It’s not me, it’s you.
I loved Mailchimp. Loved. Past-tense.
I really did. I thought we’d be together forever. I remember when we first got together and how much I loved Mailchimp’s features and low-maintenance.
But over the years, things changed. You got distant, Mailchimp and started getting into a lot of weird hobbies that I just couldn’t get into with you.
What started as an email marketing platform was suddenly dealing with….postcards?
An era of confusion
Every company has to expand. I get that. But it’s when the company begins to expand into things that take away from its primary product (email marketing), things start getting weird. This is what has happened to Mailchimp.
They are great for automation, segments, tags, and you can’t be a free plan that allows you to email up to 2000 subscribers! But then came Landing Pages, which were really helpful, but a little difficult to make and tough to track hits via Google Analytics.
Next it was postcards, which I still don’t understand what they have to do with email marketing or why I would want them, but they came along with an overhaul of their backend and a new dictionary of marketing vocabulary.
This was all under the umbrella of a total branding overhaul, which confused a lot of people. Serif fonts? Removal of the word “email” from the site? What was going on?
But they are still great about analytics, their emails look GREAT and are very mobile-friendly. So why make the jump to SendFox?
The last straw
Recently, Mailchimp decided to start charging for contacts that were on your list whom you don’t email. See, when a contact unsubscribes from your newsletter list, they stay in your database. You just can’t email them anymore. Up until now, Mailchimp did not count these contacts towards your pricing plan, since they charge by this metric.
Now, they will begin judging your pricing plan based on how many contacts you have, subscribed or unsubscribed, because “it is now possible to message these contacts using many other Mailchimp tools.” Like postcards. Which again, isn’t email marketing.
Why SendFox?
So I began to ask around for a new email marketing tool that could do what Mailchimp does that was affordable. I heard the usual suspects like Active Campaign (my other fave frontrunner), Constant Contact, and others, but SendFox had a deal going on I couldn’t pass up.
I got a lifetime plan for a one-time payment of $49 for unlimited emails up to 5000 contacts.
Go ahead. Read that again if you think you read it wrong.
SendFox can do automation, landing pages, embeddable forms, and they charge you by contacts just like Mailchimp and the interface is simpler. However, unlike MC, SF allows you to make as many lists as you like and if you have one contact on two lists, guess how many contacts that counts as?
ONE. Not two, like in Mailchimp. HUGE advantage here and will make automation email soooooo much clearer on the backend.
The drawback is that SendFox is incredible plain-looking email. However, these types of emails are statistically better read and it has forced me to reign in my typical email length, which are both good things for me.
My biggest issue is that there are no buttons, but I found a workaround for that. I just made small .png’s of buttons, insert them as images, highlight the image and make it a link. Boom. Buttoned.
Currently, they do not integrate with WordPress, but they do integrate with Zapier and like I said earlier, they do have embeddable forms and landing pages to use.
Overall, SendFox is a Godsend at just the right time. If your main concern is email that makes sense, it’s definitely worth checking out. Let me know what you think!