kvCORE vs. Intuit Mailchimp

I can't name one thing I like about using kvCORE. It has so many moving parts. This was what was offered by my brokerage & the training is all via long online prerecorded training sessions. I gave them many hours before I decided it would be more advantageous to take my leads & not use any part of kvCORE.

I loved Mailchimp 10 years ago, and as a long-time user, I appreciate working with the brand I've been attached to for so many years. It still works well with regular email campaigns and with automation. However, if your email audience is constantly growing and you have a limited budget, it may be wise to explore the more affordable options.

Incentivized

• Effortlessly keeps me in touch with my leads- kvCORE automatically sends texts and emails to my leads when they favorite a property, begin their search again, or sign up on my site. It also calls me to directly connect to any new leads that I haven't yet contacted. I don't even have to think about it or schedule it, kvCORE automatically does it all for me.
• Effortlessly generates leads for me- with the squeeze page feature, all I have to do is copy and paste my customized direct link into my ads and kvCORE does the rest for me. It prompts the person for their contact info, sends them homes in the area and price range that is similar to the ad they clicked on, lets me know that I have a new lead, and automatically texts them from "me" thanking them for visiting my page and letting them know they can contact me with any questions. If they don't respond, kvCORE then calls me to automatically connect me with the lead to make sure that no one falls through the cracks.
• Helps me to effortlessly stick to a daily schedule- kvCORE keeps me on schedule by giving me tasks to complete each day to be sure I'm staying in contact with my leads. All I have to do is login, click on my notifications at the top and follow the instructions. Call this lead....add a search alert for this lead.....add a market report for this lead....it makes it so easy to stay on task!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Literally everything. I think their free websites are terrible. Good luck getting it to pop up well on a google search.
• In my experience, their campaigns are useless on their own.
• In my opinion, Support is terrible
• Emails lack options to add attachments
• System doesn’t remove duplicate clients
• In my experience, when you transfer a lead, they will keep getting the previous agents campaigns. I think this is super confusing for consumer and terrible for agents since you need to constantly babysit kvCORE.

Incentivized

• The interface remains a cluttered, non-intuitive mess. That's true from the haphazard way features are organized to the actual email layout.
• Analytics have never been a priority, and I don't see that changing with Intuit's new ownership. I'm very frustrated over the limited choices for reporting, even when using third-party solutions. If I needed that function, I would not use MailChimp.
• I would love to develop a workflow screen that lets me focus on the things that I use all the time. Customizing the interface where the content actually goes into the software would help.
• I never understood why we couldn't import a document into a MC template. At best, we're spending time copying-and-pasting from one app into MC.

Incentivized

We love the product. One thing we haven't mentioned yet is the human element. Recently, MailChimp re-structured their plans/pricing based on the feedback they had received. They listened to a pain their users were experiencing, then strategized a solution, and implemented it fairly. The updated pricing strategy was intended to save subscribers money, and they did a great job of communicating it to their users. I would be surprised if anyone reacted negatively to the change.

It doesn't deserve a zero because you can access contacts and get reminders to contact them. In my experience, you can not use the system for proper communication with both prospects and their spouses.

I think Mailchimp enables companies to cater to their customers without requiring direct interaction with them. A simple email can convey a great deal of information. The SMS feature can give a brief link with a sentence to show promotional offers. I think that best fits with the upcoming generation; I don't always want to read a long email with lots of pictures. I think Mailchimp is easy to navigate and has many valuable features.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have not used support for myself, but my team has to upload contacts into the Smart CRM. Since there are specific categories used in kvCORE, the template is very important to make sure they match and can be reconciled. The team members who used support were very excited to have their help.

Incentivized

Any time we needed their help or support they responded promptly, friendly, and straightforwardly. It's a great feature to have multi-language support as we are a diverse team, and anyone can reach out to receive help. We've always solved our inquires

Incentivized

I am little satisfied with the MailChimp implementation process, since although it has been a bit complicated and we have had various complications that tried to affect our performance, with a little general effort, we take full advantage and currently It is out main marketing and advertising campaign platform.

Incentivized

kvCORE has a better looking IDX website and claims to have many more features and customization options. In my opinion, the problem is that the kvCORE system doesn't function well, if at all, and as far as customization in reality you can't even get it customized enough to make it function at the most basic level. Firepoint was far superior in all functional aspects and they never took our website offline over 5 years time where kvCORE seems to do so every month or so.

We chose Intuit Mailchimp over competing solutions because we found their free tier more generous, which allowed us to get started easier. Also compared to other solutions we found their drag and drop email builder to offer a much better experience and easier UI. We also liked their paid features and could see that we would be able to use Intuit Mailchimp for a long time and not need to migrate to another solution.

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.

Incentivized

• We haven't converted any leads yet, out of about 800 total leads. But it's a tough market. And FB leads just suck in general. The reported cost per lead in kvCORE is artificially low since the number of leads it tracks is much higher than actual conversions. Their support says this is due to duplicates, but I consistently track about a 30% overreporting due to duplicates, which is unreasonably high.
• Super high perceived value to our agents. They love kvCORE and love that we 1 on 1 help them set it up and use it. I think this 1 on 1 support is the key, but it wouldn't be possible without a great system.
• The efficiencies of the system have dramatically reduced our operational time to onboard new agents. We used to go through a long process to create and set up new websites for agents. Now it takes about 5 minutes to get a new agent going with kvCORE, and a website live!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized