Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 10
Author: Paul Constantopolous

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looking to quickly get our email marketing off the ground. Our audience is relatively small and email templates are a pretty straight forward layout. Mailchimp was able to get our templates built/qa'd/launched/reported on relatively smooth. The interface is very straight forward. Functionality wise we didn't need a whole lot of bells and whistles from our EMS but Mailchimp had some advanced functionality up it's sleeve that actually made our job easier. Our team enjoyed the simplicity of Mailchimp and we will continue to use moving forward.

Pros and Cons

Audience Management
Email Campaign Templates
Automating Marketing Sends

Return on Investment

Increase the number of email sends which increases ROI
Helps sends the right content to the right audience at the right time

Alternatives Considered

Yesmail360i, Adobe Campaign and Braze

Used a few other platforms that perform the same tasks as Mailchimp. These platforms, while are much more robust than Mailchimp, have a much steeper learning curve. Yesmail and Adobe Campaign have alot more to offer that would work great for teams that need more automation and deeper reporting on automated emails. I recommend Mailchimp for teams that are in the "crawl" or "walk" engagement vs using others for the "Run" phases.

Usability

Mailchimp is extremely easy to understand and use. You can tell they've spent some time on getting the interface built for users who are starting out. Really helped my team get up and running quickly and with little to no management. Steps to getting recipient lists uploaded, is very easy. Getting templates built to use within the wysiwyg editor is also very intuitive and easy to understand --even for users who are unfamiliar or have strong development skills. Really appreciate that.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

Mailchimp has a slew of integrations that we took advantage of. From Creative and Data management to Reporting, Mailchimp made it easy for multiple teams to collaborate and not be so silo'd! Design we integrated Canva to create our beautiful graphics and layout. LinkedIn and Facebook allowed us to gain quick turnaround with Social leads and Lead Generations with signup forms. Both very helpful and intuitive and easy to implement.

Lessons for Success

We've been able send more emails and have more actual email sends. With that, our list constantly changes and it's easy to update the recipient lists to get ensure we're sending the most up to date subscribers. It is VERY important to send out marketing emails to those who are currently subscribed. We've been hit with a few "SPAM" alerts due lists being stale. We've learned to scrub our lists to contain the most up to date subscribers otherwise our reputation score will take a hit and we could be sending straight to users Junk folder. This was a VERY important lesson learned from Mailchimp. Thank you

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

Creating email templates to reuse can be a daunting task, especially if you are not a developer or have strong front end experience. Mailchimp allowed us to get our templates up and running pretty quickly and we were able to preview how they rendered easily as well.

Additionally, we have a small audience list but it changes pretty quickly, so we want to make sure we are sending to actual subscribed recipients to maintain a positive reputation score. Mailchimp allows us to stay on top of our recipient list quite easily.

Highly recommend this tool, especially if you don't have a large team and you are just getting started with Email Marketing.

Mailchimp Masters Email Marketing with Manageable Automation

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp