MailChimp is often the first newsletter tool that springs to mind, possibly because they have great marketing and a charming monkey-fied aesthetic. But I guess I’m not the only one, as they claim to send roughly 10,800 emails out every second over their platform.
They offer a free plan, with which you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. This is good news for personal and small business users, as most of the tools and templates are accessible on this free account. Another feature accessible through their free account is their in-built CRM. If you’re an SMB looking for an all-in-one solution then this could be just what you’re looking for. They also have pay-as-you-go options, which work out to be cheaper for low-volume clients, whilst also giving you some included extras such as automation and integration options.
OVERVIEW OF MAILCHIMP FEATURES
Here is a run-down of some of the leading features included in MailChimp.
- E-Commerce Integration
- Marketing Automation
- Landing Pages
- Social Media Advertising Features
- Mobile App
- Flexible Designs
- Advanced Analytics
- App Integration
- Documentation
- Data Insights
MailChimp’s form builder
Before you can create an email marketing campaign in MailChimp, you’re going to need a list of subscribers and this means getting signups from your website. MailChimp comes with a built-in form builder to get you started and this is a crucial tool for any email marketing platform.
To be honest, the builder is pretty average and the interface isn’t as intuitive as other parts of the MailChimp experience. It’ll do the job in terms of helping you to easily create and embed web forms on your site but you don’t get anything sophisticated in terms of design options.
MailChimp campaigns
Once you’ve got yourself an email marketing list to work with you can start creating your first campaign in MailChimp. There are four types of campaign you can create:
- Regular: Create custom HTML email campaigns, customise your content and choose whether to send them immediately or schedule for later.
- Automated: Create campaigns with basic automation features, depending on which version of MailChimp you’re using.
- Plain-text: Send text-only emails without any images or formatting.
- A/B testing: Send more than one version of the same campaign to see which one gets the best results.
If you’re only going to use MailChimp as a basic tool for sending simple email marketing campaigns when the regular campaign type does a decent job. Just keep in mind that this really is a basic option without any real automation or targeting options.
If this is all you need, MailChimp is decent enough option.
If you’re interested in automating your email marketing strategy, things are very different. We’ll look at MailChimp’s automation features in the next section but (spoiler alert) the quick answer is they’re nothing to get excited about.
Facebook Ad Campaigns
To help you reach a wider audience and build a larger email list, MailChimp also comes with a Facebook Ad Campaigns feature. This helps you create and purchase an ad for Facebook and Instagram to promote your email offer – all of which you can do without leaving your MailChimp account.
Once again, we’re not going to get a sophisticated Facebook marketing strategy by using this feature but it’s a nice addition for smaller businesses who want to expand their audience but aren’t quite ready to manage their own Facebook advertising account yet.
Landing pages
MailChimp also comes with a built-in landing page builder and you can create as many as you want, regardless if which version you’re using. There are two types of landing page templates: one for building your email lists and another for promoting products.
Automation features
This is where MailChimp has really fallen behind the competition over the years. Email marketing without automation is like trying to build cars without a factory: it’s possible to (slowly) build one yourself but you’re never going to produce an entire line of vehicles at scale and sell them to the masses.
It’s not that MailChimp doesn’t offer any email automation at all – it does, but it’s very basic.
Let’s start with what you can do using MailChimp’s automation features.
Autoresponses
You can setup autoresponses and reach out to new contacts as soon as they sign up and schedule emails for a set time after (eg: 1 day after they join your list). You can also set up a series for things like users’ birthdays or festive messages during the holiday season.
Google remarketing ads
MailChimp will automatically create Google remarketing ads for your campaigns to target users as they continue to browse the web. The idea is to bring back visitors who didn’t buy the first time around and give them an extra incentive to make the purchase.
Recover abandoned carts
This is probably MailChimp’s most impressive automation feature, sending out email reminders to customers who’ve abandoned their cart and encouraging them to complete the purchase.
MAILCHIMP PLANS AND PRICING
The first thing you should know is that there is no free trial on MailChimp.
But there’s a good reason for that.
THE FREE PLAN
Unlike virtually all competitors, MailChimp offers a free plan. As in permanently free.
The free plan is actually good enough for many small businesses. You can add up to 2,000 subscribers, and send up to 12,000 emails per month.
If you go over those limits, then you will have to upgrade to a paid plan.
You don’t get all of MailChimp’s features on the free plan, but you get most of them. And if you compare what you get to the lowest tier of other email marketing tools, you get more.
For example, automation (being able to set-up autoresponders, mainly) is usually a premium feature on most tools. It’s only available at additional cost. On MailChimp, it’s available on every plan, including the free one.
Additionally, the free plan offers A/B testing and reporting.
This offer is one of the biggest reasons that MailChimp rose to popularity in the first place.
THE GROWING BUSINESS PLAN
MailChimp has two levels of paid plans. The vast majority of small businesses will be content with the “Growing Business” plan, so I’ll focus on that here.
Pricing According to List Size
The cost of this plan scales with the size of your list. Every 500 additional subscribers that you have will bump the price a little. This is a much more flexible pricing system than other competitors offer.
You can use MailChimp’s pricing calculator to get an idea of how much a paid plan would cost your business.
MailChimp verdict
If you only need to fire out the occasional round of emails, MailChimp is a good option. It’s mostly a very intuitive platform and the drag-and-drop email builder in particular is a joy to work with. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer the kind of advanced segmentation and automation features you’re going to need if you want to do email marketing at scale.
