ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: Which is a better fit?

Mike: My name is Mike. I'm a small business owner. I'm giving ActiveCampaign a three out of five stars today. Before using ActiveCampaign, I had been doing things pretty manually in terms of sending out email blasts and sort of just general marketing stuff. I had tried a couple of different other companies as well actually after using ActiveCampaign. I tried a couple different ones. I used another one called GetResponse. While I liked using ActiveCampaign better than GetResponse, I did run into some issues trying to incorporate ActiveCampaign into our workflow, but I was able to do the basic job of email marketing and trying to keep track of a flow in terms of emailing prospective clients as well as current clients. Originally, I chose ActiveCampaign because it came recommended from a few different people and for good reason. The program can do a whole lot of different things. It certainly works well if you're looking for a really in-depth platform that you can create content to blast out to your contacts and prospective clients. For me, it was a little bit too in depth almost where it was more than what we needed, so I ended up not using it in the long run. But definitely that was kind of the main reason that I started using it and unfortunately just never really got the hang of it. So I wouldn't say that ActiveCampaign is the easiest program to get started with, to be honest. It does require some back knowledge. I'm not a marketing expert. My partner who is more adept with it also had just some issues sort of getting the whole thing going. It's pretty easy to get a basic template going and to get a funnel going and all that stuff. It is fairly simple, but we did run into some issues and unfortunately the help in terms of the customer service wasn't the best, so we never were really fully able to right the ship. So after using it for almost a year plus, we worked out of using ActiveCampaign. So unfortunately, I wouldn't say the easiest program to get going. If you're an expert, I'm sure that it's a lot easier, but I guess I wouldn't say for beginner users, not the easiest. So if you're thinking about using ActiveCampaign, I would definitely just recommend doing some research on the platform itself just to sort of get acquainted with it and to understand all the in-depth features that it can do, which are definitely plentiful. If you're an expert or advanced user in email marketing and content creation, email templates, you're probably going to have a pretty good time with it. The funnel system is very in depth and very good. If you're a beginner or just sort of looking to get started, I would probably shy away from using something like this unfortunately. It is worth your time to check out. It's definitely a good platform overall. It didn't work for me personally, but that doesn't mean that it won't work for others. So yeah, I mean, if you're watching this, you're probably doing a good amount of due diligence. It's worth spending a little bit of time checking it out. It may fit like a glove for certain businesses and certain types of marketing techniques, but for me, it didn't end up working out unfortunately.

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.