Despite being the most popular email marketing service provider (ESP) in the market, Mailchimp has very few reviews by bloggers online. Reason may be because Mailchimp, unlike most other ESPs, doesn’t have an affiliate program. Or it may be simply because it commands a market share of 45%, with over 15 million people and businesses around the world using their service. Its closest competitor, Constant Contact, has a market share of less than 20%. Perhaps the company doesn’t need validation from others to know how good an email marketing software it really is.

Having said that, a product as good as Mailchimp should not be left unappreciated. Since starting my own inbound marketing agency in 2015, I’ve relied primarily on MailChimp to run email marketing campaigns for my clients. In the last 2 years I’ve used their service, Mailchimp has not disappointed me once.

Is it the best ESP in the market at the moment? No, I feel ConvertKit has a slight edge over Mailchimp is terms of innovation.

Is it the best in terms of pricing? Probably! The free plan makes it more accessible than other ESPs, but once you upgrade to any of their paid plans, there is not much of a difference.

Is it the most user-friendly? Absolutely! 

And that’s where Mailchimp edges out competition. Mailchimp without a doubt is one of the most beginner-friendly tools in the market and its user-friendliness is a huge reason behind why it commands leadership in the email marketing space.

In this Mailchimp review, we’ll evaluate the email marketing service on these parameters:

1. Pricing
2. Features
3. Ease of Use
4. Analytics and Reporting
5. Customer Service
6. User Feedback and Reviews

Pricing

One of the reasons why Mailchimp is so popular is because of its Forever Free pricing plan. The free plan allows you to send 12,000 emails to up to 2000 subscribers in a month. However, you’re not allowed access to some of its premium features such as email automation, inbox preview, and send pro optimization.

To access these features and more, you’d need to subscribe to any of the paid plans. MailChimp offers both list-based and pay-as-you-plans.

MailChimp’s list-based plans

Mailchimp’s pay-as-you-go plans

In addition to these plans, Mailchimp also has an enterprise-level plan called MailChimp Marketer Pro which is aimed at large businesses. The pricing for Mailchimp Pro starts from $199/month.

Related: Mailchimp vs ConvertKit – Which Email Marketing Tool is Better?

Features

Mailchimp’s forever free plan has all the essential features for users with modest email marketing requirements. For automating your emails on MailChimp, you’d have to upgrade to any of the paid plans. Here are some of the key features of MailChimp:

• Email Templates – Mailchimp offers 300+ pre-designed email templates that are easily customizable. You can also start designing a template from scratch using Mailchimp’s drag and drop template builder.

• Sign up Forms – Sign up forms on Mailchimp are pretty basic. It won’t rival sign up forms designed via OptinMonster or Sumo, but they do the job. The forms can integrate with both websites and Facebook business pages.

• Send Time Optimization – Send Time Optimization feature on Mailchimp attempts to solve one of the biggest problems faced by email marketers, i.e., deciding the right time to send your emails. If you subscribe to any of Mailchimp’s paid plans, you can use the Send Time Optimization feature and allow Mailchimp to automatically send your email at a time at which it is most likely to be opened. Check out this article to learn more about how send time optimization is calculated.

• Integrations – Mailchimp offers more integrations than any other ESP in the market. You can connect your Mailchimp account with hundreds of web services, including Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, Salesforce, and more.

• Email Automation – With Mailchimp automation, you can create a targeted email or series of emails that send when triggered by a specific date, event, or contact’s activity. Automation allows you to streamline your communication. Mailchimp has several preset automation options based on a variety of industries and events.

Related: 6 Best Email Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Ease of Use

One of the primary reasons why so many people love Mailchimp is because it’s so damn easy (and fun) to use. Due to the popularity of its forever free plan, many people start building their email list and executing email campaigns with Mailchimp. As such, it’s one of the most beginner-friendly ESPs in the market.

The dashboard is straightforward and easy to understand. Rookies and advanced users alike will find it easy to learn the basic functionalities of the tool and even master premium features such as email automation and multivariate testing in no time.

Analytics and Reporting

Tracking the performance of your emails helps you refine and improve your email marketing strategy.

Mailchimp has excellent tracking and reporting capabilities which allow you to get deeper insights into your email campaigns. Mailchimp allows you to track the following email marketing metrics:

• Open rate and click rate
• Number of unsubscribes
• Total opens and clicks
• Unique opens and clicks
• URLs clicked
• Social performance
• Other data such as subscribers with most opens and clicks, e-commerce tracking, email automation reports, etc.

Customer Support

Mailchimp primarily relies on email support for addressing the questions posed by their customers. They also have an extensive knowledge base (aka self-service support) which contains tutorials and FAQs to guide you through each aspect of email marketing on Mailchimp.

The company does not provide telephone support, but has recently started addressing customer queries via live chat.

User Feedback and Reviews

Mailchimp has outstanding reviews on review sites such as G2Crowd, TrustRadius and Capterra.

It is rated 4.3/5 stars based on 627 reviews on G2Crowd, 8/10 based on 612 reviews on TrustRadius, and 4.5/5 stars based on 1620 reviews on Capterra. Most users commend the following aspects of Mailchimp:

• Ease of use
• Friendly interface
• Easy-to-use template builder
• Powerful segmentation and A/B testing
• Super fast setup
• Forever free plan

Most of the customer complaints on these sites pertain to lack of telephone support and confusing pricing structure.

MailChimp Review: Final Verdict

Once you start using Mailchimp, it’s easy to figure out why it commands leadership in the email marketing space.

Mailchimp makes email marketing fun, easy, and effective. The forever free plan is ideal for email marketing rookies and people with basic email marketing needs.

Advanced users would have to upgrade to paid plans which start from $20/month, giving you access to features such as email automation, multivariate testing, send time optimization, among others. Even when you upgrade to a paid plan, Mailchimp still manages to be cheaper than competitors like AWeber and ConvertKit.

Get started with Mailchimp

If you liked this MailChimp review, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Please feel free to share your thoughts about the review in the comments section.

If you liked this article, you may also like:

• SendinBlue Review: Email Marketing Software for Small Businesses
• Mailchimp vs ConvertKit: Which ESP is the Best?
• 8 Best Alternatives to Mailchimp

The post Mailchimp Review: Making Email Marketing Fun and Easy Since 2001 appeared first on 99signals.

One of the new entrants in the email marketing software market,

Located in 2 cities in USA, New York and San Francisco, SendPulse consists of a small team of 35 people who work around the clock to provide support to their growing base of 250,000 active users. These users include bloggers, business owners, marketers, and large corporations.

SendPulse seamlessly combines simplicity with complexity to offer an email marketing product that can give veterans such as Mailchimp, AWeber, and GetResponse a run for their money. It seeks to bring unique features and an easy learning curve to the email service provider (ESP) market, making it an ideal option for beginners.

Continue reading to learn more about the features that set SendPulse apart and why you should start using this tool to grow the subscribers’ base of your blog or business.

In this review, we’ll evaluate SendPulse on factors such as pricing, ease of use, features, customer support, and overall sentiment around the product.

Pricing

As is the industry standard, SendPulse offers both list-based and pay-as-you-go plans. It also offers a free plan wherein you can send up to 15,000 emails per month to up to 2500 subscribers.

List-Based Plans

• Up to 2500 subscribers – Free (Limit – 15000 emails/month)
• 2500 subscribers – $9.85/month
• 3000 subscribers – $29/month
• 4000 subscribers – $32/month
• 5000 subscribers – $35/month
• 10000 subscribers – $53/month
• 25000 subscribers – $108/month

Pay-as-you-go Plans

If you don’t send too many emails, SendPulse’s prepaid email packages give you the option to pay only for the emails you need.

• 10000 emails – $32
• 25000 emails – $70
• 50000 emails– $125
• 100000 emails– $212
• 250000 emails – $440
• 500000 emails– $812

Apart from these plans, there is also a VIP plan if you have more than 1 million subscribers. You’d have to reach out to the sales team to sign up for this plan.

Ease of Use

The sign up process with SendPulse is incredibly simple, requiring just about your basic contact information. You’ll then be asked to provide a verification code which would be sent to you via email. Once you’ve verified your account, you’ll be taken directly to the user interface.

The user interface is easy on the eyes and the navigation is simple, making SendPulse an extremely user-friendly tool.

The UI mostly uses blue and green, with other colors added in to draw your attention to the key features and buttons. If this is your first time using an email marketing tool, you’ll be surprised at the ease at which you’ll be able to create your first email campaign.

The dashboard displays the number of subscribers you have, the number of emails sent (if you’ve already used SendPulse for your email campaigns before).

Below that you’ll see a brief report on your previous campaigns (emails delivered, clicks, errors, etc.). The whole layout is designed to offer you quick access to the features and information you’ll be using the most.

You can start building your email list by clicking on “new mailing list” and entering email ids manually or importing them through a .txt or .csv file. You can also import your email list directly from a preexisting email contact list as you can see from the screenshot below. I found this feature to be the most useful as it is hassle-free and saves a lot of time, especially if you’re migrating from other ESPs such as Mailchimp or GetResponse and have an email list of 1000+ subscribers.

Once you’ve imported your email list, you can move on to creating your first campaign. You can begin by simply selecting your email list, “from” email address, sender’s name, and subject line. Next, you’ll have to choose a template for your email. You can either choose existing SendPulse design templates as shown below or select one of four options (basic, news, commerce, text) from the layout template editor.

Once you’ve selected the template, you’ll be taken to a page where you can customize the content of your email before sending it out to your subscribers.

Features

SendPulse offers all the features a reliable email marketing software should do and then some more. While I was impressed with all the basic features such as predesigned email templates, subscription forms, list segmentation, and so on,  I was surprised to discover a few features that are either unique to SendPulse or provided only under paid plans of other ESPs.

Here are some features which impressed me the most:

• Autoresponders – Autoresponders aka automated emails are essential to growing your email list. As such, providing this feature is a must for all email marketing services. The most amazing aspect of SendPulse is that the tool allows you to leverage the power of autoresponders even under their free plan. I haven’t come across any other service which provides this all-important feature for free. So if you’ve just started your blogging journey and want to see the true potential of automated emails, you should probably opt for SendPulse’s free plan.
• Subscription Forms – Subscription forms provided by SendPulse are nothing fancy, but they do the job. You can create a professionally-designed subscription form through their easy-to-use drag and drop feature. You can then integrate this subscription form to your website and start building your email list.
• List Segmentation – You can segment your mailing list based on criteria which include: date of addition, active subscribers, new subscribers, domain part, rating, etc.
• A/B Testing – A/B testing or split testing allows you to measure the effectiveness of your emails and improve your results based on your subscribers’ preferences. This is a paid feature with most ESPs, but SendPulse offers this feature even with the free plan.
• Push Notifications – This is just an awesome feature provided by SendPulse, wherein you can enable push notifications for your website. This will allow users to get notifications on their desktop whenever you update content on your website. This feature can be enabled even with the free plan, but your push notification box will have a “Powered by SendPulse” label. Nonetheless, it’s an extremely useful feature, especially for professional bloggers.
• Resend to Unopened – This is yet another feature which impressed me. As the name suggests, this feature allows you to send emails to people within your email list who haven’t yet opened your emails. Depending on your industry, this feature can easily result in increase in the open rate by 30-80%. This feature is usually offered as part of the paid plans by most ESPs, but even users under free plan can leverage this uber-cool feature.
• Integrations – SendPulse is integrated with 500+ services which include Zapier, WordPress, WooCommerce, Typeform, etc.
• Analytics and Reporting – Analytics is an integral part of what makes email marketing so effective. SendPulse offers analytics reports which show the following stats. These stats can also be viewed on the SendPulse mobile app.

• Open Rate and Click Rate
• Click chart
• Geographic stats
• Statistics by device
• Error statistics

Customer Support

Customer support can make or break an ESP’s reputation. It’s an aspect of business that simply can’t be ignored by companies which want to excel in every department they are serving their customers in.

SendPulse provides 24 hour phone and chat support to walk you through any questions or issues that you may have with the product. The team is even open to understanding what additional improvements or suggestions you can provide to make their product better.

This is an area where SendPulse definitely excels over some of their competitors. Few ESPs provide live chat and phone support. Mailchimp, for instance, doesn’t provide phone or chat support and only provides email support if your question is not featured in their FAQs or resources section.

Aside from phone and chat support, SendPulse users have a number of options to turn to if they run into some problems:

• A Knowledge Base page, featuring basic information concerning all the features that SendPulse offers with their email service.
• An Email Marketing Glossary which can help beginners learn basic terminology associated with email marketing
• An FAQ page on SendPulse services. You can get most of your questions answered here.
• A Video page with explainer/tutorial videos
• SendPulse maintains an email marketing blog that covers email marketing topics and updates users on new features

SendPulse is also active on Facebook and Twitter. You can get alerted on new features or get your questions answered by tuning into their social media pages.

User Feedback and Reviews

Since SendPulse is a new entrant in the ESP market, it doesn’t have as many reviews as some of the other players in the industry such as Mailchimp and AWeber. Nevertheless, the existing reviews on review sites such as G2Crowd are overwhelmingly positive.

Most users applaud the following features and qualities of SendPulse:

• Simplicity and ease of use
• Excellent customer support
• Push notifications
• Simple, yet powerful email template builder

Final Verdict

SendPulse manages to be an excellent email marketing tool, offering all the basic features an ESP should do while providing a few unique ones which really set it apart.

The email service would be a good fit for both small and medium-sized businesses looking for a cost-effective, yet reliable ESP. It will also help bloggers who are at the start of their journey who don’t have the budget to spend on premium features such as autoresponders and push notifications.

While SendPulse can compete with other ESPs in the market, I consider it to be a powerful alternative to Mailchimp for three reasons:

1. The interface is simple and first-time users will find it extremely user-friendly. If you want to learn the basics of email marketing, then SendPulse is the ESP you should probably go for.
2. Secondly, features such as autoresponders, push notifications, and the ability to send to unopened are included in the free plan. Autoresponder, in particular, is a fundamental aspect of email marketing that helps you build a loyal subscriber base. The fact that it’s included in the free plan allows you to use this powerful feature and witness first hand what it can do to your email list.
3. Thirdly, it’s way more economical than Mailchimp or for that matter, any other ESP in the market. Even when you upgrade to one of the paid plans, you will be paying less than what you’d normally pay once you sign up for Mailchimp’s paid plans.

Give SendPulse a try and let me know what you think. With a free plan that gives you access to unique features and an easy learning curve, it’s hard not to be impressed by SendPulse.

You can sign up for the free plan by clicking here

The post SendPulse Review: A Powerful Alternative to Mailchimp appeared first on 99signals.