So with that said, we're a couple of minutes past 5 p.m. Central European time, so it's time to get rolling. Very welcome to all of you to this week's webinar on email Marketing Automation solutions. That works well with Monday. Uh, my name is Fredrik Kastenholm. I'm the CRO and one of the partners of Omnitas, a platinum partner to Monday.com. Uh, I will be leading you through this evening. And as normal, I have activated the Q&A section. So if you have questions, go. When we go through this, please enter them in the Q&A section and I will get to them towards the end. Because I'm not always seeing your questions as they pop up, but I will do my best and if I notice them, I will try to fit them in as soon as I can as well. So it's the normal routine for those of you who have been with us before. So the agenda for tonight is then through that's actually done. And then we're going to go into why email or marketing automations at all. Um, what kind of reviewed services have we been looking at and what's their differences and so on. Then we we'll have a look into the deliverability, pricing support. And I will also summarize and actually shows my top picks. And then we'll go into the Q&A section and then we're done for the night. I hope that sounds fine with everyone. So. Why email? Well, first of all, it's our oldest kind of digital marketing, actually. It's almost has 50 years age right now, and it's still actually and still going very, very strong. It's still ranked as having the best effect of all digital marketing efforts on revenue. It's also considered the best channel for customer retention and. Most professional marketeers today actually say that. It's also one of the easiest systems to set up and has a fairly low price point, and it's rather quick to build up in comparison to social media or or organic SEO and stuff like that. So you can do a lot with email. And, uh, we have approximately 4 billion email users right now in the world. So of course, as companies or as businessmen, we don't want or don't have the need to contact all of those. But that still gives us, as the sheer volume of people who have access to email is so much greater than social media and so on. Um. Uh, and as well, the stickiness, i.e. how much people interact with email is fairly high. And on average, this is a US survey, but I would think that it would tend to be the same for most of the rest of the world. Actually, people check their email at least once per day, usually more. And if it's business people then it will be a lot more. Um, today people tend to use their email as a shot, so they basically live within their inbox. So it's a good place to make sure. Yeah, I know, ha ha. Once per day that's not likely going to happen. But you're one of those business people, aren't you? But even for those of us who aim our marketing effort towards consumers, even those check their emails more often. Uh, so that's why email is still actually the way to go. Uh, we're very well complemented by social media marketing efforts. You got to have a good website with a good, uh, with good SEO. Otherwise, it's going to be rather hard to get people to sign up to your newsletter or your, um, email campaigns and your automation flows and so on, but. It's still very, very good. So the software we have been looking for for tonight are Mailerlite, Getresponse, ConvertKit, MailChimp, sendinblue Active Campaign, AWeber, and Constant Contact. So we have a mix here of European and American softwares, and they all got their own sets of features and everything. It's very hard to do a comparison straight off because depending on what program we're actually looking at, the features come in different tiers, but we have been trying our best to to make a fair valuation. So what we have said since we named this webinar, that Email Marketing Automation webinar, we have taken a look at the first paid plan, basically where automation is actually available to us. Oh yes of course. This video or webinar is being recorded and it will be available through our website later on. So you can check it out there. It's www.omnitas.com so it will be there on demand so you can watch it however many times you'd like. So these are the ones we've been looking at. They are all integrated with Monday.com since that was a prerequisite for for this setting. Uh, when we. Take a look at them. They come in kind of different tiers. The two ones that really stick out a bit is getresponse, actually, because they are not only an email or marketing automation platform, they're kind of a marketing platform going up against such softwares as Pardo, Marketo and stuff. So they include things. As you notice, since we actually are in Getresponse right now. So they include stuff like webinars and stuff like that as well, and have a wide variety of features. Active campaign, on the other hand, is more slim but can do a few more things as well. But it's the utmost, I would say, when it comes to pure automation and workflow building of marketing efforts. Then we have MailChimp. Everyone basically knows MailChimp today. They are probably the most well known brand when it comes to email marketing, and it's actually a close call for them to actually be in this webinar at all, since they quite recently actually added automation workflows to to their stack. One of the most important things when we talk about email marketing. It's not how you build your campaign. It's not how, uh, what kind of CTAs you have. Calls to action. For those of you who don't know the lingo. You can do the best campaign in the world, but nothing of that has any meaning at all. If we can't get that email into someone's inbox, but instead keeping ending up in people's spam filter or whatever. So deliverability is key. We have taken part of the the latest deliverability test done towards email service providers. Um, it was completed in March of this year and as we can see here, we have a bit of a variety here. So we can see that Mailer Lite is actually on top and a Weber is quite far behind. And what this would actually mean is that Mailer Lite will put 97% of all the emails you send at the right pace, and not end up in spam filters. Uh, whilst a Weber 22 of every 100 emails you send will end up in the spam filter. So this is key. And this is why we really want to take a look at it. We can see it's fairly even spread. But some of them are lacking a bit in this department. And this is something I would urge you to have a good think about when you are choosing your solution provider for email marketing automation. Talking about price. There's a wide variety here. And. Yes it is then. For those of you who don't see the shot here, Deb said this is good information. When someone wants to use MailChimp. Yes it is. MailChimp don't have good deliverability and have actually never had. So I fairly often actually urge my clients to use something else. Um, and one thing that's even more that plays into that is the pricing. What we have taken a look at here to try to make a fair comparison is we have put it on 2500 contacts. I presume some of you have plenty more. Some of you don't come up to that. But we have chosen that as a kind of arbitrary number to see what would you pay for the solution? And as I said before, we have chosen the plant here that corresponds with the first possibility where you actually get automation and it's a paid tier. Uh, so in my case, Mailer Lite actually only have two tiers. They have their forever free program or they have they're at 2500 contacts, at least $15 a month. After that, we scale up quite a bit and we'll end up with a Weber MailChimp kind of $30 area. And then the most advanced solutions, which is Getresponse and Active Campaign. Yes, they have the largest price tags, but a thing to remember there is you get some functionality with those plans that you will not get from the others. For example, Getresponse at that price tier, you will get the possibility to hold webinars, record your webinars, and actually publish them on demand so people can keep watching and watching and watching and hopefully make you a bit of money or your clients a bit of money at the end. Uh. But as I said, take this with a grain of salt, because the main important thing here is to actually have a look at the feature list of each and every one of these suppliers. Because they do differ, they aren't all the same. It's not. We are actually trying to compare apples and pears here a bit, but have a look at them. But this is to give you an indication of where they are priced. Mailer Lite have got a come strong into the market the last few years. And actually I think it was last year. They were designated the fifth quickest growing source platform out there in the world. Global all categories. So they are growing. And you might or we might guess that the rather aggressive pricing might have something to do with it. To say more, when we have taken a look at the prices, we have taken a look at the monthly fees. So if you would pay month by month and not adding into an annual subscription or by yearly subscription, most of these platforms support that and will give you a rather hefty discount if you sign up for more than one month at a time. For example, Miller Lite, I think it's 30% off doing that. Get response to something in the in the same tract. So it's active campaign and the rest of them. So it's a good tip would be probably try them out. And if you like them then get your yearly subscription and save a bit of money. Talking about trying out. Of course, most of these have free plans actually, and those who don't have rather extended trial periods. So as we can see, everyone except for Getresponse active campaign and constant contact, which is also a very fast, especially in the US, very fast growing ESP. Those three don't have free plans, but they do have, uh, extended trial periods. So you get to try them out for I think it's all of them is 30 days except for active campaign. I think if you're a US customer, you can actually get a trial for 60 days. I don't know if that's still active, but it's at least 30 days. But free plans is good and all. And many of you I'm sure, have tried out free plans. And they always come with a bit of caveat because that's a way to get you in. And then hopefully you will upgrade into a paid plan later on. Right. And so is, of course the case with all of these as well. Uh, so there are restrictions on how many contacts you can have on the forever free plans. Of course, it's not forever, really. It's until you hit a certain number of contacts. In my case, it's a thousand, so it's most of the rest. Uh, MailChimp is probably the nicest guys about this and actually offers you 2000 contacts, but they won't add in the automation in the free plan, which MailerLite actually will. I think they're more or less the only one that will do that already on the free plan. So if you want to have a go at making automated workflows with your emails, then that might be a good place to start. Uh, sending blue I actually forgot to mention this on the pricing. Sending blue one of the European suppliers. They are not like all the rest. They don't charge you for your contacts. You can have however many contacts you want. They charge per mail sent per month and in that fashion as well, their free plan is. Well, free. But it's not based on however many contact it's based on that. You can send 300 emails per day. So with that you if you have a large list, you might want to plan your sending I guess. Um, of course there are more than that you can't have. I have however many contacts you'd like. Of course, there are some caveats on what kind of functionality you can access. Um, it differs a bit. So like I said, MailChimp won't award you the automation, uh, while Mailerlite. Well, and I don't think Weber will need that. Um, so there's a bit of difference. You have to check them out specifically. We are normally tasked, we take security. Well, quite seriously actually. And one of the huge things with emails nowadays is the for us Europeans at least, it's the GDPR and that is how we can transport personal information or privacy data over national borders or with outside the European Union. So for us, it is might be a good idea to actually choose one of the European suppliers, because we know that we have European servers. And I have actually, while doing this review, actually taking the time to talk to all of these suppliers and actually got an okay, that their servers actually are in the EU. Mainly light is a Lithuanian company and have their servers here in the European Union. Getresponse comes from Poland, the same, and I think they're Spanish or something like that. So they all have European servers. So if you are European or if you're working with a European client, need something, those three might be a good place to start looking into. Actually for the American market, we have the rest. I should also say, of course, the European restrictions are much harsher than the American. So all your Americans, you are basically free to choose whatever you like. And and if you really, as a European, really want to have one of the American services, that's fine too. But you need to have a proper privacy policy in place. Please check with your local lawyer. We also had some talks with all of their support because support is important. If you're working with a partner like us of of course we can help you along. But when you're sitting there and tinkering with your email campaigns, you might want some answers at times. And when something isn't working, you don't want to wait for it. So we actually had to check in to see how does these service providers support actually work and Mailer Lite and get response. And a Weber offer a 24 over seven open support, uh, Mailer Lite and get response. I got responses within 30s from me logging in to their support chat, and not by a bot by an actual person. So I was rather impressed and they gave quick and good answers to the questions I post. Um, for several of the other, they have open times, MailChimp. They do kind of ad hoc variant where they are open 24 hours, but only monday.com through Friday and they take the weekend off. Sending blue got no information. They don't have chat. They, uh, they own. So it's no live support. Basically, you post your ticket and wait for the reply and we notice it might actually take some time to get that reply. What? I wasn't that impressed, to be frank. So they got a lower score. So what we can see here is the opening times and the score I attributed to each and every support function when I talked to them, and I based that on my opinion. So this is my opinion. Uh, hopefully some of them will help you better along the way if you choose to give them a go. Uh, I would also say that all of these are, um, highly integrated with whatever web service you're using or whether you're using WordPress, some custom built Wix or whatever. They will work fine with your website. I all of them also include landing page builders, that type of functionality that might be nice to use. Um, but that's a bit about the solutions. Um. But how do you integrate with Monday.com? The only one that I'm sure some of you know that have a native integration with Monday.com is MailChimp. And to be frank, that can do some stuff, but not nearly everything we'd like to do with it. So we add on that as we prefer integrate. Not all these services are available through integrations. For those of you who don't know about integrate, this is something really nice. They're basically calling themselves the glue of the internet, and they truly are. They are basically the smarter, way, smarter cousin of Sapir. So basically it's a kind of an integration motor that lets us in a nice fashion, know or low code, integrate different services to each other. Um, if this is not something you're up to yourself, this is something you could contact for example, us about because we happen to be an integral partner as well. Um. Where? Sorry, Thomas. You were saying I pass. Yeah, that's what the service is called. Uh. The thing with entanglement is that it can actually access the whole API and not only certain recipes, which is more in the case of safer. So we can do basically all of the things a full blown developer would like to do to their APIs, which means we can integrate and fetch data back and forth between monday.com and these programs. So if you have built your CRM or your marketing software, we can have data pulled back and forth and you can get dashboard data in monday.com, for example, to basically collect everything in one place. And. Yeah. So you're saying entanglement for the win. And while I can't do more than agree with him on this one because it is a wondrous tool that let us integrate basically anything we'd like in a very quick and good way. Um, but if you want to know more about Integra, please contact us and on the task. You will get my details later on and we can help you along the way to have this set up. But basically what I'm trying to say here with all of these, the the limit is only your imagination because we can do a hell of a lot. So basically make your registers sink. Having notifications or data fetches into Monday.com whenever someone subscribes to your newsletter. All of that of course tracking, bounce rates, deliveries, all of that. Uh, so you don't have have to go jumping around between software. You have to do different things. Um, so this is actually how we integrate with Monday.com. It's a fairly painless process and goes quick. So. So that's a good way. So if you're looking at other software without the scope of email marketing and your Avid Monday.com user, always have a look at, does this have the software support in mode? Yes it does. Good. Then we can do a lot of stuff with it and integrated with Monday.com. That's a good thing. So basically, to summarize and to give you my top pick. Well, the things we should keep in mind is deliverability. As you saw, I posted a link in the. Uh, presentation earlier on. You can have that watch that I will be sure to send that to all of you who have been with us here tonight as well. So you can have that. So when you go out about and, um, look at email automation softwares, you can have that in mind and see the latest reports because they keep updating it twice per year. They do large scale tests. Uh, but that's my main thing to look at that and choose a supplier that supports the features you need. It's easy to go about and thinking, oh yeah, active campaign get response. Yeah, they are the largest ones with the most features. Great. They're also the most prices ones. Do you need all those features shows the right platform that will fit your needs. And that's what I'm saying. But you can't go wrong with either get response or active campaign need that because you will probably never, ever need to upgrade away from them. Uh, so it's probably the last stop on that line you ever need. Uh, but with that said, my top pick for now for small mid-sized business is going to be Miller Lite. Actually, um, very well priced, uh, or very low priced, with an abundance of features. Uh, totally integrate with your Google Analytics to basically track everything and anything. Getting your own domain names send out everything. It's a one recipe platform that's almost free. So 15 bucks a month, that's. Well, at least here in Sweden, that's one beer, more or less. Uh, so that's one beer a month ain't that bad. So that would probably be my top tip here. Or my top pick for smaller for larger companies. 2.3 beers, some others. We'd have made a calculation. I would say that's probably going to be, uh, southern Swedish prices or something like that. Not Stockholm prices, at least. Or I'm going to the wrong part. Uh. Indeed. We got there. Yes. So. But if you're a larger company looking for enterprise level functionality, then you should look into either Get Response or Active Campaign. Probably Get response will give you the biggest portfolio of possibilities there is. There is out there. While with that said, active campaign probably have the best automation builder of all of these we have looked at here tonight. Uh, with that said, uh. Questions. Yes, indeed. You're right. Reading is very important, and reading will also have a huge impact on what you should choose. I's important and you should take that fact. And when it comes to all of these services, claim they are GDPR certified. But there are some issues going on right now legally between the US and the European Union on how how the Privacy Shield stands, really. Yeah. Someone say I weekly see the companies still using MailChimp without proper documentation. Yes. And that is a problem. And that will earn you, in the end, a fine of 4% of your yearly revenue or €20 million, whichever is higher. So it's a good thing to avoid that one. So Deb's asking. We're very experienced with Instagram integromatt at Polished Geek, but I'd love to hear which ones you feel are the best for that integration without needing API connection. Just standard integration modules. Uh. I have looked at all of them and I would say MailerLite is very easy. They even list integration as one of their integrations, so they have actually built some for it. So that's very easy to handle. Getresponse. Me and our colleague Viggo, that's been with us before here on the webinars, and he's our Integra guy. Uh, he handled a fairly complex setup for one of our clients in an hour or two. Uh, so that's really easy as well. Um. But those two are fairly easy to set up. I have personally not done too much work with the rest of them. And, as Thomas said, more on integument next week and next week's webinar, actually. And next week's webinar is actually going to be on a Wednesday. So keep a look out for that one. Yes. Then you are right. They have actually blown me away a bit with that one. So for those of you didn't see that said Mailerlite basically makes the shortlist. Yes it should at least if you're a small size or mid-size type of business then they are great. So, uh. With that said, thank you so much for joining us here today. I'm Fredrik Kastenholm, and if you have any questions at all for me, which you forgot to mention or didn't dare to mention, you are, as per usual, always more than welcome to email me and I will make sure to get you sorted. Uh, I also want to plug. We have quite recently built out a new website which is omnitas.com, where we have created our content hub where you can get most not all, but most of our webinars on demand. You can see all our upcoming webinars as well, and we're trying to host at least one per week as is, and we are planning to hold on to that, as well as tips and tricks, articles for Monday, for Integra, for drift, and for the rest of our partners. So please have a look at that. Sign up for our newsletter and you will get the proper information on what's new. And we will even let you choose what parts you're actually interested in. So you don't need to get all the information, but only the things you are interested in. All thanks to email marketing automation. Sounds nice huh? So with that said. Have a lovely evening, everyone. Oh, yeah. Of course. Please do go on in on LinkedIn and or Facebook and follow us there. We publish all our upcoming webinars, all our articles. Everything gets pushed out there. So that's a great way to get it in your feed when we have something hopefully interesting to share. With that said, have a very good night to all of you and take the best of care. I'm hoping to hear from you very, very soon. Have a good night.