Direct to Consumer Focus

• ❌ It’s easy to reach the limits of the free plan
• ❌ The costs start to mount. I found this out the hard way and so switched to Mailerlite

Mailerlite is an excellent Mailchimp alternative.

• ✅ It has some great free benefits including its email automation builder and lead forms
• ✅ Integrations like WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace
• ✅ The paid plans all allow for unlimited email sends
• ✅ Awesome Direct To Consumer focus – ecommerce integrations like WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace
• ✅ You can sell direct from the email with product images, info and payments
• ✅ You can even track you e-commerce sales, send abandoned cart emails and trigger based on a recipients interaction with your products

At the early stages of a business it’s essential to watch those rising tech stack costs. You need to prioritise key features, and that’s what Mailerlite allows you to do.

I would also consider a couple of other alternatives that might suit your business. Sender and Sendgrid are great tools that have some of the most flexible free plans. They are feature rich for scaling and moving onto paid plans.

On the ‘let’s keep it simple’ side of the scale, Sender keeps it simple much like Mailerlite.

Both have great newsletter and email automation-type features. The difference lies in their D2C vs B2B focus. Mailerlite brings in forms and landing pages, whereas Sender includes SMS and deliverability. On the other side of the simplicity scale lies Sendgrid. It has powerful APIs that cater to the tech savvy or those with access to developers. You can create a more sophisticated website integration with dedicated IPs (think deliverability!), webhooks and SMTP relay. As a Twilio product, there’s the added possibilities of SMS, Whatsapp and Video combinations.

Save Time When Evaluating

It’s important to focus your time and that’s where I hope this article comes in handy. The last thing I want is for you to repeat my mistakes. Don’t waste time and money on trying out the wrong tech when building your sales and marketing tech stack. Instead, narrow your focus and comparison to 2, max 3 options.

As a head start, you can stay clear of GetResponse. I’ve had very poor deliverability results there, and the reporting is weak. I’ll be honest. I haven’t tried and tested others such as MooSend, Benchmark, SendInBlue and Constant Contact. That said, I have done a feature vs subscriber count vs email sends pricing comparison. As such, I do not believe that they are the right choice for someone in the early stages of their business (whether solo or with a few employees).

Pick The Features That You Need

You don’t need everything. Narrow down to those features that matter the most.

What matters the most? Features that can save you time and money at this very early stage of your D2C business. For this, you need an easy to use drag and drop editor. You need email automation for email funnels. You need a clear understanding of what costs there would be when you need to move away from the free plan. Yay growth time!

Although Mailerlite is slightly pricier than Sender when you move off the free plan, it is more catered towards an ecommerce business. That is why my pick is Mailerlite.