Is MailChimp Right for Your Marketing Needs

The nature of email marketing, and the volume of contacts that many SMBs have, requires them to select an email marketing solution that helps them reach their goals. Today, we’ll review a popular option, MailChimp, to see if it is best suited to handle your business communications.

Price

MailChimp follows a very reasonable pricing strategy, especially when you consider their “Forever Free” plan. Essentially, MailChimp’s offers can be summed up with the following:

1. The Forever Free Plan, where you can send up to 12000 emails each month between 2000 contacts (but without any additional features like automation, and with a MailChimp banner taking up the footer of your emails).
2. Paid plans start at $10 each month for between 1001 and 1500 subscribers, the plans scale up from there to meet your needs.

Since MailChimp provides economic, scalable options to fit your precise needs, it is a cost-effective solution no matter how many contacts you need to reach.

Deliverability

This is a key consideration when selecting an email marketing solution, as you will want to make sure that your messages reach your intended audience at an acceptable rate. Deliverability measures the percentage of emails sent from a campaign that make it to a subscriber’s inbox. MailChimp tends to have a relatively high deliverability rate. If need be, MailChimp does allow you to re-add unsubscribed contacts to your lists, but that is strictly for accidental unsubscribes or returning subscribers.

This is where you will want to be careful, as MailChimp is pretty strict in regards to your list. You need to make sure it is clean and that everyone on it has opted in to receive your messages, so it doesn’t hurt to run an opt-in campaign on occasion. This is to make sure that MailChimp’s systems don’t conclude that you are being spammy.

CAN-SPAM Compliance: MailChimp holds its users to a higher standard of CAN-SPAM compliance, and even has built-in abuse prevention measures called Omnivore. Omnivore collects data and statistics from MailChimp emails to help identify abusive accounts and identify whether or not an email’s contents could prove to be problematic. As a result, repeated commercial messages that don’t comply with the requirements outlined by CAN-SPAM will result in your account being deactivated after three issues. CAN-SPAM is a piece of federal regulation that was first introduced in 2003 as a means of limiting unwanted and inappropriate communications through email messages.

Integrations and Automation

This is one category where MailChimp really shines, as it can integrate data and processes from 781 other apps and programs. This means that if you have a solution that you prefer to work with, there’s a relatively good chance that MailChimp is compatible with it.

MailChimp can also simplify your workflow. Its Goal Integration feature allows you to send specific emails to contacts who visit particular site pages, and you will be able to enjoy many more customizations to your workflows. Organizing and adjusting your email campaigns is made much easier. MailChimp can draw information based on numerous triggers, automatically sending your predetermined emails to your contacts when it is appropriate.

JoomConnect's Quick Campaign Pro (QCP) facilitates an integration with MailChimp to ConnectWise enabling you to easily track the opens and clicks from your MailChimp campaign back to your Marketing Campaign in ConnectWise. QCP also manages syncing your ConnectWise Marketing Group to your MailChimp list. As well any unsubscribes are updated to your ConnectWise group. 

Domain Authentication

In order to optimize the delivery of your emails, MailChimp authenticates each campaign with both DomainKeys Identified Mail (or DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (or SPF). This automatic process shows Internet service providers that the email is legitimate, giving it the best chance of reaching an inbox.

MailChimp also allows you to set up your own DKIM and SPF authentication. With a few changes to your DNS records, you can improve your delivery rates even further and make your email campaigns look better.

Performance Testing

Finally, MailChimp allows you to create your most effective messages through tried-and-true trial-and-error. Utilizing an A/B testing strategy, you can compare different email configurations against one another to determine which variables have the most impact on your audience. Which day of the week do they respond the most? Does the time the message is sent have an impact? Does the name in the “From” field matter at all? MailChimp can assist you in making these determinations, leading to a more optimized marketing process.

We also recently went over the benefits that came with utilizing another solution, Constant Contact, for these needs. Check out that blog to compare its benefits to MailChimp’s.

If you’d like some assistance in incorporating MailChimp into your systems, reach out to us at 888-546-4384. We'll make sure you’re all set up and ready to go.

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