Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And as much as I like MailerLite, here are five reasons you might not want to use MailerLite,
as your email autoresponder.
Timestamps below, along with another video that takes a deep dive, comparing MailerLite
to other free solutions like MailChimp and ConvertKit.
So let's go ahead and jump right in here.
The very first thing, that irks us a little bit about MailerLite, is the load time.
So the screen capture you're looking at right now, has not been sped up or slowed down in
any way, shape or form.
This is how long it would take, when you are logging in to go and create a landing page.
And specifically the landing page elements itself, when it's loading up, seems to take
a tremendous amount of time.
And so this is just something, if you tend to be an impatient person or you have a slow
internet connection, this is really going to drive you nuts.
Now we have tested this across multiple different Airbnbs and my business partner, Jesse, who
I'll be referencing a lot, because he helped me with this video also uses his Xfinity fiber,
whatever speedy connection in the US and it still takes a really long time to load.
So, we're very confident that it's the software itself, and not necessarily our individual
internet connections.
Because we've tried it so many different places.
Now, another thing when it comes to load lag, is there are little elements inside of MailerLite
when you're clicking around, that seemed to just be not really designed for the user.
So as an example, when you are going through an email automation, you click on an email
and then you click preview.
They give you a great preview and you can go ahead and click some of the links to make
sure the links are working.
Stick around to the end for a little bonus tip to make sure that your links actually
work correctly.
And then when you go back to the automation, you can't click to edit the email for some
strange reason, even though no changes have been made.
And so what you wind up having to do, is click out of that or click save for no good reason.
And then go ahead and click back in and then click edit.
And then you can edit the email.
Now this might sound like I'm being overly nitpicky, and if it does, okay, awesome.
You go ahead and click three or four extra times.
However, when you're trying to edit a 20 to 30 email autoresponder, that gets really annoying
really, really quick.
All those extra clicks start to add up, especially when you just want to make one little tweak
and sometimes you'll have to scroll all the way back down, find the email that you were
trying to edit.
So the next problem on our list, comes to the automations.
Now there's good news and bad news here.
The good news is, if you're looking for a free autoresponder that allows you to run
automations, MailerLite is one of two that actually allows you to do that.
I think they have the best one in their free plan.
AWeber has recently introduced something that allows you to do similar things, but when
you compare it to MailChimp and ConvertKit, MailerLite really takes the trophy here.
However, once you start doing any thing, that's a little more advanced and a little less linear,
you're going to start running into some automation problems.
So let's go through what you can do and then what you can't do.
So what you can do, which will work for probably 90% of the people using the software, is you
can have a sequence automatically go out, when someone enters their name and email on
one of the landing pages, that you can create inside of MailerLite.
By the way, these landing pages are all created inside of MailerLite.
And I really, really like the way that they look, once I'm done dealing with the low time
to build them.
And so what you can do, is you can send out your email sequence and then you can automatically
drop them into your broadcast list, something some of the others don't allow you to do with
their free plan.
As well, you can actually drop them into a customer list and then automatically remove
them from your sales sequence.
So when someone buys, they're no longer seeing the sales sequence, or you make sure that
your broadcast don't go out to people who are currently in your sales sequence.
So that kind of basic automation works excellent, perfectly.
As soon as you want to get into behavioral automations however, that's where things start
to get tricky.
And by a behavioral I mean, let's say you're doing a automated webinar sequence, right?
So you want to start sending out emails based upon people, actions people have taken inside
of your funnel, where this is where MailerLite starts to fall apart and actually has restrictions,
that don't allow you to work around.
So what I mean by this, is let's say we're creating a sequence and we want to only send
email number two, if someone's clicked on email number one or opened email number one.
Well, based upon the automations, we actually have to make two different automations to
do that check.
And then if we want to do the same thing with email number two, we have to make another
automation.
Now on this screenshot, you can see that we actually wound up making five, I think is
five or eight separate automations, for one funnel.
Checking if someone had already seen an email or already taken an action on our sales page
or our checkout.
Our cart sequence, making sure that we're sending emails based upon actions people have
taken, inside of our funnel.
Now, the problem that we ran into though, is we can only do this three times.
And so I know I'm not doing a good job of explaining it.
This is something that my business partner dealt with and worked with their support and
they were very helpful.
But at the end of the day, they don't have a system that's set up for behavior-based
email marketing.
So if that's something that's really important to you, I wouldn't recommend going with MailerLite.
Another thing that I personally found a little annoying, is that when you're creating tags
or groups, based upon an email click, you have to go create a separate automation.
So this screenshot, you can see when I sent out three emails, to segment people into one
of our sales sequences, I had to create three separate automations just for each one of
those links.
And when you compare that to the usability that ConvertKit gives you, where with ConvertKit
and some other email service providers, you just say, “Hey, if someone clicks this link,
give them this tag”, right?
And then that's it.
You don't have to go someplace else to make the link.
And then come back to your email.
It's a little bit cumbersome, but again, 80% to 90% of the people, who are using MailerLite,
aren't gonna have a problem when they have linear style automations, because they do
a great job with that.
It's just the behavior stuff that starts to drive you a little nuts.
Now, number three is going to be, deal with testing your automations and some headaches
here.
For some strange reason, you can't manually, instantly remove your email from a automation
or a group or your email list.
It takes up to 24 hours.
So if you are using an email and you're going through an automation yourself, as if you
were a person and you realize, “Oh, you know what, that didn't go out, right” Or
“I need to fix that.”
You can't immediately remove yourself.
You have to wait 24 hours or create a completely new email and a completely new user.
Now, no email service provider I've ever used, had a perfect solution for testing.
They all stink in some way, frankly, but when it comes to the speed of testing, that was
really, really slowed us down.
And Jessie got really, really frustrated because as you see, we have seven sequences.
So either he had to delete his email and wait 24 hours to test one of the sequences or he'd
have to duplicate the entire sequence.
And then test that with the same email address.
Now sometimes, you can get away with using a temporary email.
You can just go to Google and type in temporary email and see if one of them works.
And isn't automatically blocked by MailerLite’s spam filters, which 9.999 out of 10 times
is a good thing, because you don't want people doing that to yourself.
So obviously, MailerLite doesn't want you doing that, but if you can find one that works
for your testing, that might be a workaround.
So number four, is going to be data caps deals with the ability to compare how different
segments or groups are performing against each other.
I think MailerLite does a good job when it comes to just basic reporting and giving you
a nice overviews, but if you really want to dive in and you're comparing automation, number
one versus two, or segment three versus four, you're going to find that you're clicking
and creating a lot of different reports.
And you're probably just better off manually creating something in Excel, if you want to
take it that deep of a dive.
However, they do allow you to go through and see groups and segments and see some basic
data.
But you're not going to get anything super robust, where you're really starting to fine
tune or tweak your automations or how you're doing your segmentations.
And reason number five MailerLite might not be for you, comes to affiliates rejected.
Now let's quickly go over the confusion here.
So we're going to go directly to MailerLite's terms of service.
I'm gonna type in affiliate links and jump straight down to their definition.
So there's a difference between being an affiliate and doing affiliate marketing.
So they do not want people whose primary business is selling other people's products or services,
because quite frankly, most affiliates don't give 2 cents about their email list and they
don't care about deliverability.
They're in a churn and burn business.
And so MailerLite doesn't want that.
MailerLite once real entrepreneurs and real business owners.
So if you are an entrepreneur or business owner or influencer, and you occasionally
recommend things on Amazon or another brand, or you do some joint promotions, or you have
a course that you want, you know, promote that's okay, because you are putting your
face in front of those emails.
And you're not like an affiliate marketer, who's trying to hide behind some persona and
send a bunch of spam.
So when it comes to affiliate marketing, your primary business is affiliate marketin, MailerLite
is not for you.
If your primary business is selling your own products or services, or you do some occasional
affiliate promotions, with your name and face front and center on your brand, then MailerLite
is okay with that.
But they're not interested in doing business with people who are literally just affiliate
marketers.
So keep that in mind, as you go through, you're also gonna find that they have quite an application
process and that's because they're trying to keep out as many of those spammers as possible.
So you do need to make sure, that you have some sort of online presence and website before
you apply, because they just need to make sure that you're a real person and not one
of those thousands of spammers, who are just trying to quickly make a buck.
So thank you so much for watching.
I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video, if you did go and hit that like
button, comment below with your MailerLite questions, because despite all of these drawbacks,
I still use and recommend it to our subscribers and clients.
So now quick bonus round, there's something that you definitely need to know about when
it comes to creating your links in your emails.
And I didn't include this in the first five, because technically it's a user error and
just me being lazy, but you need to be aware of it.
So when you're creating your emails, you might be have your email in a word doc or an Evernote
file or Google sheet, Google docs, or wherever it is.
And sometimes you might just copy and paste it over, right?
And you'll go to edit your link and you'll see that the link is working.
So you think, okay, great.
It's good to go.
Well, actually not the case.
When you create links inside of your emails.
And then I actually did this, I went and previewed.
I started to see that a bunch of the links weren't working.
In fact, it turns out I've been sending months worth of emails, with a bunch of broken links.
Thankfully, someone finally emailed me and said, “Hey, why do all these links not work?”
I went, “Ooh, no”, Right?
So what you need to do is when you're editing your emails, is make sure that you set every
single link to open in a new window.
Now, I know that sounds rudimentary like, “Duh, Jason”, however, with my experience
with other email service providers like ConvertKit and MailChimp and even Constant Contact, when
I pasted links in there and I made sure the URL was right, I never had to check that box,
for the link to open a new tab for the link to actually work.
So hopefully that makes sense.
Just make sure when you are creating our emails, you always tell MailerLite to open it in a
new tab, because even if the link is full there, front and center and everything looks
good, if you don't check that little box, your link might not work.
It was very inconsistent, which links worked and which links didn’t.
So quick little tip, if you decide to go with MailerLite.
So again, thank you for watching, hit that like button, subscribe for more marketing
reviews, just like this one.
And until the next, keep building the business you love.