Mailchimp vs. Mailerlite vs. SendinBlue: Which is the best mail marketing system

There are a myriad of marketing channels -- a myriad of social media sites, live meetings, webinars, telephone calls, forums online and chat rooms -- email is still a hugely frequent method of engaging with clients. It's inexpensive and allows you to establish an immediate relationship with your target audience.

Which email service is the easiest to use, or the most affordable? What email marketing software helps you minimize bounce rate or assists you in creating stunning emails or provides the most granular control of your data?

Here's a deep dive into the most successful and well-known marketers using email.

Are you looking for a comparative of platforms like Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Drip and ConvertKit? Stay tuned! Our deep dive into the most effective CRM-related ecosystems will be coming shortly!

At-a-glance comparison chart

Mailchimp is a full world of opportunities

Pricing and features

It is advertised as a platform to "grow your audience and your revenue", Mailchimp is an ecommerce platform for emails and automated processes, segmentation of customers, plus education and tips.

Mailchimp provides a perpetual free plan that lets you send out 12,000 emails to as many as 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. Paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 customers; it also grants many premium features, including the most advanced audience segmentation technology and real-time support chat.

How does it work

Upon logging in, you'll see the stats for your latest campaign's performance. This will include:

• recipients
• open rate and clicks per unique open
• Number of delivery successes
• Total opens and clicks
• number of orders
• average order revenue and the total revenues.

 Audience

It is here that you upload, update and manage your subscriber list, also known as contacts. The user can add subscribers, one at a by entering their email address and other personal information in the form, or automatically import data from customers by bulk import from an alternative platform, upload an CSV file, or simply copy and paste your new subscribers' information.

Once you have imported and/or subscribed subscribers, it is easy to divide them up in accordance with their past buying habits, place of residence, or personal preferences. You can manually add Tags on customers' accounts in order to send targeted messages to customers that share the same characteristics. groups allow you to segment your subscribers according to certain characteristics or behaviors.

This section is also where you build sign-up or registration forms to allow users to sign up manually themselves to your emails. It can be accomplished through HTML forms, a pop-up window that could be placed on any web page and a contact form that sends messages to your inbox, or a number of connections with your current messaging software.

 Campaigns

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

 Automations

It allows users to modify workloads, here known as Customer Journeys. There are almost endless opportunities for ways to promote your products or brand to your existing audience -- such as the sending of a message with a promotion to customers who have abandoned their carts- or to acquire new customers, such as by using Facebook Ads ads (optionally integrated via Zapier).

 Website

Taking the ecommerce idea to the next level, MailChimp now also offers the ability to build websites that "tell your story, interact with others, and develop your business".

It's possible to get up and running with just one software; and after taking 15-20 minutes to establish payments through Stripe (which lets you receive payment from all credit cards) and as little as 5 minutes of personalization, you can start selling. Mailchimp automatically builds the order confirmation, shipping notice as well as abandoned cart email messages for your store.

Mailerlite -keep things simple

Prices and Features

Billed as a way to "create email marketing and websites that your customers will enjoy", Mailerlite offers digital marketing tools to grow your following faster and increase revenues smarter. The MailerLite team strives to "provide simple solutions to complex tasks" that are easy to use and efficient design and award-winning support.

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

How it works

After logging 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 for today and in the month ahead the number of emails that were sent as well as clicks, opens 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

Email newsletters, known as Campaigns, are split up into sections that can be drag and dropped in the edit. Blocks that can be used as examples include Logo + Content article with background image, Highlight video, the RSS list 1 item aligned left and Footer.

After you're pleased with the design After that, you'll be able to choose which subscribers will receive this email , whether through basic targeting or through advanced segmentation like "Signup Source is API' or 'Signup date is before July'.

 Subscribers

There are four main ways to add new subscribers. You can import an CSV or TXT file, duplicate and copy from Excel and add one subscriber and import from Mailchimp. The Mailerlite platform will automatically clean duplicate instances of emails after transfer.

When you've been able to import or add subscribers, it's possible to sort them out to target them more precisely Segments are continuously updated lists of your subscribers based on their characteristics and behavior. groups allow you to organize your subscriber base on interests 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 be able to examine your emails' average open rate per campaign, the average click rate for each campaign, the average monthly subscriber rate and average unsubscribe rate per month.

 Forms and Sites

MailerLite's form builder lets you design and schedule pop-up subscription forms to catch viewers' attention the most effectively. There are several pop-up types that include floating bars as well as sliding boxes. You can select a timing or scroll duration prior to when the pop-up displays.

You can also build simple landing pages to gather registrations, or promote older email content to encourage participation, or create an online survey to drive customer engagement.

 Automations

The workflows send out emails based on subscribers' choices or actions, such as their birthday, or their first sign-up. It is possible to automatically tag customers by their online behavior and then use the tags to create new segments and groups for targeting -- as well as send promotions to those who have abandoned carts.

SendinBlue -- dig up the data

Features and pricing

SendinBlue promises to assist users "Be there where your clients are, and handle all of your digital communications in the same place" through a mix of emails, including the ability to optimize sending times marketing automation live chat and CRM.

The plan for free is priced at just $0/month and allows up to 300 emails per day to unlimited contacts. The Lite package costs between $25 and $30 per month for up to 20,000 emails a month to unlimited contacts as well as A/B testing and email support. The Premium plan costs $65/month to send 20,000 emails to unlimited contacts, including everything in Lite plus automations, advertisements on Facebook, landing pages and telephone assistance.

How does it work

When you log in, you receive an at-a-glance dashboard of statistics for previous email campaigns. It displays the name of the campaign, the number of recipients, conversions, openers, 'clickers' and non-subscribers.

SendinBlue also shows the open rate trackable as well as the total number of trackable opens (the people who did not choose Privacy Protection in their email client) in relation to the estimated number of emails opened.

 Emails (within Campaigns tab)

SendinBlue provides a variety of email layouts for your newsletters, based on the type of message you wish to convey: announcing an upcoming product launch, or promoting the event, or promoting blog content.

Templates can be pre-built from the gallery -- it's also in the templates section. You can also drag and drop to build your own, or even code your own from scratch.

 Automation as well as Transactional

This lets you build automatized workflows, based upon a variety of variables. Each automation has an starting point, for instance, an online purchase that triggers the workflow; an action, such as to send an SMS or email or a requirement, such as 'Is it their first purchase or is it their first purchase?'.

The two factors work together to make workflows that assist with various aspects, like onboarding new customers with relevant content, sending discounts to an inactive customer for them to get them back on track, or offering recommendations and upsells to active customers.

Contacts

There are two options to transfer contacts to SendinBlue. Either transfer a .csv, .xlsx or .txt file from your computer, or copy and paste the contacts from an .xls file. However, you are able to access to 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 add a single contact with their contact information.

The Lists section, in conjunction with contact attributes, allows you to segment your subscribers to make targeted emails. To improve open rates even more, you can further modify your personal settings for sending, such as From Name, Reply to and the Header/Footer of each list.

Conclusion

MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendinBlue are all geared towards slightly diverse user groups in the field of email marketing: MailChimp has a breadth of capabilities; MailerLite is lightweight and affordable; SendinBlue is data-driven.

All options serve a different function, so it is your responsibility to decide which is best for you and your audience. Have fun writing!

Methodology of research

For our analysis, we considered the top 4 metrics that any great email service should provide. After defining the metrics then we decided to assign them a score between 1 and 5 in order to get a total score which would allow us to sort them. Based on the total score that we could evaluate and make a decision about which platform is the best and warrant more investigation.

The measures These are the 4 indicators with explanations as to why we consider to be the most effective marketing service for email should provide:

 Ease / speed of getting started

1. Did it take a lot of effort to get up and running by registering an account and sending your first email?
2. Did the instructions for completing something more difficult for example, like creating websites, easy to follow?
3. Is there a logical and clear way to navigate between the various services offered by the platform?

 Ease of integration and level of intuition

1. What is the easiest way to integrate the platform with third-party software?
2. If there isn't any existing integrations, can you build one simple? Are APIs easily accessible?
3. Are there functionalities that feel incomplete? It is it simple to design an email that is visually like and is similar to the one you imagined?

 Brand positioning

1. How can the business market its products? How does it use wording and images to entice customers?
2. Which kind of customer do they want to draw?

 Fees

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