Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Mailchimp is utilized by my company as the primary means to mass email customers and prospects various notices - whether support notifications of upcoming changes and outages, to announcing new products and trade show marketing material to prospects. Prior to this, these were emailed out from a single account in our system and the contact database was managed via Excel.

Pros and Cons

It is intuitive and easy to get going.
It does a great job managing contacts and allowing people to subscribe/unsubscribe.
The pricing model is budget-friendly.

Sometimes, there may be too much under the hood that can confuse administrators.
Sometimes, integrations with third-party services can be tricky or glitchy.

Return on Investment

It has saved us countless hours managing contact databases for marketing and support.
It has rules and procedures built-in to help make sure we are maintaining privacy compliance.
It's fast and easy to use - critical notices can be sent out very quickly from concept to execution.

Usability

Much of the system is wizard-driven, so setup and sending out campaigns doesn't require a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of the system. It is a great tool that anyone can pick up and start using immediately, with enough under the hood to continue to scale out as business needs change.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

We currently integrate the system with our Support CMS and Sales CMS, allowing a single source of truth and tracking for what our contacts are accessing and reading, along with providing us details on what information is of interest to our contact groups. This has helped us refine our material and benefit from shoring up our email blasts.

Lessons for Success

[The] most important lesson for any mass database system is if you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out. Take the time to make sure if you import anything into Mailchimp that it's been cleaned and up-to-date as this will help prevent delivery errors and problems down the road with being flagged by customers as spam.

Key Insights

Do you think Mailchimp delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Mailchimp's feature set?

Yes

Did Mailchimp live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Mailchimp go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Mailchimp again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Mailchimp is ideal for small businesses to large businesses as its feature set and cost make it an appropriate first step for companies wanting to mass contact their base. The initial learning curve is very small, and there [are] enough added features and settings to take advantage of as a company grows. Those looking for tight integration with legacy platforms or very advanced features may need to look at other solutions.

Mass Email Made Easy

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp