Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 10
Author: Joi Brooks

Overall Satisfaction with MailChimp

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Whether you are a small business or manage a shopping site with ecommerce, MailChimp tools and partners can support email marketing efforts. With a drag and drop editor, template library, autoresponders and clean interface, small businesses can deploy welcome messages and schedule regular campaigns without advanced skills. For ecommerce, utilizing segmentation, signup forms with automated functionality, A/B testing and MailChimp's 360 apps help track conversions, incorporate marketing metrics and web analytics, and maintain lifecycle communications.

Case Study: Civic Community Association

A Long Island civic community of 19 regularly sends 2 monthly reminders to members with a FREE MailChimp account. Since deploying messaging through MailChimp, members regularly receive meeting reminders and attendance is up.

Case Study: Book Author

A New York book author manages top-of-mind with monthly trade news to a selected VIP list of 400. Metrics identify solid engagement, book and seminar sales are up!

Case Study: California ecommerce site

Within a very competitive niche, a California ecommerce merchant continues to experiment with A/B tests, segmentation, responsive layouts and MailChimp Pro to support his business marketing efforts.

Pros and Cons

Pros

If you are new to email marketing and don't have the resources of a marketing department or agency, MailChimp can help you get started quickly. Their knowledge base will help you get started and videos are available to learn more.
If you have NO budget and a small list, MailChimp is free! For those starting a business or email marketing for the first time, MailChimp tools support growing marketing efforts into maturity.
The MailChimp community is very large. Finding a solutions partner is easy.

Cons

Support is email or chat based. If you are lucky and articulate your problem can be solved quickly. If you are not an email geek and are not able to document your problems, you may stumble over MailChimp support.

Return on Investment

The workflow is pretty easy to follow, which makes MailChimp a great toolset for a solo marketing effort.
Once you buy into MailChimp, my recommendation is to take advantage of as much functionality as possible. It is reasonable to say that any marketing effort -- whether it is list building, social engagement or transactionaly follow-up -- can succeed once the right tools have been put into place.

Alternatives Considered

iContact and Constant Contact

I recommend MailChimp because of its solid and growing market share. In some cases, small and medium-sized businesses may find the same solutions within Constant Contact, iContact, or MailChimp. It may be a simple matter of preferences that determine which email marketing solution suits their immediate needs. However, for any small or medium-sized business looking for a ESP to partner with over time and with growth in mind, I recommend MailChimp.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

25,000 to 100,000

Using Mailchimp for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Other Software Used

dotMailer, Adestra

Likelihood to Recommend

MailChimp has every potential of providing sophisticated solutions for large businesses. I have recommended MailChimp to smaller businesses, however for a large-sized, mature business, I might offer a number of other email marketing products and providers as alternatives. That is not to say that MailChimp has not kept pace with the industry. It may be that small and medium-sized businesses can mature within the MailChimp toolset, while larger businesses may require tools and services better managed by a range of high-end email marketing providers.

Mailchimp Feature Ratings

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Start-ups will grow with MailChimp