HubSpot vs. Mailchimp: Marketing Automation

Picture this: you’re putting together a marketing plan and read that email marketing has an ROI of $40 for every $1 spent. 

You have an idea of who you’d market to, but sending thousands of emails manually would take forever. How would you track results? Where do you even start?

The great news is technology is at your fingertips!

With so many marketing automation tools to choose from, you’ve narrowed down your list to HubSpot and Mailchimp, but how do you decide?

At Dijy, the HubSpot and Mailchimp debate has come up time and time again. Which is better? Which allows for automation and is easiest to use? How can you use the platform to power your marketing?

Let’s Start with the Basics

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps marketing teams attract new business, sales teams stay on top of their deals, and service teams manage their clients.

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that helps companies reach out to their target markets.

The biggest difference between the two platforms is HubSpot is all inclusive.

Marketers can use HubSpot to send email campaigns, but they can also create a blog, manage their ads and social media posts, use live chat to convert website visitors, create landing pages & forms, automate workflows with personalized marketing, have an account based marketing strategy… all while tracking and managing leads. The transparency in reporting also makes it easy to measure effectiveness of campaigns.

But we’re here about email marketing & automation, so let’s get into it.

Marketing Automation is Key

MailChimp is a great tool and has very useful features to allow you to set up simple email marketing campaigns and generate results.

However, email marketing has evolved and personalization is needed to stand out and see return and automation allows this to happen effortlessly.

Compared to Mailchimp, HubSpot has the ability to automate processes for personalization. With HubSpot, you can automatically generate internal tasks, segment contacts/leads and automate the process of updating contact & company information in your database.

Let’s break it down…

Automate internal notifications and tasks

Let's say you sent someone a marketing email and they clicked on a pricing page. You can set up a workflow in HubSpot to automatically send a task to your team to reach out.

You can get really specific too. If someone visits an event registration page on your website and didn’t register, you can offer a promo for that event to try to hook them. Or similarly if you’re a nonprofit and someone leaves your donor page, you can auto email them to ask what’s stopped them from donating. 

Automate lead management & segmentation

HubSpot allows for automatic segmentation. Segmentation allows you to organize your contacts into different groups based on data to send them content and emails relevant to their interests.

What data should you segment by? It depends - but we typically see segmentation based on geography, industry, needs or value provided.

It’s important to segment to be sure you’re personalizing your outreach. This will help you be relevant.

Automate the process of updating contact & company properties 

You’ll begin to collect more data and you need to be able to automatically store this information. HubSpot’s ability to auto update properties will ensure your data is accurate so you can use this data to your advantage.

Let’s use lead scoring for example. If someone visits your site 3 times in a week, you can set up a workflow to automatically change &  increase their lead score in HubSpot.

Or let’s say a person receives 5 emails and doesn't open any of them. You can have them automatically removed from your email list.

There’s so many great ways you can use HubSpot automation, that Mailchimp just doesn't have the capability to do.

So… HubSpot Takes the Cake

Mailchimp can certainly help with simple email campaigns, but it stops there. If you’re trying up your marketing game, be able to automate, segment and personalize, HubSpot takes the cake.

Dijy works with nonprofits and businesses to digitize their process.

If you’re looking for ways to get started with automation: