Why Mailchimp Might Be The Right ESP For You

Which orgs use it?: The 19th, Block Club Chicago, Pew Research Center, The Salt Lake Tribune, Rewiring America, WBUR Who is it best for?: Any newsroom or non-profit with fewer than 200,000 subscribers

Mailchimp is the most commonly-used email service provider in the market, and it’s because it does a lot of things well:

• It has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder for creating templates and email campaigns.
• It allows you to A/B test all parts of your newsletters, from subject lines to sent-from names to template designs.
• It offers more than 300 integrations, from payment tools, like Stripe and Patreon, to apps you use daily, like WordPress or SurveyMonkey.
• It has an automation tool, called Customer Journeys, that allows you to create complex automated emails for things like a welcome series, or that can be used to thank a paying supporter and guide them through next steps.
• It allows you to use tags or merge fields to personalize the content of the emails you send to readers.
• It has an RSS-to-email tool that can be used to send automated emails, like breaking news alerts.
• It offers two different ways to measure reader loyalty — star rating, or email engagement status. Both are useful in identifying the readers who might one day become paying supporters.
• It has a Send Time Optimization tool, which is helpful for brands that might have readers spread out across multiple time zones.

If Mailchimp was a restaurant, it’d be the local diner with one of those endless menus covering everything from brunch to seafood dinners to late-night fare. It’s a very versatile ESP — it does a little bit of everything, and does it all pretty well. For most local newsrooms and small non-profits getting started with email, Mailchimp is usually the ESP I recommend. It does the things you need it to do, and it’s easy for anyone to learn and use.

A few more things I like about Mailchimp:

They offer a lot of customizable templates — You don’t need to be a designer to create a template in Mailchimp. You can start with one of their pre-built templates, then add your colors and fonts to customize things to your liking. Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant also allows non-designers to create designs that can be deployed in a newsletter or shared on social media.

They take data security seriously — You can require all users to go through a two-factor confirmation process (password + text message or Google Authenticator code) to keep your account safe.

They allow you to customize the sign-up process for new subscribers — Want to require double opt-in, need to turn on reCAPTCHA on your sign-up modules (which I highly recommend!), or need GDPR-friendly forms? Mailchimp allows you to turn on any of these with a single click.

They allow you to create landing pages — Let’s say you’re doing a live event and want to track sign-ups from that event. In Mailchimp, you can set up a landing page just for that event, customize which fields a reader will need to fill out, and then even tag everyone who comes via that page. It’s a great feature, and creating a landing page usually takes less than 10 minutes.

You can send postcards right from Mailchimp — Let’s say you want to invite new readers to attend an event or buy something from you. With Mailchimp’s postcards tool, you can send messages to those readers — even if you don’t have their mailing address. (It costs about $.70 per postcard.) It’s a great feature that allows you to engage with a single reader through multiple channels.

What does Mailchimp lack?

The data within Mailchimp is good, but not great. Just this summer, they rolled out a nice update allowing you to easily look at the overall growth, opens, and clicks over a set period of time (i.e. last week, last month, last quarter), but you can’t then segment that data by newsletter. In many cases, you’ll have to download a report in order to slice and dice your data in Excel or Google Sheets. In other cases, you’ll be able to access data (like open rates for certain email clients), but only on an individual campaign level. More advanced users will be able to pull data out into a third-party tool, like Databox or Google Data Studio, where you can sort data to find what you’re looking for.

Mailchimp has a few strange quirks. Simple tasks, like adding a campaign name to track your newsletter in Google Analytics, require a series of scrolls and clicks. There’s also the unsubscribe flow. Readers can change their email preferences, but to do so requires a multi-step process, including clicking on a confirmation email (which you can’t customize or edit). While changing your newsletter preferences requires multiple clicks, readers can unsubscribe with a single click, and Mailchimp doesn’t offer a two-step unsubscribe process to reduce accidental unsubscribes.

If you’re looking to create sign-up forms or pop-ups, Mailchimp does offer some embeddable tools, but I often recommend using a third-party tool for these, like OptinMonster, so you can have more control over the design and copy of the form. 

Mailchimp does offer the ability to send transactional messages through their Mandrill service, but that will come at an additional cost.

What does Mailchimp cost?

Mailchimp offers four tiers, but most organizations would be best served by the Standard plan. If you have 10,000 contacts, Mailchimp’s Standard plan will cost $99 per month. (With lower plans, like Essentials or Free, you won’t get access to all of their features, like Customer Journeys or Send Time Optimization.) I do think that if you have fewer than 200,000 contacts, Mailchimp offers a fair price for the product. But once you go beyond that, it can be expensive, and you may want to consider an email service provider that charges based on the volume of emails sent, not total list size.

One thing you should know if you send a daily newsletter via Mailchimp: They put a cap on the number of emails you can send via your plan. For Standard users, the cap is 12 times the number of contacts on your plan. Here’s how that can cause a problem:

• Let’s say you send a newsletter five days per week to about 8,000 readers. You’re sending 8,000 emails per weekday, which means that in a typical month, you’re sending at least 160,000 total emails (5 days a week x 4 weeks in a month x 8,000 subscribers).
• Naturally, you’d probably pick the plan that can accommodate your 8,000 in subscribers. In this case, you’d probably pick Mailchimp’s Standard plan that allows for up to 10,000 subscribers, and wouldn’t think twice about it. But there’s a catch.
• On that plan, Mailchimp has a monthly cap on the number of emails you can send. The cap for that list size would be 120,000 emails sent per month (12 x 10,000) — and you need to send at least 160,000 emails per month.
• If you exceed the cap, you’ll pay significant overage fees to send these emails. (You can read more about Mailchimp’s overage fees here.)
• So what’s the most cost-effective choice? My recommendation is to buy a plan that significantly exceeds your number of contacts. It’s actually cheaper for this hypothetical newsroom to get on a Standard plan with 15,000 subscribers (which comes with 180,000 total sends per month) than to go on a lower plan and pay Mailchimp’s overage fees.

This becomes particularly important as your list grows. It’s easy to accidentally spend thousands of dollars more per year if you end up on the wrong plan.

A final note: Unless you’re grandfathered in to one of Mailchimp’s legacy plans (if you signed up for an account before 2019, you may be on one of these), Mailchimp charges based on the number of contacts on your list — including contacts who have unsubscribed. I’d recommend going into your list of contacts and archiving those unsubscribed users every month. (Archived users don’t count against your total number of contacts.)

What integrations does Mailchimp offer?

Mailchimp offers more integrations than any other ESP — it’s the thing they’re truly best-in-class at. Among the ones to note: Direct integrations with Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, and Google Analytics. They have a robust integration with Zapier and Segment.io, and pretty much any third-party growth tool connects directly with Mailchimp. It integrates with SparkLoop if you want to build a referral program. You can also integrate with email builders like BEEPro or Chamaileon if you’d like to build custom designs for your newsletters.

Is there anything else I should know about Mailchimp?

When you’re building out your lists in Mailchimp, I recommend using groups to organize your newsletters, tags to identify certain types of users (i.e. paying supporters), and merge fields to personalize data (i.e. a reader’s first name). Organizing your data incorrectly might lead to higher costs or difficulty getting the most out of the platform.

If you need customer service help, my recommendation would be to use their chat feature — you’ll almost always get a reply within a few minutes from an actual human. To chat, click on the black question mark in the bottom right corner when logged into Mailchimp, then select Help & Support, and then Chat. (I don’t recommend emailing them a question; their email replies often take a day or two.)

If you’re encouraging readers to reply directly to your newsletter, make sure there’s an inbox tied to the email address you’re sending from. Mailchimp won’t let you send from one email (say, newsletters@yoursite.com) and have a reader reply to a different address (feedback@yoursite.com).

Also beware Gmail clipping issues when using Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop builder. It’s easy to build emails that have too much code and get clipped in Gmail, causing issues with reporting data and sometimes leading to issues with deliverability. Make sure to send a test email to a Gmail address to see if your newsletter has been clipped.

Disclosures: I’m a Mailchimp Pro Partner, and am compensated quarterly by Mailchimp for some of the work I do with clients on their platform. I work with several dozen newsrooms and non-profits that use Mailchimp. I’m also listed in Mailchimp’s Expert Directory, and I use Mailchimp to send my monthly Not a Newsletter email.