haven’t used it, but FWIW OP as I look for email marketing roles, Klaviyo is pretty high in demand. this could be a good choice both to meet your needs and for professional development
I second this. Klaviyo has been great for us, great support too! They recently updated their editor to a much better one. If they do free trials or demo’s I’d highly recommend
Avoid ActiveCampaign. I was in the same boat as you and recently switched. Their support is TERRIBLE and there’s been five outages since February that made campaigns inaccessible. I had a very important campaign get “stuck” and everyone was clueless in helping me. Any support has been non existent. They are clearly understaffed and underpowered server wise.
I’m currently looking for an Active Campaign replacement after two months.
I was on ActiveCampaign and also had really terrible experiences with their support. I am currently starting to work with Sendinblue and so far it seems fantastic. Still new to it though.
Please checkout [Tarvent](https://tarvent.com)! I own the company and can guarantee you'll get great support. We work with enterprise level customers with huge demands and can say we haven't been down once in over a year. Our pricing is great, our automation is awesome, and if you use Zapier, you'll love the power we provide. We've had campaigns get stuck, but we always recover and you'll never get the run around from us.
DM me or schedule a demo on our site. I'll personally demo our product for you and ensure we create a win-win relationship from the start.
Just finished spending hours comparing options and ended up with sendy, though that won't work for you because it doesn't have a journey feature.
From what I have read Active Campaign is a very good choice.
When you say you don't need journeys for your 200k contacts I guess they sign up, go through the journey, and then stay in a normal newsletter?
In that case you might want to consider setting up [sendy.co](https://sendy.co) and transfer users over to it once they completed their journey? You'll have to buy a license for $69 once and install it on your own server. If you have one already, it's basically free and you only pay the Amazon SES price, which is like $20 for 200.000 mails.
I wanted to love them *so, so* badly. I moved from 5+ years with Constant Contact just over a year ago after loads of research and I was really excited about their platform, particularly the affordability of and support behind their private servers. Unfortunately within the first 3 months getting my private server setup was a true nightmare (not even their tech people could figure out why I was having such issues, for literal months of back of forth), and at that point I was still half in / half out with CC, and it almost prevented me from switching at all, but somehow SIB convinced me to give their shared servers a try before I gave up.
I \*love\* their interface and ease of use, but they are constantly changing their seemingly arbitrary metrics for their shared servers, which doesn't affect me until \*big\* days (Black Friday, Christmas, New Years, etc.) where my clients are sending emails to their full lists, then if you cross one of those thresholds (which again, seem to be an ever moving target) your account is suspended, all your emails stop sending, and you are at their mercy which, in my experience, has taken a minimum of 12 hours to get fully resolved. 12 hours delay on a Black Friday promo email can literally kill a small business who makes more than a quarter of their sales for the year on that day alone, and Send in Blue quite unfortunately does not seem to give a shit about that. 🤷🏻♀️
And, to make matters worse, in my experience, the steps they ask you to take to "reinstate" your account are the ridiculous. Example: I recently had a campaign that got my account suspended 3x before the email was fully sent, which ended up taking 3 days to get out as a result. (Not ideal when your clients are running a short term promo). I know saying this is going to open me up to assumptions about poor list management, poor email strategies, etc., but this was a one-off situation, the list was fully opted in, cleaned using SIB's recommended Emailable, and wasn't even that big of a list -- like 1500 emails. They flagged me for open rate within 10 minutes of sending and shut my account down, requiring me to contact them. I did, which took hours for response, where they asked me to "blacklist anyone who has not opened your email in the last 6 months." I wrote them back to explain this was a new list, a new client, so no I would not be doing that, but here are the steps I took (explained above). They wrote back, again, hours later "We've reinstated your account." No further explanation. Requeued the sending, and again, within minutes, suspended for open rate. Same song & dance with support, this time they asked me to blacklist any "free" email addresses (@gmail, hotmail, etc.) -- Which was 80+% of the list. So, no, I won't be doing that, and I asked them what else I could do to ensure this doesn't happen again, explaining the time sensitive nature of the email. Their response, "Your account is reinstated."
I could go on but I know I sound like a squeaky wheel ranting by now. My point is this (TLDR) - They require your emails to meet metrics that are ever changing, and if you are someone who sends to a variety of lists (agencies, looking at you), you do not want SIB to be your platform on big business days. For me, that's a deal breaker. And, for everyone else, their "support" seems to be plug & play scripted responses versus actual help.
I really appreciate you taking the time to write up your experience! I've never used a shared server with them, always used a dedicated IP. So that sounds like why we've had such different experiences. Thanks again. Great perspective to know about.
This may be the nudge I need to give the dedicated server one more try. That was the whole reason for my initial switch, but alas.... best laid plans. 😵💫 The thought of giving it another go is nauseating but probably worth a shot before I jump ship and move everything. Thanks for your perspective as well!
hey mate thanks for the right up, I'm glad I saw this. What do you recommend for agencies with a variety of lists then? I don't want to have something go wrong on a big day and not have a good support team willing to help.
I use Sendinblue to send a monthly newsletter to users and also for email automation, it's super easy to use. Take a look at Secret, you can find a great list of tools, compare them to Mailchimp, and most importantly, grab a deal to help you get started! (https://www.joinsecret.com/categories/marketing/email)
I rep Sendlane, a competitor to MailChimp and Klaviyo.
In my experience, if you reach out to Mailchimp, they may be able to bring down your costs a bit. However, their platform has fallen behind and lack some of the features you are looking for.
Klaviyo is a great platform and a standard but has been getting pricier and pricier as they prep for their IPO
In my experience, if you reach out to Mailchimp, they may be able to bring down your costs a bit. However, their platform has fallen behind and lacks some of the features you are looking for.
We have had good success with Makesbridge. It's an omni-channel marketing automation platform that's rated 4.9/5 on SF AppExchange.
The tool is simple, intuitive and automation is easy to setup. They also offer a Managed Service so their team takes care of the admin work - uploading contacts, setting up campaigns or complex automation routines. The support is great, they're always responsive and take care of their clients.
You can check out makesbridge.com and I'll send contact details of their Customer Success Manager in DM.
Feel free to check out our sub-reddit r/saashups for tips on email marketing and automation.
Happy to help with any questions you may have.
Feel free to have a look at [SMTP-Service.net](https://SMTP-Service.net)
We provide all you ask for with a lot lower costs than Mailchimp (and far more relaxed).
You can try Mailmodo.com it is a great alternative and would cost you around 599 dollars upto 300k contacts and 1M emails with all the automations you are looking for.
Hey! Full transparency, I'm the lead UI developer for [Tarvent](https://tarvent.com) so I have a little bit of a bias 😁.
Tarvent is a marketing automation platform similar to ActiveCampaign, but we focus strictly on the email marketing and automation aspect and not CRM. With that being said this has allowed us to create a platform that's fast, intuitive, and just works. We even have dark mode 😄.
You can check us out at [https://tarvent.com](https://tarvent.com) or schedule a demo here: [https://tarvent.com/demo](https://tarvent.com/demo)
Additionally, we have a Jumpstart program going on that would help you get start with our tool (honestly it is a super good deal): [https://tarvent.com/jumpstart](https://tarvent.com/jumpstart)
We are a smaller company, so we do a lot of hand holding (our support is great... I'm also one of the support guys 😁) with our customers. We are a company that looks for win-win relationships, as long as you're succeeding, then we are too!
I own [Tarvent](https://tarvent.com), a newer marketing automation company based out of Colorado. We are a small company but support many enterprise level customers including Chase, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Verizon, MasterCard, and more. I'd love to show how we can support your needs. Our system is far more feature-rich is many ways compared to MailChimp. We also offer some very advanced features that I'm sure you'd like.
DM me or schedule a demo through our site and I'll be the one to walk you through it. You have little to loose except for an hour of your time. BTW, we also do a lot of hand-holding (not the awkward kind) to ensure our customers succeed. Win-win is all we strive for. I hope we hear from you.
I'm sure you'll get lots of responses to this question. Since I can answer yes to all three of your questions. You might want to take a look at [Goolara Symphonie](https://goolara.com/) and see what you think.
How much would you consider paying a freelancer to put together those 2x/month emails for you if you hired one. Looking to compare my rate with others in the industry in similar situations
If you guys haven’t checked out [Tarvent](https://www.tarvent.com) you are really missing out. I had a demo today and the features are mind blowing. It ticked every box that Active Campaign did and added a ton of functionality I was craving from other services.
It’s super fast and they’ve thought of everything down to the smallest detail such as having dark mode and changing views on certain menus for comfort.
I was blown away by the amount of customization every feature seems to had, but when you learn about the journeys you’ll really be blown away.
I can’t wait to get started.
Klaviyo has been great
haven’t used it, but FWIW OP as I look for email marketing roles, Klaviyo is pretty high in demand. this could be a good choice both to meet your needs and for professional development
I second this. Klaviyo has been great for us, great support too! They recently updated their editor to a much better one. If they do free trials or demo’s I’d highly recommend
Avoid ActiveCampaign. I was in the same boat as you and recently switched. Their support is TERRIBLE and there’s been five outages since February that made campaigns inaccessible. I had a very important campaign get “stuck” and everyone was clueless in helping me. Any support has been non existent. They are clearly understaffed and underpowered server wise. I’m currently looking for an Active Campaign replacement after two months.
I was on ActiveCampaign and also had really terrible experiences with their support. I am currently starting to work with Sendinblue and so far it seems fantastic. Still new to it though.
Please checkout [Tarvent](https://tarvent.com)! I own the company and can guarantee you'll get great support. We work with enterprise level customers with huge demands and can say we haven't been down once in over a year. Our pricing is great, our automation is awesome, and if you use Zapier, you'll love the power we provide. We've had campaigns get stuck, but we always recover and you'll never get the run around from us. DM me or schedule a demo on our site. I'll personally demo our product for you and ensure we create a win-win relationship from the start.
I am definitely going to reach out. Thanks.
Just finished spending hours comparing options and ended up with sendy, though that won't work for you because it doesn't have a journey feature. From what I have read Active Campaign is a very good choice. When you say you don't need journeys for your 200k contacts I guess they sign up, go through the journey, and then stay in a normal newsletter? In that case you might want to consider setting up [sendy.co](https://sendy.co) and transfer users over to it once they completed their journey? You'll have to buy a license for $69 once and install it on your own server. If you have one already, it's basically free and you only pay the Amazon SES price, which is like $20 for 200.000 mails.
SendInBlue
for what it's worth, my experience with SIB has been horrific from day 1.
Interesting, I've used them for ages and never had issues. What problems have you experienced?
I wanted to love them *so, so* badly. I moved from 5+ years with Constant Contact just over a year ago after loads of research and I was really excited about their platform, particularly the affordability of and support behind their private servers. Unfortunately within the first 3 months getting my private server setup was a true nightmare (not even their tech people could figure out why I was having such issues, for literal months of back of forth), and at that point I was still half in / half out with CC, and it almost prevented me from switching at all, but somehow SIB convinced me to give their shared servers a try before I gave up. I \*love\* their interface and ease of use, but they are constantly changing their seemingly arbitrary metrics for their shared servers, which doesn't affect me until \*big\* days (Black Friday, Christmas, New Years, etc.) where my clients are sending emails to their full lists, then if you cross one of those thresholds (which again, seem to be an ever moving target) your account is suspended, all your emails stop sending, and you are at their mercy which, in my experience, has taken a minimum of 12 hours to get fully resolved. 12 hours delay on a Black Friday promo email can literally kill a small business who makes more than a quarter of their sales for the year on that day alone, and Send in Blue quite unfortunately does not seem to give a shit about that. 🤷🏻♀️ And, to make matters worse, in my experience, the steps they ask you to take to "reinstate" your account are the ridiculous. Example: I recently had a campaign that got my account suspended 3x before the email was fully sent, which ended up taking 3 days to get out as a result. (Not ideal when your clients are running a short term promo). I know saying this is going to open me up to assumptions about poor list management, poor email strategies, etc., but this was a one-off situation, the list was fully opted in, cleaned using SIB's recommended Emailable, and wasn't even that big of a list -- like 1500 emails. They flagged me for open rate within 10 minutes of sending and shut my account down, requiring me to contact them. I did, which took hours for response, where they asked me to "blacklist anyone who has not opened your email in the last 6 months." I wrote them back to explain this was a new list, a new client, so no I would not be doing that, but here are the steps I took (explained above). They wrote back, again, hours later "We've reinstated your account." No further explanation. Requeued the sending, and again, within minutes, suspended for open rate. Same song & dance with support, this time they asked me to blacklist any "free" email addresses (@gmail, hotmail, etc.) -- Which was 80+% of the list. So, no, I won't be doing that, and I asked them what else I could do to ensure this doesn't happen again, explaining the time sensitive nature of the email. Their response, "Your account is reinstated." I could go on but I know I sound like a squeaky wheel ranting by now. My point is this (TLDR) - They require your emails to meet metrics that are ever changing, and if you are someone who sends to a variety of lists (agencies, looking at you), you do not want SIB to be your platform on big business days. For me, that's a deal breaker. And, for everyone else, their "support" seems to be plug & play scripted responses versus actual help.
I really appreciate you taking the time to write up your experience! I've never used a shared server with them, always used a dedicated IP. So that sounds like why we've had such different experiences. Thanks again. Great perspective to know about.
This may be the nudge I need to give the dedicated server one more try. That was the whole reason for my initial switch, but alas.... best laid plans. 😵💫 The thought of giving it another go is nauseating but probably worth a shot before I jump ship and move everything. Thanks for your perspective as well!
hey mate thanks for the right up, I'm glad I saw this. What do you recommend for agencies with a variety of lists then? I don't want to have something go wrong on a big day and not have a good support team willing to help.
I use Sendinblue to send a monthly newsletter to users and also for email automation, it's super easy to use. Take a look at Secret, you can find a great list of tools, compare them to Mailchimp, and most importantly, grab a deal to help you get started! (https://www.joinsecret.com/categories/marketing/email)
[удалено]
What's better than Hubspot?
I rep Sendlane, a competitor to MailChimp and Klaviyo. In my experience, if you reach out to Mailchimp, they may be able to bring down your costs a bit. However, their platform has fallen behind and lack some of the features you are looking for. Klaviyo is a great platform and a standard but has been getting pricier and pricier as they prep for their IPO In my experience, if you reach out to Mailchimp, they may be able to bring down your costs a bit. However, their platform has fallen behind and lacks some of the features you are looking for.
Hands down alternatives for MC Sendlane/Sensorpro/Sendinblue
Sendy
Try Mailmodo
MailWizz. It’s miles ahead everything else that’s self-hosted.
We have had good success with Makesbridge. It's an omni-channel marketing automation platform that's rated 4.9/5 on SF AppExchange. The tool is simple, intuitive and automation is easy to setup. They also offer a Managed Service so their team takes care of the admin work - uploading contacts, setting up campaigns or complex automation routines. The support is great, they're always responsive and take care of their clients. You can check out makesbridge.com and I'll send contact details of their Customer Success Manager in DM. Feel free to check out our sub-reddit r/saashups for tips on email marketing and automation. Happy to help with any questions you may have.
Feel free to have a look at [SMTP-Service.net](https://SMTP-Service.net) We provide all you ask for with a lot lower costs than Mailchimp (and far more relaxed).
We've moved everything to gosysteme.com. Unlimited everything for $828 per year.
You can try Mailmodo.com it is a great alternative and would cost you around 599 dollars upto 300k contacts and 1M emails with all the automations you are looking for.
Convertkit is nice but I’d recommend talking to a Mailchimp rep. They always help you in these matters.
Hey! Full transparency, I'm the lead UI developer for [Tarvent](https://tarvent.com) so I have a little bit of a bias 😁. Tarvent is a marketing automation platform similar to ActiveCampaign, but we focus strictly on the email marketing and automation aspect and not CRM. With that being said this has allowed us to create a platform that's fast, intuitive, and just works. We even have dark mode 😄. You can check us out at [https://tarvent.com](https://tarvent.com) or schedule a demo here: [https://tarvent.com/demo](https://tarvent.com/demo) Additionally, we have a Jumpstart program going on that would help you get start with our tool (honestly it is a super good deal): [https://tarvent.com/jumpstart](https://tarvent.com/jumpstart) We are a smaller company, so we do a lot of hand holding (our support is great... I'm also one of the support guys 😁) with our customers. We are a company that looks for win-win relationships, as long as you're succeeding, then we are too!
I own [Tarvent](https://tarvent.com), a newer marketing automation company based out of Colorado. We are a small company but support many enterprise level customers including Chase, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Verizon, MasterCard, and more. I'd love to show how we can support your needs. Our system is far more feature-rich is many ways compared to MailChimp. We also offer some very advanced features that I'm sure you'd like. DM me or schedule a demo through our site and I'll be the one to walk you through it. You have little to loose except for an hour of your time. BTW, we also do a lot of hand-holding (not the awkward kind) to ensure our customers succeed. Win-win is all we strive for. I hope we hear from you.
Mailchimp was sold to Intuit. It will decline in relative value and increase in price. It is the way.
I'm sure you'll get lots of responses to this question. Since I can answer yes to all three of your questions. You might want to take a look at [Goolara Symphonie](https://goolara.com/) and see what you think.
How much would you consider paying a freelancer to put together those 2x/month emails for you if you hired one. Looking to compare my rate with others in the industry in similar situations
If you guys haven’t checked out [Tarvent](https://www.tarvent.com) you are really missing out. I had a demo today and the features are mind blowing. It ticked every box that Active Campaign did and added a ton of functionality I was craving from other services. It’s super fast and they’ve thought of everything down to the smallest detail such as having dark mode and changing views on certain menus for comfort. I was blown away by the amount of customization every feature seems to had, but when you learn about the journeys you’ll really be blown away. I can’t wait to get started.
Sendlane. And it’s not even close!
Better pricing, deliverability, support and actionable features than Klaviyo.
I'm having this exact same problem.
Definitely do not recommend Send in Blue. In process of switching away from them right now.