Mailchimp vs Mailjet: Which is a better fit?

Duncan: My name's Duncan. I'm the community editor with Pullman's Weekly News and Advertiser series. Our company's a news company with an employment size of 14, and I would give MailChimp a user rating of five out of five. Our company uses MailChimp on a day-to-day basis to reach more readers and an audience digitally. Obviously, the newspaper business as a print business has declined significantly in the past years. It's essential for us to communicate to our readers through digital means, and as such, MailChimp proves an excellent provider. The reasons I personally like MailChimp is it's very easy to use. You can have a drag and drop system for placing the templates in emails. You can select photographs to go with news stories very, very quickly. There's no need to download any complicated software. The platform of MailChimp contains all of the necessary infrastructure. I simply upload the database of our readers, and these readers receive the email through MailChimp servers. Some of the cons of MailChimp are its cost. Obviously, the more users you have, the larger the subscriber list, the larger the cost incrementally. It would also be nice to be able to send videos of a longer duration through MailChimp. I'm sure that would be achieved at some point, but that's one of the requests I would make.

Kathryn W.: Hi, my name's Kathryn. I'm the CEO of an online marketing company, and I give Mailjet a one out of five. Originally, we were with Sailthru as our ESP, because we're sending a volume of emails, sending around a million emails twice a day. We met Mailjet at an expo and it looked like they could do everything that Sailthru could do and for a lot less money, so we switched over to Mailjet. At the same time, we considered Selligent and making our own emails and sending them with AWS, which would mean a lot more work on our part but would have been more of a cost saving, but instead we decided to use something like Mailjet that allows you to build the emails in there and send them from the same place. We ended up choosing Mailjet mainly for a cost saving. They also seemed to have some really good editing software that meant you could lock down certain parts of a newsletter you were building and then allow other editors to come in and just change certain parts of it that weren't locked down. They also seemed to have very good reputation in terms of deliverability and we were really assured at the time that we were going to be really well looked after. I have to say, the salesperson was fantastic at his job, so that's what made us leave Sailthru through and go to Mailjet in the first instance. As with any software, when you change it internally, there's a bit of learning to be done. Especially with email service providers, they all seem to have their own language. Sailthru has Zephyr and Mailjet similarly had their own coding language for their emails. That's really to make it so the HTML is lighter and that the emails get into your inbox. There was a bit of learning from the developers' side to learn the new language that they were going to be coding in to make these emails, but in terms of integration for the newsletter builders and the content creators, that was quite straightforward. If you've ever used something like MailChimp, you wouldn't have a problem with using Mailjet. It's a very similar user interface. For anybody considering moving to Mailjet, I think it's really important that you consider how much control you want to be able to have over your own lists. Something very strange that Mailjet does is if they get a soft bounce too many times from somebody on your list, an email contact, then they blacklist them. What we found, after several months of being with Mailjet, is it all of a sudden our email list was shrinking at a massive rate. Now, with someone like Sailthru, they continue to ping an email address because sometimes people, their email inbox is full or perhaps the email is just being throttled by their internet service provider, which we see with some of the smaller domains. Then all of a sudden on switching to Mailjet, we were seeing the situation, literally, we're talking about 30,000 users a month, which for anybody who knows how difficult and how costly it is to get somebody to sign up to an email list and especially an engaged list, we were losing these engaged people really quickly. I think if what you're looking for is something that's automated, maybe you want to send transactional email automatically, you can set up different web books and say, "When somebody signs up, send them a welcome email," maybe when they purchase something you want to send them a receipt and another transactional email, I think it would still be suitable for that. If you're using email as your primary source of income for e-commerce or email marketing, I would seriously look at using something that's specifically designed for that and not Mailjet.