GoDaddy vs. Mailchimp

What to consider when creating a website

When you’re looking to create a website, you'll want to consider who will host it and how easy it will be to design. It's often best for small businesses to use a hosting service that makes signup quick and easy without compromising the security measures that keep shoppers’ information safe.

The same goes for design services. You want to be up and running fast without sacrificing the quality of your site or spending too much money on web design. Fortunately, there are user-friendly platforms—like Mailchimp—that allow you to create professional-quality sites.

Take some time and compare your options. Consider more than just the popularity of the web hosting company. Instead, compare your options and choose the one that best understands your needs as a small business. Focus on the solutions that integrate best with what you already have going.

Look at Mailchimp and GoDaddy. Both have website hosting and website builder capabilities, but each has a different focus and area of expertise. GoDaddy is primarily known as a hosting service, while Mailchimp is a fully integrated, all-in-one Marketing Platform.

Comparing Mailchimp and GoDaddy

GoDaddy has built a reputation as a web hosting service for small businesses, but it doesn't offer much in the way of digital marketing.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers a full suite of digital marketing tools. We recently added web hosting, too, but that doesn't mean we're beginners. We understand growing businesses. We've been working with them for years, and we’re committed to doing much more than simply helping you start a website.

Mailchimp vs. GoDaddy at a glance

Mailchimp as an industry leader

For 20 years, Mailchimp has helped small businesses get started and offered established businesses the ability to scale. With integrated services ranging from email marketing to customer relationship management, Mailchimp is dedicated to giving businesses the tools they need to reach their customers and grow.

Now, we’re bringing that same commitment to the worlds of website design and hosting. Our website tools are user-friendly and designed to strengthen the relationship between a business and its audience.

Domain registration by Mailchimp

Most small business owners aren’t experts in web hosting, and you shouldn’t have to get a degree in coding before you build a website for your business. Fortunately, Mailchimp has made the process of domain purchase and registration straightforward and user-friendly, even for people without website design experience.

Signing up is easy:

1. Choose your domain. Mailchimp makes it easy for you to look up your dream domain and make sure it’s available.
2. Select an extension, like .com or .net. Mailchimp’s interface shows you which ones are available for your domain.
3. Purchase your domain. Your new domain can go live right away, or you can park it with a “coming soon” message so you can take your time building the perfect site.

Once you have your domain, you can start building and designing the site. Mailchimp offers unlimited subdomains, which just means that your site can have as many pages as you want.

You can even create landing pages for your website as destinations for your digital marketing campaigns. A landing page can be designed with a specific purpose in mind, like subscribing to your email list or promoting a special offer.

Because Mailchimp is an all-in-one Marketing Platform, you’re able to fully integrate your pages with your contact lists and your other campaigns. You could, for example, take advantage of our Marketing CRM tools and set up a lead generation landing page that automatically tags new contacts based on their interests when they fill out your signup form. Not only will it help you keep your contacts organized, but it will make it easier to send them targeted messages later on.

Free self-serve web design

Mailchimp offers free website building tools for everyone who creates a custom domain through Mailchimp. That’s a significant benefit in a market where expert web design services can cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $15,000.

Some self-serve website builders can be tricky to use, but Mailchimp makes it easy to create a professional website without any web design or coding experience. Our flexible and intuitive builder puts you in control of the content, so you can create a website that communicates your brand and appeals to your audience.

The design process is simple. Once you’ve purchased your domain, you can go straight to Mailchimp’s website builder and plan the layout of your site. Then, customize your content, images, colors, and fonts with our user-friendly design tools.

With other website builders, that’s where the process can end—once you launch your website, the rest is up to you. With Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform, however, launching your website is just the beginning.

The benefits of hosting with a marketing platform

Building a website is just the first step. You also have to attract visitors to your site, and that can take time. Based on some recent research, fewer than 6% of websites rank in the top 10 search results on Google in their first year. On average, it can take three to six months for sites to even start to rank. Almost 90% of pages may not get any traffic at all.

If you want to cut through the noise, you have to advertise your site. A website isn’t like a storefront where passers-by will see the goods in the front window. Online, you have to drive traffic to get traffic, and that’s where online marketing comes in.

When you build a website with Mailchimp, you get more than just landing pages and website design templates. You get access to a broad suite of online marketing services, including social media posts, paid ads, and email campaigns, all of which can be fully integrated and connected.

Once your website is live, Mailchimp makes it easy to send targeted emails and launch social media campaigns to promote it. With the help of our Marketing CRM tools—which are available to all Mailchimp users, even folks with a free account—you can personalize each campaign based on your subscribers’ interests and help to ensure that each person gets a message that’s relevant to them. You can even have your campaigns link to different landing pages within your site, potentially driving more conversions with targeted content.

And with your personalized Mailchimp audience dashboard, you’ll be able to view the analytics for your website and campaigns at the same time. You can see which campaigns are driving traffic to which pages, then quickly make changes if necessary.

Marketing Automation

Streamline your marketing with the use of automations, which allow you to increase your scale and capacity, enabling always-on marketing. Mailchimp offers a wide array of automations and a visual automation builder so you know you’re reaching your customers even when you’re attending to other areas of your business.

Mailchimp’s automations help you:

• Develop stronger marketing strategies and market smarter
• Send relevant messages automatically
• Expand your business
• Increase your revenue
• Reach more customers
• Engage and retain new and established customers
• Save time and money

Our Customer Journey builder’s visual interface allows you to see how your customers interact with you throughout their entire journey. It’s also easy to use: just drag-and-drop starting points to initiate your customers’ journey and add branching points that guide and trigger relevant messaging.

GoDaddy also offers automations, but they are limited to simple automations such as welcome emails. They also do not have a visual automation builder, branching, or pre-built journey templates. Although Mailchimp’s Customer Journey builder is a paid feature, you can try it out even on the Free plan to see if it's the right automation solution for you before upgrading to a paid plan.

Mailchimp brings your website builder, marketing channels, and Marketing CRM tools together in one convenient place, so you can avoid disjointed data—all of your campaign and website information can be connected and available at your fingertips.

GoDaddy’s market position

GoDaddy is primarily known as a provider of domains and websites for small businesses. They host 78 million domains for 19 million customers.

Domain setup

One of GoDaddy’s strengths is helping its customers pick the right domain and get set up quickly and easily. If you’re concerned about getting a unique domain name or a specialized extension, GoDaddy might be a good option. Its database searches the largest possible pool of names on the web, so you’ll know right away if your dream domain is available.

Security

GoDaddy takes security seriously. When you buy a domain, they replace your details in public directories with the name of GoDaddy’s partner company, although you retain all ownership and control. That’s a great feature for people who don’t want their names to be associated with their businesses.

Design and build

GoDaddy’s website builder isn’t quite as straightforward as Mailchimp’s, but it does have some helpful features. These include access to design templates and more than 300 theme filters to customize the appearance of your site. The downside to GoDaddy’s website builder is that, unlike Mailchimp’s, it’s only free for a month. After that, if you want to edit your site, you’ll pay for the privilege.

Websites + Marketing

To compete with more full-service solutions like Mailchimp, GoDaddy introduced a website building tool combined with email marketing and social profile management. It’s called Websites + Marketing, and it helps businesses create sites that are part of a broader online marketing strategy. Websites + Marketing also includes a feature called GoDaddy InSight™, which allows users to track their site’s performance against similarly-positioned businesses and gain insights that will help them become more competitive.

According to GoDaddy, subscribers that use Websites + Marketing experience an 18% increase in revenue and save around 19 hours of marketing labor costs per month. Unfortunately, because this is an internal claim, we’re not able to verify this data or consider the source of the comparison. GoDaddy’s websites start at $10/month, while Mailchimp’s websites are free to build, host, and publish.

GoDaddy does not, however, offer a fully functional CRM. If you’re interested in a solution that makes it easy to manage your audience and grow through digital marketing, you may want a platform that’s a bit more advanced than what GoDaddy currently provides.

How to choose the best solution for your business

Every service provider on the market has its strengths. It's up to you to decide which provider is best-positioned to help you meet your goals. In this article, you’ve learned what both Mailchimp and GoDaddy can do. You’ve seen the specialized focus and particular expertise that GoDaddy has in web hosting and domain selection. You’ve also seen the integrated digital marketing scope of Mailchimp and how website building and hosting fits within that package. Your next step is to choose whether you want a comprehensive solution or a niche one.

The benefit of integrated marketing

Marketing is about personalization and customer experience, and the only way to deliver a truly personalized experience is to use and analyze consumer data. You need to know how your audience is responding to your content and be able to adjust accordingly. As an all-in-one Marketing Platform, Mailchimp lets you connect your website performance, marketing campaigns, and audience segmentation data in one convenient place.

Brand identity

Brand identity is another major consideration when you're building a company. GoDaddy focuses on customizing your URL, which is an important task if your keywords are either very specific or easily confused with others. By choosing a unique but readable URL, you make it easier for web crawlers to find you.

Mailchimp leads you through the domain selection process step-by-step, and you can easily check domain availability and name your website to align with your brand image. You’ll also have the opportunity to design your site so the aesthetic is consistent with your other marketing materials.

Keep in mind the importance of brand consistency. When your customers can recognize you across multiple channels, from your website to your social media posts, they connect more deeply to your message. Connected customers are more likely to become loyal followers.

Mailchimp vs. GoDaddy: The takeaway

Mailchimp and GoDaddy both offer high-quality web hosting and user-friendly site-building tools. The difference lies in the extras: Mailchimp delivers an integrated, fully-functional digital marketing experience with customizable marketing automation tools. GoDaddy is starting to offer marketing tools, but they’re still primarily a web hosting company.

When you’re a growing company concerned about scalability, integration, and ease of use matters. So does personalization, a key element of connecting to your customers.

Interested? Learn more about Mailchimp’s website building and domain hosting capabilities today.

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