Mailchimp vs. Mailerlite vs. SendinBlue: Which is the best marketer for email

In a world of countless marketing channels -- numerous social media websites, in-person occasions, webinars and phone calls, online forums and chat rooms -- email is still a hugely frequent method of communicating with customers. It's inexpensive and lets you establish an immediate relationship with your target audience.

But which email provider is most user-friendly and also the most cost-effective? Which marketing tool for email helps you minimize bounce rate or assists you in creating the best-looking emails, or provides the most granular control of your data?

This is an in-depth look at the best and most popular companies for email marketing.

Do you want to compare platforms like Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Drip and ConvertKit? Stay tuned! We will be diving deep into the best CRM ecosystems is coming soon!

Chart of comparisons at a glance

Mailchimp -- a world of potential

Features and pricing

Billed as a place to "grow your reach and revenue", Mailchimp is an E-commerce platform to send emails, automated processes, segmentation of customers, as well as education and advice.

Mailchimp has a free forever plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. Although, under this program, you're required to display their branding on your emails to clients but it's still a great option for businesses that are just starting out. The paid plans begin at $10 per month for 500 or more customers; it also grants numerous premium services such as more advanced audience segmentation and live chat support.

How it works

After logging into your account, you'll view stats for your latest campaign performance. The statistics will include:

• recipients
• open rate and clicks per unique open
• A number of deliveries that have been successful
• Total opens and clicks
• Number of orders
• the average order's revenue and total revenue.

 Audience

Here you can import, add and manage your subscriber list, also known 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 data by bulk import from an alternative website, download the CSV file, or copy and paste new subscribers' information.

Once you have imported and/or created subscribers, it's easy to divide them up according to their previous shopping behavior, or the location they reside in, or their personal preferences. It is possible to manually add tags to customers to be able send personalized messages to those who share similar traits, and Groups allow you to group customers based on certain parameters or behaviour.

The same section can also be in which you create sign-up forms or registration forms to allow people to subscribe themselves to your email. This can be done via HTML forms, a pop-up box that can be embedded on any site, a contact form that will send messages to your email mailbox, or any number of integrations to your existing messaging application.

 Campaigns

This is where you design and populate your emails, also known as campaigns. You can choose from a variety of email templates to use depending on if you are promoting new products or an announcement. You may also create your own designs and themes using Content Studio. Content Studio.

 Automations

It allows users to modify workloads, here known as Customer Journeys. There are almost endless opportunities to advertise your brand or products for your current customers- such as mailing a promo message to abandoned cart customers -or to attract new clients, like by using Facebook Ads ads (optionally connected via Zapier).

 Website

Incorporating the idea of e-commerce and running with it, MailChimp is now offering an online platform that lets you "tell the story of your business, connect with others, and develop your company".

It's possible to get started with only one software; and after taking 15-20 minutes to set up payments via Stripe (which lets you receive the payment of all major credit cards) in as little as 5 minutes of personalization, you can start selling. Mailchimp is a software that automatically creates orders confirmations, shipping notifications as well as abandoned cart email messages for your store.

Mailerlite -- Keep things simple

Pricing and features

It is marketed as a tool to "create web-based marketing campaigns and email newsletters your audience will love", Mailerlite offers digital marketing tools to grow your following faster and increase more revenue. The MailerLite team aims to "provide simple solutions to complex jobs" that are easy to use and efficient design , and award-winning service.

The service is free up to 12,000 monthly emails as well as up to 1,000 subscribers and the Growing Business costs $9/month ($108 for a yearly billing) with unlimited monthly email and up to 1,000 users as well as the Advanced plan is $19/month ($228 if billed yearly) for unlimited monthly emails with up to 1,000 users with numerous add-ons 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.

How does it work

After logging into MailerLite, MailerLite gives you a performance overview of recent emails, including statistics such as all active subscribers, the number of new subscribers today and this month the number of emails that were sent, opens, clicks and CTOR (click on rate to open) as well as the number of people who subscribers who have not been opted out and spam complaints, If there are any.

 Campaigns

Newsletters for email, also called Campaigns and are divided into blocks which can be moved and then dropped into the edit. 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.

Once you're happy with your design You can choose the subscribers who will be receiving this mailer, either via basic targeting , or with advanced segmentation like "Signup Source is API' or 'Signup date must be before July'.

 Subscribers

There are four main ways to add new subscribers: import from the CSV or TXT format, duplicate and copy from Excel, add a single subscriber and import via Mailchimp. Mailerlite's Mailerlite platform can automatically remove duplicate instances of mail addresses after import.

After you've created or imported subscribers, you can separate out these people so that you can target them with more precision Segments are continuously updated lists of your subscribers according to their attributes and behaviors and groups allow you to organize your subscribers according to interest, 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 can look into your emails' average open rate per campaign, the average click rate per campaign, an average subscription rate per month, as well as the average unsubscribe rate for each month.

 Forms and Sites

MailerLite's form builder lets you make and schedule pop-up subscriber forms to catch viewers' attention the most effectively. There are several pop-up types that include floating bars as well as sliding boxes, and you can select a timing or scrolling length prior to the pop-up displays.

You can also build simple landing pages to gather sign-ups and/or promote old email content to encourage engagement, or even publish a customer survey drive engagement.

 Automations

These workflows will automatically send messages based on subscriber's behavior or preferences, like the date of their initial sign-up, birthday or. It is possible to automatically tag customers by their online behavior and then use the tags to build new groups and segments to use for specific targeting and also send out promotional emails to customers with abandoned carts.

SendinBlue -- dig up the data

Pricing and features

SendinBlue claims to help users "Be there where your clients are and control all your digital communications in the same place" though a combination of email marketing -- which includes the ability to optimize sending times -- marketing automation, CRM and live chat.

The plan for free is priced at $0/month for up to 300 emails per day for unlimited contacts. The Lite plan costs from $25/month with up to 20,000 emails each month for unlimited contacts as well as A/B test support for emails and support. The Premium plan costs $65/month for up to 20,000 emails sent to unlimited contact lists, which includes all the features of Lite as well as automations, Facebook ads, landing pages and telephone helpline.

How does it work

When you log in, you'll get a quick overview of information for the previous emails. The dashboard displays the subject line of the email campaign, the number of conversions, recipients openers, 'clickers' and unsubscribers.

SendinBlue provides the rate of trackable open and total number of trackable opens (the users who did not enable a Privacy Protection option within their email clients) to estimated number of emails opened.

 E-mails (within Campaigns tab)

SendinBlue gives you a selection of email layouts for your newsletter, based upon the type of message you want to send: an announcement about a product launch, promoting events or pushing blog posts.

You can choose pre-built templates from the gallery -- they are also accessible within the templates section -- or drag and drop the template to make your own. You can also make your own code.

 Automation as well as Transactional

It allows you to create automatized workflows, based on a number of factors. Each automation has an entry point, such as an online purchase that triggers the workflow; an action, such as to send an SMS or email or a requirement like 'Is this the first time they've purchased?'.

These factors are combined to develop workflows that help in a variety of aspects, like onboarding new customers with relevant material, sending out a discount code to an unengaged customer for them to get them back on track with the brand, or providing recommendations and upsells to active customers.

Contacts

There are two methods to import contacts in SendinBlue: either send an .csv, .xlsx or .txt file on your personal computer or copy and paste contacts from the .xls file. However, you are able to access using the Forms and Landing page functions by clicking here. You can create custom web pages to encourage users to sign up. It is also possible to include a single contact along with their personal information.

The list section, when used in together with contact attributes allows you to segment your clients to send targeted messages. To improve open rates even further, you can alter your settings to send your messages like From Name, Reply-to , and the Header/Footer of each list.

Conclusion

MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendinBlue each caters to diverse user groups in the field of email marketing: MailChimp has a breadth of capabilities; MailerLite is lightweight and inexpensive; SendinBlue is data-driven.

Each option serves a distinct purpose, and it's up to you to decide which is best for your needs and the audience you're writing for. Happy writing!

Research methods

In our study, we considered the top 4 metrics that any great email service should provide. After defining the metrics, we looked to give each of them a score between one to 5 in order to calculate a score to sort them. With the score it was possible to compare and draw a conclusion about which platform is the best and warrant an research.

The measures The four measures with explanations of what we believe a great email marketing provider should offer:

 Ease / speed of getting started

1. Did it take a lot of effort to set up and set up an account, such as creating an account and sending your first email?
2. Was the procedure for performing a more complicated task like building websites, easy to follow?
3. Does the platform have a rational and easy way to get across the many services on the platform?

 Ease of integration and degree of intuitive

1. How easy/intuitive is it connecting the platform to third-party software?
2. If there isn't any existing integrations, can you build one easy? Are APIs easily accessible?
3. Are there features that are incomplete? It is it simple to design an email that appears and feels like what you wanted to create?

 Positioning of the brand

1. How does the company sell itself? How does it use wording and visuals to attract customers?
2. What types of customers are they trying to lure?

 Fees

1. What fees does the software have to charge? Are there extra processing fees (due to Stripe and other similar)?
2. Does the site offer a no-cost tier or trial? If so, will the trial offer a complete service or are certain features reserved for paying customers?