Mailchimp CRM Review (2024): Features, Pricing, Pros, and Cons

Mailchimp is a customer relationship management software with an emphasis on marketing tools. Mailchimp’s marketing CRM tools connect contact data, segment leads and create audience dashboards with buyer insights. Users can gain holistic views of their audience by integrating their existing tech stack to better organize and improve marketing campaigns.

While Mailchimp can be an extremely intuitive platform to learn, there are limitations on the number of emails sent per month as well as caps on available sales features. This means this platform caters best to startups or small to mid-market organizations. Because of that, there might be some alternatives offering scalability to consider.

Pricing

Mailchimp’s pricing tiers can be filtered and sorted based on how many contacts the business has. The filtering option ranges between 500 and 250,000 contacts, making it scalable to fit the unique needs of any organization. Mailchimp also offers a quiz to help identify the best plan and support option for you, with personalized recommendations.

Here is a breakdown of Mailchimp’s four pricing plans:

• Free version: Basic email templates and campaigns for $0 per month based on 500 contacts
• Essentials: $13 per user, per month for 24/7 email and chat support, email templates, SMS add-ons, A/B testing and basic automated customer journeys
• Standard: $20 per user, per month for everything in essentials plus personalized onboarding, predictive segmentation and a campaign manager
• Premium: Starts at $350 per month based on 10,000 contacts for priority support, built for teams

Key features of Mailchimp

Creative assistant

Mailchimp’s specialized creative assistant design tool helps organizations generate custom marketing designs and content instantly (Figure A). Businesses first import their brand’s assets and Mailchimp creates a brand kit. This brand kit allows users to create custom designs using your brand colors, fonts, logos and images to deploy into campaigns quickly.

Customer journey builder

Organizations can map out their customer journey within the Mailchimp platform. Within the customer journey builders, users can drag and drop rules and their responding actions to create automated workflows (Figure B). This unique feature creates journeys that help businesses visualize their marketing and sales processes to better strategize how to best engage with their leads at the most optimal time.

Email templates

With email and landing page templates, users can select from over 100 prebuilt templates to launch a professional and branded campaign in minutes (Figure C). With these customizable templates, organizations can create eye catching marketing campaigns that match their brands. Mailchimp also gives users the option to import custom HTML templates into the platform for even more customization options after upgrading to the standard plan.

Behavioral targeting

Behavioral targeting are personalized campaigns that are deployed in response to specific actions taken by leads (Figure D). For example, leads can receive a welcome message to introduce new signups after they visit the business’ website. This distinctive data-backed feature helps organizations fine-tune their audience segments by building segments based on how leads have engaged with the website, apps and marketing campaigns.

Mailchimp pros and cons

Alternatives to Mailchimp

Since Mailchimp is such a strong email and marketing tool, its top alternatives also offer advanced marketing automations. Similar CRMs with the same marketing tools — and in some cases, more robust sales tools — include HubSpot, Zoho CRM and ActiveCampaign.

Mailchimp markets itself as a solution best for small businesses, so these alternatives we suggest also offer more scalability to support mid-market and enterprise-level organizations.

*Price when billed annually for the marketing tools.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one customer platform offering marketing, sales, service and CMS hubs. While it isn’t an open-source CRM software per say, HubSpot’s customization options are robust, with over 1,500 native and third-party integrations. Mailchimp and HubSpot both offer tools such as landing page and web form builders to strengthen an organization’s online presence.

Compared to Mailchimp, HubSpot’s free tier supports up to 2,500 users with advanced marketing campaign management, making it a top free CRM software.

SEE: To learn more, read our independent HubSpot review.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a powerful sales CRM tool with advanced marketing and analytic features. Both options offer robust automations that help marketing and sales teams reduce time spent on repetitive tasks such as emailing leads for follow ups and scheduling.

Compared to Mailchimp, Zoho CRM provides better sales performance management tools, allowing users to build custom views of pending, ongoing and forecasted deals.

SEE: For more information, head over to our full Zoho CRM review.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a platform offering email marketing, marketing automation and CRM tools that all work to help organizations create seamless customer experiences with a brand. Both providers offer a type of segmenting that ensures the right leads and audience members receive the right kind of engagement, whether it be a welcome email or a follow up notification, with the help of A/B test flows.

Compared to Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign provides a special Ecommerce tool that connects the platform with online stores to drive revenue with abandoned cart reminders, product catalogs and coupons and discounts.

Review methodology

To review Mailchimp’s CRM, I used our TechRepublic CRM rubric to score the provider. The rubric consists of outlined criteria and subcriteria around the most important factors when evaluating any CRM provider. I referenced Mailchimp’s own online resources in addition to real user feedback, scores and reviews as reference points.

Here is the breakdown of the criteria used to score Mailchimp:

• Cost: Weighted 25% of the total score.
• Core features: Weighted 25% of the total score.
• Customizations: Weighted 15% of the total score.
• Integrations: Weighted 15% of the total score.
• Ease of use: Weighted 10% of the total score.
• Customer support: Weighted 10% of the total score.