Mailchimp for Email Automation: Features, Pricing & Limits

Mailchimp offers email automation for businesses that want to send messages based on customer actions, dates, purchases, campaign engagement, and other triggers. You can use it for anything from a welcome sequence to an abandoned cart or post-purchase workflow.

But how much you can automate depends a lot on pricing plan you use.

In this guide, we'll look at how Mailchimp email automation works, its key features and limitations, pricing, and five alternatives to consider.

Two types of Mailchimp email automation

Mailchimp provides two ways to create email automations:

1. Marketing Automation Flows

Marketing Automation Flows are better suited when you need branching, multiple triggers, conditional logic, delays, or several actions within the same workflow. It is the more suitable option for automations such as multi-step onboarding, lead nurturing, or behavior-based follow-ups.

First, you select an audience and choose the trigger that determines when a contact enters the flow. A flow can have up to three triggers, with the ability to add up to three triggers available on the Standard plan or higher.

From there, you can add conditions, delays, and actions. For example, you could trigger a flow when a contact receives a particular tag, wait several days, check whether they meet a condition, and then send the appropriate email.

2. Classic Automations

Classic Automations are Mailchimp's older automation system and can contain a single automated email. Each email can have its own trigger, delay, schedule, segment, design, and tracking settings.

You can use a preset automation with predefined triggers and timelines or create a custom automation.

Unlike Marketing Automation Flows, Classic Automations have an important availability restriction like they are only available to paid accounts that have previously created a Classic Automation.

Key Mailchimp email automation features

Mailchimp provides several ways to control when an automation starts, how contacts move through it, and what happens at each step.

Key Mailchimp email automation features

Mailchimp provides several features for controlling when contacts enter an automation, the paths they follow, and the actions that take place along the way.

1. Multiple automation triggers

Mailchimp supports triggers based on campaign activity, audience changes, ecommerce behavior, integrations, and dates.

For example, you can trigger an automation when a contact opens or clicks a campaign, signs up, receives a tag, joins or leaves a group, or has an audience field updated.

Mailchimp also supports API and event-based triggers, along with date-based triggers for birthdays, recurring dates, specific dates, and the date a contact was added to an audience.

2. Conditional branching and delays

Marketing Automation Flows let you determine how contacts progress through:

• Conditional splits which can send contacts down different paths based on whether they meet specified criteria

• Percentage splits that divide contacts between paths

• You can also add Time Delay steps to pause contacts for a defined period or use Wait for Trigger to hold them at a step until a specified activity occurs.

3. Automated actions

Mailchimp provides actions for sending messages and managing contacts directly within a flow. You can send an email, send an email with a survey, send an SMS, or trigger a webhook.

You can also add or remove groups and tags, update contact information, unsubscribe contacts, or archive them.

These actions can be combined with conditions and delays to create workflows that both communicate with contacts and update their information based on what happens in the automation.

4. Automation analytics

Mailchimp lets you track how contacts progress through Marketing Automation Flows by showing the number of contacts who have started a flow, are currently in progress, and have completed it.

For Classic Automations, accounts connected to Google Analytics can enable link tracking and review resulting campaign activity in Mailchimp email reports or Google Analytics.

Mailchimp pricing and automation limitations

Mailchimp's automation functionality varies considerably by plan, so the starting subscription price doesn't tell the whole story.

Based on the starting level pricing analysis we did:

• The Essentials plan that is currently offered at at $13/month supports up to four flow steps

• Standard and Premium plan, starting from $20/month and $350/month support up to 200 flows depending on number of contacts.

5 Mailchimp alternatives for email automation

If Mailchimp's automation structure or plan limits don't fit your requirements, these five alternatives take different approaches to automated email workflows.

5 Mailchimp alternatives for email automation

1. Mailmodo

Mailmodo is an alternative to consider if you want an easy way to create automation for different customer lifecycle phases.

Its prebuilt Journey options cover welcome series, onboarding, abandoned carts, re-engagement, product recommendations, event promotion, birthdays and anniversaries, post-purchase follow-ups, seasonal campaigns, and lead nurturing.

Mailmodo also provides several ways to start a Journey, including manual enrollment, adding a contact to a list, contact-property changes, form submissions, events, dates, API/webhooks, Zapier, Make, and segment entry or exit.

Pricing:

• At 500 contacts, Lite costs $27/month billed annually and supports 1 active Journey.

• Pro costs $79/month billed annually and supports 10 active Journeys.

• Max has custom pricing, unlimited active Journeys, and supports up to 100,000 active contacts per Journey.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an alternative to consider if you want to build more detailed, multi-step email automations as your automation requirements grow.

Its automation builder supports actions such as sending emails, adding tags, waiting for a specified time or condition, subscribing or unsubscribing contacts, and archiving contacts. One important difference between plans is workflow complexity: the Starter plan limits an automation to 5 actions, while higher plans support more extensive automations.

Pricing:

• ActiveCampaign's packages start at $15/month, with pricing varying based on contact volume and the package selected.

• The Starter plan includes marketing automation but limits each automation to 5 actions.

• Higher-tier plans are available for businesses that need more advanced automation capabilities.

3. Brevo

Brevo is an alternative to consider if you want to run email automations for a larger number of contacts without an automation contact limit on its Standard plan.

Its automation builder uses triggers, conditions, and actions to create multi-step workflows. Free and Starter accounts allow up to 2,000 unique contacts to enter active automations, while Standard supports marketing automation for unlimited contacts. Standard also adds features such as A/B testing, send-time optimization, and more advanced reporting.

Pricing:

• Free costs $0/month and allows up to 2,000 contacts in active automations.

• Starter starts at $9/month and also has the 2,000-contact active automation limit.

• Standard starts at $18/month and includes marketing automation for unlimited contacts.

4. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an alternative to consider if you want to create ecommerce automations based on detailed customer and shopping behavior.

Its Flows can start when someone joins a list or segment, performs a tracked activity such as placing an order, reaches a date stored in their profile, or meets conditions such as a price drop or low inventory. You can also use trigger and profile filters to decide which customers qualify for a Flow and configure whether contacts can enter the same Flow again.

Pricing:

• The Free plan costs $0/month and supports up to 250 active profiles.

• It includes up to 500 email sends per month.

• Paid pricing increases based on the number of active profiles and messaging requirements.

5. Omnisend

Omnisend is an alternative to consider if you run an ecommerce business and want prebuilt automations for common store-related customer journeys.

Its automation capabilities are designed around ecommerce use cases such as welcome sequences, abandoned carts, and post-purchase follow-ups. Omnisend can also combine email with channels such as SMS and web push, making it useful when you want customer journeys to extend beyond email.

Pricing:

• Free costs $0/month and supports up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends per month.

• Standard starts at $16/month.

• Pro starts at $59/month and includes unlimited email sends, subject to Omnisend's applicable sending policies.

Final thoughts

Mailchimp gives you several ways to automate email communication, from trigger-based sequences to multi-step flows with conditions, delays, and different actions. However, the right choice depends on the complexity of your workflows, the number of contacts you need to automate, and the limits included in your plan. If those constraints become restrictive, alternatives such as Mailmodo, ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Klaviyo, and Omnisend give you different approaches to automation.

The best way to find the right fit is to test the tools against the workflows you actually need to build. You can start with Mailmodo if you want prebuilt Journeys for customer lifecycle stages while still having the option to build a Journey from scratch. Start with a workflow you already use in Mailchimp and see how easily you can recreate and manage it in Mailmodo.