Should I Use Sugar Market or Mailchimp?

Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight
This is the first in a series of blog posts highlighting the many features that Mailchimp and SugarChimp bring to you and your marketing team when combined with SugarCRM.

The answer: it depends.

I hate that answer as well, but it would be disingenuous to say it any other way.

Instead, I am going to answer the question with an in-depth blog series and campaign run entirely using the powers of SugarCRM and Mailchimp together. Let’s call it:

Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight

If you know of anyone else who should follow this series, forward this post along and have them sign up at the Sugar Marketing Series landing page, built using Mailchimp. They will also get the full comparison grid included in the link below.

Note: We have been hearing and reading false reports of what you can and can’t do with Mailchimp in comparison to Sugar Market (formerly Salesfusion). Our goal with this series is to provide both a true comparison grid along with an inside, practical look at how to execute the marketing features it contains by using this very campaign as a living example.

The Right Tools via the Best-of-Breed Approach

Sending timely, personalized marketing campaigns is more important than ever. Doing so requires the right, tightly integrated tools to give marketers such as you the ability to leverage timely data and workflows so the right message is sent at the right time.

Businesses, such as ours, use SugarCRM as a central data hub, working in concert with the many other platform tools required to run a business; tools built specifically for various functional departments such as accounting, warehousing, marketing, and what have you. CRMs such as SugarCRM are often the single source of truth amongst all of these platforms.

Get to the Point!

You already use the best tools made specifically for whatever you are trying to accomplish. Naturally, the decision should be the same for deciding which marketing tool built specifically for SugarCRM to use. The bigger question is, which one is best for you?

Again, it depends.

I hate hearing that, but it’s the truth. It depends on what your needs are. This is why comparison grids exist. They help you pinpoint the features you absolutely need and weigh the nice-to-haves. Add in cost comparisons and you can get a decent picture of the cost vs. value of each solution to help with the decision-making process.

So when you ask the big question...

Sugar Market or Mailchimp?

It ultimately comes down to what you want to do in your campaign and what you are fiscally willing to invest to get there. Below is a quick background of these two different, by big marketing platform players in the Sugar world:

Sugar Market, formerly Salesfusion, is the in-house marketing automation solution provided by SugarCRM. Salesfusion was purchased by SugarCRM in Spring of 2019 to “enable relevant and personalized engagements”.

Mailchimp is the “All-In-One Integrated Marketing Platform” made for marketers. Don’t let the easy-to-use tools that are meant for making marketers’ lives easier fool you that it isn’t powerful.

On the contrary, the Mailchimp platform enables you to create complex, sophisticated, multi-channel campaigns. In fact, its simplicity in how it does this has confused many in the marketing world. So much so, that we have seen false comparison grids between Sugar Market and Mailchimp that overlook those strengths due to its ease to use.

Mailchimp connects with Sugar using SugarChimp, the most popular SugarCRM solution on SugarOutfitters since 2014. SugarChimp is the glue that feeds Mailchimp with all your Sugar data; targets, leads, contacts, accounts, and custom data. It also brings over campaign activity back into Sugar so your sales teams can see exactly what content folks are interacting with.

The Mailchimp/SugarChimp combo is what we use for our own marketing initiatives. You can follow how we do just that in this Setting the Record Straight campaign highlighting many of the features listed in the comparison grid below.

Comparing Sugar Market to Mailchimp

Our comparison grid is meant to be an aide in helping you decide which solution is right for you. We make no claims that either solution is best. All we know is that our own team and hundreds of our customers are continually creating and delivering outstanding campaigns using Mailchimp with SugarCRM.

Download the Sugar Market vs Mailchimp comparison PDF here.

Follow Our Own Marketing Journey

Sign yourself or your teammates up for this journey at the Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight campaign landing page to see how we utilized many of these features in the comparison grid above.

Next Up: Creating a Landing Page and Lead Form

Next up in the Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight campaign is Creating a Landing Page and Lead Form.

Want to Learn More?

Schedule an informational call to learn more about how Mailchimp and SugarCRM could work for you and your specific needs.