WHY WE’VE MOVED FROM MAILCHIMP
AND WHAT WE’RE USING INSTEAD
We recently read a copy of Litmus’ State of Email Service Providers (ESP) report and we were’t surprised to learn that Mailchimp was second choice ESP overall out of over 2,000+ businesses that were surveyed, and first choice for small businesses.
MailChimp is probably the most well known email service provider out there.
When we were just starting out (after years in the corporate world) we needed something that was flexible and as low cost as possible and Mailchimp sure fitted the bill (we were users for a looooong time). It’s free plan was generous and the number of integrations built into the software (such as Eventbrite, WordPress and Calendly) just made all of our systems super simple to connect.
We also loved its jokey, friendly tone and the cute images of Freddie the Chimp (or Frederick von Chimpenheimer IV to give him his proper title). But we were always a bit frustrated and never 100% happy. It was clunky and not very intuitive to use. But we persevered.
As we grew as a business and got more leads and clients our segmentation and automation got more and more sophisticated.
AND THEN THEY CHANGED THEIR SERVICES STRUCTURE 😢
We know businesses exist to make money but we were’t on a free trial – they were simply now making us pay for a whole heap of other features that we didn’t need – along with the ONLY one that we did.
So it was time to move and we started researching our options.
Some providers we immediately discounted without even trying them (Constant Contact, Active Campaign and Campaign Monitor) and some we were impressed with but just couldn’t justify the cost (hello Ontraport and Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
And then we came across MailerLite. A quick comparison with MailChimp showed us it had all the features we needed.
Up to 2,000 contacts
1 audience
1 step automation
CRM system
NO support
NO split testing
Up to 1,000 subscribers
Unlimited audiences
Unlimied automations
CRM system
Email support
Split testing
Setting up the account was very straightforward and the drag and drop interface for creating email templates was an absolute breeze to use.
What we found most outstanding though was how easy it was to set up automations. We’ve got some quite complex ones and sometimes struggled doing what we wanted in MailChimp. MailerLite gives you a workflow view of your automation sequence and simple ways to manage your triggers.
It’s not perfect. We’d LOVE more in built integrations with other systems but using Zapier with MailerLite is a good workaround for now.