If you’re in search of the most effective tool for email marketing, specifically for large-volume or transactional emails, perhaps you’ve been familiar with SendGrid as well as Mailchimp.
Although Mailchimp remains the largest and most well-known name in the field of email marketing programs, SendGrid enables high-volume sending and high deliverability for a number of the biggest brands today.
But what’s the major distinction between them, and which is the most suitable for your business? That is how Mailchimp and SendGrid perform in our head-to-head analysis.
About SendGrid
In 2009, the company was founded and purchased by Twilio at the end of 2018 to pay $3 billion. The company is the leader in dependable email delivery for more than 80,000 customers who pay. They include Spotify, Uber, Airbnb, and others, who utilize SendGrid to deliver more than 50 billion emails each month.
About Mailchimp
Beginning as a bootstrapped side-project in 2001, Mailchimp has since grown to provide 11 million active customers as well as an immense total audience in the range of 4 billion customers.
While it’s primarily known as the most well-known email marketing platform available on the market, over the last few years, Mailchimp has grown to become a full-service marketing platform that includes landing pages and automation, as well as social media scheduling and much more.
Features comparison between Mailchimp and SendGrid
The email marketing tool you use is at the heart of your marketing plan. Therefore, it’s crucial to select the best tool for your company. Learn what Mailchimp and SendGrid contrast against the most crucial features for email marketing, and learn how to determine which is the ideal choice for your business.
Design and Templates
SendGrid, along with Mailchimp, both make the process of designing marketing emails a breeze. For SendGrid, you can utilize their email template builder to make highly customizable designs by using WYSIWYG (What You See is the What You Get) campaigns.
Additionally, you can access HTML whenever you need it through the code editor, which is one of the most effective available. One of the major advantages of SendGrid is its edit-your-own-path options, whether you want visually-designed designs, code, or a combination of both.
Comparatively, Mailchimp focuses on providing the best out-of-the-box in terms of code-free design. They have 100+ pre-designed mail templates as well as layouts that simplify email marketing for businesses of all sizes.
In their free plan, you can test the templates on your devices, while with their paid plans, you can test your email templates using an email client.
Landing Pages and Signup Forms
Another advantage of the Mailchimp platform is its simplicity in designing and optimizing landing pages to boost conversions and convert leads into customers. It is also easy to create signup forms and integrate them on Mailchimp-hosted landing pages or your site.
However, SendGrid has limited form capabilities. The basic forms are a brand new feature to their software that you can embed forms on the SendGrid hosted webpage or on your site and connect them for automated workflows.
SendGrid’s primary focus is email, while Mailchimp has grown to be an all-in-one marketing solution. When deciding between Mailchimp and SendGrid, your company needs to determine if high-quality, adaptable, and scalable email or basic all-in-one marketing is more important.
List Management
Effective management of contacts is an important factor in useful email marketing. However, what is the best way for Mailchimp and SendGrid to measure up to managing lists and contacts?
With SendGrid, it is easy to add fields and contacts through CSV, signup forms, and API integrations. SendGrid arranges contacts into lists and segments that can be set up manually or created dynamically based on defined parameters.
Mailchimp lists are known as “Audiences,” and contacts from various lists are kept separated from one another. It’s more challenging to manage than SendGrid to manage your contacts at once and also create segments that cross multiple lists.
In particular, you may need to keep the contacts on your Mailchimp database always updated with CRM to ensure your sales team will always have the most up-to-date data.
To determine what platform’s contact management feature is the most suitable for your company, consider using their free plans and syncing information from your other apps.
Automation
Mailchimp offers an impressive automated email feature with one-click automation that is included in the free plan. For those who want to automate their workflows, you could select a more powerful program over Mailchimp (such as HubSpot’s Marketing hub or a specific automation tool); however, Mailchimp is sure to satisfy all your needs for the majority of users.
With all the information they’re collecting from their massive amount of automated users, it’s likely Mailchimp will be able to utilize it to help power machine learning capabilities within their products in the near future.
SendGrid’s automation feature was up until recently in beta, but now it’s a fully integrated part of their service. It allows you to send welcome emails that include an onboarding sequence, follow up with attendees prior to an event, and contact leads that engage with the content.
You can send automated emails or drips that are time-based with triggers you design that are based on:
- The first time a contact is into the segment or
- The first time an individual is included in the list.
Here’s a glimpse of SendGrid automation in the field:
One benefit for small-scale companies that use SendGrid is the fact that automation is offered with the free plan. However, it isn’t included with the Basic 5K plan, which is a step over Free.
That means if there are more than 22,000 people on your list or you want to mail more than 6,000 email messages each month, you’ll need to change to an Advanced 10-K program (from $60 per month) to gain access to automated features.
SendGrid also integrates well with professional marketing automation tools such as BlueShift and Simon Data.
Analytics and Reporting
Mailchimp offers a reliable report suite that provides more features on its higher-tier pricing plans, with advanced analytics and conversion data to analyze the effectiveness of email marketing across the customer’s journey.
If you sign up for a free subscription, you’ll be able to access basic reports and helpful ideas. If you subscribe to the Essentials plan and beyond (starting with $9.99/month), you will be able to get access to A/B testing.
After you’ve sent an email using SendGrid, You can quickly get individual statistics for your campaign (such as clicks, opens unsubscribes, clicks, or emails that were discarded as spam) along with device, location, and ISP statistics.
Additionally, you can use their A/B testing tool or split different email types into specific categories to make your evaluation of performance more thorough.
A useful feature of SendGrid can be found in the reputation monitoring indicator. In the dashboard’s left side, you will see the IP standing, which is between 0% and 100 %. It can fluctuate depending on bounce blocking, spam, and invalid rate.
It gives you a detailed view of the way SendGrid evaluates your email-sending practices and provides you with important insight into the best ways to improve your deliverability and the reputation of the sender.
Deliverability
In studies conducted by EmailToolTester on February 20, 2020, Mailchimp had 81.6% deliverability. In their earlier testing, Mailchimp reached as high as 90.6% deliverability but frequently could be better than competitors like ActiveCampaign.
What are the statistics on SendGrid’s deliverability? There’s been no independent testing. However, SendGrid states its customers who utilize the Expert Services have a 97 % average delivery rate, compared to the average of 85% for the industry.
SendGrid has also reported an increase of 6% in open rates after working in a conversation with the Expert Services team. The delivery statistics are quite impressive, even if you’re forced to invest just a few hundred dollars or more if you need to consult.
If you’re a large company that’s determined to get emails delivered on time, budget will not be a concern. You can test using the email marketing tool from SendGrid, the ROI Calculator, for a chance to find out the results you can expect using their software.
Customer Support
Mailchimp does not offer phone support on lower-price plans, but they offer live chat and email assistance on the Essentials Plan and beyond. For those on a no-cost plan, you won’t be able to access 1-1 support from Mailchimp for the first 30 calendar days, but you can access the user guides available in their knowledge base.
SendGrid offers 24 hours of ticket support to every customer, and 24/7 chat support for customers paying and telephone support is available to customers who have an account that is Pro or higher between 7:00 AM and 5:45 PM MST on Monday through Friday.
If you’re deciding from SendGrid as well as Mailchimp Free plans, SendGrid has slightly higher support, but only by a tiny margin.
Pricing and the ability to scalability
Of the two email platforms, Mailchimp is the most user-friendly and typically cheapest for small-sized businesses to start with. It has four pricing plans, which range from Free to Premium (available from $137.31/month, however highly adaptable to large databases of contacts).
Pricing for Mailchimp is based on the quantity of email contacts and emails you require, which you can determine through the Pricing page.
On the pricing page of SendGrid On their pricing page, you can pick whether you would like their Email API Marketing Campaigns or Email API plus Marketing Campaigns. Like Mailchimp, SendGrid pricing is dependent on the number of emails you’re sending and the number of contacts you have as well.
Through one of the Email API Plans, you can integrate email into your application or website. You can begin with the free plan that includes the first 40,000 emails in 30 days and then 100 emails a day forever after that.
A majority of companies that send transactions-based emails will require at least the SendGrid Essentials 50K plan for the long term because of this limitation.
With the Marketing Campaigns plan, you can design and distribute automated email marketing campaigns as well as automation. It’s the closest product to Mailchimp’s email marketing core product.
If you sign up for a free plan, you can save more than 2,000 contacts and email up to 6,000 messages each month.
With the Basic 5K plan of SendGrid, you can save up to 5,000 contacts as well as send 15,000 emails per month before any overages are applied. If you upgrade to The Advanced plan, it increases this by 10,000 contacts and up to 50,000 email messages per month.
The ideal moment to select Sendgrid
You’re a web developer who has a lot of needs
The primary distinction between SendGrid and Mailchimp can be seen in the fact that SendGrid excels in more technical applications. In contrast, Mailchimp remains the most popular email marketing service; SendGrid is the best email software for developers with complicated requirements and a need to create great code and be flexible. It’s built by developers, for developers – no question about it.
If you’re in search of an email service that can aid you in sending messages to recover passwords or send notifications to your site’s users, SendGrid is one of the best options. They first introduced the transactional email market based on APIs in 2009, which means you’ll be in the best hands.
For connecting SendGrid to your app, it is possible to use their documented API, which is well-documented, or you could utilize SMTP. You may also opt for an option that includes an IP that is essential to you.
Startups in the initial stages of launching an application and gaining users of the SendGrid Free plan can be a great help while making your way through the process of establishing.
Students studying development can also receive 15,000 emails per month for free through SendGrid to be part of the GitHub Educational program.
You’re operating at a high level
SendGrid will not even blink when you have to send out a million email messages. Their technology will take it on without a problem. Being the biggest cloud-based sender, they’ve designed their email delivery platform to provide rapid speed, scalability, and reliability for companies that can’t afford any errors.
SendGrid also has an enormous amount of information available to identify the future and identify vulnerabilities that nobody else has.
You will require a transactional or e-commerce system or emails
The email services offered by SendGrid are an excellent choice for increasing purchases at the retail store, verifying reservations, increasing sales, and managing subscriptions. It was designed to be secure and adaptable to sending both marketing and transactional emails. However, we believe that their strength lies in the technical and transactional aspects.
Overall, the tool offers many benefits for businesses that sell online. It’s no wonder that SendGrid is a trusted brand that is as large as eBay. It is just one of the reasons why SendGrid is distinct in contrast to Mailchimp, even though Mailchimp is working on optimizing its transactions solution.
If you’d like more data
SendGrid is aware that tracking and analyzing marketing statistics is vital for the performance of any campaign, and their statistical and reporting tools enthrall the majority of SendGrid users. The analytics of Mailchimp are excellent, but the SendGrid analytics are the most impressive of the two.
What are the reasons for picking Mailchimp?
You’re looking for simplicity
If you don’t have to consider APIs, transactions, or reset emails, go to Mailchimp. The most straightforward choice is usually the best choice, even in the case of your email marketing tool.
Mailchimp is extremely user-friendly, provides a simple onboarding procedure, and is frequently mentioned as the most straightforward email marketing software to start with.
You appreciate a great brand experience
Mailchimp’s brand is remarkable. There’s a reason why many companies look up to the company, as well as the reason why so many people think of Mailchimp when they think of an email program.
The product has been developed with the brand’s experience in mind. It creates an experience that’s just as enjoyable as their zany appearance.
Suppose you’re interested in watching and learning from the company’s development of its brand and keeping an effective email tool that will be with you on the journey. In that case, you’ll probably be a satisfied Mailchimp client.
It is only your marketing team who uses it
Mailchimp is among the best software companies for small-scale businesses that want a simple marketing method. If all you have to send are the basic marketing emails – and you’d prefer to have simple advertising management as well as social media scheduling landing pages and much more included, Mailchimp is the best option.
SendGrid has a large selection of technical and transactional emails; however, it isn’t the most powerful marketing suite that is a stand-alone product.
It’s a small-sized business, and cost is a major factor
The most popular plan offered by Mailchimp is the Free plan, which permits users to store up to 22,000 subscribers and send out 12,000 emails each month. It’s possibly the most affordable free marketing tool available, and that’s why they have an enormous user base.
Mailchimp does become a bit more expensive when you increase its size; however, you get plenty of money, especially considering other tools that you won’t be paying for because Mailchimp is a complete solution.
Summary: When to select SendGrid Vs Mailchimp
Which email software is better: Mailchimp or. SendGrid? SendGrid is designed by developers specifically for developers, so your team of tech experts will enjoy it. Your marketing team might be more inclined to use Mailchimp since it is a great choice for the nurturing, automation, and newsletter marketing tasks that they’re paid for.
In comparing Mailchimp and SendGrid, the issue boils down to the things you’ll need to gain from your email service.
To select the correct email platform for you, take a look at your business size, the things that matter in the present and future, and whether the tool is intended for your marketing or development groups (or each). Next, you should give each tool’s free plans a try alongside other decision-makers within your team.
When is the ideal time to pick SendGrid?
- You’re a developer who has complex needs
- You’re operating at a large scale
- You will require an e-commerce and transactional solution for your email
- In case you’d like to learn more
- You’ll want to get access to several lists
Why should you choose Mailchimp?
- You’re looking for simplicity
- You are a fan of a great brand experience
- It is only your team of marketers who use it.
- Small-scale businesses are less expensive, and the cost of doing business is an issue.
- You’d like landing pages as well as registration forms.
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