Mailchimp Vs. Mailerlite vs. SendinBlue: The best email marketing platform

In a world of countless marketing channels -- numerous social media websites, in-person meetings, webinars, telephone calls, forums online and chat rooms email is still an extremely frequent method of engaging with clients. It's inexpensive and lets you establish close relationships with your audience.

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

This is a deep dive into the most successful and well-known companies for email marketing.

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

A quick comparison chart

Mailchimp -a land of possibilities

Prices and Features

The company claims to help you "grow your reach and income", Mailchimp is an E-commerce platform to send emails, automated workflows, customer segmentation, as well as education and advice.

Mailchimp provides a perpetual free program that allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. While, on this program, you're required to show their logo on your emails to clients, it's still an attractive offering for up-and-coming businesses. Plans that are paid start at just $10/month for 500 or more subscribers. This gives you many premium features, including more advanced audience segmentation and live chat support.

How does it work

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

• recipients
• open rate and clicks per open
• number of successful deliveries
• Total opens and clicks
• Number of orders
• average order revenue and total revenues.

 Audience

Here you can create, manage and import your subscribers, also referred to as contacts. The user can add subscribers at a time by inputting their email address and other personal information in a form or you can automatically import customer information via bulk on another platform, or upload an CSV file or simply copy and paste your new contacts' details.

When you've imported and/or created subscribers, it's easy to categorize them according to their previous purchasing habits, their the location they reside in, or their personal preferences. The ability to add tags manually to your customers in order to send targeted messages to those that share the same characteristics. Groups allow you to group customers based on certain characteristics or behaviors.

This section is also in which you create sign-up forms or registration forms for users to sign up manually themselves to your email. This can be done via HTML forms, pop-up window that could be embedded on any site or a contact form which will send messages to your email inbox, or through a variety of connections with your current messaging program.

 Campaigns

This is where you design and then populate your email, called campaigns. There's a choice of templates for emails to choose from depending on if you are pushing new products or making an announcement. You may also create your own themes and layouts using the Content Studio.

 Automations

It allows users to modify their workloads. This is referred to as Customer Journeys. There are endless possibilities for you to market your brand or products for your current customerslike sending a promotional message to customers who have abandoned their cartsor to attract new subscribers, for example with Facebook Ads campaigns (optionally integrated by Zapier).

 Website

Incorporating the idea of e-commerce to the next level MailChimp now also offers a website-building platform to "tell your tale, communicate to people and expand your business".

It is possible to be operational with just one software; and after taking about 15-20 minutes, you can set up payments via Stripe (which lets you receive the payment of all major credit cards) and just 5 minutes of personalization, the store can begin selling. Mailchimp is a software that automatically creates order confirmation, shipping notification and emails for abandoned carts to your shop.

Mailerlite -keep things simple

Pricing and features

The company claims to "create email marketing and websites your audience will love", Mailerlite offers digital marketing tools to increase your reach faster and generate revenues smarter. The MailerLite team strives to "provide easy solutions for complex jobs" with clean and functional design , and award-winning service.

The service is free 12,000 emails per month as well as 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 subscribers as well as the Advanced plan is $19/month ($228 for a yearly billing) for unlimited monthly emails with up to 1,000 users including numerous additional features such as priority support and secure 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 performance overview of recent mailer campaigns, with stats like total active subscribers, new subscribers today and this month the number of emails that were sent open, clicks, CTOR (click to open rate), number of unsubscribed and spam complaints if there are any.

 Campaigns

Newsletters for email, also called Campaigns, are split up into blocks which can be moved and then dropped into the editor. Blocks that can be used as examples include Logo + Content an article that has a background image Highlight video, the RSS list, 1 product aligned left and footer.

If you're satisfied with your design, you can select those who are going to receive the email , whether through basic targeting or through advanced segmentation, such as 'Signup source is API' or 'Signup deadline is prior to July'.

 Subscribers

There are four primary options to create new subscribers. Import from the CSV or TXT file duplicate and copy from Excel or Excel, create a single subscriber and import from Mailchimp. Mailerlite's Mailerlite platform will automatically clean duplicate instances of mail addresses after the import.

After you've imported or added subscribers, you can segregate them to target them more precisely Segments are continuously updated lists of your subscribers according to their attributes and behaviors and Groups allow you to arrange your subscriber base on interests, actions, and more. It is also possible to add custom Fields to save any additional details.

The same section is the Stats tab. Here you will be able to examine the average click rate per campaign, average click rate per campaign, an average monthly subscriber rate and average unsubscribe rate per month.

 Formulas and Websites

MailerLite's form builder lets you create and plan pop-up subscription sign-ups to capture the attention of your readers in the best way. There are many types of pop-ups that include floating bars as well as sliding boxes. You are able to select a duration or scroll length before the pop-up appears.

Additionally, you can create landing pages to gather sign-ups and/or promote old email content to encourage engagement, or even publish surveys to encourage engagement from customers.

 Automations

These workflows will automatically send emails based on subscribers' behavior or preferences, like the date of their initial sign-up, birthday or. The system can tag users automatically based on their on-site behavior and utilize these tags to make new segments and groups for targeting -- and also send out promotional emails to customers with abandoned carts.

SendinBlue -- dig deeper into the data

Pricing and features

SendinBlue promises to assist you "Be there where your clients are and manage all your digital communications in the same place" by combining email marketing -- which includes optimizing the time of sending marketing automation live chat and CRM.

The free plan is only $0 per month for 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts. The Lite package costs between $25 and $30 per month for up to 20,000 email messages per month, with unlimited contact along with A/B testing and email support. The Premium plans costs from $65/month for 20,000 emails to unlimited contact lists, which includes everything in Lite plus automations, facebook ads, landing pages and telephone assistance.

How does it work

After logging into your account, you will get a quick overview of statistics for previous email campaigns. You can see the subject line of the email campaign, number of recipients, conversions openers, 'clickers' and non-subscribers.

SendinBlue also shows the open rate trackable and total number of tracksable open (the users who did not choose Privacy Protection in their email client) according to an estimated amount of opened emails.

 Emails (within Campaigns tab)

SendinBlue gives you a selection of layouts to your newsletters, based on the type of message you want to convey: announcing the launch of a new product, advertising the event, or promoting blogs for content.

You can choose pre-built templates from the gallery -- they are also accessible within the templates section -- or drag and drop them to create your own, or even create your own custom code from scratch.

 Automation and Transactional

It allows you to create automated workflows, depending upon a variety of variables. Every automation is comprised of: an starting point, for instance, making a purchase from the site which triggers the workflow, an action such as to send an SMS or email; and a condition, such as 'Is it their first purchase?'.

The two factors work together to develop workflows that help in a variety of aspects, like inducting new customers into the system with appropriate material, sending out discounts to an unengaged customer in order to motivate them to engage with the brand, or providing recommendations or upsells to customers who are already active.

Contacts

There are two options to import contacts in SendinBlue. You can either upload the .csv, .xlsx or .txt document from your PC, either copy-paste the contacts from an .xls file. You can also use using the Forms and Landing page functions from here to build customized web elements to encourage sign-up. It is also possible to create a single contact using their contact information.

The list section, when used in combination with the contact attributes lets you segment your customers for targeted sends. To improve open rates even higher, you can also alter your settings to send your messages, such as From Name, Reply-to , and the Header/Footer of each list.

Conclusion

MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendinBlue all cater to slightly diverse user groups within the email marketing space: MailChimp has a breadth of capabilities; MailerLite is lightweight and cost-effective; SendinBlue is data-driven.

All options serve a different function, so it is your responsibility to decide which is best for both you and your readers. Enjoy writing!

Research methodology

For our analysis in this area, we looked at the most important four metrics any top email platform should offer. After defining the metrics and analyzed, we gave them a score between 1 and 5 in order to create a total score to rank them. With the score, we were able to evaluate and make a decision on which platforms are the best and warrant an research.

The measures The 4 measures with explanations of what we consider to be the most effective email marketing company should be able to offer:

 Speed and ease of getting started

1. Was it easy to start up and set up an account, such as creating an account and sending the first email?
2. Did the instructions for completing something more difficult for example, like creating an online site, clearly laid out?
3. Do you have a clear and easy way to get between the various services offered by the platform?

 Ease of integration and degree of intuitive

1. How simple/intuitive it is to integrate the platform with third-party software?
2. If there are no existing integrations available, are they effortless? Are APIs easily accessible?
3. Do you have features that seem unfinished? Are you able to easily create an email that looks and feels close to what you had in mind?

 Brand positioning

1. How does the company sell itself? How can it utilize words and images to entice customers?
2. Which kind of customer does it aim to attract?

 Fees

1. What is the cost that the software have to charge? Are there additional processing charges (due to Stripe and other similar)?
2. Is there a free tier or trial? If so, does the trial provide a full experience or are some functionalities only available to paying customers?