ClickFunnels vs Mailchimp : one is all-in-one-sales funnel software, the other is email marketing platform for small businesses

ClickFunnels (Visit Website) and Mailchimp (Visit Website) are both marketing tools that help marketers and entrepreneurs scale and grow their businesses.

ClickFunnels is a platform that allows you to build high-converting sales funnels to generate leads, create one-click upsells and webinars, grow your sales, and more. They’re a one-stop shop, and they come with plenty of integrations to streamline your marketing efforts.

Mailchimp is email marketing software that allows you to market to your email list via newsletters and autoresponder campaigns. They’ve also added new functionality that makes it easy for customers to create Google remarketing ads, Facebook ads and Instagram ads within Mailchimp’s dashboard. Like ClickFunnels, you can also build landing pages on Mailchimp.

All in all, we find Mailchimp more suited to businesses who want to focus on email marketing, while ClickFunnels is a better fit for those who want to work on their entire funnel.

For marketers or business owners you want to do both, but are on a tight budget, we recommend using Mailchimp, which is more cost-effective. If you want to use clickfunnels as email marketing tool, that’s doable as well, but you’ll have to sign up for the “Etison Suite” plan which comes with an Actionetics integration. This plan is priced at a premium.

In this article, we walk you through the features of these two marketing tools, and discuss their pros and cons. Using this information, you can evaluate both tools, and decide which one serves your needs better!

Features

You can use both clickfunnels and Mailchimp to create landing pages. Both come with ready-made templates, and a drag-and-drop editor. You can also use both tools to create autoresponder campaigns, assuming you pay extra for ClickFunnels’ “Etison Suite”.

EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION

Mailchimp is one of the biggest names in the email marketing space, and if you’re looking for an email marketing automation tool, it’s an obvious choice. That said, the way they name their campaigns can be a little confusing – there’s no “autoresponder” option, and you’ll have to create an “automated” campaign, choose from the few options (“Welcome new subscribers”, “Say happy birthday”, and “Share blog updates”) before tweaking the campaign to fit your own objectives.

Where Mailchimp scores brownie points, though, is their easy to use drag-and-drop editor and their library of templates. These make creating beautiful emails a breeze, even for marketers and business owners who have no design background.

On top of that, Mailchimp also comes with built-in analytics and reporting. It allows you to review individual campaign reports for each email and/or campaign, and monitor campaign engagement and audience growth from your dashboard.

Mailchimp also provides interactive graphs which highlight key metrics, including how many emails were delivered, and what percentage of people opened their emails. If necessary, you can generate reports to share with your team, and A/B test emails to fine-tune your campaigns.

Mailchimp integrates with multiple eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento. Bearing this in mind, eCommerce owners will find it easy to set up automated campaigns to send product recommendations to their customers, spread the word about promotions and discounts, and reach out to those who have abandoned their carts.

Mailchimp’s free plan is perfectly decent for startups and small businesses, but if you opt for one of Mailchimp’s paid plans, you’ll get access to several advanced features. One particularly useful one is the Delivery By Timezone (also known as Timewarp) feature, which allows you to schedule your emails such that your subscribers will receive it at a specific time in your timezone. This helps you optimize your open and click through rates.

Timewarp aside, Mailchimp also provides a nifty Send Time Optimization feature that looks at your subscriber list and optimizes your send time specifically for the people in your list. Given that there are tons of businesses using Mailchimp, there’s a high chance that the people on your list receive emails from more than one Mailchimp user. This allows Mailchimp to pull together all its data on subscribers’ individual engagement patterns, and use this data to optimize your send times.

If you’re opting for Mailchimp’s most expensive plan – the Pro plan – you also get to use their Advanced Segmentation feature. This feature allows you to create segments of your lists based on whether subscribers performed specific activities, and it makes nurturing subscribers and moving them further down your funnel a breeze.

For instance, say someone opens a promotional email plugging your new product, but they don’t end up purchasing. You can easily sift out these people and add them to a new segment, then send them a coupon code to entice them to make a purchase.

Landing pages

While ClickFunnels bills itself as a platform that helps business owners and marketers build sales funnels, landing pages are a critical part of that process.

To create your landing page on ClickFunnels, you’d first have to choose a sales funnel. The pre-built options include:

1. Bestseller Book Funnel
2. Product Launch Funnel
3. Perfect Webinar Funnel
4. The “Real Stuff” Funnel
5. Fishbowl Funnel
6. Networking Marketing Bridge Funnel

Once you do that, you can use the ClickFunnels page editor to set up a landing page as part of your funnel. There are plenty of templates you can choose from, and these are conveniently categorized according to their purpose. You can pick from optin pages to generate leads and build a list, sales pages to sell your products, order form pages to collect payments, upsell pages, webinar event pages, membership sites, and much more.

Customizing your landing page is easy as well. ClickFunnels utilizes four color-coded “building blocks” to make up its page; these are sections, rows, columns, and elements. It’s straightforward enough to delete or add blocks, and move your blocks around.

To make your landing page more persuasive, be sure to explore all the different elements that ClickFunnels has to offer. Apart from standard elements such as buttons, video and audio players, you also have access to surveys, SMS sign-ups, pricing tables, user logins, affiliate links, and more. If you want your customers to make a purchase on your landing page, there are plenty of order-related elements that will get the job done, such as order forms, order summaries, order confirmations, order bumps (aka upsells).

What sets ClickFunnels apart from the other landing page builders out there? The platform doesn’t just make it easy for you to get individual landing pages up and running – it also provides a framework and a structure for your whole sales funnel.

With ClickFunnels, there’s no chance of you setting up your first landing page, realizing that it’s not quite sufficient after 3 months, then scrambling to add more steps to your funnel. Instead, you start off with a template that ClickFunnel provides you with, and this removes all the guesswork and trial and error. Of course, you should still A/B test each element of your funnel and optimize it along the way, but you’re starting off with a funnel that’s more well-designed and less likely to leak, right from the get-go.

Pros & Cons of ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels gives business owners and marketers an easy, fuss-free way of setting up a sales funnel. Here are a few pros and cons to keep in mind if you’re thinking of using ClickFunnels.

Pros

• Sales funnels involve plenty of moving parts, and with ClickFunnels, you can easily tie all of these together and set up your entire funnel in a single afternoon.
• Several pre-built funnels included, so you have a structured framework to follow.
• Comes with a simple and easy to use interface.
• ClickFunnel provides free training materials and ongoing weekly webinars to get new users up to speed. You can also reach out to their live chat or search for a relevant YouTube tutorial should you get stuck.

Cons

• Because there are so many options and possibilities, the tool might be a little overwhelming for new users. Also, while it might be a good fit for business owners who have a range of products and services they want to promote, the tool might be too advanced for bloggers who are simply trying to build up and engage their subscriber list.

Overall

If you’re trying to build a sales funnel, but you’re frustrated with all your moving parts, then ClickFunnels is definitely a great solution. It enables you to tie everything together in one place, and manage everything using a single dashboard. If you have a narrower, more specific objective (eg: building an email list), then opt for another tool to save you some money.

Pros & Cons of MAILCHIMP

Mailchimp is a great tool for bloggers, marketers and business owners who want to level up their email marketing efforts. Because Mailchimp is straightforward, easy to use and cost-effective, it’s accessible to both newbies and seasoned email marketers alike.

Pros

• Interface is simple and easy to use (once you understand that autoresponders are called “campaigns” in Mailchimp)
• Comes with a huge range of email templates
• Plenty of integrations provided
• Mailchimp has a great sender reputation, and most of their emails land in their recipients’ “Primary” inbox, not the “Promotions” tab or in Spam

Cons

• As mentioned earlier, Mailchimp uses different terminology from other email marketing software. If this is the first time you’re using an email marketing tool, you might not even realize it. But if you’ve been doing email marketing for some time now, you’ll probably take a while to get accustomed with their terminology.
• If you’re on the free plan, you only get email and chat support for the first 30 days of your plan. It goes away after that!
• Mailchimp rolls out product updates very regularly. If you’re not a heavy user, and you only log in once per month, your dashboard might look drastically different every time you see it.

Overall

When it comes to email marketing, Mailchimp is an easy, no-brainer choice. While it has plenty of features that enable advanced marketers to create powerful, highly targeted campaigns, we also recommend this platform for beginners. This boils down to the fact that it allows those who are new to email marketing to get their feet wet, without paying a single cent.

Pricing

Mailchimp is completely free to use at the lowest level, which is great for entrepreneurs and companies on a tight budget. This plan allows you to send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers per month.

If you want to gain access to more features, the “Grow” plan starts at $10/month (500 subscribers). This gives you email and chat support, as well as features such as send time optimization, delivery by time zone, and predicted demographics. There’s also a “Pro” enterprise plan which starts at $199/month. With this plan, you’ll get advanced segmentation, comparative reports, multivariate testing, and more.

On the other hand, ClickFunnels is one of the more costly funnel building tools in the market. At the bare minimum, you’ll be spending $97 per month on this tool. If you want to use ClickFunnels to manage your email list or affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to fork out for the premium plan, Etison Suite. This comes with the Actionetics and Backpack integrations, and it costs $297 per month.

ClickFunnels offers a free 14-day trial for both its basic ClickFunnels plan and Etison Suite.

Final Verdict

While ClickFunnels and Mailchimp have certain features in common, they ultimately cater to different audiences. That said, both are highly effective tools that can help you grow your business and increase your revenue.

In closing, ClickFunnels is perfect for creating working sales and marketing funnels in minutes, all from one tool. Mailchimp is a simple and user friendly email marketing platform