Jimmy ParkerMailchimp is among the most popular marketing automation systems on the market due to its huge advertising budget. It promises to make marketing via email more accessible and has recently launched a variety of e-commerce features. The company has certainly changed its approach, and we decided to check out how it compares to other players in this article. Are you ready to know whether Mailchimp is for you or not? Then read on!
On a side note, Mailchimp offers its own website builder, but just in case you wanna try other website builders, you can have a look at our best website builders in Canada and best website builders in Australia articles.
Table of Contents
Pros of Mailchimp
- Offers turnkey e-commerce to retailers
- E-commerce and websites offer options for revenue-sharing
- It comes with a flexible free pricing plan
- Full marketing hub
Cons of Mailchimp
- Campaign tracking is a bit limited and can be a little difficult
Mailchimp Overview
The all-in-one marketing platform from Mailchimp allows small businesses to market smarter to help them grow faster. As the foundation of your customer relations, they provide an AI-powered, user-friendly tool that anyone is able to use to succeed. Mailchimp places your customers in the middle so you can send out marketing emails or automated communications, design targeted advertising campaigns, design pages for landing pages, mail postcards, help with reports and analytics and even sell your products online.
Mailchimp Pricing and Options
Mailchimp offers four pricing levels including completely free. Pricing is customizable. For instance, you could pay a monthly fee or choose the pay-as-you-go plan. The latter allows you to purchase credits for your email as you require they are needed.
Mailchimp has a number of features that are good for its free plans. For instance, the monthly email sending limit is limited to 10,000 emails. Also, there are daily limits of 2,000 email messages on the plan for free. Also, your contact list is restricted to 2,000 contacts within this plan.
Furthermore, you can enjoy decent features for not paying an ounce. They include
- Formulas, landing pages, and forms
- Creative Assistant
- Website Builder
- Mailchimp domain
- Built-in CRM for marketing
They are also excellent options. Some competitors such as MailerLite and AWeber also offer free plans. But, you’ll still get the best price if stay with Mailchimp’s no-cost plan.
For instance, MailerLite lets you send up to 12,000 email messages per month for no cost. But, it’s limited to 1,000 subscribers, compared to Mailchimp’s 22,000 contacts. AWeber is limited to 500 contacts with their free plans.
Mailchimp Essentials Plan
The next level to The Essential plan. It is priced at just $11 per month to store 500 contacts. You can however store more than 50,000 contacts however this will increase the cost per month. Your monthly limit on sending is 10 times the maximum number of contacts you can number. Additionally, you can unlock additional features at this level, which include:
- 24/7 chat and email support
- A/B testing
- Customer journey builder
- Custom branding
- Templates for landing pages and email
MailerLite comes with a more affordable Growing Business plan costing $9 per month. You’ll receive unlimited monthly emails and dynamic emails, as well as selling digital goods along with unlimited websites and blogs and auto resend of campaigns.
The Essential plan from Mailchimp isn’t bad at all. However, you can get an even better price elsewhere and also with more features.
The number of contacts is worthy of mention. This is the number of members that can be able to view or receive your emails. However, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts also contribute to this number, which makes the pricing structure somewhat untrue. You’ll pay for unsubscribed contacts unless you clean the list of contacts and that’s not explicitly specified.
Mailchimp Standard Plan
The standard plan allows you to keep as many as 100,000 contact. The base cost of $17 a month only is applicable to as many as 500 contacts. The cost increases when you add contacts to your number. For instance, it costs you 155 dollars monthly for 10,000 contacts.
But, Mailchimp includes a calculator for prices to let you know the price you’ll pay for the estimated number of contacts. The Standard plan also includes additional features, such as:
- Custom-designed templates
- Dynamic content
- Optimization of the send time
- Behavioral targeting
- Customer journey builder
It’s a reasonable price when relative to the market price. However, your expenses could become out of control in the event that you do not keep track of the contacts you don’t use.
Mailchimp Premium Plan
The Premium plan begins with a monthly cost of $299. The limit for sending messages increases to 15 times the plan’s contact limit, which is 10,000 contacts. However, you are able to save up to 20000 contacts. There are also additional features that are more sophisticated, such as:
- Priority support and priority prone
- Multivariate testing
- Comparative reporting
- Unlimited seats and role-based access
- Advanced segmentation
In general, Mailchimp is reasonably priced. However, the pricing structure could be difficult to comprehend. It also increases dramatically when you increase the size of the marketing effort. AWeber may be the better option for larger agencies that have complex marketing plans. It’s less expensive and has more features that an agency needs.
Let’s examine what Mailchimp has to offer compared to its major rivals.
Mailchimp Advantages
Ease of Use
Mailchimp is among the top email marketing entry-level platforms. It’s a fantastic introduction to marketing via email that is an extremely user-friendly interface. Additionally, the drag-and-drop email builder makes the creation of your first campaign easy.
Overall the interface is easy to comprehend and navigate. Also, you don’t require programming skills to create your own campaigns. Mailchimp is also able to accommodate advanced users. For instance, you can build an individual email template using an individual HTML code by using the custom builder feature of the platform.
Excellent Email Templates
Mailchimp provides some of the most appealing and visually pleasing templates for email that you could wish for. Start with the pre-designed templates that can be customized to suit your specific needs. You can also go using the themes that need only inserting your message and then sending off your emails.
Mailchimp is definitely a good choice for those who want to make your brand appear professional. It also offers a range of kinds of emails, such as traditional newsletters, autoresponders transactional, and traditional emails. In addition, the platform offers an effective A/B test feature, which lets you determine which email types are the most effective.
AI-Powered Recommendations
The platform is equipped with sophisticated AI (AI) capabilities that can assist you in streamlining your marketing campaigns. For example, Mailchimp can automatically detect the top-selling items or your customers’ preferences. The platform then recommends the most effective content blocks according to these indicators.
In addition, the smart feature of Mailchimp detects and categorizes your highest-value prospective customers and customers that are most likely to buy from you in the future. It even offers actionable suggestions for improving your campaign’s performance based on billions of relevant information points.
Advanced Reporting
Mailchimp is ahead of the pack by offering a robust reporting feature. You can use a simple report dashboard to track your campaign’s performance quickly. The reports provide all crucial metrics like opening rate, bounce rate click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates in real-time.
The reporting option is also applicable to ads and landing pages. For instance, you could analyze your ads’ ROI and clicks, views as well as gained customers. In the same way, you can monitor the performance of your landing pages, such as views, clicks revenues, as well as registrations to lists.
All-in-One Marketing Hub
Mailchimp has significantly expanded its offerings of features and services following various recent acquisitions. The most notable is Mailchimp purchased Inspector 6, an AI platform for creating content, Sawa, an automated design platform as well as BigTeam which is a survey platform.
These acquisitions have enabled Mailchimp to provide digital marketing options that aren’t offered on a typical marketer’s email platform. For instance, Mailchimp supports SMS marketing because of its integration with Chatitive which is an in-between SMS platform. Other digital marketing options include multi-channel marketing integrated CRM, customized hosting and domain names, and a builder for websites.
Mailchimp Audience Management
Mailchimp provides a variety of tools for managing audiences. A few of these are common features. Some added benefits to your marketing campaigns. The features to manage your audience include:
- Contact and tag profiles as well as tags
- Predicted demographics
- Behavioral targeting
- Built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Segmentation
- Registration forms
The best feature of Mailchimp in this area is its integrated CRM. It’s accessible on all levels including the free plan. The competitors such as MailerLite permit integration with your CRM of choice. But, Mailchimp comes with this feature out of the box.
The CRM built into the software comes with helpful features like linking your customer’s data to pre-made segments, separating your audiences by customized segments, a unified audience dashboard, as well as automated messages.
Mailchimp also comes with a valuable behavioral targeting feature that is available in both the Standard as well as Premium plans. This feature aids in improving the lackluster segmentation feature of the platform. This feature lets you use the behavioral data of your audience that the platform gathers to help you segment your audience precisely.
You can, for instance, offer special deals to those that visit your page, and remind them to abandon carts. Additionally, the predicted demographics is, by all accounts, an innovative feature. The platform makes use of data science to forecast demographic variables like the client’s age and gender.
Additionally, you can use this prescriptive data in order to segment your audience. These are wonderful tools. However, they aren’t taking away the siloed list-based structure. It’s still difficult to organize the contacts between lists.
Mailchimp Creative Tools
Mailchimp has everything you need to design your marketing email campaign starting from beginning to finish. The platform’s creative tools feature set is designed for simplicity. The features include:
- Templates for campaigns
- Subject line assister
- Creative Assistant
- Dynamic content
- Content Studio
Presently, Mailchimp isn’t the perfect platform for those who want specific customizations. In particular, importing contacts for lists of large numbers can be difficult. The customization options are limited to what templates provide, so you’ll have to adhere to the frame of the template.
But, it’s tough to match the simplicity of Mailchimp. This is why it is the ideal tool for making your first marketing email. For instance, the subject line tool provides real-time feedback on critical criteria like character count, word count as well as punctuation.
The intelligent creative assistant powered by AI automatically designs and resizes your design in accordance with your company’s information. Alternately, Mailchimp offers the option to import your customized HTML templates. It’s an excellent option for those who have HTML programming skills.
In short, Mailchimp isn’t perfect for intermediate designers. The standard templates may be too rigid and simple and creating a new one completely from scratch with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) could be too complicated. But, both experienced and novice developers or administrators will be at ease in making the perfect marketing campaign using Mailchimp.
Mailchimp Marketing Automation
Automation helps reduce your workload. Automating repetitive tasks allows you to reduce your workload and concentrate on your primary marketing tasks. But, Mailchimp is far from outstanding in this area. You can only expect basic automation features, such as:
- Integrations
- Transactional emails
- Optimization of the send time
- Customer journeys
These basic automation tools can be useful for novice users. For example, Mailchimp can automatically send emails at the right time, based on your account’s engagement statistics. However, advanced users might be disappointed by the limitations of the feature.
Mailchimp Insights & Analytics
Analytics and insights are essential to monitoring the effectiveness of your campaigns. Mailchimp offers a solid analytics tool that has a single dashboard that covers all your customers. Additionally, you get:
- Surveys
- A/B testing
- Intelligent suggestions
- Reports
There are also useful analytical tools in this area. For instance, the A/B test feature allows you to compare emails to determine which ones are the most effective. You can also test different metrics, such as subjects, subject lines, names as well as content, and time to send. You can however only try up to three variations, which is not enough for experienced marketers and large agencies.
The feature of intelligent recommendations is also worth mentioning. You’ll receive personalized recommendations for how you can improve your images, copy and layout to increase engagement. This is an excellent feature to speed up the effectiveness of your initial campaign.
While they’re useful, Mailchimp’s insight and analytics capabilities are basic. It’s clear they’re designed for simplicity. Large companies with sophisticated and complex campaigns might choose different tools like AWeber as well as MailerLite.
How Mailchimp Ranks
Mailchimp is a well-known name in the world of email marketing. It’s a reputable brand that’s been in existence since 2001. It’s a good option for your initial marketing email campaign if you’re just beginning to learn the ropes. It also incorporates broader digital marketing tools like integrated CRM, website, and eCommerce capabilities.
MailChimp Alternatives
MailChimp doesn’t have to be the sole one available. Here are a few MailChimp alternatives:
Aweber
MailChimp’s closest rival. They’ve got an old-fashioned user interface and feel. However, they are extremely popular with direct response marketers as well as businesses that operate online.
TinyLetter
They’re controlled by MailChimp. It’s MailChimp’s super-simple, newsletter-only service.
MailPoet
Another quickly growing simple email service. They concentrate on websites that use WordPress.
MadMimi
They are focused on just email, making it as easy as is possible for small-sized businesses and websites. They are controlled by GoDaddy.
Emma
A direct competitor that is growing fast with MailChimp.
GetResponse
One of the most established companies in the market. They concentrate on usability, as well as offering a full suite of marketing tools including webinars, email, and landing pages together.
Constant Contact
The most well-known brand in the industry of email. They’ve got a lot of integrations, resources, and support from one of the largest technology companies around the globe – and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Conclusion
Mailchimp is a great option for beginners to market. The platform will help you through the entire process of creating your first marketing email. It also doesn’t require extra web design and domain services for your eCommerce website. It’s suitable for a smaller-scale trial campaign.
It’s true that Mailchimp does not have the same level of strength as its competitors such as MailerLite or AWeber. These options are better designed for advanced marketers and agencies. Pricing for Mailchimp could be out of control when you expand your marketing. The alternatives we discussed offer an improved price, all things are taken into consideration.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Deliverability of Mailchimp – Is It Any Good?
Our bi-annual tests reveal that the ability of Mailchimp to deliver can be improved. MailerLite is a far superior alternative.
Is Mailchimp Real?
Absolutely, Mailchimp can be considered a legitimate email marketing company. It assists small-scale businesses in saving their client data and provides a secure method to manage contact information.
Can I Make Use of Mailchimp in Conjunction With WordPress?
Yes, you can utilize Mailchimp in conjunction with WordPress. All you have to do is sign-up and then add the plugin to WordPress.
What Exactly Is Mailchimp Employed to Do?
Mailchimp is a complete marketing platform utilized by businesses and individuals of all kinds of sizes. It lets you manage everything from emails and automated newsletters to e-commerce.
Are You Allowed to Include Affiliate Links in Newsletters That Are Sent Out Using Mailchimp?
In general, you can include affiliate links to your newsletters, but they’ve got specific domains that are not allowed. When your affiliate’s link appears on the list below, then they will not allow you to send your email.
Are You Able to Use Mailchimp Completely at No Cost?
It’s not a bad deal. You can deliver up to 10,000 email messages to up to 2,000 customers each month. The downside is that they don’t allow you to utilize all of the options (reporting and testing is not allowed by example) and there’s only a tiny MailChimp advertisement within your emails. If you go over the limit of 2,000 subscribers, it can be quite costly.