Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 8
Author: Heide Rembold

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Mailchimp to keep track of email subscribers, send out monthly newsletters, track analytics from campaigns, and a few other odds and ends from time to time. It has been absolutely amazing, simple to use, and a huge help in solving the problem of staying connected with my community, especially during times of social distancing and things changing at a rapid pace.

Pros and Cons

Save email templates you’ve created
Keep contact emails / groups
Make automated email sending easy
Provide suggestions for different email needs

Functionality of adding and moving items to an email can be difficult
Ability to upload personal fonts
Saving the template / email easier

Return on Investment

Reaching multiple members of my community / audience at once
Tracking analytics to monitor success and popularity of certain items
Giving subscribers the option to remain subscribed or unsubscribe as they see fit

Alternatives Considered

Ascend and by Wix

I’ve only tried two (Wix and one other I can’t remember the name of). Mostly, I liked the layout and easy use of Mailchimp in comparison to the other platforms I looked at. They were just a bit more stiff and limited and made the process drag out longer. Mailchimp made it easier!

Usability

Mostly it’s great! The small things I mentioned (difficulty with the drag and drop, inability to upload fonts, and the lack of auto-saving when working on a campaign) are the few things that kept the rating at an 8 rather than a 10. There are a lot of good features it has that outweigh the not-so-good ones.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

Honestly, I haven’t really integrated anything else! I’d love to try that in the near future, but for the time being, I’ve only used it for the email campaign writing, editing, sending, and tracking portion. I don’t actually know a whole lot about the other aspects of it quite yet.

Lessons for Success

I’ve been successful in finding the “sweet spot” to send emails and in maintaining a fairly high subscriber rate. I’ve learned quite a few things along the way, mostly things that help with email marketing and marketing in general (i.e., popular ways to present links, good photos, good sending times, et cetera).

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Mailchimp go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Mailchimp again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Mailchimp has been great overall, especially against the few other email platforms I have looked through. Once you get to know it, it’s very easy to send and monitor email campaigns, segment audiences, and read reports. I can’t speak much for extremely large organizations, but it’s been working great for my small business quite well.

Great Platform for Email Campaigns!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp