MailChimp

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The Quick Take

MailChimp has mastered the art of fun. Its witty web site and appealing chimp logo make the experience of creating email marketing campaigns an entertaining one. But MailChimp also delivers the goods. With more than 15,000 customers and 80,000 users, it is an extremely popular service, offering an attractive and easy-to-use interface.  Furthermore, the programming community has taken advantage of MailChimp’s support for third party developers; the benefit for you is that MailChimp is integrated with a bevy of applications ranging from CRM leader Salesforce.com, to blogging platforms such as WordPress and MovableType, as well as content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla.  Keep in mind that MailChimp is picky about the email that you use to register with – even for their 30-day free trial. They prefer a private-domain address to a free webmail one, so if you try to sign up with a account from a free provider such as Hotmail or Yahoo, you’ll have to go through a verification process.

Key Features

• A free subscription that allows up to 100 contacts and six email campaigns a month
• Integration with Google Analytics
• Integration with Salesforce.com, WordPress, Drupal, and other software
• Free unlimited image hosting

Details

Pricing

MailChimp is the only service we reviewed that has a free plan for regular users (VerticalResponse offers one for non-profits). Though it limits you to 100 contacts and six emails a month, it’s still a great benefit for small organizations, or for those who are just getting started with email marketing.

MailChimp offers two pricing options. The first is a monthly plan, based on the number of contacts. It starts at $10 for up to 500 subscribers and goes up to $240 for 50,000 contacts. (For non-profits, the prices start at $8.50 a month and go up to $204, representing a 15% discount.)

The second is a pay-as-you go plan. For this plan, you purchase “email credits that work like stamps.” Each time you send an email, a credit is deducted from your account. The price works out to about 3 cents per email for 300 emails a month or less, and goes down the more emails you send. Again, non-profits get a 15% discount.

In addition, MailChimp offers high-volume pricing for businesses with more than 50,000 subscribers.  The company also touts its thousands of international customers from many countries around the world, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (and its “International Pricing” provides links which conveniently translate MailChimp prices into the currencies of these countries).

They also offer a 15% discount for creative agencies who manage all email marketing activities for their clients in a single MailChimp account.

Contact Management

Uploading your contacts in MailChimp is a straightforward affair. You can enter them one at a time or you can upload them from tab-delimited text file. You can’t import your contact lists directly from Excel or Outlook; they need to be converted to tab-delimited file first. It can be a little more time consuming to upload your contacts in MailChimp than it is in other services, because the information in your tab-delimited file must be ordered the same way as you have your list fields set up in MailChimp. It’s a good idea to watch their Getting Started video or read some of the Knowledge Base topics about contact lists before you start.

MailChimp helps you to create a variety of forms for your web site or blog, and offers built-in translation for more than 25 languages. We imagine you’d have to double-check the translation with a language expert but we still think this translation support is a nice feature.

Like its competitors, MailChimp also offers a powerful set of list management features that handles opt-ins, unsubscribes, and bounce-back cleaning (meaning they’ll automatically unsubscribe contacts whose emails have bounced).  They also offer a Subscriber Preference Center, where people on your list can change their own contact information.

Campaign Creation

MailChimp does a few unique things when it comes to campaign creation. Firstly, the company offers unlimited image hosting – the only service we reviewed to do so. (We imagine there has to be some limit, but they do advertise it as unlimited.) This makes MailChimp a great choice for businesses that employ image-heavy campaigns.

They also enable you to do what’s called an A/B split campaign, meaning you can send one campaign with slightly different details-- for example, a different subject line, a different “From” name, different send times -- to two groups and, based on the results, select the most effective attributes to use in future campaigns. While you could always do this manually, by sending two different emails and then comparing the results, it’s nice to be able to do it easily with a built-in tool.

Another cool feature in MailChimp is their “color suggester.” When you’re creating a new campaign, the color suggester  in MailChimp grabs colors from your web site and helps you match the branding in your email to the branding on your web site.

True to their DIY credo, MailChimp offers only a few basic templates. The company does, however, provide over 200 “headers” (essentially a banner graphic at the top of your email) which, coupled with the color suggestion tool, in essence provides simple templates.  The bottom line is that, while you can still produce very slick and professional-looking emails using MailChimp’s design tool, the layout is relatively simplistic compared with templates offered by other vendors.  We should note that MailChimp has announced the impending release of 600+ templates, which would vault the company to the head of the pack; these templates are not yet available at the time of this writing, but look to be out soon.

MailChimp offers four types of email campaigns: a “regular ole campaign,” meaning a standard HTML/plain-text email; a plain-text only campaign; an A/B split campaign; and an RSS-driven campaign (currently in Beta). For the RSS-driven campaigns, MailChimp automatically sends email whenever you update an RSS-enabled blog or any RSS feed.

In our experience, creating the email campaign wasn’t quite as straightforward as it was in some other services. We found the email-creation interface a little clunky at first. But with a little help from one of the video tutorials and some practice, the process quickly became clearer.

Sending

Though MailChimp will automatically brand your email with their logo if you are using their free service (or are in your free trial period), you can remove it for free yourself once you upgrade to a paid plan.

One thing MailChimp lacks is a free spam checker. They do offer their Inbox Inspector for $39, which they describe as a “full physical for your email marketing campaign.” It lets you see how your email will look in all the major email clients, mobile devices, and international ISPs. Then it runs your email through all major spam filters and gives you a spam score along with suggestions for things you might need to change.

MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector is far more robust than a spam checker that you get for free in other services. A spam test gives you back a score indicating how likely your email is to evade spam filters. With the Inbox Inspector, you can also see how your email will look in major email programs like Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and so on. It does this by generating over 25 screenshots of your email. 

MailChimp lets you segment your list, and use merge tags to personalize your emails.  It also offers a variety of autoresponders.

Reporting

Typically tongue-in-cheek, MailChimp refers to their “jaw-dropping, budget justifying” reports. Like its competitors, it offers lots of different ways to view your reporting  information, including “pretty, boingy pie charts” and bar graphs. One unique reporting feature of MailChimp is its “GeoMaps,” which let you see, on a map, where your emails have been opened.

MailChimp reporting includes a List Growth feature, which lets you see at a glance how much your lists are growing or shrinking. You can also track performance of your emails over time to help you pin down what you’re doing right – or wrong. MailChimp also shows you ROI and conversion statistics, so you can see how much revenue your emails are generating. The Email Domain Performance feature lets you measure how your emails perform in major domains such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and Comcast.

MailChimp also offers you the option to integrate with Google Analytics, a feature currently offered by only about half the services we reviewed. This puts another set of powerful reporting features at your disposal, including the ability to do conversion tracking – that is, to track how many clicks convert to sales.

Support and Resources

While they offer email and live chat support weekdays from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT, MailChimp does not offer phone support. They warn potential customers about this on their web site with the following disclaimer: 

“If you're just starting out, and you have no idea what you're doing, and you want to be able to pick up the phone and have someone walk you through every single step of building a campaign, that's not MailChimp. “

They do boast, however, that stats from early 2009 show that 40% of all email issues were resolved in one hour and 84% of all email questions were resolved in one day. Live chat issues, they say, were 100% resolved in six hours. When we contacted live chat support, they responded to us immediately and answered our questions at lightning speed.

On their web site, MailChimp also offers an easily-searchable knowledge base and weekly webinars. There are “Getting Started” video tutorials, which are helpful and entertaining (as you would expect from MailChimp).  Other resources include several downloadable guides, such as an HTML Coding Tips and Email Marketing Guide; a newsletter; a blog; and “ChimpCharts” – email marketing data that helps you set expectations based on your industry.

Other Services

None.  As its name implies, MailChimp specializes in email marketing.