What makes a good Mailchimp alternative
Let’s see what to look out for, when seeking a reliable Mailchimp competitor.
Automation
Complex automation services help to improve email marketing efficiency. They help you target the right people at the right time –– and do all that with a minimum manual effort.
In Mailchimp, you can trigger email messages and personalize them based on specific actions customers take. But some options lack flexibility. For example, in this tool, email lists are separated from each other, and if one user belongs to two different lists, they appear as a subscriber twice. In some situations that’s inappropriate.
Create multiple lists in: Selzy, Brevo, Omnisend.
Email analytics
With analytics, you are able to evaluate your marketing efforts and see what works for your customers best.
Mailchimp offers an opportunity to analyze your campaigns, but it looks a bit basic and lacks some advanced features like email surveys, opens by location, etc.
The following services are better: MailerLite, GetResponse.
Diverse channels
It’s nice when your email provider not only allows you to send emails, but also create SMS campaigns and push notifications. Even better, when it has options for managing clients and deals: keeping all this in one place saves tons of your time.
The problem is, Mailchimp claims to offer CRM services but they don’t include pipeline management features — it’s mostly for organizing contacts. You can save the day using integrations with other CRM services like Pipedrive — but why would you need Mailchimp in the first place then?
Competitors with built-in CRMs: EngageBay, ActiveCampaign, Zoho.
Send SMS via: Brevo, ActiveCampaign.
Segmentation & Personalization
To make your customers more personalized offers, you’ll need to segment the audience. All modern email marketing services offer this option both in paid and free plans. Flexible segmentation features are important for the success of your email marketing campaign.
Mailchimp allows you to divide subscribers into segments, but the flexibility of this option depends on your pricing plan.
Mailchimp alternatives with advanced segmentation features: Omnisend, AWeber, Hubspot.
Support
Customer support helps to solve your issues with email marketing service, so that’s very important to choose the service with prompt managers available 24/7.
As we mentioned above, Mailchimp claims to have round-the-clock live support, but in fact, live chat is unavailable most of the time, and communication with the bot is not always helpful. Also, the quality of support depends a lot on the pricing plan — for example, priority support and phone support is only available for Premium users. And on basic pricing plans, it is hardly possible to get a reply earlier than one-two weeks of expectation. Let alone the fact that support is only available via email and for the first 30 days on the free plan!
The services with fast & friendly support: Selzy, MailerLite, Brevo.
Mobile app
Mobile apps help get access to all features anywhere, anytime. Unfortunately, many email marketing services lack this option. Mailchimp has a mobile app to create beautiful user-friendly emails on the go.
Email tools with convenient mobile apps: AWeber, HubSpot, MailerLite.
Affordable pricing
At first glance, Mailchimp offers quite generous payment options. They offer an in-built CRM, nice free pre-designed templates to create the best newsletters. But if you read the conditions till the end, an unwelcome surprise awaits you.