Marlo's Review of MailChimp E-Mail Marketing
Here’s our basic review of what we thought of MailChimp as our e-mail marketing tool (and why we switched).
PROS
Free account for up to 10,000 emails / 2, 000 contacts per month
Free built-in CRM
Pay-as-you-go option with some built-in automations
Extensive integrations with countless platforms
CONS
Un-attractive free templates
Clunky template editor
Must know CSS if you want to customize design
High-cost subscription plans
If having a marketing and e-mail newsletter service that integrates with other tools is essential for you, MailChimp is a great option. It offers countless integrations with many applications (such as Zapier and WordPress). There’s an advantage to having everything you need in one tool. Those who want to manage their email marketing and sell products online all under one roof will be interested to hear that this is possible with MailChimp.
MailChimp offers all the standard services that you need such as classic newsletters, autoresponders, A/B testing RSS to newsletter and transactional emails. There are lots of choice in their bucket of templates and the paid versions are relatively modern looking. Most templates are drag & drop designs that are responsive, but the classic templates are not. And the big down side for the free plan; it only comes with the basic email templates which are starting to look super outdated. This was our biggest frustration when we started using MailChimp for Creative Roots.
MailChimp’s delivery rate is acceptable. But please be aware that their emails often end up in the Gmail ‘Promotions’ tab, which is less frequently checked.
Some things we don’t love:
One of the downsides to MailChimp is their high-priced packages should you need to up your game from the free plan. They do offer archiving or deleting low-quality contacts from your account to keep your head-count lower. MailChimp gives each of your contacts a star rating of 1-5. You can archived contacts with a rating of 2 or lower. This method is often called "pruning your list" but it can be annoying to have to manually remove inactive users to save money.
MailChimp puts on the number of lists you can create, so you’ll also need to be very organized in how you manage your contacts.
Another downside is if you happen to need some support. MailChimp’s free plan is generous in some ways, but there is no email or live chat support available. It’s only available to users on the Essentials plan and higher. We found the platform to be not so user friendly or intuitive for the average user (us). The complex backend systems that require advanced knowledge of its use and the lack of high-end design options (web-fonts or graphic options for emails) was the final nail in the coffin.
We had pretty simple requirements. Have forms on our website that allowed our audience to sign up for various programs or events, collect them into different audience segments and then reach out to those segments using beautifully designed newsletters that provided us with analytics after they were sent. MailChimp couldn’t deliver without us having to upgrade to an expensive paid version.
MailChimp might be the friend you need but honestly you really dislike. Why ?
MailChimp is clunky, it can be very frustrating, and it takes some serious time and practice to get it all setup properly BUT MailChimp remains one the the most reliable, integrated email marketing softwares available.
A long-standing player in the industry has enabled MailChimp to integrate with so many different platforms and programs. Although MailChimp just wasn’t the right platform for our particular requirements there is a reason that it remains to be a big player in the e-mail marketing industry.
You don’t need to take our word for it! MailChimp offer a free version as stated, so you can test it out for yourself.
xo Marlo
Co-Founder, Creative Roots Co.
