Why I Moved From Mailchimp To Mailerlite

If you have an email subscription form on your blog, chances are – you considered different email marketing services before choosing one to fit your needs. When starting out, most bloggers opt for mailchimp, a free email marketing service because it gives control over email campaigns as opposed to an RSS reader like feedburner.

The aim of using a free email marketing service is to be able to collect information from subscribers, group them and send targeted and customized email marketing campaigns. Embedding an email subscription link or form on your blog is the easiest way to do that.

Most free email marketing services will provide you this feature. However, as your blog grows, your need might differ from what your free email marketing service can provide and you begin to search for cheaper options or another free email marketing service.

I’ve used mailchimp’s free email marketing service since 2013 though I didn’t start out with it when I started blogging. It was easy to import my subscriber list from feedburner and send better emails. I continued with mailchimp till my blog needed change.

When I started writing my ebooks and launched my blog services, I wanted automation features. This is a paid feature on mailchimp but my mailchimp account was the free plan giving me 2000 subscribers free. It didn’t make sense for me to pay for the upgrade when I had barely 10% of the free 2000 subscribers with my free plan.

This made me go on a search. I’ve loved convertkit since I saw many pro bloggers use it for their campaigns and ebooks but it was too expensive for me. I searched for free email marketing service alternatives to convertkit and that landed me on mailerlite.

The details on their front page was encouraging, they have a page with their features in details and also have comparisons between their service and other popular mailing services like mailchimp, convertkit and Aweber. On taking a closer look, I saw that it has all the features I wanted for free. 

I immediately signed up and started setting up my account and trying out their features. The easy to use features impressed me till I ran into some difficulties uploading photos from my iPad. I contacted support via live chat and it turned out that all features work best on PCs, laptops and not iPads, tablets or phones.

Currently, I use only my iPad and phone for blogging. This news was devastating as I took hours setting up my account, creating different emailing groups, creating subscription forms, etc. My happiness reduced because I was ready to send out my first email. I wanted it properly customized but couldn’t.

While looking for a way around, I set up an rss driven campaign to send out update of my new blog post if I couldn’t find a way. Setting up rss campaign is easy as most content are coming from your rss URL anyways. You’ll only have to indicate what you want shown and that’s all.

I didn’t want to give up, so I contacted support again via mailerlite live chat. The lovely Migle agreed to help me upload the photos I was struggling to upload. I sent them to her via the chat and she uploaded them for me. All I did was to select them from file manager while composing the email campaign.

After trying out mailerlite’s free email marketing service for weeks, I still prefer it to mailchimp despite its shortcoming compared to other competitors. Here’s a summary comparison of mailchimp and mailerlite free email marketing service.

Comparison of Mailchimp and Mailerlite: Which Free Email Marketing Service is Better?

As you can see from the comparison above, most of the paid features on mailchimp are free on mailerlite. I enjoyed using mailchimp over the years but it was time to move on, no hard feelings. The reasons I mentioned plus additional features like landing pages, popup on exit are top on my reasons for moving from mailchimp to mailerlite. With the popup feature on mailerlite, I don’t need my pop up plugin anymore. Read: Must Have WordPress Plugins.

Mailerlite recently added a new feature – countdown timer. This is a feature I like and have admired in my inbox from other bloggerpreneurs. With this countdown timer, you can offer a freebie, discount or offer an event that expires within hours or days. The countdown timer can be used to remind people of how much time they have till your offer expires. 

What I Dislike About Mailerlite:  It’s not easy to use all features on mobiles and tablets. You’ll need a laptop to benefit from all features plus ease of uploading images to custom email campaigns. This is the only challenge I’ve faced so far. Luckily for me, the support via mailerlite live chat was helpful.

I’m currently using the rss-email type of campaign for new blog updates till I’m back to working on a laptop for better customization. The rss campaign on mailerlite is customizable. You can add more items to your compaigns and select how many posts you want to include in the campaign.

Maichimp is a great free email marketing service but if you’re like me and need the added features mentioned for free, it is the alternative you’ve been looking for.

*P.S. This is not a sponsored post. I really do like this free email marketing service and I know many bloggers will need it. However, if you signup through my links, you’ll recieve $20 to spend on paid features you might want on mailerlite.

Which free email marketing service are you using? Does it take care of all your email marketing needs?

Thanks for stopping by as always.
xx!

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