At the same time as upping my website game (the posting from earlier in the week) I moved from Mailchimp to MailerLite (not a referral link). I wanted something that was both affordable and powerful. I setup Mailchimp a long time ago as it was free and easy and I was just goofing around. After digging into what I wanted, here is what I ended up with:

1. Email automation for things like subscriber email auto sending as well as sending reminders to do reviews etc. Manual is fine but the more I’m doing this then the less I’m writing.
2. Affordable
3. Customizable email templates without branding
4. Affordable
5. Ability to create user segments without breaking the bank
6. Integrations with Divi or Bloom
7. Affordable

While both of the previous companies I mentioned had those options, so do sites like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign. The problem for me, as you can see from the list above, none of them was as affordable as MailerLite. I know some people love ConvertKit, but that first jump to $29/month for the same features you get from MailerLite for $10/month is huge. Maybe after I get thousands of subscribers this will make sense.

I didn’t choose Mailchimp because it didn’t have automations in their free tier and their paid tier was $5/month higher. For now, I chose MailerLite.

Converting was super easy as far as users go. I exported my tiny set of subscribers in a few seconds. I then created a simple segment to track people who came in from this website and added them to that segment. Segments will be useful in the future when I want to do newsletter sharing to add subscribers or track if they came from the back of my book instead of the site. Easy peasy.

Then came the easy harder part. Getting Divi integrated with MailerLite was super simple and done in a matter of minutes. I created a global module and then added it to the bottom of the pages I wanted the form on. Easy peasy … well, except for setting the segments. Apparently Divi doesn’t let you easily set values of hidden form elements ??‍♂️ … I have no idea. After a few hours of messing around today I managed to write some JavaScript that was able to set the hidden field value I was able to setup. Not something a normal person could do but as a web / technology nerd I could.

After the forms were setup I created a onboarding automation and did a whole bunch of testing. I also setup and modified a bunch of DNS records setting up MailerLite to verify and trust my domain and to decrease the chance that I’ll get marked as spam when I send emails. Again, not something most people can easily do but I can.

So after playing around last weekend, I have a new look & feel on my website, a newsletter integrated, and a beginning set of automations that will make my life easier as an author. If you have any questions about Divi or MailerLite then please drop me a message or a comment.