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Smart Working Tool Review – Mailchimp

Everytime people see the sticker on my laptop they take a second look and go, Mailchimp? What the heck is a Mailchimp? Mailchimp is an email marketing program that is fairly new and is making great headway in the “this is a cool web program” buzz but here is the thing, it is actually good. Sure, there are stalwarts like ConstantContact and higher end packages like BlueSkyFactory which we love very much but we were looking for a tool that was affordable and allowed us to integrate with our multi-channel campaigns, all measured using Google Analytics.

Things that make this a smart working tool:

1.) Leverages Google Analytics - There is a free add-on in Mailchimp that pulls additional Google Analytics data into your email reports. This feature is pretty powerful because it pulls in ROI data that is already set up in Google Analytics. You can see how much revenue, conversions, bounce rates and ROIs were generated by an email campaign. Pretty cool.

2.) Flexible cost models – They have a free entry model for 0-100 subscribers and a monthly subscription with unlimited sending. They also have a pay-as-you-go model so if you have to do a mass mail only a few times you can manage your budget effectively.

3.) Great UI – I am big proponent of good UI design and any web service worthy of use these days should have an easy to work with and intuitive UI.

4.) They Get Social Media - They have an interesting feature that allows you to send a notice to many of your social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon,  Digg, Magnolia, and delicious.  It automatically creates intro text (that you can edit) and a shortened URL. The only downside is that it directs those users to the online version of your email; that might not be a bad thing if your email is a newsletter that contains the “new” content, but it isn’t as useful if your goal is to drive those visitors to the website.

5.) This is actually fun to use – Let’s admit it, email marketing is kinda boring and has been around for a while so for a company to come along and actually make email marketing smart and fun is a big plus in my book.

Things that it still needs to work on:

1.) Allow Web Page Importing – Most companies have a web site that is already

2.) Easy List Importing - It is a problem that lists have to be formatted ahead of time to fit the structure of our MailChimp lists. In other words, you can’t map your internal names for columns with MailChimp’s external names, so there will have to be a level of pre-processing before you import a list.

3.) Can’t save campaign segmentation – This means that if you mail separate campaigns to the same list based on attributes, you are going to have to build that out each time. This needs to be resolved ASAP.

If you would like to see a great review of 10 other email marketing services including Mailchimp, check out the TopTenReviews on email marketing services. Mailchimp doesn’t come out on top but I will bet within a year it does.

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