Is Mailchimp the Right Choice for Email Marketing or Should You Choose MailerLite?
Mailchimp has over a decade of history that MailerLite does not. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that the enterprising team behind MailerLite should be dismissed out of hand. In fact, they were initially turned down by venture capitalists in 2010 and decided to pursue building the company step-by-step themselves rather than giving away a chunk of equity at the start. And they grew rapidly from there. That demonstrates grit, which is good to see from any service provider.
In this article, we take a brief look at these two email mailing list platforms to see which looks like the better choice.
Pricing Strategy is Similar
Mailchimp was initially free for new customers with a limited subscriber list. This remains true today too. Up to 2,000 contacts can go on a free plan. The free plan doesn’t have the full list of features, but for small businesses looking to get their start, it saves a few dollars at the beginning.
MailerLite also has a free monthly plan that supports up to 1,000 subscribers and sending 12,000 emails sent per month. There’s no access to email templates and other extras, though. There is a paid plan with more features including pre-made templates, the same subscriber limit, and the option to send unlimited emails.
Beyond that, there are higher plans with better limits and features available too.
How Small is Your Business?
Why do we ask? Because MailerLite focuses more on the smaller end with over 90 percent of their customers having fewer than 50 employees. This contrasts with Mailchimp that at the last count has around 70 percent of clients’ businesses with a similar or smaller employee count.
Do You Need to Get Started FAST?
MailerLite is created with online business in mind. They have attractive landing pages ready to go and pop-up opt-in subscriber forms available in an instant. Their online interface is fast, easy to learn, and makes it almost effortless to start making use of their service. For SMEs that care about the speed of execution, MailerLite has that in spades.
Now don’t get us wrong. Mailchimp is no slouch in getting new customers up to speed. However, they offer more features that add potential layers of confusion, and their user interface just isn’t as simple to use as MailerLite’s because of this.
Reporting on Your Progress
There’s an excellent article on the PieSync website entitled “MailerLite vs. Mailchimp: which email marketing software is best?” It’s a great question and ultimately depends on your business. Certainly, the advanced features are covered well in the above article.
One of these advanced features is reporting options. While MailerLite provides some reporting information, figuring out the ROI on each email campaign is made possible using Mailchimp. The analytical breakdown and tracking of completed orders make it possible to know when the list is profitable for each campaign.
Also, if you’re looking more towards Mailchimp for its added features, then take a look at PieSync too. It provides the cloud syncing of data between different online apps, CRMs, and SaaS providers. Using it, data from different apps can be shared securely to ensure they’re all are using the latest customer information.
While looking only at the pricing indicates that both MailerLite and Mailchimp have taken a similar approach to free plans, their differences become starker the closer you look. For smaller SMEs, the trend is clearly towards MailerLite as the more affordable, easier to use mailing list provider whereas growing ones might want to look towards Mailchimp instead
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