Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 8
Author: Andie Mace

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Mailchimp to occasionally send out newsletters from our marketing agency, Grow With Studio (owned by and operates under Volusion). We also use it as the preferred platform for our email marketing agency service that we offer to merchants. It is just used across our department, as the internal marketing team for Volusion uses a separate software. I chose Mailchimp as the software to use with our services because I believe it has the most flexibility in terms of business size. We work with a wide variety of businesses, and Mailchimp allows for zero-100 in terms of customization of email design. Additionally, they have pretty extensive capabilities when it comes to automations and forms. That being said, some of the capabilities will be limited based on what software Mailchimp is getting its info from.

Pros and Cons

Great UX for beginners or people without development knowledge, but ability to add in code snippets for more advanced developers.
Ability to have a manage preferences unsubscribe button (rather than a catch-all unsubscribe).
Lots of content/resources to learn from.
Fairly responsive support team (but only on the paid plans, I believe).

I don't think that their Analytics are that impressive.
The UX for their automations is fairly easy for basic automations, but gets rather confusing when considering different paths of actions for longer drip campaigns.
In some of the plans, you might be paying for features you aren't using like advertising. There is no way to just pay for the email marketing component.

Return on Investment

Increased brand trust.
Increase in revenue from a market segment that was not previously being tapped into.

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact

ActiveCampaign does not have as good of a UX in terms of designing emails for people with no coding knowledge. That being said, their field customization and integration with bigger CRM's is pretty good. Constant Contact had a very easy UX for beginners, but little to no customization in terms of email design beyond what is offered in their pre-made templates.

Usability

Mailchimp allows flexibility to accomplish pretty much everything you could want with a basic or even standard email marketing campaign. It only breaks down a bit when getting into really advanced techniques.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

We have not benefitted from it. We haven't really used any of those functions as our company already has processes in place for those different channels and is not ready to change them.

Lessons for Success

I have seen great success with the automations I've implemented with Mailchimp. I've found them to be very reliable. One lesson I learned is to reach out to the support team when you are spending too much time trying to figure something out. They usually have a very simple answer and it will save you a lot of time.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Mailchimp makes a lot of sense for SMB's, but would probably not be the best choice for enterprise level companies who are implementing a lot of really complex automations. Additionally, enterprise level companies might have custom fields that they want to import into Mailchimp and form what I can tell, their capabilities on doing this in an automated way are not as robust as some other platforms. But for SMB's who are starting out with email marketing or who have been doing it for awhile but are still not enterprise level companies, Mailchimp is a great option.

Great ESP for SMB's!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp