Email Marketing Platforms: MailChimp vs Aweber

Email marketing is effective – Email marketing is an integral part of any good online business strategy. It’s the most effective way to maintain contact with your customers, and the more subscribers you gain, the wider your net for making sales or for marketing. More than 90 percent of all consumers use email daily, and it’s more than 40 times more effective for gaining new customers than social media. Emails are at least three times more likely to prompt a purchase, and the average order value is 17 percent higher (Mckinsey and Company).

We recommend that you use an email marketing platform right from the moment you launch your website. The two most popular choices are MailChimp or AWeber, so we have put together a 2016 updated comparison of the two platforms.

What is the Difference?

MailChimp is an email marketing system that is free to begin with, but you will start paying once you reach 2000 subscribers.  AWeber on the other hand, has a monthly charge even if you have no subscribers to start with, but has automated email functionality, upgraded design options, more powerful tracking and email management features compared to the free version of MailChimp.

Do I Need Email Automation?

Here are some examples of email automation that will help you decide whether this something that fits with your business plan:

• Follow up with new subscribers. Sally’s food blog offers her website users a free ebook in order to subscribe to email her email. She would then like an email to go out to the new subscriber 5 days after they received the ebook to ask what they thought, or whether they might be interested in joining her cooking class. A month later she would like an email to go out to that person again to let them know of a special deal just for them if they sign up to her cooking class today.
• Offer an online program. A personal trainer offers his PT customers access to his online detox program. Each day of the two week program they are sent an automated email with advice about how they may be feeling at that particular stage in the program, detox recipes for the day, and a video pep talk.
• Offer a special deal to your current customers only. You email marketing platform can have many lists or segments, and you will like an automated email to go out to your current ‘buying’ customers a week. These customers are already fans as they have purchased from you before, so you can market to them differently than you would to your standard list and offer them your higher level programs at a certain period of time after they have paid for their original purchase.
• Send emails based on website activity. You can set up your email automation to send customers an email based on specific links clicked or material downloaded.
• Surveys. Another engagement tactic, surveys allow you to gain important feedback about the customer experience and helps customers feel valued.

AWeber Pricing

	$19/mo	$29/mo	$49/mo	$69/mo	$149/mo	Get a Quote
Subscribers	0–500	501–2,500	2,501–5,000	5,001–10,000	10,001–25,000	25,001+

 

MailChimp Pricing

MailChimp‘s basic service without email automation is free up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. You will see the table below shows the pricing is cheaper initially, however not that much different to the AWeber pricing, especially as your subscriber base grows larger.

Verdict

The better system will depend on what you want to do with your email marketing system. Think about your needs both now and in the future. You might only have a few subscribers at the moment and could get by using the basic, free service from MailChimp, but you’ll need to think to the future and be sure that you’d be happy with their prices and service as you grow. It’s very easy to set up an account and an email campaign using either provider, but it can be difficult to switch later down the line.

If you are just starting out on a zero budget, MailChimp is completely free and a great way to grow an email list. HOWEVER the free version of MailChimp does not allow you to to send automated followup emails, and offers no support, among other factors. If you want to increase your marketing and personalised customer interaction without it taking up all of your time by sending automated emails, you will need to make a small investment for an email marketing platform. For a paid email marketing platform AWeber is the better choice, as it is priced similarly to the paid version of MailChimp, and has superior functionality in automation, segmentation, reporting, gives you access to over 700 email templates and 6000 stock images, and has real-person support available when you need help.