Omnisend vs. Mailchimp: Choosing the Right Email Marketing Platform

Email marketing can be the cornerstone of a successful customer engagement strategy. But the platform you choose makes all the difference. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll compare two leading solutions—Omnisend and Mailchimp—across crucial factors like features, ease of use, capabilities, and more to help you determine the best choice for your business.

The Growing Importance of Email Marketing

Before analyzing the email marketing tools themselves, it’s helpful to understand why this channel has become so critical for modern brands.

Key Statistics and Trends

• Email marketing generates $44.25 in revenue for every $1 spent, with ROIs even higher in retail and ecommerce verticals [source: DMA]
• 64% of consumers make purchases as a direct result of retail email campaigns [source: Statista]
• The global email marketing platform market size is predicted to grow at a 14% CAGR, approaching $17 billion by 2027 [source: Grand View Research]

As the numbers show, email marketing delivers unmatched returns compared to other digital channels. It also plays a central role not just in lead conversion, but building customer loyalty and retention over time.

In fact, 80% of businesses say email is core to their overall customer retention strategies according to Campaign Monitor research. With open and click through rates exponentially higher than social media, email marketing both attracts new customers and strengthens existing relationships.

Current Email Marketing Spending

On average, retail and ecommerce businesses spend around 7-8% of their total marketing budgets on email initiatives:

Industry	Avg. Email Marketing Spending
Retail	7%
Ecommerce	8%
Financial Services	5%
Technology	6%

And roughly 25-30% of brands have recently increased their email marketing budgets or plan to in the next year according to recent Ascend2 data:

As email marketing proves it’s worth,expect continued growth in investment across verticals.

Now let’s take a deeper look at two of the top solutions competing in this space – Omnisend and Mailchimp.

Omnisend Overview

Founded in 2013, Omnisend is a ecommerce focused all-in-one marketing platform built specifically with digital brands in mind. Trusted by over 15,000 D2C retailers and small businesses, it enables creating targeted email and SMS campaigns designed to drive sales.

Some standout Omnisend features include:

• Shopping focused email templates: Optimize clicks directly to product and cart pages with pre-built templates for browsing, cart abandonment and more customer lifecycle scenarios.

• Built-in automation: Create workflows and conditional campaigns tailored to customer behaviors without extensive configuration. Pre-built automations make getting set up quick and easy.

• SMS marketing integration: Use the same segmenting, messaging and automation capabilities across both email and SMS for more touches.

• Customer analytics: Track engagement rates, revenue metrics and behavioral trends across contacts to continually refine audience targeting.

While not as expansive as some enterprise-level ESPs, Omnisend provides tremendous value specifically for early stage ecommerce brands ready to take their marketing to the next level without added complexity.

Mailchimp Overview

First launched in 2001, Mailchimp promises to make “ambitious marketing easy” with an incredibly robust email solution trusted by millions of customers. Offering both self-serve and customized enterprise plans, it’s flexibility makes it popular across small businesses, agencies and large brands alike.

Some key Mailchimp capabilities include:

• Sophisticated templates: Highly customizable templates with drag and drop modules for formatting images, text, buttons and more with pixel perfect precision.

• Automations: Create multi-step journeys across the full customer lifecycle from welcome campaigns to re-engagement when contacts go cold.

• Landing pages: Build dedicated pages to capture contacts and promote campaigns without code.

• Analytics: Dive deep on email program performance whether doing a/b testing or analyzing ERP ecommerce data syncs for true attribution.

For advanced users ready to scale sophisticated emails that integrate deeply with other systems, Mailchimp is likely the strongest choice. Now let‘s see how the two providers stack up head to head.

Side by Side Comparison

When choosing an email service provider (ESP), judging purely on features alone does not determine what platform aligns to your use case. Prioritizing criteria like ease of use, flexibility, scalability and functionality for a given business size and industry is most important. Here is an in-depth feature-by-feature analysis across some of the most crucial evaluation areas when weighing Omnisend vs Mailchimp.

User Experience and Learning Curve

For less technically savvy users just exploring email marketing for the first time, Omnisend shines when it comes to friendly user experience. The intuitive tab structure with logical groupings of dashboard insights, creating campaigns, building workflows, pop-up signup forms and reviewing reports makes getting oriented effortless.

Mailchimp offers greater depth across all those same categories. But has a more complicated menu structure that may feel overwhelming as a new user. The additional learning curve could is often unnecessary when managing relatively basic email programs.

Verdict: Omnisend wins for simpler UX best suited for email marketing beginners.

Core Email Features and Functionality

Both platforms provide the baseline email features needed for professional campaigns like customizable templates, drag and drop editors, image libraries and basic segmentation by location, purchase history etc.

Mailchimp expands capabilities even further especially for technologically adept users. With features like true multivariate testing for subject lines and content, predictive send-time optimization based on open and click through data, and a visual journey builder to customize lifecycle workflows. The expenditure charts and project management capabilities cater perfectly to marketing agencies with multiple email programs and client reporting needs under management simultaneously.

But that added power can undermine the user experience. Where core email creation and customization meets 80%+ needs out of the box, Omnisend balances simplicity and functionality rather than supercharged features that are often underutilized anyways at small scale.

Verdict: Mailchimp offers more overall email features, but Omnisend gives the majority of general use case needs.

Integrated Channels Beyond Email

One unique value proposition of Omnisend is offering SMS and web push channel capabilities tightly integrated into the same platform. So without constantly switching between systems, you can create coordinated multichannel campaigns that follow similar segmentation, timing and even content personalization logic.

Mailchimp focuses squarely on dominating email. Allowing for more specialized platforms like Follow.net to meet SMS and mobile needs between its 300+ platform integrations.

The combined channel approach is extremely convenient, especially when managing customer journeys that move contacts across email, SMS and push channels at different stages. Just be aware that SMS contacts don’t automatically sync with email data in Omnisend at the moment—requiring either manual CSV uploads or reliance on the popup forms to build that audience.

Verdict: Omnisend better supports hybrid email + SMS + push coordinated campaigns natively.

Conversion Optimization and Automation

With customer experience growing as a brand differentiator across ecommerce, the opportunities to delight and convert consumers through personalized, well-timed messaging and incentives matters immensely to bottom line revenue.

It’s part of why robust email automation coupled with strong analytics for continuous optimization wins so many fans. Mailchimp offers a leg up for savvier customers willing to invest in learning platform intricacies with possibilities for advanced conditional logic, tags and custom journey building.

But Omnisend actually trumps Mailchimp when it comes to user-friendly automation possibilities out of the box. With category leading abandoned cart savings driven by easy onboard pre-built workflows, aggressive split testing capabilities and integrations to sync offline purchase data, even email marketing first timers see stellar results.

The following graph highlights the platform‘s prowess:

Condition-based triggers, superior ecommerce metrics visibility after setting up key integrations, and extremely easy to launch pre-configured templates help average users drive far better campaign performance through automation than most competing general solutions like Mailchimp.

Verdict: Another win for Omnisend when it comes to accessible yet highly capable automation features.

Reporting and Analytics

Understanding email performance is crucial to continually optimizing and improvingCampaign Monitor research your strategy.

While Mailchimp offers incredibly deep reporting capabilities on email and advertising metrics down to geo-performance tracking and real-time inbox placement monitoring, the learning curve is steep. Most regular users struggle transforming confusing charts, graphs and tables into clear insights.

By contrast, Omnisend consolidates easy to understand metrics highlighting open, click through, contact addition and revenue metrics centrally on the intuitive dashboard. Customizable reporting dashboards extend visibility with just a few clicks rather than navigating a labyrinth of options. Strong ecommerce syncing ties offline purchase data back to email and SMS campaign influence with no further configurations needed.

For ad agencies, in-house marketing analysts and power users, Mailchimp provides superior reporting flexibility at enterprise scale. But Omnisend gives the crucial analytics the average small business needs while staying simple.

Verdict: Omnisend reporting stays simple while still offering customization for more advanced metrics as needed.

Integrations and Connected Platforms

Expanding best-of-breed marketing technology ecosystems remains tablestakes for sophisticated organizations. That’s why integration capabilities can be make-or-break especially for enterprise evaluations.

Here Mailchimp massively outpaces essentially any competitor. With hundreds of technology partners across CRM, email appending, chat software, ecommerce engines, payment platforms, form builders, CMS tools and virtually every other martech category imaginable, Mailchimp sits centrally within extremely expansive stacks with advanced segmentation, custom field mapping and real-time data syncing across channels..

The breadth caters perfectly to complex organizations. Yet risks undermining user experience from underlying platform bloat. Still, it enables personalizing email content with dynamically populated first name, company name, purchase totals and more pulled from integrated third-party data sources seamlessly.

Omnisend holds its own on the integration front for core small business needs connecting top shopify, WooCommerce and other leading ecommerce platforms along with SugarCRM, GoodData, Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo. Zapier also helps bridge less common applications. But enterprises with sprawling martech landscapes should evaluate more critically if key systems are supported before onboarding.

Verdict: Mailchimp is definitively more robust for complex, ever-expanding technology ecosystems.

Deliverability Rates and Compliance

Driving inbox placement sits right alongside relevant content creation and savvy scheduling/segmentation when optimizing email programs. With growing sophistication in spam filters, staying atop reputation monitoring and whitelist quality proves non-negotiable.

Both Mailchimp and Omnisend invest heavily in deliverability across inbox testing tools, blacklist monitoring, domain reputation safeguards and best practice sender profiling following CAN SPAM/GDPR etc.

Slight variances hit the extremes as Mailchimp’s dominance and volume likely aids reputation generally. But also increases threats should a user flag messages triggering temporary ISP blocking. Omnisend counterbalances having slightly higher baseline spam folder rates but better agility escaping overly penalized status should any blocking occur with attentive deliverability team support.

For average use cases, both excel at keeping messages out of promotions tabs. But be aware deliverability always scales in proportion to sender best practices around permission PASS setting, authentication protocols like SPF/DKIM adoption and email list hygiene above platform factors alone.

Verdict: A Tie. Delivery rates ultimately depend most on user habits much more than underlying ESP deliverability infrastructure.

Customer Support Experience

Competing strictly on features misses the bigger picture around customer lifecycle experience. That applies equally to software buyers themselves.

Here Mailchimp makes massive investments in enterprise-grade support and education content given their market presence. For paying mid-market customers and up that translates to 24/7 live chat, email ticketing and premium phone assistance. Some plans even include dedicated account management.

But that high touch white glove service gets stripped down significantly at entry level tiers. With limited hours, potential wait times across channels and restrictions on question complexity depending on plan.

By contrast, Omnisend offers live chat support across all pricing tiers as a core value. Users never feel abandoned strictly due to lower budget subscription plans. The emphasis stays firmly on nurturing growth vs maximizing short term revenue. And simplicity of the platform inherently requires less technical troubleshooting for common issues liking editing templates or configuring automations.

For premiumhigh-investment customers, Mailchimp service stands far above comparable market options. But support experience consistency falters at lower levels.

Verdict: Omnisend edge for free users and smaller accounts. Mailchimp excels for largest customers.

Pricing and Scalability Comparison

Software buying decisions weigh factors like budget, growth trajectory, team sizes and use case complexity when determining alignment of pricing tiers to needs.

Both platforms break down as follows across monthly flat fee plans:

Mailchimp Pricing

• Free – 2k Contacts / 12k Emails per Month
• Essentials – $14/Month Billed Yearly – 5k Contacts / Unlimited Emails
• Standard – $22/Month Billed Yearly – 50 Contacts / Unlimited Emails
• Premium – $299+ / Month -custom enterprise packages

Omnisend Pricing

• Free Forever – 250 Contacts / 500 Emails per Month
• Starter – $16/Month – 500 Contacts / 6k Emails per Month
• Growth – $76/Month – 2.5k Contacts / Unlimited Emails
• Custom Enterprise Plans

Volume discounts kick in around 150k+ emails at Mailchimp and 100k+ for Omnisend.

The takeaway contrasts come at startup levels where Omnisend’s forever free plan provides incredible capabilities that categories above competitive freemium offers. Ideal for early testing or light customer bases. Mailchimp only allows limited functionality past the first trial month.

At growth stage phases, Mailchimp economy of scale and premium features make stronger cases for itself. Before enterprise needs takeover and custom contracting applies.

So determining position along the customer lifecycle gives clear signals of best fit platforms according to budget and functionality requirements at each phase.

Verdict: Omnisend unmatched free offering. Mailchimp better beyond 100k emails.

Summary: Choosing the Best Platform

With a detailed feature-by-feature analysis complete between two category leaders in turnkey email marketing platforms, matching specific business contexts and use cases gives final guidance on the best choice.

Omnisend Wins For:

• Beginner email marketers prioritizing simplicity
• Early stage ecommerce brands
• Startups with budget limitations
• Smaller retail/D2C operations under 10k contacts
• SMS/push integrated campaigns

Mailchimp Wins For:

• Agencies managing multiple client accounts
• Enterprise complexity and segmentation needs
• Advanced automation capabilities
• Expanding martech ecosystems
• Custom reporting requirements

Ultimately both platforms deliver tremendous capabilities relative to pure DIY or basic ESP options. Each succeeds based on aligning use cases to strengths.

Hopefully demystifying main differences for core priorities around contract flexibility, deliverability, user experience and functionality at tier helps identify the ideal platform for your specific email marketing needs.

If still uncertain which solution best addresses your current business requirements, don’t hesitate to reach out for 1-on-1 platform guidance. Our email marketing experts always happy to help advise best fits according to any unique considerations.