HubSpot vs. MailChimp – Which One Should You Use For Your Business

Marketers today have a lot on their plate – every action you take plays an important role in creating a holistic customer experience, whether it is sending an email, an ad retargeting campaign, managing social media accounts or reminding customers to check out and complete their purchase. More tasks therefore mean more tools that are designed to make your life easier and grow your business. Today you have a tool for everything you need you to manage your business, right from handling your client relationship management needs, down to streamlining your shipping operations. 

Related – 8 Apps You Need to Have For Your Online Store *insert link*

In this article, we will compare two of the most popular marketing platforms—HubSpot and Mailchimp—to help you determine which one is the best for you and your online business when evaluating marketing tools.

Hubspot	MailChimp
HubSpot is a platform that combines marketing automation, email, and a suite of other flexible marketing tools combined with the power of a CRM platform to let your analyse how your marketing efforts are affecting your customer’s experience.	Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing service. Customers can leverage Mailchimp’s email marketing tools to connect with their audience, and expand the tool’s functionality through a number of integrations like Stripe, Zapier, WooCommerce and Calendly.

HubSpot Vs MailChimp: What Features And Tools Do They Have in Common? 

Both HubSpot and MailChimp offer:

• Contact management
• Marketing automation
• Digital advertising and social media management
• Landing pages and form options

Contact Management

A fully equipped contact management system is important for a small business. To see why, think about this:

• You come across a name and some contact details, but you can’t recall who the person is or what kind of business, if any, you did with them. 
• Or, you want to send targeted promotional materials or announcements to some of your clients, but you have no way of generating a list of only those clients for whom the materials are relevant. So you either incur unnecessary costs sending them to all of your contacts, or you don’t send them at all. 

These are just two of the many problems that a small business operator runs into without an efficient contact management system. These can result in lost opportunities to generate new clients, sales to existing clients, and tremendous loss of time and resources. Using a marketing automation platform that gives you full insights into your customers’ data and the ability to manage contacts will help you personalize your marketing and scale your business.

	Hubspot	MailChimp
Scope	HubSpot’s marketing tools in combination with CRM provides more than just information on your marketing activities.	MailChimp’s Marketing CRM can help you organize, analyze, and learn from all of your audience data. This means that you can get an in-depth look at your audience, and then segment and send relevant messages in just a few clicks.
Create custom contact properties	You can create as many custom properties as you want and use them to create lists that can be used across all your marketing campaigns.	You can create custom properties and apply them to the rest of your platform.
Further segmentation	Hubspot lets you combine properties to further segment your list of contacts.	Like HubSpot, MailChimp lets you combine properties to create finely segmented customer groups to target.
Bulk Update	You can update contacts in bulk	You can update contacts in bulk, but only through the import tool.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is important when you’re business is growing. You suddenly have too many contacts to manage, and other tasks taking up your time. Marketing automation helps you deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right customers, giving you the ability to focus on more critical tasks.

	Hubspot	MailChimp
Single automated kickback emails and multi-step drip campaigns	Along with single automated kickback emails and multi-step drip campaigns,	MailChimp’s automation platform allows single automated kickback emails and multi-step drip campaigns.
Contact Database Management	Along with the above, HubSpot lets you manage your contact database, rotate leads and create support tickets automatically.	You cannot automate your contact management.
Automate internal notifications and tasks	With HubSpot’s automation platform, you can automate lead management, notifications and tasks.	In addition to the above, you cannot automate internal notifications – leaving businesses to look elsewhere to automate these tasks.

Digital Advertising and Social Media Management

Businesses nowadays operate on several social media platform to engage the maximum number of audiences. Using ads can help you generate new leads fast, polish your messaging and targeting, and re-target contacts in order to nurture them.

	Hubspot	MailChimp
Social publishing	HubSpot lets you start by connecting all your social accounts across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and quickly report on your success on each channel.	MailChimp allows you to publish organically to Facebook and Instagram, but not LinkedIn and Twitter. Also lets you manage your Facebook ads, as well as Google display ads.
Social reporting	You can get reports on your success no matter where you published	You get reports only on social posts that were made through Mailchimp
Targeted ad campaigns	HubSpot’s ads tool lets you easily manage your Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ad campaigns from one central location.	MailChimp lets you configure targeted ads across Google, Facebook, and Instagram but not Linkedin. Also, targeting is limited on Mailchimp. You cannot use contact lists for your Google ads to refine or exclude your audience, and you’re only able to target ads at all website visitors. So, there is no opportunity to specify a specific page, or group of pages.

Landing Pages and Form Options

Landing pages lead customers to a product, service or offer and encourage them to take action. This is the part where you get the opportunity to create conversions and build your customer base. So it only makes sense that your forms are customizable to meet your customers’ needs – letting you gather all the information you need to effectively nurture your leads.

	Hubspot	MailChimp
Forms and Data Collection	HubSpot has a robust landing pages and forms solution, and lets you collect data from any form solution you use.	MailChimp has a simple drag and drop landing page editing system, as well as a forms solution. However, you can collect data only through integrations.
Progressive Profiling	Progressive profiling lets you modify what a visitor sees on your site if they’re already a contact in your database — ensuring that every form fill results in valuable information for your business.	MailChimp does not offer progressive profiling. However, it gives you the ability to provide potential customers a free download.
Drag and drop page building	HubSpot offers the feature to build pages using a simple drag and drop.	MailChimp offers this service as well.

Supported Languages

	HubSpot	MailChimp
Type	Product Language	Documentation Language	Product Language	Documentation Language
English
Spanish
French
Portuguese
German
Japanese
Dutch

Price

HubSpot

MailChimp

HubSpot’s pricing for basic email functionality starts at USD $50/month for 1,000 contacts. For advanced functionality that includes lists, workflows and automation you’ll need to get the full Marketing Pro package which starts at USD $800/month. While this price seems steep compared to MailChimp, it’s important to remember how much time you and your team can save and how much value you can potentially get out of a system which can fully utilise automation.

MailChimp is cost-effective compared with other options out there, especially for smaller businesses who might be starting with less than 1,000 contacts. The “Essentials” basic plan starts at just USD $9.99/month and costs roughly an extra USD $5/month for additional contacts over the first 500. If you’re looking to run more serious campaigns with A/B testing you’ll need the ”Premium” version which costs an additional USD $299/month. Additional contacts are priced differently.

The Verdict

Small business with teams that have the capacity to manage daily interactions with email campaigns and have a limited budget should stick to MailChimp *insert affiliate link*. Once your business grows to the point where you can no longer handle these functions and you have enough budget for utilizing marketing automation, you can consider a more powerful solution like HubSpot *insert affiliate link*.

It’s important to think about where you are and where you will need to be to make the right decision about what software you will need for the job – and if you’re not sure, speak to an expert who does to find out. *insert contact details so that customers can book consultations*.

Related – Hubspot CRM – Can It Help Grow Your Small Business?