Do Not Use if You Are an Affiliate Marketer

My Go-to for email marketing

Mailchimp has been my go-to for 5+ years and I see no reason to change that now. It's simple, easy-to-use, and affordable. I also care about who I work with. From what I can see as an outsider looking in, they have a great company culture. I once found a mistake in their API documentation and they sent me a free t-shirt! Most companies aren't willing to spend money just to say thanks, and I think that says something about the culture and character of the company.

Pros

Easy to setup: I've used Mailchimp in the launch of dozens of brands and digital products. Mailchimp is so easy to setup; I can literally have an account up and running, collecting email addresses within 20 minutes. Great free option: One of my favorite things about Mailchimp is the fact that you get up to 2,000 contacts for free. Having that as an option (particularly for new businesses) is absolutely critical in making sure you can measure ROI from the platform before you start investing a lot of money. Easy to use: Mailchimp's forms, email templates, list management, etc. is all so simple. In the rare case you can't do something you want via the Mailchimp admin, it can probably be done via the API. Mailchimp has also done an exceptional job of integrating with 3rd party platforms to make sure you can easily maximize your email collection. More than just email marketing: In the last few years Mailchimp has started offering additional features outside of email campaigns, like Facebook ads and card mailing services. I personally don't think they're as good as Mailchimp's email service, but I am sure they'll improve over time.

Cons

In the last couple of years Mailchimp has made some changes to their pricing structure that I don't particularly love: 1) Pay as you go features have become more limited compared to their monthly plans. 2) Monthly rates have increased (although that's bound to happen at some point). 3) They now include some social platform contacts in your allotted contacts (i.e. you pay for them like they're email contacts). As well, Mailchimp automatically increases your bill when you cross over your plan subscriber threshold. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I suppose I prefer it to them just disabling collection of new contacts.

Great option for our business.

Overall we loved Mailchimp, we would not have switched if we did find an option that was a little less expensive.

Pros

Mailchimp was a great option for us. It was easy to use and effective.

Cons

We found a product that fit into our budget a little better.

Why I Don't Use Mailchimp

I have used MailChimp to set up a few campaigns for clients. I also started out on it because they used to offer 1,000 contacts for free. Integrating it with the different tools wasn't too tough. But it's not great at contact management and I don't recommend it if you're going to be doing any serious (or even quasi serious) email marketing.

Pros

MailChimp is pretty easy to use and integrates with most page builders and websites. So you can quickly have an email form set up and start driving traffic to get people on your email list. They also have good support in regards to getting back to you quickly.

Cons

MailChimp lacks features and power that make it competitive in the marketplace. I couldn't ever go back to it. The tool itself doesn't do everything I need it to. And as if that's not enough, I know of several people who have been shut down and had their accounts erroneously canceled by MailChimp for violating terms of service. So they were locked out of their account and had all of their email contacts erased without warning. And these were not "black hat" businesses. These were regular, small, mom and pop shops, including a florist.

Mailchimp, good for what you need

Pros

The ability to schedule, create, and cultivate individualized email marketing lists is perfect for our business when we have different subsets of content that people are interested in (Fantasy Football, NFL, College Football, Draft Prospects, Betting). The growing ease in which we can deliver carefully-crafted, branch-specific content emails is key.

Cons

There isn't anything that we can say "we must have it" or "can't go without it" as there seems to be standard on every other email marketing software. That being said, the price is still worth it.