MailChimp

MailChimp Review 

Our MailChimp Review:  the company adds a touch of humor to all of their marketing materials, the name underscores their creativity! We like their email marketing platform and find their overall features to be comprehensive and a good fit for most small to medium sized businesses.

Like its competitors Constant Contact and Vertical Response, Mail Chimp is primarily used for email campaigns and newsletter management and has over 1 million business customers around the world.

We like their social media platform integration, enabling email recipients to connect and share on the platforms that your brand utilizes and MailChimp’s tight integration with HootSuite is well done. And, the Facebook integration is good too. Important to note, they have clearly recognized the significant growth in mobile usage, having integrated support for mobile phones with their email marketing platform.

We also like their “Delivery Doctor” which helps to asses and ensure your email marketing campaign is not sending out something that will be blocked by ISPs across the web – more on this below. Their central hub, the Dashboard has a clean user interface, is easy to navigate and we found it much less cluttered than some of their direct competitors.

MailChimp competes with most top tier email marketing vendors including: Constant Contact, iContact, Vertical Response, Emma, JangoMail, MyNewsletterBuilder and a growing list of second tier vendors.

MailChimp Email Campaign Creation

We found setting up email marketing campaigns with MailChimp to be much less cumbersome than many of their direct competitors. They have invested significant resources to ensure their platform can be easily used.

You can add HTML email design on your own or select from a group of well designed professional templates done by their team – we found it easy to add images to these templates and customize their templates.

As we touched on earlier, the MailChimp uses their “Delivery Doctor” as a front end analysis tool that reviews your email content, testing and retesting using a methodology developed in-house, which will save you from triggering blocks and/or getting your emails marked as spam by the recipients. It’s well done and we liked it.

Their Subscribe Activity Reports enables you to do a deep data dive if you will into your email marketing campaigns. Giving you a snapshot of who received the email, when it was opened, email bounces links that have been accessed, etc. MailChimp’s platform will also automatically determine which subscribers’ should be resent to and which should be deleted from your mail list.

Here’s a look at some of the features MailChimp offers:

• Email Recipient Customization: We really like MailChimp’s feedback on the number and type of email apps your recipients are using (Gmail, Outlook, HotMail, etc.) and provide you with a preview of your email in this specific format. This really improves the overall quality of an email marketing campaign.

• Interactive Graphs: These give you snapshot of the customer interaction with your email marketing campaign, enabling you to get a comprehensive snapshot of subscriber activity, social stats, click performance and advanced reports – the coolest feature is the ability to view an overview of all of this information at once.

• Click Maps: This one of our favorite features – enabling you to get a holistic email or newsletter or email campaign across all subscribers at once, with a click map overlay showing how popular all links are.

• List Building:  With MailChimp, you can customize your email list signup to match your brand. You can then share that design on your website, or Facebook. Forms can include boxes, buttons, drop-downs, and all of the industry standard options. The List Building feature is also mobile friendly, letting you add people to the list via mobile devices.

• Importing: The import feature in MailChimp lets you bring in email addresses and names from a variety of other formats.

• Chimpadeedoo:  If you love using an iPad, you can use the Chimpadeedoo iPad app to collect email addresses and store them on your iPad – even when you’re offline. The app then pushes the addresses to your mailing list when you connect with your account via their platform.

• Integration with Facebook. There are several tactics that MailChimp uses to tightly integrate your email marketing campaign with your Facebook presence, including meta tags to let your readers “like” your campaigns, social media tracking, and even adding a signup form via your Facebook profile.

• Embedded archives. You can seamlessly publish archived newsletter copies to your website, which can then in turn be indexed by Google and the other search engines.

• Comments. MailChimp campaigns give users the ability to comment and discuss the campaign, adding to the social networking element.

• Autoresponders. Being able to give immediate feedback to someone who joins your email list is one of the most important elements for marketing retention. While some other platforms have left off autoresponders, MailChimp has this capability.

• MailChimp API. For those who want to be able to directly sync a customer database with MailChimp without having to constantly import, the API can be helpful.The MailChimp API can be used in a number of ways, including on an e-commerce page, CMS, and more.

As you can see, a MailChimp review reveals a number of unique features not found in most email marketing platforms.

Pricing

MailChimp offers both a per-subscriber monthly plan as well as a per-email pay as you go plan. Here’s the breakdown of the per-subscriber plan: