Mailchimp is vs. Mailerlite vs. SendinBlue: The best marketer for email

There are a myriad of marketing channels -- a myriad of social media sites, live meetings, webinars, phone calls, online forums and chat rooms -- email is still a hugely popular choice for communicating with customers. It's inexpensive and allows you to establish a direct relationship with your audience.

However, which one is easiest to use and also the most cost-effective? Which marketing tool for email can help you reduce bounce rates, or helps you build the best-looking emails, or provides the most granular information management?

We're here to take an in-depth look at the most successful and well-known companies for email marketing.

Do you want to compare platforms such as Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Drip and ConvertKit? Keep an eye out! The deep dive we will take into the top CRM-related ecosystems will be coming shortly!

A quick comparison chart

Mailchimp is a full world of opportunities

Pricing and features

It is advertised as a platform to "grow your customer base and increase your income", Mailchimp is an E-commerce platform to send emails, automated processes, segmentation of customers, along with tips and education.

Mailchimp has a free forever plan which allows you to mail 12,000 messages to up to 2,000 customers. Even though, with this program, you're required to show their logo when you send emails to your customers however, it's a good offering for up-and-coming businesses. Paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers. This gives you numerous premium services such as an advanced segmentation of your audience and real-time support chat.

How it works

After logging into your account, you'll view statistics for your most recent campaign's performance. This will include:

• recipients
• open rate, clicks and opens per unique open
• A number of deliveries that have been successful
• Total opens and clicks
• Number of orders
• Average order revenue as well as total revenue.

 Audience

It is here that you create, manage and import your subscribers, also known as contacts. It is possible to manually add new subscribers at a time by inputting their email address and personal information into an online form. You can also automatically import data from customers by bulk import from an alternative platform, upload an CSV file, or copy and paste new subscribers' information.

After you've imported or created subscribers, it's easy to segment these people by their prior purchasing habits, their place of residence, or personal preferences. It is possible to manually add tags to your customers in order to send targeted messages to those with similar characteristics, and groups allow you to segment your subscribers based on a set of parameters or behaviour.

It is also the place in which you create sign-up forms or registration forms for your audience to manually subscribe their email addresses to your. This is possible through HTML forms, pop-up box that can be integrated into any website or a contact form which sends messages to your inbox, or a number of integrations to your existing messaging software.

 Campaigns

This is where you design and populate your emails, known as campaigns. You can choose from a variety of email templates in the event that you're promoting new products or an announcement, but you are also able to create new themes and layouts within the Content Studio.

 Automations

It allows users to modify workloads, here known as Customer Journeys. There are almost endless opportunities for you to market your brand or products to your existing audience -- such as the sending of a message with a promotion to cart abandoners- or to acquire new subscribers, for example by using Facebook Ads ads (optionally integrated through Zapier).

 Website

The e-commerce concept is being taken to the next level, MailChimp is now offering the ability to build websites that "tell your story, communicate with others, and develop your company".

It's possible to get operational with just one item; once you've spent about 15-20 minutes, you can establish payments through Stripe (which permits payments from all major credit cards) and as little as 5 minutes of personalization, it's time to start selling. Mailchimp is a software that automatically creates the order confirmation, shipping notice, and abandoned cart emails to your shop.

Mailerlite -- keep things simple

Prices and Features

The company claims to "create web-based marketing campaigns and email newsletters that your customers will enjoy", Mailerlite offers digital marketing tools that can help you grow your reach faster and generate revenue smarter. The MailerLite team is aiming to "provide easy solutions for complex tasks" with clean and functional design and award-winning support.

It is free to send 12,000 emails per month and up to 1,000 subscribers; the Growing Business costs $9/month ($108 when billed annually) to send unlimited emails per month and up to 1,000 users; and the Advanced plan costs $19 per month ($228 if billed yearly) with unlimited email messages per month with up to 1,000 users with numerous add-ons including priority support as well as password-protected pages. For more subscribers, you can incrementally pay more; there's a sliding scale at mailerlite.com/pricing to see how the pricing changes.

What is the process?

After logging in, MailerLite gives you a an overview of the performance of current emails, including statistics such as total active subscribers, new subscribers for today and in the month ahead and the amount of emails delivered open, clicks, CTOR (click on rate to open), number of subscribers who have not been opted out and spam complaints, if they have any.

 Campaigns

Newsletters sent via email, also called Campaigns, are split up into sections that can be drag and dropped in the edit. Examples of blocks include Logo + content an article that has a background image Highlight video, RSS list, 1 product aligned left, and Footer.

Once you're happy with the design You can choose which subscribers will receive this mailer, either via basic targeting or through advanced segmentation such as 'Signup source is API' or 'Signup date must be before July'.

 Subscribers

There are four main options to create new subscribers. Import from an CSV or TXT file copy and paste from Excel or Excel, create a single subscriber and import via Mailchimp. The Mailerlite platform can automatically remove duplicate instances of emails after transfer.

Once you have been able to import or add subscribers, you can segregate them for more accurate targeting Segments are dynamic records of your subscribers according to their traits and actions. Groups let you organize your subscriber base on interests, actions, and more. Additionally, you can add your own Fields to store any extra information.

This section also has the Stats tab. This is where you will be able to examine your email's average open rate for each campaign, average click rate per campaign, an average subscribe rate per month and the average rate of unsubscribe per month.

 Forms and Sites

MailerLite's form builder lets you make and schedule pop-up subscriber sign-ups to capture readers' attention best. There are many types of pop-ups such as floating bars, as well as sliding boxes. You can choose a time duration or scroll duration prior to when the pop-up displays.

Additionally, you can create landing pages to gather registrations, or promote older emails to increase engagement, or even publish an online survey to drive customer engagement.

 Automations

These workflows will automatically send messages based on subscriber's choices or actions, such as their birthday, or their first sign-up. It is possible to automatically tag customers based on their on-site behavior and then use the tags to make new groups and segments to use for targeted marketing as well as send marketing emails to customers who have abandoned carts.

SendinBlue -- dig up the details

Prices and Features

SendinBlue is claiming to aid users "Be where your customers are and control all your communications digitally in the same place" through a mix of email campaigns -- including the ability to optimize sending times -- marketing automation, CRM and live chat.

The free plan is just $0/month and allows up to 300 emails per day for unlimited contacts. The Lite package costs between $25 and $30 per month for up to 20,000 emails a month to unlimited contacts and A/B testing and email support. The Premium plans cost $65/month for 20,000 emails for unlimited contacts. This includes all the features of Lite as well as automations, facebook ads, landing pages and telephone helpline.

How it works

After logging into your account, you will get a quick overview of information for the previous emails. The dashboard displays the subject line of the email campaign as well as the amount of people who converted, the recipients, openers, 'clickers' and non-subscribers.

SendinBlue provides the open rate trackable as well as the total number of tracksable open (the people who did not disable Privacy Protection in their email client) to estimated number of opened emails.

 E-mails (within Campaigns tab)

SendinBlue provides a variety of layouts to your newsletter, based on the kind of message that you would like to send: an announcement about an upcoming product launch, or promoting an event or pushing blog posts.

There are templates that you can select from the gallery -- it's also in the Templates section. Or, drag and drop the template to make your own, or even code your own from scratch.

 Automation and Transactional

This lets you build automated workflowsbased on various factors. Every automation is comprised of: an entry point, like an online purchase which triggers the workflow; an action such as sending an email or SMS or a requirement like 'Is this their first purchase or is it their first purchase?'.

The two factors work together to develop workflows that help in a variety of activities, including inducting new customers into the system with appropriate material, sending out discounts to an unengaged customer for them to get them back on track in the future, and offering suggestions as well as upsells for customers already in the business.

Contacts

The are two ways to add contacts into SendinBlue. Either transfer an .csv, .xlsx or .txt file on your personal computer or copy and paste contact information from an .xls file. However, you are able to access using the Forms and Landing page functions from here to build customized web elements to encourage sign-up. You can also create a single contact using their personal information.

The Lists section, conjunction with contact attributes, lets you segment your clients to send targeted messages. To improve open rates even more, you can further modify your personal settings for sending including From Name, Reply-to and the Header/Footer of each list.

Conclusion

MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendinBlue are all geared towards slightly distinct user segments within the email marketing space: MailChimp has a breadth of options; MailerLite is lightweight and cost-effective; SendinBlue is data-driven.

Each option serves a distinct reason, and it's up to you to choose which one is the best for your needs and the audience you're writing for. Have fun writing!

Research methods

For our analysis in this area, we looked at the most important four metrics any top email software should have. When the metrics were identified and analyzed, we gave them a score between 1 and 5 in order to calculate a score that would let us rank them. Based on the total score that we could evaluate and make a decision about which platform is most effective and merit further research.

The measures The four metrics with explanations for what we consider to be the most effective marketing service for email should provide:

 The speed and ease in getting going

1. Was it easy to set up, including creating an account and sending your first email?
2. Did the instructions for completing the more complex task like building websites, easy to follow?
3. Is there a logical and easy way to get between the various services offered by the platform?

 Integration ease and level of intuition

1. What is the easiest way to connect the platform with third-party software?
2. If there are no existing integrations, is building one simple? Do APIs are readily available?
3. Are there features that are unfinished? It is it simple to design an email that appears and feels close to what you imagined?

 Brand positioning

1. How does the company sell its products? How can it utilize words or images to draw potential customers?
2. What kind of clients do they want to draw?

 Fees

1. What are the fees that the program charge? Do you have additional processing costs (due to Stripe or similar)?
2. Are there free tiers or trial? If so, will the trial offer a complete experience or are some functionalities reserved for paying customers?