The new wave of email marketing software: Loops, Audienceful, and Mailcoach

Most of us are getting bombarded with loads of marketing emails every single day. Many of them are simply spam. However, sometimes I find myself actually reading and keeping up with the news, insights, and offers shared in such marketing newsletters. While the information within those newsletters is the one thing that should stand out, I am a fan of lovely designed newsletters too. Whenever I get the feeling some newsletters look bland and similar to others, I scroll down to the bottom of the email, and almost every time I find the Mailchimp logo.

Although there are various newsletter services for marketing emails, Mailchimp is still the number one pick. And I do understand that to a certain point. Mailchimp is simple, easy to get started with, and has a generous free tier. So, it is a great service to pick, once you decide to get into email marketing. However, it does not feel like that Mailchimp (and other, similar well-established newsletter services) did innovate that much over the last couple of years. Mailchimp is that one service a lot of companies default to, just because it is the most popular one, but not the one you should be using. When it comes to creating product, marketing, and transactional emails, you need a modern platform that puts design first, lets you write and edit with ease, and adapt your branding with a few clicks rather than writing a lot of code.

The Mailchimp era is over. Creators, Startups, Developers, Marketers, and other creative minds build on new marketing tools to grow, connect, and convert. If you are looking for a modern, beautifully designed, and powerful service to send product, marketing, and transactional emails, you need to check out the three tools presented in this article.

Loops, Audienceful, and Mailcoach all feel like a new wave of marketing email services, tailored at modern software companies.

Loops

Loops is a YC-backed email-sending platform dedicated to crafting a high level of product quality and exceptional customer service. The main goal of Loops is to simplify communication. It is a fast, easy-to-use, and delightful platform. Modern software companies like Framer, Spline, or Perplexity are already using Loops to send out better and beautiful product, marketing, and transactional emails.

The whole team at Loops is focused on delivering an exceptional User Experience and a rock-solid, feature-rich product. There is no doubt that you can immediately feel that after signing up for an account.

What definitely stands out in Loops is its Notion-like block-based editor to seamlessly write your next product update email and simply craft a newsletter that not only stands out in peoples' inboxes but also is joyful to read. Thanks to a drag and drop editor, there is no need to write a single line of code to craft a beautiful email. With just a few clicks, you can polish up your designs, changing the background color, adding borders, and make slight adjustments.

In case you are already using tools like Framer, Webflow, Typedream*, Carrd*, Zapier, and others, Loops offers lovely integrations to further boost your workflows. With Loops' API you can send an event to your audience, add contacts to your audience, update contacts, or remove existing contacts. Loops even gives you the possibility to craft the ideal user journey by setting up a schedule and send the right emails just at the right time.

With Loops' free plan you can have up to 1,000 contacts and get up to 2,000 sends per month. The paid plans start at $49 per month and give you unlimited sends to your audience. Loops does not charge for team seats, and the team is happy to assist you in moving over your email content, automations, and anything else you may need.

Audienceful

Audienceful is another lovely modern email marketing service, that is multiplayer, lightweight, and setup for best practices by default.

Just like Loops, Audienceful features a Notion-like interface and block editor to craft beautiful emails as easy as writing a doc. With Audienceful you can say goodbye to clunky email builders, and make them a thing of the past. In Audienceful, you whole team can use editor tools with which they are already familiar if they used Notion or Google Docs before. Once you experience such an interface to craft and build your product and marketing emails, there is no looking back. It just feels amazing, it is super fast, and it focuses on your writing rather moving clunky elements around, trying to build a specific layout.

The building of modern, branded emails in Audienceful does not end with that lovely editor experience. With just a few clicks, you can set up a simple email design system, so you never have to hassle with templates again. Everything you create within Audienceful and send out to your audience is accessible, mobile-first, deliverability-optimized, and dark mode-friendly.

In Audienceful, you can set up multiple workspaces, which means you can create custom spaces for all of your businesses or clients, and easily switch between them. With the power of segmentation, you can send out different emails for different groups, by segmenting your subscribers into multiple audiences with tags, custom fields, and powerful conditions. Thanks to email sequences and automations, Audienceful gives you the tools you need to create simple drip sequences for any use case. No matter if you need to set up a sequence for onboarding, lead magnets, email courses, trial nurturing, or anything else, Audienceful got you covered.

In case you are using a CMS platform like Webflow already, you can cross-post emails and SEO content directly to your website. Additionally, you can sync data and contacts from your CRM, Payment Processor, and 4000+ tools via Zapier or their API.

Audienceful's sending infrastructure is managed by Mailgun, which is also trusted by other companies like Microsoft or Lyft. Compared to other marketing platforms, Audienceful collects far less data, and they also strive to comply with all global privacy regulations. In case you want to switch to Audienceful from another service, the team at Audiencful provides a concierge migration service and taking care of everything for you, for free.

You can use Audienceful for free for up to 1000 contacts, 2 team collaborators, and 1 automated sequence. The Essentials Plan cost you $29 per month (billed annually), and includes 3000 contacts, 3 team collaborators, 3 automated sequences, and a custom sending domain. For $56 per month (billed annually) you can grab the Growth Plan for up to 3000 contacts, 5 team collaborators, unlimited automations, multiple domains, and advanced analytics.

Mailcoach

Mailcoach is another powerful email marketing tool to effortlessly grow, connect, and convert. It is fully featured and especially built for growing creators, developers, and businesses.

With Mailcoach's powerful Campaigns feature you can send marketing emails with all the features you need, including segmentation, split testing, and analytics. Split Testing gives you the possibility to find out what emails is the most effective one, by testing different variants with smaller groups before sending it to the entire audience. With Segmentation, Mailcoach lets you organize your contacts into various segments using tags, custom fields, and powerful conditions.

Crafting and writing your emails in Mailcoach happens on different levels, as Mailcoach provides you with multiple email editors. You can either write your emails with Markdown, HTML, or a visual editor. You choose which email editor you want to use to compose your email campaigns. With the Markdown editor, you enjoy simplicity and ease of use. In case you need full control over the email design and layout, the HTML editor is the right choice. On the other hand, that kind of detailed control is not always a must. Sometimes you just want to write in an editor and hide everything else. Therefore, Mailcoach features Editor.js, which is a WYSIWYG editor that does not need any technical knowledge to craft beautiful emails.

Just like Loops and Audienceful, Mailcoach also features automations to create powerful workflows for onboarding, generating leads, or anything else you have in mind. Setting up those automations and workflows does not require writing any code. All you have to do is choosing your audience, adding your actions, and then seeing the progress.

What I truly love about Mailcoach is its dedicated privacy and security focus. Mailcoach is developed by Spatie, a Belgian software company. All their products are securely hosted in the EU. Tracking is optional in Mailcoach. You decide whether you wan to track opens and clicks or disable them. Additionally, Mailcoach is fully GDPR-compliant. If you want, you can even self host Mailcoach to completely stay in control, but enjoy the same great features.

Mailcoach does not offer a free plan. The base plan starts at $9.99 and increases depending of the amount of emails you need to send out per month.

Conclusion

Modern software companies are in the need for modern solutions to send out product, marketing, and transactional emails. It is time for a new wave of email marketing software, and Loops, Audienceful, and Mailcoach are leading the way. They provide powerful features, beautifully designed interfaces, and top-notch experiences. There is no need to default to Mailchimp, when superior alternatives like Loops, Audienceful, and Mailcoach are available.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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