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
Thinkific
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Thinkific Plus is a scalable learning platform that’s designed to be easy to use for teams and customers. Thinkific Plus offers enterprise-grade features that scale with the needs of enterprises, and the service includes a people seriously dedicated to helping users to reach their goals.
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.
I think Thinkific is very well suited if you want more control and not a ton of competition. It is very well suited if you want to create courses because it does an amazing job with providing course outline examples for you to stay organized and so forth. The only thing I would say where the courses might be less appropriate is if someone is expecting it to be like an udemy where people can see a ton of different course creators all in one place with course recommendations. Thinkific is not that type of platform and I LOVE that. On Thinkific, it almost feels like our site is our own ya know. I tried out other platforms and it just felt like you were competing with so many other people and could see other courses. Felt like being on a platter served with others. Thinkific just feels more unique in the sense it feels like when people come to your page, they are only seeing your page.
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.
Enables course creators to deliver high quality courses very fast
Offers unlimited hosting for videos included in the subscription price
Provides an easy to use administration interface that's powerful and accessible
Easy to scale subscription tiers on B2C plans, cost effective highly scaleable B2B plans (Thinkific Plus) ideal for companies who want to start a customer education program
Amazing support and account management team - great mindset and people in the teams.
auto formatting of some course building content, does not format well on phone vs desktop
filter by group functionality for website based content, it's mostly filter by enrollments
the plug and play web building is convenient but really we need a UX/UI designer to build a super good looking website. Plug and play builder works but doesnt look SUPER sharp if done by someone with no dev skills or coding ability
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.
I'm very likely to renewal as long as Thinkific stays focused on helping small businesses like myself to stay in the know of new and more effective ways to use digital learning tools to help our students get better success. I will also stay with Thinkific if they do not intend to hike up the prices and keep the different price plans suit all businesses regardless of the size.
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.
Under Site Builder, when trying to add a new section, so many templates appear; however, preview is not shown, which makes it super difficult and time consuming to identify a template that suits the purpose. Customization of certification designs is a bit difficult too. There are limitations to the type of quiz questions I can create - for example, there's no option to have fill in the blank questions.
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've never had any issues with accessing Thinkific but I can see when it has been a problem for others. When I get updates on when they are doing maintenance to their platform I tend to make sure that is not the day I plan to be working on my school so as not to get frustrated
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
When it comes to the performance of Thinkific for me I find that it's good but could be better. I tend to think that the larger the files and videos you upload on your courses may add to the impact of it's uploading (not sure if that's actually true or not). But overall the performance of Thinkific via my tablet and desktop is very good when I have a fast speed broadband speed
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!
I rate Thinkific a ten because of its excellent customer service, ease of use, high-quality product, fair price with excellent ROI, and because they keep making improvements. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. It's easy to create a course website for people who can't write code.
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.
The implementation period took time like it would in earning and using any new tool. It was more about being organised, having better time management processes in place and having people you were able to reach out to if you were every able stuck. The other key ting with the implementation period was giving yourself a realistic time scale to get the job completed.
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.
ClickFunnels is great for funnels, but as of now, it does not do well with e-learning. Maybe they'll change that in ClickFunnels 2.0. But for now, I use Thinkific because I need a place where the students can come into their own dashboard, find all the courses they have purchased on a single place and be able to track their progress.
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.
The opportunities to scale your online course business with Thinkific is endless. They provide a great range of plans with features, integrations and support to suit the needs of any business as different levels. The key here is knowing where to start with the budget you have and then knowing when it's time to scale up and the tools and resources it will require.
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.
