Email marketing and automation platforms are a necessary component of advertising strategies within most businesses. The digital age ensures that everyone is online and sending promotional material via email is commonplace practice.
Email marketing is one way of reaching and growing a large audience and providing an opportunity to engage better with your target market. Email marketing platforms can include many more options than just setting up a bulk email campaign and pressing send. Most email marketing companies will provide analytics so that you can amend your strategy or keep doing what you’re doing.
MailChimp is extremely popular and well known in marketing circles because of its user-friendly interface and features that most marketers can use right away. MailChimp has gained popularity since its inception in 2001 which makes it a front-runner in the industry but is it worth all the hype and the price?
MailChimp Offerings
MailChimp offers users the ability to import contacts or create lists of consumers they want to market to. Lists can be further segregated by filters to divide consumers up into different groups.
Marketing campaigns can be built with a simple drag and drop method and can be set up to email immediately or at specified times. MailChimp provides set out templates to pick and choose from, so it is relatively easy to use even if you have never worked on the marketing software. The campaigns are set up on newsletter style templates which communicate directly with contacts and allows them the opportunity to unsubscribe at any time.
To generate opt-ins, MailChimp allows the user to build a simple opt-in form and provides code to use on your existing website to incorporate the form. This is simple and the user-interface is average in terms of opt-in standards.
Automation is another important feature offered by MailChimp which helps companies retain and entice existing contacts. Welcome emails are automatically sent when new subscribers are added to lists and e-commerce prompting emails can also be set up to remind shoppers that they left their virtual cart hanging without payment etc. These automation workflows are perhaps more crucial to email marketing than marketing campaigns.
What Is Missing?
MailChimp is built to collect leads, create lists and email newsletters or short messages to the contacts uploaded to the platform. MailChimp also allows for automation workflows but this all comes at a steep price.
According to The Self Employed, MailChimp is a great platform for free email marketing, but there are alternatives to MailChimp, such as Sendinblue, which are more affordable and include better features, especially for e-commerce sites. Sendinblue offers scalable price plans too.
The price of MailChimp’s packages is one of the biggest cons when comparing with competitors. Paying less for a software tool that does the same as the premium-priced one is great for any marketing budget, but the cost is not the only drawback of MailChimp’s packages. The competing email marketing service providers such as Sendinblue offer better automation tools than MailChimp, which makes paying lower prices more appealing to businesses.
Alternatives
Have you done your research? Have you seen what the experts have to say about the alternatives to MailChimp? Let us explore this.
The need for complex automation workflows on marketing software is essential for e-commerce businesses, which MailChimp falls short of. Marketers with many years of e-commerce experience will be happy to know that the alternatives offer better workflows that are better suited to more complex processes. This is a very big pro in the debate of whether competitors have the edge over MailChimp.
MailChimp also lacks the ability to integrate SMS with marketing campaigns, which can open so many more doors to gaining leads and engaging with existing clients. How nifty!
Marketers who manage many different domains at the same time will also find that going with the competition, in this case, is best. MailChimp also lacks the ability to manage multiple accounts from different domains simultaneously. Great for busy marketers!
Another problem MailChimp has is that the analytics are not real-time tracking assistants, for real-time reports, one must refresh the page as it does not do it automatically. This disconnect and that of not being able to use the HTML editor easily could be reasons while marketers are starting to look for better alternatives.
CRM And Marketing Needs
Many companies require their email marketing providers to act as a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) tool to better manage processes and workflows. MailChimp does not currently offer this much-needed service. MailChimp also puts a cap on the number of contacts you can market to which, makes growing your business impossible with this limited functionality.
When taking your client or customer’s personal data into consideration, MailChimp is not GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant, which makes the business of storing of and marketing to your contact list a legal consideration. You cannot call MailChimp for help on this either as they do not provide telephone support, not to mention they don’t seem to notify you when emails are bouncing due to being perceived as spam on servers, which is a shame.
When weighing up all your needs currently and your needs in the future, ensure your email marketing service provider shares that vision and adds to your strategy in every possible way, because without the proper tools, you may as well be spam.
