Mailchimp Alternative – BigMailer

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing platform and has been expanding into a marketing platform beyond email. They have conquered their market share with small business owners and marketing consultants with their simple UI and the largest library of email templates for every need and style. 

If you are a small business owner, who needs tools beyond email (ad management, etc) and/or your email list is fairly small then Mailchimp offers exceptional value.

Why Consider Mailchimp Alternatives?

What made Mailchimp very popular for many years is its generous free tier of up to 2500 subscribers, which is no longer available as Mailchimp went through multiple price increases. The most recent pricing change limited capabilities of the existing free tier of 500 subscribers. 

Here are some top reasons marketers are looking to switch away from Mailchimp:

1. Pricing – Mailchimp has been raising prices every year by about 13% on average, and it was never cheap to begin with. There are a lot of capable email service providers (ESPs) that fit typical needs for a fraction of the cost. 
2. List Management – in Mailchimp, if a subscriber email exists in multiple lists, they are treated as separate/duplicate records. So if you select several lists to send a campaign to your subscriber will get duplicate emails. Plus, any overlaps cost you more since every subscriber that exists in multiple list counts towards your billing total. 
3. No support for transactional emails – this requires you to use more than one ESP to manage the same list, and hopefully your data is fully in sync for compliance in handling unsubscribes, complaints, and bounces.
4. Support – can your business afford to wait 2-3 days for a reply? We think it deserves better, so BigMailer offers chat support 7 days a week. 

Here is a high level comparison of features and pricing, but be sure to read detailed explanations that follow as well.

Mailchimp + Mandril 2 Platform/Bill Alternative

While Mailchimp does offer support for email sequences and automation, their support for transactional email is serviced through a separate service Mandrill, which is priced separately from bulk/marketing email platform. So if you want a unified customer view and streamlined workflow for all your email marketing needs, BigMailer offers an advantage at a simple low price for all your campaign types.

You can manage ALL your bulk/promotional + auto/drip + transactional email in BigMailer.

BigMailer offers support for bulk (promotional), automations (drip or rss-to-email), and transactional campaigns with a single price point. With BigMailer, all the engagement data is in sync for use in segmentation across all campaign types in real-time.

For example, if you send an email confirmation to your website visitors when they become members or start a trial via BigMailer’s transactional API, the subscriber record is automatically added to your pre-defined list and can trigger a welcome sequence. You can also have real-time subscriber data for your (bulk) marketing campaigns based on a transactional email, not to mention you actually control the email template and subject line of your transactional email in BigMailer (and not in your website back-end code).

MailChimp Sub-Accounts Alternative

BigMailer is an email platform built for marketing agencies, optimized for brand management. It offers a built-in brand dashboard and access based user permissions so you can invite team members or clients with relevant permissions.  MailChimp offers a concept of sub-accounts, which is basically separate accounts linked to a single login.

BigMailer customers have an option to invite unlimited users with 4 access levels to choose from – administrator, account manager, brand manager, and campaign manager (no access to lists).

Branding and White Label Option

In BigMailer you can setup a branded email preference center instead of a boring global unsubscribe page, at no extra cost. Offering options for managing email subscription preferences can help retain more subscribers on your list.

In Mailchimp, the most common way to add unsubscribe categories is to map them to your lists, which becomes a cost multiplier for an already expensive product.

BigMailer offers 2 types of white labeling that MailChomp does not:

1. Custom tracking domains at no extra cost. Custom tracking domains make your emails appear more authentic to mailbox providers and improve your inbox placement. Once configured, a custom tracking domain is also used for hosting an unsubscribe page so email recipients can’t identify the platform used to send the email.
2. Host BigMailer platform on your own domain with your logo and no BigMailer references. This option allows agencies and consultants, that manage email campaigns for their clients, to charge any fees, while still sharing access to clients data.

Support When You Need It

Mailchimp offers email support 5 days a week, but sometimes it takes 2-3 business days to get a reply. Does your business deserve better? We certainly think so – BigMailer offers live chat support 7 days a week that’s available to customers on all plans.

Affordable Pricing

If you are a small business owner and/or your email list is fairly small then Mailchimp offers exceptional value. However, for businesses with larger email list sizes (over 10,000) and perhaps more frequent sending schedule than included in Mailchimp plans, BigMailer offers a much better value and affordable pricing.

With BigMailer you have access to dedicated IPs at $25 per IP per month, which can improve your inbox placement, while Mailchimp doesn’t offer you this option.

Ready to try out BigMailer? Sign up for a free account. Got questions? Schedule a demo or reach out via live chat icon on bottom right.