Contributed by Edrian Blasquino

Today’s marketers are tasked with the arduous responsibility of managing multiple sites, platforms, tools, and trackers daily. And the list of skills needed seems to increase every day. 

Due to the ever-growing demand for intuitive, efficient integration tools, sites like HubSpot and MailChimp were born. Both platforms offer a vast range of marketing tools and capabilities, designed to aid teams in tackling their never-ending to-do lists. 

But in the battle of HubSpot vs. MailChimp, who is the stronger of the two? This article intends to find out where the strengths and weaknesses of HubSpot and MailChimp lie. 

MailChimp and HubSpot in a Nutshell 

HubSpot and MailChimp are marketing platforms that allow you to plan, schedule, and post digital content. They are the nucleus of marketing strategies, and most marketers couldn’t imagine life without them. 

MailChimp

This all-in-one marketing platform focuses on CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It’s easily adaptable for both big and small businesses seeking to grow their audience. 

MailChimp software provides a wide variety of editable templates, email analytics, and paid and free account options. They also have highly customizable content strategies. MailChimp is a trusted and well-connected email marketing platform with a distinct reputation for ease of use.

HubSpot

Providing a similar toolkit to MailChimp, this sophisticated marketing platform is known for its comprehensive list of services and high level of personalization. 

Extending beyond just email marketing, HubSpot offers inbound marketing strategies, advanced digital customer-facing services, analytics, and a very responsive help desk. 

Targeted at small-to-medium-sized businesses, HubSpot is a flexible yet refined marketing platform. Marketers with a need for automated tools that expand beyond conventional strategies can benefit from the diverse number of services, resources, and customizable templates that HubSpot offers. 

Measuring Capabilities

With a similar arsenal of capabilities, it’s no wonder marketers are torn between these two powerful integrative platforms. In the HubSpot vs. MailChimp battle, picking a winner is not easy.

HubSpot and MailChimp are both clearly adept at what they do. But our mission today is to determine where their individual strengths lie. To do so, we must comb through all of the tools and services that the two platforms provide.

Email Marketing

With access to the correct email marketing tool, your business can increase its ROI to a near-unbelievable $36 for every dollar spent. Because email marketing is one of MailChimp’s main selling points, let’s start with an overview of how they approach this tool. 

MailChimp is what you need if you’re looking to ramp up your email marketing strategy. Offering a wide variety of different templates, this platform was practically designed for creating personalized email newsletters.

There are unique themes to choose from, complete with an array of elements and designs that further individualize your newsletter’s outcome. Creating transactional emails is easy. Plus, you receive access to data that provides insight into heatmaps, open rates, and clickthrough rates to improve your design. 

MailChimp also features a drag-and-drop tool, allowing you to edit newsletters easily. If you don’t like any of the provided templates, you can encode your own for further customization. MailChimp’s email marketing usability level is high, making it ideal for beginner or start-up marketing teams. 

HubSpot may not have been in the email marketing game for as long as MailChimp, but it sure has caught up fast. HubSpot’s email editor is straightforward to use with solid customization ability. It offers a slew of creative templates that you can modify to your individual taste. 

The true strength of HubSpot’s email marketing strategy comes in with its CRM automation tool. By creating detailed email campaigns, you can personalize each email per your customer’s preferences. 

An if/then feature is also applied on-demand, allowing for customers’ more contextual and tailored email experiences. Both HubSpot and MailChimp’s email marketing tools feature A/B testing, email personalization, device optimization, and post-send email analytics. 

Automation Tools

Automation tools are one of the most groundbreaking features of modern marketing strategies. With so many projects on the go, automating certain functions can save a lot of time and energy. 

MailChimp offers automation tools for email marketing only. This presents as emails being triggered by specific customer actions, such as a birthday notification, abandoned cart alert, and more.

Their Customer Journey Builder allows for precise mapping of customer journeys, leading to more accurate consumer behavior predictions. 

MailChimp’s other automation features include welcome messages, order and appointment notifications, and date-based automation. It does not have recording options or sales call tracking, which is a slight disadvantage. 

On the other hand, HubSpot boasts a pretty impressive range of automation tools. Reaching beyond just email automation, HubSpot allows its users to automatically manage contact databases, create support tickets, and even rotate leads amongst sales teams. 

In addition to conventional automation tools such as drip campaigns and kickback emails, HubSpot enables you to apply conditional logic and delays to your strategy. 

That means an even higher level of customization, allowing for more precise control over customer experiences and another layer of depth to your team’s workflow. 

Contacts Management

Contact management is necessary to organize and store contacts spanning multiple active platforms and channels. It is a crucial feature of any integrated marketing platform because it holds together the personal information necessary for connecting with audiences. 

HubSpot boasts impressive contacts management tools. Built on top of a CRM strategy, users have insight into the most delicate details of every contact’s information and experiences with your company. 

Through this system, you can follow a map of how contacts interact with content, how their recent sales calls went, and whether or not they opened your latest email. 

The strength of MailChimp’s contacts management tool lies in integrating customer segmentation. The segments automatically group themselves based on specific (and controllable) variables, making contact management easy to execute.

You can also create tags for individual contacts, allowing them to naturally group when searching for the tag as a keyword.

Data Analytics

Data analytics form a considerable part of any marketing strategy. To provide customers with the kind of content and messaging they want, you need insights into their behind-the-scenes behavior. This is an area where HubSpot shines when weighing up  HubSpot vs. MailChimp. So, let’s start with its position first.

HubSpot has a robust analytics program. By providing a specialized Analyze tab, HubSpot allows you to compare all of the critical metrics for email responses in one place, giving more insight into consumer activity. You can also break down reports easily to discover key trends over time. 

HubSpot’s data analytics tools allow you to measure traffic quantity and quality – not just page-by-page but also on your website as a whole. Detailed reports are available for each of your marketing channels, enabling you to focus on marketing campaigns that need it most. 

MailChimp’s data analytics program isn’t as sophisticated as HubSpot’s, but it is by no means inadequate. This experienced platform provides four main data reports, including Landing Pages, Campaigns, Automation, and Comparisons. These reports allow users to observe data collected throughout their marketing campaigns.

Advertisements and Social Media Performance

Both HubSpot and MailChimp have great ad and social media integration tools. Social media performance forms a massive part of what current marketing strategies are all about, so it should come as no surprise that both platforms have well-established performance tools. 

HubSpot permits you to organically schedule and post across your social media platforms, from X (formerly Twitter) to Threads. There are also granular insights available on the performance of individual campaigns, so users can methodically understand what is driving engagement with their audience. 

Managing multiple channels is easy on HubSpot. They are all connected via the HubSpot CRM, which allows you to reply to messages across various channels and improve contact management. 

Similar to HubSpot, MailChimp allows you to schedule and post across multiple channels at once. However, it is easier to configure ads spanning Google or strictly social platforms like Instagram, encouraging users to reach new audiences faster. 

You can upgrade your plan and access some more advanced features such as ad tracking. MailChimp’s basic ad management tools also make it a great HubSpot alternative. 

The Verdict on HubSpot vs. MailChimp

When debating HubSpot vs. MailChimp, there’s no denying the competence or success of both HubSpot and MailChimp as marketing platforms. However, based on the information accumulated here, HubSpot appears better suited to medium or large-scale enterprises, while MailChimp may be better for smaller teams. 

HubSpot is not as easy to use as MailChimp, but that’s a small price to pay for the high level of technical tools, features, and deliverability that it possesses. In comparison, MailChimp is more user-friendly but limited in integration and analytical precision. 

Now that you have a deeper understanding of both platforms, you’re better equipped to select the tool that aligns best with your marketing goals.

For more marketing tips and insights, be sure to check out the Techmub blog.

This article has contributed by Edrian Blasquino

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