Buttondown vs. DailyStory

When it comes to growing a newsletter, choosing the right platform is crucial. You want an email marketing platform that has the best tools to make you stand out from the inbox crowd, retain subscribers, and scale your newsletter. With so many options, how do you know which is the best for you? One company you might consider is DailyStory. 

DailyStory is a marketing automation platform created in 2017 by a software engineer who believed that marketing should be integrated. Over the years, DailyStory has grown into a digital platform that helps companies address their digital marketing efforts. DailyStory offers email, SMS, CRM, automation, and popups. DailyStory’s core marketing features include:

• Automation workflows
• Targeted segmentation
• Mobile-optimization
• Analytics and reporting
• Drag-and-drop email builder
• Omnichannel marketing with email, SMS, pop-ups, and push notifications

DailyStory’s omnichannel marketing approach is ideal for mid-sized to enterprise-level businesses and marketers in regulated industries. Because of this, DailyStory is a good option for e-commerce businesses that want to grow sales or regulated industry businesses like CBD companies, while Buttondown is well-rounded with superior capabilities that support creators, publishers, and all-sized companies. This isn’t to say that DailyStory lacks solid basic marketing features that can create engaging email campaigns, because it does. The question is, are these features beneficial to your business **and your brand? Are these features useful for you, or will you pay more for tools that you won't utilize, like SMS and pop-ups? DailyStory is nearly double the price for the same core email marketing features.

Automation

Automation is a key aspect of email marketing and digital marketing in general. All email campaigns will benefit from automated workflows. Automation makes your life easier by taking repetitive tasks off your plate and streamlining workflows for lead nurturing and subscriber retention. Essentially, it does the work of sending emails, like welcome emails, for you. DailyStory offers unlimited automations and provides 25 automated templates. The platform offers automation exports, imports, and integrations like Shopify, for abandoned cart, order shipments, and other e-commerce triggers. Similarly, Buttondown gives you unlimited automations. Make as many as you need to keep your newsletter sends on schedule, for example. Or create automations personalized to your subscribers' actions and behavior by creating custom sequences. You can even organize your subscriber lists by using tags to keep emails relevant and engaging, increasing click and open rates. 

Segmentation

You want to make sure whichever platform you choose has segmentation capabilities to send personalized emails to your audience. Why? Because you want your subscribers to feel like you care about their interests. It’s the best way to nurture lasting relationships with your subscribers and increase retention. DailyStory and Buttondown have targeted audience segmentation that lets you organize your email marketing lists based on criteria. DailyStory’s segmentation criteria incorporate factors as geographic location, behavior, and purchase history. Our in-depth segmentation feature breaks down behavioral metrics such as platform usage, geographic location, open rate, and click-through rates, making it simpler to drive conversions and engagement. 

Analytics

DailyStory’s reporting is comparable to most platforms' insights. Their analytics cover the basic key email metrics like delivery, clicks, opens, and bounces. If you want extensive analytics that provide the ability to learn more than surface-level stats, Buttondown may be a better choice. Our advanced analytics lets you dig deep into performance and subscriber behavioral metrics by looking at opens, clicks, browser usage, referral analysis, subscriber events, bounce rates, and more. You can even do A/B testing by comparing email performance, optimizing performance for future emails. Track as much or as little as you need. Up to you!

In addition, Buttondown makes it easy to export your reporting data. Whether you are periodically exporting your newsletter data to a spreadsheet or you are using it to build a custom dashboard, we make it as easy as possible for you to get your data out of Buttondown. Unlike DailyStory, whose reports can only be exported in CSV format, your data can be exported in CSV or JSON format. 

Do more with Buttondown

Here at Buttondown, we are all about the humanity behind the screen. Your subscribers want to hear from you! We offer many similar features to DailyStory, however, we focus on designing powerful core email marketing features that encourage connection while at the same time utilizing automation and data to elevate your newsletter at a fraction of the cost! Our plans begin at a low cost of $9/mo. Your newsletter will continuously benefit from our intuitive editor, marketing automation, analytics, integrations, surveys, and segmentation tools. Want to implement paid subscriptions with no service fees? You got it. You keep every dollar you earn. Want to keep your subscribers engaged? Use our comment feature to keep the conversation going and build community. Tempted to switch over, but don’t want to deal with moving your list? We will do it for you! No extra cost. Privacy is a top priority to us, which is why we will keep your and your subscribers' information to ourselves.

At Buttondown, we believe that the best campaigns come from a collaborative effort, which is why we offer teams! Teams is the easiest way for you to invite friends and collaborators to proofread your emails, manage your subscribers, and set up administrative details like webhooks and custom domains. Unlike the majority of ESPs, Buttondown makes it easy to own your brand by offering whitelabeling. We don't need to advertise ourselves in your newsletter. It's your newsletter, not our business. Plus, Buttondown’s deliverability is among the highest in the industry, and our spam protection is best-in-class!

We prefer to keep everything transparent and straightforward, especially our prices. Check out how we compare to DailyStory.

At Buttondown, we aim to make building your newsletter easy, enjoyable, and affordable. Our biggest concern is your long-term satisfaction and success. You won’t find any other ESP more dedicated to your needs than Buttondown