ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: which one is better for you in 2024?

Have you ever felt your emails are ignored in the big world of marketing? It's like talking in a busy place, hoping your customers notice your cool updates about your amazing marketing campaign. 

You're not alone. 

In the email world, getting noticed is like putting together an awesome ad: a mix of knowing how to market well and genuinely loving what you're offering.

Here, the question arises, which tool is the perfect fit for your business, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, or any other tool?

Don’t stress! I’m here to help you choose the perfect one for you. 

Before you go looking at ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp, let me tell you about another free, easy-to-use email marketing, and feature-packed tool that is Zixflow, an amazing alternative to ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp.   

Ready for it? Scroll down!👇🏻

Zixflow: a feature-packed tool

ZixFlow is an all-in-one email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM platform. It helps businesses of all sizes and you can create and send email campaigns, track their results, and nurture leads.

This tool allows you to design visually appealing and responsive emails without needing any coding skills. You can easily drag and drop elements, images, and text to create professional-looking emails. Also, you can easily generate emails through its AI wizard. 

How cool is that right? 🤩

With email automation, you can set up a series of emails to be automatically sent based on specific triggers. For instance, you can create welcome emails for new subscribers or send a follow-up email when someone abandons their shopping cart. 

Zixflow is not just only about email marketing it provides a feature more than just that. That’s why it stands out as one of the best tools.🤩

Zixflow puts all your customer data in one spot, so it's easy for you to find and handle. This includes emails, validation, and company details, job titles, and other important information. 

Keeping everything together helps everyone on your team see things clearly, avoids data confusion, and ensures everyone's on the same page.

As Zixflow is an omni-channel platform, you can create and send targeted email marketing campaigns, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns to your customers and leads. You get to segment your audience and track your campaign results.

Now that I’ve talked about Zixflow, you can be more confident in your choice between ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp. 

So let’s jump back into comparing ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp.

Overview table of ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp

Check out this quick table to see the main differences, and I will also share a detailed explanation of both tools for you to understand better.

Detailed comparison of ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp

Imagine you're running a small bakery, eager to engage customers through email marketing. But confused, how? Right? That is where ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp come in. 

So, let's dive into a detailed comparison between ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp. For you to select the best one!

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Email Campaign

In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, your campaign success depends on good email strategies. 

ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp are top choices, both having strong email campaign features.

For you, checking out both is important to use their unique strengths. Let's see how ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp can boost your email efforts, get better engagement, and streamline your sales approach.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign makes marketing easy by automating tasks. Imagine it's like having a helper for your marketing efforts. You can create customized email plans, group your audience, and let automation handle personalized journeys based on what people do.

For instance, let's say you run an online store. With ActiveCampaign, you can send emails to customers who visited your site but didn't buy anything, offering them a discount to encourage a purchase.

Using ActiveCampaign to make emails personal is simple too. You can add real-time info like names or what someone bought into emails. This makes your emails more relevant and helps get more customers interested.

ActiveCampaign isn't just about emails. It also helps manage your business by organizing contacts, tracking deals, and automating your sales tasks with sales automation. It's like a hub that makes running your business smoother.

Want to know how your marketing is doing? 

ActiveCampaign gives you detailed reports. You can see who opened your emails, clicked on links, and even figure out what content works best.

Mailchimp

Now, let's talk about Mailchimp. Mailchimp is a robust email marketing platform that is super easy to use for beginners. With Mailchimp, you can make emails without any difficulty. Just drag and drop elements, use pre-made designs, and launch your campaigns.

If you're just starting, Mailchimp's free plan is great. It lets you have up to 500 contacts for basic email needs. As your business grows, you can choose paid plans that offer more features.

If you need to send a quick announcement. Mailchimp is best at this. You can instantly send out emails, perfect for urgent promotions or announcements.

While it might not be as advanced as ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp's basic automation is still useful. You can set up simple workflows, like sending a welcome email when someone subscribes to your list.

For example, let's say you have a blog. With Mailchimp, you can automatically send a welcome email with a link to your best articles when someone signs up. It adds a personal touch without much effort.

List Management

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp deal with list management features, but which one is better? 

Let's compare what they offer to help you decide.

ActiveCampaign

First, let's talk about ActiveCampaign, which handles things differently. Its lists are more versatile, allowing you to send the same campaigns to contacts on different lists. You can organize contacts using tags or custom fields, like noting their location or interests. What's great is that tags and custom fields can be added or removed automatically based on what users do.

For example, let's say you run a blog. With ActiveCampaign, you can tag subscribers who click on links related to technology, allowing you to send them targeted content about the latest technology.

ActiveCampaign's email editor also has a useful feature: you can set it up so that contacts who click on a link or image are segmented and added to a specific list. This is not a common feature in every email editor. 

And here's the best part, they offer lead scoring. 

This means you can assign scores based on actions taken by your subscribers. For instance, you can give higher scores to subscribers who frequently engage with your content. It's a powerful tool to prioritize your efforts and automate sales engagement.

Mailchimp

If you've used MailChimp, you might have found it a bit hard to handle your email lists. MailChimp's lists are a bit inflexible. You can't use the same contacts in different lists for your campaigns. So, here the best option is ActiveCampaign because it is one of the best contact management software.

And, since Mailchimp charges per subscriber, if you have the same contact on different lists, you end up paying for them twice. This might make sense if you are managing multiple businesses, but for most users, it's just a hassle and adds unnecessary costs. 

Let me give you an example: Imagine you run an online store and have a customer who's interested in both your clothing and accessories. With Mailchimp, you'd have to choose one category or the other, missing the chance to target them with a campaign covering both.

In my opinion, Mailchimp's way of managing lists is more complicated than it needs to be. So you can also use alternatives to Mailchimp.

Besides lists, Mailchimp has tags, segments, and groups to organize contacts, and it might feel overwhelming, especially if you are a beginner.

While both platforms have their good points, ActiveCampaign's way of managing lists gives more flexibility and automation. This makes it easy to customize your campaigns for specific audience groups without a fuss.

Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign and MailChimp are both well-known for their marketing automation feature. 

Let’s take a look at what each of them offers.

ActiveCampaign

If you use ActiveCampaign it is like stepping into a world of automation. With ActiveCampaign, you can combine different things like actions, and conditions to create smart workflows. 

Here I’m talking about sending emails, scoring leads, and organizing your data with tags and segments, all working together seamlessly. It's like having a personal marketing genius on your team to manage your sales engagement model.

And here is the best part, ActiveCampaign continues beyond email automation. For you, it means it plays nice with its built-in CRM. So, it's not just about automating emails, you can also set up automation for your sales processes. 

Think of sending follow-up messages, one-on-one chats, the whole deal. It's like having a marketing assistant who never takes a break, working hard to boost your efficiency and engagement.

MailChimp

If you've ever tried out MailChimp, they claim to be a 'powerful marketing automation platform,' but let me tell you, their automation falls a bit short compared to what you get with ActiveCampaign.

Now, I'll give credit where it's due, Mailchimp does offer some great automated campaigns, like the ones for abandoned carts, email triggers, and purchase confirmations. MailChimp even made their automation editor easier to use, which is a plus point.

Mailchimp allows you to do SMS marketing too. However, here is the main thing, if you want to include SMS in your automated campaigns, you'll have to use separate third-party tools.

Analyzing and reporting

Choosing the right platform for analyzing and reporting on your email marketing is crucial for making your campaigns work better. 

Both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp have useful tools, but they suit different needs. Come, let's dig into what each of them offers:

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides detailed reports on individual emails and your entire campaign, keeping tabs on open rates, clicks, conversions, and revenue.

Study-specific groups in your audience to see how they behave with your emails. This helps you understand and personalize things for them.

Look deep into how your automated workflows are performing. Find spots where people drop off and fix them to make things work smoother.

Track deals won and lost, see how your sales pipeline stages are doing, and check how well your sales team is performing, all in your analytics.

Create reports that focus on the metrics that matter the most to you, aligning your data analysis with your goals.

Use charts, graphs, and tables to make your data easy to understand. See how different channels, like email and social media, play a role in getting conversions. This helps you spend your resources wisely.

Understanding these analytics can really boost your email game and get you better results!

Mailchimp 

Mailchimp offers tracking for open rates, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes, giving you a quick overview of how your emails are doing. You can also keep an eye on your subscriber list growth, seeing how effective your efforts are at gaining new contacts.

If you're into sales, Mailchimp lets you generate reports on the sales and revenue directly tied to your email campaigns. This helps you connect your marketing actions to real results.

They also help you fine-tune your landing pages by analyzing visits, conversions, and bounce rates. This way, you can make them work better for you.

Want to know how much buzz your emails are creating on social media? Mailchimp keeps tabs on how often your emails get shared, showing you the organic reach and engagement your campaigns are getting.

If you are busy marketers will appreciate the quick insights available through their reports and dashboards. You can view your data in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

While Mailchimp doesn't go as deep as ActiveCampaign in audience segment analysis, it's a solid choice if you like simplicity and efficiency in your data analysis.

Using Mailchimp for email reporting and analytics has a couple of downsides for you. First, remember to turn on settings to see open and click-through rates in your reports. Don't forget this extra step.

Another thing to know is that Mailchimp doesn't give you real-time updates on how your emails are doing. So, if you want to understand your audience right away, you might find this a bit limiting for your sales efficiency. Just keep it in mind when using Mailchimp for quick insights. In case you do not wish to deal with these downsides, you can also explore alternatives to Mailchimp.

Pricing 

So, when it comes to pricing, both ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp have different levels depending on how many contacts you've got and what features you're after. Let me break it down for you:

Select the right email marketing platform that fits your business needs 

The choice between ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp depends on your specific needs and preferences. Consider your business size, goals, and the level of automation you require to make an informed decision. 

If you prioritize advanced automation and analytics, ActiveCampaign might be the better fit. 

If simplicity and a user-friendly interface are key for you, Mailchimp could be the preferred choice.

But if you need free, easy-to-use, and advanced features then you can go with Zixflow. 

So what are you waiting for? Get started today to level up your business with Zixflow’s amazing features.