If you’re looking for an email marketing platform or CRM, there’s a fair chance you’ve come across both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign.
They’re two very well-known options and, on the face of it, there’s quite a lot of crossover. On both, you can store contacts, organise your audience, send emails, segment people and create automations.
Which doesn’t exactly make choosing between the two particularly easy when you’re starting out.
And if you start reading comparison pages, you can quickly disappear down a rabbit hole of features, pricing levels and enormous tables covered in ticks.
But we’d suggest starting somewhere else.
What do you actually need the system to do?
Because neither is universally ‘better’, but they may well be better suited to different requirements.
Mailchimp is heavily focused on helping businesses organise audiences and communicate with them.
You can use tags to label contacts, segments to pull together particular audiences and marketing automation flows to respond to customer actions.
For a business that primarily wants to build a database and communicate regularly with it, that can be more than enough.
Which Is Better For Email Marketing?
If your priority is getting regular emails out to your audience, Mailchimp might well be all you need.
And keeping things simple is not necessarily a bad thing (and it might be advantageous!).
You can build an audience, tag contacts, create segments and send different messages to different groups depending on who they are and what they’re interested in.
If you’ve prospects and customers and you’re looking to email everyone in a particular sector, then you’re in a good spot with Mailchimp.
The important bit is getting the structure right in the first place. Because you can have every feature under the sun, but if your contacts are disorganised and nobody really understands why you have 87 different tags, your marketing will still be harder than it needs to be.
Which Is Better For Automation?
This is where things become slightly more interesting. Both platforms can automate your marketing, so this isn’t a case of Mailchimp being the ‘email one’ and ActiveCampaign being the ‘automation one’.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation flows allow you to create journeys based on customer activity and automate organisational actions such as adding or removing tags.
For example, someone downloads a guide, gets an introductory email and then receives a couple more emails over the next few weeks.
Straightforward, useful and for plenty of businesses, exactly what you want. The question is what happens when you want to take it further…
Maybe somebody downloads a guide, visits a particular service page and then makes an enquiry. At that point you might want your marketing activity to influence what happens within your sales process as well.
That’s where ActiveCampaign becomes particularly worth considering because its automation can work alongside its Deals CRM and sales pipeline.
But complexity for the sake of complexity isn’t the goal.
There’s no point creating a 47-step customer journey if three useful emails and a phone call would work better…
What If You Need To Manage Sales Opportunities?
This is probably the clearest point of difference between the two.
Let’s say somebody fills in a form on your website, it’s at that point that your marketing has done it’s job because you’ve generated an enquiry.
Now what happens next?
If your sales process involves conversations, quotes, follow-ups and several stages before somebody becomes a customer, then being able to track those opportunities can become incredibly useful.
ActiveCampaign’s CRM uses pipelines, stages, deals and tasks to help manage that process.
So, you might have:
Enquiry → Qualified → Quote Sent → Follow-Up → Won/Lost.
Someone in your business can then see where each opportunity sits and what needs to happen next.
If you don’t have that type of sales process, though, don’t worry about it.
There’s no point choosing your CRM because it has a brilliant sales pipeline if you’ll never actually use it.
Which Is Better For A Small Business?
This is where we’d resist giving you the slightly annoying answer of just naming one.
Because it really does depend (sorry!).
If you’re a small business with a relatively straightforward sales process and your primary aim is to build a database and communicate with people regularly, Mailchimp might be the logical place to begin.
It can help you do the important bit: getting useful marketing in front of your prospects consistently.
But ‘small business’ can mean almost anything.
A ten-person consultancy with a lengthy sales process may have far greater CRM requirements than a much bigger ecommerce business with a relatively straightforward customer journey.
So, business size probably isn’t the question.
Complexity is, though.
- How complicated is your customer journey?
- How many people need to use the system?
- How much automation do you want?
- Do you need to manage sales opportunities?
- What information do you need everybody to see?
Those answers are far more useful than your turnover or headcount.
Is ActiveCampaign Better Than Mailchimp?
For some businesses, yes, for others, absolutely not.
If you’re using Mailchimp successfully, your audience is organised and you’re regularly getting marketing out of the door, don’t move because somebody told you ActiveCampaign is ‘better’.
Better at what?
That’s the question.
If you’re finding yourself creating workarounds because you need more sophisticated automations, closer links between marketing and sales or a proper way of managing opportunities, then ActiveCampaign is certainly worth looking at.
But changing platforms creates work too.
You’ll need to move data, recreate automations, organise tags and fields and make sure everyone actually understands how the new system works.
So there needs to be a reason for doing it.
ActiveCampaign VS Mailchimp: Which Should You Choose?
Before looking at either platform, map out what needs to happen in your business.
- Where do leads come from?
- What communication do they receive?
- What happens when somebody responds?
- Who follows up?
- What happens if they’re not ready to buy?
- And what happens once they become a customer?
If the answer mostly revolves around building an audience and communicating with it, Mailchimp could be exactly what you need.
If your requirements extend further into managing sales opportunities and connecting that process closely with your marketing automation, ActiveCampaign might make more sense.
But the software won’t do the thinking for you. Get the process right first and then use the CRM to make it easier, faster and more consistent.
Who Are 3XM?
We’re 3XM Marketing, our goal is to generate you more leads and get more customers.
Simple, right?
The 3XM Marketing team with the ‘Best Strategic Marketing Firm’ Midlands Enterprise award from SME News.
If you’re looking for a strategic marketing partner to work with and ensure you’re doing the right stuff (and getting it to the right people) and you want to make sure it happens… consistently, then we can help.
Across our team, we’ve got most marketing bases covered, from strategy to copywriting, from paid traffic to CRMs, and we can work closely with you to:
- Get more marketing out the door
- Improve the quality and results of your marketing
- Enjoy your life and your business more
Get help to grow your business, for FREE
Book a free 3XM Business Growth Call, and spend 30 minutes with a member of the 3XM team, where we’ll help you outline some straightforward actionable things you can do to improve your marketing and grow your business, no strings, no tie ins, and no purchase necessary.
During your Business Growth Call, we’ll:
- Take a look at the marketing you’re doing, and give you our two cents on how to improve it
- Tell you what we’d be doing if we were in your shoes
- Give you actionable tactics and strategies we’re using right now to get leads and customers for our clients
- Make sure you walk away with something you can take away and use straight away
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