Mailjet vs MailerLite: Which is a better fit?

Kathryn W.: Hi, my name's Kathryn. I'm the CEO of an online marketing company, and I give Mailjet a one out of five. Originally, we were with Sailthru as our ESP, because we're sending a volume of emails, sending around a million emails twice a day. We met Mailjet at an expo and it looked like they could do everything that Sailthru could do and for a lot less money, so we switched over to Mailjet. At the same time, we considered Selligent and making our own emails and sending them with AWS, which would mean a lot more work on our part but would have been more of a cost saving, but instead we decided to use something like Mailjet that allows you to build the emails in there and send them from the same place. We ended up choosing Mailjet mainly for a cost saving. They also seemed to have some really good editing software that meant you could lock down certain parts of a newsletter you were building and then allow other editors to come in and just change certain parts of it that weren't locked down. They also seemed to have very good reputation in terms of deliverability and we were really assured at the time that we were going to be really well looked after. I have to say, the salesperson was fantastic at his job, so that's what made us leave Sailthru through and go to Mailjet in the first instance. As with any software, when you change it internally, there's a bit of learning to be done. Especially with email service providers, they all seem to have their own language. Sailthru has Zephyr and Mailjet similarly had their own coding language for their emails. That's really to make it so the HTML is lighter and that the emails get into your inbox. There was a bit of learning from the developers' side to learn the new language that they were going to be coding in to make these emails, but in terms of integration for the newsletter builders and the content creators, that was quite straightforward. If you've ever used something like MailChimp, you wouldn't have a problem with using Mailjet. It's a very similar user interface. For anybody considering moving to Mailjet, I think it's really important that you consider how much control you want to be able to have over your own lists. Something very strange that Mailjet does is if they get a soft bounce too many times from somebody on your list, an email contact, then they blacklist them. What we found, after several months of being with Mailjet, is it all of a sudden our email list was shrinking at a massive rate. Now, with someone like Sailthru, they continue to ping an email address because sometimes people, their email inbox is full or perhaps the email is just being throttled by their internet service provider, which we see with some of the smaller domains. Then all of a sudden on switching to Mailjet, we were seeing the situation, literally, we're talking about 30,000 users a month, which for anybody who knows how difficult and how costly it is to get somebody to sign up to an email list and especially an engaged list, we were losing these engaged people really quickly. I think if what you're looking for is something that's automated, maybe you want to send transactional email automatically, you can set up different web books and say, "When somebody signs up, send them a welcome email," maybe when they purchase something you want to send them a receipt and another transactional email, I think it would still be suitable for that. If you're using email as your primary source of income for e-commerce or email marketing, I would seriously look at using something that's specifically designed for that and not Mailjet.

Erin P.: Hi, my name is Erin. And I have a couple of companies, actually, but they're both small companies. And one is just, I'm a solo entrepreneur in the one, and the other is with a business partner. This is for MailerLite, and I would give it about a 3. I decided to move forward with MailerLite because previously, for another side of my business, we've been using Shopify, and that has a larger price tag to it. So we decided to use MailerLite because we thought that it had a great price. And it was a new business venture and we wanted to kind of try it out. We thought it would be really easy. And that was why we ended up trying MailerLite. We decided on MailerLite because the price, they had a great sale that was going on. They also had a lot of all-inclusive items that some other programs didn't have. So they had the web builder, they had the ability to be handling mailing lists, they had the ability to be doing landing pages. So it seemed like a really good package and a good deal. And for the price, it seemed like a great way to be starting this new venture that we had. In the beginning, it kind of started off to a bit of a rocky start, unfortunately. We had a bit of trouble just even getting some basic questions answered. Until you level up to one of their higher packages, they actually don't offer any kind of real customer service, which we didn't realize in the beginning. And when we hit a couple of roadblocks, we had to go through a really lengthy process to even just try to get some customer service back. So that wasn't a great way to start. So, once we got started up and running, the main focus initially was to actually get a website up. And the website was where we actually were running into all the problems. The other side was for the mailing list, and that actually went really well. So we had no problems creating mailing lists, being able to send everything out, to be sending auto-mailings. That all was great with MailerLite and actually stays. We still use them for that. And I do believe that maybe that they actually started as that was what their company started doing. So I think that the other portion, which is why we also had joined, was because of the website. I think that that maybe was an add-on later, and I don't think that that is their core functionality, and that is where we were having the issues. Unfortunately, on creating the website, it became very glitchy. It was really difficult to actually get in and build things. It wouldn't stay. So that side is something I just, unfortunately, would not recommend. I would steer clear and I would find a different way to go. But the mailing part of it, the actual email functionality, they've been fabulous. So I would recommend it on that side. So, that's it.