Is Systeme.io the perfect all-in-one tool… for everyone?
Had you asked me three months ago, I would have said yes.
I migrated from Kajabi to Systeme.io one year ago and it has been working great for the business model I had.
But it has a few limitations, especially as I changed my brand. Let’s see which and who I now recommend it for.
Written in July 2023. Updated in October 2023.
An overview of Systeme.io features
Systeme.io is an excellent platform that covers nearly all of your online business needs. It simply works - and it is simple to use.
Systeme.io hosts your website and blog (including multiple domains).
Systeme.io features the crucial Autoresponder, needed for email marketing; both campaigns and newsletters with advanced automations.
Systeme.io has excellent sales funnels with multiple payment processors (currently Stripe, PayPal, Mercado Pago, Razorpay, Flutterwave and Mollie).
Systeme.io has also a very convenient course platform, where each course library is hosted under its own domain (if you have several domains) and the students can see all the menus and buttons in their own language (as per the 9 languages I mention below).
You can easily configure an affiliate program to let anyone in your contact list promote your own courses without them taking any additional setup steps to become an affiliate. (And you can become an affiliate of Systeme as well; my link for that is https://tisha.tv/systeme).
The Systeme.io customer service (via email) is very good, both when it comes to answer your questions, and when you want to look them up in their blog or Facebook group. They also keep developing, so new features come out every month and you can vote on new features you wish for in their roadmap.
On top of that, Systeme.io is probably the cheapest online platform you will find. I love that you can start for free with full functionality (so I can recommend it to my students), scaling up to 27 and 47 dollars per month with increasing limits, and at 97 dollars you get the unlimited plan (a very unusual feature, especially with regards to how many email subscribers you can have). With the yearly plan, you pay 30% less.
Another thing that is quite important to me is that Systeme.io is multilingual! Rather unusual too. The back office and the customer service and blog are available in 9 languages! English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Russian and Chinese. Quite impressive.
All of this without additional plugins, and without Zapier!
How I’ve used it
I’ve grown it to 5 domains with 3 blogs, 12k email subscribers and I’ve had 6,000 dollar months in course sales with it.
I’m not saying this to brag but just to put it into perspective. Context is crucial because there is no perfect tool - we always have to consider “perfect for whom”.
I’ll go over the features with their pros and limitations, and explain a couple case studies to clarify and help you decide.
Pros and limitations of each feature
The free plan
When you’re just starting your business, it’s a huge benefit to be able to use the free plan. You get 2000 email contacts (very generous!), 3 sales funnels with 15 steps, 1 blog (=website) with unlimited posts, 1 domain, 1 course to sell with unlimited students, 1 community with unlimited members, unlimited file storage (!!!), 1 workflow (advanced automation), 1 automation rule, 1 tag, 1 automated email campaign, 1 coupon code, 1 1-click upsell, 1 order bump, 1 AB testing. Very generous indeed.
Limitations to the free plan
Because sending out mass emails is based on tags, I believe having only 1 tag in the free plan is the first thing you will need to upgrade. As soon as you have an email list with a bunch of people who have not yet purchased, and you start having those who have purchased, you do need to segment them.
The good news is that you get 10 tags (which is frankly enough for many people) at the 27-dollar Startup plan.
Sales Funnels
Systeme.io is built making an emphasis on the sales funnels. Probably its strongest feature is the sales funnel capability, which can be configured where each landing page has its own domain if you wish to. There are many templates that are beautifully designed, and the automations between steps are flawless.
Systeme.io has excellent and simple countdown timers that can be configured to redirect a page at a certain date or time (they are actually perfect even if you wish to redirect something right away).
Because the cart and course platform are hosted under the same virtual roof, it’s flawless. You can let a visitor see your sales page, watch a video, purchase a course, get an order bump, accept or refuse one or several 1-click upsells and downsells, and finally get their login email without leaving the space, no plugins and no additional integrations.
You can also create multiple discount codes, bundles, drip course content, evergreen webinars and complex automations.
And these funnels have pretty good statistics on conversion rates at each step of the funnel.
Systeme.io Sales Funnels Limitations
While Systeme.io has a lot of pretty templates for both the squeeze page, sales page and cart page, they don’t follow the same visuals or themes. It can therefore be tricky to find a sequence of pages of different types with matching styles.
The countdown timers work quite perfectly for general countdowns (such as a live course launch) and also for limited countdowns (like in the upsell page, “you have this offer for X minutes and it disappears when you leave this page”).
However, the “Deadline Funnel” feature (where the timer starts as the person registers), used on evergreen webinars, works based on cookies, so if your lead registers to watch a webinar on their phone and decides to watch it later on their computer or tablet in a larger screen, the system won’t recognize them and will show the expired page.
There is currently no option for a 100% discount code (but it’s announced to be coming soon, in their roadmap). And you cannot copy a sales funnel step and “convert the type” so if you intend to have a free version of the sales page, you will need to create the copied sales page from scratch (or from saved blocks). — UPDATE: It was added in November 2023, so YES there is a 100% coupon code option now! 😀
Email marketing
Systeme.io has an excellent autoresponder feature (meaning that people opting in to a freebie download, or purchasing a course, get an email sent to them immediately). You can create sequences of emails (“campaigns”) as a nurture sequence to warm up the lead to take the next step with you (such as going from the freebie to the paid programs). And you can obviously also send out “newsletters” to your subscribers, meaning the email updates you create for the current moment, that may be sent “now” or programmed for later.
Emails are based on tags, with the option of including tags (only with the feature of “tag A” or “tag B” etc, that is, what many tools call “any of these tags”) and also excluding tags (in the same way; any of the tags you indicate will prevent the email to be sent to them).
You can send plain text emails, or one basic template of narrow width with inserted photos, separation lines, headlines, etc.
Then you can see statistics of how many people opened and clicked (from the list view of newsletters, which makes it very convenient), and from the advanced view you can also see the spam report rate and bounced rate, as well as a list of the emails you sent it to and which of those people have opened, clicked, reported as spam or bounced.
In the automation for email aspect, you can tag people who click “the link” (any link, so you should ideally have only one) in an email, which is very useful to track whether people have visited a page you are promoting. You can also tag people depending on which page they visit, which means you can actually produce tags from multiple links on an email.
You can also do rather complex “workflow” automations, so you can build out rather complex email campaigns where your lead starts a new email campaign once the previous one is ended, if they haven’t purchased yet.
Limitations to the email marketing feature
Since there is no segmenting using other means such as lists, groups or segments, you will need to make sure any and all of the people on your list have the pertinent tags to be segmented properly.
There are no advanced email templates to choose from, but honestly, those often hurt deliverability so I’ve been quite happy with the existing options.
You cannot see how many people an email is going to be sent to until it’s actually sent, so you better make sure all the tags are properly used.
You cannot save your own email templates, so my regular procedure is duplicating a previous email that has the formatting as I want it, and edit it in order to send the new version.
You cannot add any blocks of script such as live timers on an email.
Nor can you do AB testing on emails (yet - they’re working on adding that feature soon).
Funnel vs Website vs Blog
Let’s clarify some terminology.
A funnel in Systeme.io is a sequence of pages with the same purpose. It usually starts with a “squeeze page” which is the optin page or landing page where your contact first arrives to you. Next comes a confirmation page, possibly the page where you download the content or watch a webinar, then comes the “sales page” where you have your long sales text to sell your program, the “cart page” where you have the actual cart details (you can have a combined sales page with cart in the end as well) and the “thank you page”, thanking your customer for their order. You may have optional upsells (offering something more expensive) and/or downsells (offering something less expensive).
The landing page is usually public, while the next pages in the funnel are usually hidden from search engines.
A blog in Systeme.io is the actual website. In the Blog section you can configure your one or several webs, each with their blog posts, blog categories and static pages (such as your “about” page, your “contact” page and “home” page).
In Systeme.io, all blog pages (whether static pages or individual posts) are hidden from search engines by default, so if you want to have them public, you must make sure you unclick that setting inside each page.
A domain is the actual yourname.com or in my case, tishaholistic.online: the actual URL or web address of your space.
A website is… well, it could be a funnel sequence or what Systeme.io calls a blog. Websites usually contain a blog section with articles (posts), but if you are not going to have actual blog posts you could use the funnel feature instead since it can be configured with page header and footer and its navigation.
Something I love is that you can add one of the beautiful pre-designed block of content (a section) in any of the pages (such as testimonials, pricing blocks, etc), and you can also save your own sections as your own blocks for things you use a lot. You may also create master blocks, which you have to be a bit careful with because if you make a change in any such blog in any of your domains, it will be automatically updated anywhere else you use this block.
Some limitations
As I mentioned above, Systeme.io focuses primarily on you being able to monetize your efforts, so you get the best functionality from the sales funnels. These include A/B testing, automation rules (when a contact visits/registers/purchases at every step, something is triggered, such as getting a tag, an individual email, being added to a campaign or a course), statistics, sales figures, deadline settings and list of leads that came from that page.
On the other hand, the blog pages have no statistics at all so you cannot know how many visitors a post got you. Depending on your business model and stage of your business, you may not mind, or it may be a problem.
Automations
Systeme.io has excellent rule capability in style of “if this, then that”.
Trigger types: tag added, tag removed, funnel step form subscribed, blog form subscribed, campaign completed, registered to webinar, enrolled in course, enrolled in course bundle, new sale, sale canceled, email link clicked, page visited.
Action types (outcomes): subscribe to campaign, unsubscribe from campaign, add a tag, remove tag, send email, send email to a specific email address, enroll in course, webhook.
You can also set up complex automation sequences, called workflows, making a visual tree with conditional formatting. The parameters include actions (such as the one in the simple rules described before), a delay in days, hours or minutes, or a decision, where the path of the contact is split depending on whether a condition is present or not. You can also combine multiple groups of conditions where any of them (this one OR that one) are met.
An example that I used here was that “If the person filled in a form indicating country Spain in the picklist, add the tag ‘Country: Spain’ to their profile”.
Automation limitations
Email segmentation is largely based on tags alone, which may not be a problem as long as you keep track of what you are doing. That is, you cannot send an email to a person filtered by content in a field (such as country), that’s why I created tags for each relevant country.
For added functionality, you do get webhooks to link Systeme to third-party tools, but with an important note: the Systeme.io webhooks do NOT include the email of the subscriber. That is, if you intend to have a webhook that indicates the email address, such as toolname.com/api/path/xyz123?email={{subscriber.email_address}} be aware that it will not work (I learned that the hard way, as I’ll explain below).
SEO
Every single page, whether in a funnel, blog post or blog static page, has its SEO capabilities. You can indicate the Title, Description, keywords, Author and social image for the post.
You can also edit the header and footer codes, as well as add Facebook tracking pixels.
Courses
Back in the day I had my courses in Thinkific, later I moved to Kajabi and later Systeme (and Thrivecart). I should say that most of the features in the course platforms in all of these are pretty standard nowadays. You can have course materials in video, text and downloadable files.
I love it in Systeme’s course platform that you can edit each lesson as you like it (unlike Kajabi that is quite set requiring a video in each lesson), and it’s totally flexible to be viewed from different devices.
Systeme does not have its own app, but after having experienced the limitations of the Kajabi course app, it’s not something I have missed (nor have my students missed it).
To be noted: you decide under which domain a course resides, so if you have registered multiple domains in Systeme.io, you can have separate course libraries, and students would log in from the respective website. Which is good if you have separate brands.
You can also link a course to a sales page, so that students accessing that domain’s course dashboard may see other content they not yet have and purchase it from there, which is also a very useful feature.
My recommendation: Systeme.io is best for…
Beginners. You have all that you need as you start your online business, in one single place, minimizing the need for technical skills. You don’t need any plugins or Zapier integrations. In fact, you don’t need to integrate anything (other than your domain and Stripe & PayPal). You can be up and running in a day or two, and even do it for free or at the starting price of 27 dollars per month. Cost effective, simple and efficient.
Multilinguals. People needing the internal sections (“back office” or “back end”) in a language other than English. Since I’ve been teaching a Spanish audience, I’m quite aware of the lack of resources for non-English speakers, so Systeme.io is perfect for an international audience. You get both the internal sections (what you see as a creator) and the public pages and templates in all the 9 languages offered.
Intermediate-level online professionals. If you are getting your traffic from social media, YouTube or ads, and have a full-blown strategy with freebie, email sequences, selling courses or live coaching, Systeme.io is pretty perfect. (As I mentioned in the beginning, with intermediate I’m talking in the 5-6 figure range of courses, with multiple thousand subscribers and hundreds of students).
If you have a large email list of not readily monetizable subscribers. This would be the case of non-profit organizations and even network marketing teams.
Case example: In my network marketing business with dōTERRA, I offer the trainings for my team as courses in a private course platform. I love the automation features that make it easy for me to specify which courses open up as the members do their subsequent monthly orders (I have a total of 10 courses so it’s not a good idea to open them all up at once). Consider the nature of a thriving network marketing business model: exponential growth. When my team grew past 2000 members (that I would not sell anything to directly) I realized I had to leave Convertkit with its model of increasing cost with a growing list (at 2000 subscribers, Convertkit for email alone costs 41 dollars per month, at 10,000 subscribers it costs 100 dollars a month, and keeps increasing). Systeme.io is perfect in this sense. And so my team website, courses and email list certainly will stay there. With the unlimited plan, the team can grow as much as it wants and I will not have to pay any extras.
When Systeme.io falls short - my story
After 2 years of using Kajabi, I went into Systeme.io in the summer of 2022 and was super happy with it. I was paying 97 dollars a month instead of 399 for Kajabi + 199 for Samcart (which has more advanced sales pages than Kajabi but comparable to Systeme’s) so it was huge savings and a much better set of tools.
However, as my course business started to grow, I wanted to run evergreen webinars with deadline funnels. I launched my first in October 2022. That’s when I found that the Systeme.io deadline funnel feature is based on cookies: I had upset subscribers reply to my emails complaining that they had just registered (on their phone) and they couldn’t watch the webinar (on their computer). I had to give them a page without a timer on so they could actually watch the webinar, which defeats the purpose of the deadline funnel… I decided to stop the automated campaign. Alternatives? The pricing of the official tool Deadline Funnel (starting at 49 dollars per month and also based on cookies) didn’t feel any better, so I didn’t pursue that option. I decided to continue with live launches until further notice.
In May 2023 I found Countdown Hero, which implies a one-time payment of 70 dollars and is triggered not by cookies but from the link sent by email so the multi-device problem was solved. I was thrilled and started adapting my email sequence to this tool, counting on using the Webhook feature in Systeme.io to connect it. That’s when I found out that Systeme’s webhook wouldn’t pass on the email address (as I mentioned previously in this post) to the third-party tool, so the whole idea wouldn’t work. (It did take me several days of back-and-forth emails with Systeme’s customer support to clarify why it wasn’t working; I guess the webhook is an advanced feature few users even need).
I decided to go back to Convertkit, my beloved email tool I used before, and build the email sequence there. Because Convertkit integrates directly with Countdown Hero, no webhooks were even necessary, and I could insert the countdown in the actual email. But that meant I also needed Zapier to communicate to Convertkit when somebody purchased the course in Systeme.
And yet Convertkit didn’t have some of the more advanced automation features. I felt that if I decided to actually start using a separate email tool, I wanted one I could really grow with as my business developed even further so I wouldn’t have to migrate again in the near future. I looked into Mailvio (my initial tests got me bad deliverability) and ActiveCampaign (it’s steep pricing shocked me and it felt quite unattractive aesthetically). Then my email experts of reference provided a great offer with Keap, which has email automations but also Customer Relationship Management (CRM) features, so I decided to migrate my new English email list there, in July 2023. It felt exciting to have a proper CRM for the first time in 6+ years of online business. I finished the migration process into Keap only yesterday, but I’m quite happy with the automations I’ve created and all of its features, even though it took me a few days to really understand how their visual automation flows actually work. With this offer, Keap has a monthly cost of 90 dollars for 2500 contacts - I’ll be paying around 300 dollars a month when I have 10,000 contacts. Will it be worth it? I’ll make a blog post in a few months to give an update.
October 2023 update: Keap proved to be unstable, multiple bugs, and no possibility to have an overview of which automations were in place. In the meantime, Systeme has improved some features with emails, so I move all the emails back to Systeme and cancel Keap. Paying so much for a tool that is not even working properly… makes no sense.
Having made the decision to migrate email marketing out of Systeme for my English brand (which is the smallest and newest of my three brands and therefore the easiest to migrate as well), I took a strong look at all the features I had not quite liked with Systeme, to see what else could be improved in my toolset, “while I was at it”.
I’ve started participating in Summits, so I needed a 100% discount code for my offers. Systeme doesn’t provide that and makes it quite difficult to offer a free version of a paid course. I had long yearned after the features of Thrivecart (one-time payment of 495 dollars-no subscription- for endless sales carts) so I decided to go ahead. I was thrilled to discover I could have my English courses for free under the same roof and cut down on Zapier (which has a cost of 30 dollars a month for 750 automations triggered - the free plan only offers 100 automations). The courses section in Thrivecart Learn are fairly similar to those of Systeme, but the student dashboard has added functionality that I really like.
In the upsell page I was offered Convertbox, and I’m eager to test it (it requires an integration with an email tool such as Keap so I will be able to make it work; but it can also work with Systeme).
I had also decided to have an increased focus on blogging as a source of leads (minimizing social media), so the lack of statistics on Systeme’s blog felt insufficient. I started this Squarespace page (this week!) and I’m quite fond of it, although it has no sales funnels per se so I will do a combination of offering some of the smaller course straight on Thrivecart, having the sales page in Squarespace and the cart on Thrivecart, or even keeping some in Systeme with a separate domain if needed (we’ll see…). Squarespace has a cost of 33 dollars a month for the Business plan, or 276 per year with the annual discount which means 23 dollars per month, quite reasonable in context.
In summary
I’m leaving my whole brand (course platform and email campaigns) for my network marketing business in Systeme.
I’m leaving my two Spanish brands (teaching about natural health with essential oils, and teaching online business) in Systeme, with their courses, blogs and emails.
I’ve migrated my new English brand (teaching online business for mainly female entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space) to this combo of Keap + Thrivecart + Squarespace. The added cost is in the hundreds of dollars per month. Will it be worth it? Only time will tell, but with the Summits I’ll be launching in the near future, my list will grow and so also my student base. At my current stage of business trajectory, I’m willing to take the added cost, also as a case study to compare and see which set of tools actually performs best.
Do subscribe to my emails (there’s a form in the footer of this page) to stay tuned to future updates!
Combining Systeme.io with other tools
Depending on your needs, you can use some of the features of Systeme.io and integrate with other tools. Here’s some examples.
Website in Squarespace (or Wix or Weebly or Wordpress) and email marketing, sales pages, courses etc in Systeme. Just note that if your domain is configured for another tool, you would have to configure a subdomain with Systeme to host your other pages and courses.
Email marketing in Convertkit (or ActiveCampaign or Keap or Flodesk or Mailchimp -gasp) and website, sales pages, courses in Systeme. I would point out that while some tools have much more advanced email features than Systeme, the segmentation capabilities of Systeme are superior to Flodesk and many others. Integrating with ActiveCampaign is extremely easy, in fact it’s the only external tool that has its own integration section. With other tools, you can create an optin form (with script) from your email platform of choice and embed it in a Systeme page. You would need Zapier if you need to tell your email tool that a contact has purchased in Systeme, in order to trigger followup sales emails. October 2023 update: unless you want something very specific, Systeme is actually a great email tool. If you’re in doubt, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll let you know if you can do that with Systeme.
Courses elsewhere and everything else in Systeme.io. While this is actually possible, I’d invite you to consider migrating the courses. It would be easier to manage and unless your course platform has extraordinary capabilities, Systeme.io probably does things just fine. In the unlimited plan, Systeme does offer free migration so you could check it out.
Final Conclusion
We started with the question, whether Systeme.io is the perfect all-in-one tool for everyone who wants to promote their brand, courses and programs online. With the description above, I hope to have clarified who will be super happy with Systeme and even feel its an upgrade in spite of it costing a fraction compared to other tools; and who might need something else.
If you choose to go with other tools, be aware of the huge price difference it means. For a 4000 people contact list, having it with Convertkit + Thinkific + Squarespace as a simple combo would have a starting cost of 66 + 48 + 33 dollars per month for basic features. That’s 147 dollars and you would not have proper sales funnels included. You can do that with Systeme at 27 dollars per month and have better functionality than with the three others combined. Just saying…
My affiliate links:
Start with Systeme.io for free with tisha.tv/systeme - if you later upgrade to paid version, I’ll receive an commission at no extra cost to you.
If you already have a website and email marketing you like, you can get Thrivecart at a one-time cost; host your basic sales pages, basic and advanced cart pages and courses in the same place (they also have multilingual capabilities towards the customers). My affiliate link is tisha.tv/thrivecart.
If you’re looking for an email tool that has advanced automations and features a tad more complex than Systeme, I would recommend starting with Convertkit, which is also very pleasant to look at and feels easy to use. My affiliate link is tisha.tv/convertkit. With this link you can use Convertkit for free up to 300 subscribers before going into paid plans.
Are you curious about other aspects of online business or other tools? Leave me a comment and I may write a post about them! I’ve tried a few… 😉
