All I want to do is send an email, am I asking too much?
I’ve got a bit of a bug bear, a Bette Noire, something that is really p*ss*ng me off. All I want to do is send my past/current clients an email.
I’m looking at you Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, et all, we are all too lardy dah to be an email service anymore, we all want to be a marketing platforms.
Here’s What I Need From My Email Service Provider
I’m a simple man, I have the following needs from my email people:
- I want to send broadcasts when I write new blog posts and I have an offer to make.
- I want to reach out to my past clients every 90 days using automation.
- I want to segment my list with tags so I can email appropriate people.
- I want to send out an email sequence to clients whom I’ve just completed a project with. I want to check in after a few days, ask for a testimonial, ask for a referral and upsell my maintenance plan.
That’s it, but I’m struggling to find a service provider that give me this, they all want to be more more more.
What I’m offered
The majority of email service providers out there are suffering from a need to play a bigger game, they cannot be “just email” they all have FOMO.
They want to offer me:
Websites – you can build a simple website to do your thing on these platforms now.
Landing pages – okay I get that a simple squeeze page to collect addresses is a good thing. but nothing I can’t do on my website
Popups – get in peoples face on each turn on your website to grab that email.
Social Media ads – create lookalike audiences from your email list to advertise on Facebook
Ecommerce – link your e-commerce platform to your email service provider for cart abandonment, product recommendations it’s good but I do services I don’t need this.
Complex automation – multi step tag and jump automations, link clicking page visiting spying on your customers.
Web Personalisation – change the content of your website depending upon a customers journey through your email list
CRM – they all claim to act as a contact management platform but none do it very well.
This is just a few of the offerings, all things I really don’t need.
I Can’t Opt Out, I have To Pay For The Bloat
The trouble is I need a fraction of these features but I’m paying for a marketing platform I don’t need.
If I could add these features to my plan in an add-on fashion that would be great but I’m paying for the support and development of huge platforms that I simply don’t need.
Keeping Up With The eJonses
The trouble is, once Johnny Mailchimp has the ability to create a look-a-like audience for Facebook advertising Jenny Constant Contact and Faye Active Campaign need to follow like sheep and add in Facebook advertising to their portfolio.
I get a feeling these services are all looking at each other. They have this massive sense of FOMO and instead of providing an excellent streamlined product for their customers they are in an arms race with one another.
Let Me Take You Back to the 90s
I’m showing my age, but I was an IT technicians working for a large accounting firm. I was looking after the PCs of a bunch of accountants. They loved their spreadsheet software those bean counters did.
Lotus 1-2-3 and later excel was installed onto a PC from a stack of 3 1/2 inch floppy disks.
Those software companies also played the game of keeping up with the eJonses and I remember those stacks of floppy disks growing year on year and installation time taking longer and longer, we don’t need to return to those days of software bloat.
I attach and image of a 3./5 inch floppy disk for the young-uns reading this.
Be Less Mailchimp and More Basecamp
Basecamp the project management people (and recently an excellent attempt at email at hey.com) have a product development philosophy to not add every feature a user asks for.
They are not bound to any huge clients forcing them to add bloat.
They create software that does just enough to get the job done, nothing more nothing less. Our SaaS providers should take a look a them and fix the problem they set out to solve and not more.
Basecamp’s book Rework is a great read on this topic.
Enter Creativemail
I’m trialling an alternative to those big email providers called Creativemail.
They provide a plugin for WordPress which give you cut down version of the constant contact on your WordPress site.
I came across this when I was building a development site and Bluehost did their annoying trick of auto-installing plugins. I’m not usuauly a fan of this tactice but I was grabbed as soon as I saw this plugin.
It styles itself as email for WordPress and WooCommerce.
It’s a fraction of the price of my old email provider $29 as opposed to $79 for a list the size of mine. There is a free plan to test is out.
It is really minimal and allows you to send broadcast emails, have automations (including time based). It allows you to setup an RSS feed automation. It seems to meet my minimal email needs.
Email collection is via the common WordPress contact forms Gravity forms, Contact Form 7 Ninja Forms etc. There doesn’t seem to be an HTML form you can paste into your site.
It’s too minimal at the moment, there are no tags, but I can move a user to a new list and do tagging style automations in that way I think tags will come.
There are no custom fields so I’m storing my clients websites URLs in a physical address field, and I’m storing my 90 day reach out trigger date in a birthday field
I’ve not looked into the WooCommerce integration in depth, but you can use Creativemail to send you standard store emails and do some automation and cart abandonment work.
If like me you are looking for a more simple this is worth a look. That’s not a recommendation at this point I’m just trialling things at the moment, If I decide to use this full time I’ll create a video tour.
Wrap Up- All I Want To Do I Send An Email
Post cards! Post cards, why in all things digital would I want to send someone a post card from my email service provider? I would love to have been able to sit in on that brain storming meeting.
“I tell you what none of our competitors are doing ” said Freddy Marketing.
“What’s that Fred?” Replied Lisa CEO.
“Do what we do now, but send it out via snail mail and make it really expensive!”
SILENCE FOR A FEW SECONDS OF CONTEMPLATION
The room erupts and Freddy Marketing is carried out of the meeting room on the shoulders of his colleagues.
AND BREATHE.
Can you suggest a more streamlined service provider answer in the comments please.