In today’s episode, I’m answering the question: What is the best email service for online business?
If you’ve been thinking about setting up your mailing list or changing your email list provider and you want to know which is the BEST email service for your online business, you’re going to find this one particularly helpful.
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
MailerLite: mailerlite.com
ConvertKit: convertkit.com
Active Campaign: activecampaign.com
Kartra (please note that this is an affiliate link): tashcorbin.krtra.com/t/TAXWzIl4MPYf
Kajabi: kajabi.com
Grow Your Audience free training: tashcorbin.com/audience
Let’s dive on in!
We need the best email service provider as online business owners for a number of different reasons.
Yes, when you’re first starting out and emailing people one-to-one, you can use a common email service such as Gmail. But once you get into the space of collecting email addresses and wanting to email people en masse, you need to have an email service provider.
One of the main reasons for this is that it ensures that you are compliant with the legal requirements for emailing people in bulk.
In Australia, we have very strong anti-spam laws, and different countries around the world have different requirements.
The fastest way to ensure that you’re compliant is to use a compliant email provider.
I know that a lot of people want to find the best free email service for an online business. They see this as something where they can save some money by finding some freebies and workarounds. But ultimately, this is an important tool of the trade.
Your mailing list is one of your business’s key assets.
It’s an area where I don’t recommend you skimp – particularly on the functionality and the automations that you need in order to run your business and grow your list easily.
The recommendations that I’m going to share with you today about the best email service for online business, will be dependant on what stage of business you’re in.
I also want to preface this by saying:
1. I’m not a tech expert.
I can’t determine what exactly you’re going to need in your business.
If you’re unsure or you have specific requirements or unique circumstances, make sure that you enlist the support and advice of a tech expert.
I recommend people such as Bev Roberts, Tiffany Souhrada, Andrea Jordan, and many more amazing people available to support you in our Heart-Centered Community who are real experts in choosing the best email provider for your technology stack, and also learning how to integrate that with the other things that you do in your business.
2. It’s so important that you have a good email provider for that functionality and the automations.
3. The most important reason for getting a good email provider, other than being compliant legally, is that you want an email provider where you can quickly, effectively, and easily set up a new lead magnet, opt-in, webinar, or something that’s actually going to grow your list.
That’s really important, especially if you are looking to grow the long-term viability and sustainability of your business.
Your mailing list is one of your most important assets.
Let’s dive into what I think are the BEST email service providers for online business…
1. MailerLite
This is for anyone in the early stages of startup, all the way through to having about 1,500-2000 people on your mailing list.
The reason why I recommend MailerLite when you’re first starting out is that it’s very cost-effective, but it also has good functionality.
It’s very simple and user-friendly. The user experience is fairly straightforward. It’s not too complex and I think it’s a really good platform for you to use when you’re first starting out.
Find out more about MailerLite here: CLICK ME
2. ConvertKit or Active Campaign
This is for once you get to the 2,000+ mark in your business if you’re still only selling services (you’re not selling online courses or memberships and you don’t need a membership platform).
There are people who are complete Active Campaign lovers and you can never talk them out of it, and there are people who are complete ConvertKit lovers and you can never talk them out of that.
I’m not married either way.
Personally, when I was at that stage of business, I found ConvertKit much easier to use and the deliverability was much higher than when I moved over to Active Campaign.
However, when I moved to Active Campaign, I didn’t understand the way that Active Campaign measures the quality of a mailing list.
I didn’t understand how to transition to a new mailing list provider in a way that would keep my deliverability really high.
I went from around 98% deliverability in ConvertKit, to about 60% deliverability when I moved over to Active Campaign.
That was actually because when I moved over, it wasn’t managed effectively.
The person who helped me to move it over didn’t realise that we were potentially damaging my deliverability with the way that we moved people over from one provider to another.
This is why I recommend that you work with an expert.
Finding someone who’s really keyed up on these platforms and the things you need to do – particularly when you’re moving platforms – to make sure you maintain your deliverability is critical.
One key tip I want to give you is that when we moved over to a new provider, the first few emails that I sent out were promo emails. Therefore, they had a higher unsubscribe rate than my regular newsletter.
We were doing a bit of list cleansing when we moved over to the new provider. We were doing things like getting people to opt out and ensuring that people were still interested. What we should have done was do that all over on the old provider and only bring the cleansed active list over to the new provider.
We did it the exact wrong way round.
That meant that it created a big issue with deliverability because the first few emails I sent out when I was in Active Campaign were emails that had high unsubscribe rates, low open rates, low engagement rates, and high deletion rates.
All of those things told Active Campaign that this newly imported list is not a good quality one.
We did it totally the wrong way around, and it was just a matter of not understanding or having any experience in that space.
I make mistakes so that you don’t have to!
If you are going to change providers, just do all your list cleansing through the old provider, not through the new one.
Find out more about ConvertKit here: CLICK ME
Find out more about Active Campaign here: CLICK ME
3. Kartra or Kajabi
This is for once you’re at the point where you’re selling online courses, and you’re looking for an all-in-one service provider.
I absolutely love and adore Kartra. A lot of people also love Kajabi.
One of the pieces of feedback that I’ve had on Kajabi is that they have some deliverability issues in relation to emails as well.
The people that I know with mailing lists over 25,000-30,000 who use Kajabi for their courses, actually also use Active Campaign for their emails.
They don’t use Kajabi as an all-in-one platform, because they’ve had some trouble with deliverability, and the quality of getting those emails into people’s inboxes.
I don’t want to scare you with deliverability issues, but I just want to raise a little bit of awareness around those things, because we can get very caught up in other people’s opinions, beliefs, and perspectives of the email service providers that they use.
We really want to make sure the one that you choose is fit for your purpose.
The best email service provider for online business is one that is fit for your specific needs.
It’s very similar to the phenomenon of when someone uses an Apple computer, they want to recruit everyone to be on Apple computers. When someone is with a certain telecommunications provider, they want to convince everyone else to come and join their telecommunications provider.
The reason why we as humans do this is that we want to feel like we’ve made the right decision. Getting other people to make the same decision as us, makes us feel confident and comfortable that we’ve made the right decision.
I want you to just be mindful of that.
When you go and ask a random bunch of strangers on the internet whether you should use Kajabi or Kartra, the people on Kajabi will tell you Kajabi, and the people on Kartra will tell you Kartra.
It’s important that rather than going and asking strangers, instead, just spend a little bit of money hiring an expert to help understand what you need and provide recommendations based on where you’re at.
Those people that I mentioned before, as well as other systems and tech stack providers, will be able to give you a far more detailed recommendation based on your exact needs.
The one thing that I would recommend if you’re working with someone like that, is to not fall into the trap of asking them to find you the cheapest available for what it is that you’re doing.
I understand the desire to save money and limit the monthly recurring costs in your business. But as I said at the start of this episode, this is one of those really important assets in your business.
To save $10 a month, but have to ask someone to set up an opt-in for you every time you need to do it because you don’t know how to use the platform and it’s too hard and there are too many plugins or workarounds that you need…
I think it’s short-sighted.
Similarly, using a cheaper platform that has bad deliverability rates, but it’s cheaper, isn’t necessarily the right decision for your business.
Maybe you choose the cheaper workaround, but then you have to pay for another tool to plug that tool into this tool, and it’s just creating all of those unnecessary tech headaches and workarounds. Whereas if you just invested in the right fit-for-purpose technology without scrimping and saving would actually be far easier for you.
Have a think about what it is that you actually want to be doing.
For some people, I actually recommend buying the tool that you’re about to move into being ready for rather than buying one for where you are now.
For example, in the Leverage and Launch program – which is one of my group programs on creating and launching group programs – some people will come into that program that currently have MailerLite as their provider.
They’ve got that list under 1,500 people, and they’re thinking of moving into ConvertKit or Active Campaign. But they have plans in the next year to release a course or a membership and it’s going to be hosted on a course platform.
Eventually, they’re going to need to move to an all-in-one platform.
If that’s the case, I will make the recommendation to do the first launch with the existing tools they have, and make a budget in that launch for some of that income to be invested in that all-in-one platform.
If they get a certain number of enrollments in the first launch of their course, that’s a sign it’s time to move straight into Kajabi or Kartra, or straight into something that’s more integrated than going that leapfrog type of arrangement when you’re not going to be staying with a certain provider for long because you’re going to move into something that’s fully integrated.
Find out more about Kartra here (please note that this is an affiliate link): CLICK ME
Find out more about Kajabi here: CLICK ME
I hope I’ve given you some things to think about in regards to my recommendations of the best email service for online business.
It’s one of the most common questions that I get asked, and it’s usually one that requires me to ask three or four follow-up questions to be able to provide a recommendation. But ultimately, if you’re in those early stages of startup, I think MailerLite is pretty hard to beat.
If you have 2,000-10,000 people on your mailing list, and you’re not selling online courses so you don’t need an all-in-one platform, ConvertKit is pretty much my favorite. But I do know that there are a lot of people who love Active Campaign as well.
Then if you’re moving into having that fully integrated, all-in-one platform, I love Kartra. That’s why I’m on it. There are some good reasons to jump into Kajabi as well.
One of those two is likely the one that I would most recommend for you.
I am an affiliate for Kartra, so if you are interested in doing a $1 trial of it, you can check it out using my affiliate link here: CLICK ME
When we moved from using a bunch of different systems into an all-in-one like Kartra, it was really powerful and it saved me a bunch of money.
We now use Kartra instead of Active Campaign for emails. I had Thinkific for course hosting, we had an affiliate plugin that we used for affiliates, and we also had Zendesk for our helpdesk.
We went from using all four of those (plus a very expensive version of Zapier to get them all talking to each other) to just using Kartra.
I went from about $400-$450 a month in all of those different platforms, down to $125 a month using Kartra.
For me, it was a really smart financial decision to make that move, because we were able to eventually transition all of those services.
The last service that I will be transitioning over to Kartra is also my integrated calendar.
At the moment I use Acuity for calendar bookings, but Kartra does have a calendar service that I will transition into.
It’s got a couple of functions that they’re working on that it doesn’t have right now, so I’ve decided not to move over until those are all set up. But once that’s set up, I’ll also then save money on having my paid version of Acuity, and I’ll be able to move that into Kartra as well.
For me, it’s a big cost-saver to move over to Kartra.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centered Business Podcast.
If this has piqued your interest in growing your list and making sure that you’ve got that working on autopilot, I have a free resource for you.
It’s called Grow your Audience.
It’s a 40-minute training on how to get that list growth happening for each stage of business.
Grab it for free at tashcorbin.com/audience
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
