As online marketing grows, there is a proportional need for more inclusive and intuitive tools as well. One area of marketing that has remained essential to businesses is email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the top ways brands build awareness, create, and sustain customer relationships with their target market.
In this article, we will be comparing two marketing tools Hubspot and Mailchimp. They are known for helping businesses automate sales and marketing processes.
Hubspot and Mailchimp Features: Overview
HubSpot is one of the SaaS platforms that primarily focus on inbound marketing. It also comes with other features that help businesses identify leads, set up a sales funnel, and track analytical data to determine the performance of campaigns.
MailChimp started in 2001 as a paid service known for its email marketing automation tailored to serve businesses. However today, MailChimp offers a whole lot more than just email marketing solutions allowing users to create a website or launch an online store, build landing pages and websites, customize and create digital ads, and get comprehensive analytics to track campaign performance.
Hubspot and MailChimp are marketing platforms that offer marketing functionalities such as email marketing, customizable newsletters, audience segmentation, and campaigns.
We’ll evaluate both software not only as inbound marketing solutions but also as marketing automation tools.
Hubspot or MailChimp: Who Automates Better?
When it comes to marketing automation, both platforms have automation tools, but they diverge in terms of offerings and prices. Mailchimp offers marketing automation mainly through email. Automatic emails can be triggered based on actions taken by your users. It could be abandoned shopping cart emails, birthday notifications, and a lot more. Since it is a more email-driven platform, automation in other features, for instance, contact management is still not properly defined.
HubSpot’s platform comes with a lot more automation capabilities not only limited to email. Apart from simply triggering emails by interactions, HubSpot’s CRM allows users to move leads. You can move around between sales staff, view granular data about their engagement and interactions. You can also add conditional logic to optimize and automate workflows.
Unfortunately, the most useful automation are only integrated into their Professional and Enterprise plans. Although, the event-based automation is only available on the Enterprise plan.
Overall, the fact that HubSpot has a built-in CRM (and an easy-to-use workflow template) means that it has more automation features.
READ MORE: Hubspot vs Salesforce: Choose a CRM Software
Hubspot and MailChimp Features: Plans and Pricing
Both HubSpot and Mailchimp operate a freemium model; users have access to all basic features, but you’ll have to subscribe to a paid plan for advanced features.
MailChimp has three paid subscriptions – Essentials, Standard and Premium.
The Essentials plan costs $11 monthly for 500 contacts and has all the features of the free plan. It also has email and landing page templates, custom branding for company communications, and a customer journey builder.
You can also use it for A/B testing, automation, behavioral targeting, and integration with social accounts. You also have access to support via email and chat 24/7.
The Standard plan starts from $17 each month per 500 contacts and the features of the lower-priced plans as well as a marketing calendar, an AI-powered Creative Assistant, over 250 app integrations, personalized product recommendations, retargeting ads, etc.
The Premium plan tagged at $299 monthly allows up to 10,000 contacts, unlimited audiences, advanced segmentation, knowledge-based marketing glossary. Users on this plan also enjoy prioritized phone support and access to Smart Tools as well as other features. MailChimp users interested in increasing their contact limits will have to pay an additional fee.
Hubspot Plans and Pricing
HubSpot users interested in a more advanced marketing automation experience have the option of three paid plans – Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. The Starter plan costs $45 monthly and comes with all the free features the basic CRM package offers. It also comes with email marketing, chatbot, landing pages, website traffic analytics, multi-language content creation, list segmentation, shared inbox, etc.
The Professional plan costs $450 monthly and comes with smart content and reporting, dynamic personalization, e-signatures, phone support. Subscribers can also access the features available on the Starter plan.
The Enterprise plan comes with a higher price of $1,200 each month and allows users to extend administrative controls through advanced permissions, sales analytics, playbooks, predictive lead scoring, conversation intelligence, increased support, etc. Users on all Hubspot CRM also enjoy a 10% discount on an upfront annual payment.
Forms and Landing Pages
MailChimp comes with a customizable landing page builder with varied template options. MailChimp’s landing page builder allows users to create an unlimited number of landing pages. It also has customizable form fields to get more audience data.
HubSpot has a comprehensive landing page builder with a drag and drop editor that allows users to easily create landing pages without any code as well. However, HubSpot places a limit on the number of landing pages that can be published. Users would have to pay $40 a month to access unlimited landing pages.
HubSpot’s form builder has a feature that sets it above MailChimp: a tracking code. HubSpot landing pages come with a tracking code you can add to your website. The tracking code automatically pulls data from your landing pages into the HubSpot CRM allowing you to create progressive profiles to help you optimize the content for users.
Social Media Performance
MailChimp offers basic ad management options to all of its users allowing businesses to post organically post on integrated social media platforms. However, features like ad tracking and scheduling posts are only available on upgraded plans.
HubSpot offers the same functionality but takes it a step further by offering in-depth insights into the performance of your campaigns and allowing users to respond directly to customers through multi platform integration with the CRM software.
Hubspot and MailChimp Features: Free Plans
The two platforms have expanded their capabilities to serve enterprises of all sizes depending on the market’s needs. However, they have taken it a step further offering free versions to smaller companies that may not need more advanced features. For email marketing, for example, HubSpot allows users to send 2000 free emails each month while MailChimp offers more free email sends at 10,000 emails every month.
Hubspot Marketing CRM allows up to one million contacts on the free version while MailChimp allows 2000 free contacts. Both platforms’ CRM also comes with the upload of sales documents, records for companies and contracts, segmentation of customers by demography, etc.
However, HubSpot offers more flexibility and its functionalities are sales-driven.
Looking at their free versions, it’s clear that the primary focus of MailChimp is email marketing while HubSpot is targeted towards marketing and sales.
Hubspot and MailChimp Features: Final Verdict
Both platforms have built a reputation for helping businesses automate marketing processes and improve sales. However, a look at their features shows their pros and cons.
When it comes to pricing, though MailChimp seems cheaper at a glance, costs can add up quickly especially as companies begin to scale. However, HubSpot’s more expensive pricing is a “one-stop-shop” model where features match up nicely with an increase in pricing.
MailChimp offers more features for its email marketing solution and is a more affordable option for smaller companies that need CRM software that provides email marketing and basic CRM in one place or entrepreneurs new to the email marketing game.
On the other hand, HubSpot will be a favorite with sales and marketing teams of bigger organizations that require a holistic digital marketing solution.
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