Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 5
Author: A Leung

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Mailchimp is being used in our organization as a marketing campaign tool, which we will send emails to our own contacts about various update of our company. It is solely used by the marketing department. We wanted to have email marketing tool like the Mailchimp to raise the level of automation for our marketing activities, and hence increase the productivity of our electronics marketing.

Pros and Cons

Online web interface.
Responsive and quick operations.
Easy import tools for contacts.

Not many options for keeping list into categories and types.
Misleading pricing scheme which easily made people confused.
Very picky and troublesome for the contact reviewing process.

Return on Investment

Negative, needs a lot of time to solve the contacts problems.
Positive, tools made template nice.
Positive, lots of automation can be executed.

Alternatives Considered

Sendinblue

Comparing with Sendinblue, Mailchimp wins in the user interface department by quite a lot. The website site online interface is very easy to use, full of tools and function and yet very responsive to the user's every input. While the Sendinblue's user interface seems like more old fashioned and laggy.

Usability

Once again the Mailchimp has a wonderful intuitive user interface which responses quickly and in an ideal way, but it is the policy and mechanism behind all these that made the overall experience down a bit. When you use like 5 minutes to create a campaign but then the judging process may takes days, there is something not right at the back end.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

We have tried to use the so called all-in-one marketing platform of Mailchimp, but the more we dig in the more trouble we found ourselves into. This is because there are many different gates and guards for each part of the all-in-one marketing platform, in order to utilize full function of all marketing activities, you got to make sure your contacts and super clean and addicted to your company.

Lessons for Success

Well, during the process of setting up the Mailchimp, I've learned that even if there are many good things in their website and many different tools, if they are not usable then it is very frustrating. The feeling is like you have a super laser machine gun but they don't give you the password for the safety switch of the trigger.

Likelihood to Recommend

While there are lots of good things about the fancy online user interface, like easy to find icons and options, fast and responsive buttons on the website, easy to use email templates tool, the major down side of the Mailchimp is when you have your contacts all ready and uploaded, it keeps asking various kinds of questions to judge whether your contacts are clean. I would see this as a general unfaithful way to treat customers.

All-in-one but not all to be used Marketing Tools for Mailchimp

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp