The Real Talk on Email Marketing Platforms: My Faves, My Flops, and What I Actually Recommend

It’s time for some real talk about email marketing platforms—because I’ve used a ton of them, and I have thoughts. In this episode, I’m spilling the tea on which ESPs (email service providers) I actually like, which ones are solid free options, and which ones I would 100% ghost if they were people.

I’m breaking down why Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is my ride or die, why MailerLite is a strong runner-up, and why MailChimp makes me want to scream. Plus: a few insights on ActiveCampaign, Drip, and what you really need to think about when choosing an ESP for your biz.

In this episode, I’m talking about:

• Why Kit continues to be my go-to, even after trying “bigger” platforms
• The free ESP I recommend to clients again and again
• When ActiveCampaign is worth the investment—and when it’s not
• Why MailChimp and Drip are on my personal “never again” list
• What to look for in an ESP that grows with your business (without making you rage quit)

Links & Mentions:

• Kit (ConvertKit)
• MailerLite
• ActiveCampaign

Need help choosing the right platform or making a switch?

Hit me up at patti@bizmagic.co—I’d love to help you figure out what works best for your biz (and yes, I can help with migrations too).

If this episode saved you from a MailChimp meltdown or helped you rethink your setup, share it with a fellow biz owner! And don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review—it really helps!

Learn more about BizMagic or the BizMagic Podcast.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the Biz Magic Podcast, your place for all things tech in your online business with solid. Of General Biz Chat two. My name is Patty Meyer and I am the CEO and founder of Biz Magic, where my team and I support entrepreneurs who are overwhelmed by the backend tech of their business.

We create, implement, and teach the tweaks that help our clients make a bigger impact with less stress. Today I am super excited to talk with you about something that I share a lot of information about on my social media. I have in blog posts, I talk with people in podcasts I'm interviewed on, and that is email marketing platforms because I have.

A lot of opinions. Now, if you don't know, email marketing platforms are also commonly known as ESPs or email service providers. So you might hear me refer to them as an ESP throughout the episode, or you might hear somebody else talk about that. So that is what that means. Now, I have used these suckers a lot over the years for myself and for my clients over.

Many, many, many years. So right Biz Magic has been in business for almost eight years and I was using email marketing platforms, um, before Biz Magic was even in business. So I have a lot of opinions about this, but I have a lot of experience under my belt that has led to these opinions. As such, if it's a tool that lets you send emails, build automations, and confuse the hell out of people with the word segment.

I've probably touched it. Some I love, some I tolerate, and some I'd rather delete from the internet entirely. I. If you followed me at all for any period of time, you know which one I'm talking about. So if you're ready, I wanna dive into this. So I wanna start on a high note, which is my very favorite ESP or email marketing platform, and that is Kit.

And you might know it by its former name, ConvertKit. I don't love their new name, but whatever we. I'll have to deal with rebranding sometimes. Kit is my ride or die when it comes to email marketing platforms. That's just the piece I've made with myself at this stage. I've left it before thinking that I needed something more robust, something better, um, but I came back to it within.

A year, uh, probably about a year. I was an active campaign and as soon as they jacked up their prices to a ridiculous amount, I was like, I'm done. Nope. I'm going home. And that home was kit. So here's what I really love about it. It's super clean. I find the interface to be. Really simple and user friendly, even though it has a lot that it can do.

I don't wanna scream or feel confused every time I log into it. And the forms are actually really nice. They're, you can make them fancy and all of that, but even their most basic forms that you embed in line into a website are super clean and they look really nice. That is not the case for all forms.

I'm talking to you, ActiveCampaign. So it is really a game changer to have a form that actually looks good on your website when you need to embed it. The list structure of kit makes sense. It basically is one big list, and then you organize your contacts with tags and segments, which is how my brain works really well.

So I really love that. Sometimes it can get really confusing when you have a lot of lists and you have a lot of tags. It can feel very overwhelming when you're managing your contacts and your emails and, and all of that. I also really love that they have solid, robust automations, but especially they have their rules.

Feature, which is essentially a mini automation sort of, and it's great for quick automations that don't require building a 47 step flow chart of doom, right? So if you just wanna say, when somebody fills out this form. Add them to this tag, boom, you're done. You can do it with a rule in two seconds. You don't have to create a new full automation for that.

And so I really love that because it's this nice quick hit thing. And the other thing is that I find it scales really well with your business as it grows without requiring you to have to rebuild the entire thing. When you hit a different level, of course it's not perfect. Nothing is perfect, and I'm not here to pretend everything is perfect.

With Kit, I find their automation builder to be a little bit clunky sometimes, and why can't I not just paste in a few email addresses to add people manually? Why must I create a CSV or. Do them all one person at a time. That is something that drives me mad. So there's some things in Kit that aren't perfect.

They're things that I don't really love. Also, their free plan used to be pretty much garbage. Like you can collect email addresses, but good luck doing anything with them. Kind of garbage. You couldn't have any automations or anything like that. But now they've changed their free plan, so they allow you to have a.

A basic single automation, which is fine for new businesses that don't have a lot happening just yet. So it could be a really great place to start, which I love that they've changed that. It's not amazing, but it is a little bit better. But if you're like, cool, I don't wanna pay right now, but I probably need a little more of then that one.

Simple automation. I wanna talk to you about some of my other, uh, runner up email platforms, one of which is mailer light, which is what I have as my go-to. For clients who want a really solid, free option that still lets you do more than just send a little welcome email. Their builder is typically pretty intuitive.

The automation setup is actually pretty decent, and while it's not fancy, it gets the job done, especially for solopreneurs who are just getting their systems in place. Next up is active campaign. Oh, active campaign. We have a complicated relationship. If you want bells and whistles, marching bands, and a detailed dossier of every subscriber, you can get that with Active Campaign.

Their CRM features are top notch, and I do love how detailed you can get with both the list. And the tags, their contact records are laid out really well too. It's super easy to see everything that I need and make any changes, and I really love that. Their forms, as I mentioned, they're ugly. Like it's painful.

CSS, if you know some basic CSS, you can use it to fix the forms a little bit. But it doesn't do a lot. And why should we have to? That's sort of how I feel there. Honestly, the platform also isn't super intuitive all the time. It can feel a little confusing and overwhelming because they have so much that you can do with it.

And the biggest issue for me at this point is the recent price hike that they did last year, late last year, and that's the thing that had me fly right back to Kit I. Was in ActiveCampaign because I really felt like I needed some deeper funnels and automations that I just couldn't get with ConvertKit.

But they nearly doubled their price, which they had just done before I had switched. So I had made the decision at the end of 2023. To move over to ActiveCampaign because there were things I wanted to do within my email marketing that I ended up not doing in my business. Um, but I wanted to do some of these things that I felt like.

Could be better handled within my list in active campaign. So just as I was about to make that switch, they hiked up the price significantly and I was like, well shit, alright, I really want this. I am super comfy in active campaign and I'm going for it. So I went ahead and made the switch. Took all the time to do all of that, right?

We, and if you've ever moved EMA platforms, you know it. It's not easy all the time and it takes a little effort, but it made this switch and then at the end of 2024, they did another major hike and I was like, fuck this, I'm done. So as did many others and a lot of people fled to back to kit. So that sort of my experience there, I just don't think it's worth it to.

To be there for what my needs are at this stage. So that's kind of my favorites though, despite their, their pricing. If there are things that you really need that are detailed, man, it really is a great platform and you can do a lot in it, which I, which I really, really love. Now, let's look at the platforms I don't particularly love first up, and this is the one you have all, if you followed me for any period of time, have heard me talk about, and that's MailChimp.

So many people start with MailChimp, and I get it. It's been around forever. It has cute monkey branding and it shows up in a lot of the searches when it comes to best free email marketing platform or ESP. But here's the thing. MailChimp and I are not friends because the interface is simply not that intuitive.

I've worked with it for years and I still have to Google things. I should be able to figure out myself and I'm a tech nerd. Their free plan, it's fine. But when you actually want to do things, their pricing gets pretty aggressive in that. I recently migrated somebody from MailChimp to Active Campaign. An active campaign was cheaper.

That says a lot. And they were getting way, way more features in Active Campaign than they were getting in MailChimp. Like I was blown away when I saw the price that they were paying for MailChimp. So for me, that's nonsense. The real deal breaker though, for all of this for me, is that it doesn't scale well.

Once you need more than the basics, good luck organizing your contacts, tracking what people are interested in, or setting up advanced automations without pulling your hair out. It's really frustrating and it's really hard. They make it so that you have to have multiple lists. The lists don't always communicate well with each other.

Their form systems are real funky and they don't make it easy. It, it's just kind of a, a mess. So that's why mailer light wins for me when it comes to free. Every single time, I will tell everyone to run for MailChimp, if at all humanly possible. So then there's Drip. Drip is my other one that only recently kind of made my shit list.

Last year I moved a client of mine to drip from Active campaign last year. And on paper it sounded really great. It had. She was moving her business to a way more simpler model, so she didn't need all the fancy bells and whistles anymore that ActiveCampaign had and that we had used in her business with her for years.

And so we had done research and everything about Drip sounded really great and the price point was excellent. So we were like, cool, let's do this. But then we hit the analytics wall, and when I say wall, I mean ran into it at full speed to figure out who clicked a link in an email. You had to run a report, then download the report, and then open it before you could see the data.

In 2024, it was. Absolutely absurd. Other platforms let you click the damn link in your dashboard and see the clicks, right? Like, why is that hard? But it blew my mind and, and I mean, we contacted the help desk because they kept looking at it and I'm thinking, how was this possible? How was it possible that you cannot actually see your data right here in the dashboard or in an email?

It, it was crazy. And sure enough that was the case. They, their reports are garbage. So for me that just, yeah, we left pretty quickly. Like she didn't even last a year in Drip and it sucked because we spent money, you know, she's paid me to migrate her, spent money to do all of that, and then we had to migrate her again, uh, to Kit so that she could get what she actually needed.

So where does all of this leave us? Here's my kind of wrap up. Of all of my thoughts about email marketing platforms, which clearly, as I've said and you've now seen, I have a lot of opinions. I think if you're just starting out and you have a tight budget, you're looking for something free, then start with mailer light.

It's free, it's clean. It lets you build really decent basic funnels and it won't make you wanna pull your hair out if you're ready to invest in something that you can grow with, I would say Kit all the way. I come back to it every single time, and unless you have a serious CRM need or run a mega complex funnel heavy business, it's probably all you'll need.

And again, if you're a nerd for deep data, you wanna go all in on. Funnels and automations active campaign could totally be worth it. Just make sure you've got some time and budget to wrangle it. But I do love ActiveCampaign. I think you can do a lot with it. Again, I hate those forms, but that aside, I was, I was willing to overlook the forms when I moved there, so, and I wanna be clear.

As I always say, these are my opinions. These are the experiences I've had in my business and in other people's businesses, experiences that they've had. You may love MailChimp. You may love Drip. That is a okay. You do. You and I have zero judgment. I just don't typically. Refer people to those platforms for the reasons I've explained, but for you, they may not be something that proved to be a problem and you might enjoy them.

And so that is great. So that's it for today for my ESP throw down, if you will, if you. Found this episode helpful. Please share it if you have any questions. If you're interested in me helping you figure out the best email platform for you, um, I won't probably recommend MailChimp or Drip, but I may recommend something that I didn't even mention here today because there's so many more out there.

And, um. I would love to help you and I would love to help you migrate if you already know what email marketing platform you wanna move to. I'm here for that too, so feel free to hit me up Patty at Biz Magic Co. And of course I would love to hear what your favorite email marketing platform is, what your least favorite is.

And I would love to hear also what your thoughts and opinions are. If you really don't like Kit very much, or Mailer light, and you are MailChimp all the way, feel free to message me. Tell me all about it. I love hearing this stuff. I love talking about this stuff clearly. So, um, I'm here for it. And, uh, until next time, I'll talk to you soon.

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Biz Magic Podcast. Like most small businesses and podcasts, we rely heavily on word of mouth. So if you like what you heard today or in any episode, please share with your friends and colleagues. And rate, subscribe and comment on your favorite podcast platform.

Till next time, cheers to your magical biz success.