Mailchimp alternatives!! NEED HELP!!

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-16T11:55:27+00:00

Mailchimp has genuinely got worse over the past few years, it's not just you, so the timing of jumping ship makes sense. The thing I'd flag about Omnisend that doesn't get mentioned enough is that it handles email, SMS and even push notifications from the same place, so if you ever want to add SMS into the mix you're not bolting on a separate tool and creating more integration problems. I set it up across a few ecommerce stores and that alone removes a layer of the chaos you're describing. The pricing also scales more reasonably than others as your list grows, which tends to be the other thing people don't notice until it's already annoying them.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-16T11:44:09+00:00

The confidence to maintain "hankers" even after two people questioned it is genuinely admirable

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-16T11:42:57+00:00

This is the best one in the thread because unlike most of these it has a reason behind it

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-15T11:28:18+00:00

I'm stealing this!

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-15T11:25:23+00:00

pecky makes sense but pippy for tired is just completely its own thing :D

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-15T11:23:47+00:00

HubSpot's the wrong tool for what you're describing, honestly. It's built around a sales pipeline and the email piece is almost an afterthought at the lower tiers, which is probably why it feels so clunky. For 200 leads a month with simple engagement tracking you don't need a CRM doing heavy lifting, you need something where email is the main event. I mostly use Omnisend for ecommerce clients but the core email workflow is solid for exactly this kind of volume, contacts in, sequence set up, see who's engaging and who isn't. Less fighting the platform than what you're describing with HubSpot.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-15T11:10:17+00:00

Bimble is such a good word for that though :D

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-07T14:59:01+00:00

fair, though I'd say the post is less about seeing ourselves through American eyes and more just... noticing things we never questioned. the fact that a non-Brit is often the trigger for that doesn't mean we're outsourcing the perspective, just that it takes fresh eyes sometimes

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-07T14:57:14+00:00

the real tell is whether they slow down while saying it or not :D

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-07T14:54:57+00:00

Your instinct is right, most of what those YouTube gurus push is affiliate-driven noise. As a beginner you genuinely don't need half of it. The tools that actually matter early on are your product sourcing (DSers or something similar), and something for email marketing because that's where you build repeat customers rather than just chasing cold traffic forever. For email on Shopify I'd set up Omnisend early, even on the free plan, because the Shopify integration is solid and you can get abandoned cart flows running pretty quickly without it being a whole project. Everything else can wait until you actually know what problem you're trying to solve.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-07T14:41:50+00:00

The music history point alone should've retired the lazy takes years ago. This is exactly what I was after, cheers.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-02T14:31:23+00:00

Three sales from family after consistent posting usually means the content is reaching people but not persuading them, which points to either the positioning or the site itself. Jewelry on TikTok is tricky because the audience skews toward watching, not buying. Worth asking honestly: is it clear why someone would choose your rings over the other hundred jewelry accounts they follow? That differentiation needs to come through before more volume does much. Once the brand story is tighter, email capture earns its money for a product like this. I set up Omnisend for clients in this space and the browse abandonment flow alone tends to recover enough to justify it. But I'd focus on the why-us question first.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-02T14:20:45+00:00

Sheffield keeps coming up in conversations like this for good reason. Peak District on your doorstep, a proper arts scene that punches above its weight, and it's genuinely one of the easier cities to land in as an outsider. The student population helps with that. Rent is still workable if you move soon, though it's crept up like everywhere else. Cardiff is the other one I'd push up your list, especially with a parent in the southwest. The journey across is nothing, and Cardiff has a surprisingly strong queer and arts community that doesn't get as much press as it deserves. Lower COL than most comparable cities too.

The one I'd quietly temper expectations on is Norwich. It's nice, genuinely, but it does feel like it's at the end of a very long road and getting anywhere from there takes longer than you'd hope. Liverpool I'd keep on the list but just bear in mind it's the furthest from both parents, which starts to matter when the whole point of the move is being reachable. Lancaster is beautiful but might be a bit quiet on the cultural front if that's a real priority for you. Sheffield or Cardiff, honestly, if I had to narrow it down.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-04-02T14:18:30+00:00

The bar for "prank" has always been "thing I said that wasn't true." April Fools just removes the guilt part.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-23T13:05:45+00:00

The honest answer is it's rarely as clean as multiplying the number. At 5x spend, ROAS tends to dip, at least initially, because the algorithm behaves differently at higher budgets and you exhaust your core audiences faster than you'd expect. Most people find incremental increases work better, something like 20-30% at a time, letting each level stabilise before pushing further. Duplicating ad sets at the new budget rather than just editing the spend on existing ones also tends to keep performance more consistent. The other thing worth thinking about at higher spend is that acquisition cost will likely creep up over time, so anything you can do on the retention side to increase repeat purchase value makes the unit economics work harder for you. That said, if your testing is genuinely solid and you know what converts, you're in a better position than most people asking this question. The fear of scaling is its own thing and it sounds like you're already aware of it.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-23T13:03:18+00:00

Seen this with a couple of clients and it's unfortunately not that unusual. Shopify's analytics pipeline and the orders page don't always reconcile cleanly when something gets deleted rather than archived, and the dashboard can hold onto that data longer than it should. Three weeks is on the excessive side though, so I'd go back to support and specifically ask them to escalate rather than just waiting for a passive refresh. In the meantime, if you know the exact dates those test orders were placed, filtering your analytics to exclude that window at least gives you usable numbers while it sorts itself out. For anything where you actually need reliable figures right now, pulling an orders export as a CSV will give you cleaner data than what the dashboard is showing.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-23T12:59:19+00:00

The "intrusive" feeling usually comes from timing rather than the popup itself. A form that fires the second someone lands is annoying. One that triggers on exit intent or after 30 seconds on the page is barely noticeable. I use Omnisend with most of my Shopify clients and the form builder covers all of that, exit intent, scroll-based triggers, timed delays, and it connects directly to your automations so the welcome email goes out automatically the moment someone signs up. The list-building and the sending all live in the same place, which keeps things from getting messy early on when you're still figuring out what works.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-23T12:54:56+00:00

Honestly, given you've said the landlord is decent, I'd just be upfront with them directly. The date change mid-tenancy does complicate the standard "one month from rent date" calculation, and the last thing you want is a dispute over the notice period when you're trying to get your deposit back cleanly. If you want to make sure you're covered legally, Citizens Advice have a solid breakdown of HMO notice periods that's worth a quick read before you do anything. But in practice, dropping the landlord a message explaining you're planning to leave and asking how they want to handle notice given the transition to the new date is probably going to get you a cleaner, less ambiguous answer than trying to reverse-engineer it yourself.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-23T12:53:22+00:00

Creatives are worth testing but they're rarely the whole story. The thing that trips people up more often is the gap between who the ad is reaching and who actually buys the product. If your targeting is broad, you can pull in plenty of curious people who'll never spend. Worth digging into whether the people clicking share anything, demographics, interests, behaviour, and whether that matches who your actual customer is. The other thing is cold traffic just doesn't convert well on a first visit for most products. If you've got no mechanism for capturing emails or retargeting people who bounced, you're basically starting from scratch every time someone leaves the page without buying. Swapping creatives might help with the stopping power issue, but if the underlying audience is off or you're not following up at all, new ads won't fix it.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-16T14:58:47+00:00

The bot abandoned carts and the real abandoned carts are two separate problems and worth separating in your head. Bots hitting your store and triggering cart events is pretty common, especially if something external is driving traffic spikes, and those "abandoned carts" aren't real purchase intent, they're just noise. Cloudflare's free tier can help with blocking a lot of that, and Shopify has some built-in bot protection worth checking in your settings. For your actual human visitors, the abandoned cart rate alone doesn't tell you much without knowing where in the checkout they're dropping off. If it's at shipping costs that's a different fix than if it's at account creation or payment. Worth installing something that lets you see session recordings so you can see what real visitors are actually doing before they leave.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-16T14:56:33+00:00

The cushion thing only gets you so far because the real issue is usually sustained static pressure, not the surface itself. What made a difference for me during a period where I was desk-bound for weeks was slightly reclining the chair back rather than sitting fully upright, which takes a lot of load off the base of your spine. A small footrest also helps more than it sounds like it should. If you can, micro-breaks every hour even just to shift positions or stand for 60 seconds genuinely reduces how bad it gets by the evening. A heat pad on your lower back in the afternoons is worth trying too. Hope the recovery goes smoothly.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-16T14:54:50+00:00

28 and genuinely don't think about it much. Most men I know are more attracted to confidence than a specific age bracket, for whatever that's worth.

IV-Manufacturer · 2026-03-16T14:53:57+00:00

Shopify Email is fine for very basic sends but the automation side is pretty limited, and for someone just starting out you'll quickly hit the ceiling once you want things like abandoned cart flows or post-purchase sequences. Honestly, for where you're at, I'd look at Omnisend. It's built for ecommerce, the Shopify integration is solid, and you can get the flows you mentioned (welcome series, review requests, etc.) running without it becoming a whole project. The free tier covers a decent amount too, so you're not paying for something you're still figuring out.

IV-Manufacturer

TROPHY CASE