Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform. Beyond just tracking how campaigns perform, Mailchimp takes it a step further by analyzing data from over half a billion emails to show why campaigns perform, driving informed decisions.
$0
per month
PAR Punchh
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
PAR Punchh is a loyalty and offers solution that focuses on providing restaurants with the tools and services to create branded and consistent in-store and digital customer experiences.
For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.
We launched the program quickly and on schedule, Punchh has continued to evolve and enhance to adapt to our changing business needs, importantly developing integrations with other key partners —Olo, PAR Brink POS. I think it's ideal for a brand of our size with under 200 locations, perhaps for a chain of more than 2,000 locations, it could be worth considering building an in-house solution as a potential cost saving.
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
Reward-based App material. Punchh is great platform for reward tracking and fulfillment. I have not found one that does a better job at customer loyalty.
Look carefully into the integrations, find out exactly what is possible. We launched when we had Monkey Media as our online ordering tool, although it was integrated, we ended up having to move to Olo just because it was such a stronger integration.
I would re-think having Facebook as an option to allow registration and signup to our app. This was recommended by Punchh, but we ended up getting so many out of date email addresses in our system that were associated with the Facebook account.
One thing we wanted to launch with was a gift card integration, but due to Punchh not being PCI compliant, and due to other technological limitations, that's not something we've been able to bring into our loyalty app, which would be nice to have.
We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
The customer success people are not as invested as it seems they should be in their clients' business, at least not for the amount of money the platform costs. I am always looking for best practices to be provided or at least discussed with my AM, and she doesn't ever seem to care about what others are doing in my industry.
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.
We were looking for a partner who would help us get a loyalty program and a mobile app launched quickly, Punchh delivered our app on-time, the cost was very competitive and Punchh was being used by similarly sized brands in the restaurant industry. The integrations were in place and Punchh offered the Product functionality and performance we were looking for.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.
