Another incidental finding. Loops is a promising minimalist, low-design simple mailer, with an attractive free-till-1k starting offer and – unlike the very similar Audienceful – unlimited automations(!).
This is my comprehensive first-try-and-see review of it.
I like the homepage, I like the docs. It has an essentialist Buttondown-like vibe that I really dig. Let’s jump right in and register.
You are immediately prompted to verify your domain, which is fine by me. I like mailers who take delivibilty serious, especially when such a generous unconditional free plan is offered for early phase businesses.
The Interface – is awesome
I honestly love the looks and the layout. It goes towards that tranquil, clean direction that I feel the email tools of this decade will shift to. Lot’s of white space, noise on the minimum.
Let’s go over the side menu real quick. Fortunately no weekend-shopping-list-long submenus, altough the home and templates tab nobody would miss. (the templates are also offered in the 3 below)
For those light sensitive vampires out there, the moon icon on the bottom corner indeed means a dark theme. I’ll be showing the white now for better comparability to the vibe of other tools I reviewed of late.
Similarly to Audienceful (or Flodesk or Buttondown), the entire focus is on creation.
Loops doesn’t publish to multiple mediums, only email, which is fine by me. Sending emails, you have 3 categories:
- Campaigns (1-off broadcasts)
- Loops (ie. drip sequence automations with a trigger), and
- Transactionals (single email autoresponders, mostly for admin messages)
Group your emails, Transactionals and drips by cases
Compared to Audienceful again – where you could add tags to the content you create – here the organization is by Group categories.
And I like this even better as it gives a logical overview of your passengers journey. Look at this:
I quickly added a base template, I’d go and duplicate for quicker work. Now based on what I’m sending, I’d just drag the new piece to where it belongs.
We are now in the Campaigns tab, but the other two has an identical layout.
Now Loops is tailored primary to SaaS startups, so you will see the prebuilt group categories and templates with that in mind. That’s fine tho, you adjust these and set up the lifecycle of any digital product or service model. It would be much similar, maybe just not using the transactional part.
The template library
Within the templates, you’ll find plenty plain copy swipes for all three categories.
None of these are too well written, but I guess for starting SaaS companies it’s a convenient way to get the necessary messages in place. (And given how much SaaS apps suck at email marketing…better than nothing already hits the bar)
Templates are not Templates 🙁
Unfortunately, despite having a library of swipes, Loops doesn’t allow to use ‘templates’ as presents that you can edit, save and then call into the editor.
If you press on New, the blank editor opens. You can copy-paste. Or you can create a draft campaign and duplicate it to further edit. BUT
The Campaigns section is not connected to the Automations. If you add an email as an automation step, you get the same blank editor.
No way to invite an existing draft or apply a style. And setting all the fonts, logo etc up every time is the definition of inconvenience. (go check)
So 2 browser tabs – copy paste.
To put this into contrast: in Audienceful, you craft your emails at the center, assign a template and then, you can invite it in to the automation. This process supports creative flow … the one in Loops just add extra annoyance.
The Editor, that you are already using
Familiarity is the name of the game in UX design and the editor in this sense did a great job not reinventing anything that Notion users already settled with.
I really appreciate that you can freely reorganize lines (similar to Convertkit) and that the image is resizable by just dragging it’s corner (as in Flodesk).
Nothing is in the way, simple, clean writing xp.
Another good thing is that you can access the entire Google fonts library, to at least write in the style you like. (not that it will necessarily show up the same in gmail…)
Some smaller limitations…and a big one
Unfortunately type / or markdown is not supported, that would be a neat addition.
You also don’t have blocks, columns or anything fancy – if you need these, I’d recommend Flodesk, or Aweber.*
No footer customization?
Strangely you can’t edit the footer and that’s more painful of a problem. For one, the footer is a great place to add menu items to your pages, some affiliate links or evergreen offers. No can do here.*
Secondly, the default footer they made sucks.
In the Settings you can add your Business and the address, and it is added to that “receive updates from” copy.
Your business address (eg. Shady Business Ventures Inc), is not the same as your brand they know (eg. www.gethairy.com) or even the name of the newsletter. But you can’t differentiate.
* Checking the docs, you can create an email design in Figma then upload into Loops in MJML format. There you’ll have both the fancy and the custom footer…just not the convenience and ease.
Moving on to automations and list management.
automations are easy – but limited
Automations (called Loops here) are single line sequences where you can queue emails with delays and filters between.
The filters are well made, and much welcomed – you can (could*) mix multiple rules, extend it to the whole line or just the next step, and set exclusions too. This means, that you have a tight control on who gets what – cool.
The available triggers are new contact, field update and event.
Unfortunately, you cannot update your contacts by automations, nor trigger by links clicked in an email. You will have to use 3rd party integrators – or more likely API.
I’ll get back to this in a sec, because it is the governing theme with Loops.
Before we move on, there is an additional feature in the automatons section I want to show you: branch logic.
I’m not sure how to feel about this. Since the only action available is sending an email, this means a variant of the message based on some of the field attributes.
I don’t like that too much..having versions around like that … it can get pretty messy and hard to look through after a while. (if you had the pleasure to decypher some overcomplicated Infusionsoft automations built like this, you know to avoid these practices)
A conditional show/hide option within the emails would be a cleaner solution, or if there are exclusion filters like in Convertkit and Aweber simply jumping over that step.
This means you can put option A and B one after another with a complementary filter, but then the line continues as one. The problem with conditions is that with most tools you can’t reunite them.
segmentation is only by fields
List management is where I think Loops gets a bit thin for a fully capable email marketing tool. At least on it’s own.
You don’t have multiple lists or tags. Fortunately you can add custom fields: text, numbers and yes/no booleans too.
Since you can’t auto-update fields from within, this means that:
- you need to come up with list management process using only fields (which can be a single record each)
- then set up their update by external integrations – triggered by events happening elsewhere.
As I mentioned filters can be varied and you can save these into segments, so random AB testing is possible.
On the other hand, you can’t filter by past engagement. This means, list cleaning or testing on warm segments is not possible.
In my opinion – as it is now – Loops is only viable as an early phase simple mailer for any other business models other than SaaS Startups.
And you will have to complete the native functionalities with API or integrators.
This is the major weak point of Loops in my opinion, other than the lack of Templates.
API Dependence
No can do without tweaking API
As I got deeper into the practical, real-project setup, it became clear that Loops can only be used for more sophisticated marketing with API or a 3rd party automation tools.
Since they built it towards SaaS clients, I think they counted that there would be a dev guy around somewhere to build these. If you connect your app to a tool, you are probably firing API calls anyway.
Unfortunately tho, this may not be the case on lean setup starting projects, you run on a Carrd page, Ghost, even on WP.
For any auto contact management – field update etc – you have to use an integrator or API.
Basically you have to set these to trigger the link click (or page visit) and then send the signal back to update a field. Loops does support Zapier (actions only), Make/Integromat and Segment.
API isn’t that scary…
Fortunately their API doc is excellent and because the tool itself is simple, so will be the setup.
I just released an open Mini-Course on exactly that:
Setting up API with Email tools, with Loops used as an example.
So with that, you will be able to automate Loops pretty well, creating contacts, update fields…and…be compliant?
Khm…on that.
Double opt in & email confirmation?
We kinda forgot…
As I tried to set up a form on my site, I discovered that double optin is not built into Loops. (wait what?)
The cheerful dev team at Loops forgot to build a simple native email confirmation link, that you get in *every-damn-mailer-there-is* for a good reason.
It’s not that with direct signup your list will be automatically crap, but if you need to comply to GDPR – you want to have new subs to confirm their signup, with their explicit consent on getting emails from you.
In Loops this was clearly an afterthought and quite inconvenient to set up.
- Create the contact via API setting the Subscribed field to ‘false’,
- Then, set up a flow with your confirmation email – since there is no [confirm-url], you link to a custom confirm page that you can track.
- And then you have to trigger a new API setting the field as ‘true’. Now the trouble is how to trigger that, and ID the user.
- Either the confirmation link has to push the email as a query to the page, where there is a button only form they have to click…basically subscribing again with the email added into a hidden field – and that changes the field.
- Or, you Register them as a WP subscriber, so they are logged in the site as their email creates the contact. When they come back, their arrival to the custom confirmation page as a logged in user will trigger the API again – changing the field to true. Except…if they confirm with a different device.
Sounds good? No? Because it’s not.
I prefer simplicity, not just in the UX but in the setup too. Especially for a tool that will cost 49/mo after a few hundred subs. (remember there is a 2k/mo send limit)
And that’s a shame, because Loops is simply fantastic in all else, with a very attractive starting invite.
The pricing – warm Morning turning windy
Now that I mentioned the price, this is another factor that (would) put Loops ahead the other two similar minimalists, (Buttondown and Audienceful), at least for a moment.
The features are not tiered. You can use everything, unlimited.
And below a 1000 subs (and 2k sending/mo) Loops is free.
To compare, in Audienceful or Buttondown you only get unlimited sequences from paying +70/mo.
So for starting projects – I’d pick Loops. Once passed 1k?
Eh…I’d just migrate the hell away. I’ll be honest, the pricing beyond 1k rises with such steep jumps, I’d recommend it for the summer olympics on the triple jump.
It quickly becomes more expensive than either of those two, costing about the same per list size as Convertkit.
So this brings us to the final big question:
Should you pick Loops vs. Audienceful/Buttondown as a project starter?
Is it a keeper or you should migrate later?
Verdict
Ok, let’s recap.
- Awesome, clean UX.
- Great writing interface with smart organization.
- Unlimited (sequence) automations and autoresponders.
- Good choice of 3rd party integrators (Zapier, Segment, Make)
- The forms support HTML embed with some native integrations to Carrd, Webflow and a few more.
- BUT you will be forced to use API, for even basic contact management automation or click-the-link preference
- And deliverability is a question – 1000free attracts a lot of people, who would not bother to set up the complicated double optin while engagement segmentation is not possible.
If you want to learn how to set up custom API for email tools, I have a new open course teaching you exactly that.
What I loved in Buttondown and Audienceful I love here too. Once you get through the setup, on day-to-day creation it doesn’t drag you down, you can do why you came for without any unnecessary clicking around.
And in the starting phase – that matters.
But, to sum it up, based on everything I saw, Loops is
not a fully capable email marketing tool and because of the send limit at the free tier, and the steep price ladder it is
I wanted to recommend Loops. All the great ideas I liked so much makes it a potentially great tool. But for who and and why does it makes more sense than less costly and more capable alternatives? With all that coding, and…well loops and getarounds … you’d pay the same as for Convertkit.
Not a newsletter publisher tool either
Because of the 2k/mo send limit, frequent newsletter are out of the question. No multiple custom domain to support 3-4 newsletters.
Vs. Audienceful or Buttondown
The simple clean editor is a big selling point on all three, and they all use the same linear automation type. (For selling digital products of any kind drip sequences are a must.)
Despite of the API dependency, Loops, has the most capable automation, not just because of the unlimited flows, but in Audienceful you can’t add filters in Buttondown you can’t add additional steps.
But workflow-wise and customization I think both the other minimalists are better.
But what if I really love it?
I kind of do. If you really dig the content groups and the unmetered automations, with the same Notion-style editor, Loops is for you. But it is
- if don’t need double optin and are not GDPR dependent, OR
- you run a SaaS app and have devs around (and want to go lazy and use their templates)
Even in this case, I’d upgrade to Brevo for SaaS, or Convertkit otherwise, once moving to phase 2.
While Loops is fine for a simple mailer in the starting phase, past 1k subs you are paying the same as you would for Ck at every tier.
And once you have multiple products or tiers, you’d benefit from the more advanced segmentation and automation functions that Convertkit offers. (it’s not a hard switch as Ck has a similar writing based interface, just with more options.)
If you want to keep it simple and tidy, Flodesk have a flat fee of $38/mo regardless of the size. (19/mo for the first year through this link)
If you want to stick to this write-centric low-key vibe, Buttondown will also get cheaper beyond 5k at every step and then you’ll have the same automations there too.
While migrating an active list is not that easy as copy-pasting text, with the right plan and structuring you can get through it fast and pain free. It is not as simple though as giving it to the new tool’s team, 99% they’ll mess it up.
I’m planning to make a compact course specifically on list migration, if you are interested in the topic, click here.
What to improve
Loops have a great base. Once they fix a few things I’ll be happy to recommend them:
- custom templates to save and apply across the tool (!)
- custom footer(!)
- double opt in confirm link (!)
- engagement segmentation to clean cold subscribers (!)
- trigger links within email
- field update from the automations
- maybe lower the price or add smaller steps