What is MailChimp used for
Mailchimp is used for getting leads into your email database and then sending a mass message to many people at the same time via email and social media. Mailchimp offers its solutions to customers according to the principle of Software as a Service (Saas). Customers need no additional software on their computer or server but can use a browser-based user interface to access the tool.
In this article, we will learn what MailChimp is, its pricing plans, and its features. We will discuss the pros, cons, and alternatives to the MailChimp email service. We will also discuss when to use this email service.
Table of Contents
In this article, we will cover the following topics.
- What is MailChimp?
- MailChimp Pricing Plans.
- MailChimp Key Features.
- The Pros and Cons of the MailChimp Email Service.
- What are the Alternatives to MailChimp Email Service?
- When to use the MailChimp Email Service?
- Using MailChimp for Sending Emails Explored.
What is MailChimp?
Ben Chestnut and Mark Armstrong founded the Mailchimp email service in 2001. Mailchimp is one of the world’s most popular email marketing solutions, with more than 14 million users, and they deliver 1 billion emails daily. While most of Mailchimp’s customers are small businesses, some medium-sized businesses use its Premium Plan.
Best for an all-in-one integrated email delivery branding solution. Mailchimp is a powerful marketing API service that provides you with intelligent marketing tools. It works with your favorite apps and web services and helps you do more with your email marketing. It can also find the tools you use or discover new ways for email marketing.
MailChimp allows you to create and send emails and offers other features since it is a more comprehensive email marketing tool. Some examples are the ability to manage and import contact lists, send emails for abandoned carts, use a drag & drop editor, and schedule emails.
With MailChimp email service, you will be in good company. When you build integrations with Mailchimp, you create tools for a trusted and reliable platform that powers your marketing, e-commerce, and more for millions of small businesses.
Mailchimp’s API client libraries and mobile SDKs make it so easy to work with Mailchimp Marketing and Transactional APIs with your language or platform of choice.
Some of the key features of MailChimp email service:
- Drag and Drop Custom Email Builder
- Email Automation
- Store content like images to use later in the campaign.
- Send transactional emails
- Real-time analytics
MailChimp Pricing Plans
The Mailchimp email service pricing starts at $13 per month. It provides one free plan and three paid plans. Below, we provide a breakdown of Mailchimp’s monthly subscription costs.
| Plan | Monthly Emails | Users | Support | Price | Features |
| Free | 2500 | 1 | Email support for first 30 days | $0 per month | Pre-built Email Templates. 300+ Integrations. Basic Reporting & Analytics. Forms & Landing Pages. Creative Assistant. |
| Essentials | 5,000 | 3 | 24/7 Email & Chat Support | $13 per month | Pre-built Email Templates. 300+ Integrations. Basic Reporting & Analytics. Forms & Landing Pages. Creative Assistant. Role-based Access Remove Mailchimp Branding, A/B Testing. Email Scheduling. Automated Customer Journeys. |
| Standard | 6,000 | 5 | 24/7 Email & Chat Support | $20 per month | Pre-built Email Templates. 300+ Integrations. Basic Reporting & Analytics. Forms & Landing Pages. Creative Assistant. Role-based Access Remove Mailchimp Branding, A/B Testing. Email Scheduling. Automated Customer Journeys. Pre-built Journeys. Custom-Coded Templates. Predictive Segmentation. Content Optimizer. Send Time Optimization. Dynamic Content. |
| Premium | 150,000 | Unlimted | Phone & Priority Support | $350 per month | Pre-built Email Templates. 300+ Integrations. Basic Reporting & Analytics. Forms & Landing Pages. Creative Assistant. Role-based Access Remove Mailchimp Branding, A/B Testing. Email Scheduling. Automated Customer Journeys. Pre-built Journeys. Custom-Coded Templates. Predictive Segmentation. Content Optimizer. Send Time Optimization. Dynamic Content. Multivariate Testing. Comparative Reporting. Advanced Segmentation. Assisted Onboarding. |
MailChimp Key Features
Following are some key features of the MailChimp email service.
Create an email campaign.
Mailchimp makes it very easy and shows you all the steps necessary to create an email campaign, making it suitable for new users. The workflow won’t necessarily suit everyone as you have to fill in all the details of your campaign, such as subscribers, subject line, and from address, before you can design your email.
Mailchimp offers you many options and flexibility in terms of email design functionality. When you create your email, you can choose the following:
- Basic layouts.
- Layouts targeted at certain campaign types, such as announcements, or product sales.
- Template themes.
- Coding your own from scratch.
Mailchimp features an easy-to-use web builder that lets you develop your campaigns from the front end without needing any coding knowledge.
It is also easy to edit your template by adding text blocks, social sharing buttons, videos, and images. And also, from the font to indents, colors, and shades, and even spell checking, it can be completely customized to your brand.
Mailchimp’s commenting section allows you to send test emails to other people and collects all their comments in one place. This enables better collaboration and helps to ensure your emails are error-free.
Mailchimp also offers advanced A/B testing functionality, letting you test up to three different variations of content and subject line, from name and send time, and sending these variations to a percentage of your email list or segment.
As every campaign has different goals, Mailchimp lets you specify the criteria for choosing the winning email. This could be clicked, open rate, total revenue, or another option.
Audience Management System.
Mailchimp has an advanced contact management feature. Its contact management dashboard and functionality are super analytical. You can find all the usual features, such as adding contacts manually and importing lists, but you can also drill down into the specific behavior of your contacts.
One of the best features is the audience segmentation capabilities provided by Mailchimp. Other email marketing software may give you only the insights into your email, such as email open rate and clicks, but you have to build the segments yourself.
The Mailchimp email service automatically creates segments based on a machine learning model that can predict how likely a customer will shop with you again and how much they will spend. You can also then send campaigns to this segment from the audience dashboard.
All the segments- created by you or Mailchimp- are dynamic. So instead of you having to maintain them manually, Mailchimp moves contacts in and out of segments as they meet the relevant criteria. And the more sophisticated the automation, the better you target your contacts with relevant content. This can save time on building segments and creating lists, and you are also less likely to miss a contact accidentally.
Automation.
The Mailchimp email service allows you to set up automated workflows based on behavior triggered, such as a user abandoning a cart or signing up to your email list.
You can also choose from Mailchimp templates, and some of the helpful automation templates are
- Rewarding loyal customers.
- Order notifications.
- Cart or browse abandonment.
- Purchase follow up.
- Win back / customer re-engagement.
- Abandons cart.
- Buys a specific product.
- Clicks specific links in the email.
- Opens email.
- Recurring date.
- Sign ups.
- Time since the last purchase.
You can create a single email for each automation workflow or a series. For example, if you need to create a series to win back a customer who hasn’t interacted with your brand for a while. You could send one email with new or recommended products and follow this up with a discount if they don’t respond.
And finally, if they still haven’t responded, you can email them to say you are removing them from your list. You can also set this up in Mailchimp, so it all happens automatically at intervals without you having to lift a finger.
Analytics and Reporting
Some email marketing software only gives you access to basic stats such as sends, bounces, opens, and clicks. Mailchimp’s Marketing Platform offers the kind of insight that allows you to understand the actual ROI of each campaign in real terms. Some of the most useful reports, for example, are the number of orders, average order revenue, and total revenue. This also allows you to see which campaigns have made an impact rather than tracking vanity metrics that haven’t brought in revenue.
Mailchimp includes tools that track performance, improve deliverability, and offer actionable insights to grow your business. Mailchimp automatically tracks the following performance data for all of your campaigns. Here are some of the metrics that Mailchimp tracks.
- Open rate (your average vs. industry average).
- Click rate (your average vs. industry average).
- The number of successfully delivered emails.
- Top links clicked within your email.
- Subscribers with the most opens.
- Social media performance (tweets, Facebook likes, etc.).
- Geographical regions with the most opens.
Mailchimp lets you track the performance of one-off email campaigns and shows you how each of your automated email series is performing. That way, you can correct any steps if they are not nurturing customers down the pipeline.
Integrations.
Mailchimp offers over 250 built-in integrations with third-party software. It also provides an open API that allows developers to build custom integrations with the solution.
The list of some of Mailchimp’s most notable integrations is given below.
- 3dcart
- Amazon Marketplace
- BigCommerce
- Chargebee
- Commercev3
- Magento and Magento 2
- Mailchimp
- Mi9
- OpenCart
- PrestaShop
- Salesforce
- Shopify
- Spree
- Volusion
- WooCommerce
- Wufoo
- Zendesk
- Zoho
The Pros and Cons of the MailChimp Email Service
The pros and cons of the MailChimp email service are the following.
Pros.
- The MailChimp platform includes a wide range of marketing tools that are well-organized and easy to use.
- Using the Mailchimp email service does not require advanced technical expertise.
- Mailchimp has over 250 built-in integrations to third-party platforms.
- Advanced email reporting and analytics.
- Automated email responder templates.
- Helpful in-app tips and support tools.
Cons.
- The MailChimp’s paid plans are less affordable than many of its competitors.
- The marketing automation tools are less robust than some competitors.
- Mailchimp does not offer built-in integrations with Shopify.
- Limited support for lower tiers.
- Occasional navigational issues.
What are the Alternatives to MailChimp Email Service?
Mailchimp competes with several email marketing solutions that offer similar features. The best choice for you to make will depend on your budget and feature preferences.
Mailchimp’s top alternatives are:
- SendinBlue
- Mailjet
- AWeber
- SendGrid
- MailGun
- AWS SES
- HubSpot
Mailchimp vs SendinBlue Email Marketing API
Sendinblue is an excellent choice as an email marketing API. It is fast, simple, and accessible to everyone. You can send millions of marketing emails in no time using Sendinblue’s robust Email API. Their email API can accept up to 120k emails per minute, and 99% of emails are processed in less than 2 seconds.
Sendinblue email service also provides digital marketing and sales tools for your business to expand. The features offered by Sendinblue including email designing, marketing automation, launching Facebook ads for a targeted audience, and much more.
The free plan contains 300 emails a day, and the paid ones cost $20 for 20,000 emails a day and $1000 for the business plus plan.
Features:
- Separate dashboard for transactional email configuration
- A/B Testing for emails
- Drag and drop email builder
- Advanced report generation
Mailchimp vs Mailjet Email Marketing API
Mailjet is the best for Email API and marketing solutions. Mailjet provides an easy-to-use platform for designing and sending email marketing campaigns, newsletters, and automated emails.
You can design beautiful responsive emails in a few minutes using Mailjet Email Marketing API. You can start from scratch or select from a variety of pre-designed templates in Mailjet.
There is a free plan which offers you to send 200 emails per day and 6000 emails per month, have unlimited contacts, and provide statistics about the performance of your emails. The premium plan costs $15 for 15,000 emails per month.
Features:
- Intuitive Online Email Builder
- Real-Time online collaboration
- Send Transactional emails easily via SMTP relay or RESTful API
- Personalized email templates
- Transactional SMS API
Mailchimp vs AWeber Email Marking API
Tom Kulzer founded the AWeber email service in 1998. Today, it is used by over 150,000 businesses around the world.
AWeber is the best option for small businesses and entrepreneurs that desire an essential and affordable email marketing tool with exceptional customer support. It includes most of the typical features of this type of software, such as data integration and storage, segmentation, A/B testing, a drag-and-drop email builder, and reporting.
AWeber also offers a free plan that includes up to 500 subscribers, and 3,000 email sends per month. AWeber’s paid plan starts at $19 per month and increases based on your number of contacts.
Features:
- The AWeber email service is more affordable than many of its competitors.
- AWeber offers unlimited email sends and lists.
- AWeber offers 24/7 customer support by email, live chat, and phone.
Mailchimp vs SendGrid Email Service
SendGrid is one of the top transactional email service providers available on the market. It is owned by Twilio, is heavily documented, and provides an excellent freemium plan.
We’ve written extensively about SendGrid in the past. Click here to read all of our SendGrid reviews, guides, tutorials and more.
Features:
- Predefined templates.
- Robust Reporting.
- Mailing List Management.
- Dedicated IPs.
Mailchimp vs Mailgun Transactional Email Service
Mailgun is a great cloud-based email service for developers. You can use it for transactional and mass emails, but it doesn’t offer independent functionality for marketers, like templates and a media library.
We’ve written a full series on Mailgun. Click here to read our reviews, insights & tips on Mailgun
Mailgun is an email service that allows us to use the SMTP protocol or API to send emails. It also provides us with reports to track the number of emails sent and also allows us to check addresses for typos or spam problems. It has an email validation service that provides accurate validation results on the market.
Mailgun website offers you lots of information and enough space to get confused. Here is a list of the main options. You won’t find the obvious splitting for different types of emails.
Transactional Email API
Mailgun is one of the most helpful email APIs that developers use. We can easily send transactional or bulk emails using Mailgun’s SMTP and HTTP API in PHP. Mailgun allows you to choose how you want to send your emails through API or SMTP.
Mailgun also allows you to create eye-catching emails in minutes. You can create a personalized email targeted at a specific audience. And the Email analytics, based on performance data of your sent emails, lets you know the best time to send your messages.
In Mailgun, you can have the option to choose how you want to send your emails using Mailgun’s API (A popular method of sending emails that can integrate with languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, and more.) or using the SMTP method (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is an easy way to transfer your emails.)
Features:
- Easy SMTP integration and flexible HTTP API.
- Personalize and schedule emails.
- Automatic Email Parsing.
- Improved Email Deliverability.
- Email analytics.
Mailchimp vs AWS Simple Email Service (SES) Transactional Emails
Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a top-rated cloud-based service offered by Amazon. It is one of the alternatives to Mailchimp. It allows for sending and receiving emails and is mostly suitable for transactional emails. Its users often use it alongside other AWS services, such as SQS or EC2, and take advantage of seamless integrations. It also works perfectly fine as a standalone offering.
It also provides a variety of deployments, including dedicated, shared, or owned IP addresses. And also, reports on sender statistics and a deliverability dashboard help businesses make every email count.
One of the best features of Amazon SES is its low cost. The AWS SES service is chosen and used by companies such as Netflix, Reddit, and Duolingo.
AWS Service Integration
Another important feature is the integration, through the console itself, API, or SMTP, it is possible to configure the sending of emails. In addition, Amazon SES not only allows sending of emails but also receiving them.
Mailchimp is more like an all-inclusive tool, suitable for sending all kinds of emails, while Amazon SES mainly does transactional emails. SES works with pay-as-you-go pricing, while PostMark offers pre-designed(monthly) plans. The rates also differ, of course.
With AWS SES, a user gets to send 5 emails per second. This number can go up to 50000 emails per day. However, the numbers can further go up if the users happen to maintain an excellent email-sending reputation.
Mailchimp differs a little bit from Amazon. Here, users need to buy a huge quantity of emails with which they can slowly increase their email limitation. This limitation entirely depends on the email-sending reputation.
Features:
- Build customized email marketing campaigns
- Content filtering
- Dedicated IP addresses
- Integrate easily with other applications
Mailchimp vs HubSpot Email Marking API
HubSpot email service combines marketing automation, email, and also other flexible marketing tools with the power of a CRM to give you insight into how your marketing efforts are influencing your customers and their experience across their entire buyer’s journey. The HubSpot email service is ranked #1 in Marketing Automation by G2 and Gartner Peer Insights.
The HubSpot email tool has all the features Mailchimp offers and more. HubSpot’s drag and drop email editor is easy to use, and we offer a slew of templates to personalise your brand’s specific needs. As you grow, you will unlock features like smart send times, A/B testing, and more.
The real power of HubSpot’s marketing email tool comes when it’s combined with CRM and our marketing automation platform. With HubSpot, you can create detailed email campaigns that give each contact a tailored experience based on the information you’ve gathered within the CRM. You can also create if/then logic in your automated email campaigns so each contact receives a contextual email based on their experience with your brand.
Features:
- Social Media Tools
- Email Tracking Software
- Sales Email Automation
- Ads Software
- Email Marketing Software
- Lead Management Software
- Pipeline Management Tools
When to use the MailChimp Email Service?
Mailchimp email service is a perfect option for experienced and novice email marketers. This email service provider has many advanced features and a well-organized and intuitive user interface that makes it quick and easy to start. Plus, it has many helpful tips to get the most out of the system and improve your email marketing skills. Its advanced analytics features make it easy to track the success of your email campaigns and get the insights you need to improve constantly.
The Mailchimp email service is suitable for any marketer, even if they have zero email marketing experience and have never used any email marketing software before. It is effortless to use, combined with its heavy focus on analytics and actionable insight, making it an excellent solution to track metrics and take a data-driven approach to email marketing.
Using MailChimp for Sending Emails Explored
Mailchimp is one of the world’s most popular email marketing solutions, with over 14 million users. The Mailchimp email service core competency is email marketing, and the platform includes several valuable tools that help small businesses with online marketing. This consists of a content library, landing page builder, paid ads campaign manager, and a recommendations engine. Also, the Mailchimp email service does not require advanced technical expertise or coding.
Mailchimp is best for small businesses that prefer an all-in-one platform that supports the key components of online marketing and does not require advanced technical expertise. If you are a small to medium-sized business that requires sophisticated automation tools, consider testing ActiveCampaign. If you are an e-commerce business operating on Shopify, you should consider Klaviyo because it integrates directly with the platform.
This article explains what Mailchimp is, its pricing plans, and its features. It also describes the pros and cons and when to use the Mailchimp email service, and we hope you find this article helpful.
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