MailChimp

Mailchimp has allowed me to not only grow both my business' engaged clientele base, but also fans of my music and label! It's also allowed me to provide campaigns and reporting for my clients that are easy to understand and digest. With just social, it can be hard to cut through the saturation, but with email marketing, you're going directly to your Interested audience and able to create incentive for them to not only continue to engage, but to share with others. It's been truly amazing.

Avantages

The ease of use is off the charts. Aside from that, their pre-fab templates help you get you to market quickly, amazing analytics, integrations and flexibility, and incredible resources to help you learn and become an ESP pro. They make it easy to grow your audience with pop-up forms that can be integrated on your website, or separately, and make it a good point to stick to industry regulations. They're the most robust ESP on the market, and you shouldn't use anything else. Plus, their branding is just fun, and every now and then, they'll do something special for their customers (i.e. free socks and swag).

Inconvénients

There's nothing I dislike about Mailchimp. So long as they continue to grow the integrations and capacity to link with outside vendors and applications, they'll continue to rule the market.

Mailchimp has been my go-to for 5+ years and I see no reason to change that now. It's simple, easy-to-use, and affordable.

I also care about who I work with. From what I can see as an outsider looking in, they have a great company culture. I once found a mistake in their API documentation and they sent me a free t-shirt! Most companies aren't willing to spend money just to say thanks, and I think that says something about the culture and character of the company.

Avantages

Easy to setup: I've used Mailchimp in the launch of dozens of brands and digital products. Mailchimp is so easy to setup; I can literally have an account up and running, collecting email addresses within 20 minutes.

Great free option: One of my favorite things about Mailchimp is the fact that you get up to 2,000 contacts for free. Having that as an option (particularly for new businesses) is absolutely critical in making sure you can measure ROI from the platform before you start investing a lot of money.

Easy to use: Mailchimp's forms, email templates, list management, etc. is all so simple. In the rare case you can't do something you want via the Mailchimp admin, it can probably be done via the API. Mailchimp has also done an exceptional job of integrating with 3rd party platforms to make sure you can easily maximize your email collection.

More than just email marketing: In the last few years Mailchimp has started offering additional features outside of email campaigns, like Facebook ads and card mailing services. I personally don't think they're as good as Mailchimp's email service, but I am sure they'll improve over time.

Inconvénients

In the last couple of years Mailchimp has made some changes to their pricing structure that I don't particularly love:

1) Pay as you go features have become more limited compared to their monthly plans.
2) Monthly rates have increased (although that's bound to happen at some point).
3) They now include some social platform contacts in your allotted contacts (i.e. you pay for them like they're email contacts).

As well, Mailchimp automatically increases your bill when you cross over your plan subscriber threshold. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I suppose I prefer it to them just disabling collection of new contacts.

I have had an overall GREAT experience with MailChimp. As with any product there will be things that come up, but I have never had a problem with getting them resolved easily and timely with their Customer Service options whether it be through Chat or Email. One of the most significant qualities I have noticed about MailChimp's customer service over all the other EMSP's I've worked with is that THEY WILL ADMIT WHEN SOMETHING IS THEIR FAULT! It is unheard of with these types of companies but they do it, and I have gained so much respect for them as a company because of that.

Avantages

What I love most about MailChimp is the amount of services you get for absolutely NO cost. There are endless possibilities of things you can do with this application, and the user interface beats all the others. It is very easy to maneuver and understand for even the most beginner email marketer. The reporting features are phenomenal and with them you are able to provide designer looking reports to clients without even touching them. As a graphic designer, the template creator is definitely the best one I've seen as fair as email marketing applications go, plus they have a variety of pre-designed templates to use that are again, COMPLETELY FREE. I could go on and on about everything I love about MailChimp.

Inconvénients

The one con I have with MailChimp is that it's been hard for me to get used to their recently updated interface, I feel like the terminology and layout makes a little bit less sense than the old interface, but I could also chalk that up to just being comfortable with what I'm used to. Also (and this is hardly a con) when you have a free version of the application, it does require your emails to be sent out with the MailChimp logo at the very bottom of the email. I say this is hardly a con because with everything they are giving you for free it makes sense that they want to try to advertise.

We are able to reach more customers with less legwork

We were also able to change how people view our company as a whole. Mail chimp makes our 5 to 10 person group seem like and Army.

Avantages

Mail Chimp is very flexible and gives you a wide variety of easily customizable options. I use it for everything from Turkey Drives and fundraiser registrations to Album release contests. I hired 2 new people that have almost no graphic design experience and they were both able to learn the platform in a short time and implement what they knew in a real-world environment. Furthermore. The templates aren't cookie-cutter and are easily customizable. They update someone signs up for your product or offer. Its a low key way to get alot more customers and sell alot more products without texting 100 people1 at a time. in the end its definitely worth trying out

Inconvénients

I wish Mail chimp had a desktop app that was downloadable and cloud-connected. I also wish that you could integrate it with other software like Google Drive or other Cloud-based services.

I have never had any problems with MailChimp. Its been quite easy to setup with minimal steps required. I did have to contact the customer service team on one occasion and they replied promptly and direct to the point with a solution. So my experience with both the software and their team have been great.

Avantages

Widely used and can be integrated easily into other software such as QuickBooks, Xero, WooCommerce, Shopify, Inventory systems and many others.

MailChimp gives the user the options of many different emails output depending on the circumstances. For example; newly registered user emails, newsletters, abandoned cart emails, if a customer hasn't made a purchase in a while or hasn't returned to your site in some time, which are all great for reminding the customer of your existence, and gaining that lost customer back!

The form builder is pretty easy to use, and also gives you a copy & paste option of the code afterwards so it can be easily implemented into your website.

Inconvénients

You are limited with the styles of emails you can send to your customers. You can fully design your emails from scratch, but regarding the features you can place within the emails, it is kinda limited compared to other software. This would includes things like which items were abandoned when sending the customers an abandoned cart email. Or showing which items still remain in the customers 'Wishlist' if they haven't purchased the items yet and haven't been on the website for some time.

I am not a big fan of the MailChimp logo at the bottom of every email sent to the customers.