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February 20, 2009

MailChimp – Easy Email Marketing

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MailChimp is an email campaign manager with a difference. The name is based on the premise that ‘email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it’. The site aims to make email marketing both easy and fun with a suite of powerful tools. MailChimp has around 15,000 active customers and manages emails sent to over 75 million subscribers, delivering millions of messages a day.

Although MailChimp is easy to use, the features it offers are quite powerful. Users can divide up their email list into groups, test different campaigns, ensure that they won’t get flagged up by spam checkers, brand their campaigns and much more. The service can work for groups of any size, from small community groups to large enterprises.

MailChimp offers a similar range of features to other email campaign managers, but is much easier to use than many of them. With a powerful APIand plugins, it can integrate with almost any system, making it a handy marketing solution.

Practical Uses:

  • Communicate product updates and important announcements to your customers
  • Create an email marketing campaign to attract customer referrals
  • Manage an online newsletter for your community group
  • Test different email marketing campaigns to see which is most effective

Insider Tips:

  • Use the inbox inspector to see how your email will be viewed on different email software and operating systems
  • Segment your client list so you can market to customers fitting a particular profile
  • Add Google Analytics code to your email campaign for more in-depth tracking of customer activity
  • Update your subscribers automatically when you add new content with the RSS to email feature
  • Use MailChimp plugins to sync with other applications such as blogging programs or shopping cart software

What we liked:

  • MailChimp is easy to use – just point and click to create a slick email marketing campaign
  • MailChimp includes email authentication so that recipients can be sure they are not forged
  • The email templates are beautiful and easy to customize
  • MailChimp can help you find out the best days and times for sending your campaigns

What we didn’t like:

  • The Campaign Builder tool can be finicky. Changes are not always applied immediately
  • Although MailChimp offers many templates, larger firms will need someone with web development/coding capabilities to make custom email templates
  • MailChimp attempts to validate your email lists the first time you use them to ensure there’s no spamming going on (a wise approach but it can be annoying to the honest marketers)

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: 2001
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: Atlanta GA
  • Founded by: Ben Chestnut, Dan Kurzius
  • Web site: http://www.mailchimp.com

Costs:

  • Free starter plan up to 100 subscribers
  • Pay as you go starting at $15
  • Monthly plans starting at $10

Comments

  1. Tmobile

    Mailchimp is a waste of time, claimed our client t-mobiles data was not up to their content standards, when I recommended to get all of us on the phone to correct this mistake they informed me they don’t have a phone number to call. As a customer and one that was willing to spending 10K+ a month in order to run email campaigns for my client I found it quite odd that no one at mailchimp would bother with getting on the phone with us. Thanks to Vertical Response they were happy to take our money and take the time to talk with us over the telephone to get us setup.

    Stay away from mailchimp it’s just a waste of time.

  2. I would only recommend Omnistar Mailer for my email marketing http://www.omnistarmailer.com

  3. Wilber Bakowski

    When you like hiking, mountain climbing, or just traveling and camping out, then sleeping bags come in incredibly handy. Sleeping bags are comfortable readymade beds. Really uncomplicated to set up. You might just lay it and you are ready to make use of it. But note that not all sleeping bags are the very same.

  4. Lim Shi Fu:
    Email blasts are a crucial part of web marketing campaigns, and Mailchimp definitely makes it easier for anyone to get started. It is very user friendly, and at the same time has different payment tiers to ensure that you only pay for what you need, which is great for companies just starting out.

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