Mailchimp vs Shopify email marketing software, which is better?
In this post, I will be comparing two popular email marketing platforms for ecommerce stores, Mailchimp and Shopify Email Marketing.
If you’re asking questions like:
Does Shopify do email marketing? Is Shopify email marketing good? How do I use Shopify email marketing?
Then keep reading!
I will tell you everything that you need to know about Mailchimp and Shopify email marketing, so that by the end of this post, you can make an informed decision!
Recently, Mailchimp announced the launch of an integrated Direct Integration.
Which means that, Mailchimp will allow all Mailchimp and Shopify users to directly connect their Mailchimp accounts to their shopfront.
Before we go deep…
Why Is Email Marketing Important For eCommerce?
If you do email marketing right, about 20%-30% of your total store revenue should be coming from email marketing campaigns.
About Mailchimp eCommerce Email Marketing
Mailchimp for eCommerce is an email marketing automation platform used by millions of stores hosted on popular platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce & Shopify.
Mailchimp Features include:
- Flexible Templates and AI-generated custom designs
- Advanced campaign personalization and segmentation
- Expert insights and recommendation
- Growth-focused reporting and analytics
- Built-in product recommendations
- Brand and content audio
- Social ads and organic posting
- Digital retargeting ads
- Pop-up forms and landing pages.
Now we’re going to break down these features and explain what they mean, the practical application.
Flexible Templates and AI-generated Custom Design.
This gives you the ability to design amazing email marketing campaigns using their drag-and-drop design tools.
The AI-powered assistant helps you generate email designs. If you’re not that good and graphic design, this feature is a no-brainer feature.
Advanced Campaign Personalization and Segmentation
Mailchimp’s advanced email segmentation gives you the ability to build out email campaigns based on subscribers email behavior.
Advanced Segmentation allows the customer to receive the email campaigns they expect.
With Mailchimp’s segmentation feature, you can track, and segment email subscribers based on transaction details, purchase frequency, location, and more.
This will help you send out personalized email campaigns that’s relevant to your email subscribers, which will in turn increase sales!
Expert insights and recommendation
This is a 2-in-1 feature, first is A/B testing, second is data powered recommendations.
Mailchimp’s A/B testing feature gives you the ability to send different variants of email campaigns to different set of your email subscribers, with the goal of finding out which email campaign performs best.
Let’s say you have an email list of 2000 subscribers, and you want to test out which abandoned cart email sequence will work the best.
All you have to do is write or design two different variant of abandoned cart email campaigns.
One might be focused on using discounts to get them to complete checkout, the other might be focused on telling them the benefits of using your product, just like we did in this abandoned cart email campaign
Growth-focused reporting and analytics
With Mailchimp’s growth focused reporting and analytics dashboard, you’ll have the ability to view from real-time reports and personalized recommendation and tips on what to do to increase your sales.
Built-in product recommendations
This feature gives you the ability to automatically deliver personalized product recommendations based on a customer’s previous purchase history.
Let’s say a customer bought a brown shoe from your store, and you also sell brown socks, Mailchimp will give you the option to recommend the brown socks.
Since brown socks go well with a brown shoe, got it?
Social ads and organic posting
With Mailchimp, you can create and launch social ad campaigns to reach your email subscribers on social media platforms like Facebook or Tiktok
You can also use Mailchimp’s look alike audience feature to find or target people similar to customers who previously bought from your store.
Digital retargeting ads
Mailchimp retargeting ads feature gives you the ability to turn websites browsers into customer by retargeting them on social media platforms.
Pop-up forms and landing pages
Pop-ups forms are the basics of email marketing, because they give you the ability to turn website visitors into email subscriber who might buy from you in the feature.
With this feature, you can create unlimited number of pop-ups forms and landing pages to capture leads and grow your subscriber list
Mailchimp Pricing
Mailchimp offers a free and paid plan.
They offer 4 plans. The free plan, The Essentials Plan, The Standard Plan and The Premium Plan.
Mailchimp Free Plan
The free plan is limited to 2000 contacts. With the free plan, you get:
- Marketing CRM
- Creative Assistant
- Sign up Forms
- Landing Pages
- Social Posting
- Facebook ads | Instagram ads |Postcards|
- Ability to connect your sending domain.
Mailchimp Essentials Plan
The Essentials plan starts at $11 per month, and it gives you access to:
- Everything in free plan, plus
- Email templates
- Multistep journeys
- Custom branding
- A/B testing
- 24/7 customer support
Standard Plan
The standard plan starts at $17 per month, and it gives you access to:
- Everything in essential plan, plus
- Customer journey builder
- Send time optimization
- Behavior based targeting
- Custom template
Premium Plan
The premium plan starts at $299 per month, and it gives you access to:
- Everything in standard plan, plus
- Advanced segmentation
- Multivariate testing
- Unlimited seat and team members
- Phone support
About Shopify Email Marketing
Shopify email is an email marketing app built for Shopify users.
Keep in mind that Shopify email only works for Shopify store owner, whereas Mailchimp can be used on any ecommerce platform.
Shopify Email Features include:
- Custom workflows
- Pre-built email templates
- Automations
- Email tracking
- Segmentation
- Powerful analytics
Now we’re going to break down these features and explain what they mean, the practical aspect.
Custom Workflows
With the custom automation feature, you can set triggers and conditions and any conditional logic based on a subscriber’s behavior.
Let’s say a subscriber open your emails five times in a roll, you can set up a custom automation to send a discount code to them for being an active subscriber.
Pre-built email templates
With pre-built email templates, you do not have to design emails from scratch. If you’re not that good at graphics design, this feature is a no-brainer.
Not only is it a savior for people who are not good at designing stuffs, it’s also a time saver!
Automations
The Shopify email app automation feature gives you the ability to set up email flows like Welcome email campaigns, abandoned cart email campaigns, back-in-stock email campaigns.
For example, if someone joins your email list, a welcome email will be sent to them automatically, meaning you don’t have to manually send an email welcoming every subscriber.
Email tracking
This feature gives you the ability to track stats like your open rate, email click-through rate etc.
Segmentation
This Shopify email app feature helps you segment your subscribers based on criteria like, location, gender, previous orders etc.
With the segmentation feature, you can send more personalized emails to your subscriber.
For example, if you sell run a store that sell both male and female product, you can segment based on genders.
So that on occasions like Mother’s Day, you can send out an email to all the women in your email list.
Shopify Email App Pricing
Shopify email app pricing is different, because it is a pay-per-use software.
This means you start for free and pay as you use.
Every month, you can send up to 10,000 emails for free. After that, only pay for what you use at $1 USD per 1,000 additional emails sent (or $0.001 USD per additional email).
Mailchimp vs Shopify Email App – Summary.
Based on the feature and comparison I’ve made above, maybe you’ve already made up your mind on which platform to go with.
But the question is which ecommerce email software platform is best for your store.
To identify this, you need to take several things into account. For starters, see what your budget is and the size of your email list.
What’s your end goal? Do you want to increase your sales? It’s important to select the tool that offers the specific features you need.
The best part is that most of these email marketing tools come with a free trial or money-back guarantee.
Which gives you the ability to test out the product before upgrading to a paid plan.
When you find what you are looking for, then you can make the final purchase.
If you’re looking for my top pick, I recommend you get started with:
Shopify Email App if you’re just starting your store, and Mailchimp if you have an email list of 2000+ subscribers.