Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 9
Author: Vicki Lesage

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use MailChimp internally and also recommend it to our clients, where appropriate. It's a great way for clients to get into email marketing with minimal commitment as they learn the ropes and grow their subscriber list. As their needs and subscriber base grows, MailChimp can grow with them. Internally, just our marketing department uses it, and we find the same is true with our clients. MailChimp helps solves the business problem of how to stay in touch with your audience reliably and affordable.

Pros and Cons

Mobile-friendly email templates -- You can always trust that MailChimp's templates will work well across the most common email clients and devices. Much more efficient than hand-coding!
Easy-to-use WYSIWYG editors -- You can do almost anything you want in an email with MailChimp's easy WYSIWYG interface.
Customizing the sign-up process -- You can brand each page and make it look good while still keeping it streamlined.

I think the pop-ups (to encourage users to sign up to your mailing list) could have more flexibility in their design. I was designing one the other day and it had limited choices for the image sizes, so I had to play around with it quite a bit to get it to look good.
It's great that they now integrate with Facebook Ads but the reporting is really basic and I find it hard to make changes mid-campaign. For example, I have not been able to find aggregate stats -- I have to hover over the number of each day in the chart and add up the stats for the month. And you cannot extend a campaign more than 3 days before it ends, so you better remember to mark your calendar and update it before it ends with you!
The list segmenting is pretty basic. I can do a few of the things I want but nothing too complex at the same time.

Return on Investment

It has not had a direct impact on our ROI but has allowed us personally to stay in front of our clients more easily.
Some of our clients have seen great results with their email campaigns; I can't share exact stats but an e-commerce client of ours regularly sees a spike in sales after sending a campaign.
Another one of our clients had a good experience with their automated drip campaign, allowing them to keep communicating with prospects.

Alternatives Considered

I've used other email marketing platforms in the past:
- Campaign Monitor is good and I like their list features better than MailChimp, but I find MailChimp easier to use and less expensive (though Campaign Monitor is still very affordable).
- Emma has excellent customer service and also has a nice user interface. They're very comparable to MailChimp in many ways except again, MailChimp is less expensive. However, Emma is very reasonably priced and could be the right fit for slightly larger companies or those who are looking for that extra level of support.

Usability

I would have given it a higher rating a while ago, but some of the recent changes make it harder to find things. "List" is now called "Audience" and it's almost too broad; I'd rather be able to drill into an individaul list and see what is going on with each (who is subscribed, which forms I have set up, etc.). In the same vein, it takes lots of clicks to get to things that seem like they should be easier to find. If you want to change the default MailChimp logo that appears at the bottom of your emails and sign up pages, there are 3 different places you need to do so, none of which are immediately obvious. Creating emails is relatively easy, though.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

We haven't really used the all-in-one plaform capabilities, other than Facebook advertising. Some of our clients just don't need those services, while others already have other tools in place to handle that. I would like to give a few of them a try at some point, but we (and our clients) just haven't had the need yet.

Lessons for Success

I think one of the biggest successes we have with MailChimp with our clients is simply the fact that we DO it. It's easy to get up and running with MailChimp, and because of that, our clients are actually able to get a taste of email marketing. Many other providers are daunting and it has kept them from even trying until now. However, as MailChimp has changed their pricing model, we've learned a few lessons. Since it's more likely you'll have to start paying sooner (which is fair, MailChimp is a business after all!) it means our clients need to give a little more thought to how they will use it and what is most important when getting started. They're not necessarily opposed to paying, but if you're going to start paying a monthly charge, you want to be sure you're using all the features. Previously it seemed easier to get up and running with a free account, and that would last our clients at least a little while (enough time to feel it out and be sure they wanted to stick with not just MailChimp but email marketing in general) before committing to ongoing monthly payments.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think MailChimp is perfect for small business and newbies because it's the easiest email marketing platform around. You can get up and running quickly and affordably (in most cases even free) and try things out. So many times clients think they want a huge marketing automation platform, and while that could be right for them, I think it's better to start with small, achievable goals and go from there. Send your first email. Get your first subscriber form in place. Learn the ropes and see what works for your business. Then decide if you want to upgrade to MailChimp's more robust features or perhaps graduate to a different (more expensive) platform. For a large business or one with a lot of experience in email marketing, I still think MailChimp can be great because it's very powerful and integrates with nearly everything.

Users and Roles

2 - The people who use MailChimp in our company have multi-faceted roles, but the main aspect we use MailChimp for is marketing and CRM.

Support Headcount Required

2 - Design, development, copywriting, and marketing

Business Processes Supported

CRM - staying in touch with our existing clients
Marketing - letting our existing clients know about our services

Likelihood to Renew

We like MailChimp, it's affordable, and are looking forward to trying out some of its new features. We've tried many other email marketing platforms and, at the time, none met our needs as much as MailChimp. Even if the competitors have improved, it would take a lot for us to switch from MailChimp because (a) we're familiar with it and (b) we're happy with it.

Products Replaced

Yes - In the past, we used Campaign Monitor for email marketing. We did like it, but we moved to MailChimp since it's what we recommend for our clients and we wanted to know the product inside out so we could be more helpful to our clients. Our main goal was to find something that was easy to get started with and easy to stick with.

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Usability
Vendor Reputation

Cost was a biggie for us simply for scalability. If we were going to recommend it to lots of clients, many of whom are small businesses, we needed to be sure it was something that wouldn't cost a lot -- at least not right off the bat. We wanted something that could grow with our clients, not a hugely monthly invoice from Day 1.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I am happy with our evaluation process and wouldn't change anything. I feel we checked for the things that were most important and went off those.

Implementation Rating

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.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was minimal

Implementation Issues

None

Mailchimp Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Problems get solved No escalation required Support understands my problem	None

Premium Support

No - We, and most of our clients, do not pay for premium support. If you do pay, you get great service. If you don't pay, you're pretty much relegated to the Help articles. As an experienced user, I can usually answer most questions myself. So if I have a questions, it's often one not covered in the Help articles. It would be nice to have the premium support, but it ends up being a bit too expensive when the majority of our clients (us included) only send one email per month. It just doesn't make sense financially.

Bug Resolution

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Technical support not required Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	Unnecessarily complex

Easy Tasks

Create an email template
Sending an email campaign

Difficult Tasks

Editing lists (or "Audience" as it's now called)
Finding where to make specific changes to an account, a form, a list, etc. -- certain things are quite buried

MailChimp is easy to use and affordable -- you'll be up and running in no time!

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp