What's your favorite transactional + marketing email stack for an early-stage startup?
I am launching a product soon and trying to select the best email stack. I am currently between MailerLite + MailerSend and Loops, both seem to have a good UX. For auth emails, using Supabase for now.
What's important for me:
Low-risk, paying only if the project will actually gain users.
Possibility to send a custom "Best matches" email that can be sent weekly automatically
Or if you have any other ideas, feel free to share them.
Thanks a lot!
P.S. I am also a bit confused about how they count active subscribers/contacts. If the user is not subscribed to the marketing emails, for example, and I am only sending them transactional/welcome emails, do they count as subscribers?
Replies
Hi Laura! Great question. Are you B2B or B2C? What sort of email volume are you expecting? I would strongly recommend HubSpot's free version of its marketing hub if you're selling SaaS to businesses (up to 2,000 emails/month at no charge). The functionality you get for free — with a paid version you can grow into if your project is successful — is a pretty great one stop shop for sales, marketing, and service, with functionality for both transactional and promotional emails.
It also helps provide some structure to your sales cycle early with strong CRM and sales funnel tooling.
@cholden_lewis Hi Holden, thanks for your comment! Indeed forgot to specify that it's a B2C project (a job search platform), so technically, I don't really need CRM. The volume is hard to predict, but I don't think I will have more than ±300 MAU in the first months. What's important is to be able to send basic emails to users (auth, welcome emails, order confirmation, etc) and occasional marketing emails.
@lauragenno Ah, my bad! I took a guess based on your profile.
For your email lists, will your contact data be stored outside the app anywhere? Do you plan on sending a newsletter with the latest posts or anything like that? At any rate, the options you mentioned are good, mailchimp and sendgrid also have good free tiers (sendgrid for example 100 free emails/day).
Good luck!
@cholden_lewis For now, contact data is only stored in Supabase, but I guess if I go with any email provider, I will have subscriber data there as well? I am thinking of sending a newsletter, yes, for example, with the personalised job matches.
I tried Sendgrid, but they seem to have only a limited 60-day trial, and after that, you're kind of forced to choose any of their plans. MailerLite/Loops seemed to have a more startup-friendly plan where you can go free forever until you meet your email/subscriber quota :)
Thank you!