7 Best Mailchimp Alternatives for Email Marketing Automation

Why an alternative to Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is well-known for offering a range of free and inexpensive price plans. However, this is no longer the case, as they reduced what they offer this year. The free option has become even more limited regarding the number of contacts you can have and emails you can send. Once your email list grows, the cost of using Mailchimp can get significantly expensive.

With Mailchimp, every contact you have will be chargeable, even if they are no longer subscribed to your mailing list. Because of this, if you don’t want to end up paying much more than is necessary to use Mailchimp, keeping your email list clean needs to be an absolute top priority. Along with this, you’ll be billed twice for any contacts that appear on multiple lists. This way, you’ll hit the contact limits quickly if you’re not careful.

Segmentation of your email list can also be quite tricky in Mailchimp. Instead of separating your mailing list contacts into different segments, Mailchimp encourages users to have one list, known as an audience, and use tags to segment instead. However, this can quickly become quite confusing and messy.

Additionally, while Mailchimp has some excellent features on offer, you will usually only get access to these when you’re paying more. Some of the main disadvantages of Mailchimp that might have got you to a point where you are now actively looking for an alternative option include:

• Being charged for contacts that have unsubscribed
• No integrated live chat, SMS marketing, or push notifications
• Limited free plan
• No Shopify integration in the standard drag-and-drop email editor

There is the additional landing page builder, which can be handy if you want to create more than just signup forms. This is not a common feature in email service providers, so it can be a nice extra on top of creating and sending beautiful emails.

However, the landing page editor can feel pretty basic and has limited features compared to dedicated tools such as Instapage.

Best Alternatives to Mailchimp

If you want to switch from Mailchimp and find an alternative that works for you, then you should consider the cost and features you’ll get somewhere else. The good news is that several Mailchimp competitors are available with a range of comparable features and, in many cases, better prices.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers a user-friendly and affordable email marketing program. Along with email marketing, it also provides a complete marketing and sales toolbox, with all the essential email marketing features available alongside marketing automation, SMS, CRM, chat, Facebook advertising, and shared inbox. 

Sendinblue offers a range of features that gives it a significant advantage over Mailchimp. These are:

• Prices are based on how many emails you send rather than the size of your contact list. With Sendinblue, you can store an unlimited number of contacts on all pricing tiers, and you won’t be charged any more, regardless of how many active subscribers sign up for your list.
• The free plan is very generous compared to Mailchimp, allowing you to quickly grow your list and build an email strategy without paying more than necessary.
• A robust email deliverability infrastructure ensures that emails are landing in subscriber inboxes where they can be opened and engaged.
• Transactional emails are included in every plan, allowing you to send a range of transactional emails over the SMTP server. Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers them as a paid extra only.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing platform mainly marketed towards creators, including artists, bloggers, YouTubers, and anybody running a creative business. The email marketing tool is optimized for this specific audience. It also offers a range of benefits in comparison to Mailchimp, including:

• No double charges for the same subscriber appearing in different lists.
• There is a free software migration service available if you have more than five thousand subscribers.
• The option to create multiple signup forms for different opt-in incentives or content assets, allows you to easily grow your subscriber list with content upgrades.

ContentKit offers some of the best email marketing features, including email campaign building, A/B split testing to get the best conversion rates from your sign-up form, analytics and engagement scoring, a form-building tool, mobile-responsive templates, RSS to email, and the option to run a paid newsletter. There’s an easy-to-use visual automation builder, list segmentation and autoresponders available, while you can send unlimited emails.

Moosend

Moosend is an affordable solution for email marketing and automation. However, compared with other email marketing platforms available today, it is lacking in some multichannel marketing tools and native integrations. But this doesn’t stop it from having everything you’ll require to develop and launch a successful and engaging campaign.

The fact that it is much cheaper to set up and use, and the free plan includes quite a lot, has always been the main advantage of Moosend over Mailchimp. Overall, Moosend is an ideal option for sole traders, smaller businesses and marketers who don’t send emails very frequently. 

There are many great features on offer, including real-time analytics, unlimited emails, newsletter templates, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder, advanced reporting, list segmentation and more. It also makes email marketing automation easier than ever with an automation workflow editing tool, lead scoring, automation templates, and conditional triggers.

HubSpot

If you want a tool that offers email marketing and a lot more, HubSpot is a fantastic alternative to Mailchimp. This email marketing program can do so much more as it is backed up with a fully equipped features suite for both marketing and automation, with options that are designed to assist you with creating a unique and personal experience for your target audience. Some of the main reasons why HubSpot is an excellent alternative to Mailchimp include:

• Growth platform: HubSpot offers all the essentials to get your marketing strategy off to the right start and access more advanced features in the future with popups, forms, ad management, chatbots, live chat, landing page creation, and much more. There is also a CRM designed to provide support for both customer services and sales, offering a seamless customer experience at all times.
• Automation: HubSpot offers a wide range of advanced email marketing automation features that go beyond basic email autoresponders. While you can set up automated drip campaigns and kickback emails with Mailchimp, in HubSpot, you can come up with unique and detailed automation workflows designed to help you manage your contact database, automatically create support tickets, pass leads to other teams, and more.

As an email marketing tool, HubSpot offers a wide range of excellent features, including list segmentation, popups and forms, mobile optimization, email analytics, and health insights.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo offers an email marketing platform designed for selling online and can be easily integrated with Shopify. It is beneficial in terms of advanced insights and analytics and is one of the best Mailchimp alternatives to consider if you are hoping to dig deeper into customer information. Some of the main reasons why Klaviyo is worth choosing over Mailchimp include:

• More detailed segmentation – with Klaviyo, you can access granular segmentation, as there are tons of behavioral and transactional datasets that you can use to segment your contacts. There is also predictive analytics that allows you to determine the Customer’s Lifetime Value.
• Analytics and tracking features make it easier than ever for you to track the sales that are a direct result of your email marketing campaigns.
• Save time thanks to pre-built automation workflow templates, with a library of pre-designed templates, including options for welcome emails, abandoned carts, re-engagement emails, and more.

Regarding email marketing, Klaviyo has many features you can take advantage of, including personalization and segmentation options, reporting based on ROI, A/B testing, signup forms and popups, and easy, one-click integrations with tons of services and apps. You can get it done with Klaviyo email marketing agency. Bear in mind, when considering email marketing, Klaviyo alternatives offer comparable or upgraded features, making them worth exploring for enhanced capabilities in your campaigns.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign offers various marketing software capabilities, including an email marketing tool. You can easily use contact data to personalize your emails, and there are split testing options for up to five different versions of an email so that you can easily see which content has the best performance. Along with this, you can quickly and easily find out just how likely your emails will go to the junk or spam folder with the built-in spam testing tool.

Some of the main advantages of ActiveCampaign over Mailchimp are that they offer a fourteen-day free trial, plenty of workflow and automation templates and instructions to get started with, and advanced features. There is a range of excellent email marketing features, including a drag-and-drop editor, options for creating an email newsletter, analytics, and many email templates to choose from. Automation is also excellent with contact and lead scoring, autoresponders, automation maps, and marketing automation.

Constant Contact

If you’re looking for a Mailchimp alternative with similar features, look no further than Constant Contact.

Much like Mailchimp, Constant Contact has features for email campaigns, as well as a landing page builder to facilitate creating signup forms and collecting leads from your website. Business owners can use this tool as a dedicated email marketing software for email sequences, as well as a full-stack tool for generating leads.

There is one downside to using Constant Contact for email marketing services – there is no free plan. You have to sign up and grab a monthly plan right off the bat. However, there is also an upside: Constant Contact provides unlimited emails across all of its premium plans.

Constant Contact is also incredibly easy to use. If you’re just entering the world of email builders and you want to send out email newsletters or something else to your lists, you’ll have no trouble getting started. 

The email editor lets you create bulk emails with ease and with a little bit of extra time, you can learn the advanced segmentation to send personalized emails at scale. For ecommerce businesses, you can trigger and send abandoned cart emails and integrates with popular ecommerce tools such as Shopify.

Constant Contact pricing starts at $12 per month and scales with the number of emails you have on your list. There is no option for unlimited contacts.

Mailchimp alternatives wrapped up

As you can see, Mailchimp has plenty of features that make it attractive to businesses, large and small. However, the competition is getting fierce, with better and more advanced features, more affordable premium plans, more effective ways to send out transactional emails and more. Today, we’ve given you an overview of some of the most popular solutions you should consider.

And before you start using your email marketing software to send out email sequences and transactional emails, take a good look at your email lists. You want to make sure you don’t have outdated, misspelled and duplicate emails before sending out hundreds of emails per day.

To get there, all you need is Bouncer! Sign up for Bouncer today for free and start validating your email addresses!

Frequently asked questions:

Are there better alternatives to Mailchimp?

It depends on your needs. If you’re looking for more value for money and you also need a dedicated landing page builder, then you can try out Constant Contact. If you’re looking for something that lets you manage lists easily, go with Sendinblue (now Brevo) or Hubspot. For ecommerce use cases, you can skip everything above and head straight for Drip or Omnisend.

What is the best free alternative to Mailchimp?

If your main concern is not getting a cheaper alternative, but getting email marketing software for free, then Sendinblue (Brevo) is your best bet. It offers unlimited contacts as well as the option to run SMS marketing campaigns, which makes it a worthy competitor.

Does Google have an alternative to Mailchimp?

Yes, Google has something called the Google Marketing Platform, which is a more general marketing platform for advanced automation. It encompasses more than email service, so it’s not recommended if all you want to do it send personalized emails and manage lists. However, if you want to stay in the Google ecosystem and you’re willing to do some learning, it may be worth a shot.