Mailchimp: Automation & Email Platform

Mailchimp has become a go-to email marketing platform among businesses that handle daily email marketing. With a simple interface, Mailchimp helps users create and send elegant-looking emails, integrates with social media networks, and tracks the results of your email marketing campaigns.

When it comes to email deliverability reports, MailChimp has a score of 8.6 out of 10, which measures an email’s ability to be delivered from the sender to their recipients’ inboxes. Mailchimp company’s approaches to delivery are constantly evolving as email deliverability has become a crucial criterion for B2B marketers.

Mailchimp offers a variety of solutions that can help you build lasting relationships with your customers. As a result, improved customer loyalty and repeat purchases drive sales.

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About Mailchimp company

Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Atlanta, MailChimp emerged as an email marketing tool for small businesses that couldn’t afford the oversized, expensive email software of the early 2000s. For over 20 years, empowering users to build, send, and track email campaigns has been MailChimp’s Top Priority.

Mailchimp's goal has always been to help customers grow their businesses by providing the tools, expert insights, and Mailchimp support they need to put their best foot forward. From newsletters to drip campaigns, Mailchimp provides customizable templates and tools.

The platform offers webhooks that enable you to connect your online store or blog with MailChimp so that it can capture order information from each transaction made by customers who have signed up for your newsletter on their respective websites.

Mailchimp integrates various eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Bigcommerce, Magento, etc. to streamline your workflow and enable you to sync customer data. The platform gives you access to marketing data on open rates and click-throughs, custom reporting, and the ability to track subscriber data.

Pressed by their customers to add new channels in addition to email, MailChimp launched a Marketing CRM, social posting, digital ads, shoppable landing pages, postcards, websites, smart content tools, and advanced automation over the past couple of years.

Mailchimp Features

Let’s look at Mailchimp services more closely. 

Email marketing

Being known primarily as an email client, MailChimp offers the basic email marketing features. Users can create plain-text or custom HTML email marketing campaigns enhanced by automation features. MailChimp’s built-in form builder gives users simple and limited design options to easily create and embed web forms into their sites. The Content Optimizer gives users personalized suggestions to improve the copy, layout, and imagery of their emails.

Social media posting and ads

When using MailChimp, marketers can run multichannel social campaigns and target audiences based on their best-performing demographic segments. MailChimp’s Lookalike Audience Finder shows you the people who are most likely to buy your product.

The Facebook Ad Campaigns feature helps marketers promote their email offers to a wider audience by purchasing and creating social ads. Perfect for small businesses, this feature doesn’t require marketers to manage their own Facebook advertising accounts yet. They can stay on their MailChimp accounts and publish ads for Facebook and Instagram. You can see the sources — Facebook ads, Google ads, etc. — that drive traffic the most and are bringing in the most conversions (and which ones aren’t).

The retargeting feature enables users to remind their website visitors about their product while they’re on social media.

Email templates and custom designs

MailChimp’s flexible templates offer three options. First, you can choose from fully designed emails called “themes.” Next, you can customize MailChimp’s pre-designed templates using easy-to-use design tools. Finally, you can code your own custom designs from scratch using MailChimp’s AI-powered Creative Assistant. Marketers manage audiences and campaigns and sync campaign analytics with their database, accessing Mailchimp data and functionality with the Mailchimp API.

MailChimp’s customizable email templates belong to the category of the best email marketing tools on the market and easily let your brand shine with professional-looking email newsletters.

Landing pages and opt-in forms

MailChimp’s built-in landing page builder helps build email lists and market products, using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. The landing page templates are of two kinds: one for email list building and another for product promotion, either of which can be used with the service's free or premium accounts.

Advanced segmentation and personalization

MailChimp's advanced segmentation and personalization capabilities track and segment customers based on transaction details, location, purchase frequency, and more. Marketers can then target different segments with personalized content that will resonate with them.

Automations (Welcome, Abandoned Cart, Product Recommendations, First purchase, Post-Purchase emails, Re-engagement, Product Retargeting, etc.)

The Customer Journey Builder tool automates your customer's journey to deliver relevant content based on behaviors and interactions. Marketers remind customers about products they already want with abandoned cart emails or win back lapsed customers with re-engagement promotions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

MailChimp's CRM tools are essential in helping marketers segment their audiences and communicate with target customers more effectively. Coupled with the ​Increase Traffic to Your Site feature, MailChimp’s CRM helps build stronger relationships with your customers with content that means something to them.

Predictive insights and reporting/analytics

MailChimp's Purchase Likelihood feature gives personalized recommendations based on patterns in customer behavior and estimates of the probability of a future purchase. Real-time reports and built-in analytics tools allow marketers to keep tabs on outreach campaigns, Facebook targeted ads, automation, and more.

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Mailchimp Pros and Cons

Even though MailChimp has become one of the best email marketing tools for many businesses, it deserves a hard, rational look to ensure you made the right choice.  

MailChimp’s strong sides

  • Terrific email template builder. MailChimp empowers small businesses to create professional-looking templates without teams of designers and coders. For users who are new to email marketing, it is a lifesaver.
  • Generous free plan. Given the number of features, options, and functionalities MailChimp’s freemium offers, having 10,000 emails per month is a great bargain for small-scale email marketing efforts. 
  • Outstanding customer service. MailChimp customer support is excellent. Even free accounts can contact support via Mailchimp Assistant or get 30-day email support.  
  • Extra features. MailChimp keeps adding new functionalities over the years, such as landing page integration, drip campaigns, the ability to re-hit those who didn't open an email, and better target segmentation within a list.
  • Thorough reporting. Easy-to-understand reporting formats inform you of everything you need to know about your email marketing campaign performance, including geo-tracking, social media, and Google Analytics integration.

MailChimp’s weaknesses

  • Pricing. Once your contact lists get longer, MailChimp costs get ridiculously high. Anything past 2,000 subscribers is very pricey for most small businesses that don’t use email marketing that often.
  • No free scheduling. Email scheduling used to be available on free plans, but MailChimp recently removed it. Now only paid plans have the scheduling function.
  • The new user interface is confusing. Many Mailchimp reviews refer to the new interface as confusing. Even though the interface looks clean, the navigation isn’t as easy to use as it used to be and some tools are hard to find.

Mailchimp Pricing

Also available as freemium, the MailChimp pricing structure begins at $11 per month per 500 contacts and ends at $1,300 per 200,000 contacts.

However, MailChimp's pricing policies can seem bewildering. You can send up to 12,000 emails per month to less than 2,000 contacts for free. But if you want to get unlimited emails, the cheapest plan of $11 is available only for up to 500 contacts. If you have up to 2,000 subscribers, that cheapest plan will cost you $34 per month.

Each pricing plan – Essential, Standard, and Premium – comes with additional features and extra pay for contacts and the number of emails you can send. Thus, the sliding scale pricing will change according to the number of contacts as follows:

Marketing to 500 contacts will cost $11 for Essential and $17 for Standard; 5,000 contacts - $59 and $90 respectively; 20,000 contacts - $189 and $225; and so on. 

For free, you get Marketing CRM, Creative Assistant, Website Builder, Forms & Landing Pages, and a MailChimp domain. The publishing and automation features are available in all versions.

Premium offers advanced segmentation, comparative reposting, and multivariate testing at the price of $299 for up to 10,000 contacts; each batch of additional 5,000 contacts increases the price.

Mailchimp Support

Depending on which type of payment plan you have, there are different ways to contact MailChimp for help.

If you have a free plan, contact Support via Mailchimp Assistant. New customers have 30-day email support access. If you have a paid plan, 24/7 сhat support or email are available. If you have a Premium plan, you have access to weekday phone support. Some teams, such as Billing and Compliance, are available through email only.

Mailchimp review: Conclusions

The bottom line: If you're looking for an easy way to start creating and sending great newsletters, MailChimp is a perfectly good tool for most English-speaking users. It's easy to use, has a wide range of features, and offers both paid and free plans.

With over 400 Mailchimp integrations available, it has one of the largest available ecosystems of any email marketing tool. They have a wide variety of features, including analytics and social media integration, and their free plan is pretty generous.

However, most MailChimp reviews state that the subscription plans tend to be pretty expensive compared to other similar tools. We recommend looking into Mailchimp alternatives before you sign up with MailChimp — you might find one that better fits your needs!