12x cheaper mailchimp alternatives for email marketing

12x Cheaper Mailchimp Alternatives for Email Marketing

Mailchimp Email Marketing

When we started updating our blog on a regular basis, we felt there is a need to send email updates to our email subscribers on a regular basis to keep the visitors returning to our website. Initially we started to send updates with Google Feedburner Email Subscriber Update feature, which is of course free, but came with many restrictions. Understanding the need of proper email list management software and to send updates along with some useful tips to our subscribers, we started looking out for proper software.

As I was looking for email marketing tool, I came across several tools such as Aweber, Mailchimp, CampaignMonitor, iContact, Constant Contact and Campayn. I did a detailed analysis of each which led me to discover some cool in-built features coupled with promising price models. These tools seemed like the solution we were looking for, and we decided to try many of these at our end.

Mailchimp – A Complete Email Marketing Solution for Newbie Having realized the need of our own email marketing solution, the first try was obvioulsy the most simple tool known to us for ages- Mailchimp. Any Startup discussion on email marketing never ended without the mention of MailChimp marketing tool. Extremely user friendly and easy to access,

Mailchimp is loved by its users for the hassle free experience in handling it.

Add to that, all those awesome features talked about in various discussions and forums are available even in the free edition of Mailchimp.

Mailchimp free edition comes with 12,000 free emails per month and a maximum of 2000 subscribers. For any new blogger or startup, these numbers are really good. Since we had an email list that surpassed the 2000 limit, we went for the paid account which comes for $99 for 10,000 subscribers per month for unlimited mail campaign.

Over a period of 3 months, our email list jumped upto 25,000. You can calculate the amount we were paying to the Chimps to handle email campaigns. With one of the most convenient and easy to use Mailchimp email editor, we were also taking full advantage of A/B testing and managing multiple email lists to segment users.

Mailchimp Email Marketing Solution

No doubt the email templates supplied were great to us for certain email campaigns but we found that for an e-commerce marketer, MailChimp did not had enough of email templates which we can make use of. Not to forget the feature of MailChimp was Mobile Responsive email template, which is little tricky to make these days. Finally, while calculating ROI of the email campaigns with Mailchimp we severely failed to meet expectations and finally stopped using it. So, now we had the right time, to lookout for cheaper Mailchimp alternative.

Mailchimp Alternative – AWeber MailChimp vs Aweber – Trial Start at $1 Only We moved to Aweber which says ‘Start $1 Trial‘. In this plan, you get a 30 days trial for $1 only. Once we finished the 30 days trial period, we took the paid plan which was starting at $19 per month for 500 contacts only. Although this plan gave us the independence of sending as many campaigns as we wanted, our increasing list made Aweber an expensive option again.

AWeber-Mailchimp Email Marketing Alternative

I would mention here that we used Aweber only because they are well known for their auto-responder features, and they also accept internet marketers and affiliate marketers.

Try Aweber for $1

Mailchimp Alternative – Campaign Monitor Mailchimp vs Campaign monitor – $9 plan for 500 Contacts Campaign monitor’s plan of $9 allowed us to send 2500 emails to 500 contacts per month. Though we thought this plan to be costly, we still went ahead and gave it a try. Overall, as affiliate marketer we felt with Campaignmonitor, Email Newsletters are made super easy but at a cost which didnot give much return to us.

The unique feature of Campaign monitor also included a White label program for agencies and designers to set up multiple clients and markup the pricing.

Mailchimp Alternative – Campayn Mailchimp vs Campayn – 20,000 Free Email for 2000 Contacts Trying out various options didnot deter our spirits, and we kept on trying new solutions. The next in our league was Campayn- A new email marketing company which promises to send upto 20,000 emails to 2000 contacts per month under the Free Plan. Paid plans starts at $10 per month only!

Overall, it can be very wells aid that Campayn is designed mainly for micro merchants and small businesses- Courtesy, the ease of use. We used Campayn but still it was not what we were looking for. Also, Campayn was just few cents cheaper than Mailchimp. We made a shift, again.

Mailchimp Alternative – Mailerlite Mailchimp vs Mailerlite – A 12x Cheaper Mailchimp Alternative

MailerLite-MailChimp Alternative

After we were failing to meet expectations with Mailchimp and keeping a check with our email marketing budget, until now we had tried many options.

Not willing to give up easily, we also tried using a MailChimp Alternative namely MailerLite. In the first impression when we looked at the price we were quite surprised. As we took a look at the Demo of the email editor, I assumed that it is cheap because it might have low email delivery rate.

MailerLite-MailChimp Alternative-Price Comparision

As I explored its features in details, I got to know the real reason behind the low price- Their team said, they have kept the price low because they mostly dealt with bulk email marketing for enterprises and they have not made the product clamped up with features which very few marketers use. This helped them to keep Mailerlite affordable at cheap price.

After this I checked the testimonials, where they mention More than 40,000 happy Customers. They included some of the best online marketers and they were all real testimonials!

Try Mailerlite for Free

Convinced with the insight, I went ahead and signed up for a Mailerlite Trial Account, which gave me access to send email to 1000 email subscribers. After few hours I checked the report and the result was jaw dropping- 55% Open Rate! Usually this list of 1000 email on Mailchimp also had an opening rate of around 60%. So, looking at the number I was completely satisfied and went ahead taking a pro account for 30,000 Subscribers. For this 30,000 subscribers I had to pay $297 Only for an Year for Unlimited Emails!

Price Check: The price is exact 12 times cheaper than what we were spending on Mailchimp Pro account for a month!

Now we are quite satisfied with the features and the services provided by MailChimp Alternative – Mailerlite. The one best feature which can compete with Mailchimp, is their ‘drag and drop Newsletter Editor’, which is quite simple to use, beautiful and very lightweight. Overall you get wonderful control over creating your beautiful newsletters. Along with this, Mailerlite also gives default email templates to play with.

MailerLite Editor-MailChimp Alternative

Some other features worth exploring also included drip email Autoresponderscombined with Webform, which we regularly use to send email newsletters, step-by-step for every new subscribers.

In Mailchimp we were also using Segment Feature under list of email subscribers, which gave us flexibility to filter those who were not opening our emails. Yes, the same feature is also present in Mailerlite, which you can use quite frequently for effective email list management.

At any point when you are done with the campaigns you can also use Email Campaign Report to Track everything including opens, clicks, unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounces, link activity, reading environment and much more.

MailerLite Email Reports-MailChimp Alternative

Update: Recently, we started using RSS campaign feature of Mailerlite which enables us to send automated RSS feed campaigns for our blog posts to our subscribers automatically. No doubt this feature again is very simple to use and have very setup to complete and get started. This is alternative feature form MailChimp which takes big leap in favour of Mailerlite.

MailerLite RSS Campaign-MailChimp Alternative

Hope, this post will help you getting the right software to send Email Campaigns at Affordable price. You can check and try out Mailerlite – The Mailchimp Cheaper Alternative from here.

Once you start using Mailerlite, let me know your experience in the comment section below.