When we started updating our blog on a regular basis, we felt there is a need to send email updates to our subscribers on a regular basis to keep the visitors returning to our website. MailChimp was the most heard software, but we also came across a list of MailChimp Alternatives.

Initially, we started to send updates with Google FeedBurner Email Subscriber Update feature, which is, of course, free but came with many restrictions. Understanding the need for proper email list management software and to send updates along with some useful tips to our subscribers, we started looking out for proper software. As I was looking for email marketing tool, several tools such as MailChimp and MailChimp Alternatives; which include-

Sendinblue

EasySendy Drip

MailerLite

AWeber

CampaignMonitor

iContact

Constant Contact

Campayn

Omnisend

I did a detailed analysis of each which led me to discover some cool in-built features coupled with promising price models. These tools seemed like the solution we were looking for, and we decided to try many of these at our end.

MailChimp – A Complete Email Marketing Solution for Newbie

Having realized the need of our own email marketing platform, the first try was obviously the most simple tool known to us for ages- MailChimp. Any Start-up discussion on email marketing never ended without the mention of MailChimp marketing tool. Extremely user friendly and easy to access and is loved by its users for the hassle-free experience in handling it. Add to that, all those awesome features talked about in various discussions and forums are available even in the free edition of Mailchimp.

MailChimp offers free edition comes with 12,000 free emails per month and a maximum of 2000 subscribers. For any new blogger or startup, these numbers are really good. Since we had an contact list that surpassed the 2000 limit, we went for the paid account which comes for $74 for 10,000 subscribers per month for an unlimited mail campaign.

Over a period of 3 months, our contact email address list jumped upto 25,000. You can calculate the amount we were paying to the Chimps to handle email campaigns. With one of the most convenient and easy to use Mailchimp email editor, we were also taking full advantage of landing page templates, A / B testing and managing multiple email lists to segment users.

MailChimp Email Marketing Tool

No doubt the email campaign templates supplied were great to us but we found that for an e-commerce marketer, MailChimp did not have enough of email templates which we could make use of like other Best MailChimp alternatives. Not to forget the feature of MailChimp was Mobile Responsive email template, which is little tricky to make these days. Finally, while calculating ROI of the email campaigns with MailChimp we severely failed to meet expectations and finally stopped using it.

So, now we had the right time to look out for cheaper alternatives.

Hackernews Discussion

MailChimp as a CRM:

As of now, MailChimp only provided its users with the benefits of email marketing platform and email automation. But now mailchimp offers CRM functionality that makes it all in one marketing service. With MailChimp CRM, you can manage your customers and reach out to them in a more effective way.

The CRM works by bringing all your contacts in one place and present you with related patterns and data to help you understand your audience better. The users can study their audience insights and accordingly send out personalised messages based on user behavior , lifecycle stage and individual interests.

You get to have an audience dashboard where the audience is segmented based on common tags, recent sources of growth, CLV (customer lifetime value). So, you can send the right message to the right audience at the right time and henceforth improving your marketing strategy.

1. Mailchimp Alternative – Sendinblue

Sendinblue free plan offers 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts.

Sendinblue ( read a detailed review of Sendinblue ) is one of the Mailchimp alternatives, which places itself as all-in-one email solution for small business which provides email and sms messages for email marketing campaigns including transaction and marketing automation. More features include Sign up Forms, Landing Pages, Facebook Ads, Retargeting, A / B Testing, CRM and chat support too.

The best feature about Sendinblue is that they charge you based on the number of emails sent. They also provide longer support even for their free plan. Apart from English Sendinblue application is also available in other languages including Français, Español, Português, Italiano, Deutsch. With the ability to add unlimited contacts you can send 1000 emails/day and 40,000 emails for $25 per month.

On a side note SendinBlue is quite popular so you can find plenty of knowledge base to help you get started with it.

2. Mailchimp Alternatives – MailerLite

MailChimp vs MailerLite – The 12x Cheaper

MailerLite free plan offers 12,000 emails per month and 1000 subscribers.

After we were failing to meet expectations with Mailchimp and keeping a check with our email marketing budget until now we had tried many alternatives. Not willing to give up easily, we also tried MailerLite. In the first impression when we looked at the price, we were quite surprised as it is one of the best Mailchimp alternatives with lots of features. We took a look at the Demo of the visual email editor, I assumed that it is cheap because it might have low email delivery rate.

Below are the pictures of MailChimp and MailerLite pricing that will help you with price comparisons.



MAILCHIMP

MAILCHIMP Upto 2000: Free

Upto 2500: $29.99 /mo

Upto 10000: $75.99 /mo

Upto 15000: $129 /mo

Upto 20000: $159 /mo

Upto 25000: $189 /mo

Upto 30000: $219 /mo



MAILERLITE

MAILERLITE Upto 1000: Free

Upto 2500: $15 /mo

Upto 5000: $30 /mo

Upto 10000: $50 /mo

Upto 50000: $75 /mo

Upto 100000: $360 /mo

Upto 150000: $510 /mo



As I explored its features in details, I got to know the real reason behind the low price – their team said, they have kept the price low because they mostly dealt with large volume email marketing for enterprises and they have not made the product clamped up with features which very few marketers use. This helped them to keep MailerLite affordable and reliable at a cheap price.

After this, I checked the testimonials, where they mention More than 40,000 happy customers. They included some of the best online marketers and they were all real testimonials!

Convinced with the insight, I went ahead and signed up for this Mailchimp alternative MailerLite Trial Account, which gave me access to send email to 1000 subscribers, along with A / B testing, sign up forms, email automation tools, email templates for a small business like us.

After a few hours, I checked the report and the result was jaw-dropping- 55% Open Rate! Usually, this list of 1000 email address on Mailchimp also had an opening rate of around 60%. So, looking at the number I was completely satisfied and went ahead taking a pro account for 30,000 Subscribers. For these 30,000 subscribers, I had to pay $1176 Only for a Year to send unlimited emails!

Price Check: The price is exact 12 times cheaper than what we were spending on Mailchimp Pro account for a month!

Reddit Mailchimp Review Discussion

Now we are quite satisfied with the features and the services provided by MailerLite. The one best feature which can compete, is their visual ‘drag and drop Newsletter Editor‘, which is quite simple to use, beautiful and very lightweight. Overall you get wonderful control over creating your beautiful newsletters. Along with this, MailerLite also gives default email templates to play with.

MailerLite Editor

Some other features worth exploring also included drip email Autoresponders, A / B testing, email automation tools, unsubscribe page builder, landing pages combined with Webform, which we regularly use to send email newsletter, step-by-step for every new subscriber that we capture. The file manager feature was also very useful as it helped us to organize our images for our different email campaigns.

In Mailchimp, we were also using Segment Feature under the mailing lists of email subscribers, which gave us the flexibility to filter those who were not opening our marketing emails. Yes, the same feature is also present in MailerLite, which you can use quite frequently for effective subscriber list management.

At any point when you are done with the email marketing campaign you can also use Email Campaign Report to Track everything including opens, clicks, unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounces, link activity, reading environment and much more.

Update 1: Recently, we started using RSS campaign feature of MailerLite which enables us to send automated RSS feed campaigns for our blog posts to our subscribers automatically. No doubt this feature again is very simple to use, user friendly and have very setup to complete and get started. This is an alternative feature from MailChimp which takes big leap in favour of MailerLite.

MailerLite RSS Campaign

Hope, this post will help you get the right software which provides you with impressive Email campaign templates at Affordable price. You can check and try out MailerLite – The Mailchimp Cheaper Alternative from here.

Once you start using MailerLite, let me know your experience in the comment section below.

Update 2: MailerLite, has added the ability to create landing pages through a drag and drop editor. Through this, you can easily create E-Course, Invite, Webinar, Coming soon, Lead Generation, Product, E-book landing pages without any coding skill!

MailerLite

Other than these latest updates, MailerLite also added some of the amazing features like Auto Resend, Automation workflows, Click Maps in campaign reports and RSS email campaigns for publishers and bloggers.

Update 3: MailerLite has announced new prices for the subscriber limits. It can be found here. This pricing will be applicable for new customers and will be visible on the website from 01-September-2016. So, the existing paid customer can still access old pricing structure; also, if you plan to upgrade your MailerLite plan to paid one now, then, you will continue to get the existing (reduced) pricing for a lifetime.

After 25-May-2018; MailLite has added GDPR and CCPA related features which include, right to be forgotten, proof of Subscriber consent, identifying EU users, data processing agreement and so on. You can register with MailerLite from here and discuss with their team on GDPR and CCPA feature and process enablement.

Below is a screenshot of the pricing plans offered by MailerLite when I select 1000 subscribers.

To view the full revised pricing list visit here. You can also join their Facebook social media community from here.

MailerLite revised pricing

3. Mailchimp Alternatives – EasySendy Drip

MailChimp vs EasySendy Drip – $19 plan for 10,000 Subscribers

EasySendy free forever plan offers upto 30,000 emails per month and 2,000 subscribers.

EasySendy Drip’s plan of $19 allows sending 5 emails/sec to 10,000 contacts per month. With EasySendy Drip, Email Newsletters and email drip campaigns are made super easy.

The unique feature of EasySendy Drip is that it allows integrating through email delivery API service provider like, Amazon SES, SendGrid, MailJet, AriticMail, SparkPost, and MailGun for small businesses. This feature helped us to control our email delivery budget in check. For example, if we were sending 50,000 emails in a month, then we had to pay only $5 to Amazon SES and, in certain months, if the email delivery goes over 100,000 then we had to pay $10 to Amazon SES. It also has 1 free and three paid plans.

4. Mailchimp Alternative – AWeber

MailChimp vs Aweber – Trial Start at $1 Only

You can try 30 day free trial of AWeber .

Capterra Aweber Review

Aweber says ‘Start $1 Trial‘. In this plan, you get a 30 day trial for $1 only. Once we finished the 30 days trial period, we took the paid plan which was starting at $19 per month for 500 contacts only. Although this plan gave us the independence of sending as many campaigns as we wanted, our increasing list made Aweber an expensive option again.

I would mention here that we used Aweber only because they are well known for their auto-responder, landing page templates and builder, stock photos, smart email designer, email template library, contact tagging features, and they also accept small businesses including internet marketers and affiliate marketers.

5. Mailchimp Alternative – Campayn

MailChimp vs Campayn – 19$ plan for 15,000 Free Email for 3000 Contacts

Campayn free forever plan offers 12,500 email and 500 contacts.

Trying out various options did not deter our spirits, and we kept on trying new solutions. The next in our league was Campayn- A new email service provider and marketing company (one more alternative to Mailchimp) which promises to send upto 12,500 emails to 500 contacts per month under the Free Plan. Paid plans start at $19 per month only!

Campayn is designed mainly for micro merchants and small businesses- Courtesy, the ease of use and helpful learning material. We used Campayn but still, it was not what we were looking for. Also, Campayn was just a few cents cheaper than Mailchimp.

6. Mailchimp Alternative – Sendlane

Mailchimp vs Sendlane – 5000 contacts for $99

Sendlane is known for more segmentation options and advanced features of automation as compared to Mailchimp. It is an ideal choice for digital marketers, eCommerce platforms, unlike Mailchimp, that solely caters to the needs of small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses. Although Sendlane is a bit expensive it is worth a try.

7. Mailchimp Alternative – Moosend

Mailchimp vs Moosend – Free forever plan up to 1,000 subscribers

Moosend- ecommerce tools

Moosend is easy on the pocket email marketing software for businesses who are looking for affordable options. It is comparatively cheaper, for instance, Moosend paid plan starts at $10 for up to 5000 contacts that are cheaper compared to $50 with Mailchimp. The visual automation workflow functionality and email builders of Moosend are more advanced and easier to use. They also provide pre-built email templates for customer engagement, re-engagement, weather based automation and a lot more.

Moosend- Types of marketing automation workflows

8. Mailchimp Alternative – SendFox

Mailchimp vs SendFox – Lifetime plan at $49 for 5000 contacts

Sendfox email composer

SendFox free plan offers throttled email sending i.e. it may take 1 email per minute.

SendFox is an email marketing solution specifically for content creators. It is created by the Sumo family who is also the creator of the famous AppSumo. The interface of SendFox is super clean that doesn’t feel overwhelming.

If you want to create simple emails with no extra graphics or images, SendFox will fit perfect. Creators on Youtube and Instagram don’t usually have a website and in that case, building a subscriber list is tough. But, with SendFox, you can create a landing page exclusively for you and get the job done. Also, SendFox offers affiliate marketing where you can earn some extra bucks by referring this tool to others.

9. Mailchimp Alternative – EmailOctopus

Mailchimp vs EmailOctopus- 5000 subscribers for $20

EmailOctupus free plan offers 10,000 emails per month and 2,500 subscribers.

EmailOctopus, among email marketing tools and a great Mailchimp alternative allows users to send emails through Amazon SES, which results in an overall affordable solution. It offers several templates for email marketing that ease out the creation of campaigns. Another plus point of these templates is that they are responsive so one can access them on all the devices.

10. Mailchimp Alternative – ConvertKit

Mailchimp vs ConvertKit- $79 for 5000 subscribers

G2Crowd Review

ConvertKit free plan offers 1000 subscribers management.

ConvertKit might come as a little expensive alternative to Mailchimp, but the landing page builder features, automation workflows builder, personalized emails and form features of this tool are better as it helps you capture more lead. ConvertKit is an excellent option for bloggers, freelancers and content creators. You can send your targeted content at the right time using this email marketing automation.

It doesn’t have a drag and drop editor as it claims that simple emails perform better. It provides you with a lot of landing page templates. The advanced segmentation, contact tagging system and subscriber management of ConvertKit are fantastic, and the analytics are quite detailed. Paid plans start at $79 for 5000 subscribers. ConvertKit social media community is available here. You can also become a part of ConvertKit affiliate marketing program and earn 30% commission for every new creator you bring on board.

11. Mailchimp Alternative – Automizy

Mailchimp vs Automizy – $69 for 5000 subscribers

Automizy offers free trial of 60 days.

Automizy is a new email marketing service as compared to MailChimp. But it has some features that made us dive into and check it out. Automizy allows you to connect all your marketing channels and uses the concept of omnichannel marketing.

The other unique feature of this tool is the subject line tester which ranks your subject line compared to other similar campaigns. It can be a game-changer in getting better email open rates.

Automizy has an easy to use visual email workflow builder which is super easy to use, and an interface that is immaculate and tidy. You can join Automizy Facebook social media community from here.

12. Mailchimp Alternative – Omnisend

Mailchimp vs Omnisend- $20 for 1000 contacts

Omnisend offers a free plan where you can send 15000 emails/month. Apart from that, you can try each of their standard and pro plans for free. You can sign up for their 14-day free version without providing your credit card details.

Omnisend is quite a new player in this field. Since Mailchimp no longer offers integration with ecommerce platform Shopify this tool is a saviour for online ecommerce businesses. The main USP of Omnisend is that it specializes in omnichannel marketing. If you are an established eCommerce business and platforms where generic marketing automation is no more supportive, Omnisend is a great Mailchimp alternative. It offers several features like personalization, creating instant discount codes, marketing automation, content editor, advanced segmentation, weather-based product recommendations, website tracking tools to name a few that are specially targeted to help you grow your online business.

Mailchimp vs Constant contact- $20 for 500 contacts

Constant Contact is an email marketing solution that cater to the needs of small to medium-sized businesses. It offers four core features email marketing, website creation, ecommerce solutions and social media marketing. Store owners of any kind planning to go digital this tool can help amp up your email marketing efforts. Constant Contact will fulfil all your email marketing needs apart from just email creation. With this tool, you get an intuitive UI, powerful automation features, good email deliverability rate, A/b split testing options, email design template library and reporting features.

You can also create ad campaigns with your Facebook and Instagram social media accounts.

The pricing of Constant contact is based on two plans email and email pro. The email plan starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts, and the email plus plan starts at $65 per month for 500 contacts. You can also try their affiliate marketing program, which pays you $5 for every referral that signs up and $105 if they pay for the account.

14. Mailchimp Alternative – ActiveCampaign

Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign- $15 for 500 contacts

ActiveCampaign is one of the best all-in-one email marketing solutions with a built-in CRM adopted by more than 90,000 small business customers. It goes beyond simple email creation and offers lead scoring, lead nurturing, creating sales funnels and versatile email automation.

ActiveCampaign boasts of a powerful email automation system they are really good at it. ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a landing page editor, but they help you to send personalised conversation with If/Then/Else logic which is pretty impressive. With this feature, you can manage which content to show to which customer based on their activity on your website. Their autoresponders are excellent and accommodate a variety of conditions. You can also do the automation within your CRM.

The one unique feature of ActiveCampapign is they offer sms personalization options so in short, you are also able to do sms marketing.

ActiveCampaign integrates with Facebook so you can manage how your Facebook social media ads are displayed to your contacts.

15. Mailchimp Alternative – GetResponse

Mailchimp vs GetResponse- $15 for 1000 subscribers

GetResponse is another MailChimp alternative that is all in one marketing platform that offers landing page builder, built-in CRM and power-packed advanced features for automation. Their list segmentation is intelligent and better than most of the tools in the email marketing industry. It offers conversion funnels and landing page features which is a great plus for ecommerce companies. With the help of this feature, you can create sales funnel for a myriad of areas of your business and work on your conversion rates.

Another thing that is highly appreciated for GetResponse is its competitive pricing options.

MailChimp vs iContact- $36 for 500 subscribers

iContact is one of the oldest email marketing automation platform and has a lot to offer on its plate. This tool caters explicitly to small businesses as well as professional internet marketers. Like all other tools, iContact offers fundamental marketing features to manage your email marketing campaigns like drag and drop editor, reporting tools, email analytics, segmentation tools, to name a few. It also offers good social media integrations as compared to its counterparts. It comes in two plans base and pro that charges you based on the number of subscribers you have. The starting price is $36 per month for 500 subscribers.

17. MailChimp alternative-SendX

Mailchimp vs SendX- $7.49 for 1000 contacts

SendX is a relatively new player and not as popular as email marketing giants like MailChimp. But still, this tool is worth a try for its simple and easy to use features. SendX doesn’t try to do a lot of things, so their primary focus is to provide well-rounded email marketing features. Business owners who do not want advanced segmentation options but want straightforward newsletter templates and email designs this tool is a great pick.

SendX has plenty of list building tools for contact management and other tools to manage your customer data. SendX also offers plenty of web forms such as sign up forms,opt in forms, landing pages and pop-ups that you can use to expand your contact base.

The customer support is also good where you get an email and chat support as well as phone support.

Bottomline conclusion:

Mailchimp marketing service has really great features and is good for small businesses. I would consider MailerLite as the best Mailchimp alternatives as it’s easy to use landing pages, drag-and-drop email builder, also includes built-in photo editor. Most importantly it’s pricing plan is very attractive as it’s 12x cheaper and also improves your marketing efforts.

Questions asked while looking out for MailChimp Alternatives: