Mailchimp

Reviews and Expert Opinion

Mailchimp

By Mashum Mollah

MailChimp is a perfect tool among most English-speaking users. It has a broad range of features, an easy to use interface, and the best free plans in the market. However, the subscription plan of this tool is relatively expensive in comparison to the other service providers. It tells you why some people opt to go for MailChimp alternatives. It is good to check at the other available options before making the final decision.

MailChimp In-Depth Reviews

5.0Based on 1 reviews
  • Features
  • Ease of Use
  • Performance
  • Support
  • Pricing
Pricing Details
  • Free Plan $0/Free
  • Essentials Plan $10.41/month
  • Standard Plan $15.54/month
  • Premium Plan $310.84/month

Overview

Mailchimp Email Marketing Tool

It can be a tricky endeavor to succeed with email marketing if you don’t do it correctly. Improper implementation of this strategy may end up hurting your business and its reputation. Lucky enough, MailChimp is one of the modern tools that will help your business to succeed and thrive with its email marketing efforts. What MailChimp does is to change the game and give you an edge in the market. These insights should be able to help you to understand what is MailChimp. Let us now go ahead and learn how to use MailChimp.

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a software that gives users the ability to create and manage automated campaigns, newsletters, and mailing lists. The solution puts you in the seat of the driver and grants you complete control of the email marketing efforts from the start to the end.

MailChimp is easy to use and simple solution that gives users access to a broad range of email marketing tools and all of them are located conveniently in one place. MailChimp provides several benefits over its competitors in the industry. It makes it the best option for any business that wants to use email marketing to put its foot in the door.

MailChimp is an all-inclusive email marketing platform that helps you in managing and talking to your customers, clients, and the other interested parties. Its marketing approach pays attention to healthy practices of contact management, powerful data analysis, and beautifully designed campaigns. With all these features in one place, you will discover that MailChimp pricing is among the best in the market.

How to Use MailChimp?

The most important thing you need to learn before buying any email marketing tool is how to use it. It makes no sense to buy a tool that you will be unable to use. The beauty of this platform is that it has a user-friendly interface that is quite easy to use.

As an all-in-one platform, MailChimp will help you to talk to your customers, clients, and other interested parties and also manage them. The approach of this company to marketing focuses on healthy practices of contact management, powerful data analytics, and beautifully designed campaigns. Are you ready to start off your campaign? The next section will teach you how to use MailChimp to create awesome campaigns. You can also get helpful resources from the company website to use in your work.

Set up Your Account

After signing up for the MailChimp Account, you will have to enter your name as well as the email address. Once you do this, you will get an activation code from the company. After you get this activation code in the email that you provide, all you need to do is click the link to be able to activate your account. In case you have a challenge at this stage, don’t hesitate to contact MailChimp’s support.

When you log in to the company website the next time, the system will walk you through the remaining setup steps. You will input profile details like your physical address and website and also connect all your social media accounts. If you are selling products online, you will get the option of connecting the store through MailChimp WooCommerce.

Set Up Your Audience

The basis of great marketing is clean and up to date record of your contacts otherwise referred to as your target audience. After creating the MailChimp account, the company will use your setup details to generate your target audience for you automatically. You can edit your default information for your audience if you feel like or start adding contacts immediately.

The design of MailChimp only allows you to have a single audience. There are so many helpful audience management platforms to help you separate and organize contacts. If you decide to create another set of the target audience, remember that data is not shared across audiences. Besides, the contacts that are more than a single audience count separately towards the limit of your subscriber.

Customize Your Signup Forms

If you don’t yet have any contacts, there is no need to worry. The company will generate a signup form automatically for your audience. You can post it on your Facebook page or website to help you begin to collect your contacts right away. Besides, you will have so many options for customizing the design of the signup form so that it can fit your brand. Here are the steps of accessing your signup forms;

i. Click on Audience drop-down and select the Audience dashboard

ii. In case you have more than a single audience, click on the current audience drop-down and then select the one you wish to work with

iii. Click the drop-down for manage audience and select the signup forms

iv. Choose from builder

v. Check the response emails drop-down menu and forms and select the form you would like to edit

vi. Click on the design it tab

vii. Click through the referral, forms, body, or page tabs to review the options of customization. Use the drop-down and fields menus to make any modifications that you would like on the fields, colors, and styles. MailChimp will automatically save these changes.

viii. Once done, click on save and then close the window

Create a Campaign

From here, you can now create your first campaign. The campaign refers to the message that you will be sharing through different channels like ads, emails, and many more. Most users begin with a regular email campaign in MailChimp.

The steps below will help you to start up with the regular email campaigns

  1. a)     Click on the drop-down menu and then select email
  2. b)     Enter an appropriate campaign name and then click on Begin

You can get detailed instructions on how to create a regular email campaign by reading further. You will realize that the process of designing an email campaign in MailChimp can be fun and also complex. The reason is that this platform offers so many customization options. You need to take some time to get used to the various controls. You also need to plan your campaigns all the time before you start to design them. You will become a guru before you can even tell. 

Design a Campaign in MailChimp

After clicking on send, the process does not stop there. The key element of successful marketing is being able to track your audience engagement to be able to provide most of the things that your contacts would like to have and less of what they don’t.

When you log in to MailChimp the next time after you send an email campaign, you will see the number of contacts that clicked, opened, or unsubscribed from your current campaigns right on the Dashboard. For more detailed information, click on reports. It will also help you to download, print, and even share the campaign reports.

The open and click data tracking of MailChimp tells you the number of people who looked at your campaign, the links that they clicked on, and the other info such as geolocation. For more in-depth reporting, you can integrate MailChimp with your Google Analytics account.

About Campaign Reports

Once you become familiar with the basics, you can look at how the different MailChimp features take your marketing to the next level.

Automation

Automated campaigns which are also referred to as autoresponders or drip campaigns will send targeted emails and other messages when s specific subscriber activity, date or event triggers them. The automation tools of MailChimp assist busy marketers to send consistent communication which nurtures contact management.

Ads

MailChimp allows users to buy ads without any additional fees. Thus, you can take advantage of the big audience on Facebook or Google to reach out to your best clients, like-minded individuals, and those people who like your products but do not subscribe to your email. It is one of the things that make MailChimp pricing India worthwhile.

Landing Pages

With MailChimp, you can create amazing landing pages to promote your products and grow your audience. From here, you can share the pages around the website to drive traffic to them. Landing pages are excellent for achieving specific and short-term marketing goals.

Postcards

A printed postcard campaign assist MailChimp user to stand out from the crowd. It will give the audience thing that will make them remember you. Postcards reinforce the messages that you send through ads, emails, elsewhere making them be a smart addition to the multichannel marketing strategy.

Mobile Apps

Android MailChimp or MailChimp for iOS is a free application that helps users to manage their accounts on the go. Track your campaign and subscriber activity, add new subscribers, and view campaign reports from your mobile device directly.

MailChimp subscribe is a mobile app that is used to create simple signup forms on the tablet so that individuals can join your target audience from anywhere. It is a great app for people who wish to collect signups at events or in their stores. You can set up MailChimp Subscribe for your Android or iPad in a few easy steps.

Developer Tools

The initials API 3.0 basically stands for the application programming interface. To understand better, an API is a way in which different applications talk to each other. Advanced users that are familiar with custom coding may use the API in passing data from their app to MailChimp for advanced utility and customization. It is a great thing to learn about MailChimp campaign reports. Now that you know how to use MailChimp, let us the go-ahead to explore its features.

Features (4.6/5)

Now that you know how to use MailChimp, we can go ahead to look at the features of this tool. It will help you to tell whether MailChimp is ideal for your email marketing campaigns or not. You need to compare all these features with your needs before making the final decision.

1. Automate Email Campaigns

The other thing that MailChimp gives you is the ability to automate entire email campaigns. It could be an email that you send to a subscriber directly once he signs up to a list like a simple thank you. You can also send them some meaningful content that they get once they sign up to your email list.

With automated campaigns, you will be able to personalize the efforts of your brand and improve the invaluable interaction between your subscribers and you. One thing you need to remember that these subscribers are potential customers. Therefore, you cannot underestimate the value of MailChimp for WooCommerce.

In addition to welcoming customers, automated emails also help you put purchase data underuse. It also helps users to follow website activities from a specific campaign, motivate your subscribers to come back for more, and make sure that you are in full control of the campaign. The beauty about MailChimp is that it integrates with so many applications such as PayPal, Facebook, and WordPress. This is the point at which something like MailChimp WordPress Plugin comes in handy. You need the MailChimp API key to be able to use and integrate with MailChimp. The API keys are used in tracking and controlling how you are using the API.

Automated emails are perfect when it comes to welcoming new email subscribers. It also gives these subscribers a customizable mailing whether it is an annual email to wish your subscribers a happy birthday, purchase product suggestions, thanking regular and actively engaged subscribers, or collecting crucial information about your site among others.

All the above are great triggers for the automated emails that will bring your brand closer to the customers or subscribers. It is something that MailChimp will help you to acquire perfectly. MailChimp offers a wide range of available workflows to help you get started. There is no way you will go wrong as long as you choose the right MailChimp email templates.

2. Inbox Testing and Preview

This is one of the most important features in as far as email marketing is concerned. The ability to test a campaign before you can launch it is very important. It will help you to have a preview of how it will look once the subscribers receive and open it in their respective inboxes.

This feature gives you valuable insights that will help you avoid any mistakes that may end up being so drastic. MailChimp has a valuable inbox preview tool that allows you to see how the email you send will look like in more than forty different customers.

The feature makes sure that your mailing will have a perfect look no matter the device or browser that the receiver is using. Remember, all that it takes is a simple mishap or minor error to ruin the whole campaign even if you spend so much time in designing your campaign. You can take advantage of this feature to avoid some of these errors.

3. Geotargeting Your Campaigns

There comes a time when you have to target a selected group from your subscribers on a geographical basis. This can be highly useful when you are looking towards running an email promotion for a particular state, city, or any other geographical area.

After sending your email campaign, MailChimp will track particular data like the location of the email subscriber hence granting you the ability to segment your mailings as you move forward. It is indeed a powerful feature that offers a high level of flexibility to tentative business owners who would like to reach out to certain areas of the industry. The ability to target particular geographical regions will help you maximize the potential of your email marketing campaign. It is something that MailChimp works pretty well. Most people use MailChimp India for this purpose to grow their target audience and business at large.

4. Email Beamer

With these features, creating a campaign draft is extremely simple and does not even require you to log in to MailChimp. All you need to do is use your personal email like Yahoo Mail or Gmail to write up an email and include your subject line and content among other details.

Once you are done with drafting your email, you can send it off to a personalized email address which is provided by MailChimp and it will take care of all the other things. You will have a campaign draft for your review within no moments. You can either do this on the go or at home and it is really easy. If you have a problem with this, you can always go through the MailChimp tutorial for guidance. It is one of the easy to use rich features on MailChimp.

5. RSS to Email

This is a powerful MailChimp feature that allows users to share their RSS feeds in the email form. It is a feature that utilizes a single stone to kill two birds for people who publish widely and would like to share their content in a wide range of formats to fit the diversity of your subscriber base. 

When you automate this process, MailChimp will help you to cut on the time that you need to set up a campaign manually. If you have a problem with this process, MailChimp’s support is always available to help you out. The other thing that you can deploy is the RSS-to Email as frequently as you desire whether it is monthly, weekly, or even daily.

6. Growing Your Lists and Getting More Subscribers

You could already be having a well-established email list but you would like to grow it further. In some cases, you may not be having an email list and would like to set up one. Whatever the case, you can be sure that MailChimp will serve you perfectly.

The good news is that MailChimp pricing in India is quite affordable. The platform has user-friendly dynamic forms that will help you to grow your list. You can customize the forms to match your branding and you can either embed them or link them to your personal or business website.

MailChimp also has the ability to use custom fields in the forms that allow users to capture the relevant info about your subscribers pertaining to your needs, practice, or business among other elements. It is a cinch to make these forms and implementing/sharing them cannot be any easier.

7. E-Commerce Integration

 With both free and paid MailChimp accounts, campaign managers can easily track the amount and number of purchases from a given campaign. It comes in handy when you want to see the performance of your email marketing campaign in terms of the revenue and sales that it generates.

With the eCommerce360, you can directly connect your email campaigns to your online store through the simple API integration. This is capable through the use of MailChimp for WooCommerce. The online stores can base on a broad range of shopping platforms like Prestashop, BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento. It is one of the things that makes MailChimp stand out from the other solutions in the market.

Once you have set up everything correctly and you are ready to go, you can begin to see the success of your campaign truly when it comes to translating it into additional revenue for your brand. It will help you to know the things that you are doing right and what you need to improve on. You can also use the eCommerce data in segmenting your campaigns’ email list. Therefore, eCommerce integration is among the top features that you need to look for in any email marketing tool.

8. Accessing Your Campaigns on the Go

We are living in a fast-paced environment and using mobile devices is now more prevalent than ever before. The mobile App of MailChimp makes it to accommodate this functionality and gives users the ability to add new subscribers, manage lists, view analytical reports, and finalize/send campaigns.

The mobile app of MailChimp is available for both iOS and Android and connects users to their campaigns on the fly. You will no longer need to scramble to get your tablet or laptop with MailChimp because you can take care of your business wherever you are.

As long as you know how to use MailChimp, you can easily use this feature. It is one of the capabilities that users search for in any email marketing software. In case you encounter any challenges along the way, you can always conduct MailChimp support.

9. MailChimp Pro

MailChimp’s pro version offers additional options and functionality to the users. Some of these extra features include predicted demographics and automation of campaigns for various time zones. You can further segment the mailings on a stricter criterion that gives you a fully optimized campaign.

The pro merge fields give clients 50 more merge fields for more storage of data. The other additional feature for the pro clients is the ‘stop delivery.’ It comes in handy when there is a mistake with your mailing such as a typo. Pro clients get priority customer support together with advanced analytic that is high end. With all the extra benefits that are set aside for MailChimp pro clients, it is definitely worth it to pay the additional fee.

10. A Solid Marketing Tool

All the benefits and powerful features of MailChimp make it top on the game when it comes to email marketing. The good thing about this platform is that it continues to grow over time. Start taking advantage of the email marketing solutions that this tool offers and use it to expand your outreach and grow your business.

It will help you to establish an actively engaged subscriber base and this is highly valuable and will make a big difference by putting you on top in your marketing efforts. A successful marketing campaign will grow your potential and also improve your reputation.

Ease of Use (4.4/5)

MailChimp email marketing platform

It is so easy to get started with the MailChimp email marketing platform. Once you have created a list, you can move forward to initiate your initial campaign. To build a beautiful newsletter, there is no need for any coding knowledge or knowing about HTML because MailChimp will do all the work for you.

The only thing you should do is choose from its vast selection of prebuilt templates and use their easy to use WYSIWYG builder to customize the content. If you are looking for a fancier thing, you can create a custom-designed MailChimp template in the way that you exactly want it to appear. You can either schedule emails or send them right away depending on what will work best for you.

Performance (4.6/5)

Seeing how your campaigns are performing is among the most exciting elements of any email campaign. Would you like to know the number of subscribers who receive your email successfully? The number of subscribers who opened the email? The links that receive more clicks and how many they are? This is crucial information that brings valuable feedback to your campaign manager and will help them to see what worked well and what did not work.

Detailed analytics and reports could indicate the typical patterns of behavior of a specific base of subscribers and inform your campaign manager some of the things they need to look for and implement in their future campaigns. May be your subscribers like picture links and not the simple text links. Most of the links that subscribers are clicking on could either be at the bottom or top of the email content. MailChimp offers high-end analytics that is highly detailed and in-depth. You will rarely come across another tool that gives you this type of analytics. It tells you why the number of people who use analytics has been on the rise.

The other type of reporting that is provided by MailChimp is what we refer to as the A/B testing. It enables campaign managers to send out various mailing versions at different times and leaning the campaigns that performed better and why that is the case. The variance in every campaign could be as simple as a subject line that is different, a different layout/design of the content of your mailing, your mailing timing, and the time it goes out. It can tell whether the open rate is better in the morning or later in the afternoon or morning.

For any marketing efforts to be successful, you have to learn the tendencies and behaviors of your subscribers. The advanced reporting and integrated analytics help MailChimp to set the standard in the industry.

Support (4.7/5)

Mailchimp Support

If you have any questions or run into technical while using MailChimp, you can access the tutorials and guides of the company for troubleshooting tips and self-guided instructions. You can also get access to additional support via email or chat depending on your payment plan.

All the paid plans will give you access to the email or chat support. Those with the premium plan get an additional benefit of the phone support. Those on free plans have access to email support 24/7 and self-service guides and tutorials. Therefore, you will not get into a technical issue when using MailChimp and fail to get the desired customer support. The company is dedicated to giving its companies their best when it comes to customer service.

Pricing (4.5/5)

MailChimp has four main pricing plans. These include the Free, Essentials, Standard, and Premium plans. The free pricing plan has all the basics that businesses that are just starting need. The Essentials plan has all the features for an email sender who requires additional support.

The Standard plan offers better insights for the growing businesses that need more customers. Lastly, we have a premium plan that comes with advanced features for professionals who require more customization. You can choose a plan depending on your individual needs.  

Pricing Details
ActiveCampaign Plan Users Audiences Support Price View Details
Free Plan 1 User Up to 2,000 contacts Forms & Landing Pages $0/mo Click here
Essentials Plan 3 User Up to 50,000 contacts +24/7 Email & Chat Support $10.41/mo Click here
Standard Plan 5 User Up to 100,000 contacts +24/7 Email & Chat Support $15.54/mo Click here
Premium Plan Unlimited Users 200,000+ contacts Unlimited +Phone Support $310.84/mo Click here

User Reviews

Nicole Adam

Great tools for Email Marketing
(5/5)

When it comes to Email Marketing, MailChimp comes in handy. MailChimp is one of the Great tools for Email Marketing. I will defiantly try.
October 14, 2020
Write a review

Bottom line

In summary, MailChimp has a bucketload of integrations that are available. The reason could be the number of active users who are on this platform. When you combine this with the relatively powerful tool, it will add up into a very great tool.

If your business has specific needs such as utilizing your personal tracking domain or powerful marketing automation, you may need to shop for a different newsletter tool. However, there are so many features that you will love in MailChimp. It is not like any other tool that you will get in the market.

Mashum Mollah

Mashum Mollah has been there in the blogging industry for over a decade. He has always believed that blogging holds the most potential in the digital marketing industry. With years of research, he has created some of his best blogging practices, which have helped him establish himself in the industry as a Blogging Engineer. Now he is on a mission to help others and spread the concept of Blogging Engineer.