Mailchimp Alternative – BigMailer

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing platform and has been expanding into a marketing platform beyond email for some time. They have conquered their market share with small business owners and creators alike with their rich feature set and generous free tier, that is no longer offered.

If you are a small business owner with a small list size (under 10k), and might need tools beyond sending email, then Mailchimp may be a good platform for you.

Why Consider Mailchimp Alternatives?

If you are a high volume sender or actively growing your list size, you may want to consider cheaper alternatives like BigMailer, that may fit your needs at a fraction of the Mailchimp’s monthly bill.

Here are some main differences between Mailchimp and alternatives like BigMailer:

1. Pricing – Mailchimp has been raising prices every year by about 13% on average, and it was never cheap to begin with after the free tier. There are a lot of capable newsletter platforms that can send your emails 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 and basically  double/triple counted  towards your billing total, ouch!
3. Transactional Emails – lack of support for transactional emails 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. Mailchimp owns a separate service Mandrill that offers transactional email support but it’s managed completely separate.
4. Email Template Management – on Mailchimp’s cheaper Standard plan customers can’t manage their own templates and are limited to pre-made template library.
5. Team Management – Mailchimp offers a limited number of users and fast growing businesses with large teams simply outgrow it.

Here is a high level comparison of features and pricing we put together for a quick comparison:

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, priced separately. 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.

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.  In BigMailer you can also share templates with all brands in the account. 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.

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.