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A Simple, Cost-Effective Marketing Email Solution for Small Businesses
Updated January 08, 2020

A Simple, Cost-Effective Marketing Email Solution for Small Businesses

Tom Pick | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp

I use MailChimp for my own business as well as for several clients. It's generally used by marketing to both help build an opt-in email list for the company to use as well to send out emails on either a pre-scheduled or ad hoc basis. It helps us stay in front of prospects and nurture leads throughout the sales process.
  • Provides a pop-up form to collect site visitor email addresses.
  • Helps build your opt-in email list using different forms.
  • Makes it easy to schedule regular communications, such as weekly blog roundups.
  • Could use more flexibility in designing pop-up forms.
  • More sophisticated segmentation and auto email sequences.
  • Simpler UI.
  • Has helped grow my opt-in email list by 50% in the past year.
  • Makes it easy for me to track progress in terms of opens and click-through rate.
  • Saves 2-3 hours every week over producing manual blog roundup emails.
Mailchimp is cost-competitive and the easiest to use tool among these alternatives. It has the simplest interface for design, is simplest to use for setting up automated regularly scheduled messages such as weekly blog roundups that are automatically created and sent out, and it has the best functionality for creating pop-up forms to help collect email addresses from website visitors.
Like most email service providers, the MailChimp interface is fairly simple overall but has a few quirks you need to get used to. Each system does certain things in its own way, and MailChimp is no exception. But the processes of managing lists is pretty intuitive, and the functionality for adding "list builder" elements like pop-ups to your website is elegantly designed.
We were able to get rid of two WordPress plugins (one for sending automated emails of blog posts and one for creating pop-up and slide-in subscription boxes for list building), which was great. Fewer plugins means faster load time and easier site maintenance. In addition, the MailChimp pop-up boxes are more mobile-friendly than the WordPress plugin was.
It's simplified tasks like list building and also made it more effective; our opt-in list has grown faster since switching to MailChimp pop-up and slide-in subscription elements. The biggest thing though is the increase in efficiency; once the design was done, we're able to send out professionally formatted every week with zero manual effort. One key lesson is always be testing. Test different designs for subscription forms, and even when one works well, mix it up so it doesn't get stale with repeat site visitors.
Mailchimp has broad applicability across departments and industries. It's probably not the best choice for large, multi-product organizations with very complex needs for segmentation and features such as conditional branching based on recipient actions, but it's ideal for solopreneurs and small businesses with less than 10,000 contacts and relatively simple needs.

Mailchimp Feature Ratings

7.7
WYSIWYG email editor
9
Dynamic content
8
Ability to test dynamic content
5
Mobile optimization
9
Email deliverability reporting
9
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
5
Lead Management ()
Not Rated
Campaign Management ()
Not Rated
Social Media Marketing ()
Not Rated
8.0
Standard reports
8
Platform & Infrastructure ()
Not Rated

Using Mailchimp

2 - We are both in marketing, but use MailChimp for two different sites. One is focused on digital marketing, the other on live event marketing for businesses and non-profits. We have also used MailChimp in the past to deliver training as a scheduled set of weekly lessons people could sigh up for. Again, the automation was very efficient.
1 - Honestly, there is very little support required. The design is easy to do, list maintenance is almost fully automated though occasionally something comes up that has to be handled manually (due to our processes, not a shortcoming of MailChimp), and again, we like to mix up the pop-up subscription box designs, so that takes some ongoing work. But it's not difficult.
  • Marketing
  • Training
  • List building
  • eBook download promotions
  • Sponsored promotions
  • A paid subscription delivery service
So many reasons. MailChimp is reliable, saves us a lot of time and effort, it's easy to set up and maintain, and it's a great value compared to competitors in the market. Also, MailChimp makes the effort to stay current and continue to enhance their base offering to make it even better and keep up with market trends.

Evaluating Mailchimp and Competitors

Yes - MailChimp was a direct replacement for two WordPress plugins, Subscribe2 and Sumo. Subscribe2 was no longer being maintained regularly but even if it was, the automated emails were very plain. MailChimp offers better deliverability plus a more attractive, professional-looking design for our regular messages. The subscription pop-ups work as well as Sumo on desktops and better on mobile devices.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
If I had to specify a single most important factor it would be value, which to me is the combination of features and price. Alternatives either cost a little less but offer a lot less, or provide more functionality but at a higher price. MailChimp is hard to beat for what you get compared to what you spend.
If I had more time, I probably would have evaluated more products in comparison to MailChimp. I kept the competitive set fairly small and limited to some of the more popular, well-known choices. There may possibly be a newer or lesser-known alternative that offers a better overall value, but it wasn't the extra time and effort in our search.