I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended.
Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most.
And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program.
The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons.
Op here. I sort of agree but all these tools offer affiliate programs and I can assure you we chose MailerLite because we think it’s a tool we can use for 5-10 years.
That being said: besides running a startup (Atlist.com) I also run an affiliate site (it’s how we funded Atlist) and I would agree there is good reason to read affiliate websites skeptically. I regularly receive offers from website builders to “buy” the top spot in my best website builder roundup. https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/best-website-builder
The article is “I tried every top email marketing tool” and starts with eliminating a majority of the field based on an arbitrary rubric of what the author specifically is looking for. Then fails to compare essentially anything about the tools to provide any semblance of a useful review for any other person to consume for their own research. I have to agree with the other poster that this really just seems to be a reasonable attempt to get affiliate link click throughs.
Deliverability, price, pricing model, api/automation, UI, email builders, support, etc.
The article is just “why we chose breva” and is very specific to you. As far as I can tell you didnt even use half of the offerings since they were ruled out purely due to pricing models.
EDIT: just an example. If I wanted to know about sendgrid and how it compares, the only information this page gives me is “it has an overage charge”. How am I supposed to consume this article as an informative comparison?
This is not a universal comparison. This is the story about how I tried 25 email marketing tools. I’m sharing my subjective experience. You might be looking for something that my article doesn’t claim to offer.
Great article. Thanks for writing it all up. A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.
With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability.
For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab.
1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly
2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address
Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent.
3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox.
4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly.
5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.
It's not an issue of being too hard to understand.
The moment I say "double opt in", marketing will decide I lack the skills to be involved in mail and deliverability will be placed in the hands of someone with a graphics design background that has never heard of dns.
I've seen it in every single place I've tried to help marketing campaigns for over 20 years.
> A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.
Interesting point about charging for unsubscribed contacts!
I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers.
I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!
Good analysis. One correction though, EmailOctopus does offer auto-plan downgrades. Screenshot of the billing page on our account: https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP
After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan).
I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew.
But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company).
CEO of EmailOctopus here. I was just about to offer this clarification, so thanks for commenting! Confirming that we offer auto-plan downgrades (and if you prefer it to not be automatic, as a lot of people do, you can manually increase/decrease your tier at any time).
It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are:
I don't have a horse in this race, but I came across Postmark[1] several years ago and thought to myself if I ever needed to send marketing emails — or transactional for that matter — I'd give them my business. They seem.. nice.
Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them?
Postmark is owned by Active Campaign, which was included in OPs list, though I'm not sure how the Postmark product differs from the original Active Campaign product.
I've been using Postmark for hobby projects for the past three years, and I've been happy with them, but my needs are super minimal - just sending out <100 emails per month programmatically where latency doesn't matter.
There's one tool worth mentioning that was missing from the list: High Level.
It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP.
If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot.
A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing.
Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.
Adding our recent experience with Klaviyo.
Klaviyo charges by "profile". When paired with Shopify, it automatically imports / pulls customer information 5o it's servers even when the customer specifically opted out of marketing.
First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us.
Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded.
They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.
That explains why that box hasn't worked when I've used Shopify stores before. I couldn't be bothered to take them to task individually, but I figured they were using some kind of crappy "legitimate interest" basis.
This is very relevant to my industry (escape rooms). Our mailing lists quickly reach 10,000+ and unsubscribes happen often.
I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.
Presumably it would also have lost your record of the fact that they'd already asked to not get your email. So you'd have added them back to the spam list if they ever dealt with you again, so they'd have to unsubscribe again.
Spam has gotten so normalized that not only are people not even pretending to get opt-ins, but they don't see why they should have to pay any real attention to opt-outs.
Yes, you are a spammer, and so are most of the businesses on the Internet at this point.
In the "you had one job" category of things to look at from an email marketing tool:
What about email deliverability?
Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes.
The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly.
This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.
Or unless your emails matter to your customers, with you seeing them as individual names instead of spray and pray marketing.
Deliverability is the single most important thing to reach individuals in the first place, even more critical to maintain the transactional or workflow email relationship.
Anthropic right now has an issue where their "passwordless" emails go to junk for M365 customers (85% of SMBs in U.S.), people literally can't use the service since the email isn't delivered to the inbox.
To your point, in a past gig helping thousands of businesses with turning contacts into not just buyers but fans, I discovered mass marketers don't really care about deliverability at the level of "every single communication must land with every person".
At the same time, I learned customers you want to build a relationship with very much do care. Ever since, when evaluating these, I start there, even before price. How many communications, transactions, or workflows with a future buyer with intent are you willing to fail to connect?
"You had one job" means the primary, not only, dimension. Yes, the primary job of a mailer is for the mail to get there.
That's just one current example of when email delivery matters, likely to resonate with HN as being senders and receivers they recognize struggling with this. Not just a Microsoft thing, we can talk about a dozen where Gmail files things wrongly as well, and where the common element is the mailer.
These mailers all have different levels of trust and deliverability stats. It's critical to know.
I don't think you're getting what I'm saying here. If an email provider is throwing away wanted messages from legitimate senders because of some "trust" metric, then it is that email provider's reponsibility, not the sender's, to make damned sure that doesn't cause the loss of desired email.
You are of course correct that neither GMail nor Microsoft 365 or Hotmail or whatever they call it this week is suitable for any serious use.
You don’t have deny the responsibility of the relevant authorities to properly maintain hiking trails, in order to place responsibility on a hiking guide to safely get you along poorly maintained trails.
> That ("Anthropic's" deliverability issue) is a Microsoft issue.
Emphasizing this. Validation emails sent to Microsoft hosted email are at high risk of never arriving.
For at least 2 years I've seen this on MS's free, paid and enterprise/hosted services. The issue is per validator; mails all arrive or none ever will. Generally I'll try again months later and find that service is still blocked.
Anthropic has a lot of issues. I tried paying them and my card is rejected without explanation.
I tried different cards, addresses, even a VPN. Nothing works. After googling a bit I found on Reddit that this is very common. I don't thinks their investors are happy with them not accepting customers.
Your main headline claims you tried every email marketing tool. (“Top” is only in the HN title, and even then I don’t know if Adobe Marketo doesn’t qualify as “top”.)
Every “top” marketing tool.
Obviously it’s not possible to try all tools, there are probably thousands.
“Top” is a subjective category so OP just evaluated most relevant tools probably.
I love the idea of a breakdown like this, but so many of the author's deal-killers are not relevant for most startups (the audience here). This is more of a list of solo freelancers.
I particularly thought this part was really fascinating, where they start complaining about a EMAIL SPAM SPECIALIST COMPANY which uses, surprise surprise, shady email marketing list sign-up tactics. It does what it says on the label, as the saying goes.
"5. Scammy Email Tactics
Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""
If Brevo is one of the best, I am sceptical. I've had he displeasure of using it this year and the tools they offer are very iffy. But even ignoring that, the service is often down. I was often trying to edit a template, but it would not work because you keep getting a message like "something went wrong" and nothing gets displayed.
You can build kind of blocks that you use, but for anything more complex you're pretty much forced to use a kind of free HTML field, which of course is just a text field where you either suffer by editing html and their templating system in a browser text field (the templating is something Django compatible) or you copy and paste from your text editor which is also a form of torture. I've edited the wrong template on occasion, and saved it. Even if you just stick to their wysiwyg you still have to sometimes add conditional blocks and this also is for me anyway difficult. They have developer mode too, which is your email as a giant yaml.
So they support a bunch of things, but personally I would not use it for anything except simple marketing campaigns. We do use it for that, but someone had the idea of having all customer emails go through it, and I don't really like it.
Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.
I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended.
Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most.
And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program.
The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons.
[0] https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
Op here. I sort of agree but all these tools offer affiliate programs and I can assure you we chose MailerLite because we think it’s a tool we can use for 5-10 years.
That being said: besides running a startup (Atlist.com) I also run an affiliate site (it’s how we funded Atlist) and I would agree there is good reason to read affiliate websites skeptically. I regularly receive offers from website builders to “buy” the top spot in my best website builder roundup. https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/best-website-builder
The article is “I tried every top email marketing tool” and starts with eliminating a majority of the field based on an arbitrary rubric of what the author specifically is looking for. Then fails to compare essentially anything about the tools to provide any semblance of a useful review for any other person to consume for their own research. I have to agree with the other poster that this really just seems to be a reasonable attempt to get affiliate link click throughs.
OP here.
What would you compare the tools on? Be specific
Deliverability, price, pricing model, api/automation, UI, email builders, support, etc.
The article is just “why we chose breva” and is very specific to you. As far as I can tell you didnt even use half of the offerings since they were ruled out purely due to pricing models.
EDIT: just an example. If I wanted to know about sendgrid and how it compares, the only information this page gives me is “it has an overage charge”. How am I supposed to consume this article as an informative comparison?
This is not a universal comparison. This is the story about how I tried 25 email marketing tools. I’m sharing my subjective experience. You might be looking for something that my article doesn’t claim to offer.
… We didn’t choose Brevo.
You didn’t even read the article!
Sorry, mailerlite. I definitely read it and just swapped your 2nd pick.
I think the issue here is with the word "tried" and what that communicates. I think "compared" would be far more appropriate.
That’s fair! I actually “tried” more than the “elite 6” but I eliminated many of those tools for different reasons
Great article. Thanks for writing it all up. A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.
With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability.
For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab.
1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly
2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address
Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent.
3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox.
4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly.
5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.
It's not an issue of being too hard to understand.
The moment I say "double opt in", marketing will decide I lack the skills to be involved in mail and deliverability will be placed in the hands of someone with a graphics design background that has never heard of dns.
I've seen it in every single place I've tried to help marketing campaigns for over 20 years.
> A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.
How about never. Is never good for you?
Interesting point about charging for unsubscribed contacts!
I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers.
I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!
Good analysis. One correction though, EmailOctopus does offer auto-plan downgrades. Screenshot of the billing page on our account: https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP
After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan).
I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew.
But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company).
[1] https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctop...
CEO of EmailOctopus here. I was just about to offer this clarification, so thanks for commenting! Confirming that we offer auto-plan downgrades (and if you prefer it to not be automatic, as a lot of people do, you can manually increase/decrease your tier at any time).
Great point. Thanks for sharing.
(I originally considered it “not automated” because it wasn’t on by default but that’s a bit harsh in hindsight. )
It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are:
My understanding is Customer.io is what most startups use these days with larger companies using one of the other four.I don't have a horse in this race, but I came across Postmark[1] several years ago and thought to myself if I ever needed to send marketing emails — or transactional for that matter — I'd give them my business. They seem.. nice.
Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them?
[1] https://www.postmarkapp.com
Postmark is owned by Active Campaign, which was included in OPs list, though I'm not sure how the Postmark product differs from the original Active Campaign product.
I've been using Postmark for hobby projects for the past three years, and I've been happy with them, but my needs are super minimal - just sending out <100 emails per month programmatically where latency doesn't matter.
What about https://sendy.co -- 1 million is about $100
There's one tool worth mentioning that was missing from the list: High Level.
It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP.
If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot.
https://gohighlevel.com/
For additional context, I've switched all my businesses and clients out of Mailchimp and Klaviyo to High Level.
A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing.
Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.
Adding our recent experience with Klaviyo. Klaviyo charges by "profile". When paired with Shopify, it automatically imports / pulls customer information 5o it's servers even when the customer specifically opted out of marketing.
First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us.
Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded.
They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.
That explains why that box hasn't worked when I've used Shopify stores before. I couldn't be bothered to take them to task individually, but I figured they were using some kind of crappy "legitimate interest" basis.
This is very relevant to my industry (escape rooms). Our mailing lists quickly reach 10,000+ and unsubscribes happen often.
I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.
> Deleting them would have moved me down a tier.
Presumably it would also have lost your record of the fact that they'd already asked to not get your email. So you'd have added them back to the spam list if they ever dealt with you again, so they'd have to unsubscribe again.
Spam has gotten so normalized that not only are people not even pretending to get opt-ins, but they don't see why they should have to pay any real attention to opt-outs.
Yes, you are a spammer, and so are most of the businesses on the Internet at this point.
You can archive users when they unsub to avoid them counting towards your billable total
Do you have to manually do this or can it be automated?
Manual afaict.
Bachman has relevant commentary on marketing and companies like MailChimp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8
In the "you had one job" category of things to look at from an email marketing tool:
What about email deliverability?
Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes.
The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly.
This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.
I disagree. It’s a dimension of the decision, certainly not the “one thing” to look for.
… unless you’re a spammer haha.
Or unless your emails matter to your customers, with you seeing them as individual names instead of spray and pray marketing.
Deliverability is the single most important thing to reach individuals in the first place, even more critical to maintain the transactional or workflow email relationship.
Anthropic right now has an issue where their "passwordless" emails go to junk for M365 customers (85% of SMBs in U.S.), people literally can't use the service since the email isn't delivered to the inbox.
To your point, in a past gig helping thousands of businesses with turning contacts into not just buyers but fans, I discovered mass marketers don't really care about deliverability at the level of "every single communication must land with every person".
At the same time, I learned customers you want to build a relationship with very much do care. Ever since, when evaluating these, I start there, even before price. How many communications, transactions, or workflows with a future buyer with intent are you willing to fail to connect?
"You had one job" means the primary, not only, dimension. Yes, the primary job of a mailer is for the mail to get there.
I agree there's lots more to look for as well!
That ("Anthropic's" deliverability issue) is a Microsoft issue. Don't normalize Microsoft's bad practices.
That's just one current example of when email delivery matters, likely to resonate with HN as being senders and receivers they recognize struggling with this. Not just a Microsoft thing, we can talk about a dozen where Gmail files things wrongly as well, and where the common element is the mailer.
These mailers all have different levels of trust and deliverability stats. It's critical to know.
I don't think you're getting what I'm saying here. If an email provider is throwing away wanted messages from legitimate senders because of some "trust" metric, then it is that email provider's reponsibility, not the sender's, to make damned sure that doesn't cause the loss of desired email.
You are of course correct that neither GMail nor Microsoft 365 or Hotmail or whatever they call it this week is suitable for any serious use.
You don’t have deny the responsibility of the relevant authorities to properly maintain hiking trails, in order to place responsibility on a hiking guide to safely get you along poorly maintained trails.
Write your own guides if you don’t like the ones that are freely provided to you.
I’m talking about a person that you hire as a guide.
How is gmail not suitable for serious use?
Never had any issues with deliverability or receiving and been using it for years in a business context.
> That ("Anthropic's" deliverability issue) is a Microsoft issue.
Emphasizing this. Validation emails sent to Microsoft hosted email are at high risk of never arriving.
For at least 2 years I've seen this on MS's free, paid and enterprise/hosted services. The issue is per validator; mails all arrive or none ever will. Generally I'll try again months later and find that service is still blocked.
LOL I wonder if Copilot or Azure AI validation emails are at a high risk of never arriving?
Anthropic has a lot of issues. I tried paying them and my card is rejected without explanation.
I tried different cards, addresses, even a VPN. Nothing works. After googling a bit I found on Reddit that this is very common. I don't thinks their investors are happy with them not accepting customers.
They most likely only care about Enterprise customers. Individual consumers like you are not relevant to their bottom line.
You did not evaluate adobe marketo.
True! Have you tried it? Any thoughts?
Your main headline claims you tried every email marketing tool. (“Top” is only in the HN title, and even then I don’t know if Adobe Marketo doesn’t qualify as “top”.)
Every “top” marketing tool. Obviously it’s not possible to try all tools, there are probably thousands. “Top” is a subjective category so OP just evaluated most relevant tools probably.
As I already tried to point out, “top” is only in the HN title, not in the actual article title.
Wow you're telling me he didn't try every one of 12,000 marketing tools that exist?
I’m telling you he’s being criticized for the hyperbole.
I love the idea of a breakdown like this, but so many of the author's deal-killers are not relevant for most startups (the audience here). This is more of a list of solo freelancers.
That’s fair. Any specifics?
Just to add this wasn’t written from the perspective of a solo freelancer. I’m part a 4-person startup (Atlist.com)
I particularly thought this part was really fascinating, where they start complaining about a EMAIL SPAM SPECIALIST COMPANY which uses, surprise surprise, shady email marketing list sign-up tactics. It does what it says on the label, as the saying goes.
"5. Scammy Email Tactics Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""
If Brevo is one of the best, I am sceptical. I've had he displeasure of using it this year and the tools they offer are very iffy. But even ignoring that, the service is often down. I was often trying to edit a template, but it would not work because you keep getting a message like "something went wrong" and nothing gets displayed.
Can you be specific about “iffy”? I’d be curious to know more.
You can build kind of blocks that you use, but for anything more complex you're pretty much forced to use a kind of free HTML field, which of course is just a text field where you either suffer by editing html and their templating system in a browser text field (the templating is something Django compatible) or you copy and paste from your text editor which is also a form of torture. I've edited the wrong template on occasion, and saved it. Even if you just stick to their wysiwyg you still have to sometimes add conditional blocks and this also is for me anyway difficult. They have developer mode too, which is your email as a giant yaml.
So they support a bunch of things, but personally I would not use it for anything except simple marketing campaigns. We do use it for that, but someone had the idea of having all customer emails go through it, and I don't really like it.
s/email marketing/spam/
Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.
There are degrees of everything. Good luck with "If you build it they will come." Lots of people here hate advertising of any form as well.
You need to promote things in some form in almost all cases.