I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended.

Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most.

And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program.

The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons.

[0] https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

The article is “I tried every top email marketing tool” and starts with eliminating a majority of the field based on an arbitrary rubric of what the author specifically is looking for. Then fails to compare essentially anything about the tools to provide any semblance of a useful review for any other person to consume for their own research. I have to agree with the other poster that this really just seems to be a reasonable attempt to get affiliate link click throughs.

Great article. Thanks for writing it all up. A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.

With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability.

For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab.

1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly

2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address

Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent.

3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox.

4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly.

5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.

Good analysis. One correction though, EmailOctopus does offer auto-plan downgrades. Screenshot of the billing page on our account: https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP

After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan).

I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew.

But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company).

[1] https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctop...

In the "you had one job" category of things to look at from an email marketing tool:

What about email deliverability?

Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes.

The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly.

This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.

Interesting point about charging for unsubscribed contacts!

I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers.

I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!

This is very relevant to my industry (escape rooms). Our mailing lists quickly reach 10,000+ and unsubscribes happen often.

I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.

Can’t agree with MailerLite. I have 6,000 subscribers and literally all I want to do is send them an email maybe once a month, along with:

- An API to sign up to the list - A welcome email automation

That’s all. And I pay like $700 annually for that. When they sent me an email the other day of all of the features my plan has - none (not one!) applied to what I actually use it for! I don’t need ecom functions, a website builder, AI, none of that. I’m frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a product for me.

It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are:

  - Customer.io
  - Iterable
  - Braze
  - Marketo
  - Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Seems odd that 4 out-of-the 5 criteria are price related, and only 1 of 5 is related to how good the actual product is.

This post seems less about “trying every email marketing tool” to actually just being about “what’s the cheapest tool”.

Sad to not see a mention of tracking, i.e. the ability to disable open-tracking or click-tracking. Some services even have it disabled by default to respect subscribers’ privacy but sadly they weren’t included in the article. Some examples: Buttondown, Mailcoach, SendStack. No affiliation, I just researched them in the past (https://blog.daniemon.com/2022/11/15/privacy-first-newslette...)

I want to share my experience with D2C (direct to client) brand email marketing. Initially, I was creating HTML emails with react-email and sending them through Postmark's broadcast stream. The open rates were very good - 40-50%, and it had solid deliverability.

When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder.

This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps.

I spent 5 days building a custom solution with:

- Simple drag-and-drop email builder - Dynamic coupon generation with dynamic criterias - Template variables - SQL-based segmentation (<-- priceless!) - Automated flows (abandoned carts, welcome series, etc..) -SMS integration

I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too.

Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I came across Postmark[1] several years ago and thought to myself if I ever needed to send marketing emails — or transactional for that matter — I'd give them my business. They seem.. nice.

Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them?

[1] https://www.postmarkapp.com

I particularly thought this part was really fascinating, where they start complaining about a EMAIL SPAM SPECIALIST COMPANY which uses, surprise surprise, shady email marketing list sign-up tactics. It does what it says on the label, as the saying goes.

"5. Scammy Email Tactics Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""

I am not sure if this report is accurate and not biased. Brevo is so bad both in terms of quality of service and support.

trust me, I was working with Brevo for 4 years!

Affiliate marketing spam listicle, presented as something that it's not.

Just spam..

Great article, it must have been a lot of work (I've been on the very same road), so I'd do the same with some affiliate links.

I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.

There's one tool worth mentioning that was missing from the list: High Level.

It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP.

If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot.

https://gohighlevel.com/

For additional context, I've switched all my businesses and clients out of Mailchimp and Klaviyo to High Level.

This may be off topic but how hard is it to setup amazon simple email service and send out emails for close to 0$/mo by comparison?

Are these websites doing something other than a pretty UI for AWS SES for non technical folks?

A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing.

Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.

I love the idea of a breakdown like this, but so many of the author's deal-killers are not relevant for most startups (the audience here). This is more of a list of solo freelancers.

Adding our recent experience with Klaviyo. Klaviyo charges by "profile". When paired with Shopify, it automatically imports / pulls customer information 5o it's servers even when the customer specifically opted out of marketing.

First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us.

Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded.

They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.

Thank you for taking the time to review all these email marketing tools.

In my honest opinion, it really does not matter which one you use. Aside from the feature and price differences, I consider them to be small details.

What you want to focus on is providing valuable education in each email, and being consistent. An Educational Email Course is a great example of this.

If Brevo is one of the best, I am sceptical. I've had he displeasure of using it this year and the tools they offer are very iffy. But even ignoring that, the service is often down. I was often trying to edit a template, but it would not work because you keep getting a message like "something went wrong" and nothing gets displayed.

I didnt find any email marketing platform that made sense pricing wise for a B2C product with a free tier. They all get stupidly expensive even if most of your customers wont read the email and likely won't pay you anything. Same problem as the authentication space that charge per logged-in user.

I was expecting OP to trash Klaviyo, since I had a really bad experience with how expensive they get if you click the wrong button and choose to be charged based on your email list size, only to find out that the market is filled with bad examples like that.

Change the title to I checked out a few email marketing tools and here's the one that pays me the biggest and the longest affiliate commissions.

Sneaky, I almost trusted this til I reached the comments that this just another pretty looking affiliate spam

Thanks, it was an interesting read. It's a shame MailChimp became so scammy, they used to be okay. I guess they are trying to squeeze every penny out of their customers, disregarding any reputational damage.

Btw you look like Finnish actor Pekka Strang.

I’ve been with MailerLite for close to five years. I agree with his findings.

Bachman has relevant commentary on marketing and companies like MailChimp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8

I especially like the naming and shaming of the user unfriendly pricing tactics. This feels like the appropriate way of fighting dark patterns.

Surprised not to see Bento on the consideration list. Maybe not (yet) well known, but gives Customer.io a run for its money and pricing is great.

I thought that having your website/article on the frontpage of Hacker News was good news. I guess I was wrong.

What about https://sendy.co -- 1 million is about $100

You did not evaluate adobe marketo.

s/email marketing/spam/

Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.

Anyone know something self hosted + compatible with AWS ses?

Sentopia.net (https://www.sentopia.net) here, we do not charge per subscriber or contact, just deliveries, and can be as low as $0.0007 :)

I think you misspelled spam.