Segmented emails got 2× the clicks; the builder costs US$4.50 to US$20 a month

01Which cuts moved the numbers

Mailchimp’s breakdown is the useful part of its study, and it argues against two of the 2023 list’s eight.¹ Segments built on interest groups did best on clicks, bounces and unsubscribes: 74.53% more clicks, 17.61% fewer bounces and 25.65% fewer unsubscribes. Merge fields, the demographic cut, added 54.79% clicks. Segmenting by date added looked good on opens, 29.56% more, and was a trap underneath: 55.18% more bounces and 33.76% more unsubscribes, because a sign-up-date segment is really a list of people who have not yet left. Subscriber activity gave the smallest click gain, 15.69%, and more abuse reports.

Read against Mailchimp’s December 2023 benchmarks, an all-industry average of 35.63% opens, 2.62% clicks and 0.22% unsubscribes, the click gain is the one that matters: doubling 2.62% is worth more than nudging an open rate that mail clients now inflate by pre-fetching images.² Our view is to segment on stated interest first, behaviour second, demographics third, and never on sign-up date alone.

02What the segment costs, plan by plan

Four pricing pages, read in September 2026, put the richest segmentation on a paid tier and none of them on a free one.^{3 5 6 7} Mailchimp alone documents a builder on its Free plan: up to ten conditions with one and/or operator; the advanced builder, unlimited conditions with nested logic, needs Standard, which starts at US$20 a month for 500 contacts, and predictive segments are “Standard or Premium plans only”.^{3 4} Zoho Campaigns lists “basic segmentation” on Standard at US$3 a month for 500 contacts and “advanced segmentation” with dynamic content on Professional at US$4.50; its Free plan, 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, lists neither.⁵ Brevo puts “advanced segmentation” on Starter at US$9 a month (US$8.08 billed yearly).⁶ HubSpot Marketing Hub Starter shows US$20 a seat a month for 1,000 marketing contacts and caps you at 50 active segments with criteria “limited to form submission data, contact property information, and marketing email activity”; 1,200 active segments cost US$800 a month on Professional.⁷

03Buying and sending in India

Zoho Campaigns is the one of the five that invoices in INR with GST, which is why the TechBag Pipedrive Campaigns page tells an Indian buyer to weigh it against any USD-billed tool: a direct foreign-card purchase means 18% IGST under reverse charge and the FIRA and FEMA paperwork that comes with it.⁸ Mailchimp’s page for Indian visitors prices Free at ₹0 for 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, and Essentials at ₹845 and Standard at ₹1,265 a month for the first twelve months as a half-price offer; the ongoing rupee price is not printed.³ On the sending side, the regulation that bites is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: consent must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, and withdrawing it must be as easy as giving it, which makes every behavioural segment a stated purpose in your notice and the unsubscribe link a legal mechanism rather than a courtesy. The DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025, with the consent and security duties applying from 13 May 2027.¹⁰