MailChimp Alternatives for Form Features

It's important for businesses to get the word out there and mark their place in competitive industries. This is achieved by marketing  — and in this age where technology is easily accessible, email marketing has been a great contributor for businesses to establish a connection between themselves and potential clients. 

There's a reason why a lot of email marketing platforms come up — there's an obvious demand to get one's message across in the most effective and efficient manner. One of the ways to do this is to get information through building their emailing list via forms. Let's explore one of the top performing platforms in the market as of present in regards to form features and emails going hand in hand: Mailchimp.

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing platform designed to connect businesses to their clients and interested parties. Its accessibility and free plan (which includes a subscriber list of 2,000 and a send limit of 12,000 emails) attract plenty of small businesses who are out there seeking efficient ways to market themselves and connect with potential customers. Apart from this, MailChimp includes features to help their users further their email marketing experience — such as scheduling emails, providing detailed data reports on emails sent, and integration with other apps and services. 

They also feature form building, wherein users can build (add structure and content to signup forms), design (change background color and font), and translate (MailChimp supports more than 50 languages!). 

Despite these pros, however, there are quite a few aspects in which this tool is lacking, and here are are some of them: 

1. Email templates to form submissions

For businesses to grow, it's absolutely important for them to attract potential customers as much as possible — to keep them via email marketing, it's important for their emails to be visually pleasing. You have at least 50 milliseconds to please your potential customers — if they find it dull and lacking, they're mostly likely to click away. 

MailChimp provides email templates to use for your business, but they aren't exactly the type to visually appeal, even on a paid plan, they are limited in design aesthetics. If your aim is to customize an email template to your tastes, using MailChimp might take more time away from you trying to customize your own template, rather than beginning to grow your business. They even noted that some parts of the signup forms you create in MailChimp as well as the response emails linked to the information for your submissions can’t be edited in the Form Builder.

In this case, if you're aiming for visually pleasing email templates on the go that you can send to your submissions (without having to upload lists and manually make templates), form sites like FormKeep and Klaviyo efficiently get the job done to get good-looking templates straight to your form contacts.

2. Handling Spam Submissions

Running email campaigns aren't always going to be smooth — at most times, your emails are to be dumped as junk, most likely from the volume of messages a user receives, or out of disinterest — there are plenty of reasons as to why your email can end up in a user's spam folder. According to ReturnPath, 21% of emails from legitimate email marketers end up as spam. 

Because of this, MailChimp strictly complies with various laws that restrict email spamming. And along with these regulations are the chances of getting shut down by MailChimp. Once you are shut down, unused credits (if you've opted for a paid plan) will not be returned. This may be frustrating for business owners who only genuinely want to market their businesses. Another issue you can encounter is your form submissions; there's no way to determine if the emails send to your forms are spam. The process of updating the customer list database is not automated at all, it can be annoying to manually review and update each list.

If you're looking for spam protection and a little more wiggle room so you won't get shut out right away, FormKeep is the right tool for you. Even on the free form, FormKeep offers spam protection, helping you steer clear of spam traps and have no fear of getting shutdown if your email towards a contact go to their spam folder. Also, automation is always a plus.

3. Integrations for subscriptions / memberships / affiliation

Email integration is essential to email marketing, as you tie various systems, tools, and software to your email for your target market's convenience. MailChimp stops emails that contain blacklisted links (which include most retailers), which is a downside to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is the process where third parties earn commissions for marketing another party's products and services. This gives it the characteristics of being inconspicuous and based on recommendations and trust.

MailChimp also has trouble on integrations with WordPress and Paypal — you may set up autoresponders, but they will only work only if someone on your email marketing list has subscribed to one of your webforms. This gives users who plan to subscribe or get on membership plans slightly more trouble getting what they want. 

If you're looking to make the job easier for your target market, as well as provide smoother integrations with both WordPress and Paypal, FormKeep gets the job done. Formkeep has native integrations from various apps and tools for data management, storage, and more that you can get in one place.

4. Form builder interface 

Forms are effective tools to help establish rapport between your business and its target market. With this in mind, one should put thought into a form's design — making a good first impression is important when it comes to communicating with your potential customers, and with this, one should need a handy form builder to do the job.

MailChimp gets the job done if you're looking for an easy way to create forms for your website, but if you're looking to create forms with a more intuitive experience, Leadformly is the better the tool for you, as it can help you refine your forms to perfectly maintain company branding across your landing pages. FormKeep also has a user-friendly form builder interface through the drag and drop editor that you can easily setup for your website.

5. Segmentation 

Email segmentation is where email subscribers are split based on set criteria, such as their location, interests, and purchase histories. This is important, as emails sent to your audience would be more suited towards their interests, and in return, is the probability of furthering their engagement with your business. 

MailChimp is definitely a go-to for business owners seeking a tool to start simple email marketing campaigns. However, MailChimp is lacking in options to automate and target emails for your audience in their free plan — and with segmentation being a useful tool to further your business' engagement with your target market, it's a huge miss. The fact that MailChimp restricts users to sending out emails to only one list at a time is a dealbreaker. You can customize that list, but you can’t send to multiple subscriber lists at once.

FormKeep offers better segmentation through the ActiveCampaign integration, something that allows you to work your data to get the targeted response you need from your desired leads and prospects. Learn more on how ActiveCampaign and FormKeep can help you with segmentation here.

Conclusion

Choosing the right tools for marketing your business is a vital step in making your business grow. With this in mind, it's best to know alternatives to the features you need in your forms to better gather information, provide ease for your users on the interfaces, and offer options for segmentation and customization for a more effective email marketing.