A quick search on Google for ‘Best Marketing Tools’, it won’t be long before you’re comparing HubSpot vs Mailchimp. Two of the biggest marketing platforms on the market.
HubSpot bills itself as an all-in-one marketing automation platform. So does Mailchimp. But does that mean they’re the same thing?
In truth, no.
Whilst HubSpot and Mailchimp will help you, just as they advertise, they are tools with very different objectives in mind.
In this blog, we highlight some of the features they share. A couple they don’t and unpack the difference between each marketing platform.
So let’s dive in.
So what is HubSpot?
Founded in 2006, HubSpot has become one of the world’s most popular and effective cloud-based CRMs and marketing automation platforms.
HubSpot is the #1 Marketing Automation Platform on G2.
HubSpot has a vast product suite.
Everything is designed to help both sales and marketing teams. Each tool is there to help align, implement and optimise inbound marketing campaigns.
As well as foster sales enablement, and manage contact and customer relationships.
Every tool is designed for individuals who want to manage their databases. As well as enterprise organisations chasing ambitious goals.
It’s little wonder then that HubSpot surpassed the $1 billion annual recurring revenue mark in 2020.
They have amassed a vast amount of social proof and a loyal user base along the way.
Now, what about Mailchimp?
Mention the word ‘email tools’ and, chances are, most people will think of Mailchimp.
Founded in 2001, Mailchimp has become one of the go-to email-marketing platforms. For everyone from solopreneurs, bloggers and small to medium businesses across the globe. Just last year, it’s been estimated that 340 billion emails were sent from the Mailchimp platform.
Recently, however, Mailchimp has begun expanding its offering to include a lot more than just email marketing. Making the comparison between HubSpot vs Mailchimp even more relevant.
Today, you can create a website, launch an online store, build landing pages, create and edit paid ads.
Plus, you are now able to enjoy a comprehensive list of analytics features that allow you to track your performance.
It’s why Mailchimp has become one of the go-to tools in brand building and email marketing over the last decade.
Ok, so when comparing HubSpot vs Mailchimp, what do they have in common?
So HubSpot and Mailchimp look to be focused on different market ends, it’s clear their product offering does overlap. So let’s take a look at some of the features that both HubSpot and Mailchimp have in common:
Email marketing
Mailchimp is the go-to email marketing platform that makes creating and sending emails for your business easy.
When comparing the email functionality of HubSpot vs Mailchimp, this is probably what most people will want to know.
The good news is that nothing has changed. It’s still effortless to create and send emails in Mailchimp.
There are plenty of pre-built templates from which you can select, each of which can be customised according to your brand guidelines or edited using the drag and drop builder which requires little to no experience at all to use.
Failing which, you can upload or create custom coded HTML email templates, which along with the standard templates can be personalised according to your contact’s information or transaction history.
As with Mailchimp, HubSpot’s email tools are simple and easy to use. You don’t even need any prior experience to get going!
There are a host of pre-built templates available to get you started.
You’re also able to purchase custom-designed templates from the HubSpot marketplace or upload your own HTML versions.
A host of analytic tools are available to help you dissect data including email open rates, click heat maps, link click-through rates and even A/B testing.
Marketing automation
Relying on automation to effectively communicate with your contacts and customers has become incredibly important.
A reliable marketing automation platform allows you to customise your engagements with contacts based on their interactions with your business.
This is where HubSpot comes into its own.
HubSpot is one of the best marketing automation platforms available.
Mainly because HubSpot allows you to automate more than just email.
The workflow tool is integrated with the CRM, which means you can automate just about everything.
From allocating leads amongst team members, assigning internal tasks or customer service tickets, sending custom internal notifications to triggering emails to your contacts and customers.
The depth of HubSpot’s automation tools means that you’re able to automate your lead and customer management completely.
There are even some pre-built automation templates to help you get started.
Mailchimp’s automation, however, is focused mainly on email.
You can send emails to contacts and customers at varying times based on their engagement.
Engagement such as abandoned cart emails, order confirmations, newsletter welcome series and more.
Thankfully, there are a whole host of automation templates to help users get started on Mailchimp too.
The lack of sales or internal automation features provides HubSpot with an advantage for users.
Especially those looking to expand on their marketing automation efforts past just email interactions.
Interestingly, Mailchimp has recently launched ‘Customer Journey’ automation features, which provides some conditional logic tools and expand the previous email-focused automation, indicating that they may aim to bridge the gap between Mailchimp and HubSpot soon.
Landing pages
Landing pages are a critical part of inbound marketing, and essential in generating new contacts and engaging existing customers. So having a platform that provides a flexible easy-to-use landing page builder becomes just as crucial.
Luckily both HubSpot and Mailchimp offer just this.
HubSpot:
HubSpot’s landing page builder is one of the most comprehensive on the market. For those of us who are not experienced developers and coders, the drag and drop builder, as well as a host of easily customisable templates, makes creating and publishing new pages an absolute breeze.
HubSpot’s design manager makes it easy for those comfortable with coding their pages to create, manage and deploy custom coded landing pages just as you would on any other website builder.
However, there is one clear advantage HubSpot has over Mailchimp with its landing page builders...
The fact that the landing pages are part of the CRM means you benefit from a variety of personalisation features that enable you to create smart content based on which contact is viewing your page. You’re also able to implement progressive form fields to ensure you’re collecting new and relevant information from your contacts.
On top of that, HubSpot provides detailed analytics for each landing page that links to the CRM. Allowing you to have contextual, relevant conversations with your customers and contacts based on their website engagement.
Mailchimp
Just like HubSpot, Mailchimp offers an easy-to-use and competent landing page builder that doesn’t require any coding or development experience to use with a host of very customisable templates to get started with.
While we’re all familiar with the email marketing features of Mailchimp, landing pages remain a relatively new offering .
Whilst certainly very capable and appropriate for most solopreneurs and small businesses, organisations with a longer or more sophisticated buyer’s journey may find the lack of progressive forms or personalised content challenging.
What are the main differences between HubSpot vs Mailchimp?
Contact management
As your business continues to grow, your list of contacts will also continue to increase. This factor plays a vital role when deciding between HubSpot and Mailchimp. Marketers understand the importance of engaging their contacts to boost conversions.
The CRM anchors every HubSpot product. This means your contacts and customers will always be at the forefront of everything you do.
Each of HubSpot’s marketing and sales tools can access an exceptional level of contact detail, which in turn provides incredibly detailed insights into how your contacts engage with everything from your website to emails and even team members.
The sheer amount of analytics and data that HubSpot can provide on a granular contact level makes it easy to segment and report on your contact database as needed.
The incredible number of filters available based on contact, company, deal or even custom fields make achieving any desired view of your database simple and easy to manage.
Mailchimp’s CRM is purely marketing focused. Tags allow you to segment contacts according to campaigns or the demographics you’ve created via the tag manager feature.
Mailchimp’s CRM focuses on email audiences, with a host of monitoring tools available to gauge their engagement. However, managing and viewing customer and financial data in Mailchimp is a little more challenging.
Paid Ad Performance
When comparing HubSpot vs Mailchimp, it’s worth remembering HubSpot tends to refer to itself as an all-in-one marketing platform. They’re not kidding.
HubSpot’s integrations with Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn provide a best-in-class ad management suite that ties directly into your CRM.
This means you can automatically sync audience data with Facebook and Google which means better audience segmentation, the ability to run personalised campaigns, build better look-a-like audiences, and increase your campaign effectiveness and performance.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, provides no paid media integrations. Whilst you can post natively to the most significant networks through Mailchimp, you’re unable to view, create or manage your paid efforts through the platform.
Whilst this may not be a deal-breaker for most users, being able to view and report on the performance of every campaign element, including ads, goes a long way to proving and showcasing ROI and general campaign performance.
Sales tools
Perhaps the most significant difference between the platforms is their sales functionality.
Whilst Mailchimp provides some surface-level contact and customer management, HubSpot offers an entire product suite to enable their users to manage and close more deals, deepen their customer relationships and effectively manage their sales teams.
Whilst these tools are aimed at the B2B market, (an area Mailchimp is perhaps less focused on), their seamless integration with the CRM and Marketing Hub makes it much easier to view the context of a contact’s entire relationship with your business.
The sheer functionality of a fully equipped CRM loaded with sales engagement tools that tie in with marketing, reporting and analytics make it easy to see why HubSpot’s sales tools have become so popular worldwide.
What is the difference in cost between HubSpot vs Mailchimp?
Perhaps the most significant difference between HubSpot vs Mailchimp is how much it costs. Luckily, both platforms take the ‘Freemium’ approach, with specific tools available at no cost but to make the most of either HubSpot or Mailchimp, you’ll likely need to upgrade to one of the paid tiers.
HubSpot’s basic Marketing features are available from just $50 per month with Enterprise licenses for bigger teams available for $3 200 per month.
Sales tools are available at a similar rate with plans for larger enterprise teams starting from $50 per month and reaching up to $1 200 per month.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, tends to be a little easier on your pocket. Paid plans start from $10 per month for the Essentials package, going all the way to $363 per month for the Premium offering (based on 10 000 initial contacts).
So between HubSpot vs Mailchimp, which platform is better?
Comparing apples and oranges is never a good idea, and whilst HubSpot vs Mailchimp may have more in common than just being in the same food group, they aren’t quite the same platforms.
Mailchimp has enjoyed enormous success since 2001, focusing on solopreneurs looking at engaging and growing their audience. For individuals or businesses looking to increase brand engagement and easily communicate with an audience, Mailchimp remains one of the best and most affordable platforms on the market.
HubSpot, on the other hand, is focused on businesses looking for growth. For businesses get marketing and sales on the same page.
Each product hubs is focused on placing customer or contact data at the heart of each action within the platform.
This helps you engage with your customers and understand your business’s performance.
In truth, which platform is better, HubSpot or Mailchimp comes down to what you’re looking to achieve.
Businesses looking for a simple tool to drive brand engagement may lean towards Mailchimp, whilst companies looking to consolidate their tech stack, remove complexity from the marketing and sales operations and better understand their customers should focus on HubSpot.