Is MailChimp the Right Marketing Tool for Your Business?
July 20, 2015

Is MailChimp the Right Marketing Tool for Your Business?

Sherri Kesinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MailChimp

MailChimp is a fabulous email marketing program that is very user friendly, easy to get started and FREE for up to 2000 contacts! This makes it very easy, particularly for small businesses, to get started with email marketing. MailChimp also integrates very well with WordPress and plugins such as OptinMonster to help grow your list.
  • Free for up to 2000 contacts (excluding autoresponder functionality)
  • Easy to design; great tutorials
  • Integrates well with WordPress
  • Advise creating group segments for targeted marketing as MailChimp only allows sending to 1 "list" at a time.
  • MailChimp is very reputable and takes spam seriously, which is great. However, this can mean that with an older list, MailChimp can get touchy about higher than normal bounce rates. If your bounce rate is too high, MailChimp will lock the account and require explanations about where you obtained your list, when you emailed to them last, whether they opted in to hear from you, etc.
  • Easy (and free) to get started.
  • Helps with sales funnel in regard to seeing who opened (interested), who clicked (very interested), who bounced (good reason to follow up), etc. Gives you the tools to see what topics are resonating with your audience, what they are clicking on, etc. so you can provide more of what your audience likes.
  • Once initial template is created, MailChimp makes emailing your list very efficient as you can replicate a previously used template and just swap out the content.
  • Constant Contact,Infusionsoft

MailChimp and Constant Contact are on a similar level as far as functionality and cost. A few differences to note:

MailChimp is more strict on bounce and spam rates than Constant Contact.

MailChimp is free for up to 2000 contacts (excluding auto responder functionality). Constant Contact usually provides a brief trial period before payment is required, but there are not "free" accounts with Constant Contact.

Infusionsoft is much more robust and costly than MailChimp. It offers more of a seamless solution for companies that need email marketing, CRM, ecommerce and fairly extensive ways of building if this, then that campaigns. Infusionsoft also requires a much larger investment compared to platforms such as MailChimp.

This is a great platform for small businesses / entrepreneurs on a limited budget to get started with email marketing. It works well "out of the box" with clean designs, user friendly layout and great WordPress integration, plus it's free to get started if you're working with fewer than 2000 contacts.

However, if your business is mid to large in size and you require greater integration with CRM and list segmenting, you may want to consider some other platforms.

Mailchimp Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
10
Dynamic content
Not Rated
Ability to test dynamic content
Not Rated
Landing pages
Not Rated
A/B testing
8
Mobile optimization
10
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
9
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
5