Welcome to Episode 302 of Hit The Mic with the Stacey Harris.
Hello, hello, Episode 302, and today we are talking about email marketing. There are a ton of email marketing tools to choose from, everything from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign to Infusionsoft and Ontraport and Mad Mimi and Constant Contact and all sorts of options. It can be a little overwhelming, how do you choose a tool and how do you know when it's time to change tools. That's what we're going to talk about today.
Changing email marketing tools is something I have done a few times, more than I would like. If I had to do it all over again, I would have probably done it a tiny bit differently. That's the lessons I'm sharing with you today, so aren't we glad that I made those mistakes, right? Oh, they weren't really mistakes. They were just not the right tool for me long-term. Let's talk about what you need to consider when you are choosing an email marketing tool. Yes, budget's a factor, a small factor, but I want you to remember that cost alone should not make this decision. You also want to consider some other things. With that said, you need to get the best tool you can afford.
I do not encourage you, in fact I actively discourage you from day 1 thinking Infusionsoft is the best option. Infusionsoft is not a bad option but it's not the best option ever. There are a lot of businesses, mine included, that function perfectly well without a tool like Infusionsoft or Ontraport where you have this whole collection of tools because for example, for me, I would use probably 5% of Infusionsoft because my business model doesn't need the other 95%. It's just the way it is. However, I know a lot of people who use and love and are obsessed with Infusionsoft and what it can do for their business. Here's the thing is there's not one right tool for everybody, but factor in your budget and then factor in a few other things we're going to talk about.
The first thing besides budget and this is something that I really, really encourage you to look at is, what are your long-term goals? What do you want to be able to do with your email list? Meaning, do you want to have things like multiple lists and be able to send them different follow-up emails depending on which list they signed up to? By the way, the correct answer to that is "yes." Not all tools can do that. For example, Constant Contact only gives you 1 welcome email option, meaning when someone new signs up for your list, they get the same welcome email no matter what list they sign up for. That's a problem. If you want to have multiple welcome emails or multiple followup sequences, for example, depending on what you sign up for when you sign up for the VIP list which is my email list, you get a different follow-up sequence.
If you sign up for the social media challenge, I'm delivering you something that if you sign up for a webinar or the Facebook ads campaign, you get something different in each of those cases. It doesn't make sense for there to be 1 follow-up option. If you want to have things like that down the road, you need to consider that. Do you prefer lists or tags? If you don't know what that means, then this might be worth having this conversation with somebody who does, whether that's a email marketing expert or a business coach or an email marketing virtual assistant or an online business manager, whatever, whoever the person is in your life. Honestly, maybe it's about talking to your accountability buddies or your mastermind and figuring out what tools they're using