ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are both very popular email marketing providers. But we would be deficient in both tools if we did not make a further comparison. Because although there are many similarities, each has its own strengths.
Mailchimp is an online email marketing platform that helps companies and individuals design, send, and manage email marketing. This is a familiar solution, especially among starting entrepreneurs and marketers. This is mainly because of the options in the free basic package.
With a comprehensive range of features and capabilities, ActiveCampaign marketers and entrepreneurs have the tools they need to develop and execute more effective and personalized marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp is often used for starters and ActiveCampaign for marketers who want to professionalize, but this comparison is not entirely true. Both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to compare in a nuanced way and choose the solution that best meets your needs. In this article, we'll dive deeper into the functionalities and options that both email marketing providers offer, so you can make a good choice.
Opt for scalability
An email marketing platform is a solution that deeply integrates you into your workflow and business operations, you don't just switch providers. Contact lists are still easy to transfer, but things like settings, automation, templates, activity tracking and reporting are completely platform-dependent. It is a painful process to switch at a later time, so it's best to choose the right tool right away.
Mailchimp is not available in the Dutch language, but it is available in English. If you're not quite fluent in the English language or jargon, this can make it a bit difficult to get started. On the other hand, a free subscription is offered for starters; as a beginner, this is extremely useful to do email marketing without obligation and on a small scale. Is your business growing? Then you can gradually upgrade your account according to your needs.
ActiveCampaign does not have a free subscription, but can be tested free of charge for 14 days. If you compare the functionalities and possibilities, you will quickly find out why this is. ActiveCampaign is clearly aimed at companies that want to invest in professionalizing and automating email marketing.
Convenience
Navigate
One of the most important aspects of ease of use is being able to quickly find the right information and perform actions without losing many clicks. Information must be clearly displayed and you must be free to apply your own way of working.
Active Campaign:
The homepage immediately displays essential elements in the form of widgets, such as the number of contacts, recent campaigns, automations, email templates, most important contacts (those who read your emails most often), pipelines and tasks. The latter two are available exclusively in ActiveCampaign's premium packages, which also include a CRM system. You can drag and drop all widgets, so you can easily personalize the dashboard.
There is also a menu on the left side, which clearly shows what each icon represents on the main page. This allows you to easily navigate to your contacts, campaigns, automations, deals, conversations, lists, site, reports, and settings. At the top of the page, there is the option to search within contacts and campaigns. On other pages, similar to Mailchimp, you only see icons in the menu. Above all, ActiveCampaign is also available in Dutch!
Mailchimp:
Mailchimp excels in its ease of use and is ideal for users who want to set up simple email campaigns. While it offers some automation features, it's not as advanced as ActiveCampaign. Mailchimp is more focused on companies looking for simple email marketing solutions without the complexity of extensive automation. On the home page, all your audience statistics are visible. The audience is a list of contacts you can send email campaigns to. You can't further personalize this dashboard. On the left side is a menu with Mailchimp's various functionalities. In the case of mailchimp, there's some jargon you have to get used to,
Overall, both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are self-explanatory and the ease of use is very high. With visual tips and quality help pages, you can get started quickly and you'll quickly learn how the functionalities work and where to find them in the tool. If we make a comparison here, ActiveCampaign offers more and detailed analysis than Mailchimp.
Perhaps that makes sense, as the options are simply more extensive. In addition, ActiveCampaign focuses largely on the CRM, which, combined with touchpoint automation and transactional tracking, leads to more detailed reporting.
Setting up email templates
Both tools have an editor where you can design one or more standard layouts that you use to send emails. This makes it easy to quickly and effectively put the content into an email and send the mail, without having to make the design over and over again. For ease of use, it is therefore crucial that it is easy to create and use email templates.
ActiveCampaign:
The visual email template builder in ActiveCampaign is located under Campaigns. After naming your campaign and selecting a contact list, you will arrive at the design page. You can choose to use the visual email designer, send text only, or format emails with custom HTML and CSS.
In this case, we opt for the visual email designer. We can then choose to further develop one of the standard templates or build our own template from scratch. The editor is a very user-friendly way to design emails. It's very easy to structure and choose from different elements that you can place in the template by dragging.
Mailchimp:
Mailchimp also offers a clear and easy-to-use visual editor for creating email templates. Using the intuitive drag and drop interface, you can quickly build an email template. And another trick! You can let Mailchimp scan your website for your brand identity, including the color palette and logo you use, via the Creative Assistant. Based on this, you can build templates even faster and easier.
With more extensive features, ActiveCampaign can take longer to get the hang of. You can also set up very specific automation and tracking, which will have to be tailored to existing websites and tools. This may take a while, but the time you invest quickly pays off in more leads, higher conversion and time savings.
Mailchimp offers the best opportunities to get started quickly if you simply want to send emails or want limited automation at a lower price.
For an in-depth comparison and a demo of the functionalities, feel free to contact us.
Comparison of functionalities
Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are ideal for setting up email marketing. But there are certainly differences! And of course, you want the email marketing platform that meets your needs. Because email is one of the most important channels where you connect with leads and customers. What are the main differences?
Difference in CRM features
Mailchimp, with their approach to CRM, appears to be somewhat less comprehensive than ActiveCampaign's. While Mailchimp is limited to customer information, tags, and analysis, ActiveCampaign offers a more comprehensive system.
An important difference already comes to the fore here: with Mailchimp, there is a significant disadvantage when it comes to contacts. The lists (or “audiences” as Mailchimp calls them) and their contacts are separate. This means that you can't add contacts from different lists to a campaign at the same time. If you have one email address on 2 different lists, Mailchimp counts this as 2 contacts. And that in turn has consequences for the subscription you need, a financial consideration.
ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, is taking a different tack. Lists have no limits here. You can send a campaign to different contacts on different lists. And importantly, one email address always counts as one contact, which makes more sense.
Difference in mailing list management
Mailchimp sometimes makes managing lists a bit difficult. Depending on your subscription, you can create 1 to 5 lists. Within this list, you can further subdivide groups and tags, which can quickly lead to confusion if you don't apply a clear structure. These groups and tags are managed manually, unless you have another solution for this via the API or an integration.
ActiveCampaign makes it easier. Lists have no limits, you can send a campaign to different contacts on different lists, and you can segment contacts with tags or custom fields. Tags and custom fields can even be added or removed via automations.
Difference in marketing automation
Mailchimp also offers automation options, through a visual editor. It was recently updated with a visual update to improve the overview. However, despite these improvements, the options available still feel more limited than with ActiveCampaign. The automation, which is referred to as “Customer Journeys” in Mailchimp, is mainly based on touchpoints of leads and customers that Mailchimp can easily track. This includes, for example, subscribing to a newsletter, a contact's birthday, filling out a form, or when no activity has been detected with a contact for a long time.
ActiveCampaign dominates with its powerful automation tool. Visually oriented, it offers a well-organized editor that allows you to combine unlimited triggers, conditions, and actions. This allows you to create advanced workflows, perform segmentation and tagging, and use lead scoring. There are many more automations that you can set up using a range of available integrations with other tools. Remote automation based on webhooks, by means of Make offers endless possibilities.
Difference in contact forms
Although Mailchimp's editor is similar to ActiveCampaign in terms of use, it remains limited. You can only create one form per email list. The editor works on a drag-and-drop basis, which allows you to adjust colors, fonts, and images, but the choice here is somewhat limited. You can create a simple form that you can then embed on your website, which is often sufficient.
ActiveCampaign may have an advantage with a user-friendly form editor. It not only offers convenience but also diversity. You can create multiple forms, integrate them into your website via a link or app, and they'll be displayed neatly on both computers and mobile devices, something Mailchimp sometimes experiences some friction. There are various ways to integrate the form, so you can decide for yourself what the placement of the form is.
Note that both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp do not rely on their own opt-in forms. There are many other ways to link a form to the email marketing platforms. In many cases, this is even preferred, because it provides full control over the layout and data.
Difference in site tracking
Site tracking is a feature that lets you see which pages your visitors are viewing. With a code on your website, you can track the actions of page visitors, which you can then use as a trigger in automation or sending emails. For example, if a visitor fills a shopping basket on your website but then leaves the website, you can send this person a reminder that the shopping basket still contains products based on site tracking.
Mailchimp offers a limited solution here. There is no tracking that you can easily add to your website, you can only set up transactional email marketing. This function therefore seems to be aimed at sending emails; other triggers and actions are not eligible.
With ActiveCampaign, you can make use of site tracking. So you can send specific mailings to visitors who appear on your mailing list with a special code that is provided. The activities of a website visitor are noted in the contact in the CRM.
Prices
ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial, after which you'll need to switch to a paid plan. Mailchimp, on the other hand, has a free basic subscription, although the options are logically limited. Both tools offer their services as SaaSS (Software as a Service) solutions. Here you pay a paid amount per month for which you get access to the options included in the package in exchange.
Start a free Mailchimp account here
Mailchimp:
Active Campaign:
ActiveCampaign has distributed the available functionalities across different types of subscriptions. For example, you can opt for a Marketing subscription, email marketing and marketing automation. You can also opt for the Sales subscription, CRM and sales follow-up. Or you can choose a bundle of the two.
Start a free ActiveCampaign trial here (Enter your email address and click “Get Started”)
The prices for the Marketing and Sales subscription are as follows:
Marketing:
Sales:
Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp include an important second component in the price, namely the number of contacts. It's a bit of a snag, but with both tools, you pay for the basic package. By default, Mailchimp includes 500 contacts and ActiveCampaign includes 1,000.
Now, suppose you need more contacts, you'll need to upgrade the package you have with additional contacts. And, of course, this also comes at a price.
Conclusion
Despite Mailchimp's efforts, it still can't compete with ActiveCampaign's extensive automation capabilities. For those looking for powerful, flexible automation, ActiveCampaign is the recommended choice. Both tools offer a professional approach to setting up and managing email marketing.
If you mainly send out newsletters, want to get started easily and quickly and only want to make limited use of automation, Mailchimp is the perfect choice.
Entrepreneurs who want to further professionalize and integrate automation far into their organization will have a better choice with ActiveCampaign.
For an in-depth comparison and a demo of the functionalities, feel free to contact us.
