Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 4
Author: Chad Wagner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Mailchimp to send product updates, surveys, and marketing emails to our client base. It's a tool used to connect with and maintain relationships with our growing customer base while we make changes and updates to our offering. I have also used it to set up drip marketing campaigns to connect with buys that we have not had consistent contact with but would like to keep in our network.

Pros and Cons

UI is inviting and fun to look at
User permissions are easy to set
Sales process was very easy

Marketing email creator UI and UX is difficult to understand and also difficult to make it do what you would like it to do. The options do not allow you to customize to the extent you would want to.
Customer lists and email address database management is difficult. Modifying a list in Excel, deleting your current list in Mailchimp, them uploading your new one is annoying.
Options are sometimes not clear. An example of this- I had a marketing email ready to send and wanted it to send out the next day. The options after setting it for my desired time make it seem like it will send right when you click to accept button. Little things like this are common.

Return on Investment

70% open rate when it landed in inbox
Emails were converted to sales frequently
Helped move product in a pinch via marketing emails

Usability

It's OK, it has the functionality to do what you need to do but makes it very difficult to do what you want to do. Most of the time you'll make compromises on what you want to do vs what you can do- sometimes you'll stop trying because the UI just doesn't seem to understand or allow what you'd like to edit while creating an email. This might be fine for some, but while creating an email that thousands of people will see I want it to be perfect, and sometimes Mailchimp doesn't allow it. The lack of customization options is the root of this poor review.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

I primarily use Mailchimp to build lists, create marketing, sales, or drip emails and send them to customers. There are a lot of features Mailchimp offers that I don't use and therefore I can't honestly speak on these other features. With the features I have used, our company has benefited by having a tool we can create and send marketing and sales emails to our customer base with.

Lessons for Success

I've used Mailchimp to get products sold we could not hold on to for long. It worked well enough to build email campaigns with product features, specs, and quantity information to get them sold as soon as possible. If we didn't have Mailchimp during that time I don't think we would have sold those products.

Key Insights

Do you think Mailchimp delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Mailchimp's feature set?

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?

Yes

Would you buy Mailchimp again?

Likelihood to Recommend

Easy enough to use to send out a quick marketing email to a large list but not easy enough to use to consider the tool for long-term use. The functionality is there but once I realized what you need out of a tool like this it became apparent that Mailchimp might not have a few core elements that I needed to consider for long-term use.

Functionality is good- Customization is OK

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp