Hopefully you are convinced you of the necessity of using an email marketing platform for your health coaching business. But there are so many options out there and so many opinions on which you should be using that it can be difficult to choose. In this article I review the top email marketing platforms and give you some guidelines on how to choose.
Things To Consider
When looking for an email marketing platform the things to consider are:
Cost.
Most platforms charge by the number of subscribers you have, so you should consider costs now and in the future when choosing your platform. You might need to look at the extra benefits of the higher cost platforms and see if they will save you time and money. Or if the lower cost platform has everything you need.
Deliverability.
Lots of things can affect whether your subscribers actually get your emails. Your email platform is one of them.
What Tech Do You Need?
To start and grow your wellness business
Ease of use.
This is very subjective. I recommend trying out a few of the platforms and see which work best for your business. But you do want a platform that easy to use so you can set up your marketing system quickly and without errors.
Features.
On the other hand, you should choose a platform that will allow you to operate your business in the way you want. And allow you to grow without being limited by what you can do.
Integrations.
Does it integrate with other platforms? This is important if you are using other platforms like a course platform.
Customer support.
Something is likely to go wrong at some point, so you want help to be available.
Do you like using it?
This is even more subjective than ease of use. But you’ll hopefully be spending lots of time in your email marketing platfrom so make sure it’s a platform that you like to use.
Four Email Marketing Platforms to Consider
I’ll provide a brief summary of each platform followed by a comparison table.
MailerLite
MailerLite is a great option for health coaches. I provided an in depth review of it here. For the cost, MailerLite is the most feature rich platform that I’ve seen. It does lack a few advanced options and doesn’t integrate quite as well as some. It's also very intuitive to set up automations and email campaigns.
MailerLite has gone overboard with templates for landing pages, but I haven’t found a template I really like for wellness businesses. But its landing pages are more full featured than other platforms. I also don’t like the small edit window that's provided for setting up emails. They also don’t offer advanced automations or integration options. Another visual annoyance of MailerLite is how emails are shown in the automations. They take up a lot of room making it hard to visualize longer automations.
MailerLite is one of the few platforms to offer a feature rich free plan.
According to this article MailerLite is tops in email deliverability. However I have seen other articles which rate other platforms higher.
ConvertKit
I recently switched my email marketing to ConvertKit. As I'm updating this article I realized that my first impressions of ConvertKit were not good, but I've come to appreciate how it works and I'm now quite happy with it.
My initial experience with ConvertKit wasn't favourable. I had issues with the functionality when I first started, as it works differently than MailerLite and ActiveCampaign in several ways. ConvertKit does lack some organization features that other platforms have. I've had clients with many automations, tags and sequences simply outgrow ConvertKit because of it's lack of organization.
On the other hand ConvertKit is visually much more appealing for creating emails, and automations than MailerLite or ActiveCampaign. It has several nice features like being able to filter out people from promotions once they sign up, or the use of actions and sequences rather than creating automations for simple workflows.
ConvertKit does have a free option, but it doesn’t allow you to have automations. However ConvertKit is highly rated so it’s worth checking out.
Active Campaign
Active Campaign is easily the most powerful of the email platforms that I’ve listed. It does take a little getting used to, but Active Campaign will allow you to set up automations that do exactly what you want and easily keep track of all your contacts.
Active campaign includes a nice email and automation editor. Unfortunately many of their best features aren’t available in their Lite plan.
The downside of Active Campaign is the cost, especially as you increase subscribers. It starts off very affordable, but sharply increases as you increase the number of subscribers. So Active Campaign is not the platform to use if you have a list full of freebie seekers that never buy.
The complexity of ActiveCampaign can also be a downside. Unless you are using the complex features all the time, it is difficult to remember how to do things. Many people make mistakes setting things up that can lead to issues later on.
FloDesk
FloDesk offers beautiful templates, simple automations and it’s simplicity makes it easy to work with. It does lack many of the features of platforms like Active Campaign and it currently doesn’t offer many integrations so that makes it difficult to use with other platforms. You end up losing the simplicity of the FloDesk platform by adding the complication of adding a Zapier automation.
One thing that makes FloDesk standout is their flat fee. They only have one monthly charge, regardless of the number of subscribers you have. They don’t have a free plan, but they do have a 30 day trial that you can use to check them out.
Comparison table
Free plan | Cost for 1000 subscribers (monthly) | Best For | ||
MailerLite | yes | $10 | Free plan, affordability, ability to create landing pages | |
ConvertKit | yes (limited) | $29 | Visually appealing email creation and automation. Rules and filters help to simplify it's operation. | |
Active Campaign | trial | $29 * | Advanced automations and integrations | |
FloDesk | trial | $38** | Simplicity, visually appealing templates. |
*I think this is correct, but I’m Canadian so they only show me Canadian dollar pricing
** There seem to be many people offering a $19 price for FloDesk when you use their affiliate links. Definitely worth checking out.
Platforms I don’t mention
I know many health coaches choose MailChimp to start because of it’s free plan, but if you are looking for free, MailerLite offers many more features.
I’ve also heard good things about Aweber. They do offer a free plan with limited automation capability. I haven’t tried it myself so I didn’t include it in this article.
How should you choose?
The first thing to remember is that any choice you make is not permanent. If you choose MailerLite to start because of the cost, but decide to move to Active Campaign when your business is established, this is not as hard as it sounds. Most of these companies will help you to migrate and you can always hire a VA to complete the migration for you.
If you are just starting or you are looking to change providers, I recommend doing a free trial of some of these. Choose the one that meets your needs, your budget and that works the way your brain works.
If you need help deciding or help migrating book a free call to find out how I can help:
