You’ve Got Two Suitors — MailChimp & ShoutOUT — Who Would You Say Yes To? 💍
Marketing your products and services in the current competitive business environment is very essential (and really hard! I know) to stay on top of things. Among the many tools you employ in promoting and marketing, email ✉ marketing stands a prominent place due to its effectiveness in reaching out to customers and prospects. Therefore, in this article, I thought of comparing and contrasting the two email marketing tools, MailChimp 🐵 — as it is a popular and favourite tool among many -, and ShoutOUT — as it comes with lots of features although it’s slightly a new service.
Let’s have a look at the differences you can see between MailChimp and ShoutOUT.
In the above table, you could see the main differences that are being focused on, in this article. If you think you need to learn more about these differences; which features would benefit you more if used, how they would benefit you in marketing, then do grab a cup of coffee and find a comfy spot 😊. But it won’t take long I promise 👯
The Use of SMS to Boost Email Campaigns
It is a fact that SMS have a 97% read rate within 15 minutes of delivery whereas it’s only 20%-30% with emails. So, as I’m sure has already occurred to you, you can send SMS reminders alongside each email campaign to boost 📈 the open rate of your emails (not to mention how it will affect lead conversion too 😉). ShoutOUT has recognized this fact and facilitates both triggered and broadcast SMS to make things better.
Isn’t this strategy way better than leaving your emails to be opened after days (or sometimes never) ? Well, you decide 😛
CRM and Customer Segmentation 👲👳👱
Segmentation is a really important aspect of CRM when it comes to targeting email campaigns. It is imperative that your customers are constantly segmented by studying their customer life cycles. Just like you can remember exactly when and where your bae sneezed last😍, you need to track all your customer activities to understand their customer life cycle so that you can segment them and run a successful email campaign where the relevant email reaches only the relevant party.
If your business doesn’t involve frequent and real time interaction with your customers, then MailChimp is your sweetheart since they focus mostly on broadcast emails.
On the other hand, if your business is one which demands real time and frequent communication with customers, say YES to ShoutOUT, your life partner 👰! ShoutOUT tracks each customer life cycle and keeps segmentation up to date.
For example, Mary will be in the ‘active’ segment if she constantly purchases your products, but will be automatically moved to ‘less active’ segment if she doesn’t purchase for over 30 days.
With these analyzed data, an email campaign to get back customers who are moving away will be sent to Mary who would have been lost if a proper and dynamically updating segmentation process wasn’t being handled 🎉
How Should Customers be Assisted
Customers nowadays are well adapted to new technologies and expect us to be up to date too. (just why I’ve written this and you’re reading it! 😂)This reason has led ShoutOUT to facilitate live chat assistance to customers in order to enable immediate assistance and direct feedback. On the other hand, MailChimp not facilitating live chat assistance in order to portray their service as error free might be a wise decision, but only on the surface level, given the difficulty to use MailChimp for a beginner.
Well, it’s always better not to make your customer wait (during that auspicious time when you become the lucky winner to get on their nerves 💣) for you to assist them. I know, I know. Nothing’s worse than an angry customer! 😳
Email Delivery and Open Rate
I’ll knock my head on the wall if my crush wouldn’t even open that text I spent like two hours on typing, just to make it sound good 😭. Won’t you get the same feeling if your customers and prospects wouldn’t open your emails? Well, for them to be opened, they first have to get your customer’s attention.
ShoutOUT stands a better chance in this as their emails get delivered directly to the primary inbox whereas MailChimp emails will probably end up in the promotional tab or spam folder. The reason is the reputation of ShoutOUT’s email server which, according to Sendgrid’s scale, is currently 97% 😎
Email templates
Campaign designing being a main focus of MailChimp, it obviously provides ready-made email templates along with the option to create an email that is template free using your own HTML design code. And it is something really cool! 👌ShoutOUT also provides a medium type email editor which enables including text and image URLs.
However, what distinguishes between ShoutOUT and MailChimp is that one would at first find MailChimp complex to use whereas you can enjoy a simple email editor in ShoutOUT 😇
Are We Building Another Version of MailChimp?
No way! ShoutOUT is not another alternative to MailChimp. ShoutOUT is a data-driven customer communication and engagement platform, aimed at helping businesses to collect customer data from different sources in omni channel environment where your customer engages with your business at the physical store, the online store and obviously on social media. I’m sure you know how you can benefit from customer data. If you don’t, let me assure you that your customer data not only help you for better segmentation and sending targeted messages, but also to sync with third party services like Facebook custom audiences and your sales CRM 🎊
So, here’s a two-in-one option for you to have both CRM and Messaging on one platform. Make sure you decide wisely! 😉 Oh, by the way, how was the coffee? ☕
