MailChimp Conclusion

MailChimp is a stylish and relatively new email marketing service, which offers some great advantages, but which also contains significant flaws. Although MailChimp offers unparalleled email creation flexibility, a superior contact management system and reliable email deliverability, they have inaccurate reporting and poor customer support.

MailChimp: Email Creation

When it comes to email creation, MailChimp offers the most flexibility of any email marketing provider we’ve reviewed. They offer 4 basic templates, which are really simple layouts for you to customize and build from scratch. MailChimp recently added an online interface that walks you through selecting ready-made images and headers to add to your email template, which makes it easier for you to get started. They offer a WYSIWYG/point-and-click editor, which allows you to drag and drop pictures and move email elements around easily. MailChimp offers free, unlimited image hosting, which adds to the flexibility of customizing your template. They also allow you to easily create highly customizable auto-responder emails that can be sent to new sign-ups. Once you’ve upgraded from a trial account to a paying account, MailChimp will remove their brand logo from your emails for free. However, they give you a unique option of keeping their logo in exchange for affiliate rewards or “Monkey Rewards” that are essentially credits you can apply to your monthly fee.

MailChimp: Contact Management

MailChimp gives you more options than any other email marketing provider for adding contacts to your email list. You can import from an Excel file, CSV file, TXT file, Salesforce and Highrise, as well as cut & paste multiple cells from Excel. Before you create your list, however, you must check several checkboxes to state that you haven’t/won’t buy or sell your list and that you are complying with industry best practices. A clear unsubscribe button is automatically inserted into new email campaigns. List segmentation is easy to use, and MailChimp’s list cleanup will automatically handle opt-outs, unsubscribes and bounces. You can create a web signup form easily with unlimited custom fields for contact information as well as interest groups. You can also preview the form before creating it.

MailChimp: Email Deliverability

Emails sent using MailChimp had 100% deliverability rate to all major email servers that we tested. MailChimp lets you manually schedule your email campaigns or send right away. The lag time between sending and receiving was minimal (a few minutes), and emails appeared in inboxes rather quickly. MailChimp does not offer a spam checker, but they do expect you to comply with CAN-SPAM laws and industry best practices when sending email campaigns. If you want to be safe, you can purchase MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector for $29 per three inbox inspections.

MailChimp: Analyzing Reports

Our test email campaign revealed that MailChimp’s reports did not update quickly or accurately. MailChimp claims to report basic statistics, such as opens, bounces, unopens, open dates, click rates, successful deliveries, unsubscribes and forwards, as well as extra stats, like opens by location, click performance by URL and email domain performance. However, after two days, the only thing that updated were the unsubscribes. Opens and all other statistics were not reported. We contacted customer support to try to get this issue resolved; however, we found it difficult to resolve (read the next review section on Customer Support to learn more). MailChimp offers A/B testing, as well as integration with Google Analytics, two exceptional features. MailChimp also offers the ability to export reports as Excel files, CSV files or TXT files.

MailChimp: Customer Support

MailChimp does not offer phone support, which significantly limits your ability to troubleshoot email campaigns. MailChimp only offers only email ticket support, which available M-F 9a-5p EST. The availability of customer support may be impractical for those living outside of the Eastern Time zone. For example, if you live in California, you must email your question before 2 p.m. Pacific time in order to receive a same-day response. We sent a question to them at 3 p.m. Central time that wasn’t answered until the next day. We were also frustrated that the emailed response did not resolve our original problem. We were forced to reply to the email, requesting further assistance in viewing accurate reports, to which we were sent a one-sentence response: “Bear in mind it can take a couple of hours for reports to populate.” This was not the response we had been looking for after two days of waiting to fix malfunctioning reports. We also attempted to contact live chat, but we were directed to the email ticket system. To make up for lack of phone support, MailChimp offers thorough tutorials to help new users use the system. These, however, take some time to view.

MailChimp: Pricing

MailChimp offers two payment plans. You can either pay a monthly fee, based on the number of contacts you add to your list, or you can pay as you go, based on the number of emails you send per month. If you choose the latter option, your unused email credits do not expire and will rollover to the next month. MailChimp also offers a 15% discount for non-profits under either the monthly or pay-as-you-go plan. If you sign up for a free trial, your account will not expire, but you will be limited to only 100 contacts on your email list.