MailChimp: Should Brands Invest in It?

Notwithstanding its odd monkey mascot, MailChimp means serious business with regards to email marketing. It’s a cloud-based facility for organizing email marketing strategies, creating email lists, determining which users were able to open your messages, and working with third party applications. The platform provides wider marketing possibilities, thanks to its tight integration with social media. In just a simple click, you’ll be able to send out an email campaign, while updating your social media pages.

MailChimp claims that its biggest strengths is its ability to cater to all types of brands, by tailoring built-in tools, pricing, and design. As a businessman, should you invest in it?

Is MailChimp Relevant?

Wise Marketing tweeted recently regarding some of the best marketing tools that make businesses successful. The tweeted article from from Business2Community showed that email marketing bested other trends, including social media, business websites, and content marketing.  Despite email marketing being old-fashioned, article writer Tabitha Jean Naylor said it can yield desirable results when executed properly. This is where MailChimp comes in, allowing you to do the following:

• Interact with consumers and convince them to give their email address (for introducing new products, promotions, events, and services).
• Use Google Analytics to track user behavior, whether they open your emails or not and if they do specific actions after reading them.
• Send quality emails with informative content (a blog post or a relevant news article on your products).

Where Does It Excel?

• A Great Learning Resource

Before creating campaigns, MailChimp provides useful resources such as instructional videos for interface familiarity and eBooks for campaign creation. It also provides the Guides section, maximizing the learning curve on mobile devices, transactional emails, spam filters, and merge tags. Based on industry statistics, the software informs you of how well your subject line will perform in lead generation.

• Analytical Tracking

MailChimp gauges user activities based on your emails through interactive graphs. The graphs include information on unsubscribe rates, click rates, bounce rates, and even the open rates (with detailed information on the location and device used for browsing). Through Google Analytics, MailChimp determines how much revenue your email strategy is generating. For a competitive advantage, it provides additional insights on how email marketers are performing in the industry.

• Design Control

Jimdo Blog’s Niccolo Montanari commends MailChimp for giving its users control in the overall design of the campaigns. You can tailor specific newsletters based on your company brand thanks to the inclusion of the intuitive drag and drop editor. If you have a company website, you can customize sign up boxes and integrate them into your social media channels. And, MailChimp has a tight integration with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Shopify, among others.

Where Does it Fall Short?

• Forever Free Plan Expiration

The Forever Free Plan allows you to target 2,000 subscribers. Unfortunately, exceeding this limit requires you to pay a monthly subscription of $30, and this rate increases as you double your subscriber list. If you have around 5,000 subscribers, your monthly bill approaches to $50.

• No Affiliate Marketing

Another pitfall for marketers is that MailChimp doesn’t allow affiliate marketing, a performance-based technique wherein a company rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor. If you’re using affiliate links on your blog, there’s a high chance that MailChimp will terminate your account, deleting your list of valuable emails.

Email Marketing Tips Using MailChimp

• Content/campaign creation
  • If you wish to work outside the content editor tab, you can use simple text editors such as Notepad and TextWrangler.
  • Tap the style editor to set the font, spacing, and colors.
  • If you’re borrowing content from a specific website, use the Clear Styles option to remove the code from another program.
• Campaign Testing Tips
  • Proofread your content
  • Maximize the Link Checker
  • Tap the ‘Push to MailChimp Mobile’ option for mobile optimization
  • Ask for testing volunteers
  • Check plain-text version

Despite minor flaws, PCMag still notes MailChimp as a ‘centralized smorgasbord of features,’ for real-time management and customization of email campaigns. Although it will get pricey for startup once they’ve exceeded the 2,000 markup, it’s worth a shot to maximize MailChimp’s full potential to reach more audience.

("mailchimp-vinyl-toy" by Tomos licensed by CC BY-SA 2.0)