Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used by the Marketing department for announcements, news letters, webinars, event and review promotions. It is also used by Product for feature updates and end of year emails, sent to our over 12,000 clients. It addresses our need to send emails to hundreds at a time and track conversions and engagement.

Pros and Cons

Organizing tags in cohorts.
Tracking and analytics.
Beginner level editing.

Intermediate level editing. It is incredibly annoying trying to make an email look nice that doesn't fit in to one of their pre-populated templates if you don't know how to code.
If you do know how to code it is still frustrating getting anything dynamic involved, even when using their merge tags.
Customer Journey (may still be in Beta) is not exactly user friendly. If you start creating one path, and then want to change the order, you basically have to start over.

Return on Investment

Decent for maintaining communication with existing clients.
Able to keep our list of qualified non-users updated.
No real measurable ROI apart from that.

Alternatives Considered

Intercom, Yesware, Marketo and Pardot

Mailchimp is what I inherited from my predecessor in the marketing department. It is more specialized into email marketing than Pardot or Marketo (though both have other benefits that make them really stick out for overall marketing automation), and is vaguely less expensive. Yesware is still good for the daily cold email blasts to multiple recipients, while Mailchimp is better at anything that includes a stylized email. Intercom, though, while not inherently designed for just email campaigns has actually been incredibly helpful and possibly is now surpassing Mailchimp at my company.

Usability

It's been explained in my previous answers, but the real downfall is the customizability of the templates. It just is so not user-friendly. If you want to move something just a little bit, too bad. If you want to change the font - or god forbid the line height - oh man are you going to want to pull your hair out until you give up and start trying to remember HTML from back in the days of MySpace. Want to use an image as a border? Need to edit that image at all? Say goodbye to the rest of your day. It's hard to describe how something can flip flop between being the MS Paint of email automation AND the Python (I'm not a coder, so insert whatever means "you have to basically be an engineer" here). There is no middle ground in my experience with Mailchimp.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

It pretends to be an all-in-one. It truly is not and I think it's incredible (in-credible. not credible. I'm bad at jokes) that they are presenting themselves as such. There is no world in which I would recommend Mailchimp to someone looking for a all-in-one marketing platform. In fact my company has been looking for all-in-ones, and I am excited that that means we may eliminate the need for Mailchimp. My mind still can't comprehend that they can even claim that.

Lessons for Success

Mailchimp has had minor successes here and there but overall is just lacking some super necessary functionality. Having to get an engineer to push a Mailchimp email campaign through as one-off dynamic emails from mandrill (their sister company I guess) is frustrating, horrible for analytics, and shouldn't be necessary. If I can create merge tags I should be able to use them with confidence. If I have an image and want a text overlay I shouldn't have to take a coding class and work on my prayer to achieve that. My lesson is to research alternatives when inheriting prior tech.

Likelihood to Recommend

Mailchimp is something that everyone thinks will solve their problems, but unless your problems are minuscule or you have someone willing to be the dedicated Mailchimp user and dig incredibly deep into just one platform, then you're going to be frustrated. So for organizations with larger marketing teams (and budget, with all the increased prices lately), this would work well as there are more resources to dedicate to the platform. If you're in a smaller organization with less time and money to allocate, I would shop around.

Monkeying around with Mailchimp- not worth the pun!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp