Everyone knows Mailchimp by now. This company has been on top of the email marketing industry for quite some time now.
Luckily, tech progress has never been more rapid. With that speed, a range of Mailchimp alternatives has been developed in recent years. Let’s review the top 6 of them for Ecommerce businesses.
1. SendinBlue: Simply a great Ecommerce solution
SendinBlue is simply a great solution and made our top 6 list with flying colors. The features it offers are great and it easily competes with the ones offered by the other alternatives.
Like Omnisend and Klaviyo below, SendinBlue offers an extremely easy to use email builder. It offers a wide range of templates and pre-built automation workflows which enables its users to be as creative as they want.
Another great feature is that SendinBlue enables its users to add SMS marketing into their strategy. You can read more about SendinBlue in our Mailchimp Alternatives article.
2. Omnisend: Omnichannel at its finest
Omnichannel marketing is a multichannel approach for promotion. It provides your customers with a completely interactive experience through all possible touchpoints. These touch points can be through emails, SMS, text messages, Facebook ads, chatbots, pop-ups, etc.
Omnichannel marketing is the next level of multichannel marketing. When it comes to omnichannel marketing, Omnisend is known as a solid solution for any marketer planning to try it out.
To begin with, Omnisend has built-in visual workflow and a modern drag-and-drop email builder tool. This allows even complete beginners to create an attention-grabbing, professional email template. It also takes a few minutes to automate the whole process of an email marketing campaign!
Using Omnisend you can also create an automated communication with clients via all available channels. You can also collect their emails via customizable pop-ups, landing pages, and animated game-like forms.
Omnisend’s pricing is good too. As a beginner, you can grab a free package, which includes 2000 emails per day or 1500 emails per month. Their standard plan starts at $16 per month and increases the number of emails available up to 60,000 + plethora of extra features.
3. Klaviyo: Good, but pricey, for bigger Ecommerce
Another great alternative to Mailchimp is called Klaviyo. We could say that it is almost as complete as Omnisend. It provides its users with a range of features and tools for effective marketing automation. These tools include automated workflows, audience segmentation, landing pages and pop-ups, email campaigns.
Klaviyo achieves this with a drag-and-drop interface and user-friendly email builder. Sounds familiar, right?
Klaviyo’s key competitive advantage though is automated email flows. They offer various flows to try when you are just starting out, like the abandoned cart and browse abandonment flows. This is useful for beginners to get a grasp of where their starting point should be.
Klaviyo is great, but there is one huge – BUT. It’s pricey. For beginners, they offer a free package, which includes 250 contacts and 500 emails to be sent per month. That’s fine, but once you reach 1001 subscribers, the price goes as high as $75 per month, and keeps climbing!
4. ActiveCampaign: Your Ecommerce tech-friend
It was hard to choose between Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign for the No.3 spot on my list. Both are good tools, offering a great range of features. Klaviyo is more expensive but at the same time way more user-friendly, which is why we gave it the sweet 2nd place.
If we had to choose one adjective to describe ActiveCampaign, it would be sophisticated. It is far from easy to use, so if you are a complete beginner, you should probably pass on this tool. Using this tool reminds me of using some good old-fashioned CRM tool, which is not a bad thing, it’s simply not easy.
ActiveCampaign has pretty much all the features necessary for advanced email marketing automation. It’s also very reasonably priced, so if you don’t mind a steep learning curve, it is a highly recommended tool.
5. Drip: For smaller Ecomerce
Another alternative is called Drip, and this one is a complete beginner’s tool. Its main focus is on visual components and its offered visual platform, which makes it an extremely easy and pleasant to use the tool.
If your priority is to provide your customers with a creative email marketing experience, Drip will definitely not let you down.
Obviously, when the tool is heavily focused on one set of features only, other areas are meant to be not so flawless. One is email builder, for example. Drip restricts its users from creating the usual customizable ‘blocks’. It instead offers to separate each email into fixed horizontal parts. That’s far different from what Mailchimp offers!
Luckily, Drip’s priced on the lower end – it will cost you only $99 to get a Pro plan. If you are a complete beginner and 2500 subscribers are your starting point, then $49 is where their plans start.
Obviously, when the tool is heavily focused on one set of features only, other areas are meant to be not so flawless. One is email builder, for example. Drip restricts its users from creating the usual customizable ‘blocks’. It instead offers to separate each email into fixed horizontal parts. That’s far different from what Mailchimp offers!
Luckily, Drip’s priced on the lower end – it will cost you only $99 to get a Pro plan. If you are a complete beginner and 2500 subscribers are your starting point, then $49 is where their plans start.
6. SmartMail: Email marketing only
SmartMail is as basic as Drip. Slick design, easy to use, and offers only what is crucial for efficient email marketing.
Same as Mailchimp and Omnisend, SmartMail offers its users a ‘drag-and-drop’ email builder. This is already an advantage over Drip’s fixed horizontal email separation.
On top of that, it allows the segmentation of your customer database. Its segmentation is a bit unusual: you can segment into one-time, loyal, and at-risk customers.
SmartMail is obviously not without some limitations, hence the 6th place on our list. Its key drawback is that its users must manually add all the products into the constructed email templates. Also, SmartrMail only focuses on email marketing, so more complex marketing operations are off the table.
note: I’ve tried contacting them via Facebook, but they didn’t respond. I’m not sure they are still operational. I’ll update you as soon as I find out.
With each of the tools in this list, there’s sure to be a great alternative to Mailchimp for eCommerce that suits your brand and your customers. However, not every tool is going to be perfect for every company, so it’s critical that you test each of the tools that interest you.
After all, with as important as email marketing is, it’s about time your brand was in good hands.
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- 6 Alternatives to Mailchimp for Ecommerce Email Marketing - February 25, 2019
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