For most businesses, email marketing is the number one strategy that allows them to keep their brands thriving. It is only logical that marketers and business owners want the most feature-packed e-marketing platform that would grow their contact base and reach out to their existing customers in the most effective way.
Undoubtedly, MailChimp has become a household name as an automated marketing platform that’s always on point with its wide range of services. However, would you say “no” to someone who would offer you all of the most sought-after functions (and even more than that) at a fraction of the price or even for free? Interested? Then you should try an email marketing service from SendPulse as it proves to be a great free MailChimp alternative that will help you keep the budget under control.
SendPulse and MailChimp Pricing Comparison
MailChimp comes with quite an impressive set of features available under its free plan. Нowever, if your mailing list is slightly bigger than 2,000 recipients, which is the largest number of subscribers you can email monthly for free, the costs become harder to nail down. For example, if you happen to add 10 new contacts to your list or exceed the 12,000 emails per month limit, you’ll immediately have to pay $30 monthly to continue using the service, which can become a burden for fast-growing startups that still strive to break even.
With SendPulse, you can reach 2,500 subscribers or send 15,000 emails monthly absolutely for free, while the starting price of its paid plan is as high as $9.85. For $30 a month, your email campaign will embrace 12,000 subscribers. The difference between SendPulse and MailChimp pricing strategies becomes even more evident if you note that MailChimp wants extra $10 for every 100 contacts in the mailing list, while with SendPulse, one can add up to 1,000 new subscribers for less than $2.
Pay As You Go Plans
Those who do not have a fixed number of subscribers, often opt for MailChimp pay as you go plan, where one pays only for the emails sent via the platform. SendPulse offers the same option but at a much more affordable price. For example, MailChimp pricing starts from $150 for 5,000 prepaid emails, while with SendPulse, you can get an impressive 10,000 email package for $32. Add the possibility to send SMS and Viber messages and the unlimited access to web push notifications, and you can safely say that SendPulse is one of the best alternatives to MailChimp as far as pricing is concerned.
The Best Free MailChimp Alternative in Terms of Functionality
SendPulse offers an amazing range of functions, most of which can be used under its free plan without limits. Along with MailChimp, it was one of the pioneers of automated email, allowing users to send the right messages at the right time with minimum effort. With its convenient drag and drop editor, you can create stylish email templates that would match your unique website design.
While using the embedded, pop-up, or fixed subscription forms, you can encourage website visitors to join your mailing list and leave the necessary personal details, which will further be used for customized email.
Automate
Both MailChimp and SendPulse understand the benefits the automation of routine tasks brings to a business. With their smart automation tools, you can make communication with your customers effortless and effective as never before.
Once you tweak your email marketing campaign to make it respond to triggers, welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, birthday cards, and other messages will be delivered to your customers’ inboxes at the most suitable time. Moreover, SendPulse unique tool called Automation 360 allows for multichannel communication, where you can reach to your customers not only via email but also via SMS and web push notifications.
Optimize
You can monitor trends, check your customers’ preferences, and adjust your future campaigns to address your audience’s needs better.
SendPulse is as good as MailChimp at gathering the audience behavior data: you can see who clicked on your links, where they come from, which device they used for browsing, etc. Segment your audience, A/B test your messages, and come up with better-informed marketing solutions to boost your campaign’s performance.
Integrate
Integration with CRM, web analytics, and a whole range of other business applications can take your email marketing campaign to a new level. In today’s competitive market, it would be unwise to deprive a business of such an opportunity to target customers faster and more accurately and deliver a higher ROI.
Although MailChimp’s list of integrations is hard to beat, SendPulse still has a lot to offer. In particular, SendPulse can be integrated with various e-commerce solutions, CMS and CRM systems, and a great lot of other online services. For example, SendPulse has developed a WordPress plugin, which allows users to embed SendPulse features into their WordPress powered websites. In other words, you can try out a free alternative to MailChimp WordPress plugin!
SendPulse for WordPress Plugin
SendPulse for WordPress plugin is as great as its MailChimp alternative. It was designed to add a subscription form to your WordPress website. The contact details of each new subscriber will be automatically imported to your mailing list, allowing you to launch email campaigns and send digests and transactional emails to all contacts on the list. Combining this feature with SendPulse smart automation, you can make sure that your message reaches the recipient at the right time, thus increasing the open rate of your emails.
How SendPulse for WordPress Plugin Works
Use this step-by-step guide to install SendPulse Email Plugin for WordPress in no time and create your first subscription form!
1. Install the plugin
Login to your WordPress account and select “Plugins.” Type “SendPulse” in the search bar. Choose the “SendPulse Email Marketing Newsletter” plugin and install it.
Don’t forget to activate the plugin after the installation.
2. Configure the plugin
Sign in to your SendPulse account and open the “Account Settings.” Then choose the API tab, activate REST API and click “Save.” The API ID and the new Secret will be generated.
Copy API ID and Secret and paste them to the fields “Client ID” and “Client Secret” found in the “Settings” menu in your WordPress dashboard.
Specify your mailing list in SendPulse in the field “Address Book for new users.” Click on “Save Changes” so that all changes are applied.
3. Import emails from WordPress to your mailing list in SendPulse
Select “Settings” in the left menu and choose the tab “Import.” Here you need to specify a mailing list in SendPulse. It will be shown in the field “Import to Address Book.” Email addresses from WordPress will be uploaded to this mailing list.
You can also select the group of users in the field “Import Users Group” for import. After you click the button “Start Import,” the plugin will import the contacts to SendPulse. To save all changes click “Save Changes.”
4. Create a subscription form to add it to your post or a WordPress web page
Select “SendPulse Forms” in the left menu. Click “Add form” to save one of the forms. All forms you create and save will be displayed in this section.
Then go to your SendPulse account and design any subscription form that suits your purpose. After the form has been created, copy the code of the form and paste it to WordPress.
For this, open your WordPress dashboard, select “Add Form” in the left menu and insert the code in the “Constructor Form Code” field. You will see the “Shortcode” in the right panel, namely, [sendpulse-form id=’44’] in this case. Finally, save the form.
5. Add your subscription form to a post or a website page
Now let’s add your new form to your blog post or your website. Select “Posts” (or “Pages” if you need it to appear on a page of your website) in the WordPress dashboard and choose “Add new.” Then paste the “Shortcode” of your subscription form to the main field, and click “Publish.”
Now the form appears on your website.
To sum everything up, SendPulse is probably the best free MailChimp alternative that will offer you any features needed for creation of a really outstanding marketing campaign. It is seamlessly integrated with a number of business applications and allows users to build their contact base, send customized messages to their customers via various channels, and analyze the effectiveness of their campaigns without breaking the bank.
