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PROS:
CONS:
With its Free Forever plan and extreme ease of use MailChimp is the most common choice of beginners in email marketing. This is why MailChimp is among the first, if not the first email marketing provider by market share. The use of this service doesn’t require special IT skills, most computer users will be able to configure it and set up effective campaigns.
The possibility to make email campaigns for free is awesome, especially if this is your first endeavor into the email marketing. MailChimp is not just free for some basic use of email marketing, it is also one of the easiest email marketing solutions for use. Its unique approach to product and pricing makes even those paid plans very useful and explains the leading market share of this provider.
The Free plan is pretty awesome. It will be yours as long as you need it, and all that time you will have an ability to send 12,000 emails to a maximum of 2,000 users. There are no specific limits per contact, so theoretically if your list has just 100 contacts it means you can send each 120 messages throughout 30 days. Free users can access, customize, edit and develop their own templates, fully manage their mailing lists and access in-depth analytics. How well campaigns go is much up to the visuals, and MailChimp features a designer suite letting you create HTML-rich templates without any coding. There is also A/B testing which is usually a premium feature or sometimes simply nonexistent, is free with MailChimp.
Those who want more, can choose among two budgeting types: a standard monthly flat fee plan or pay-as-you-go bundles with packs of email credits. Regardless of that, all paid users have access to full automation options with order notifications for buyers from your website. There is also recipient information based on their social activity, which can help in targeting, abandoned shopping cart reminders, limited email inbox preview and more.
Email Creation and Sending
Unlike many other email software platforms, MailChimp doesn’t offer professional design services. Instead, you can either rely on the email designer suite or import your own codes. With the onsite design suite you can make layouts of text boxes, images, graphics and action buttons, making it one of the most powerful on-site template editing and customization solutions. Importing templates can be done by just sending it to an address used with MailChimp, which will check the imported template for any errors in code and content. The content is checked for spam by Omnivore, a machine-learning algorithm which tracks development of spam hunting activities across the Internet and is updated regularly to be in constant accordance with the regulations.
Custom templates can be reviewed with the Inbox Preview tool that would demonstrate how your messages and newsletters will look in various email clients such as Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. This feature is only included in the paid plan and is limited. It even includes a color blind review to see how the content will look to viewers with color vision deficiency. Inbox Preview uses token system, and for every preview in a certain client such as Gmail and Outlook, one token is spent. Paid plan users get 25 free tokens monthly and Pro users get 1,000 free tokens. Additional inbox previews cost $3 for a bundle of 25 tokens.
MailChimp boasts one of the highest delivery rates among similar services and software. Messages can be time-warped. The system determines any recipient’s location and timezone from their IP address and the sender can have all their recipients receive the message in the same local time, thus avoiding off-hours disruption.
List Options
Contacts can be added manually, mass imported, or added through contact management systems integrated with your MailChimp account. Thanks to this, customer activity can be tracked along with their contact information in order to create a more personalized approach, in which case it is fruitful to sign up for the Pro addon to further grow business with targeted emails. Targeting is however, still possible with the free or paid accounts without addons, and can be aided by surveys and polls.
List growing options are also great: you can set popup forms for your website which are integrated with your Facebook page, or you can import any popup form template into a MailChimp account.
BOTTOM LINE
As a company which pioneered the freemium solution in email marketing industry, MailChimp targets almost every company. There is simply no business and industry which can’t do well with this platform through proper configuring and you can be aided by a calculator which will tell you what is better for your business: starting up free, pay-as-you-go or flat fee. With this freemium aproach, you can start growing your list before spending anything on email marketing, and start paying for these services once you’ve already started earning from email campaigns.
Fixed-price plan costs depend only on subscription list length,and there are no sending limits.
$10 for 1-500 users
$15 for 501-1,000 users
$20 for 1,001-1500 users
$25 for 1,500-2,000 users
$30 for 2,001-2,500 users
$35 for 2,501-2,600 users
$40 for 2,601-2,700 subscribers
$45 for 2,701-2,800 subscribers
$50 for 2,801-5,000 subscribers
$75 for 5,801-,10,000 subscribers
$150 for 12,801-25,000 subscribers
$240 for 32,001-50,000 subscribers
Mailing lists longer than 50,000 subscribers are subject to sending limitations. Long-term campaign can be paused for one month, once or twice yearly, for the months when you plan going on vacation or when campaigns and promotions appear to be less fruitful for your revenues.
Pay-as-you-go is billed per email credit. 1 email credit equals 1 sending. $0.03/credit for up to 2,000 credits, $0.02/credit for up to 10,000 credits and $0.01/credit for up to 75,000 credits. Larger packages will cost even less per credit. The larger the bundle the lower the price per credit, and the largest bundle is 25 million credits, worth of $10,000.
Pro is a luxury addon which costs $200 monthly and might be the most expensive product in the email marketing industry. Behind the price are some powerful enterprise features, including personalized messaging, multivariate testing (same as the A/B but with up to 8 variations), advanced segmentation for perfect customer targeting, demographics prediction and an absolute priority in reaching out support.
Contact form: https://mailchimp.com/contact/support/
Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mailchimp/
Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.
By: Miroslav | Last updated April 17, 2017 
