Easy and fun email marketing with MailChimp

Maybe the title seems a little too enthusiast but if you haven’t tried MailChimp yet you should. MailChimp is an email marketing instrument that helps you manage your email subscriptions on your website, send emails, track campaigns reports and even earn some money by referring other users. I don’t know if it’s the best email marketing service around but I’m using it and I’ll tell you what I think of it.

First let’s see what MailChimp can do for your website:

• manage multiple email subscriptions lists with sign up forms
• manage email campaigns for various email lists and websites
• design your own templates of you can use some of the predefined ones
• deliver emails without them being tagged as SPAM by major webmail providers (Yahoo, Google are the most important)
• track reports of your mailing lists and sent emails

MailChimp main screen, a little different graphics than other similar services

What I like about MailChimp is the fact that they offer a free subscription plan that allows you to have a list/or lists with maximum 100 subscribers and send 6 newsletters per months. If you don’t like what they’re offering you can stop using their service, export your current list and go use other email marketing services.

For paid users the pricing plan is like this:

Pay per month plans

• 10 $ for 0-500 subscribers and unlimited sent emails
• 30$ for 501-2,500 subscribers and unlimited sent emails
• 50$ for 2,501-5,000 subscribers and unlimited sent emails
• 75$ for 5,001-10,000 subscribers and unlimited sent emails
• 150$ for 10,001-25,000 subscribers and unlimited sent emails
• 240$ for 25,001-50,000 subscribers and unlimited sent emails

Pay as you go plans (1 credit = 1 sent email)

• 9$ for 300 credits
• 30$ for 1,000 credits
• 60$ for 2,000 credits
• 100$ for 5,000 credits
• 150$ for 7,500 credits
• 200$ for 10,000 credits
• 250$ for 25,000 credits
• 500$ for 50,000 credits
• 750$ for 75,000 credits
• 1,000$ for 200,000 credits
• 1,875$ for 375,000 credits
• 2,500$ for 500,000 credits

I’ve chosen the free plan at first and after that I went for monthly pricing. I even offered to translate the interface for Romanian (as what they had was not correct), they accepted and then credited me with 6 months worth of subscription. I say that is nice for one hour of work.

Now, about their service let’s see that I like and dislike:

• very easy to set up mailing lists, campaigns and import/export users
• nice clean subscription forms and campaign templates
• emails seem to get delivered no matter what
• good support – they’ve answered me fast and on subject to my email inquiries
• they keep adding features at a fast pace
• I don’t like the limited number of templates they have
• editor for campaigns doesn’t have too many options
• for your own template you can chose to use a very limited WYSIWYG editor or a code editor – there’s no middle way

I know I haven’t tried other paid email marketing systems (Feedburner’s included email subscription service is very basic so it doesn’t count as personal experience) but I like MailChimp and I think I’ll be using it in the future as well.

If you want to subscribe to MailChimp you can do that here.