Mailchimp vs Marketo

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Our analysts compared Mailchimp vs Marketo based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

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Product Basics

Mailchimp is a web-based marketing platform that specializes in email marketing, sending, monitoring and personalizing communications. Given its pricing point, it’s great for small or medium businesses who want a fully-featured marketing implementation.

Standout features include an intuitive website builder with a drag-and-drop interface, an integrated database, as well as robust landing page builders for web and social media traffic. It also facilitates the creation of digital ads as well as physical postcards to reach customers via postal services.
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Marketo Engage offers a cloud-based marketing platform for companies to manage and monitor customer relationships. Its integrated modules include marketing automation, social marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, budget management, analytics, sales insight and website personalization.

It’s designed to serve both B2B and B2C environments. There’s also an active marketers’ community named the Marketo Marketing Nation in which marketers around the globe share their knowledge, ideas and best practices.
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$13 Monthly, Freemium
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Tailored to your specific needs
$895 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
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Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Free Version: A free version includes features such as an audience dashboard, tags, segmentation and more.
  • Multivariate Campaign: Test up to eight campaign variations and send improvised emails every time. View the impact of small changes to email campaigns on subscriber engagement.
  • Mobile App: Access reports, manage audiences, create campaign content and work on email campaigns on the go using an app for iOS and Android devices.
  • Retargeting Digital ads: Retarget website and landing page visitors when they use Facebook and Instagram, in order to bolster revenue and stay in constant contact with customers.
  • Website Builder: Build websites for free without coding skills, saving time and money. A built-in sign-up form and an option to claim a custom domain name enhance branding.
  • 24/7 Support: Support team and resources are available 24/7. Unlimited access to tutorials and marketing guides, as well as assistance in contact management, template design and website development are available.
  • Account Security: Leverage two-factor authentication that includes Mailchimp’s login credentials and a one-time passcode via text message, ensuring system security and authentication.
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  • Web Forms: Generate complete customer profiles via social form fills and progressive forms that can recognize known website visitors. Also, ask new questions to visitors. 
  • AI-Powered Content Suggestions: Automatically present relevant content across multiple channels using machine learning and predictive analytics, which identifies top-performing content. Choose content recommendations from the website assets such as videos, e-books, case studies and blog posts. 
  • Marketo Sales Connect: Connect sales and marketing with a single workflow for automated and personalized inbound and outbound engagements. 
  • Better Focus: Sales reps can prioritize and close deals by accessing real-time insights about customers from both sales and marketing touchpoints. 
  • Team Coordination: Plan, coordinate and share marketing activities through a centralized calendar. This simplifies scheduling individual components of a single campaign or coordinating activities across teams. 
  • Campaign Control: Build and modify marketing campaigns directly in the calendar with simple drag-and-drop functionality. 
  • Data Tracking: Track goals and progress with calendar HD, using rotating calendar views and custom background images. 
  • Customer Segmentation: The built-in Audience Hub tool automatically updates members in each segment as their behaviors or demographics change. 
  • AI-Powered Account Profiling: Uses AI-based best-fit indicators for converting into ABM filters to personalize and deploy ABM campaigns by activating the target account list. Also provides predictive customer profile models, custom model tuning and recommendations based on predictive scoring. 
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  • Audience Dashboard: Store contact data and track trends to understand the audience better. Clickable sections in the dashboard help instantly launch campaigns based on that data.
  • Segmentation: Ready-made segments based on campaign activity, purchase history and more are offered to send campaigns. Enable up to five layers of segmentation filtering, and update data automatically. Add a set of nested conditions facilitating different combinations of data collected such as purchase activity, gender, age range and more.
  • Behavioral Targeting: An API enables pulling custom event data or actions performed by users, to send targeted messages based on specific activities, such as downloads or account renewal.
  • Lookalike Audience: Works with social ads and postcards to reach more people. Find new people similar to contacts using marketing CRM data and an audience network. Create Facebook and Instagram ads, and target people interested in the company’s products.
  • Content Studio: Stores assets such as photos, documents and other files. Upload or sync assets, edit them directly in the content studio and use them for marketing.
  • Templates: More than 100 predesigned templates are available. Customize templates to launch campaigns.
  • Email Builder: Create posts for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter directly from the email builder. Also add photos, write copy and share the post after the email is sent.
  • Landing Pages: Create a place for contacts or potential contacts to land on when they click through from an email, ad, social post or other location on the web.
  • Email Automation: Automate welcome messages after user subscription, and emails based on dates and events. Drag and drop RSS content into any template to pull in the latest posts.
  • Schedule Campaigns: Send a campaign or schedule it for a specific date and time. Includes: 
    •  Send time optimization, which recommends a time for subscribers based on click time activity. 
    •  Timewarp to send campaigns to recipients based on their time zone. 
    •  Batch delivery to send campaigns in timed batches. 
    •  Ability to pause campaigns. 
  • Reporting: Monitor trends and track performance. The growth, engagement and revenue reports facilitate viewing who’s interacted with marketing, along with their clicks, buys and downloads. Compare open, click and unsubscribe rates to industry peers.
  • Real-Time Analytics: Keep tabs on all marketing campaigns including emails, automations, social ads and more. Manage marketing budget using real-time stats. Track sales from a campaign to purchase by finding out who made a purchase after opening the campaign, viewing what they bought and seeing the money earned by the campaign.
  • Integrations: Integrates with apps and web services including Xero, Zapier, Square, LiveChat and more.
  • A/B Testing: Test up to three variations for campaign and build a working strategy.
  • Security:Includes data center security, protection from data loss or corruption, application-level security, internal IT security and more.
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  • Search Engine Optimization: Compares keyword rankings of competitors, provides recommendations for new keywords for higher ranking web pages, and discovers inbound link opportunities based on targeted keywords and competitors’ links. 
  • CRM Integration: Offers native integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications to provide a bi-directional data sync that auto-updates every five minutes. Also facilitates custom-configured integrations for various CRM platforms such as NetSuite, Oracle, SAP Sales Cloud and SugarCRM. 
  • Lead Scoring: Rank customers by assigning positive and negative scores based on demographics or their likelihood to exhibit certain behaviors, such as making a new purchase, being open to cross-sell offers and more. 
  • Email Marketing: Supports both batch and real-time triggered emails. Helps: 
    • Create personalized campaigns for mobile, web, ads and more using a visual editor and responsive templates.
    • Personalize content based on inferred information from website visitors, such as company, country, zip code and city, helping segment and localize content.
    • Use browsing behavior to identify product interest for target accounts.
  • Mobile Marketing: 
    • Helps connect with customers on the go, track inputs from different marketing channels and respond via mobile apps.
    • Sends push notifications and in-app messages, and incorporates beacon and geo-fencing technology to send location-relevant messages to customers.
    • Visual dashboards measure overall performance by opens, installs and session duration across multiple apps.
  • Social Media Marketing: Facilitates running social polls, sweepstakes and referral campaigns with built-in social share buttons and shareable videos. Integrates social metrics into marketing reports to help measure the impact of social activity on conversions and revenue. 
  • Digital Ad Campaigns: Connects with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other advertising platforms, and targets customers with relevant ad campaigns. 
  • Analytics and Reporting: Automatically connect data from different sources into a unified platform. Enables: 
    • Mapping and measuring a customer journey at every stage through shareable, prebuilt dashboards and ad-hoc reporting tools.
    • Designing custom models with the help of AI.
    • Leveraging a suite of attribution models.
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Product Ranking

#20

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#6

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

90
82
86
64
90
99
83
75
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Integrations and Extensibility
Lead Management
Platform Capabilities
Social Media Campaign Management
Email Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Campaign Management
Dashboard and Reporting
Lead Management
Email Campaign Management

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Mailchimp
Marketo
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 86 90 83 83 93 82 100 83 93 100 100 55 64 99 75 94 88 68 90 100 78 81 88 43 0 25 50 75 100
86%
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14%
43%
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57%
87%
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13%
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83%
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17%
67%
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33%
82%
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18%
91%
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90%
5%
5%
85%
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15%
71%
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29%
57%
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43%
100%
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90%
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10%
83%
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17%
100%
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90%
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70%
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82%
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18%
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88%
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12%
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86%
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100%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

100%
0%
0%
63%
0%
37%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 41542 reviews
Great User Sentiment 4522 reviews
88%
of users recommend this product

Mailchimp has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 41542 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

81%
of users recommend this product

Marketo has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 4522 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.3 (10702)
4.1 (2125)
4.48 (15519)
n/a
4.5 (13246)
4.2 (582)
4.5 (222)
n/a
4.1 (1853)
4.0 (1815)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Mailchimp and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management, Platform Capabilities, Social Media Campaign Management and Integrations and Extensibility.

Lead Management Award
Platform Capabilities Award
Social Media Campaign Management Award
Integrations and Extensibility Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Easy to Use: The platform has a simple interface and can easily be understood by anyone with basic knowledge of email marketing, observe 95% of reviewers referencing this feature.
Easy Email and Templates: It’s easy to create and understand emails using templates, send professional email flyers, and run campaigns automatically, according to 83% of users who mention this feature.
Email Marketing: Everyone referencing this aspect thinks it’s a comprehensive email marketing tool with features like campaign management, customer journey, transactional email, integrations and more.
Customization: Almost 80% of reviewers who talk about this feature feel the built-in templates are easily customizable, and editing them doesn’t require graphic design experience.
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Lead Management: The ability to route and categorize leads based on requirements is helpful for staying on top of customers inputs, in the view of 60% of users talking about lead management.
Customizable: All reviews on this aspect agree that the system is highly customizable and offers email templates that can be created as per requirements.
Automation: Marketing and sales automation make it easy to use and eliminate manual entry, according to 83% of users who reviewed this feature.
Reporting: Provides custom reports that fit the user requirement and are insightful, say 75% of users referencing reporting.
Integrations: Integrations for websites, event platforms, survey platforms, mobile apps and more, along with two-way integration with CRM systems, aid functionality, according to 75% of users mentioning integrations.
Customer Support: The training is great and customer support is responsive, according to 66% of reviews on this topic.
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Paid Version: More than 85% users mentioning this aspect observe that the free version doesn’t include all features and the premium version is expensive compared to other email marketing services.
Email Spam: Every user talking about this feature mentions that sometimes clients' e-blasts end up in the spam folder for recipients.
Glitches: There are glitches such as difficulty signing in when logged in from another device, frozen modules, slow editing process, poor compatibility with Outlook and more, as every review on this feature mentions.
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Not User-Friendly: The functionality is cumbersome and pages take time to load, in the experience of 60% of users who reviewed the usability.
Dashboard: Campaign dashboards are outdated and the design needs an upgrade, according to 75% of users specifying this feature.
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Stepping into the realm of email marketing, Mailchimp emerges as a prominent contender, captivating businesses with its user-friendly interface and extensive features. User feedback from the past year sheds light on Mailchimp's strengths and weaknesses, offering valuable insights for potential adopters. Mailchimp's intuitive design empowers users of all skill levels to craft visually appealing email campaigns. The platform's drag-and-drop editor and diverse template library simplify the creation process, enabling businesses to maintain brand consistency and engage their audience effectively. Affordability is another hallmark of Mailchimp, with tiered pricing plans catering to businesses of varying sizes and budgets. The availability of a free plan further enhances accessibility, making it an attractive option for startups and small businesses. However, Mailchimp's automation capabilities have drawn mixed reviews. While the platform offers basic automation features, such as welcome emails and abandoned cart sequences, some users find them to be less robust compared to competitors like ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo. Additionally, Mailchimp's segmentation options, while functional, may not provide the same level of granularity as more specialized email marketing platforms. Despite these limitations, Mailchimp's ease of use, affordability, and comprehensive feature set make it a compelling choice for businesses seeking a reliable email marketing solution. Its intuitive interface and extensive template library empower users to create professional-looking emails without extensive design experience. The platform's scalability ensures that it can accommodate the evolving needs of growing businesses, making it an ideal choice for those embarking on their email marketing journey.

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As a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage supports both demand and account-based marketing strategies that work in sync with marketing and sales. It offers a range of features that help businesses operations. Notable features that users call out include custom reports, automation tools and lead management. It’s highly customizable and can integrate with a wide range of business systems. Users also appreciate the robust customer service. Some limitations include an inconvenient mobile app, outdated user interface for campaign dashboards and cumbersome functionality. Overall, businesses looking to automate their sales and marketing efforts will find the system has a lot to offer.

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