It is impossible not to have heard about Wishpond & Mailchimp if you are running an online business. After all the grinding & hard work, these are the tools that will help you bear fruits. Watching your business grow and attract more clients is the fun part of having a start-up. Although the process of marketing can be quite tedious and unrewarding at most times. However, Wishpond & Mailchimp are here to make your lives so much easier by providing you with automated solutions. No longer will you have to rely on marketers or salesmen for your marketing needs. Wishpond & Mailchimp are two marketing tools that go about this job in slightly different ways. They provide easy to use and practical solutions that anyone can learn to be a master marketer. Understanding them thoroughly and knowing their strengths & weaknesses can help you choose the ideal tool for your business. We shall go about this by comparing them head-to-head on various spheres like main features, pricing, customer support, etc. After reading through, you will have a clear understanding of which marketing tool to choose for expanding your business. Let us get to it then.
Wishpond & Mailchimp are used by business owners as well as marketing agencies to achieve more growth. Mailchimp focuses mainly on providing solutions for email marketing needs. Wishpond is more of a total marketing solution that provides a variety of marketing features.
Founded in Canada way back in 2004, Wishpond has developed into a reliable brand in the marketing industry. Their marketing platform provides a variety of services like landing page building, activity tracking, email marketing, etc.
You can also integrate Wishpond with several other tools. This makes Wishpond an all in one marketing tool that is perfect for almost any type of business. Apart from marketing, they also provide a lot of customization options to better suit your brand.
Mailchimp was founded 19 years ago by two web designers in Atlanta, USA. Like Wishpond, Mailchimp is also a marketing tool that is known for its email marketing services. It is a cloud-based software that simplifies your marketing needs for a large database. It is done by setting up sequences to target a particular type of audience.
Mailchimp helps small to medium businesses in streamlining their marketing needs and overseeing customer satisfaction. Apart from email marketing, there are also options for sending, voicemails, faxes, and even postcards. Mailchimp can bring all your marketing needs under one roof by integrating with several services to further aid your business.
Wishpond , although easy to learn, will take some getting used to as it comes packed with a lot of features. But Wishpond provides free training for you to get more assimilated to their software through articles, eBooks, and webinars.
They will also provide you with free access to Wishpond academy that contains everything from getting started to increasing your client base. You can also book a live demo according to your convenience. The learning curve with Wishpond is a little steep. But once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to seamlessly orchestrate marketing automation.
Following are the main areas you need to learn to master Wishpond:
Mailchimp is an easy to use email marketing tool. Their interface is quite user-friendly and straight forward. They have a very helpful blog that contains information describing every step in detail. Mailchimp also provides video guides and tutorials on all the features that they have.
To utilize Mailchimp to the fullest, you will need to learn about:
- Accounts - Setting up accounts and invoices
- Audiences - Importing contact & managing them
- Emails - Mastering everything about email delivery with Mailchimp
- Design - Customizing landing pages, emails & websites
Verdict: Neither of these tools is difficult to use. However, Mailchimp is user-friendly and a lot less complicated compared to Jungle Wishpond and hence takes the win.
Similar Features
Lead scoring & segmentation is a marketing process for ranking potential clients and subdividing them into groups. The groups that will be divided into is based on how likely they are to purchase a product from you.
Wishpond has a very extensive and detailed take on lead scoring. It will let you set some parameters by which you can define the leads that are generated. This will help you understand better about your potential customers. Listed are certain features in Wishpond that comes under lead scoring:
- Lead scoring ranges
- Lead scoring fit criteria
- Lead scoring engagement criteria
- Lead score time settings
- Lead score calculations
- Lead score story
All these parameters will help you see how a lead came to know about you. You can utilize this information to turn them into loyal clients.
Mailchimp prioritizes automatic lead scoring to assess the level of interest of a potential client. Listed are processes in Mailchimp related to lead scoring:
CRM is an approach that helps businesses to define and design improved customer service. CRM integrates the marketing, sales & customer support services to streamline all processes into one platform. It is focused on customer retention and gaining new customers to increase sales and thereby, revenue.
Wishpond 's CRM can easily handle a high number of contacts and allow you to navigate through them efficiently. Wishpond does not offer bi-directional CRM syncing. But they do offer social CRM
Mailchimps 's CRM acts as the central hub for sales and marketing. Mailchimp provides bi-directional CRM syncing, but not social CRM.
Integrations with other tools are crucial to streamline the work output. They can also be used to negate certain flaws that software could have.
Wishpond offers 300+ integrations. Popular integrations are:
Mailchimp offers 750+ integrations. Popular integrations are:
This is also known as split testing. It used to compare among 2 versions of a marketing asset like email, SMS, etc. to determine which works better. This is very useful as it will let you know which type of content returns more value for you.
Wishpond has a built-in split testing functionality to optimize your outgoing content and reward you with greater returns.
Mailchimp also offers split testing for you to determine the most effective email campaign through trial and error.
Unique Features
Wishpond: Features- Built-in captcha: Weed out all the spam accounts by using this feature.
- Custom CSS and JavaScript: Customize everything in your website with the help of custom CSS and JavaScript provided by Wishpond.
- Social promotion & contests: Wishpond will let you conduct various fun contests to boost your web traffic. They provide pre-made contest campaigns to choose from.
- Activity dashboard: Track all of your reports and email success rates through a convenient activity dashboard.
- Multivariate testing: This is a brand new testing technique that combines multiple variables. This test will automatically find out the best combination for you.
- RSS feed: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) will convert website updates & publish them to get a wider reach.
Verdict: Wishpond has more in-built features, whereas Mailchimp has more integration options available. Therefore, this round ends in a draw.
Leads generated and their contact information is the lifeline of any online business. Hence it becomes paramount to ensure the protection of that data. Any loss or theft of client information could be disastrous for your business. The various data stored by marketing tools are:
- Cardholder Data
- Client Confidential Data
- Company Confidential Data
- Personal Data
Wishpond complies with information security risk management policies to keep all your data confidential. The data presented to Wishpond is stored in third-party infrastructure service providers. These are the measures taken by Wishpond to keep your valuable data secure:
- The Wishpond office network is centrally monitored.
- Entry into data center facilities is for authorized personnel only.
- All points of connectivity in the Wishpond network are protected by firewalls.
- Any potential loopholes in IT systems are taken care of as fast as possible.
Mailchimp follows The United States Securities & Exchange Commission policies to keep all your data secure and confidential. The measures that are taken by Mailchimp to ensure safety & security of your data are:
- All data is mirrored and regularly backed up on different servers.
- Mailchimp utilizes multiple MTAs to store data. These are state-of-the-art centers located around the US.
- All data that is transferred between the applications, platforms, and servers are flown with Transport Security Layer (TLS).
- Regular security tests are conducted with the help of various third-party vendors. Any vulnerabilities found are fixed immediately.
- Brute force protection is provided to all Mailchimp login pages.
Verdict: The security features provided by Wishpond are not very reassuring. Mailchimp wins this round by providing water-tight security when it comes to the protection of your data.
Wishpond has a three-tier pricing system. The purchasing plans vary with the number of leads and additional features. The plans start at $49 and include all the basic features. All payments are billed annually.
Their Rapid Growth plan is further divided into 18 sections based on the number of leads. Separate pricings are given based on the number of leads from 10,000 to 1,000,000. Listed are the pricing brackets for Wishpond:
- Starting Out package - This package will let you have a maximum of 1000 leads for a monthly rate of $49. This includes landing pages, popup bars, user accounts, and social contests. It also comes with email drip campaigns and marketing automation.
- Everything You Need package - This includes everything from Starting Out package for a maximum of 2500 leads. This will cost you a monthly rate of $99. Additional features include A/B testing, API access, and custom CSS & JavaScript.
- Rapid Growth package - This plan will give you all the above elements for 10,000 contacts at a monthly rate of $ 199. You can stretch up to 1,000,000 leads if you can spare $2989 a month. You will receive priority customer support & implementation coaching worth $1500 for free with this plan.
All plans have a 14-day free trial. You can upgrade or downgrade your plans at any time.
Mailchimp has a four-tier pricing system. But what sets them apart is that they have a free plan available for start-ups that includes all the basics. The plans vary with the number of contacts, user admins & additional features. Listed are the available purchasing plans of Mailchimp:
- Free package - This package will let you have up to 2000 contacts absolutely free of cost. It is for one user admin and will allow you to send 10,000 emails per month. This also provides 7 marketing channels, 1-step automation, custom domains, and basic templates.
- Essentials package - This includes everything from Free package for a maximum of 50,000 contacts. This will cost you a monthly rate of $10. Additional features include custom branding, A/B testing, and 24/7 support.
- Standard package - includes everything from Essentials package for a maximum of 100,000 contacts at a monthly rate of $15. You will also get advanced audience insights, retargeting ads & behavioral targeting automation series.
- Premium package - This plan will give you all the above features for 200,000 contacts at $309 per month. Additional features include multivariate testing, advanced segmentation & phone support.
There are also prepaid plans that will let buy email credits so that you won't have to pay monthly recurring charges.
Verdict: The pricing plans of both Wishpond & Mailchimp are cost-effective. But Mailchimp is undoubtedly the more affordable option and hence wins this round.
Wishpond has an extensive support system to answer any queries or solve any difficulties you may face. There are hundreds of articles in their knowledge base that you can browse through.
Their live chat support is quickly responsive. Listed are the various kinds of support Wishpond provides for their clients:
Mailchimp boasts of having an award-winning 24/7 customer support service. Multiple reviews online have proved their support system to be very satisfactory. Their tutorials are available in multiple languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese & Dutch, apart from English. Listed below are the types of support given by Mailchimp:
Verdict: Both Wishpond & Mailchimp provide excellent customer support. But Wishpond just about clinches this round by providing their customers with live chat support.
Wishpond supports these languages:
Mailchimp is only available in English even though their support section has info in multiple languages.
Verdict: Wishpond easily wins this round by being available in 6 languages.
- A complete marketing tool. From building landing pages, lists & forms to sending automated emails, Wishpond provides it all.
- Easy to use. The learning curve is not that steep even though it's feature-packed. No technical knowledge is required at all to use this product.
- Email drip campaign. This is a brilliant marketing feature that works wonders for getting high conversions.
- Customizable templates. Plenty of templates are available that can be customized to reflect your brand style.
- SEO friendly. The landing pages from Wishpond are fully customizable and SEO optimized to place your website higher in Google rankings.
- Although Wishpond is affordable for a lower number of leads, it can get expensive as the number of leads goes higher.
- Integration difficulties. Wishpond can get buggy at times when it is integrated with other tools.
- Tacky drag and drop option. Edit web pages can get frustrating as the drag & drop option is not very user-friendly.
- Limited templates. Although they provide a free version, the templates included in it are inadequate.
- Lack of advanced features. Mailchimp provides pretty decent email automation, but not as much as advanced options you would want.
Mailchimp wins the battle with Wishpond by taking home most of the rounds. Mailchimp provides better value for money by giving you useful features at low costs. However, Wishpond is no pushover either. Their landing pages & SEO optimized templates are guaranteed to make your business grow. In the end, there is no wrong choice here. These are two of the best marketing tools you could want for your business.
