MailChimp Review (2023): Features, Pricing, Pros and Cons

MailChimp, apparently, is mostly the very first email marketing or newsletter tool that pops up in your mind when you think of sending automated newsletters.

What’s great about MailChimp is their facility is provided to everyone to start email marketing from zero budget.

It is something that inspired a lot of small owners and businesses to start or at least try email marketing and automation.

But one of the biggest issues with MailChimp is it is too broad in its functioning and does not have many specializations.

It is a pretty decent tool and there are arguments to be made from both sides regarding whether it is worth your buying or not in 2021.

So that’s what we will do here. We are reviewing different aspects of the Mailchimp Tool on the basis of its features, pricing, pros and cons, and much more.

Contents

Is MailChimp The Right Email Marketing Tool For You?

It Is Recommended If :

You require an all-in-one solution for Email inbound campaigns

MailChimp is known for focussing on the significance of running opt-in-based lead generation campaigns.

They offer features such as landing pages, forms, automated drip campaigns, and more to make it easy to do so.

Along with their in-built CRM, you can also set up customer profiles and even assign a lifetime value to your customers.

You’re looking for all the popular features of an email marketing tool.

One of the great advantages of MailChimp is that it is successfully able to offer all the required features that you may expect from a commercial email marketing tool.

Everything you need is just provided to you under one roof, making your email marketing campaigns easy.

Do you want integrations in your email marketing tool

If you are specifically looking for a newsletter service tool or email marketing tool that supports multiple integrations with other tools, MailChimp is a good option.

You may be into e-commerce or a business owner, blogger, or website owner who wants to add various integrations to your campaign.

MailChimp graciously offers hundreds of integrations to both very well-known applications as well as niche applications.

Do you offer in-person or online services?

MailChimp is effective with its appointment booking feature, which can be easily added to the service listing page.

It integrates well with your availability for the time on your website. It also allows you to make online payments as well.

It Is Not Recommended If :

You want support but have less budget

MailChimp certainly wouldn’t be the answer when you want access to support but don’t have much of a budget.

Their free plan has plenty of perks for users but what really bothers the users is there is no facility to access email or live chat support.

If you want access to support with MailChimp, you have to spend money on their Essentials or the higher plans.

You do affiliate marketing.

MailChimp is straightway not recommended for you if you’re an affiliate marketer.

It is because of their strict policy that prohibits affiliate marketing under their Terms of Use.

There are various penalties applied when the respective policy is exploited, including account cancellation.

So, it is better to just steer clear from MailChimp if your purpose here is to do affiliate marketing through it.

You are not well-organized

MailChimp puts a limitation on the maximum number of lists you can create, so it becomes essential for you to be extremely organized to manage your contacts.

Reviewing Different Features Of MailChimp

Email Automation

MailChimp’s email automation functionality is relatively efficient and robust as compared to its other features.

It is available with applied rules to send follow-up emails based on various factors and certain conditions such as opens, clicks, etc.

Users can also find more complex automation, such as email links or goals to action as well via the Customer Journeys feature, including workflow-based automation.

Rating: 4/5

Ease Of Use

MailChimp offers a very clean and easy-to-use interface where using the tools also becomes simple and fast to learn.

Navigation, on the other hand, could have been better and more simple. It is because certain tools remain a bit hidden to miss out.

When you set up the initial opt-in process, it is somewhat challenging due to the confusing menus.

Rating: 4 ½ / 5

Newsletter Editing

There are two editors available for the users to create and edit newsletters in MailChimp.

However, one of them is still in the beta version. Both of these editing tools are easy to use, fast, and don’t take much of a learning curve to adapt.

It offers users to put content blocks in the editor to create a newsletter such as video blocks, content blocks, social media buttons, etc.

Rating: 5/5

Personalization

Personalization, as part of editing a newsletter, isn’t completely facilitative for the users.

You will find the If/Then/Else logic, but they aren’t very user-friendly but still available.

MailChimp does offer a handy cheat sheet to help users to understand these concepts.

Users are also allowed to insert Merge tags in their email content to address their subscriber’s name or email address to make it more personalized.

Rating: 3/5

Deliverability

You can say that MailChimp’s deliverability rates are acceptable. Saying it is good will be a stretch, but it can get there with mere few improvements.

So it does have great potential. A lot of times, their emails apparently end up in the ‘Promotions’ tab of the inbox, which is not usually checked.

It impacts the success rate of the email automation campaign as it tends to lower the open rates of your emails.

Rating: 3/5

Email Types

You will get all the standard email types that you will require, such as the classic newsletter, transactional emails, autoresponders, and even A/B testing RSS as well.

So, as far as it comes to email types, MailChimp got you covered.

Rating: 4 ½ /5

List Management

MailChimp provides decent segmentation methods to their users to personalize their emails or make them more effective.

It allows users to create a combination of five position or negative conditional relationships, such as what email client they’re using, whether they opened the emails or not etc.

However, it doesn’t offer management across the list because each list is siloed.

Rating: 3/5

MailChimp Features – Detailed Review

Form Builder

You are going to need the subscriber list before you can create an email marketing campaign in MailChimp.

So, for that, you need to get sign-ups on your website. MailChimp offers an in-built form builder to simply create forms.

It is quite easy to use and helps you get started with your email marketing strategy for your website right away, even if you are a newbie.

MailChimp’s Form Builder is quite average and isn’t something out of the world to be honest.

It is definitely not as detailed and intuitive as other features or aspects of MailChimp to begin with.

It is true that the form builder makes it easy for new users to create sign-ups instantaneously, so they can start building their list.

The complaint here is that you wouldn’t find anything extensively facilitating in terms of design.

Email Campaigns

After building sign-up forms to create your subscriber list, you can get started with creating your first email marketing campaign on MailChimp.

MailChimp here offers you four types of campaigns to choose from :

Regular: You can create a custom HTML email campaign with customized content and choose to send emails right away or schedule them for later.
Automated: Automated email campaigns allow you to create campaigns that offer automation features depending upon the plan you are rolled for.
Plain-text: You can just send text-only emails without using any images or even using formatting.
A/B Testing: Using this campaign, you can send more than one version of an email to see which one gets you the best results.

MailChimp works great if you’re looking for a basic email marketing tool with the functionality of sending emails to your subscriber list.

Their regular campaigns are quite efficient, and not to forget, very easy to use and just get started with.

However, their regular campaign doesn’t include any detailed automation feature.

When it comes to sending automated emails or finding a tool that is highly efficient in email automation, MailChimp doesn’t offer something worth the buzz.

Still, we will discuss how good or bad MailChimp is with their automation capability in the ‘Automation Features’ sections further in the article.

Landing Pages

One of the key features of a commercial email marketing tool has to be its features for creating and optimizing landing pages.

With MailChimp, you also get a built-in landing page builder where you can create as many landing pages as you want, regardless of your given plan.

You will find two types of landing page templates where they are for

Building your email list
Promoting the products

These templates allow you to edit and fill the content gaps, include images, and put your logo and other graphics.

You also get their default product page template which is a bit more complex and detailed with customization.

There are different sections to edit, add or customize, such as logo placeholder, hero-style design, CTA section, image holder, testimonials space, and more.

Still, it is basic to use, so when you want to advance or get a bit more customization, you would need a dedicated landing page builder.

All in all, MailChimp’s landing page builder or templates aren’t enough if you want more customization or a more sophisticated landing page.

In this case, you definitely have to use a third-party dedicated landing page builder such as Instapage or Unbounce.

Email Templates

MailChimp offers almost a hundred templates and they are quite basic in their nature.

Their templates can be helpful if you’re looking for something very basic but not anything above that.

In fact, you would be able to find plenty of quality email templates offered by MailChimp competitors in the same free plan.

However, they also offer pre-designed email layouts, which come with customization.

It does allow you to customize to a great level, almost to create ‘themes’ for your emails.

Or you can also use the email templates use these fully-designed emails where you only need to just add your content

MailChimp Automation Features

This is where MailChimp truly lacks behind and disappoints, especially on the grounds of their longest-running reputation.

Their automation features aren’t capable enough to catch up to the competition when it comes to other evolving email marketing tools in the market.

With email automation, you cannot really run an email marketing campaign successfully unless you’re at an extremely basic stage or just want to send emails manually.

Automation is what really fuels the email marketing strategy for online businesses. It helps to scale, increase conversions, and build consistency and engagement long-term without spending too much time on it.

Here are the different features of their automation, their advantages, and their limitation :

Autoresponders

MailChimp automation does offer autoresponders for your email marketing campaign, so that’s something to count on the positive side.

You can set up auto-responses for your emails and make sure that you reach the new contacts or leads as soon as possible.

This will also allow you to send them auto-responses on the basis of different actions, such as – on every new sign-up.

So this means you will be able to automatically reach out every time a new contact signs up for your email.

You can also schedule your emails for the set date or set time of the prompted action.

For example, you can set up the autoresponder ‘welcome’ email to new contact after one day of their sign-up.

Further to the date, you can also schedule a series of emails that are sent to be automated over a period of time.

For example, an autoresponder email for their birthdays or holiday seasons and festivals.

Google Remarketing Ads

MailChimp also allows you a Google Remarketing Ad campaign that automatically starts for your target users.

It basically hits your already users or people who visited you or interacted with you in any way, at any point of time.

They show your ads to those targeted visitors to bring them back as they didn’t buy a product from you for the first time.

By sending customized emails to these remarketing campaign targets, you can add some extra incentive to encourage them to make the purchase.

Retargeted Abandon Carts

Another great automation feature from MailChimp, and probably the most exciting one that they offer.

It allows you to send automated email reminders to all the customers who’ve abandoned their carts for one reason or another.

Sending them customized emails to retarget those and encourage them again to complete the purchase.

Again, here also, these emails will contain some added incentives, some special offers or discounts to push them to complete the transaction.

Feedback Emails

This is a basic email type and automation but is highly significant to put your customers in the loop.

MailChimp offers some feedback emails that are automated to send to those customers who’ve just bought from your store.

These emails can be anything ranging from a short survey to ask them about their experience or it can be some additional value you want to provide them.

Have a look at Mailchimp vs. AWeber: A Comparison Guide.

Pros & Cons Of MailChimp

Pros of Mailchimp

It offers a generous freemium plan

Mailchimp offers most of its tools and features in its free plan only. Users are allowed to send 10,000 emails to 2,000 of their subscribers.

It is quite a generous freemium plan, and users aren’t making a bad deal out of it.

Detailed Reporting

Mailchimp offers highly extensive, detailed, and thorough reporting, basically everything you would want to, or need to know.

Their detailed reporting and analysis also include Google Analytics integration, geo-tracking, social media, and more.

Efficient Template Editor

Mailchimp also provides an efficient and easy-to-use, simple but yet highly powerful template editor.

It comes with all sorts of features and options to customize your template design, format, layout, and other factors as well.

Not to forget how easy and clean the interface it is based on to make the learning curve extremely less.

Additional Features

The email automation and marketing tool further provide a plethora of additional or extra features to further make it a good investment.

They have various recent additions and upgrades in their feature set, expanding over their capability as well.

Some examples have to be these significant extra features such as appointment scheduling software, online store builder and so much more.

Have a look at Mailchimp Vs Sendinblue: A Comparison Guide.

Cons of Mailchimp

Expensive Subscription Plans

Mailchimp can be really expensive for small business owners or anyone who is just starting out their business.

While it has a generous freemium plan, its paid subscription plan can match the initial investment pool a small business or a startup has.

This is because the prices of their subscriptions keep getting higher and higher as you would require more subscribers to send emails, more number of emails to send, and other tools as well.

As your need to use the tool grows, the subscription plan cost will increase too, and that comes out with high-cost subscription plans.

Lack of Slack Integration

Slack is commonly used by small businesses as well as large enterprises, and even individuals and self-employed business owners.

It would be great to have Slack integration in Mailchimp, as its competitors certainly provide that.

Limitation of Versatile templates

A lot of users have complaints about how they end up getting tired of using similar templates.

Mailchimp does a good range of creative and useful templates to use for designing or creating emails.

But a lot of them lack imagination in design or are not updated as per today’s design style and trends.

Have a look at Omnisend Vs Mailchimp: A Comparison Guide.

Pricing

To begin with, there are three basic categories under which MailChimp products are offered.

Marketing Platform
Website & Commerce
Transaction Emails

Free

You will get all the multi-channel tools to use for free in order to grow your business and increase your audience.

You can grow your subscriber base up to 2,000 contacts

Highlights :

Creative Assistant
Marketing CRM
Website Builder
Mailchimp domain

Essentials

This particular plan is for the users who are looking for round-the-clock support for their business or store.

It will cost you USD 9.99 per month based on 500 contacts.