Mailchimp Review: Everything You Need to know about Mailchimp
Do you know what is the most important thing for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs? It is finding ways to save time so that they can focus on revenue-generating opportunities for their business. The second most important thing is saving money. So here have the solution. Read on this Mailchimp Review.
Mailchimp claims to help small business owners kill two birds with one stone. How? Well, our review explains just that and goes a step further by analyzing whether Mailchimp actually lives up to its claims.
What is Mailchimp?
Ben Chestnut and Mark Armstrong founded Mailchimp in 2001 as a subsidiary of its parent company, Rocket Science Group. In 2021, Mailchimp was acquired for a reported $12 billion by Intuit, a global technology platform that aims to overcome financial challenges faced by customers and small business owners around the world.
How this affects Mailchimp’s future is still uncertain, but as of writing this review, Mailchimp is still an extremely popular email marketing tool that has over 14,000+ new subscribers every day. The company has over 1000+ employees and is based out of Atlanta, GA.
Mailchimp Review
Mailchimp offers a free-to-use tool that allows for up to 10,000 emails a month to a subscriber list of up to 2,000 customers. Moreover, this tool comes with its own built-in CRM and plenty of other features that allow for the automation of various marketing processes. It also allows for integration with other software or tools you might use.
Mailchimp makes email newsletter marketing an easy and quick process for business owners by offering both a free-to-use, pay-as-you-go, or premium membership model. A testament to its success is the fact that over 12 million businesses rely on Mailchimp for their marketing, automation, and growth needs.
Check out this Beginner User Guide for Mailchimp:
Who Is Mailchimp For?
For those wanting an easy-to-use platform where they can create marketing content and send it out to customers on their subscriber list with a few simple clicks of the button, you can’t go wrong with Mailchimp. However, that’s not all that Mailchimp can do for your business. This tool is far more versatile than simply an automated email marketing tool.
Mailchimp allows its users to receive online payments, automate sales and marketing processes, market to existing clients, and find new potential customers under one umbrella. This makes Mailchimp the go-to option for an all-in-one marketing platform for small to medium-sized businesses.
What Does Mailchimp Include?
Mailchimp offers easy-to-use tools to help build landing pages, create targeted email ad campaigns, send marketing emails and automated messages, facilitate reporting and analytics, and most importantly, help you sell more online.
It allows for over 250+ app integrations, an awesome feature for business owners involved with e-commerce, blogging, or nonprofit businesses. It offers a variety of tools to build up a business’s email subscriber list, which is essential to business growth.
Mailchimp also offers a ton of lead capture campaign tools to rake in more customers while keeping your existing ones informed, happy, and content. What’s more, Mailchimp offers its built-in CRM, allowing users to set up customer profiles and even assign customers a lifetime value or priority status on premium plans.
Recently, new features such as appointment booking and service listing pages have been added to Mailchimp, making it an even more versatile tool than ever before.
Mailchimp Pricing Plans
Mailchimp offers its user a choice of four plans; Premium, Standard, Essential, and Free. Mailchimp also offers pay-as-you-go plans for business owners that require flexibility when it comes to their marketing needs.
The Free Plan
The free plan costs $0 and is ideal for entrepreneurs and new business owners who are looking for cost-effective tools to help them build the foundations or building blocks necessary for their business to succeed.
This plan includes all the basics you will need to get your business up and going. With the free plan, you can have a contact list of up to 2,000 customers and can send out 10,000 emails per month.
You also get access to basic email templates, single-step autoresponders, emails for abandoned carts, landing page building tools, integration with e-commerce, and a business email inbox.
You also get CRM access, allowing users to create contact profiles and set up tags and segments. The free plan includes a Mailchimp advertisement at the footer of all emails sent, while the paid plans do not.
The Essential Plan
This plan starts at $11 a month and is great for users who require added support when managing their email newsletters. You get everything that comes with the Free Plan plus the following:
- Up to 3 users/audiences
- Access to all email templates
- 500 contacts
- 500,000 email limit per month
- Chat and email support
- A/B Testing
- Scheduling Software
The Standard Plan
Starting at $17 a month, this plan is ideal for businesses that require insights on how to grow their customer base and get into the real nitty-gritty of how and to whom they market their products.
The plan offers everything that comes with the essential plan, plus the following:
- Multi-step automation
- A max. of 5 users/audiences
- Social post scheduling
- Social media retargeting
- 2 additional advanced features – time zone delivery and predicted demographics
- CRM allows access to features such as customer lifetime value, audience finder, and a customer’s purchase likelihood that can help prioritize your leads and sales efforts.
The Premium Plan
Businesses that are larger and require a lot more customization and other advanced features to help them manage their email marketing campaigns would find the premium plan most suited to their needs.
The plan starts at $299 a month and offers everything the standard plan does, along with several additional advanced features:
- Unlimited email sending limit
- Unlimited users/audiences
- Advanced segmentation
- 2 additional advanced features – comparative reporting and multivariate testing
Premium plan subscribers can also benefit from services offered by Eve Pacific Media.
Pay-As-You-Go
You can choose to additionally buy added contacts for any of the plans you may be subscribed for. Mailchimp allows for a maximum of 50,000 contacts which will cost $640 on top of whatever you pay monthly.
The Benefits Of Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers its users plenty of benefits whether you have a paid subscription or not. One of its most important benefits is the fact that it lets you keep track of all your potential contacts and ensure that they are aware of everything new and exciting happening in your business.
The Free Plan is also very generous in terms of its features for no cost! The email templates are also modern and can be customized in many ways using a simple-to-use, non-buggy interface. Finally, it allows you to have everything you need to streamline your email marketing campaign efforts under one umbrella.
Users can go from creating their perfect email newsletters to seamlessly sending them out to all their contacts without having to go anywhere else. With integration to e-commerce, social media, Google Analytics, and much more, you can manage your business marketing needs while tracking your growth and progress.
Setting milestones and targets and doing everything you can to achieve them is what drives and motivates business owners. With Mailchimp’s friendly chimp by your side, seeing your marketing efforts bear fruit can be so rewarding!
The Drawbacks Of Mailchimp
As your business grows and you need more contacts or a higher email sending limit the paid plans can get a bit pricey. You might have to pay a lot more if you have a growing number of subscribers.
The other drawback is that recently Mailchimp removed the email scheduling feature on their free plan. Even though the plan is still generous in its offering, not having this feature makes it less desirable as scheduling emails manually is time-consuming.
Furthermore, the free plan doesn’t offer any email or live support which can be very frustrating for new users. Also, due to the strict limitations on the number of lists you can create, you need to be meticulous with organizing and managing your contacts to ensure you get the most out of your campaign.
Verdict – Is Mailchimp Worth It?
Mailchimp is an excellent tool for business owners seeking to grow and streamline their business’s marketing needs. The Free Plan offers many features for those of us who are just getting started and don’t have a big budget to spend on marketing.
However, when it comes to paid plans, that’s where things start falling apart. The premium plan is expensive at nearly $300 a month. There are competitors out there that will offer unlimited contacts and email sending at much lower costs.
So, unless you require complex contact segmentation, advanced reporting systems, or features such as multivariate testing, the premium plan is simply not worth it for most small business owners.
There is no denying that the interface and tools offered are some of the best you can find for email marketing. However, the Free Plan would be nice to include features such as live support and email scheduling.
