Mailchimp

Mailchimp is incredibly solid, the UI is familiar to many staff (so learning curve was slight), and they seemed to maintain high quality sending ip integrity (so open rates remained high). Other competitors we have tested over the years seemed more flexible with their sending quality, so we noticed sharp open-rate drops (even after warming up the list).

Campaigns were easy to setup and it was relatively easy to set up attractive emails (or pull in templates from elsewhere). Reporting made sense, and it was useful to be able to track client engagement over time.

We were very committed to Mailchimp over a long period (10+ years) but primarily for email newsletters. As the software developed, they continued to introduce more and more features, but in some ways this just complicated things for us. We used Mailchimp for infrequent mailouts to large mailing lists, and this worked well when they allowed you to buy adhoc credits. However, when they introduced subscription pricing only (arguably fair enough given all their new features) it made it entirely unviable to continue.

I started using MailChimp a while ago and I love all the ways it helps my small business. Firstly, I love how it is a nifty tool for keeping an eye on clients and effectively engaging with them. I like how it can be easily consolidated with many other software and the variety of languages it comes in. I think it's really nice and convinient that the software can be easily deployed from different types of gadgets and operating systems. I very much appreciate the auto responder option because it cuts out the manual labour that I would otherwise go through if I had to spend hours sending emails one by one. The survey builder is really great, market research can be done effortlessly so that new business strategies can be adopted after analyzing responses. I love the creative assistant feature because it makes some work easier and leads to better marketing which in turn grows sales. Lastly, as a small business owner, I found the pricing plans to be appealing and I was able to choose one which suits the needs of my business.

Mailchimp can get very complicated, I found the user interface to be really tricky for an ordinary user such as myself. Its easy to get lost in the confusing, esoteric jargon and customer service in my expirience isn't always quick to respond when you need their help. In as much as the automation feature is great, the way in which it is setup is very tricky. Lastly, the data management and manipulation features are a bit too limited.

My favourite feature in Mailchimp is undoubtedly the creative assistant. If you don't have a lot of design skills and you want to visually improve your e-mails, the creative assistant can quickly come up with something useful for you.

I think Mailchimp is really complicated. Even very simple user-friendly UX studies are still missing. This makes things really difficult. It has truly become a product that a neuron can use. I've used Hubspot before and since I'm used to the comfort there, the Mailchimpin interface really challenged me. In addition, imports are very slow and we often get errors. I don't like re-entering our colour codes every time to apply branding in mail designs, it really slows things down. In addition, contact list management is very difficult, tagging something, undoing tags, and multi-deletion is a very challenging process.

Mailchimp was my first approximation to a customer relationship management tool and, after many years, still is my usual selection and advice to other small businesses. It is an easy-to-use platform with a great development team who cares about its clients. In recent years the tool has evolved and added new features, all great additions.

Right now, nothing about Mailchimp is bad for my small business.