Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 10
Author: Ron Rothstain

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Mailchimp to publish and disseminate our weekly newsletters to our students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members. As far as I know, it is only being used by one other department within our school, besides ours. For us, the business solutions it addresses is it provides a easy solution to create and produce newsletters and disseminate it to our community of over 5,000 people. It is easy to add text, photos, etc. and as the publisher, I have access to identify who has opened the newsletter and who has not.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use and updates to application have been very customer focused.
Love the amount of services you receive from them at absolutely no cost to you. You can add up to 2,000 subscribers for free.
Compatibility with our CRM and HubSpot which enables us to target our email marketing efforts.
Great customer service. Any time issues arose or questions needed to be addressed, their customer service team was very responsive and helpful.
Outstanding email analytics which allows us to measure many metrics for our email marketing campaign.

Cons

I wish that the uploaded files were easier to manage in that I would like to delete older versions of uploaded files that I no longer need. However, they are "layered" in the Content Manager section and I am not able to un-layer them to delete versions I do not need.
It can get expensive quickly, particularly if you have over 2,000 subscribers which we do (close to 5,000 subscribers).
Sometimes the formatting of an email newsletter-type communication can be tricky for a novice on Mailchimp, but after doing it once or twice, you get the hang of it and it becomes much easier.

Return on Investment

Keeps our community engaged which has increased contributions and attendance for our departmental events.
Allows us to profile people in our community who are making a significant difference.
Reduced time and effort spent on generating newsletters/correspondence.

Alternatives Considered

Constant Contact

Mailchimp is much better. It's a perfect combination of a boutique platform and a legacy system like Constant Contact. They have a stellar free-level package (up to 2,000 addresses) that makes them a no-brainer go-to for any organization or department. Also, their customer support team, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the best teams I have dealt with on the corporate level because of how responsive they are to any issues an user may have.

Usability

Overall, my favorite thing about MailChimp's product is its great usability. It makes collecting emails so easy that anyone can create an invitation and schedule a blast, with this resulting in the growth of his business leads in short time. Also, based on the statistic report, you can refine and optimize your campaigns, so they become more effective.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

Mailchimp's platform has enabled our business to market smarter so we can grow faster. As an example, we have used the platform to send marketing emails and automated messages, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online to our clients which has allowed our user base to more then double since implementing the product.

Lessons for Success

Increasing client engagement with our different products. Previously, many of our clients were not active participants in our programs. By creating marketing campaigns and establishing regular newsletter communication with our clients, we have realized over 80% increase in client interactions (emails, phone calls, social media contacts, etc.). The most important lessons I learned were using the templates provided and personalizing it for our usage. That took some time to make the templates fit what we were doing.

Other Software Used

HubSpot, SurveyMonkey, Google Drive

Likelihood to Recommend

Mailchimp is absolutely ideal for corresponding with customers/clientele. Not only is Mailchimp very affordable for businesses with limited budgets, it is a great way to manage and store the likely smaller customer lists those businesses have. In my personal experience, I have loved the way the "unsubscribe" feature works with Mailchimp. It notifies you as the user when and why someone requests to be unsubscribed from future correspondence, and ensures they are actually removed from your Mailchimp list. Along those same lines, mailing out to a list on a spreadsheet and/or directly from an email account often results in the message being flagged as spam/junk for recipients. You also often have limits as to how many addresses you can send a message to at one time, creating additional time and work for the user. Mailchimp does it all for you with one click of the button. Not only that, you can review analytics including how many people have opened the email, how many additional clicks links within the email have gotten, how many emails were undeliverable, and more. It is just so user-friendly. Can get pricey if you have a large subscriber list (over 2,000).

Mailchimp Feature Ratings

Using Mailchimp

Users and Roles

8 - They cover many different facets of our organization. Some work in an administrative capacity, others work in alumni relations and are responsible for outreach to our alumni community. Finally, others, such as myself work in an academic capacity keeping our respective departmental communities updated with what is new and going on in our department.

Support Headcount Required

People who are very customer focused and are patient to resolve questions and concerns that users may have. These professionals should have the technical skills and product competencies to be able to solve any questions we, as users, have of the product. Also, in instances where we reach out via email, instead of over the phone, they should be extremely responsive to our questions and provide prompt responses.

Professional and easy way to send to the masses!