Mailchimp vs BuzzBoard: 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.

James M.: Hi, I'm Jay. I'm the CEO of a marketing agency and I would give BuzzBoard a four out of five. So BuzzBoard is a prospecting software and we were using something called Mapify360 prior to that to try and find businesses that we could cold call or cold email or outreach to network not claiming their Google My Business profiles and they're having issues with review generation. That's part of what we do. It was a good software, but BuzzBoard's that on steroids. It gives you so much data about a company and competitor analysis. So it was a no-brainer to make that switch when it happened. The BuzzBoard's starting price point is pretty low, which made it pretty easy to want to give it a shot. So it's not expensive to start with and to kind of experiment with for a couple months, without you dumping out a ton of money and possibly losing out on your ROI there. So the reps were very personable. They got back to me right away. I actually asked for some custom solutions with integrations with Zapier and TrayIO, and they were able to accommodate those. So that was something that really kept me on the platform. So when we onboarded BuzzBoard into our team, it took me all of three to five minutes to explain to my project managers how to use it and to my sales team how to do prospecting. And within minutes, they were creating competitor analysis. They were finding new leads. They were finding new prospects, and it was something that was very easy to use. If you're considering using BuzzBoard for your business, you need to really take into consideration one of two things. Are you doing it for outbound or inbound sales? And what are you going to do with that data after you get it? So if you're doing cold email and cold calling, this is a really great prospecting tool for those types of campaigns, because you can basically find your exact client. It's really great for account-based marketing. The downside is you don't have an automated way to pull that data out of BuzzBoard and put it into every marketing campaign on say, Facebook or Google. They don't have those integrations set up. If you want that integration set up, you're going to have to pay out of pocket a pretty decent amount with a company like TrayIO to have that done, because there is no native integrations outside of that. They just don't exist. But if you're doing inbound calls only, that's where those lists could come in handy. If you do the exporting out of those CSVs and putting them into lookalike audiences. But that being said, it's a lot of work for not really some great tangible results. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, if you will. So if you're doing outbound and you're doing cold, it's a great platform. If you're focusing on inbound, I would steer clear from it.