Mailchimp is a solid email marketing tool
July 21, 2016

Mailchimp is a solid email marketing tool

Alec Dibble | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with MailChimp

Many department uses Mailchimp to communicate to clients, contractors, and internal employees. The built-in templating feature is used extensively to design responsive newsletter and marketing campaigns. In general, the tool is easy to train and most people can harness it without much trouble. Using mailchimp allows email responsibilities to be shared.
  • It has a very strong responsive email templating system. You can drag and drop different layouts and create good looking emails without development skills.
  • It is very easy to build and save segments using the interface.
  • The reports it generates after a campaign is sent out are well designed and relay much of the information you need for analysis.
  • Mailchimp doesn't do advanced or complicated segmentation so well. It gives you the option with Mailchimp Pro, but it still has one fatal flaw. From my understanding, Mailchimp doesn't re-evaluate the segment conditions on scheduled sends for advanced segments. This means scheduled sends could be sent to an out-of-date segment if the segment isn't manually updated.
  • Doing quality assurance on scheduled campaigns is very hard. Once a campaign is scheduled, there is no way to view segment criteria or the design for QA without the pausing the schedule. This introduces risk as it is possible to reschedule at the wrong time. For people managing a lot of campaigns, being able to QA scheduled campaigns would be very helpful.
  • I felt that Mailchimp's automation features fell short of other email automation tools. They didn't give you enough control to build triggers and workflow for customized business cases, only a few general ones.
  • The inability to QA scheduled campaigns without rescheduling has caused campaign errors to occur, which I believe has had a negative ROI in those cases.
  • The ease of use has reduced the need for engineers to participate in low volume and internal email campaigns, which is a positive ROI.
  • The templating system allows low volume campaigns and newsletters to look professional and responsive.
I believe Mailchimp is great for simple newsletters and campaigns. It is easy to use for non-developers and has a clean interface. For more advanced marketing operations, it can fall short. Factors like the inability to QA scheduled campaigns and the simplistic automation features make it a bad fit for those running sophisticated email operations.

Mailchimp Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
10
Dynamic content
6
Ability to test dynamic content
5
A/B testing
6
Mobile optimization
8
Email deliverability reporting
8
List management
7
Triggered drip sequences
4
Dashboards
7
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
5