Mailchimp

Pros

Mailchimp’s free plan allows you to have up to 2,000 subscribers and includes 12,000 emails you can send out, per month. For those new to Mailchimp, there are numerous preset templates you can choose from which you can further customize to your liking or create your own from scratch. Campaign templates can incorporate images, polls, embedded videos, call to actions, plain text, and custom HTML. Once you have created a template – with the specific look you are looking for – you can duplicate it and create your next campaign so you do not have to start from scratch. It’s likely you will encounter someone on your subscriber list who either resides or works for a company in the EU. Mailchimp has all the needed GDPR tools and regulations in place to make your campaign process as easy and stress free as possible to manage.

Uploading new contacts to your subscriber list can be done in minutes (CSV files). You can also create multiple lists which you can further segment into more specific groups (in the case you may not want to send the campaign to the entire list of your choosing). Before sending off your campaign you can preview what it will look like to your recipients on desktop and mobile devices and check your links to make sure they work appropriately. Mailchimp also provides A/B testing and basic analytics, pertaining to each campaign you send out, to give you more insight into the campaign’s open rates and clicks.

Cons

I have very few complaints about Mailchimp, but I do wish they could incorporate spell check into their system somehow to help expedite the editing process. Also keep in mind, if you choose to upgrade from the free plan into a paid plan, you can only downgrade back down to the free plan once.

If you choose to make any changes to a campaign that has already been sent off, it will not update those campaigns, it will only show those updated changes to those you send the campaign to after saving those changes. Meaning if you find a mistake in a campaign you have recently sent out, know that there is no “undo” or fix.

Pros

Mailchimp is incredibly easy to use, and can be taken from setup to launch in less than a day if you put in some effort. While there are platforms with more features than mailchimp, those are A) commonly much much more expensive, and B) harder to use unless you know exactly what you are trying to accomplish.

Cons

Two things:

1. Their removal of the plugin with Shopify was incredibly shortsighted. The vast majority of clients we used mailchimp for were on Shopify, and the connection between the two was one of those beautiful things that kept us coming back and recommending them again and again. Using them has become more difficult since that was removed.

2. If you are trying to go down the rabbithole and target super-specific customers, you may run out of segmentation ability on Mailchimp. At the time of writing this review, you could only combine 5 criteria to create a custom segment, and your segment could only be created as 'user matches all criteria' or 'user matches any of the criterion'. This makes it hard to get your segment just right. However, if you are really needing to make THAT custom of segments regularly (based on past conditional behavior, ESP, etc.) you probably have a bigger budget and can go get one of those fancier email sending platforms.

Pros

I liked the templates a lot. They are beautiful and well done. Very useful if you are into template use. Also, the free plan saved our business when we were out of money. It got all the basics for a business just getting started. Finally, the brand is beautiful. The UI is beautiful.

Cons

It's frustrating to use. The user experience is, I would say, quirky. It's really hard to find an option/feature. A lot of them are hidden in places that don't make sense. For example, I was looking for the landing page editor, I could find the landing page REPORTS under REPORTS but no editor at all. I gave up. The metrics it tracks are very limited compared to the competition that delivers way more useful and detailed metrics overall. Also, it lacks some of the most useful features like a robust tag system and marketing automation.

Pros

Mail Chimp is very flexible and gives you a wide variety of easily customizable options. I use it for everything from Turkey Drives and fundraiser registrations to Album release contests. I hired 2 new people that have almost no graphic design experience and they were both able to learn the platform in a short time and implement what they knew in a real-world environment. Furthermore. The templates aren't cookie-cutter and are easily customizable. They update someone signs up for your product or offer. Its a low key way to get alot more customers and sell alot more products without texting 100 people1 at a time. in the end its definitely worth trying out

Cons

I wish Mail chimp had a desktop app that was downloadable and cloud-connected. I also wish that you could integrate it with other software like Google Drive or other Cloud-based services.

Pros

Widely used and can be integrated easily into other software such as QuickBooks, Xero, WooCommerce, Shopify, Inventory systems and many others.

MailChimp gives the user the options of many different emails output depending on the circumstances. For example; newly registered user emails, newsletters, abandoned cart emails, if a customer hasn't made a purchase in a while or hasn't returned to your site in some time, which are all great for reminding the customer of your existence, and gaining that lost customer back!

The form builder is pretty easy to use, and also gives you a copy & paste option of the code afterwards so it can be easily implemented into your website.

Cons

You are limited with the styles of emails you can send to your customers. You can fully design your emails from scratch, but regarding the features you can place within the emails, it is kinda limited compared to other software. This would includes things like which items were abandoned when sending the customers an abandoned cart email. Or showing which items still remain in the customers 'Wishlist' if they haven't purchased the items yet and haven't been on the website for some time.

I am not a big fan of the MailChimp logo at the bottom of every email sent to the customers.