Campaign Monitor vs Mailchimp vs Brevo: Which Email Marketing Service Wins?

Do you want to build an email list, but haven’t yet decided which email marketing service you are going to use? We’ve all been there, browsing through different email marketing services sites, trying to figure out which has the best features for your business. While we can’t go through all the email marketing services out there, we are going to take a look at the three most dominant email marketing services—  Campaign Monitor vs Mailchimp vs Brevo.

Campaign Monitor vs Mailchimp vs Brevo

We’ll look at the features these email marketing services offer and give you an insight into the best email marketing service to consider. Let’s get down to business.

Campaign Monitor 

Campaign Monitor is one of the recommended solutions on our list. It comes with some of the best email marketing tools. This web application allows you to create data for an online mailing list. In addition to that, it even allows you to send HTML e-newsletters. 

Before, Campaign Monitor didn’t offer a free plan. As we looked at the website, they are now offering a free plan just by signing up to their website. 

They also provide three different paid plans—basic, unlimited, and premier. While those three plans have some standard features, they differ in certain ways.

These are some of the key distinctions found in those plans:

• Lite Plan has a limit on the number of emails you can send to your subscribers in a single month. If you have an email list with 500 subscribers, you can only send 2,500 emails a month. On the other hand, if you have a list with 30,000 email addresses, you can only send 250,000 emails. Also, with the lite plan, you are limited to designing automated sophisticated subscriber journeys.
• Essential plan doesn’t limit the number of messages you can send to your subscribers. These plans also offer sophisticated automated email journeys.
• The Premier Campaign Monitor plan allows you to email unlimited subscribers through multiple users. It even comes with phone support. There is also a feature known as send-time optimization, which sends e-newsletters at specific moments when they are likely to get opened.

Since the pricing depends on the size of your database, we are going to give you an overview of three different scenarios that will help you understand Campaign Monitor pricing:

Note: These are monthly prices.

• A database with 500 subscribers will cost you $11 in the Lite plan, $19 in the Essentials plan, and $149 in the Premier plan.
• A database with 25,000 email addresses will cost you $219 in the Lite plan, $268 in the Essentials plan, and $499 in the Premier plan.
• If you have a top-tier database with a list of 50,000 subscribers, you have to pay $349 for the Lite plan, $409 for the Essentials plan, and $989 for the Premier plan.

None of the plans limits the number of users that can access the account, and they allow you to assign roles to different team members. Also, you have the power to choose which features a certain role can access.  

Campaign Monitor offers the option to run SMS marketing campaigns, but you must contact the platform’s sales team to find out how many messages you can send with each plan.

Campaign Monitor Key Features

Templates

• Offers more than 100 premade email designs
• Drag-and-drop email editor
• Branded templates
• A/B testing
• Create lightboxes, and embeddable forms for landing pages

Email Options

• RSS Feed triggers 
• Dynamic content 
• Transactional emails
• Image gallery with more than 2 million free pictures 

Options like the Countdown Timer, Send Time Optimization, or Email Section Locking are only available within Essentials and Premier plans.

The platform offers a powerful segmentation tool enabling users to send messages that target different subscriber groups. It also has an A/B testing feature that lets you create two versions of an email to check, which one has better open or bounce rates. 

Automation

• Allows you to send multiple autoresponders
• Create a series of automated emails based on the rules you define
• A journey designer helps you to create different automated email series

Analytics and Insights

• Quickly reviews your analytics from the unsubscribe rates, and click-throughs

You must purchase the Premier plan to unlock the Advanced Link Tracking feature that shows you an email campaign’s performance on CoreMetrics, Omniture, and similar platforms.

Usability and User Interface

• Straightforward to navigate the front-end
• Has an inbox preview which shows how your email will look like in your subscriber’s inbox

Pros

• Automation features are great
• Easy to use
• Professional templates

Cons

• Limited support 
• No landing page creator
• Can be a bit, expensive

Campaign Monitor Installation & Setup

Before everything else, create and verify your Campaign Monitor account. Then, Install and activate the plugin to your WordPress. After activating the plugin, the global settings tab and form action will be available. From there, your WordPress site needs to link to your Campaign Monitor account. 

Setup Your Campaign Monitor Integration

Proceed by going to the Campaign Monitor website, and log in to your account. Then, click your profile image > Account Settings > API Keys.

Select Show API key to copy and paste your API key. 

If you don’t have the generated one yet, select Generate API Key instead.

On a new browser, proceed by going to Formidable > Global Settings > Campaign Monitor. From there, you can now copy and paste your API key and Client ID to the Formidable Global settings page.

Create Forms By Using Campaign Monitor

You can now proceed by going to your integration choice, then Forms. For this one, we are using Formidable. 

After that, go to the settings page for the form. Now, click Settings > Actions & Notifications. Select the Campaign Monitor icon to add the plugin action to the form. For easy reference, give an Action Name to your Campaign Monitor action. Lastly, select again the Campaign Monitor list to appear the fields needed for your form. 

After filling everything up, submit the form. 

Try Campaign Monitor Today

Mailchimp 

Another email marketing tool recommended is Mailchimp. Mailchimp offers a free plan. This might be a suitable option if you want to try out Mailchimp features. It lets you host a mailing list with 2,000 addresses and allows you to send around 10,000 e-newsletters each month. However, your e-newsletters will have Mailchimp ads.

Paid plans are billed in the following way:

• Essentials– Starts at $4.62 per month for a list with 500 email addresses.
• Standard– Starts at $6.89 for a list with 500 email addresses.
• Premium– Starts at $137.84 for a list with 500 addresses.

All plans support over 300 integrations, including WordPress integration, offer pre-designed email templates, and come with the Creative Assistant feature that lets you import logos, fonts, or images from your website. 

It’s also worth noting that the number of emails you can send monthly depends on the plan you choose. You cannot send more than 1,000 messages per month with the free version of Mailchimp. 

The Essentials plan increases the monthly email sends limit to 5,000, while the Standard plan enables you to send 6,000 emails every month. These plans also limit the number of team members who can access a Mailchimp account, and you must buy the Premium plan if you want to allow unlimited users to send emails from your company’s account on this platform.

The Essentials plan doesn’t let you automate your marketing emails through autoresponders. If you are keen on automation, you should consider the standard and the premium plan.

If you don’t send emails frequently, you can consider using the ‘pay as you go’ plan. This option allows you to pay a certain fee, depending on the number of emails sent. It is based on the essentials plan, so it has the same functionalities as the essentials plan.

Take note: watch out for your subscriber count while using Mailchimp.

Let’s say you have 1000 subscribers on your account, then 200 unsubscribe from your list. Mailchimp will charge you as if you have a subscriber list of 1000 addresses. You can resolve this by deleting unsubscribed addresses from your list.

Mailchimp Key Features

Templates

• Mailchimp has some of the best templates that are versatile, diverse, and quite customizable.
• Seamlessly add unique images, and social media buttons to your email template
• Templates are not fully loaded
• Has a drag and drop feature
• There are no options that let you adjust the top and bottom margins

Email options

• Email Scheduling 
• Content Optimizer 
• Campaign Manager 
• Contact Profiles 
• Content Studio 

These features aren’t included in all plans, so the scope of email marketing tools you’ll have at your disposal will be relatively narrow if you choose the free or Essentials plan. All Mailchimp plans offer a variety of forms, and landing pages you can use to convert website visitors into subscribers. 

Automation

• Has various automated email presets organized into different categories
• Offers a custom option that builds an automated email series from scratch
• Ability to integrate automation functionalities with your website
• Allows automation only on top-tier plans. 

Analytics and Insights

• View your emails’ basic results, such as click-throughs, email open rates, and comparative overviews.
• Send Optimizer lets you know the best time to send an email.
• Allows three test campaign types

Usability and User Interface

• Campaign builder is quite flexible
• Offers unlimited storage for storing images
• Finding landing pages section can be quite challenging for some users

Pros 

• Provides a lot of integration with other tools
• Has a built-in CRM that allows users to setup customer profiles

Cons

• If you have any affiliate program on your website, unfortunately, Mailchimp has a strict policy prohibiting affiliate marketing.
• If you are a free plan user, support such as email or tickets are not available.

Mailchimp Installation & Setup

Set Up An Account

Create your account by going to Mailchimp’s website. After creating an account, Mailchimp will send an activation email. Click the link provided to activate your account. 

Installing the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin is probably the fastest way to start using this email marketing service on your site. However, you don’t need a plugin to add a Mailchimp signup or popup form to a WordPress website, as you can generate an API key to connect your accounts on these platforms.

Create Your Email Campaign

Now that you finally have an account, it’s time to create your first email campaign. 

Go to the Mailchimp dashboard, and click the pencil icon, which is the Create tab.

Upon selecting, it will flash different campaigns. Now, choose email.

After choosing email, click on Regular, 

After that, enter the campaign name that you want, and click the Begin button.

By clicking that, it will take you to the builder. This is where the customization begins. 

Try Mailchimp Today

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is one of the best email marketing services providers on the list. Besides this, Brevo is an all-in-one platform that allows you to automate marketing campaigns for various channels apart from email, such as SMS, WhatsApp, and Chat. The email service provider is highly flexible as compared to MailChimp.

Brevo has a user-friendly and intuitive interface to help anyone get started with it quickly. The email service provider is highly suitable for startups, SMBs, agencies, eCommerce stores, and enterprises. 

Like other email service providers, Brevo plans are based on the number of emails you send. They also allow you to have unlimited contacts. The free plan is a feature-constrained trial enabling you to send 300 emails daily.

Paid plans are billed in the following manner:

• Starter Plan– 20,000 emails at $25 per month.
• Business Plan– 20,000 emails at $65 per month
• BrevoPlus Plan– This plan is suitable for large organizations that send hundreds of thousands of emails in a month. The price is customized based on your needs, and the number of emails you are planning to send.

All plans come with a drag-and-drop editor, an extensive template gallery, and an efficient content management system. Hence, segmenting your contacts or capturing new leads with Brevo’s signup forms shouldn’t be difficult.

Brevo Key Features

Templates 

•  Offers 40 responsive email templates that you can customize as per your needs

Email Options

• Unlimited email marketing campaigns 
• Powerful personalization features 
• Effortless send time optimization (Business and Enterprise Version)
• Transactional emails 

All emails you send with Brevo’s free version will have the platform’s branding. The same is true for the Starter plan, but you can pay $12 per month to remove Brevo branding from emails you send to your contacts. 

These plans don’t have the landing page builder or the A/B testing functionality, and their reporting capabilities are neglectable. To get a landing page builder and highly advanced reporting, you need to go for the Business or Enterprise version.

Automation

• Different workflow templates can be redesigned to fulfill a particular purpose
• Page tracking
• Allows access automation features in all plans

Analytics and Insights

• Run A/B tests on email content and subject lines.
• Has email reporting tools that give metrics on subscription clicks and open rates

Usability and User Friendly

• Straightforward user interface and easy to navigate
• Has a minimalistic design 

Pros

• Allows you to schedule your email campaigns. May it be either send them on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your publishing frequency.
• It has a free version that allows you to send 300 emails per day in a month.

Cons

• It needs improvement on the reporting views.
• The support system is slow.
• It has limited integration with other platforms.

Brevo Installation & Setup

Before you get started, you need a validated account to proceed. If you have, then you can now create your first email campaign.

Set Up Your First Campaign

Before you create your campaign in Brevo, your account must be verified. 

After this, you should go to the Campaigns -> Email. Then, click on the button Create an email campaign. 

You will be able to view a page related to creating an email campaign. In the regular tab, mention the campaign name and create a campaign. 

After filling up everything, you can now start configuring the advanced options for your email campaign. Here, you need to decide on From, To, and Subject Line.

Try Brevo Today

Campaign Monitor vs Mailchimp vs Brevo: Which Email Marketing Service Should You Choose?

Now that you’ve gone through those three email marketing services, the next thing you need to do is choose a suitable platform.

A little while ago, our favorite email marketing service was Mailchimp because it had a user-friendly interface. However, since Brevo upgraded its interface, it has become quite competitive. And you know what?

Brevo allows you to manage your email marketing features from your WordPress admin dashboard quite easily. While Campaign Monitor is a reliable email marketing service, we couldn’t find a solid reason to choose it over Mailchimp or Brevo. However, when it comes to automation and personalization, Campaign Monitor has some exciting features. Such features can only be useful if you are willing to put in the work. Campaign monitors might be suitable for you if you like such features.

Frequently Asked Questions about Email Marketing Platforms

When to Send Marketing Emails?

Choosing the perfect time to send emails to your subscribers can ensure high open rates, and consequently increase the sales of products or services you’re offering. 

But, to do that, you must understand your audience, and know when they’re checking their emails. Statistics show that 55% of people check their email before going to work. 

That’s why the best time to send a marketing email is between 9 AM and 12 PM. Emails sent before 9 AM have an 11.3% engagement rate, so it’s important not to send emails too early. Emails sent between 12 PM and 3 PM have a 27.6% engagement rate, while those delivered after 6 PM have a measly 6.6% engagement rate.

Which Email Newsletter Service is the Best?

Mailchimp is undoubtedly one of the most popular email marketing services, with over 13 million active users. However, it is not the best option for small businesses because it limits the number of contacts who receive newsletters, and other promotional messages sent through this platform. 

AWeber, GetResponse, Brevo, and Campaign Monitor are among the best email marketing services, allowing users to send weekly or monthly newsletters. However, if you’re searching for a service focusing primarily on newsletters, you should consider Substack or ConvertKit. The most important thing here is to choose a platform that provides features that are valuable for you because there’s no point in paying for a service that delivers a bunch of options you’ll never use.

Verdict

While finding a fully reliable email marketing service can be a rather daunting task, the platforms we have recommended above have excellent features. If one doesn’t suit your needs completely, you can switch to another service, and try out its functions. Eventually, you will find a suitable email marketing service that you are comfortable with. Which is your favorite email marketing service out of these three?  Let us know in the comments below!