Autoklose vs MailChimp: Which One to Use for Your Email Outreach8 min read

OK, I know you may think that this blog has the purpose of persuading you to switch from MailChimp to Autoklose. 

However, that’s not the case. 

As a matter of fact, I like Mailchimp, and my team use it to send our weekly newsletters. 

Secondly, I couldn’t even try to persuade you to switch from MailChimp to Autoklose because we’re talking about two similar but very different platforms. 

Here’s the thing, both Autoklose and MailChimp will make your life easier by automating your email campaigns. 

And that’s pretty much where all the similarities end.

I know that this might sound confusing, so I’ll start from the very beginning and pinpoint some of the main points of difference between our two essentially different tools. 

TL;DR

Autoklose vs MailChimp

• Autoklose – sales automation platform intended for email outreach / MailChimp – email marketing automation platform and  a strict permission-based newsletter delivery service
• Autoklose allows you to send cold emails / MailChimp isn’t good for cold emails but for newsletters 
• Autoklose sends your email campaigns from your server / MailChimp sends your email campaigns from its own servers
• Autoklose doesn’t send all the emails in a campaign at once, but a couple of them every couple of minutes/ MailChimp sends all the emails in a newsletter campaign at once and at the same time

What Is Autoklose? 

Autoklose is a time-saving sales automation platform that will help you streamline and automate your sales process and close your deals faster. 

I know what you’re going to ask: But isn’t Autoklose an email automation platform? It’s used to schedule and send email campaigns, right? 

While it’s true that we’re talking about email automation here, it’s not for the purpose of email marketing! 

Now is a good time to introduce two entirely different concepts: email marketing and email outreach. 

What Is Email Marketing? 

Email marketing revolves around nurturing your leads by sending them valuable content, tips, news, and other interesting material about your company and product. This is usually done via regular email newsletters that are sent to your subscribers. 

Pay attention to the term “subscribers” – people who fill out a form on your website or otherwise subscribe to receiving your blog posts or newsletters.  So, they’re not people with whom you’ve never contacted before. 

Such emails are well-designed, lengthy, and packed with various useful links. 

The purpose of this strategy is branding and informing your audience about your latest products or features, and generally staying on your subscribers’ radars. 

What the purpose of this strategy isn’t is building meaningful relationships with individual members of your audience. 

That brings us to the next question: 

What Is MailChimp?

As you can guess, MailChimp is an email marketing automation platform with a catch – it’s defined in the company’s Terms of Service that it’s a strict permission-based newsletter delivery service. 

Sounds like some legal mumbo-jumbo, right? But in essence, this means that MailChimp can be used only to send emails to those who subscribed to your newsletter or blog. 

And that excludes sending cold emails to your cold leads. As a matter of fact, it’s practically forbidden to do so according to that already mentioned TOS. 

So, MailChimp is a cool email automation tool, but using it for email outreach is a big no-no. 

But, even if it were possible to send your cold emails with MailChimp, you shouldn’t do that. 

Here’s why:

Reason #1

This platform sends all emails using their own servers and being a big company, it has a lot of servers optimized for sending gargantuan volumes of emails on a daily basis. 

In order to do so, MailChimp slices its users into different groups so that each group shares one of its servers. In a nutshell, when you use this email marketing platform, you basically share a server with a number of other companies and individuals. 

And this fact highly affects email deliverability. 

As you know, in order to get your email directly into your recipient’s inboxes, you need to have a stellar reputation with your Internet Service Provider and Email Service Provider, meaning that if you spam people all around the clock, these two entities (as well as recipients’ themselves) will flag you as a spammer. 

And, that’s the end of your reputation.

Once you ruin your reputation, your deliverability will suffer and you won’t be able to reach your recipients’ inboxes as your emails will be sent directly to spam, never to be seen, opened, or read. 

Now, picture this server that thousands of other people and companies that you know nothing about, use to send their emails. What if they’re spammers? The server will be scrutinized by ISPs and ESPs, and its reputation tarnished. 

Together with yours because you’re using that very same server. 

And naturally, your deliverability will be affected very negatively. 

Reason #2

Wait, there’s more! 

When you schedule your newsletter to be sent via MailChimp and other similar platforms, all the emails will be sent out at the same time. 

In other words, if you schedule your newsletter to go to 2,000 recipients at 10 a.m., the entire batch of 2,000 emails will be launched at 10 a.m. – like a blast. So, what we have here is sending mass emails at once. 

Now, if you’re wondering what could be wrong with that, think about whether it’s possible for a human to send that many emails at the same time. 

Of course not. 

And, since ISPs pay close attention to such “robotic” behavior as it resembles spamming, it will affect your deliverability. They want people to stop sending mass emails which is why they sanction mass emails by flagging them as spam. 

Having said all this, I’d like to stress that MailChimp and other companies that specialize in automating email marketing go out of their way on a daily basis to improve the reputation of their servers, but there will always be spammers who make this very difficult to achieve. 

Now, let’s take up where we left off and define the concept of email outreach. 

What Is Email Outreach? 

Email outreach refers to the strategy of sending emails directly from your email account. 

These emails should be natural, highly personalized, and 1-on-1. 

Their purpose is reaching out to a person you’ve never had any prior communication with, establishing a connection with that person, and building a relationship with them.  

What we’re talking about here is cold email outreach, a tactic that brings you new leads and sales opportunities. 

We can conclude that successful email outreach has to be very personal, personalized, and it should feel like a conversation. It absolutely shouldn’t be bland, generic, or come off as automated. 

In other words, if you send exactly the same message to a number of your cold leads, you can’t expect them to reply.

But you have to automate it somehow, right? 

Yes, but MailChimp is a bad idea because of these two reasons that we discussed in the previous section. 

Luckily, we noticed this problem and built Autoklose to help you solve it.

Why Should You Use Autoklose for Your Email Outreach? 

Autoklose is used for sending automated emails at scale. 

You can use it to send a maximum of 500 emails per day per one email account. 

Now comes the best part: 

Autoklose sends your campaigns using your own email provider be it Google, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. and your server. So, no sharing IPs and servers with others who could hurt your reputation. Needless to say, this will tremendously improve your deliverability. 

Another important thing is that Autoklose doesn’t send all the emails from your campaign at once. In other words, if you schedule a particular campaign with 500 emails for 10 a.m., our algorithms will take care that human behavior is mimicked, by sending a couple of emails every couple of minutes. 

This way, you won’t raise any red flags with your ISP and this will also improve your deliverability. 

Besides, given that timing plays an important role when it comes to email outreach, the system takes into consideration the time zone of your every single recipient and makes sure that they receive your email during their office hours. 

Long story short, Autoklose uses your server to send out your campaigns and sends and delivers them as if a human has manually clicked the send button.

Closing Words

In order to choose which one is right for you, you need to understand the difference between Autoklose and MailChimp and why the latter isn’t a good choice for cold email outreach. 

While both Autoklose and MailChimp are email marketing automation platforms, the latter is intended for email marketing only, not for email outreach. 

So if you’re looking to send highly customized, highly personal, and 1-on-1 emails to your cold leads, look no further – book your Autoklose demo today!