Mailchimp vs Selzy. Features and Pricing Comparison

Mailchimp is a tool that used to come to mind every time you heard "email marketing". Which is kind of obvious: it's an email service provider that’s been around since 2001. Since then, many alternatives have come along, all with their pros and cons. Selzy is one of them.

Selzy has been a top player in email marketing in Russia and CIS since 2008. Ironically, it's even known in Russia as a "Russian Mailchimp alternative". Selzy is currently expanding its service to the US market and can definitely compete with Mailchimp in many ways.

In this article, we're going to do a very honest and thorough comparison of Mailchimp and Selzy to figure out which one turns out to be best for your business. We will talk about both positive and negative things for both players on all levels.

Let's dig in!

The overview

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform. It used to be focused purely on email marketing solutions. Now, the company focuses on independent business owners who run their business themselves or with a team. Mailchimp offers multiple options in the field: landing pages tool, visual content creation tools, and social media management.

Selzy is an email service provider. It is an easy-to-use email marketing service for small- and medium-sized businesses. Selzy is very focused on email marketing solutions, though it has some other tools to offer.

Email builder and templates

Let’s start with something fairly straightforward: you need an email builder to create emails. Both Selzy and Mailchimp have drag-and-drop email builders.

Let’s compare Mailchimp and Selzy email builders and templates.

TLDR: both have quite a few blocks, but which has it better?

The main thing about email builders is the number and the contents of blocks they have to offer.

Mailchimp and Selzy email blocks detailed comparison

In Mailchimp there are 13 blocks: text, boxed text, divider, image, image group, image + text, share button, social follow buttons, button, footer, code, and video. There is also a beta version that only has ten blocks.

A lot of those blocks are very similar; there are four different ways to add an image.

Selzy ones it up by just one block, making it 14. There are more things you can do with each of them, however. You can add countdown timers for upcoming offers, attach menu buttons, or a carousel of images (AMP-blocks).

Add a countdown timer in a couple of clicks to get people to motivate customers for purchase.

In Mailchimp, you can customize each block of your message in the ‘Style’ tab. You can choose fonts, spacing, and alignment separately for different parts of your message, for example, for header, body, and your email mobile version.

You can customize the settings for each block.

Mailchimp text block settings

In Selzy, each block can be customized separately, but they are customizable to a higher degree. You can indicate the exact number of pixels for indentation or hide a block for a certain device type. The best thing? All these settings are in one tab, so you don’t have to switch tabs to access the setting you need.

In Selzy, you can set indents for each block separately, and hide a block for mobile or desktop devices

In Selzy you can create separate email versions for mobile devices — add different buttons and text. This is possible because you can hide any block for mobile or desktop devices. We focus on that for a reason: 60% of people use phones to read their emails, so this option really comes in handy. Mailchimp doesn’t have this option.

You can use your own HTML templates both with Mailchimp and Selzy. You can just use a visual HTML editor to edit your message.

What Selzy does better than Mailchimp

• In Selzy you can create an email from scratch. In Mailchimp you have to always use a template;
• In Selzy you can save separate email blocks (for example, a footer or a header) to use them in other campaigns. In Mailchimp you can only save entire emails;
• Selzy has 100+ free templates. Most Mailchimp templates are not available for free;
• Selzy has 12 email layout columns vs only 2 in Mailchimp.

What Mailchimp does better than Selzy

• Mailchimp has an image editor where you can add text to images and use filters on them.
• In Mailchimp you can add comments to test emails for quicker communication with your team. Send a test message and get the response with comments and edits, all stored in the Comments section of Mailchimp’s builder.

Mailchimp's test message has all the comments in the Comments section

 

Check Selzy out in action — access Selzy email builder in 1 click, for free, no registration required.

Email marketing tools

Since both Mailchimp and Selzy offer a whole lot of email marketing features, let’s compare all of them in the chart.

Selzy email marketing perks

• Tools to improve your campaigns. ‘Recommendations’ tool gives you tips on how to improve your campaign to avoid spam folders. ‘Marketing checkup’ tool gives an overview of your email marketing results and provides feedback to boost performance.
• Unlimited contact lists. In Mailchimp you can have a maximum of 3 contact lists for the Light subscription plan and 5 for the Standard plan.
• Detailed campaign reports. Selzy offers both basic and in-depth analytics: click map, dynamic opens report for a month, device types report.

Selzy marketing checkup shows you the weak spots of your campaigns, and what you can do to fix them

Mailchimp email marketing perks

• Different tools to collect contacts. You can create a signup landing page for contacts and put a signup form on your Facebook page. NB: Selzy offers the same features via Facebook and Tilda (a website builder) integrations.
• Surveys. You can share your survey on social media or an email. It’s possible to embed a survey into an email, too.
• Managing campaign responses without leaving Mailchimp. If your subscribers reply to your email, you will see their answers right in the Mailchimp interface and can respond.

Mailchimp survey options

Both Mailchimp and Selzy offer email workflows, segmentation, and A/B tests.

Deliverability

To keep your campaigns away from spam folders, you need two things.

1. Good domain reputation. It depends on your domain, the quality of your email list, the frequency, and the quality of your campaigns.
2. An email service that ensures good deliverability.

Emaildeliverabilityreport.com cites Mailchimp’s deliverability as 80.54%, probably due to its size and varied user base. Selzy offers an outstanding 99.8% deliverability.

Integrations

Mailchimp provides 286 integrations with all types of software and websites. Analytics, chatbots, CRMs, etc.

Selzy offers several important ones (e.g., Magento, Facebook, Zapier).

 

Selzy offers a free direct integration with Facebook Lead Ads. Unlike in the case of Mailchimp, you do not have to have a paid Zapier account to automatically add Facebook leads to your email list.

Pricing plans

Free plan

A free option is available for both services. A Mailchimp free plan includes 10 000 emails and 2 000 contacts (including unsubscribes). You can send your email across just one list (‘Audience’). You will also have limitations, such as no A/B testing or automation.

With Selzy free plan you can send 1500 emails to a maximum of 100 contacts. However, all features (A/B testing, automation, and many others) are available on a free plan.

Paid plans

Let’s compare MailСhimp and Selzy paid plans for 5000 contacts. The price is listed in USD

 

As you can see from the chart above, email marketing with Mailchimp will cost you two to three times more than with Selzy for a similar number of subscribers.

Selzy offers special pricing plans for a specific number of emails

Special features

MailСhimp has everything for emails and even more than that. Recently, it has expanded its focus from emails to marketing in general. Here are the options that come with it:

• Built-in image editor. Add text and filters to your image without leaving Mailchimp;
• Creating landing pages and setting up Facebook and Instagram ads inside Mailchimp;
• Postcards! The company takes care of printing and sending out postcards for any of your clients.
• Creating and conducting surveys

Mailchimp Creative Studio allows you to develop your unique email design in just a few seconds, all thanks to neural networks. You add a link to your website, it gets analyzed for the coloring, fonts, picture style and proposes various design options. However, when I tried it, I got no result. Oh well

Selzy stays focused purely on email marketing. No editors or postcards, but here’s what it does have:

• Marketing Checkup. This smart tool automatically gives an overall assessment of your campaign’s performance and provides recommendations on what you can do better. It analyzes sending frequency, email list growth speed, deliverability, opens and clicks, subscribers activity, and loyalty and suggests concrete steps you can take to improve things.
• Recommendations. This tool checks your campaigns for errors. It detects words that might create a risk of landing in spam folders, the weight of your emails, short/long links, and many other parameters.

Customer support

That feeling when you see that a big chunk of your “Webinar date change” email campaign landed in spam, and it's 10 pm and your ESP support team works 9 to 5… It’s in moments like this that we realise how important it is to get help from your email service provider support representative exactly the moment you need it, not hours later.

Both Selzy and Mailchimp offer user support via phone, chat or email. But there are quite some differences.

As you see, Mailchimp limits their support options depending on the plan you choose. Important: whatever plan you choose with Mailchimp (even the most expensive one), you will never have a 24/7 access to their support team help via all channels.

Selzy provides 24/7 support via all channels - phone, chat or email - for all their users (free or paid) without any limitations.

So, what’s the final choice?

Mailchimp is a platform with all types of marketing tools. You can create a landing page and set ads for your social media, but get ready to pay an arm and a leg. There are lots of options, and with those options comes a headache. The UI is decent, though it gets weary clicking through options. There are way more integrations with services that you might even need.

Selzy is an email service provider with a much lower price, an easy-to-use yet powerful email builder, a deeper focus on email marketing (including many smart tools to boost your email marketing results), and an extensive knowledge base to answer all your questions. And, did I already mention the outstanding deliverability of 99,8%?

The final choice is always down to you and your business needs. Try Selzy for free to see all of its features and superpowers.