Gone are the days where you had to write plain, boring e-mails that you would send one by one if you wanted better personalization, searching through a big messy Excel database to find what you needed. Nowadays, the digital customer is scrolling through hundreds of e-mails daily, and if yours don’t catch his attention immediately, he probably won’t ever go back to them. Luckily for you, companies have adapted rapidly to the dynamic behavior of the customers, and there are plenty of E-mail Marketing tools you can choose from to create beautiful and personalized e-mails ready to launch automatically to your whole contact list. Today, we will do a MailChimp Review 2018, and discover everything that you can do with one of the most popular tools on the market.
If you aren’t using an E-mail Marketing Automation tool yet, or you are planning to but you don’t know why it adds value for your business, then this post is for you.
In my future posts, I will explore as many E-mail Marketing tools as possible so you can make the right choice, but today I am exploring MailChimp, one of the most widely used ones.
What is MailChimp?
MailChimp is an E-mail Marketing and Marketing Automation software that offers basic and advanced features for creating personalized, beautifully designed templates for e-mails and newsletters. With MailChimp, you can manage the list of your subscribers, send thousands of e-mails at once, and more interestingly, observe how your e-mails perform after being sent – whether they have been opened, and whether receivers engaged with the elements inside them.
MailChimp has a beautiful and simple interface that allows you to easily navigate through it, which is especially great for people who are new to E-mail Marketing, since they find no difficulties using it. The functionalities are divided into 4 categories: Campaigns, Templates, Lists and Reports, where you can easily manage your E-mail Marketing campaigns, save templates that you will be using at another moment, import lists, and see reports on how well your campaigns performed.
2. So, what exactly can I do with MailChimp?
Depending on the subscription plan you’ve chosen, you might be limited to a certain extent with features such as multivariate testing, comparative reports or number of e-mails you can send, but all plans allow you to the basic functions of E-mail Marketing, which are pretty good:
- Design and launch E-mail Campaigns: doing this is as easy as creating a list of contacts (you can import the ones you already have from another database), and design your own e-mail by choosing one of the MailChimp templates and customizing it according to your preferences. You are ready to send e-mails straight away, or schedule them for another time.
- E-mail Campaign Automation: MailChimp allows you to set up automated e-mails such as a thank-you-email for subscribing, an annual mailing for happy birthday, or gathering feedback.
- List Management that lets you import your contact lists and create targeted marketing campaigns for your customers.
- A/B Testing and Time-Warp option: the first feature allows you to test out your e-mail campaigns before you send them to your contact list, and the second one, as we already mentioned, gives you the possibility to schedule your e-mails and newsletters so that they can send automatically at the right time to the right customer.
- Geotargeted campaigns: you can target only a selected group of your subscribers depending on their country or geographical area.
- eCommerce integration: if you have an online store, MailChimp allows you to connect it to your MailChimp account in order to track the amount and number of purchases from a particular campaign. This feature allows you to follow up if your customers abandon a cart or complete a purchase.
3. How do I activate it on my website? Do I have to download anything?
No, you don’t need to download or install any software on your computer. You just go to mailchimp.com, create an account, and you are ready to get started.
4. Can I get a MailChimp certification? Does it costs anything?
There isn’t currently any official certification by MailChimp, but there is a website dedicated to the verification and recognition of people’s skills that rewards you with badges and certificates: credly.com. You can use it to prove your experience in MailChimp.
MailChimp itself provides you with learning resources so you can learn how the platform works, and it also gives you the possibility to find an expert for 1-on-1 training sessions and international webinars.
5. MailChimp Rating
G2Crowd: 8.6 / 10 (2131 ratings overall)
PCMag: 9 / 10 (editor’s choice)
TrustRadius: 7.9 / 10 (824 ratings)
6. What features does MailChimp offer?
Some of the features are the following:
- Marketing Automation;
- Segmentation and Groups;
- Analytics for tracking audience engagement;
- Reports;
- MailChimp Mobile;
- Multi-user accounts;
- Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaigns;
- Abandoned cart;
- Delivery by Time Zone;
- eCommerce integration.
To see all of them, click here.
7. What are the pros and cons of Mailchimp?
As with absolutely everything, there are always advantages and disadvantages, so let’s take a look at them:
Pros:
- Free plan for small businesses (up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 e-mails per month);
- Built-in, customized e-mail and newsletter templates;
- Third-party integrations;
- Highly functional and intuitive;
- E-mail scheduling according to time zones;
- Good analytics and reports;
- Simple and user-friendly;
- Free learning resources;
Cons:
- Lack of 24/7 customer support;
- Lack of professional design services;
- High frequency of updates (every 4 weeks), which can be confusing;
- E-mail Automation is limited;
- High-priced subscription plans;
- Incomplete list management;
8. What prices are associated with it?
MailChimp offers 3 plans:
- New Business: Forever Free – if you have 2,000 or less subscribers and send up to 12,000 e-mails a month, you can use this tool for free without expiring trial or credit card required.
- Growing Business – it starts from $10 a month and the price is calculated on the number of subscribers you have.
Here you have two types of plan, one is paying Per month, and the other is called Pay as you go.
If you choose pay Per month, you have unlimited amount of e-mails, and the price varies depending on your subscribers:
0 – 500 subscribers: $10
501 – 1000 subscribers: $15
1001 – 1,500 subscribers: $20
If you have more than 1,500 subscribers, calculate your price here.
If you choose the plan Pay as you go, you receive E-mail credits that you get with a prepaid amount:
300 credits – $9. 00 – 0.03 cents per e-mail
1000 credits – $30.00 – 0.03 cents per e-mail
2000 credits – $60.00 – 0.03 cents per e-mail
Check the rest of the prices for e-mail credits here.
- Pro Marketer – this plan is priced like an add-on, and it is recommended for businesses with more than 50,000 subscribers (although you can purchase it with any number of subscribers). It costs an additional $199 on top of the plan that you have already chosen. It includes multivariate testing, advanced reporting, the option to stop delivery, and priority support.
9. Should I upgrade to Premium (Pro Marketer)?
Of course, it depends on the size of your mailing list as Premium provides a lot of advanced features for better performance, but if you are just starting with E-mail Marketing, I would recommend you to use the standard plans, and upgrade as your list grows. When you feel that you are ready to go Pro, you can do it anytime. But if your list of subscribers is relatively small at the moment, you might not be able to take the full advantage of the advanced features yet, so take your time to grow your list first.
10. What other tools can I pair with MailChimp?
MailChimp offers more than 500 third-party integrations and add-ons for a variety of sectors such as e-commerce, non-profit, or real-estate. Here are some of the most popular ones:
- Google Analytics to track campaign success;
- eCommerce 360 – integrations with shopping cart programs such as Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce;
- CRM Integrations with Salesforce, Zoho, Sugar CRM, etc.
- Zendesk for offering customer support;
- Eventbrite for managing event invitations;
…and many more!
11. What else should I know about MailChimp?
MailChimp offers social sharing along with E-mail Marketing, giving you the possibility to post automatically newsletter updates on social media. If you go Social Pro, you get an add-on that collects demographic data from subscribers based on their activity on social networking sites.
You can also pair it up with Google Analytics to gain additional insights about your customers´behaviour.
Did you miss any important information from our MailChimp Review 2018? Let us know in the comments!
Ani Miteva
