Email marketing is a crucial tool for SMEs looking to establish and maintain connections with their customers. Mailchimp and Brevo have gained popularity as email marketing platforms, both offering various different features. When considering the significant price difference, you may be left wondering what the difference between the two platforms is. So, if you’ve been weighing up whether to use Mailchimp or Brevo, then you’re in the right place! In this blog, we’ll compare the two email marketing platforms to help you understand which would be better for your business.
Pricing & plans (correct as of March 2024)
Let’s start with the main difference between the two platforms, pricing. Brevo does work out cheaper, with the first paid plan starting at £16 per month, and unlimited contacts on all plans. However, depending on the scale of your business, they do offer a generous free subscription. Their free plan includes 300 emails per day, customisable mail templates, transactional emails and SMS & whatsapp campaigns (limited on the free account).
Whereas, Mailchimp tends to be slightly more expensive with paid plans starting at £10.36 for 500 contacts. On Mailchimp, you have to pay more depending on how many contacts you have, which might be considered a drawback to those using the platform. This also means that if you have over 500 contacts, you cannot use the free plan. It allows you to send 1000 emails a month, use basic pre-built templates, take advantage of the landing page builder and over 250 app integrations.
Ease of use
Overall, both platforms are fairly easy to use. They’re well organised platforms, with lots of easy to understand features. They both feature a drag and drop feature, which make it even easier to design an email campaign.
Email automations
Mailchimp offers email automations as part of its paid services. Whereas Brevo includes these in the free version, and also offer more options such as a ‘best time’ automation, lead scoring, and pre-test to see how your campaign will do before you send it out.
SMS marketing
This is a feature that Mailchimp only offers when you sell products in a store you’ve created on Mailchimp, and it’s only available in the US. Whereas Brevo allows SMS marketing on all plans, as long as you purchase some credits.
Email templates
Templates are a great starting point and guide, especially if you haven’t sent an email campaign before. Mailchimp offers a limited amount of basic templates in the free version, so to access the more intricate templates you will have to invest in the paid plan. Brevo provides templates on all of its plans, giving you a bit more choice when using templates.
Reporting
Both platforms offer good report features for the email campaigns you send. With the free plan, Brevo allows you to see the open rates, click rates and unsubscribed rates, alswell as soft and hard bounce information. To get more detailed stats and analytics, you need a paid plan. The same applies to Mailchimp’s paid plans. You will receive detailed reports on how your email campaign has performed. This includes click maps to easily see hotspots for where users clicked, open rates, click rates, bounced rates, total opens and much more. Although both platforms offer quite good reporting features, Mailchimp does tend to be a bit more detailed which is really useful in enhancing your email marketing and better understanding your audience.
Mailchimp and Brevo are both very good email marketing platforms to use, but when it comes to which is best, this really depends on the scale of your business and what outcomes you want to receive from the emails. If you’re looking to maintain relationships with your audience, then Brevo could be a better choice for you. It includes features for you to fully customise your email, is easy to use, has good reporting features and won’t cost you very much. However, if you’re looking to send a bigger volume of emails to generate sales, you’re better placed to use Mailchimp. Although it’s a bit more expensive, it’s features will be much better for a sales-oriented goal. It offers far more integrations than Brevo, meaning that it can be linked with social media platforms, paypal, and many other marketing tools. Its reporting features are much more advanced and detailed, making it easier for you to see what works and what does not work for your audience.
If you’re interested in getting started with email marketing, or want to enhance your existing emails, book a meeting to speak with our content marketing team today.
