Mailchimp is the email marketing and marketing automation platform. Most email marketing platforms tell you how your campaigns perform, but Mailchimp goes a step beyond and tells you why by analyzing the data from half a billion emails sent through the platform every day to offer personalized recommendations for improving content, targeting, automations, and driving revenue using emails
$0
per month
Visible Intelligence, discontinued
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Visible Intelligence, developed by Visible Technologies and formerly offered under the name Cymfony, was a listening tool with an analytics dashboard. Visible was acquired by Cision, and later discontinued.
With Mailchimp we are able to revive and enhance our personal connect with the customers. The easy-to-use tools allows us to personalize the email content, segregate and target important leads & send relevant messages. Also, it offers interactive analysis on the performance of a particular campaign. We can judge the effectiveness of our mailers in real time.
The only time I have trouble recommending Visible is to my clients of specific markets. We work with several McDonald's co-ops and we can't narrow our searches to a specific region for example, to the state of Iowa or Kansas City region.
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
The way the cloud of related terms, a.k.a "social media differentiating terms", was organized into a chart with the frequency of appearance was extremely helpful. Each term was also a link to other terms that may be related to your research as well, which was insightful.
Visible Intelligence allows you to view the differentiating terms across platforms. This is particularly a useful tool when trying to compare and understand what is being said and where exactly (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Most of the social media analytical tools allow you to view "sample content". However, and I find this extremely useful in many cases, Visible Intelligence allows you to directly connect with the person that posted the content. Because of such feature more clarification can be accomplished.
The interface remains a cluttered, non-intuitive mess. That's true from the haphazard way features are organized to the actual email layout.
Analytics have never been a priority, and I don't see that changing with Intuit's new ownership. I'm very frustrated over the limited choices for reporting, even when using third-party solutions. If I needed that function, I would not use MailChimp.
I would love to develop a workflow screen that lets me focus on the things that I use all the time. Customizing the interface where the content actually goes into the software would help.
I never understood why we couldn't import a document into a MC template. At best, we're spending time copying-and-pasting from one app into MC.
Firehose terms. I wish there was a place in setting or somewhere that let us know what firehose terms we currently have. To make it really great it would be nice for it to also show a history of what terms we had in the past with dates and the start dates of current firehose terms. I can't tell you how many times we've had to reach out to our rep to let us know what we currently have in place and when you have multiple users in the agency using the tool, it's near impossible to keep track of when changes were made.
Exports, I wish there was a way to have larger exports. And if you can't, an easier way to break down larger exports. For example, say my timeframe is only 1 day and I have over 20,000 results in that day– there is no way for me to export all of those results by breaking it down because my only options are most recent, most relevant, klout, most confident, most influential, most followers, positive, negative. There's no option to break down 1 day by the first 20,000 then the second 20,000 and so on. Instead I have to then manually break it down by media type and hope each one of those is less than 20,000.
Author influence, I know this algorithm is tricky but at the very least I think it could be better explained within the tool so when clients ask questions we can answer them. It could be nice to have some filtering options with this because several authors get a 99 score and it's not valuable information.
Tagging, when tagging content it is extremely annoying that I can't add new tags in the "select tags" drop down. It takes too much time to go in to where I can add new tags and then go back to where I was.
It'd also be nice to have setting for a stream where only a certain folder or folders of tags display. So when I'm in client x's search the only tags that display are client x's instead of all 5 clients and I have to keep scrolling through to find what I need.
Archive, when you hit archive on a post it does nothing. It stays in your search and ends up in all you charts which skews your data. What I do now is I created an actual tag called "archive" (because if I didn't tag it with that and I exported everything nothing in the excel doc tells me I hit Visible's archive button for that result) I export the search, I remove everything I tagged as "archive" in excel and then I manual make charts. When I hit Visible's "archive" button it should be completely removed and if I made a mistake and I want to un-archive it, there should be a section where I can go and see everything I archived and be able to un-archive it.
We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
I loved the way Visible Intelligence was similar yet different from Radian6. Although I have more experience with Radian6, it still wasn't hard to use and get familiar with Visible Intelligence. I personally liked how easy it was to do your "thing" and conduct your analysis using VI. That is plenty of reason for me to consider re-using it in any project that requires social media analysis.
Our team use Mailchimp almost every week. Overall UI is simple for anyone to get started with it. The resource library around using particular features is also there, so we don't have to train our team on this product. We also used a lot of other features as well.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
Mailchimp is a means to an end and a way to stay within GDPR laws. We may not use it if this wasn't a requirement. Other platforms are better for design or management of contacts, but Mailchimp offers that secure storage of data that is required. I have not tried other bulk mail applications, so am unable to compare these.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
Mailchimp has allowed us to communicate effectively with thousands of customers with ease.
Mailchimp's use during our second year of business helped us expand our list of brands considerably (almost 30% YTD) because of regular interactions that we've launched.
Mailchimp ramp-up time is minimal for new users so I can turn things over to junior staff - saving me time and money.
