Mailchimp: A Quality and Cost Effective Email Marketing Solution

 When I wear my marketing hat at Capabilities, Inc., I have a couple of prerequisites when I am choosing any service or product.  The first two things I look at are the quality and the cost of the product or service.  When I started looking at email marketing solutions, I first thought that I could just get away with making custom mail merges with Microsoft Outlook (Although I still use this method to attach items to emails to emails).  Unfortunately, using that method did not satisfy my design needs when it comes to using CSS.

So, after weighing all my options, I decided to go out and find a mass mailing service.  Since I work for a small business that has never had a mass mailing service, I thought that this would be a hard sell to my employers as to why we need to pay for this service.  So, I then hit up one of my favorite review sites, Top 10 Reviews.  In looking at the prices for the Email Marketing Services, my first thought was that this was never going to fit into our marketing budget.  In looking at the prices for all the different services, one of them caught my eye when I saw this: FREE.

So, I jupmed on the free service's website, and I anticipated seeing a less than ideal solution.  The company offering the free service is called MailChimp.  Since the setup is even free, I thought I would give it a try to see how it worked for me.  After our first few messages that I sent out using it, I was sold.  Firstly, I was amazed of the design and feel of the site.  It is very appealing to the eye, and it seems very modern.  An added bonus is that they throw in links that they think people will enjoy like this:

FYI: This is the link that they lead you to: http://bit.ly/mWhiNr.

After using it and getting all the great statistics that you get by using a mass mailing service, I quickly did not know what to do with out it!  Now all the staff updates and marketing emails are all routed through MailChimp, and better yet, I can even measure the results of all the emails that I am sending out using those great stats.

In have tried out and played with Constant Contact (another mass mailing service- albeit a dreaded paid one), and I have to say that MailChimp has one feature that Constant Contact doesn't have that I couldn't live without.  This is how MailChimp handles bad email addresses.  If MailChimp gets an error back from the email address, that email address is automatically put into a list of contacts that will not receive emails. So, the next time a message is sent out, that bad email address is automatically excluded!  In Constant Contact, this is not a feature that was provided.  The one thing that I did prefer about Constant Contact was that they seemed to have a few more templates to use.

With the use of the Wordpress Plugin that they provide, I was even able to have a sign up fields on the site that I was working with at the time.  This makes it very easy for people to sign up for mail lists.

So, all in all, I have not been let down in my choice of MailChimp at all.  I believe that it would even be worth it to pay for their service, as they offer an intuitive and easy to use interface.

Note: MailChimp does offer paid services, which you have to move to if you deal with a higher volume of emails or subscribers.  To find out more about their pricing structure, please visit this site: http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing/.