Item: Mailchimp
Rating: 9
Author: Austin Lin

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Mailchimp to distribute a weekly email newsletter for approximate 1000 subscribers. We use the newsletter to keep our company's name and services at the top of mind for three different groups of constituents. We add subscribers anytime we engage new potential, future, customers, partners, and internal/external staff members. The goal is for our newsletter to help us (mostly passively) build/extend our network in order to grow the business.

Pros and Cons

Pull in content from our WordPress website.
Deliver our content consistently without fail.
Maintain a contact list that keeps us engaged with our customers, partners, and staff members
Provide the functionality listed above at an excellent price point
Provide performance detail on our campaigns
Introduce new, helpful features to make the service more valuable
Keep us informed of new, helpful features.

We schedule our weekly newsletter manually each week, but since we have an exact day of the week and time, we send our newsletter each and every week, it would be helpful if the Campaign Tool/Manager had the functionality to setup a schedule for the whole year or longer and then mark exceptions like for major holidays.
Like many websites...the function to "Keep/Stay Signed In" doesn't seem to work...at least for me.
It would be helpful if the "Add Subscriber" form provided direct access to enter notes about the subscriber versus having to go back into the contact after the initial add to then enter notes.

Return on Investment

We've had new business leads as a result of using Mailchimp for our weekly newsletter.
We've kept in touch with partners, customers, and staff members easily...even if they move companies, positions, or industries.
The pricing is very good. It keeps our operational costs low. A very good value for our needs.

Usability

In my experience, very simple to use. It just works and is 100% reliable. Again, the only functionality that would be helpful is having the ability to schedule several weeks, months, or years at once...meaning every Tuesday at 7AM until MM/DD/YYYY or something like that. And then having a button to easily exclude certain Tuesdays that, say, fall on a holiday.

All-in-One Marketing Platform

We don't have a formal marketing program so Mailchimp is our go to solution. I suppose if we wanted to expand our marketing to leverage social media tools like X, Instagram, FB, etc., then it would be nice to have those options built in, but we don't so, we don't find anything missing from Mailchimp. It looks like Mailchimp integrates with CRM tools which might be something we may want to leverage in the future.

Lessons for Success

Our successes with Mailchimp have been obtaining new business leads, identifying new business partners, and expanding our network. When someone who receives our newsletter mentions our company and services to someone new who then joins our network and/or newsletter, it has eventually led to new opportunities...and in most cases this has happened quite passively. Little effort, but positive outcome/results. Win-win!

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

For us Mailchimp works really well for us because we have a very simple model. We send a weekly newsletters with a relatively small audience. We don't want to pay for a ton of features we won't use. But we want a solution that just works and is reliable. Mailchimp does that very well. Our plan will scale our plan up as our audience grows or shrinks. It doesn't have hard quotas that force us to pay more than we need to. Mailchimp seems to offer a lot more services like SMS support that we probably won't need, but it is nice to see the company continues to innovate. If we ever need these additional services, it is good to know they will be available.

Mailchimp is a great small business marketing tool and service!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp