Which CRM is best for you?

Choose the right CRM for your business as we compare these two CRM giants

Email Marketing remains one of the most powerful tools in a digital marketer’s toolkit, despite the rising popularity of other marketing tools, such as conversational commerce, programmatic advertising or video marketing.

According to Cuker Marketing’s study, email maintains a higher conversion rate of 2.3% compared to social media’s 1%, despite the increased affection and borderline addiction to social media. Email marketing remains very effective.

of consumers say emails influence their purchase decisions

In other words, getting your email marketing right should be a top priority.

The best way to ensure you bring your A game with email marketing is by utilizing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. CRM enables businesses to manage interactions with current and potential customers in a systematic, dynamic, and integrated way. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the CRM adoption rate is set to rise by 12% year on year until 2028. Customer knowledge and insight is an incredibly valuable resource. CRM technology centralizes every little detail it can find about customers into a main database. This plethora of information allows businesses to boost customer relationships through informed decisions about personalized communications. CRM platforms offer many functions and tools to help your business succeed. Regardless of the size of your business, selecting the right CRM software will keep you competitive, connected with customers, in control of sales and help you to excel in marketing efforts.

of companies with 10 or more employees use a CRM

Two of the most used CRM platforms you will have heard of are Hubspot and MailChimp. Hubspot is recognized as one of the globe’s best software companies, thanks to its power of CRM integration and implementation. It is characterized as a growth platform offering marketing automation, email, sales assistance, and a collection of other flexible marketing tools. The platform offers 3 types of plans- starter, professional and enterprise all at varying costs, alongside a free plan with limited features. For a list of the full features on offer click here. MailChimp is another marketing automation platform designed for businesses to engage in targeted and effective email marketing. It facilitates email marketing with its logistical resources and analytical features- such as mailing list management, template creation, segmentation, and automation. Similarly, MailChimp offers a variety of plans at a range of prices with the addition of a free multi-channel tools option. Deciding what platform is best for your business in terms of your resources, capabilities and goals can be a little confusing. We have put together a comparison between Hubspot and MailChimp to help you make an informed decision for your business.

Here is a comparision between Hubspot vs. MailChimp on their core features:

1. Email Marketing

Email is a good point to start this comparison as it is probably what springs to mind when you think of these platforms. Hubspot: Offers an easy-to-use marketing tool with a range of templates which can be personalized according to your business’s needs. Opting for the more expensive subscriptions grants you access to the more sophisticated features such as A/.B testing, smart send times and so much more.This platform provides analytic reports and dashboards making it easy to track email engagement. Cool analytical features include a heatmap of links clicked and comparative ratios of how long customers spent looking at your email. MailChimp: Offers a similar level and variety of templates to build an email campaign, or if you wish to build your own with its drag & drop builder. As with Hubspot, Mailchimp also offers insights into who has viewed, opened, or clicked on any part of the email, as well as the usual demographic metrics of location, gender, and age. The main difference is that MailChimp also offers comparisons to other companies in your industry, as well as a comparison to your campaign average response rates for clicks and opens. Bottom line: Hubspot has slightly more template design options, whilst MailChimp provides some additional industry comparison metrics you can’t access on Hubspot.

2. Contact Management

If your business is focused on growth, you will hopefully be handling an expanding list of contacts. If so, a CRM’s contact management capabilities heavily influence your choice of platform. Hubspot: Builds all marketing tools on top of its CRM, offering you a lot of control and incomparable detail. Vast amounts of data are collected about website interactions, emails opened, outcomes of sales calls and number of tickets opened. This platform is ahead of the game as you can create and customize an unlimited number of properties to segment your contact list. Mailchimp: Makes use of tags and segments to assist you in managing and organizing contacts. The Customer Journey Builder allows you to automate and design customer journeys. If you opt for the free subscription you can apply up to five conditions when creating an audience segment. With the premium plan, segment till your heart’s content with unlimited segmentation. Bottom line: Mailchimp is more intuitive when it comes to segmenting lists, while Hubspot offers a rich, detailed view of an individual contact’s journey with your brand.

3. Marketing Automation

Having access to a comprehensive marketing automation platform is crucial for a growing business. These systems allow you to curate increasingly personalized experiences for your customers, using automated emails prompted by triggers and behaviors. Hubspot: Has one of the leading automation platforms. Its workflows offer so many possibilities, you might feel like a kid in a candy store. This could be anything from a simple thank you email to a new newsletter sign up, to creating nurture emails reminding customers about an upcoming sale, to complex automations with if/then tree branches that send out emails based on clicking specific links in your last email. However this feature comes at a cost: you need to have a Pro plan or higher to use this feature. MailChimp: Offers automation but on a more simple scale. Emails are triggered based on previous actions and behavior such as, abandoned cart emails, thank you for your order or birthday messages. The newly launched Customer Journey Builder is the closest you will get to HubSpot’s automated marketing capabilities. Bottom line: The two platforms are continually increasing the number of automated features, allowing marketers to take a break. Although as it currently stands, Hubspot is just that bit ahead.

Idil Woodall

4. Landing Pages

Creating intuitive and appealing landing pages is essential to improve sales- through encouraging conversion and directing the customer’s attention to your unique benefits on offer. It is good practice to use a platform with a landing page builder to do this. Hubspot: Provides a comprehensive landing page builder with its easy to use drag and drop tool – no complicated code to navigate. To gain even more comprehensive insights about how your landing page is performing, there is a tracking code feature. This automatically transfers data from your landing pages to the Hubspot CRM. But you need to have a Pro plan or higher to use this feature. MailChimp: Has a versatile landing page builder with customizable templates that require very little technical knowhow to use. It’s a win-win kind of situation. Just to note that MailChimp enables you to publish your website and curate an unlimited amount of landing pages for free. With Hubspot this would set you back $40 per month to remove landing page limits. Bottom line: Both Hubspot and Mailchimp are on fairly equal footing when it comes to landing pages so take your pick.

5. Forms

Hubspot: Has progressive profiling options and custom form fields to enhance content for users. The platform enables you to create custom forms with easy-to-use drag and drop editing. The free form builder offered streamlines the process of converting anomalous website visitors into qualified leads by capturing key contact details. MailChimp: Allows you to customize form fields to gather more data from viewers, however there are no progressive profiling options available. This advanced form customization is a relatively new feature to this platform so we can expect this to keep growing with new updates as more companies start using it. Bottom line: Both platforms offer free and easy-to-use form building tools, however Hubspot is a step ahead with the progressive profiling options.

6. Social Media Performance & Ads

We all want to save time by managing social posts to any or all your platforms in one place, as well as to understand what your audience engages with most and evaluate campaigns with detailed engagement insights. Hubspot: Has a highly integrated platform allows you to manage and operate your social presence across a range of applications including Facebook and Instagram. This social inbox feature is elevated further as all this data is fed back into the CRM, informing future business decisions, and influencing social campaigns. Again, you need to have a Pro plan or higher to use this feature. MailChimp: Enables you to post directly to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A newly launched feature includes configuring ads across Google and social networks. This is ideal for reaching out to new audiences. Basic ad management is available to all users, whilst ad tracking and scheduling posts are for those who pay that bit more. Bottom line: Hubspot comes out the clear winner, but don’t count out Mailchimp who has been steadily expanding their social media toolkit.

7. Pricing

Pricing is a key point of difference with these two market offerings. Hubspot: Offers free tools options including some forms, email marketing and live chat, however its options and abilities are of course limited. The other monthly starter, professional and enterprise subscription plans range from $45 to $3200 per month. Although if you are completely confident HubSpot is the one for you, paying an annual fee could save you some money. MailChimp: Is very budget-friendly as the free account option provides access to all the multi-channel tools a small business requires. Whilst the essentials, standard and premium pans range from $11 to $299 per month. Compare these pricing plans here. Bottom line: The fact that you can use all their features for free on Mailchimp makes them the clear winner. It is every start-up’s dream come true.

In short…

Hubspot offers holistic oversight and management of all email interactions with advanced tools and features. Their email marketing tool works best when you combine it with the business’ CRM, allowing the creation of targeted and data informed campaigns. HubSpot’s additional features including superior form curation, dynamic workflows, and optimal report options, make it more sophisticated and ideal for growing businesses. Mailchimp is ideal for small businesses, who are less sales driven and therefore wouldn’t benefit as much from the array of sales tools and systems Hubspot offers. Mailchimp offers an amazing platform for those with a smaller budget, the range of tricks and tools available for free is currently unmatched.

About Us

Blacksoc is an award-winning virtual digital marketing agency with clients in 48+ countries worldwide. We collaborate with a talented team of domain experts located across 5 continents – North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Originally founded in Toronto in 2014, today Blacksoc operates out of our virtual hubs in Toronto, New York and Lisbon.