10-second breakdown:
Synonymous with ‘free emailing,’ MailChimp offers great email marketing features for small and medium sized companies. Perfect for bootstrapped businesses or soloprenuers.
MailChimp is used in small (0-50 employees), and medium companies (51-1,000 employees).
The good:
MailChimp has a free plan that is a great starting point for any small business. The Forever Free plan lets you send 12,000 emails/month to less than 2,000 accounts.
MailChimp offer lots of features such as alerts for pay-as-you-go customers, Inbox Preview, chat support(paid plans) and campaign reporting. There are also no message limits on paid plans.
MailChimp is one of the few email marketing providers that integrates with third party platforms, such as FreshBooks, Google Drive and Salesforce, allowing you to automatically download your contacts fast.
The bad:
There is no live support offered. You can contact customer support through email and there are plenty of tutorials, guides, and knowledgebase articles to help answer your questions.
MailChimp doesn’t take paypal as a form of payment which may hinder many small businesses.
How it works:
MailChimp provides everything you need to get started sending out email campaigns, they include a visual drag and drop editor for your emails, you can make custom forms to encourage users to opt-in to your email list, automate emails to go out when you specify, and have all the analytic tools you might want. The entire program is kept very simple and clutter free, all sorts of organizations and businesses use MailChimp so they focused on making it as accessible as possible.
Although it’s not available on the free plan, MailChimp offers some world class analytical tracking. They provide you with interactive graphs to view all email activity. They include the usual open rates, click through rates, bounces and more, but MailChimp steps it up a bit by including more details like open by location, unsubscribe rate and more. They also integrate with Google Analytics to give you even more insight into your campaigns and allows you to see how much revenue each campaign is bringing in.
MailChimp’s mobile app offers a couple unique features too. It covers all the basics like viewing how your campaigns are doing and keeping on top of social media, but also allows you to add new subscribers in right from the app. If you’re hosting a booth at a trade show you could bring a tablet and get email signups right from your table.
Getting started isn’t difficult with the help of MailChimp’s free learning resources. They include video tutorials on how to perform certain functions or run specific reports and even a few ebooks you can download and keep. The really cool part about their learning library is that it extends further than just technical support. There are guides for things like getting the most out of your marketing campaign and how to write emails that boost your clickthrough rates.
One thing to note, MailChimp doesn’t offer any kind of design or spam filter guidance. Many competitors will include access to professionals, at least on higher paid pricing plans. MailChimp’s email editor is robust and there are templates, but if you’re looking for a professional opinion you’re out of luck.
While MailChimp might be known as the ‘poor man’s email service’ with its attractive free tier, they also offer a few paid tiers that come with enough perks to potentially sway your decision. There are three in total – ‘Forever Free’, ‘Monthly’ and ‘Pay As You Go’.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room, although it might be limited in features, MailChimp’s free plan is famous among small businesses and penny-pinchers alike for how easy it is to set up and the generous amount of emails you get to send.
The ‘Forever Free’ plan gives you up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails a month. There’s no contract, and no credit card required, if you try to go over the limit they’ll simply prompt you to upgrade to a new plan.
There are a few notable features missing for hardened email marketers like autoresponder capabilities and tools to make sure you pass through spam filters but overall its earned its reputation for one of the best free plans in the industry.
MailChimp’s Monthly plan is their full-featured email service, filled with the features missing from Forever Free. It ranges in price from $10 a month for 500 or fewer contacts all the way up to $475 for email lists 100,000 long. If you have a larger list than that, MailChimp recommends you give them a call for a custom consultation to get set up.
The Monthly plan includes all of the basics that Forever Free promised, and rounds out your package with email automation, delivery by time zone and support through email and live chat. MailChimp offers a ‘Pro Package’ you can tack onto the monthly plan if you’re a power user. It costs a flat $200 per month in addition to your package and gives you fifty additional merge fields to use in your emails, predictive demographic charts, A/V testing up to 8 different versions and priority support.
Pay-As-You-Go gives you the freedom to only pay for what you need, rather than a monthly fee you pay for ‘email credits’ up front and then burn through them when you want to send out an email blast. For businesses that only send out a few blasts a year, this is a godsend. Keep in mind that it can get expensive fast, prices start at $.03 per email if you buy 2,000, and go down to $.01 per email if you purchase 25,000 or more.
Although it can get expensive if you exceed their sending limits. MailChimp is a great option for small to medium sized organizations who are just looking to collect customer information and keep in contact. Its attractive interface and helpful guidance tools make it easy to operate regardless of past technology experience.
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