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

In the midst of numerous marketing channels, including social media sites, live occasions, webinars and phone calls, online forums and chat rooms -- email is still an extremely preferred method for communicating with customers. It's cost-effective and allows you to establish close relationships with your customers.

However, which one is most user-friendly and also the most cost-effective? Which email marketing platform will help reduce bounces and helps you create the best-looking emails, or gives you the best information management?

This is a deep dive into the top and most well-known email marketing service providers.

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 ecosystems is coming soon!

Chart of comparisons at a glance

Mailchimp -a land of opportunities

Prices and Features

Billed as a place to "grow your customer base and increase your income", Mailchimp is an ecommerce platform for emails and automated processes, segmentation of customers, as well as education and advice.

Mailchimp has a free forever plan that lets you send out 12,000 emails to up to 2,000 customers. While, on this program, you're required to showcase their brand in your email to customers but it's still a great offering for up-and-coming businesses. Paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers; this grants you many premium features, including the most advanced audience segmentation technology and real-time support chat.

How it works

When you log into your account, you'll be able to view the stats for your latest campaign's success. It will show:

• recipients
• open rate and clicks per unique open
• A number of deliveries that have been successful
• total opens and total clicks
• number of orders
• Average order revenue as well as the total revenues.

 Audience

Here you can upload, update and manage your subscribers, also known as contacts. You can manually add new subscribers, one at a by inputting their email address and personal information into a form or you can automatically import data from customers by bulk import from an alternative platform, or upload the CSV file or copy and paste the new contact information into.

After you've imported or created subscribers, it's easy to divide them up by their prior purchasing habits, their place of residence, or personal preferences. You can manually add Tags to customers to be able to send targeted messages to customers with similar characteristics, and Groups allow you to group subscribers according to certain criteria or behavior.

It is also the place where you build sign-up or registration forms for people to subscribe themselves to your email. It can be accomplished via HTML forms, a pop-up box that can be integrated into any website and a contact form that sends messages to your inbox, or through a variety of integrations with your existing messaging application.

 Campaigns

This is where you can design and populate your emails, known as campaigns. There are a range of email templates in the event that you're promoting new products or an announcement. You are also able to create new designs and themes within the Content Studio.

 Automations

The ability to tailor workloads, here known as Customer Journeys. There are countless possibilities to advertise your products or brand for your current customers- such as the sending of a message with a promotion to customers who have abandoned their carts- or to acquire new clients, like with Facebook Ads campaigns (optionally integrated by Zapier).

 Website

Taking the ecommerce idea and running with it, MailChimp now also offers an online platform that lets you "tell your story, communicate with others, and develop your business".

You can get started with only one product; after 15 to 20 minutes to establish payments through Stripe (which lets you receive the payment of all major credit cards) in as little as 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 for your online store.

Mailerlite -keep things simple

Prices and Features

Billed as a way to "create emails and websites your audience will love", Mailerlite offers digital marketing tools that can help you grow your audience faster and drive revenues smarter. The MailerLite team strives to "provide easy solutions for complex tasks" that are easy to use and efficient designs and award-winning customer service.

Sending is free for as many as 12,000 messages 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 while the Advanced plan costs $19 per month ($228 when billed annually) for unlimited monthly emails and up to 1,000 subscribers including numerous additional features like priority support or 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

Once you're logged into MailerLite, MailerLite gives you a information on the performance of your recent email campaigns with statistics including the total number of active subscribers, newly added subscribers today and this month and the amount of emails delivered as well as clicks, opens and CTOR (click for open), number of unsubscribed and spam complaints If there are they have any.

 Campaigns

Newsletters for email, also known as Campaigns, are split up into sections that can be moved and then dropped into the editing. Examples of blocks include Logo + Content, Article with image background Highlight video, RSS lists one product aligned to left and Footer.

Once you're happy with the design, you can select which subscribers will receive this email , whether through basic targeting , or with advanced segmentation, such as 'Signup source is API' or 'Signup date must be before July'.

 Subscribers

There are four main options to create new subscribers. You can import an CSV or TXT file copy and paste from Excel and add one subscriber, and import it from Mailchimp. The Mailerlite platform automatically eliminates duplicate instances of email addresses upon transfer.

After you've imported or added subscribers, you can sort them out for more accurate targeting Segments are continuously updated lists of your subscribers according to their attributes and behaviors and groups allow you to organize your subscriber base on interests as well as actions. You can also add customized Fields to save any additional details.

The same section is the Stats tab, where you can look into the average click rate per campaign, the average click rate per campaign, average monthly subscriber rate and the average rate of unsubscribe per month.

 Formulas and Websites

MailerLite's form builder lets you design and schedule 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, and you can select a timing or scroll length before the pop-up displays.

It is also possible to create simple landing pages to collect registrations, or promote older email messages to stimulate interaction, or publish surveys to encourage engagement from customers.

 Automations

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

SendinBlue -- dig deeper into the details

Prices and Features

SendinBlue promises to assist users "Be where your customers are and manage all your electronic communications from the same place" through a mix of email campaigns -- including optimizing the time of sending -- marketing automation, CRM , and live chat.

The plan for free is priced at $0/month for up to 300 email messages per day, to unlimited contacts. The Lite plan costs from $25/month with up to 20,000 emails each month for unlimited contacts along with A/B test support for emails and support. The Premium plan costs $65/month for 20,000 emails to unlimited contact lists, which includes everything in Lite and automations, as well as advertisements on Facebook as well as landing pages, and phone assistance.

What is the process?

Upon logging in, you get a quick overview of information for the previous emails. It displays the name of the campaign, the number of recipients, conversions, openers, 'clickers' and unsubscribers.

SendinBlue will also show the rate of trackable open and total number of trackable opens (the users who did not enable a Privacy Protection option in their email client) in relation to the estimated number of open emails.

 E-mails (within Campaigns tab)

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

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 or create your own custom code from scratch.

 Automation as well as Transactional

This allows you to build automated workflowsbased on a number of factors. Every automation is comprised of: an entry point, such as an online purchase which triggers the workflow process; the action to take, for example send an email or SMS; and a condition like 'Is this their first purchase or is it their first purchase?'.

The two factors work together to create workflows that can help in a variety of tasks, such as onboarding new customers with relevant information, providing coupons for an existing customer in order in order to motivate them to engage in the future, and offering suggestions or upsells to customers who are already active.

Contacts

The are two ways to add contacts into SendinBlue. You can either send an .csv, .xlsx or .txt file on your personal computer or copy and paste contacts from the .xls file. But you can also access using the Forms and Landing page functions from here to build customized Web elements that encourage people to sign-up. It is also possible to include a single contact along with their personal information.

The Lists section, in combination with the contact attributes allows you to segment your clients to send targeted messages. In order to increase open rates more, you can further customize your own sending settings including From Name, Reply-to and the Header/Footer of each list.

Conclusion

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

Each option serves a distinct purpose, and it is your responsibility to determine which option is right for both you and your readers. Have fun writing!

Research methods

For our analysis, we considered the top four indicators that a top email software should have. When the metrics were identified, we looked to give them a score between 1 and 5 in order to create a total score that would let us rank them. On the basis of the overall score that we could compare and draw a conclusion about which platform is the most efficient and require an study.

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

 The speed and ease of starting

1. Did it take a lot of effort to set up by registering an account, and then sending the first email?
2. Did the instructions for completing the more complex task like building websites, easy to follow?
3. Does the platform have a rational and straightforward way of navigating through the different services of the platform?

 Easy integration and level of intuition

1. What is the easiest way to connect the platform with third-party software?
2. If there aren't any integrations, is building one easy? Are APIs easily accessible?
3. Do you have features that seem lacking? It is it simple to design an email that looks and feels close to what you wanted to create?

 Brand positioning

1. How does the company sell itself? How can it utilize words and visuals to attract potential customers?
2. What kind of clients are they trying to lure?

 Fees

1. What are the fees that the program charge? Are there additional processing charges (due to Stripe and other similar)?
2. Are there free tiers or trial time? If so, will the trial provide a full user experience, or are there some features reserved for paying customers?