![]() If it’s not a cheaper solution, does that mean I need to look for Mailchimp clones that are… free? And so, I started looking for free alternatives to Mailchimp. I started searching for cheaper alternatives to Mailchimp, but look, if I’m already going to pay, I might as well pay for the original. “Not worth it”, I thought, and like any other lazy programmer I looked for people that had already faced this problem before, hoping they already came with a solution and posted it online. Is this worth $1k+/mo? Apparently it is, because Mailchimp is a big company with many customers, but I was not willing to pay the price at this moment.Īs a programmer, I obviously considered coding my own newsletter system, but the list of problems I would have needed to tackle kept growing as I kept thinking about it. Tracking marketing metrics: open rates and click-through rates are important metrics for a newsletter, and tracking them (implementing tracking pixels and adding links) requires a whole different system on top of everything we’ve already covered.Emails only support a tiny, specific subset of HTML/CSS, and if you use a visual editor it needs to account for it or your messages will be broken. But if you try to use in emails the same code you use for websites, it won’t work. Emails, like websites, use HTML and CSS code to display their content. Emails don’t support standard HTML or CSS.Some of them might be double opt-in, increasing complexity. You might have a list for important platform notifications and another list for marketing purposes, and you want to allow users to belong to them and manage them independently. ![]() Managing multiple lists: one single user can be subscribed to more than one mailing list.You need to think about where are you going to upload your email attachments if you’re building a marketing email platform from the ground up. Hosting images and assets: when you attach something in Gmail, like a picture, you’re uploading it to Google’s servers and what gets attached is just a link to the picture, not the picture itself.Here’s a nice checklist of everything that can go wrong and that you should account for. Technical logistics: your DNS need to be set up right, your DKIM signature has to be valid, same goes for your SPF and DMARC records, your MAIL FROM has to be configured, your email server’s IP can’t be listed in any of the dozens of email blacklists out there, your email server has to have a good reputation, your emails need to have appropriate headers, ideally a List-Unsubscribe header, etc.You need to send emails from a reputable email server, or your messages will simply not arrive. Email deliverability: you can’t just send emails from your own server, because other email servers don’t trust yours and will label you as spam.You need a system in place to detect bounces and remove bad addresses from your mailing list. Handle bounced emails: sending emails to addresses that bounce your messages hurts your reputation as a sender and can get you banned from sending emails altogether.You need a website where users can self-manage their subscription status, with a unique and private URL per user. They report your emails as spam, email clients like Gmail pick up the complaints and you might become absolutely invisible to everyone. Offer a simple way for users to unsubscribe from your newsletter: people become really angry (understandably so) if you send emails without an “Unsubscribe” button.Here are just the first few problems you’d face if you wanted to build a service like Mailchimp from scratch: ![]() And Mailchimp does a damn good job at solving it. Well, turns out email marketing is a really difficult problem. ![]() I don’t know about you, but paying a monthly amount of money comparable to rent seems like a bit much to me for a newsletter tool. At $1,075/month, Mailchimp pricing feels a bit too steepĪll plans become greyed out with the message “Contact limit exceeded”, leaving you with their most expensive plan as only option, at over $1k a month.
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