I have an idea to provide a service around such tools. I use MailChimp. Could you let me know what you use? Just a brief mention of the provider’s name would be very helpful. I’m trying to get a feel for which provider is the most commonly used.
Many thanks!
Mailchimp but looking at Drip and ConvertKit
We use Drip at DNSimple.
I use ActiveCampaign.com. I love it. Easy to use, decent support (although spotty - some CSRs are less knowledgeable than they think).
CRITICAL FEATURE : I can preopopulate Forms. So that lets a user UPDATE their info, it also lets me send them a form prepopulated with their email address so that the form (survey) goes into their record.
This is GREAT for gradually getting more info about your subscribers. (This is a variation of Escalating Commitment)
I’ve tried a lot…
I’ve used CampaignMonitor. Looked closely @ Mailchimp (weak on email automation. was never designed for that), and Drip (a little bit pricey for me (although comparable to the higher featured plan @ ActiveCampaign (I don’t need those features) but it seems GREAT).
Looked very closely @ https://www.agilecrm.com/ but it’s not usa based and support didn’t seem particularly good. (Turns out you want REALLY good support if you’re doing email automation).
Also looked at a number of others (GetResponse)
Hmmm… I think there might be better, easier ways to figure out which tools are more common. Maybe look at which ones integrate with other tools (like Zapier, etc.) and Google Searches on the company.
Asking here is going to get you Sampling Bias as well as a very very small sample size for a LOT of work.
Thank you for your replies. The reason I’m asking here (in addition to research on Google) is that as I said I have a tool in the pipeline and the difference here is that I might be able to get in touch with “first users”.
Here’s what the tool does: It automatically enriches your existing email lists with the first names of your subscribers. It’s meant for businesses who don’t collect their users’ names but would still like to personalize their mailings (eg. “Dear Clay” instead of the generic “Hi there”). The advantage are better open rates. The prototype supports MailChimp and will be finished today. If someone wants like to give it a try for free, just DM me.
I had an idea for another feature of such a tool:
Confirm this is a real name or at least pronounceable.
Something to check to see if NAMES seem valid. Just had a contact today give a name as “gevfcvx”. Obviously fake.
And it’s FAR worse to write:
Dear gevfcvx
Than nothing.
Even if I just had a way to see “is this name pronounceable” and if it’s not, I email them asking “hey, it seems like gevfcvx isn’t a real name. I can’t even pronounce that”.
I might switch them from thinking “this is probably an inhuman automation” to "wow, they actually read these names.
I too am using ActiveCampaign.
That said, I love Drip and have their free plan, but I was concerned with not much coming in right now, was the sudden shift from $0 to $50 when I hit 101 contacts. I’m currently spending $9 on ActiveCampaign, and I haven’t needed a lot of the features. If we gain legs, I suspect I will migrate to Drip but for now, I need to keep my cashflow real low.
Great answers so far. I’m going outside the box here. I’ve seen more and more people using facebook messenger instead of email. Higher open rates and much easier to integrate into a funnel with facebook ads.
I’ve been using it for a few projects and have seen great results.
Interesting! I guess that’s more for b2c though (?)
Facebook is super underrated in the B2B realm. Some of my best campaigns have been B2B. It just requires more nuance and hands-on tweaking instead of massive a/b testing.
Not all industries work on FB, but if they do, messenger can be great. I guess one hold-up could be if you need to share email lists with another company. That can be tricky, but it’s still possible.
I’ve even seen people build landing pages that drove to messenger instead of a form fill. Super smooth experience.
Can you give me an example of Facebook messenger campaign?
Are use messenger myself but I don’t understand the concept of using it to send messages to customers.
Sure thing!
First, you create traffic ads on facebook, but the CTA button opens up a facebook messenger window. You can have pre-set responses they can choose from, so initiating the conversation literally takes a click of a button on their end.
You can then create a follow up campaign where instead of typical news feed ads, you create messages to be sent out via messenger. You can only send these to people who have sent you a message in the past (hence the first campaign driving to messenger).
There are cases where these campaigns have higher open rates than email, not to mention the access to mobile customers.
You can even plug in your own code to create more sophisticated sequences within messenger.
We use Drip at Quaderno. 100% recommended.
I’ve been using Drip since it came out and highly recommend it.