Which is email marketing tool is best for your business: mailchimp vs hubspot
According to Statistica, there are an estimated 3.9 billion active email users in 2020. This figure is expected to grow to 5 billion by 2023.
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool for businesses.
However, with many options, choosing the best tool for your business can be a daunting task. In this post, we compare two popular options mailchimp vs hubspot and determine how each platform is suitable for your business.
What is mailchimp?
Mailchimp has been labeled as the ‘yahoo’ in email marketing since it was the pioneer platform launched to deal exclusively with email marketing. Launched in 2001, mailchimp has grown to become a popular email application for small businesses and individuals for sending newsletters and emails. Sending email on mailchimp is free if you have 2500 subscribers and below. Once your subscriber list grows beyond 2500, you pay a small monthly fee depending on your chosen plan. To understand what is mailchimp used for, here is a layout of the features.
Mailchimp features
Ready-to-use templates
Mailchimp comes with pre-installed mail templates for all users, whether free or paid. With these templates, add your message and customize the emails before forwarding to your subscribers. You can also drag and drop photos, memes, charts, or any multi-media file that you want to include in the emails. With the in-built edit tools, you can resize, edit, or alter any features on the data to make them more appealing to potential clients. The features are availed on all mailchimp plans.
Marketing Automation
With the mailchimp automation feature, you can add personalization to your emails before sending them to potential leads. This feature is useful if you have an extensive subscribers list, and wish to personalize each email. With the onboarding tool, you can set up a welcome email to all potential clients who visit your website. Further, you can integrate mailchimp to your ecommerce store to follow up on purchases, fulfill abandoned carts, or sent birthday gift reminders to clients.
A/B testing capability
The A/B testing feature allows users to test various email features that can reduce the bounce rate. For instance, you can check the best subject lines to use when sending emails, the best time to send emails, or ideal language to increase customer engagement.
Merge tags
With merge tags, you can add a touch of your voice to every email sent to potential clients. For instance, instead of starting every email with a dear customer, you can use the customer’s name for a personalized feel. Merge tags collect data from subscribers and assign a unique label to the data. Before sending the campaign, select the merge tag and add it to the email.
Pros of mailchimp
Price
Mailchimp pricing is the most attractive feature of the platform. With mailchimp, you can sign up for free and start enjoying tools like free templates, automation, merge tags, reminders, and free landing pages. When your subscriber list grows to a specific limit, you can sign up for the mailchimp starter package, which is highly affordable.
Simplicity
Ease of use is a popular feature of mailchimp reviews. Once you sign up, you can start using the free templates to create campaigns, edit, and post or share. With the automation feature, you can design any email without employing a developer.
Positive return on investment
Mailchimp is more popular with small entrepreneurs and individuals due to its positive return on investment. Even the starter plan which costs $10 monthly, has many amazing features like content segmentation, automation, work-flows system, email reports, and content optimization. If you don’t have a huge marketing budget, you can start with a mailchimp free package and scale your budget as you start generating revenue from your email marketing campaigns.
Cons of mailchimp
Limited flexibility
The most significant limitation of mailchimp email marketing is the lack of flexibility. With mailchimp, you must use the tools provided by the platform; in most cases, these tools don’t support the overall digital marketing strategy.
Support
If you have a challenge using the tools, it might take a while before being assigned a customer relationship manager (CRM). Even for the paid plans, customer support may take up to 24 hours before responding to an inquiry.
Limited automation power
Compared to hubspot, mailchimp has limited automation features. While most email features are automated, you cannot alter, edit, or format the pre-installed templates. Also, mailchimp doesn’t support multiple communication channels like SMS, interacting with other CRM platforms, or changing contact details.
What is hubspot?
Unlike mailchimp, hubspot is a more robust, sophisticated, and multi-dimensional CRM tools. Besides email marketing, you can do more with hubspot like blogging, social media marketing, CTAs, CRM, and website CMS. Essentially, hubspot allows you to manage your entire digital marketing strategy on different platforms like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, affiliate websites, e-commerce, and any other online platform.
Features of hubspot
All-in-one solution
Hubspot email marketing is not the only feature offered by hubspot. It is a complete marketing platform that can manage your entire sales process from lead generation to converting clients, closing deals, and making follow-ups. With hubspot, you get to create more marketing assets such as blogs, websites, and ecommerce platform, a landing page, and videos. This way, you get access to client data across various purchase process and take corrective action at every stage. Thus, to answer the question of what does hubspot does, the best answer is, its an all-in-one CRM tool.
Personalized content
With the smart feature on hubspot email tracking, you can change the client emails according to their activity. This way, you make your emails targeted, personalized, and highly relevant. With hub sot, you can customize the emails basing on the marketing funnel, product category, or the industry of your potential client.
Contact segmentation
As an alternative to mailchimp, the hubspot is more advanced due to its contact segmentation capacity. Using the data collected, the platform can segment the database on factors like geographical location, income level, age, sex, stage in the purchase process, and online activity. This segmentation allows you to create more relevant and appealing messages to clients.
Pros for hubspot
Analytics
Unlike mailchimp, hubspot gives more insight into collected data. Other than grouping, segmenting, and generating reports, hubspot can give you recommendations. With hubspot email tracking tools, you can get into the bounce rate, devices used, duration on the website, buying behavior online, and affiliates activity.
Powerful automation tools
Hubspot is superior to mal chimp since it goes beyond sending auto-responding emails. Hubspot has powerful customer relationship management tools that automate the entire selling process from lead generation, client management, and follow-ups.
Flexible design s and templates
Though hubspot comes with in-built templates, you can adjust, edit, or format the designs to meet your client needs.
Cons
Price
Hubspot cost is the most significant limitation associated with this CRM platform. Hubspot has four plans. Hubspot marketing starter, which is free, has basic email marketing features. Hubspot starter plan costs $50 monthly, while the professional plan costs $400-$800 monthly. The enterprise plan is the most advanced costs, $1200 to $3000 monthly.
Robust platform
Hubspot is an excellent platform for large companies with substantial digital marketing budgets. For small entrepreneurs and individuals, the robust features might be sophisticated for their operations.
Recommendation
While mailchimp and hubspot are great marketing tools, each product is ideal for different companies. Mailchimp is perfect for a small company with simple online transactions. However, hubspot tools like hubspot newsletter and hubspot for Gmail are ideal for more prominent companies that have more complex operations and more data to analyze and interpret.