Even with all the new communication tools that companies are leveraging, such as Slack or Discord, email continues to be the main mode of communication for businesses.I don’t where my company would be, without leveraging some of the advanced tools on the market today.
HubSpot initially got me hooked on read notifications, but their free plan limits you to 200 notifications per month, which just isn’t enough for my business. Their introductory plan starts at $50/month and I feel it has a lot of useless features that are used to justify the price. After deciding I need reliable and affordable read notifications, I spent an entire evening testing and using alternatives.
MixMax
MixMax won me over because they had all the features I wanted and a beautiful interface. Every time someone opens an email of mine, it records when they opened it, from which device and where they were.
My second favorite feature is the email scheduling. Although I’ve been up working since 3:30 am this morning, I used to be a night owl, which means I’d be responding to emails at night. The problem with emailing at night, is the rest of the world is usually sleeping. So if I was writing an email at 1am, I’d schedule it to send at 9:30 AM in the morning.
However, schedule sending is nothing unique to this list. What is unique is the fact that MixMax leverages data to build predictions of when you should target each recipient. In the following screenshot, MixMax concludes that I should send an email to my dad at 1:26 PM. This number changes, based on who you choose as the recepient.
Although this is my software of choice, it’s not perfect and I am always following the competitors for better options.
Some of the things I’d like to see in MixMax:
- Competitive pricing. I pay $29/month for MixMax. It’s a bit high for just a few features, but I’ve yet to find a competitor with dramatically reduced pricing to make it worth switching.
- Schedule follow-ups without a template. I’d like to pre-write a follow-up when writing the initial email and have it send in 3 days if the first email doesn’t get a response.
SalesHandy
SalesHandy is also one of the top email marketing solutions available on the market. For any of the good features like a multi-staged mail merge, you’re looking at $20/month.
Similarly to MixMax, SalesHandy also makes you use a template structure for follow-ups, which very well could have been enough to make me switch from MixMax.
I did give SalesHandy an opportunity to perform, but I couldn’t get my contacts imported, without a vague error message. However, I will likely revisit SalesHandy in the future and advise all of you to give it a fair chance.
ReplyUp
For those of you on a budget and looking for automated followups, look no further than ReplyUp. For just $12/month, you can deploy follow up sequences which schedule bulk, personalized emails and track their open rate.
Gmelius
Gmelius is currently playing catch-up but priced at just $15/month with a load of features, CEO Florian Bersier could be sitting on top of one of the most promising email solutions in 2018. In a day and age where multiple followups are everything, the founder reassured me that this and everything I’m looking for is coming in 2018. Out of all the solutions available, this is the platform to watch.
Thanks for your email. Sequences or multiple follow-ups are not part of our solution yet. This is on our road-map and will be released at the start of Q1 2018.
All the best,
Florian
CEO, Founder
Boomerang
Boomerang is the reigning champion. They are the PayPal of payment processing, which is a good and bad thing. They’re well known mainly due to their free version, but the benefits don’t justify spending $15/month given the amazing options on the market. However, if you’re sending from a Gmail address, you can get a handful of Boomerang features for just $5/month whereas the others on the list start at a much higher price.
GMass
I tried GMass a while back and ran into some issues. The software itself runs out of Gmail, whereas competitors like MixMax and SendHandy have their own thought-out user interface to manage campaigns, reports and statistics. The messy labelling system used to report message reads reminds me of a makeshift mail solution I made a few years back.
They have a strong marketing campaign to get the company in front of people like myself, but they really need to rethink the product.
If you’d like me to review your email marketing software, send me an email.
1 Comment
Nice list man. Going to have to try some of these out.