Mailchimp vs. Mailerlite vs. SendinBlue: The most effective email marketing platform

There are a myriad of marketing channels -- a myriad of social media websites, in-person events, webinars, phone calls, online forums and chat rooms -- email is still an extremely frequent method of engaging with clients. It's cost-effective and lets you establish an immediate relationship with your target audience.

Which email service is the easiest to use and also the most cost-effective? What email marketing software will help reduce bounces and helps you create stunning emails or offers the highest-quality information management?

We're here to take a deep dive into the most successful and well-known companies for email marketing.

Are you looking for a comparative of platforms such as Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Drip and ConvertKit? Be sure to check back! Our deep dive into the top CRM ecosystems is coming soon!

A quick comparison chart

Mailchimp -- a world of potential

Prices and Features

The company claims to help you "grow your reach and income", Mailchimp is an ecommerce platform for emails and automated workflows, customer segmentation plus education and tips.

Mailchimp offers a forever free plan that lets you mail 12,000 messages to up to 2,000 subscribers. Although, under this package, you are required to showcase their brand when you send emails to your customers, it's still an attractive option for businesses that are just starting out. The paid plans begin at $10 per month for 500 or more subscribers. This gives you many premium features, including the most advanced audience segmentation technology and live chat support.

How does it work

Upon logging in, you'll see the data for the most recent campaign's performance. It will show:

• recipients
• open rate, clicks and opens per open
• A number of deliveries that have been successful
• total opens and total clicks
• Number of orders
• average order revenue and total revenues.

 Audience

It is here that you upload, update and manage your subscribers, also known as contacts. You can manually add new subscribers one at a time through entering their email addresses and other personal information in a form or you can automatically import customer information in bulk from another platform, upload an CSV file, or simply copy and paste your new contacts' details.

When you've imported and/or established subscribers, it's simple to categorize them in accordance with their past purchasing habits, their the location they reside in, or their personal preferences. It is possible to manually add tags to customers to be able to deliver targeted messages to people with similar characteristics, and Groups allow you to group subscribers based on a set of characteristics or behaviors.

It is also the place the place to create sign-up or registration forms to allow your audience to manually subscribe themselves to your email. This is possible via HTML forms, pop-up that is placed on any web page and a contact form that will send messages to your email inbox, or through a variety of integrations with your existing messaging software.

 Campaigns

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

 Automations

It allows users to modify their workloads. This is referred to as customer Journeys. There are endless possibilities for ways to promote your products or brand to existing customers- such as mailing a promo message to cart abandonersor to attract new customers, such as with Facebook Ads campaigns (optionally integrated via Zapier).

 Website

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

It's possible to get up and running with just one item; once you've spent 15 to 20 minutes to set up payments via Stripe (which allows you to accept the payment of all major credit cards) and as little as five minutes to personalize your store, the store can begin selling. Mailchimp automatically builds order confirmation, shipping notification and emails for abandoned carts for your store.

Mailerlite -- Keep things simple

Prices and Features

The company claims to "create email marketing and websites people will appreciate", Mailerlite offers digital marketing tools that can help you grow your audience faster and drive more revenue. The MailerLite team strives to "provide intuitive solutions for complicated work" using a clean and practical design and award-winning support.

It is free to send 12,000 emails per month as well as up to 1,000 subscribers The Growing Business costs $9/month ($108 for a yearly billing) to send unlimited emails per month and up to 1,000 subscribers as well as the Advanced plan costs $19 per month ($228 when billed annually) 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?

When you're signed in, MailerLite gives you a information on the performance of your recent mailer campaigns, with stats like the total number of active subscribers, newly added subscribers as of today and for this month and the amount of emails delivered as well as clicks, opens and CTOR (click for open) and the number of subscribers who have not been subscribers who have not been opted out and spam complaints, if any.

 Campaigns

Email newsletters, known as Campaigns, are split up into blocks which can be dragged and dropped into the edit. Examples of blocks include Logo + content an article that has a background image, Highlight video, the RSS list 1 item aligned left, and Footer.

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

 Subscribers

There are four options to create new subscribers. Import from the CSV or TXT format, Copy and paste data from Excel or Excel, create a single subscriber, and import it from Mailchimp. The Mailerlite platform automatically eliminates multiple instances of emails after import.

When you've created or imported subscribers, it's possible to sort them out so that you can target them with more precision Segments are continuously updated lists of your subscribers based on their characteristics and behavior. Groups allow you to arrange your subscribers according to interest as well as actions. It is also possible to add custom Fields to save any additional data.

In this section too is the Stats tab. This is where you will find out your email's average open rate for each campaign, average click rate per campaign, average subscription rate per month, and average unsubscribe rate per month.

 Forms and Sites

MailerLite's form builder lets you create and plan pop-up subscription sign-ups to capture readers' attention best. There are many types of pop-ups that include floating bars as well as sliding boxes. Additionally, you can select a timing or scroll length before the pop-up displays.

It is also possible to create simple landing pages to gather sign-ups and/or promote old emails to increase interaction, or publish a customer survey drive engagement.

 Automations

The workflows send out emails based on subscribers' actions or preferences such as their birthday, or their first sign-up. The system can tag users automatically by their online behavior and utilize these tags to build new segments and groups for targeted marketing as well as send promotions to those who have abandoned carts.

SendinBlue -- dig up the details

Features and pricing

SendinBlue claims to help users "Be in the same place your customers are, and handle all of your electronic communications from one place" through a mix of emails, including optimizing the time of sending marketing automation CRM and live chat.

The free plan is just $0/month and allows up to 300 email messages per day, to unlimited contacts. The Lite plan costs from $25/month for up to 20,000 emails per month, with unlimited contact and email support and A/B testing. The Premium plans costs from $65/month to send 20,000 emails to unlimited contacts, including everything in Lite and automations, as well as facebook ads as well as landing pages, and phone assistance.

What is the process?

Upon logging into your account, you will receive an at-a-glance dashboard of data from previous campaigns. It displays the title of the campaign, the number of people who converted, the recipients openers, clickers, and unsubscribers.

SendinBlue also shows the trackable open rate and total number of open that can be tracked (the users who did not enable a Privacy Protection option on their email client) in relation to the estimated number of opened emails.

 Emails (within Campaigns tab)

SendinBlue gives you a selection of layouts to your email newsletter, depending upon the type of message that you would like to convey: announcing an upcoming product launch, or promoting events or pushing blogs for content.

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

 Automation and Transactional

It allows you to create automatized workflows, based on a number of factors. Every automation is comprised of: an entry point, like a purchase on the website which triggers the workflow process; the action to take, for example sending an email or SMS as well as a precondition like 'Is it their first purchase or is it their first purchase?'.

These factors are combined to make workflows that assist to accomplish various activities, including inducting new customers into the system with appropriate information, providing coupons for an existing customer in order to encourage them to re-engage with the brand, or providing recommendations as well as upsells for customers already in the business.

Contacts

There are two methods to transfer contacts to SendinBlue: either send a .csv, .xlsx or .txt file from your computer, as well as copying and pasting contact information from the .xls file. You can also use the Forms and Landing page functions from here to build customized Web elements that encourage people to sign-up. It is also possible to add a single contact with their contact information.

The Lists section, in together with contact attributes permits you to categorize your clients to send targeted messages. For a better open rate even higher, you can also alter your settings to send your messages like From Name, Reply to and Header/Footer on each list.

Conclusion

MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendinBlue all cater to slightly different user bases within the email marketing space: MailChimp has a breadth of options; MailerLite is lightweight and inexpensive; SendinBlue is data-driven.

Every option has a unique purpose, and it's your job to decide which is best for your needs and the audience you're writing for. Happy writing!

Research methods

During our research, we considered the top four indicators that a top email service should provide. After defining the metrics and analyzed, we gave each one a rating between 1 to 5, to calculate a score which would allow us to rank them. Based on the total score it was possible to evaluate and make a decision on which platforms are the most efficient and require more investigation.

The metrics The four indicators with explanations as to why we think a top email marketing provider should offer:

 Speed and ease of getting started

1. Was it easy to get up and running and set up an account, such as creating an account, and then sending the first email?
2. Did the instructions for completing the more complex task, such as building an online site, clearly laid out?
3. Is there a logical and straightforward way of navigating between the various services offered by the platform?

 Integration ease and the level of intuition

1. How simple/intuitive it is connecting the platform to third-party software?
2. If there are no existing integrations, is building one effortless? Are APIs easily accessible?
3. Are there features that are unfinished? Is it easy to create an email that looks and feels close to what you wanted to create?

 Positioning of the brand

1. How can the business market its products? What is the best way to use words and visuals to attract potential customers?
2. What types of customers does it aim to attract?

 Fees

1. What fees does the software have to charge? Are there additional processing charges (due to Stripe or similar)?
2. Are there free tiers or trial? If so, does the trial offer a complete service or are certain features reserved for paying customers?