Email Marketing

Mailchimp is an email and SMS marketing automation platform primarily used by small and mid-market businesses, in-house marketers, and agencies to build, schedule, and analyze campaigns across email, SMS, landing pages, and basic website/ecommerce storefronts. Practitioners use it for audience segmentation, multi-step automation flows (formerly Customer Journey Builder, now Marketing Automation Flows), A/B testing, and ecommerce integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and others. Since its 2021 acquisition by Intuit, it has been integrating AI-generated content tools, predictive analytics, and a transactional email/SMS API (formerly Mandrill) into a unified platform — though its contact-based pricing model and aggressive free-tier reductions since 2022 are common pain points for practitioners managing growing lists.

beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform built by former Morning Brew engineers that combines email delivery, a hosted publication website, paid subscriptions with 0% platform take rate (Scale plan and above), a cross-publisher recommendation and paid-acquisition network (Boosts), and a brand ad marketplace in a single dashboard. Operators get per-send analytics, audience segmentation, A/B testing, email automations, digital product sales, and podcast hosting without needing separate tools for each. It targets independent newsletter operators and small media teams who want direct monetization control and compete with Substack on deliverability and economics.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is an email marketing platform purpose-built for online creators — bloggers, podcasters, course sellers, and newsletter writers. It combines email broadcasts, visual automations, landing pages, and a built-in digital product storefront in one system. The free tier supports up to 10,000 subscribers with basic automation; paid plans unlock unlimited sequences, advanced A/B testing, deliverability reporting, and multi-user collaboration.