Mailchimp review

• Popular email marketing software
• List management, campaign creation and optimisation features
• Automation features to easily create dynamic and optimised email campaigns

 

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms, and has been providing marketers with an easy way to set-up and run email campaigns since 2001.

Mailchimp was designed to be a simpler and cheaper version than the oversized, expensive and mostly confusing email platforms at the time, giving small businesses access to the same intuitive and high-end email tools to compete with bigger competitors.

Since then the platform has developed and now offers a wide range of email and marketing automation tools that are affordable and easy-to-use.

Mailchimp features

Although it started out as a straightforward email platform to send simple HTML emails to a subscriber list, over the years Mailchimp has grown into a dynamic and email and marketing automation engine.

Its full list of features can be broken down into the following categories:

• Create
• Connect
• Automate
• Optimise

Create

Mailchimp makes it easy for you to create and launch effective marketing campaigns, whether your goal is to increase sales, grow your audience base or build brand recognition.

As well as creating professional email templates, you can also create and launch ads across Google, Facebook and Instagram, build landing pages and more - all without leaving the Mailchimp dashboard.

Connect

One of the big advantages of using Mailchimp is that it integrates with almost every other major software tool, which can help inform and enhance your existing marketing and CRM strategies.

Some of the major tools Mailchimp integrates with are:

• Salesforce
• Eventbrite
• WooCommerce
• Shopify
• PrestaShop
• Magento
• Zapier

Automate

Mailchimp's automation tools are designed to help you send the right marketing message to the right people at the right time.

This could be simple automation like sending welcome emails to new subscribers that have an optimised sales message depending on their age, location etc... or turning your blog RSS feed into an automatic weekly email keeping your subscribers up to date with your brand.

Mailchimp also has more advanced automation options such as sending abandoned cart emails, product retargeting emails and more.

Optimise

Whether you are running a small email campaign or a large-scale brand building project, you need to be able to see what's working and what's not - and adapt your strategy based on reliable data.

With Mailchimp's optimisation tools you can gain valuable insights into everything from what email template/messages are driving sales, and which ones are losing subscribers.

Segment your audience, run A/B tests and personalise your marketing messages to produce better results and increase your ROI.

Mailchimp pricing

Unlike many of their competitors, Mailchimp has a fairly straightforward pricing structure organised into three packages: Free, Grow and Pro.

Free

The free account lets you manage up to 2,000 subscribers and send a total of 12,000 emails per month. However, your emails will have the branded Mailchimp footer on them, but you do get access to just about all of Mailchimp's other features.

If you're just starting out in email marketing and want a free, easy-to-use package of high-end tools, a free Mailchimp package is ideal.

Grow - from $10 per month

The price of the Grow package depends on how many subscribers you have. The amount of emails you can send per month is unlimited, and you get full access to all of Mailchimp's features.

Pro - from $199 per month

The Pro account is designed for more advanced users and big agencies, and provides access to the more advanced set of Mailchimp's automation tools.