With ActiveCampaign increasing their 2023 annual fees considerably, many people are now looking for cheaper alternatives to the popular customer management platform. But before you jump, do your research first. A client of ours asked us about MailerLite, here’s the (arguably basic, for good reason) advice we gave…
- It’s simpler than AC, which is good and bad. Good for starting off, decent for large-ish groups that require simple management, not so good for advanced workflows or more complex data arrangements. The whole ‘if/and/or’ operators that we use in AC may or may not be available in the same form in ML, or they may not do the same thing with the data. I’d be hopeful all platforms that advertise this feature do the same thing, however.
- All subscription end-points such as BookFunnel, PayHip, your website etc would need to be redirected to ML, some via Zapier. This middle-layer via Zapier will add overhead time and maintenance costs. Perhaps not much to begin with, but it’s worth keeping in mind, especially as you grow.
- ML visual automation logic is simpler with less functionality than AC, but it is improving.
- ML uses groups, segments, and custom fields rather than tags and lists to identify collections of contacts, so we would need to factor that in before the migration.
- Onboarding automations would need to be rebuilt and redesigned when moving platforms.
- All AC forms would need to be rebuilt using ML forms and deployed appropriately.
- All AC landing pages or WordPress landing pages that integrate in any way with AC would need to be rebuilt and/or redirected to the ML equivalent.
- ML prefers users to utilise ML landing pages rather than WordPress/CMS website pages, but we can integrate the two fairly seamlessly if required.
- It’s not usually possible to 100% replicate an existing AC setup in ML, specifically detailed onboarding arrangements, so we would need to compromise on a few things such as how we implement and handle onboarding, group promotion/demotion, activity-recording automations, and resubscribe email alerts.
- There’s no ML integration with popular online sales platforms such as PayHip, so Zapier would be required to bring subscriber data over to ML, adding an additional layer of cost.
MailerLite is in no way a worse platform, but it is different, so expectations need to be managed for a successful migration.
