We are about to launch our MVP marketplace and want to ensure we have all the tools set up so that our clients are receiving the necessary attention. In short, we are a marketplace which enables customers to browse and book surfing experiences with various service providers.
Our needs include:
tracking and organising new visitors and leads
sending transactional emails for new trip requests
creating an automated flow of emails from new trip request → trip confirmation → pre-trip → in trip → post trip
create nurturing/marketing email flows
It looks like hubspot’s free CRM gives us the needed requirements for tracking + organising leads (although we are a B2C business and so are using contacts vs. deals which makes it a little harder to create reports for easy tracking of leads by status).
We are looking at using drip, klaviyo, mailchimp for the transactional emails/email marketing. We currently have sendgrid set up to send the transactional emails as it was the preferred tool for our design/develop agency, however it seems to be very limited in functionality and cumbersome in terms of UI/UX.
Any advice on effectively utilising Hubpot’s CRM, preferred email marketing tools and setting them up to work together would be greatly appreciated - we are currently small in size and so looking to keep costs low, however the tools we use in this initial phase need to support a potentially fast growth!
I’ve seen Postmark pop up a few times on forums here - it seems to be preferred by developers, but limited in functionality and ease of use. How does it compare with the ecommerce ESPs from your experience?
I would disagree. Postmark is very easy to integrate with, and their API documentation is great!
I used Sendgrid for a year before I was forced to switch to Postmark because Sendgrid’s deliverability was terrible where users weren’t getting password reset emails – important emails. Their support team at the time suggested upgrading to a higher plan that supports the ability to purchase a dedicated IP which would’ve brought the monthly cost 5 or 10 times higher than what I was paying at the time. Postmark was cheaper and highly rated by other Bubble developers, so I went to them and have had little to no trouble with deliverability since.
I’d recommend Brevo (formally send in blue), it has a free tier and is reasonably priced with lots of features as you scale your usage.
I built my own private plugin to integrate Brevo with my Bubble app so that I can benefit from all the features I need. I’m happy to publish it if you’d be interested in using it?
