by So, here we are, Mailchimp vs HubSpot – The Software battles. Email marketing and marketing automation. If you say Mailchimp, we immediately think of email marketing. But what can Mailchimp actually do? And what can HubSpot do in comparison?
We dive into the two marketing platforms and compare things like user interface, functions and reporting.
Hopefully this page can help you figure out which platform is best for you. Do you need software that meets your email marketing needs or software that makes your marketing efforts play along with the sales department?
Let’s take a look at what HubSpot and Mailchimp can do.
What can HubSpot do?
If you are looking for an all-round platform, HubSpot is the clear number 1. Here you get a free CRM for handling your contacts and the option of a wide range of functions for the rest of the organization.
You can add hubs within Marketing, Sales, Service and CMS and thus gather the entire company on one platform.
What is HubSpot Marketing Hub?
When we compare with Mailchimp, it is naturally most interesting to look at HubSpot’s marketing module HubSpot Marketing Hub.
The Marketing Hub platform provides you with a number of tools for your marketing activities. You get the opportunity to follow your leads all the way through the funnel and can automate large parts of your marketing. The platform is created for Inbound Marketing.
What can Mailchimp do?
Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform. As a user, you can connect with your customers and potential customers via a wide range of integrations.
If you have been sending out newsletters for many years, you have probably come across Mailchimp. The free version is used by many small businesses to send monthly newsletters and welcome emails. Do you want to benefit from automation functions etc. you have to upgrade to one of their paid plans.
Read also: - WordPress Vs HubSpot – Which CMS Should You Choose?
Functionalities
Marketers have lots of tasks to solve. Send an email, set up a retargeting ad and create engagement on social media. It all helps to create a good customer experience. But which tools can help you implement the marketing strategy? Mailchimp vs HubSpot, can automate some of the processes and help you create even better customer relationships.
E-mail marketing
An email platform is often the first tool marketers add to their toolkit—and for good reason. Email marketing is a quick way to engage with prospects and turn them into loyal customers. It is also extremely cost effective, with some studies showing a ROI (Return on Investment) of up to 4400%. When choosing an email service provider, you want to make sure it has the features you need and is flexible enough to stay with you as your business grows.
Mailchimp’s email marketing tool has a drag and drop email editor and option for custom email templates. When you upgrade to a paid tier, you get access to features like A/B testing and dynamic airtimes. You also get the option of reports that compare your emails, so you can start analyzing data across campaigns and share insights with your team.
HubSpot’s email tool has all the features that Mailchimp has – and more. HubSpot’s drag and drop email editor is easy to use, and you’ll find a variety of templates that you can customize to your brand’s specific needs. As you grow, you can unlock features like smart airtimes, A/B testing, and more.
You get the very best out of HubSpot’s email marketing tool when you combine it with HubSpot CRM and their automating workflows. With HubSpot, you can create detailed email campaigns that give each contact a customized experience based on the information you’ve collected in CRM.
For example, you can use your customer consultant responsible for Germany as the sender to contacts in France, while you send from a customer consultant from the metropolitan area in Brazil. You can also create “if/then” functions in your automated email campaigns so that each contact receives an email based on the experience they’ve had with your brand.
We’ve put together an overview comparing HubSpot and Mailchimp’s features for the sake of clarity:
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |
| Drag and drop email editor | ✅ | ✅ |
| E-commerce emails | ✅ | ✅ |
| Personalized emails | ✅ | ✅ |
| A/B testing | ✅ | ✅ |
| Send according to time zone | ✅ | ✅ |
| Responsive optimization | ✅ | ✅ |
| Analyze | ✅ | ✅ |
| Comparative reports | ✅ | ✅ |
| Emails based on the contact’s action | ✅ | ✅ |
Managing contacts
As you grow, so will your database of contacts. Being able to track how these contacts have interacted with your brand and take action on this is critical to your success. A marketing automation platform that gives you full insight into your customers’ journey and the ability to manage contacts across a team will help you personalize your marketing while helping you scale your business.
Mailchimp’s Marketing CRM has an audience system that leverages segments and tags that can be used to manage your prospecting reach. Segments will automatically create groups of contacts based on a single variable, while tagging your contacts lets you create manual groupings – just like you would tag a group of blog posts as “How to” articles.
Mailchimp lets free users use up to five conditions to create a segment, while premium users can use advanced segmentation features that let you combine unlimited conditions to filter your audience.
HubSpot’s marketing tools are built directly on top of CRM – giving you insight into your contact’s entire experience with your company. You get extremely detailed knowledge of your contacts’ actions and how to manage them. HubSpot CRM contains more than just information about your marketing activities.
In addition to seeing if a contact has opened your latest marketing email, for example, you’ll be able to track how contacts have interacted with your website, how their last sales call went, and whether they have an open ticket with your support team. Create as many custom properties as you want in HubSpot CRM. Use the attribute values to create lists that can be used across all of your marketing campaigns.
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |
| Handling of lists | ✅ | ✅ |
| Custom contact properties | ✅ | ✅ |
| Combine filtering to segment lists | ✅ | Premium |
| Update multiple contacts at once | ✅ | Only via import |
| Timeline of interactions with your company | ✅ | Limited |
Marketing automation
Marketing automation – is essential for any business that wants to scale. As you grow, actions you used to perform manually, such as sending nurture emails at a regular cadence, are no longer possible. You have too many contacts to manage and too many other tasks to spend your time on. Marketing automation lets you continue to provide your customers with a personalized experience while you focus on other tasks.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation platform lets you trigger marketing emails based on a series of your contacts’ actions. But Mailchimp only allows you to use marketing automation to send emails. You cannot automate your contact management or internal notifications through their automation tool. It has to be done manually, which makes growth companies choose other platforms.
HubSpot’s automation platform goes beyond just emails. Emails based on actions your contacts take are just the tip of the iceberg. While Mailchimp can send automatic return emails and more, HubSpot’s workflow tool lets you manage your contact database, handle leads in your sales team, and even create support tickets automatically.
You can also go a step further and add e.g. delays to your automation so you can customize your workflows to meet your team’s needs. HubSpot’s automation platform is designed to help your entire business — not just your email marketing.
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |
| Automatic return emails | ✅ | ✅ |
| “Drip” campaigns in multiple steps | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automatic if/then function | ✅ | – |
| Automatic lead management and segmentation | ✅ | – |
| Automatic contact and company updates | ✅ | – |
| Custom automation via API | ✅ | ✅ |
Social media and advertising
If you want to engage your followers and contacts, it is important to be active on social media. Which social media you should be active on depends on your target audience and their use of social media.
Ads can be made targeted with your messages across e.g. Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Digital advertising is a fast way to generate new leads and nurture your contacts.
Mailchimp’s social media tools allow you to publish organic content to Facebook and Instagram. Their ads tool lets you manage your Facebook ads and Google display ads. You also get a number of reports that link your ad spend with revenue.
For Facebook, however, you must have an e-commerce platform connected to your account such as Shopify or WooCommerce. Targeting is limited on Mailchimp. For example, you can’t use contact lists for your Google ads to refine or exclude your target audience, and you’re only able to target ads to all website visitors. There is no option to specify a specific page or group of pages.
HubSpot is the tool if you’re looking for one tool for both your organic social media management and paid strategies. Start by connecting all your social accounts to HubSpot across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Schedule ads across each network and quickly see how ads are performing on each channel. HubSpot gives you insight into the performance of posts, regardless of where you publish, which ensures that posts published in HubSpot or via e.g. Facebook or LinkedIn are tracked. You can also connect your YouTube account to HubSpot to see how your audience interacts with your video content.
With the monitoring tool, you are also able to keep track of specific trends and keywords that are important to you and your brand. You can also reply directly to comments on your social media posts in HubSpot.
HubSpot’s ad tool lets you easily manage your Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ad campaigns from one central location. Once you’ve connected your account to HubSpot, adding tracking pixels to your site is a two-click process—no developer required. Any leads generated through a Facebook lead ad or LinkedIn lead generation form are automatically synced over into HubSpot.
You can also do detailed targeting using any CRM data point or an extremely specific grouping of pages to reach exactly the ones you want. HubSpot Ads is closely tied to CRM, so you can report on exactly how much revenue is attributable to your ads at different stages of the buying journey.
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |
| Posts via social media | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter | Facebook & Instagram |
| Social media monitoring | ✅ | – |
| Reporting of social media results | No matter where you publish from | Only when you publish via Mailchimp |
| Facebook/Instagram ads | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google search ads | ✅ | – |
| Google display ads | – | ✅ |
| Advanced website audience | ✅ | – |
| Contact list target group | ✅ | Facebook only |
| Facebook lookalike audience | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ad ROI reporting | ✅ | Ecommerce integration required |
| Ad reporting across attributions | ✅ | – |
Landing pages and forms
Effective landing pages that match your brand and drive conversions are essential for growing businesses. An effective landing page should make it easy for your visitors to quickly fill out a form and learn more about your offer. Your forms must be customizable to meet the needs of your business and your customers – so you can gather all the information you need to effectively nurture your leads.
Mailchimp offers a simple drag and drop editing experience for building landing pages and a form solution. Your forms are automatically linked to a list, making it quick and easy to follow up on forms.
HubSpot has even more robust solution for landing pages and forms. What sets HubSpot apart from Mailchimp is the tool’s flexibility. By adding the HubSpot tracking code to your website, you can automatically bring data into HubSpot from any form tool you use. HubSpot also understands that the goal of a form submission isn’t always to convert a new lead the first time.
Progressive Profiling allows you to change what a visitor to your website sees if they are already a contact in your database – ensuring that every form fill provides valuable insight and information to your business.
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |
| Forms | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pop-up forms | ✅ | ✅ |
| Embedded forms | ✅ | ✅ |
| Collect data regardless of which platform you use | ✅ | Via integrations |
| Custom form fields | ✅ | ✅ |
| Hidden form fields | ✅ | ✅ |
| Progressive profiling | ✅ | – |
| Dependent fields | ✅ | – |
| Drag and drop page structure | ✅ | ✅ |
| Development via templates and custom code | ✅ | ✅ |
| Use custom domain | ✅ | ✅ |
| Planned release | ✅ | – |
| On page SEO optimization | ✅ | – |
Language
As your business grows, so will your team. Your marketing team that started in one office can now span multiple offices around the globe. Or maybe English is just not your preferred language. Whatever the case, the tools you use to execute your marketing strategy should be available in the language your colleagues operate in.
Mailchimp offers documentation in multiple languages, but their product is only available in English.
HubSpot, on the other hand, has a variety of languages that can support your growing team in a variety of languages.
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |||
| Type | Product language | Documentation language | Product language | Documentation language |
| English | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Spanish | ✅ | ✅ | – | ✅ |
| French | ✅ | ✅ | – | ✅ |
| Portuguese | ✅ | ✅ | – | – |
| German | ✅ | ✅ | – | – |
| Japanese | ✅ | ✅ | – | – |
| Dutch | ✅ | – | – | – |
Integrated platform
HubSpot is much more than just email and marketing automation. With live chat, a managed CMS, SEO tools and more, HubSpot has everything you need to get your marketing strategy off the ground with advanced features you can use – even as you grow.
Also, add your sales and service teams to HubSpot and see how having all teams working in one system reduces friction throughout your customer’s experience with your business.
| HubSpot | Mailchimp | |
| Live chat tools | ✅ | – |
| Bots that can be programmed | ✅ | – |
| Combined e-mail & chat inbox | ✅ | – |
| Blog | ✅ | – |
| SEO tools | ✅ | – |
| Video hosting and handling | ✅ | – |
| Hierarchical teams | ✅ | – |
| Meeting booking tool | ✅ | – |
| Lead scoring | ✅ | – |
| Automated sales flows | ✅ | – |
| Ticket and deal automation | ✅ | – |
| Knowledge platform | ✅ | – |
| Customer feedback tools | ✅ | – |
| Help desk tools | ✅ | – |
Support
Whether you’re experienced or just getting started with a marketing automation platform, HubSpot has the resources you need to succeed. They offer extensive online resources and a support team that is ready 24/7 to help.
The winner: HubSpot vs Mailchimp – which is right for you?
It of course depends on your needs. We’ve tried to summarize when you should choose Mailchimp and when you should choose HubSpot:
When to choose Mailchimp?
- You only need email marketing functions
- Only need to automate emails
- You don’t need a system that can be shared with your colleagues in customer service and sales
When to choose HubSpot?
- If need a system that can do everything you need in email marketing
- You want to automate more processes than just emails
- If want a platform that can be used by the entire organization
- You will experience greater efficiency by gathering tools in one platform
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