Mailchimp
ConvertKit
Mailchimp is designed and built for every marketer — from begginers to advanced. With a painless onboarding process and advanced features, Mailchimp email marketing tool helps set the standard for a perfect email marketing software.
ConvertKit is designed and bulit for bloggers and e-commerce marketers. ConvertKit is perfect for those looking for a basic email platform. This wonderful tool offers you both segmentation and form building capabilities to help get started.
ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp 2020: – While Mailchimp, and many of the best email marketing software, aims to serve all kinds of industries and audiences, ConvertKit is very clear who it’s for creators.
ConvertKit defines creators as bloggers, authors, creators, YouTubers, poets, painters, musicians, podcasters, chefs, designers, and teachers as examples.
ConvertKit has made a couple of bold decisions that it claims to tie in with this audience. First, it claims that plain text emails work better than more visual emails, so you don’t have a drag and drop email editor. Their templates are also very basic.
The second bold decision ConvertKit made was not to offer a free plan. The company believes you must pay if you want an email marketing solution that helps you create valuable emails. Let’s discuss in detail about ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp.
Who is ConvertKit for?
ConvertKit is aimed at freelancers and small businesses who want to make money from their blogs. Since it lacks a drag and drops email editor, it is best suited for people who have the technical knowledge and know enough code to be able to create an email using an HTML editor.
Who is Mailchimp for?
Mailchimp is a user-friendly interface, along with its personalized in-app tips, make it a good choice for people who have never used email marketing software before, or companies who don’t want to spend a lot of time creating campaigns. But its robust feature set also means it’s suitable for email marketing experts.
Main differences between Mailchimp and ConvertKit (ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp)
- ConvertKit does not count duplicate subscribers, while Mailchimp counts duplicate subscribers.
- ConvertKit is best suited for bloggers and storytellers, while Mailchimp is best for eCommerce sales.
- Mailchimp allows multiple sites on one account, while the ConvertKit requires a separate account for each site.
- Mailchimp is list-centric, while ConvertKit is subscriber-centric
Comparing ConvertKit versus Mailchimp means first understanding your target audience. Both platforms are designed for early-stage start-up and creator business such as small e-commerce sites, bloggers, and small retail companies.
Both tools help these small businesses get started with email marketing, increase their subscriber lists, and ultimately build robust online businesses that generate revenue.
And while ConvertKit and Mailchimp have options for early-stage companies, they have a vested interest in the continued rapid growth of these small businesses.
And yet there are clear differences in how ConvertKit vs Mailchimp helps small businesses grow. ConvertKit is subscriber rather than list-based, so your subscribers can subscribe to all kinds of lists, and you are not charged multiple times.
You can also access all the ConvertKit features at each price level, but the more you grow on your lists, the more you pay.
Mailchimp is focused on design, image, and promotion and has a strong emphasis on e-commerce tools with connections to Facebook and Instagram ads that are incorporated directly into your subscription lists.
Not all features are available at all price levels, but you can choose to pay monthly based on your list size or through pay-as-you-go credits.
ConvertKit vs. Mailchimp is also not the only email marketing comparison for small businesses.
Features Of ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp
Ease of use
Being able to find the relevant features right away is key to user adoption. That’s why it’s important for email marketing software to guide you to the right actions instead of letting it take care of itself.
What ConvertKit offers
Like its feature set, the ConvertKit prioritizes subscriber management and segmentation when it comes to ease of use. When you start using a ConvertKit, the software displays a checklist to guide you through certain tasks to launch your email campaigns.
This list doesn’t show what you might think of like the fairly obvious “create email” option. Instead, the ConvertKit invites you to “create your first stream” or “send a stream. ConvertKit does not have a main dashboard, so there is no way to get an overview of all your activity.
You just have to access all the information in the corresponding menu. This makes navigating the solution more complicated, as you cannot return to the home panel to verify the actions that you still need to take.
On the plus side, the ConvertKit provides demo videos of each feature when you first use them to help you understand what they do and how you can get the most out of the software.
What Mailchimp offers
Mailchimp prides itself on being easy to use, and with good reason. There is a reason why many inexperienced email marketers choose Mailchimp. One tactic Mailchimp uses to make your software seem easier to use is to create fun copies and visuals that are also useful and easy to understand.
Mailchimp also provides personalized tips throughout the app that are based on your answers to various questions at startup. This includes if you
- Supports online reservations or appointments.
- Sell products online.
- Measure success based on the number of products sold online or the people who interact with your software.
These tips are packed with information and help you not only to use the software but also to understand why you should complete a certain action (such as customizing the subject line) and how it will benefit your business.
Mailchimp is hard to beat when it comes to usability and the ConvertKit doesn’t measure up, as its lack of focus on creating emails stands out in comparison.
Automation {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
ConvertKit offers you a visual automation tool where you can create your subscriber drip campaigns. Drag and drop a workflow through events, actions, and conditions, and see how many subscribers have moved through the funnel directly into the workflow.
Create your cadences, labels, and email forms, and then assign them as events, actions, and conditions to move subscribers through automation. You can also assign dates to improve the delivery time of emails or particular offers.
Mailchimp has truly been dedicated to automation in recent years, and the tool has come a long way since adding automated drip campaigns. Automation in Mailchimp means everything from running auto-reply emails to drip campaigns to classify your subscribers into segmented lists and remove subscriptions from your current lists as they happen.
Connect to Facebook and Instagram ads to increase your mailing list, and the information in those ads can be used to help segment your lists and personalize your content through robust e-commerce automation features.
This would be a badge of honor for ConvertKit, email automation. They have a great system in place, it’s easy to find just by clicking on Sequence and it’s there.
What caught my eye was not just visual automation, a workflow that allows you to view your email sequences, and if this is it, or if you don’t do this, which is amazing, you already have a ton of sequences in place that you can choose, modify and use. If you have no idea how to set up a sequence, the ConvertKit helps you out.
Email builds {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
ConvertKit believes in sending text-based emails rather than email templates with many images. They have a full blog post on why it is important not to emulate the types of emails that you would assume to be ads and therefore not really read.
This distinction about the types of emails people read is an important value to the company that directs how they design their tools. That said, while you can’t access sophisticated image templates, you can write emails that have most of the major text-editing features: italic, bold, underline, images, and links available.
You can even configure click tracking for your emails to get an idea of where your customers are interacting. However, you won’t get many pretty templates.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, gives you customizable drag-and-drop templates where you can choose to add specific text, images, or design elements throughout the email, or you can use HTML to design your own email templates.
If you don’t subscribe to ConvertKit’s super-simple email selling philosophy, check out Mailchimp for its sleek, image-ready email templates.
So now that we’ve talked about contacts/audiences, email streams, and automation, it’s time for this ConvertKit vs. Mailchimp “fight” to take us into the email editor round.
And here Mailchimp has a clear advantage.
- The Mailchimp editor will allow you to create an attractive HTML email or you can create a plain text email if you prefer.
With ConvertKit you can send all the beautiful emails you want as long as they are in plain text, you don’t have those cool templates like the ones on the landing page section to choose and modify.
But ConvertKit is launching a new email editor soon, and it’s now in beta. Then you can go and use it. The way I felt about it was like an average editor, and it will even allow you to add HTML blocks to your emails, better late than never.
Integration with other software {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
If this is your first time using email marketing software or you are a veteran and are switching from another solution, it is important to consider how well each tool integrates with your existing technology landscape.
What ConvertKit offers
ConvertKit provides native integrations to many different solutions, helping data flow seamlessly between different software and improving collaboration across departments. Here is a list of native integrations with popular software:
- Shopify
- Square space
- Unbounce
- WooCommerce
- WordPress
- Acuity Scheduling
- Stripe
ConvertKit lacks many integrations with commonly used software such as PayPal, Survey Monkey, Canva, and Xero (or any other accounting software). ConvertKit provides an API, plus a lot of useful documentation, to let you create integrations with any software, not on that list.
What Mailchimp offers
Mailchimp offers many native integrations (over 200 and counting) across a wide range of software categories, including eCommerce, accounting, payments, content management, and productivity. Some examples of popular software integrations include:
- WordPress
- Xero
- Canva
- Chargify
- Google analytical
- ClickFunnels
- PayPal
Mailchimp also provides an API, so you can create integrations yourself that is not in the list of native integrations. The only downside to using the API is that Mailchimp does not provide any support when you use it to build your own integrations. You should contact a Mailchimp integrations specialist if you need help.
In this case, Mailchimp is a good Convertkit that is missing some integrations with commonly used software. That means you have to create your own integration, which is more complicated and time-consuming.
Forms and landing pages {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
ConvertKit has paid attention to the forms and landing pages you can create to help convert readers to subscribers, and has updated the form generator as of July 1, 2018.
You will find every part of the forms online. You can create in ConvertKit are customizable, from the form’s messages and colors to your follow-up confirmation / double-subscription email messages.
All ConvertKit forms are available online, via a popup mode, or swipe across the bottom right or left of the screen. You can even connect your third-party lead generation tools to your ConvertKit forms to take advantage of automation.
ConvertKit landing pages are created almost exactly like your ConvertKit forms, but they have the added value of a title and page content that you would expect to see on a home page.
Set up page forms like any other ConvertKit form, including confirmation email, and insert landing page on your website via ConvertKit WordPress plugin, or share live link of landing page directly via from your social networks or email lists.
Mailchimp forms come in 3 standard types: form builder, embedded forms, and subscriber popup. Each of these starts in the Build It tab of your form builder, which you can access through its list.
The Design It tab allows you to choose different designs for the entire list, but you will not be able to create different designs in different ways. Mailchimp provides 2 different landing page templates to choose from based on your goals, but within those templates, you can customize the look with a visual editor.
Embed your landing pages on your website with an embed code, or share your forms and landing pages directly to your social accounts through their individual URLs.
Thank goodness those days are over, and in this ConvertKit vs Mailchimp match, both tools have those characteristics, and you can create your forms and embed them anywhere on your website.
And the same goes for landing pages as well. An interesting thing is that both tools try to save you some time by giving you some templates for your landing pages and forms. Mailchimp gives you some templates and allows you, if you prefer, to design yours from scratch.
How you organize your subscribers {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
Here’s a big difference in the way your subscribers organize. They behave like most email marketing tools. Contacts can be segmented, tagged, or some variation of these things. But one uses lists and the other does not.
ConvertKit will allow you to upload all your contacts in one place, and then you can organize your contacts by segments, labels, and the products they bought from you. Mailchimp uses lists to organize your contacts, and being an all-in-one marketing platform, it leverages this to provide you with a more granular targeting of your audiences as it calls it.
The only problem with Mailchimp is something that we already addressed in the prices section, but it is worth repeating it if you have the same contact in different lists, it will count as different contacts, so technically you are paying two, three, four times for it. same contact.
So, ConvertKit is best due to the direct approach.
List segmentation {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
ConvertKit:
ConvertKit doesn’t allow you to create lists, so when you add contacts, they all go in the same place. However, you have the option to sort the contacts into labels, forms, or sequences. You can also make separate segments for similar contacts, even if they fall in the same sequence or shape.
Mailchimp:
Mailchimp offers the option to create lists, allowing you to keep your contacts separate from each other. It should be noted that if you include a contact in two separate lists, Mailchimp will charge you for the duplication.
Furthermore, you can organize your contacts using labels or segments. Once you have created certain segments, your contacts will automatically go to the respective segment when they register. However, managing multiple-choice lists often gets confusing.
Support {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
Some people prefer to solve problems on their own, others want to chat with a customer service agent. It is important to consider support preferences when choosing email marketing software.
What ConvertKit offers
ConvertKit has great support options, which you can easily access via a permanent help button on your dash. Their live chat and email support is available to customers on all 8 a.m. plans. at 8 p.m. EST Monday through Friday. ConvertKit also offers limited support via live chat and email on weekends.
If you prefer peer-to-peer support, you can ask other questions for ConvertKit users in the online support forum, which the company moved from Facebook to Slack to make it easier to get help.
The ConvertKit Knowledge Base contains many detailed articles that can help you solve your problems yourself, and shows demo videos on each main feature page to help you get the most out of its functionality.
What Mailchimp offers
Mailchimp is about self-service support. If you’re on the free plan, you only have access to the Knowledge Center, and if you can find the option, you can submit a ticket.
If you pay Mailchimp, you can receive email support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, although phone support is only provided with the highest price plan. The Mailchimp Knowledge Center contains tons of useful articles, complete with screenshots and videos, to help you solve problems yourself.
If you can’t find an answer and want to submit a ticket, you need to scroll down to the end of an article to find the contact details. Mailchimp does not provide access to this option.
ConvertKit is more useful as it makes it easy for you to contact your support team and speak to a human.
Design and flexibility {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
Mailchimp has over 80 themed templates, including event invitations, newsletters, vacation emails, and e-commerce promotions. They are completely designed so that your work is just adding your copy. Additionally, the platform offers 14 blank layouts to which users can apply their layouts. Overall, this app offers more visual aesthetics and flexibility when creating an email.
On the other hand, ConvertKit has only 3 basic templates, all of which are text emails with different sources. They are just text, modern and classic. Modern and classic templates allow you to add images and apply text formatting. If you want to do advanced formatting or further customization, you will need to edit the HTML code of the email yourself.
So don’t expect too many fully designed visual templates. This is because they believe that simple emails or plain text messages provide better results than sophisticated template emails.
Although this makes sense and has proven to be true in some cases, we still think it’s better to have more options for email layouts, so in this case, Mailchimp can be better option.
Registration forms {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
With ConvertKit, you can create forms in different ways, and generally the process is simple. You can add your form as a popup, embedded, or slidable form, and adjust images, colors, and custom. The app prevents duplicate subscriptions by allowing you to hide forms from returning visitors.
Mailchimp offers three basic form types: Subscriber Popup, Embedded Forms, and Form Builder. You can choose different designs for the entire list from the Design It tab, but you cannot create different designs in different ways.
What’s confusing about Mailchimp’s forms feature is that you feel like a different editor appears for each type of form you want to create. A visual editor looks completely different from the others you find in this application.
In general, the different Mailchimp editors make the process more confusing, unlike the unique and easy-to-use ConvertKit editor. So in this case, ConvertKit can be best.
Reports {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
Reports in ConvertKit are limited to the overviews you see in your dashboard: the form chart and the subscriber chart. These charts show the growth of your list over time and some breakdown metrics for the forms you took to capture subscriptions.
The form graph at the top of the dashboard are your options over time broken down by each form option. The recently added subscriber chart gives you an overview of your subscriptions, unsubscriptions and net growth for your entire account, and includes various filters and date range to customize this view.
When it comes to reporting in ConvertKit, there is a limitation regarding the number of overviews you see on the dash. Reports tell you about open rates, click rates, and subscriptions. This means that you don’t get any information about geographic data, bounce rates, or heat map clicks.
With access to different filters and date ranges, you can customize the view. The worst thing about ConvertKit reports is that it doesn’t allow you to rename your emails. This makes it difficult and frustrating to differentiate between multiple emails with the same subject line.
Mailchimp has comprehensive reports designed not only to give you a lot of insight into the performance of your campaigns but also to help you create better emails and campaigns in the future.
Expect to see interactive charts and a lot of automatic list maintenance in these reports. You can explore the results of that maintenance in your reporting functions, but you don’t have to interact much with the lists, which is pretty good.
Rather, Mailchimp offers comprehensive reporting focused not only on giving you valuable insight into the business but also on helping you create better campaigns in the future.
With multiple interactive charts and automatically updated lists, you get insights into social stats, hourly performance, click maps, openings by geographic area, and performance by domain. Not only this, but you can also find out how your campaigns work compared to the average industry standards.
Email delivery capability {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
Email deliverability is difficult to measure. It really is up to the provider to present their delivery rates and no company will make it appear that their emails are not arriving!
ConvertKit:
Based on informal comparisons, ConvertKit has a better overall email delivery rate than Mailchimp. Emails created with this tool are also more likely to end up in the main Gmail inbox. The spam rate associated with your emails is much lower.
Mailchimp:
Mailchimp, on the other hand, has a better email sender score than ConvertKit. However, your emails are more likely to end up in the Gmail promotional inbox, which is not ideal.
Subscriber activity reports show who is replying to their emails and who is not even opening, giving you plenty of ammo to create follow-up campaigns.
Benchmarking gives you an idea of how well your particular campaign works against other companies in the same industry. Click detailed map reports in individual emails to show exactly where your customers are paying attention and clicking.
A / B testing {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
ConvertKit allows you to test subject lines; Mailchimp adds tests for the sender’s name, content, and shipping time.
ConvertKit offers no-frills, simple A / B testing for subject lines. When you are creating your email, you will see A / B to the right of your first subject field. If you click on it, it will expand and add another field for your second subject line variable.
Just type in your subject lines, and ConvertKit does the rest. Each variation is sent to 15% of the recipients (so the two variations are sent to a random 30%) and after four hours, the winning version will be sent to 70% of the recipients.
You cannot control percentages or test time. Once you send the email, you can track metrics and A / B test results by clicking on that specific email to view the report.
Surprisingly, A / B testing is not available with Mailchimp’s free plan. If you have any of the paid monthly plans, you can try A/B one of four variables: subject line, “from” name, content, and shipping time.
What is particularly interesting is the “content” variable: you can try different email templates or content blocks, all in Mailchimp’s drag and drop editor.
You can only choose one variable type and create up to three variations (that is, test up to three subject lines). Mailchimp generates the different email campaigns and sends them to different groups of subscribers.
To choose the winning email, you can track the open rate, click-through rate, or total revenue (if you have an e-commerce store connected to your account).
Prices {ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp}
Free plan or no free plan, that’s the question. Some email marketing programs offer free plans, others only offer free trials. Free plans inevitably don’t have the same range of features as price-paid plans, but these features may be enough for some companies.
What ConvertKit offers;
ConvertKit is very direct about your decision not to offer a free plan. The company says it believes you should pay if you want to create campaigns that are worthwhile from an income point of view. It offers a 14-day trial to help you decide if it’s the right software for you.
The price of ConvertKit depends on the number of subscribers, not on features. You get the same features no matter what you pay for. That said, ConvertKit is comparatively quite expensive. Their least expensive plan costs $ 29 per month, and that’s only for 1–1,000 subscribers.
What Mailchimp offers
Unlike ConvertKit, Mailchimp offers a free plan. However, this plan is only supported by email and only allows you to send 10,000 emails per month and manage a contact list of up to 2,000 people. It also doesn’t include A / B testing and only provides basic email templates.
Mailchimp has three plans that you have to pay for, and the total cost of each varies depending on how many contacts you have. For example, the Essentials plan, which is the least expensive paid option, costs:
- $ 9.99 for up to 500 contacts
- $ 29.99 per month for up to 2,500 contacts
- $ 49.99 per month for up to 5,000 contacts
- $ 74.99 for up to 10,000 contacts
In this case, Mailchimp is better. Mailchimp’s free plan is a great option for small businesses, providing tons of functionality. Their price-paid plans are also less expensive than ConvertKit plans.
Pros and cons of usability Of ConvertKit Vs Mailchimp
Mailchimp
Not all marketers are super techs, even digital marketers. Even now, there are some companies that are still in a period of digital transformation, where their business is not a digital native, and there may be some apprehension around digital marketing tools.
For companies like this, the free version of Mailchimp is an ideal starting point. Still, it’s intuitive enough, but the clarity with which you follow the steps is incredibly useful. It’s a great “first steps” approach to email marketing, hence its popularity. There is not a single element of the email creation process that is not simple and easy to use. In
In case you get stuck on something, it’s been around long enough that you’re unlikely to be the first person to find a problem – a quick search through their own website or the internet will generally look good on you.
Friendly and as it is, you don’t miss a trick trying to sell more. You can try to do something, for example, remove the Mailchimp flag from your emails, at which point you will be prompted to update. It feels like a tough sale trying to impersonate soft.
You can upgrade and downgrade between the top two levels of Mailchimp as you see fit. Of course, when you reach 2,000 subscribers to your company, you will have no choice.
The cheapest option for over 2,000 subscribers is $ 25 per month, which translates to $ 60 on the prepaid option, which seems like a pretty low value.
Another somewhat cunning element to Mailchimp’s friendly behavior is that you can only switch to the free option once in the life of the account. Therefore, you will need to pay attention and choose carefully when performing such tasks.
ConvertKit
Simplicity is a recurring selling point that ConvertKit highlights throughout its marketing. It’s largely based on drag and drop functionality – it’s hard to make things easier than that! It’s pretty limited in depth of functionality, but that’s the point.
It’s not supposed to be a Swiss Army knife of marketing functionality. It is literally to subscribe to subscribers and send them an email. And ConvertKit does it very well.
It should be noted that ConvertKit may not be an ideal option for someone who wants to incorporate such a tool into their blog from the beginning. As part of the approval required to be able to send emails, you must have a list of subscribers.
Complete Marketing Approach Beats Niche Product
ConvertKit is strong in many areas. Its analytical approach to managing subscribers helps you understand buying behavior and gives you the kind of revenue-based insight that can help you increase your return on investment.
Its advanced targeting options, especially the ability to include and exclude subscribers, make it stand out. But its email editor can disappoint you. The problem is that the ConvertKit email editor is much less user friendly than Mailchimp, which makes creating emails more time-consuming.
And the email editor is a key feature in any email marketing solution. ConvertKit has a lot of potential and is positioned as the leader when it comes to Mailchimp’s competitors, but it is not enough to beat the chimpanzee, which excels in almost every respect apart from the support.
You must use ConvertKit if:
- You want the easiest and most convenient way to create automation workflows, send streams, and build your list.
- You want a subscriber-centric email marketing platform that allows you to track each of your subscribers according to the tags. You can combine subscribers from different campaigns launched on your blog. But they were kept separate and organized correctly with the help of tags.
- You want to quickly create customizable forms that you can insert into your blog without the use of third-party applications to create one for yourself. You can also create lead magnets to attract more people to sign up.
- You need more options for your landing page templates, so you don’t have to start from scratch every time you create one for your blog.
You should not use ConvertKit if:
- You need a drag and drop generator to help you create your emails and landing pages. The templates available for your emails and landing pages in ConvertKit are editable, but do not offer the convenience of creating emails using a visual editor.
You must use Mailchimp if:
- You want to create a free initial email list.
- You want to create beautiful emails to send to your list using its drag and drop generator. You can also choose from a variety of email layout templates so you can edit and adjust the template to fit your message. All of these features allow even non-designers to impact your email campaigns.
You should not use Mailchimp if;
- You want a more intuitive and visual automation feature that allows you to drag and drop items into your workflow.
- You don’t want to shell out cash if you don’t have a list to send emails or are still creating one
- You want a platform that is less focused on e-commerce, as you don’t plan to sell products anytime soon.
- When you compare ConvertKit and Mailchimp, you realize that ConvertKit is the best tool for bloggers when it comes to email marketing; Mailchimp is more for eCommerce merchants who need a website and user tracking. Both email marketing tools are popular with their respective user bases. So if you’re looking for an email marketing tool to increase your reach or improve conversions on your blog or website, consider these two options for sure.
Mailchimp is very focused on the brand; therefore, e-commerce merchants can greatly benefit from using this email marketing tool. ConvertKit focuses on ease of use and making the most of your email list, making it the perfect choice for bloggers.
In general, if you’ve done a free trial of these two tools, you don’t need to convince others. Why you shouldn’t look any further. I hope I have been able to review these two tools in the best way and have helped you make a decision. Happy blogging! And, happy sale to eCommerce merchants.