happens. I don’t want anyone taking advantage of my content creator friends and clients. And when everyone is an affiliate for something – it is often the result of an excellent profit, not so much a great product. So I did some digging.

The result is this post. As with most things, there are Pro’s and Con’s to each choice – so read through and find the one that works for you. HINT: the email marketing co that I use will likely not be the best choice for you if you have lots of subscribers!

K – down to brass tacks. These are the 4 email marketing companies we will review and how we will review them.

1. Flodesk
2. Mailchimp
3. MailerLite
4. Convertkit

These are in NO particular order. We will be evaluating them on these areas:

Flodesk Review

Overall impressions: I saw this CEO in an interview (I linked in the newsletter last week). She – and the team that founded Flodesk are in the middle of disrupting the entire email marketing niche! I’m totally serious and pretty intrigued! I haven’t changed to Flodesk yet for WPB because of the lack of RSS to Email(see automations).

Emails: They are beautiful and done-for-you. It is built with blocks, very similar to our editing screen in WordPress now. And each block comes with lots of options to change the colors, images and text.

Emails can automatically import IG feeds and a few other social media feeds.

Forms: The forms are simple to create and are added to the site like all the other apps – with a copy & paste bit of code.

I love that the forms are simple to create and customize. And they offer the popup function directly – no other plugins needed.

You can use the integrations to add subscribers automatically from Facebook, WooCommerce and other apps through Zapier.

Segmentation / Personalization: Each form allows you add a ‘tag’ so you know where that user signed up and you can target them for personalized emails.

Automations: The only downside that I saw with Flodesk is that they do not support RSS – to – Email functions. You cannot automatically publish from your WordPress site (or any feed) to email and send automatically.

You can add many other kinds of automations in the emails themselves. You can create a new series of emails that send in timed intervals. And you can add a custom freebie to each form if you like!

Pricing: $38 per month, regardless of size (I confirmed this – it’s kind of unbelievable!) As you hit ‘enterprise’ level, they will encourage you to use a different service.

Checkout flodesk here.

Let’s Compare Mailchimp Next

Forms: Signup forms are limited to 3 choices plus a few landing pages. The more expensive the plan, the more forms are unlocked.

There are great integrations for MailChimp because it is so well known. So lots of plugins integrate well and you can use plugins’ forms instead of theirs.

Emails: – There are two types of email editors with Mailchimp. The classic builder is a block based editor where each block comes with limited options. However if you know html, you can edit in the html editor.

RSS to email is the strength of Mailchimp – there are lots of ways to add and manipulate feeds in Mailchimp while creating emails.

Segmentation: is relatively difficult with MailChimp. Contacts can be added to groups via the signup form. Contacts can manage their own ‘groups’ if you let them. For example they can select to get the once a week newsletter or the daily RSS Feed emails.

Also, Tags must be added manually to each contact, which is just not practical.

Automations: The tagging is the difficult part, once they are tagged the automations are fairly easy to set up – with a similar drag and drop builder as the other 3 services.

Price: up to 2000 contacts, free
5,000 contacts = $90/mo
50,000 contacts = $359/mo

Checkout Mailchimp here.

Compare Mailerlite

Overall Impressions: I love Mailerlite. In honesty I selected it before I had really looked at many others. But it has everything I need and a free version that is enough for WPB. Plus it allows unlimited email automations and personalization on the free plan. This is the one I recommend if you’re a beginner.

Forms: there are basic forms similar to Flodesk. I always recommend a clear simple form that you can paste into any page. And add a custom-field for tags in every form (and hide it from readers). In Mailerlite there are NOT a lot of options for forms. They do offer landing pages (which we don’t recommend for bloggers).

Tip: For all forms in all companies, I recommend you design the titles and photos on the page itself – then the forms will take the same styles as the theme.

Automations: As I mentioned one of my favorite features is that you can use any number of automations without a paid account. A welcome series is SO important. MailerLite makes it really easy to create a form, tag the recipient, and create an automated response sequence all in one screen.

Triggers (to start an email sequence) in MailerLite have a lot more options than the triggers in Flodesk (as of publication).

Segmentation & Personalization: is super easy with Mailerlite. You can segment your contacts by the form they signed up with, and my favorite – the tags you add to any form. This helps you track if an already-subscribed readers signed up again for a particular opt-in. You can follow up and provide the info they’re looking for.

Pricing: MailerLite also has several tiers when it comes to pricing. They are based on subscribers and also the number of emails sent.

These tiers are subscribers with minimal emails sent per month:

• 0 – 1000 = free
• 1000- 10,000 = $15 /month
• 10,000 -100,000 is $50 /month

Checkout Mailerlite here.

Compare & Contrast ConvertKit

Overall Impressions: A few years ago ConvertKit disrupted the entire marketplace and made it really easy for bloggers to send freebies (opt-ins) to their readers. This was huge!

Now, for the first time (other than enterprise software), you could send a different opt-in to each subscriber based on the form they used to sign up. “Automations” weren’t really needed – the delivery of the opt-in incentive was already baked into the form creation process. For each form, you immediately add the delivery email (or thank you email).

Forms: I did find the forms dashboard interface could get unwieldy after 20-30 forms. They do have a plugin which makes integration with WP easy. And this platform has the most options for styling forms.

Email Creation: The emails have gained tons of features since 2021. The builder has the same intuitive block-based design – you can add images, and buttons. But now they add social media integration and a few other ecommerce goodies. However, if you purchase a pre-made HTML template, there is the ability to upload the whole thing. So if you hire someone, it is completely customizable!

Automations: Automations are baked right into the forms workflow – allowing you to send a separate opt-in incentive to each subscriber based on the form they used to signup.

Segmentation/ Tags: You can easily tag subscribers in the forms, and then using plugins, when they checkout on your site. These plugins are integrations with Convertkit and work to add tags to subscribers after subscribers have performed a particular action (like purchasing something).

Pricing: Unfortunately, the downside comes when you look at the price.

• 5,000 subscribers = $79/mo
• 0- 1,000 subscribers = free

Checkout Convertkit here.

Conclusion

So there you have it! My honest review of 4 popular email marketing companies that can help you automate your email marketing. Always keep in mind, the goal: nurture relationships and/or serve through sales.

Be sure to use the links above to send me a little love (affiliate links). And checkout the difference between Email & Newsletters & RSS, how to create an email marketing plan, and what to send to your subscribers.