If you are looking to take your business to the next level, then email marketing is highly essential. It helps to generate more traffic to your website, connect with your customers and build new prospects. But selecting the right marketing tool that fits into your advertising strategies is hard to find. Small and medium businesses rely heavily on email marketing to grab the interests of their customers. Apart from social media engagement, email marketing is also vital to engage with your customers.
Over the years, you could have come across various email marketing tools, and only a few players dominate this sector. In this article, we are going to compare the services of two of those players in Mailerlite and MailChimp.
So, let us begin our review and comparison of Mailerlite versus MailChimp email marketing tool:
What is MailerLite?
If you don’t know what is MailerLite then MailerLite is an email marketing tool specially designed to cater to the email marketing needs of small businesses. It is loaded with a lot of features and allow businesses to use the platform to execute their email marketing campaigns with ease. The application comes with an easy-use interface and comes packed with all features that every email marketers will be looking for.
Mailerlite also features an easy to use drag and drop editor that allows marketing professionals to design their email campaigns quickly without any knowledge about HTML or CSS. All you need is to look at the features provided and select the features you need by dragging it into the work area. But that’s not all, people having HTML knowledge can play with the Rich Text Editor to directly edit the HTML according to their requirements.
Mailerlite Review – Benefits of MailerLite
- Mailerlite is created specifically for small and medium businesses, and unlike other email marketing software on the market, it is a fairly simple and straightforward tool.
- It comes loaded with lots of features and functionalities. Many email marketers have praised the software for its simplicity and ease of use.
- It allows users to install the software quite easily and use it straight from the box.
- Powerful and effective, Mailerlite is a software that enables small businesses to utilize every feature of the best-in-class email marketing solutions without breaking their bank.
- The entire setup procedure is a stroll at the park. The program enables you to tailor your email to how you need it with content forms and agreements.
- You can include all kinds of elements in your email campaign like text, pictures, company information, social media links and anything you need.
- The easy to use drag and drop editor allows anyone without HTML or CSS knowledge to create and execute a campaign in minutes.
- Mailerlite also allows businesses to track the progress of their email campaigns and generate various reports, including click-through rates, pen rates, etc. All email campaigns and newsletters generated using Mailerlite are optimized for mobile devices as well.
Mailerlite Review – What We Like About Mailerlite
- Affordable service
- Plenty of useful features
- Excellent customer support
- Third-party integrations
- Drag and Drop editor
Mailerlite Review – What We Don’t Like About MailerLite
- No phone support
- No support for site monitoring
- Long approval process
What is MailChimp?
If you don’t know what is MailChimp then MailChimp is a popular email advertising service that offers various plans for small and growing businesses and may is capable of sending bulk emails.
MailChimp is both an email marketing software and marketing automation system. Not only can you use it for email marketing campaigns, the software can also be used to create landing pages, Ads, etc.
MailChimp offers affordable plans perfect for startups. MailChimp also supplies various analytical tools to enhance your business. Using robust technology tools it helps businesses to get in touch with their clientele to promote their goods and services easily. User-friendly and incredibly cheap, MailChimp is a major player in the email marketing solutions sector.
Using MailChimp, small and medium businesses can create and execute their email marketing campaigns easily. The platform also enables businesses to manage subscribers, view click-through details, campaign success rates, track email campaigns. MailChimp offers you a whole lot of pre-defined templates that will save you a lot of time. Businesses can also design their campaigns from scratch.
MailChimp Review – Benefits of MailChimp
- Remove manual tasks by solving them utilizing pre-designed advertising automation. It allows you to focus on strategy and participate and follow up with customers that matter.
- Insert your brand logos and images to customer signup forms.
- Easily integrate these sign-up forms on your websites and landing pages.
- You can also easily categorize your customers based on their requirements and create targeted emails to each category. There is also an option to send blast emails to all your customers at once.
- Create automated email marketing campaigns using automated workflows and RSS-to-email. It allows you to send messages automatically based on some customer activities or some predefined triggers.
- Reporting tools allow businesses to know exactly the number of customers clicking on the links in their emails and the number of people visiting their website. These reports can be accessed from your mobile devices as well and hence you easily forward the reports to your team members quickly
- Another interesting feature is “Tweet Trends” which allows you to monitor your customers activities including how many clients mentioned your business, how many retweeted, how many liked etc.
- There are also options to integrate Google Analytics to your email campaigns to get detailed reports and stats about the progress of your email campaigns and how it impacted your sales etc.
- Utilize Tweet Trend to know readers’ activities on Twitter. Google Analytics integration offers insightful statistics about how your email campaigns affect your site traffic and internet sales.
MailChimp Review – What We Like About MailChimp
- Excellent reporting features
- Many tools available in the free plan
- Great template editor
- Import your own email templates
MailChimp Review – What We Don’t Like About MailChimp
- Steep learning curve
- No auto-resend
- No popup capability
- No revision history
MailerLite and MailChimp Similarities
Both Mailerlite and Mailchimp provide a host of similar features as outlined below:
- A/B Testing
- API
- Activity Dashboard
- Activity Tracking
- Automated Scheduling
- Automatic Notifications
- Campaign Analysis
- Campaign Management
- Campaign Segmentation
- Click Tracking
- Collaboration Tools
- Contact Database
- Content Management
- Custom Fields
- Custom Forms
- Customer Database
- Customer Profiling
- Customer Segmentation
- Customizable Branding
- Customizable Templates
- Data Import
- Data Import/Export
- Delivery Tracking
- Demographic Data Collection
- Design Management
- Drag & Drop Interface
- Drip Marketing
- Email Distribution
- Email Integration
- Email Marketing Management
- Email Notifications
- Email Templates
- Email Tracking
- Engagement Analytics
- Event Triggered Actions
- Geo-location
- Landing Page Templates
- Lead Capture
- Lead Generation
- Loyalty Program
- Mailing List Management
- Mobile Integration
- Monitoring
- Multi-Campaign
- Multiple User Accounts
- Performance Reports
- Permission Management
- Preview Functionality
- Progress Tracking
- Real Time Analytics
- Real Time Data
- Real Time Monitoring
- Real Time Reporting
- Reporting & Statistics
- Rich Text Editor
- Social Media Integration
- Subscription Management
- Template Management
- Third Party Integration
- Unsubscribe Database
- Website Integration
- eCommerce Integration
Pricing Comparison Between Mailerlite and MailChimp
Mailerlite Pricing
Mailerlite pricing will depend on the plan you choose and the biggest difference is in subscribers count:
- Mailerlite plans start from $10 a month.
- They have both free and subscription plans.
- Free trial available
- No credit card required to starting the free trial
- Up to 1000 Subscribers and 12K emails/month – Completely Free
- 1001-2,500 subscribers and unlimited emails – $15/month
- 2501-5000 subscribers and unlimited emails – $30/month
- 5001-10,000 subscribers and unlimited emails – $50/month
Check the full pricing list here.
MailChimp Pricing
- Plans starts from a $9.99 a month.
- They have 4 plans including Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium
- Free trial available
- No credit card required to starting the free trial
- Up to 2000 Subscribers and 12K emails/month – Completely Free
- Up to 50000 Subscribers and unlimited emails – $9.99/month
- Up to 100000 Subscribers and unlimited emails – $14.99/month
- 200000+ Subscribers and unlimited emails – $299/month
- The Premium version also includes phone support as well as advanced segmentation, comparative reporting, and multivariate testing etc.
Check the full pricing list here.
Mailerlite vs MailChimp: Drag and Drop Builder
To make a complete Mailerlite and Mailchimp review – we have to compare drag’n’drop builders, because it’s a heart of email marketing and the user interface have to be simple when non-experienced user tries these tools.
When it comes to drag and drop editor, both software is equipped with this fantastic and easy to use feature.
In Mailerlite, the editor is on the right side and design and other resources on the left side. It allows email marketers easily to drag and drop the necessary elements for the email campaigns easily.
In MailChimp you have the same principle only with two columns. You can also use drag and drop elements around.
MailerLite vs MailChimp: Templates and Layouts
Mailerlite offers simple yet elegant way to choose ready-to-use templates from their Template Gallery.
MailChimp also offers a lot of templates for your email in their free plan.
Automation: MailerLite vs MailChimp
Mailerlite provides options for automation and auto-resend, but auto-resend is not available in Mailchimp.
Auto resend features provides customers with a second chance to open the newsletters in case they missed initially. If the software sees that the customer has not opened the email, it automatically sends the email again to the customers.
Email marketers can also change the subject line and message to customize it more personally to attract the attention of their customers.
File Manager: MailerLite vs Mailchimp
When you are sending a lot of email campaigns every day, it means you are using a lot of images and other elements. And if you don’t have a method to organize those images, then it could become quite tedious to search and reuse them.
Mailerlite
Mailerlite allows you to easily organize all your files using their File Manager. You can easily share images and other files quickly with your team or newsletter subscribers. Mailerlite can be integrated with Google drive as well, so you can access all the files from your Google Drive which can be convenient for some people.
It also allows you to search hi-res images and GIFs from Giphy through their File Manager for your email campaigns.
MailChimp
In Mailchimp, The File Manager is called as the Content Studio that allows you to access and organize all the files you uploaded in MailChimp. It contains all your images, documents, product images, Giphy files and also access to your Instagram Business Account images.
Integration Possibilities: Mailerlite vs Mailchimp
Both Mailerlite and MailChimp comes packed with a lot of integrations to make your workflow more efficient.
Mailerlite
Mailerlite allows you to integrate with various web services including Shopify, WooCommerce, SendOwl, Privy, Thrive, Gleam, UpScribe, BookFunnel, MailMunch, MailOptIn, etc.
MailChimp
MailChimp also allows you to integrate with more than 200+ apps, including PayPal, Facebook, Google Analytics, WordPress, WooCommerce, SendSurvey, Mandrill, SalesForce, Shopify, Twitter, etc.
Split-testing or A/B Features
Both Mailerlite and MailChimp come equipped with A/B Testing features.
While MailChimp lets you choose around three variables, Mailerlite only provided you to choose A & B variables. But both features work considerably well.
MailerLite and MailChimp Customer Support
Customer support is great on both platforms. While both don’t offer phone support, MailChimp does offer phone support for only its premium version customers. But you can also contact customer support online on both platforms. And there are tons of information and how-to articles provided to clarify all your queries if you are a newbie to email marketing systems.
Conclusion
When it comes to choosing professional email marketing solutions, both MailChimp and Mailerlite provide a simple and easy-to-use platform. MailChimp is unarguably the best email marketing platform that even gives up to 2000 subscribers in the freemium plan.
But if you are a small business and looking for an affordable email marketing solution, then you can go with Mailerlite.
For medium and large corporates, MailChimp will be the better option as it comes with excellent eCommerce integration features. As a business, it also helps you see your revenue made through your email marketing campaigns.
Hopefully our comprehensive MailChimp and Mailerlite review about MailChimp vs Mailerlite have provided you with enough information on two of the most popular email marketing platforms on the market.
Make your decision based on your requirements and the solution that will fulfill all your needs and take your business to the next level.