Comprehensive Mailchimp Review: Is It The Right Email Tool for You?

 

Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channel to market your products and services. That is why a reliable email automation tool is essential. There are many email service providers (ESPs) that are available in the market nowadays. And Mailchimp is one of those that get a lot of attention among email marketers. It has features that make it easy to manage and send emails to subscribers.

But despite being a giant email provider, Mailchimp has gotten some negative feedback from its clients, mostly due to its price and tools. I never used it for my email marketing campaign. But to know if Mailchimp is true to what it claims, I did some testing. Can this software live up to your expectations? Find out because I will be giving my full Mailchimp review in this article.

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is an American all-in-one email marketing software that was established in 2001. They first headquartered in Atlanta but are able to have additional offices in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Vancouver. Since then, they have been helping small businesses and empowering millions of clients such as East Fork, Chronicles Books, The Fader, and Sweat.

It has more than 250+ app integrations that allow you to sync information from your store to Mailchimp. Aside from email, it also offers marketing channels such as social media posts, Facebook, Google, and Instagram ads, customizable pop-up forms, postcards, and websites. It features Marketing Automation, All-One Marketing Campaign Management, Customer Relationship Management, Email Marketing, Email Tracking, Landing Page, Retargeting, Small Business CRM software, Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing, Survey, integrations such as with Google Analytics.

What Does Mailchimp Offer?

If you have been involved in email marketing , you probably heard that Mailchimp is an essential tool to use. Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform for all small-to-medium-size businesses. It simplifies the way you create and send custom emails to your targeted audience. Aside from that, it is also a email marketing tool that helps you manage your email list and track your email campaign performance.

To give you a better understanding of what Mailchimp can offer and if its quality matches its popularity, take a look at the following factors to help you decide if this email service provider is worth using.

Mailchimp Features

When looking for a partner ESP, the first thing you have to consider is the features. This is to know if the one you will be getting can provide what you need for your email marketing plan. Mailchimp has the following advanced features.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a feature that allows you to segment your contacts into smaller lists based on your customers’ demographic data, product interests, purchase history, and more. Mailchimp segments contacts based on the shared data such as signup page, gender, location, purchase history, and the likes. 

Automation Features

Mailchimp is also a marketing automation software. Their automation features to allows you to set up, manage, and automate your marketing campaigns. It helps you send the right messages to customers at the right time based on their behavior. Usually, these are welcome emails, thank you emails, greeting emails, cart abandonment emails, and etc.

Personalization

Personalization is a feature that helps you to tailor-fit your email content based on the data you have collected from your subscriber to increase open rates and drive revenue. For Mailchimp, you can start personalizing your email by creating an email subject line. Then, you need to activate the “Personalize the “To” field”. Once it is activated, you can use a merge tag to personalize the content. You can select the recipient’s first name, last name, email addresses, and more.

Reporting

Data is essential in marketing so that you have an idea of how your customers engaged in your business and what products or services created the biggest impact on them. In Mailchimp, baseline success rate and basic data such as email metrics, like open rate, and unsubscribe rates are presented in a simple way. These can be seen on your campaign page so you can easily see the result. Aside from that, it also tracks the revenue of your campaign. 

Landing Pages

Landing page templates in Mailchimp are mobile-responsive, meaning they can still look nice even when the customer is viewing your page using their phones and other devices. There are more than a hundred pre-designed landing page templates available and these are categorized into two: basic and themed. You can drag and drop the content blocks into your template. Then, add your logo, text, and other images to customize the landing page that fits your business. 

You can use these landing pages for occasions such as driving app downloads, welcoming new subscribers, releasing new products, and promoting a sale. 

Email Templates

Mailchimp also offers more than a hundred professional email templates. These beautiful emails do not have heavy HD graphics or images that can affect the deliverability of your email. However, you need to have a premium plan to access all of these email template options.

To create your own template from scratch, you need to choose from these email template categories: Layout, Themes, and Code your own. Once you have a template category, you can create a new template. Just like in the landing page templates, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to add content blocks as well as your logo, text, and images to complete your content.

If you are a designer on MailChimp’s marketplace, you can choose the standard “all rights reserved” or make your work available for public use.

Mailchimp Customer Support

Mailchimp customer service varies depending on the plan you are subscribed to. For a free plan, you can only get limited support. You can only get their 24/7 support via email or their live chat software if you are at least on the standard plan. They also offer phone support but this is only available for premium plan subscribers.

However, whatever your plan is, you can access their knowledge base such as Guides & Tutorials, Marketing Tips, Free Marketing Tools, Marketing Glossary, Marketing Techniques, and Integration Directory that are all uploaded on their website. These resources are written in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and French.

Mailchimp Pricing 

You can start making and sending your email marketing campaigns for free because Mailchimp does offer a free plan. You can already have 2,000 contacts, 1 audience, email builder, marketing CRM, Forms & Landing Pages, Creative Assistant, and Website Builder & Mailchimp Domain. However, you cannot avail of their 24/7 support. 

But if you want to upgrade your plan and unlock more features, you can choose the following plans: 

• Essential: $9.99 per month. This plan includes up to 50,000 contacts, 3 audiences, email templates, multi-step journeys, custom branding, AB testing, as well as 24/7 email and chats support. 
• Standard: $14.99 per month. This plan includes up to 100,000 contacts, 5 audiences, customer journey builder + branching points, send-time optimization, behavioral targeting, custom templates, and dynamic content.  
• Premium: $299 per month. This plan includes 200,000+ contacts, unlimited audiences, advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, comparative reporting, unlimited seats, and role-based access as well as phone support.

Mailchimp Pros and Cons

Over the past years, more and more people have turned to email marketing to drive traffic and direct revenue to their websites. This is understandable because email marketing is still a powerful marketing technique to efficiently and effectively grow your business. With many email automation software available, Mailchimp is among those that stand out. It is understandable because it helps millions of startup businesses around the world. 

But Mailchimp has its own benefits and drawbacks as well. Read this pros and cons guide to know why you should or should not use Mailchimp. 

Pros

Mailchimp is user-friendly. The tools are well-organized, easy to use, and easy to navigate for email segmentation, automation, and personalization. When you are working with a team but remotely, you don’t need to worry because it allows multiple people to work on the same account at the same time. You can easily make customized templates and personalized content using the drag-and-drop editor. It provides analytics that can help you understand your marketing campaign’s performance. 

Cons

The first thing I dislike about Mailchimp is its image size limitation. You need to resize the image so that you can upload and use it to your templates. For the templates, the email designer is very basic. In fact, you cannot have more than two columns. You need to upgrade your plans to unlock other features. Also, technical issues sometimes occur when you are making your campaign, so you need to constantly save your project in order not to lose it. Affiliate marketing is prohibited in MailChimp as well.

When it comes to customer support, you can get limited support from them when you have a free plan. Phone support is also available for premium plans which I found weird for the other two paid plans. Lastly, Mailchimp has a maximum number of contacts and email sends even if you have a premium plan. 

Why Did I Stop Using Mailchimp for My Email Marketing Campaigns

As I have mentioned above, I never used Mailchimp for my email marketing campaigns before. And after some time of using it to have a better grasp of what it can offer, I decided not to continue using it.

Here’s why. 

Same Subscribers are Counted When Separate Contacts are Created

One of the things I look at for better ESP is the number of contacts it can give me both for free and paid versions. This is, based on my opinion as a marketer, my campaign’s backbone. The higher the number of contacts I have, the more recipients can receive my email. However, the same subscribers are counted when I created separate contacts in Mailchimp. This is a bit disappointing because it can easily take up my contact allowance 

Advanced Automation Tools are for Paid Plans Only

Automation is one of the features I consider when looking for a better ESP. Advanced automation is a must so that I can send my emails to my subscribers at the right time. For Mailchimp, automation is not that powerful. I needed to have some third-party integrations to have better automation. Though it offers advanced automation, this is only available for paid plans. 

No Multivariate Testing and A/B Testing for Free Plans

Multivariate testing and A/B Testing are also essential for email marketing campaigns. These tools allow me to have a better understanding of my campaign’s performance. However, these are not available for free plans. I need to upgrade my plan for me to access these features. 

Monthly Email Sends are Limited to 120,000

For other ESPs like Klaviyo, I get to enjoy the unlimited email sends for my paid plan. But for Mailchimp, despite having a premium plan, monthly email sends are limited to 120,000. This is quite disappointing especially when your business grows and needs to send more than 120,000 emails per month.

Limited Customer Support

Having reliable customer support makes me at ease because whatever issues I may encounter, I can easily ask for some assistance. But for Mailchimp, their customer support is not that responsive and impressive. Limited support is only offered to free plans. And although you are paying for their plans, certain supports are only available for premium plans. 

Best MailChimp Alternative

With the latest news about Mailchimp reducing their free plan down to 500 subscribers and just 1,000 email sends per month, this is starting to make MailChimp less attractive as an email marketing software. I would highly recommend these other MailChimp alternatives instead.

Vbout

Possibly the best marketing automation software in my opinion. It has one of the most sophisticated marketing automation capabilities around, comparable to Klaviyo. You can direct automation flows from one workflow to another, essentially even creating a loop. It allows direct WooCommerce integration and product blocks. Not to mention the social media features like scheduler and inbox, task management, forms and landing pages.

UseInbox

One of the most affordable MailChimp alternatives around. They are an email marketing software that still offers unlimited email sending and you only pay for the number of contacts.

Final Thought

If you are just starting up, using Mailchimp’s free plan is just fine. But if you want to earn more money through email marketing, you should not waste your time with Mailchimp and get Klaviyo instead. Klaviyo’s free plan works much better and is likely to give you a better ROI. Even for the free plan, you can have better segmentation and automation, get detailed analytics, as well as multivariate test and A/B test your email campaigns. 

For me, Mailchimp is not useful at all for email marketing campaigns and there is no point in using it. Subscribing to an email service platform that would not give you a better ROI is just a waste of time and effort. The only reason I would think of using Mailchimp is to use it on a list of cold to warm leads that you are unsure of before moving them on to a hot list on Klaviyo to save a few bucks.