Mailchimp review

Mailchimp review: 1-minute summary

Mailchimp was one of the first email marketing companies that offered a free plan in 2007. Its free plan helped Mailchimp to become the biggest and most popular email marketing tool in history. Every decision they made was in the best interest of the Mailchimp customer until May 19, 2019, when it changed its pricing. Mailchimp became more expensive from that moment, and its customers switched to other email tools. Intuit, a publicly traded company, purchased Mailchimp in 2021 for $12 billion. Since then, Mailchimp has increased its prices multiple times and added more limitations to its free plan.

If you want to know MailChimp’s full story, watch the documentary I created below.

A fascinating story if you have an entrepreneurial mindset. It also tells Mailchimp’s latest moments up to the $12 billion sale to Intuit.

Mailchimp review: Pricing

Complex pricing structure
Relatively expensive compared to other email marketing software

Price comparison

	500	1,000	1,500	2,000	2500	3,000	4,000	5,000	6,000	7,000	8,000	10,000	15,000	20,000	20,000	50,000	100,000	200,000	300,000	500,000	700,000	900,000	1,200,000	1,500,000	2,000,000	2,500,000	3,000,000	4,000,000	5,000,000
MailerLite Growing Business	$10	$15	$25	$25	$25	$39	$39	$39	$59	$59	$59	$73	$109	$139	$139	$289
MailerLite Advanced	$20	$30	$40	$40	$40	$50	$50	$50	$80	$80	$80	$110	$150	$180	$180	$340	$440	$820	$1,200	$1,900
ConvertKit Creator	$29	$29	$49	$49	$49	$49	$79	$79	$99	$99	$99	$119	$149	$179	$179	$379	$679	$1,279	$1,879
ConvertKit Creator Pro	$59	$59	$79	$79	$79	$79	$111	$111	$139	$139	$139	$167	$209	$251	$251	$519	$879	$1,579	$2,179
Zoho Standard	$4	$7	$17	$17	$17	$18	$24	$31	$35	$38	$41	$49	$61	$74	$74	$138	$242
Zoho Professional	$6	$12	$29	$29	$29	$30	$40	$52	$58	$63	$69	$81	$101	$123	$123	$230	$403	$748	$1,035	$1,380
Sender Standard	$19	$19	$19	$19	$19	$33	$33	$33	$57	$57	$57	$57	$87	$107	$107	$227	$367	$697
Sender Professional	$35	$35	$35	$35	$35	$60	$60	$60	$120	$120	$120	$120	$200	$250	$250	$460	$860	$1,660
Constant Contact Lite	$12	$30	$50	$50	$50	$80	$80	$80	$120	$120	$120	$120	$180	$230	$230	$430
Constant Contact Standard	$35	$55	$75	$75	$75	$110	$110	$110	$160	$160	$160	$160	$210	$260	$260	$460
Constant Contact Premium	$80	$110	$150	$150	$150	$200	$200	$200	$275	$275	$275	$275	$325	$375	$375	$575
ActiveCampaign Marketing Lite	$39	$39	$61	$61	$61	$99	$99	$99	$174	$174	$174	$174	$286	$286	$286	$486
ActiveCampaign Marketing Plus	$70	$70	$125	$125	$125	$186	$186	$186	$287	$287	$287	$287	$474	$474	$474	$699
ActiveCampaign Marketing Professional	$187	$187	$187	$187	$187	$262	$262	$262	$424	$424	$424	$424	$686	$686	$686	$1,011
ActiveCampaign Bundles Plus	$116	$116	$171	$171	$171	$232	$232	$232	$333	$333	$333	$333	$520	$520	$520	$745
ActiveCampaign Bundles Professional	$482	$482	$482	$482	$482	$557	$557	$557	$719	$719	$719	$719	$981	$981	$981	$1,306
GetResponse Email Marketing	$19	$19	$29	$29	$29	$54	$54	$54	$79	$79	$79	$79	$174	$174	$174	$299	$539
GetResponse Marketing Automation	$59	$59	$69	$69	$69	$95	$95	$95	$114	$114	$114	$114	$215	$215	$215	$359	$599
GetResponse Ecommerce Marketing	$119	$119	$139	$139	$139	$169	$169	$169	$199	$199	$199	$199	$299	$299	$299	$444	$699
Mailchimp Essentials	$27	$45	$45	$75	$75	$110	$110	$110	$180	$180	$180	$180	$230	$270	$270
Mailchimp Standard	$20	$45	$45	$60	$60	$100	$100	$100	$135	$135	$135	$135	$230	$285	$285	$450	$800
Mailchimp Premium	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$350	$465	$535	$535	$815	$1,025	$1,600
AWeber Lite	$15	$25	$25	$25	$25	$45	$45	$45	$65	$65	$65	$65	$145	$145	$145	$388	$788
AWeber Plus	$30	$40	$40	$40	$40	$60	$60	$60	$80	$80	$80	$80	$160	$160	$160	$403	$803
AWeber Unlimited	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899	$899
Klaviyo Email	$20	$30	$45	$60	$60	$70	$100	$100	$130	$150	$150	$150	$350	$375	$375	$720	$1,380	$2,070
Klaviyo Email & SMS	$35	$45	$60	$75	$75	$85	$115	$115	$145	$165	$165	$165	$365	$390	$390	$735	$1,395	$2,085
Beehiiv Launch	$0	$0	$0	$0	$0
Beehiiv Grow	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49	$49
Beehiiv Scale	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99	$99
HubSpot Marketing Hub - Starter	$20	$20	$40	$40	$60	$60	$78	$96	$112	$128	$144	$176	$256	$336	$336	$816	$1,616
HubSpot Marketing Hub - Professional	$890	$890	$890	$890	$1,140	$1,140	$1,140	$1,140	$1,140	$1,140	$1,390	$1,390	$1,640	$1,890	$1,890	$3,190
HubSpot Marketing Hub - Enterprise	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,600	$3,700	$3,700	$3,700	$4,000	$4,450	$5,250	$5,950	$7,350	$8,550	$9,750
Moosend Pro	$9	$16	$24	$24	$32	$32	$48	$48	$64	$64	$64	$88	$160	$160	$160	$315	$624	$1,216	$1,808	$2,896	$4,080	$5,840

Click here for a full-width version if you’re on a laptop or PC.

Different plans

Free plan (forever free)
Essentials (starting from $13/mo – no trial available)
Standard (starting from $20/mo – no trial available)
Premium (starting from $350/mo – no trial available)

Mailchimp Essentials review

Pros

Can remove Mailchimp branding

Cons

Relatively expensive
Maximum email sends of 10X your contact plan
Maximum of 4 journey points
No access to multi-step automation
Cannot use If/Else and 50/50 Split rules (branching points)
Maximum of 50,000 contacts
Limited to 2 users (Owner & Admin)
Cannot create custom-coded templates
Cannot schedule social posts
Limited to 3 audiences
Cannot use retargeting ads

Mailchimp’s Essentials plan is relatively expensive if you compare its features and price with other email marketing tools. Usually, most email marketing tools give you access to all its marketing automation features when subscribing to a paid plan. Although Mailchimp grants you access to its automation features (Customer Journey Builder), you can only create a few automated emails because of its limited journey points.

Furthermore, the limit of 10X on your contact plan can be an issue for you when you plan to send a newsletter twice a week. For example, I send two newsletters each week plus an automated email welcome series for new people joining my list, and I send roughly 120,000 emails per month with 10,000 subscribers.

The bottom line is the email marketing features on the Essentials plan are limited in terms of automated emails and the number of emails you can send monthly.

Mailchimp Standard plan Review

Maximum of 100 journey points
Relatively expensive
Maximum email sends of 12X your contact plan
No special reporting features
Limited to 5 audiences
Maximum of 100,000 contacts

Here’s the deal:

Mailchimp’s Standard plan is very similar to its bigger and way more expensive brother, the Premium tier plan. The most important differences are, in my opinion, the monthly sending limitations, segmentation, reporting, and testing features.

What’s the bottom line?

All in all, I wouldn’t recommend subscribing to Mailchimp’s Standard plan. Other tools can do a better or similar job than Mailchimp for less money.

I think Mailchimp charges a relatively high price because of its brand recognition and not so much because of its product features or quality.

If you search online for an email marketing tool, you quickly find Mailchimp.

Furthermore, most people start with a free plan and don’t bother looking elsewhere when there’s a need to upgrade.

Most people don’t spend months comparing all the different email marketing tools to find the best bang for the buck. Luckily for you, I did.

Premium plan

Maximum email sends of 15X your contact plan
Access to Advanced Segmentation
Unlimited audiences
Unlimited seats (users on your account)
Access to Comparative Reports (advanced segmentation)
Relatively expensive
Phone & priority support

The Premium tier starts at $299 per month up to 500 contacts or $3,588 per year. The Premium tier isn’t that different from the Standard plan, as you can see yourself by visiting Mailchimp’s pricing page.

I feel the Premium tier is made for agencies or more prominent companies with branches worldwide.

If you’re looking for a tool that supports creating multiple subaccounts in the main account, a great alternative to Mailchimp’s premium tier could be GetResponse’s MAX2 plan. The MAX2 plan allows you to create up to 500 subaccounts in your main account.

No annual plans

Many Mailchimp competitors offer annual plans or even 2-year contracts, see GetResponse, but Mailchimp doesn’t have the option to go annual. The advantage of annual contracts is that it often means you’ll receive a great discount. In a nutshell, Mailchimp only offers monthly plans.

The number of contacts (subscribed vs unsubscribed)

Mailchimp charges you for contacts that are either subscribed or unsubscribed from your email list. In other words, if 500 people unsubscribed from your email list, you still pay for those email addresses. Still, you can’t send these people newsletters because they are unsubscribed from your newsletter. Mailchimp still lets you pay for these contacts because, according to Mailchimp, you can still market your products to these contacts through remarketing campaigns and postcards. You can choose to archive those who unsubscribed, so you won’t have to pay for them, but you need to do this manually.

Multiple email lists/audiences

Mailchimp offers you to create multiple lists (Mailchimp calls lists audiences), but there’s a catch. So, for example, if email X is on two audiences, you’ll pay for two contacts instead of one.

Usually, you don’t need more than one list. The only instance when you should create more than one list is when you have a B2B and B2C side to your business. That way, you can separate the messaging for those two audiences. Another example will be if you use Mailchimp to speak to your customers and internal communication, e.g., your company’s employees. You don’t want to create a new list when you meet people at an event or for people in different cities or other interests, etcetera. For this, you should use tags and custom fields.

Refunds

Mailchimp doesn’t issue refunds.

Discounts

Mailchimp offers a 15% discount to nonprofits and charities. You can contact their billing team once you sign up for a free plan. Furthermore, they offer a 10% discount for one month if you enable two-factor authentication.

Furthermore, Mailchimp hasn’t offered discounts on special events (e.g., Black Friday).

Mailchimp’s Additional Charges Explained

Besides Mailchimp’s normal pricing tiers, Mailchimp also charges additional fees.

Example 1: when you have 4,500 contacts in your account and add 600, Mailchimp charges you extra. Note that Mailchimp doesn’t automatically upgrade you to the next tier. It instead charges additional charges.

Example 2: if you add 1,200 contacts to your 4,500 contacts on the standard plan, you will receive an extra bill on top of your monthly statement. If you instead upgrade your account, you might pay less than receiving the additional charges.

The same thing goes for the maximum number of emails you can send monthly. If you exceed that number, you pay an additional charge.

In other words, be warned that it can quickly become more costly than needed if you ignore your monthly plan, contact number, and the number of emails you send. In my opinion, taking all of this into account is a bit annoying.

Mailchimp review: Email credits (Pay As You Go)

With 100 credits, you can send 100 emails (1 credit = 1 email)
Credits expire after 12 months
No refunds
Pay As You Go plan has the same features as the Essentials plan
The least amount of credits you can buy is 5,000 for $175

The Pay As You Go plan only becomes financially attractive if you purchase more credits at once. For example, the biggest credit plan you can purchase is 25 million credits for $11,500. That is $0.00046 per credit or email. If you buy 5,000 credits for $175, you pay $0.035 per credit or email.

Canceling your paid account

You can easily cancel, pause, or delete your account online in its dashboard.

Mailchimp review: Free plan

Does Mailchimp offer the best free plan compared to its competitors? The short answer is no – the longer answer can be found here, where we compare the best free email marketing tools.

Forever free plan	✔️
Maximum subscribers/contacts	500
Maximum monthly emails	1,000
Maximum daily emails	500
Email automation	🤔 (only access to 1-step-automation) **
Support	🤔 (email support first 30 days)
Remove branding	❌
Maximum sign-up forms	Maximum 3 forms **
Maximum landing pages	Unlimited
Can add custom domain	❌
Email scheduling	❌
Create a website	✔️

** When you are at the Customer Journey page inside Mailchimp’s dashboard there’s a line at the top that says Looking for our old automations builder? Check out Classic Automations. Well, that is the multi- and single-step automation. With Mailchimp’s Free and Essentials plan, you can create a maximum of 1 automation, i.e., send one automated email with Classic Automations. For example, you can send an automated email the moment one enters your list.

Mailchimp’s maximum sending limit and maximum contact count aren’t the best compared to others in the industry. In the midst of 2022, Mailchimp reduced it from 10,000 monthly emails to 2,500 for free plan users. It also reduced the contact limit from 2,000 to 500. Then, at the beginning of 2023, it reduced the monthly emails to 1,000.

The other thing that might be annoying once you start to play around with email marketing is that there are limits to its automation features.

However, there’s a way to bypass Mailchimp’s automation limitations. Here’s you can do that:

Create classic automation with one email (you cannot add more than one email hence the no access to multi-step automation
Create another traditional automation with one email and use the email from step 1 as the trigger for email 2.

This process is cumbersome, but now you can create multiple welcome emails while still being on the free plan. I’m not sure how long this bypass will last, though. I feel this isn’t Mailchimp’s intention to use its classic automations, and they might remove it shortly.

Mailchimp’s classic automations are a bit hard to find inside its dashboard. Mailchimp tries to force you to use its ‘new’ email automation feature Customer journeys. But sadly, Customer journeys are only accessible from the Essentials plan and up.

What’s the bottom line?

I wouldn’t recommend Mailchimp when looking for a great free email tool to start your email marketing game.

Mailchimp review: Newsletter Features

This section only covers Mailchimp’s newsletter features and not its automation features

In a nutshell, Mailchimp’s newsletter has cool features, e.g., Creative Assitant, Recent subject line performance, Advanced Segmentation options, Surveys, Send Time Optimization, and Timewarp. You’ll find an explanation of these features below.

The question is, is it worth its price?

In 2021, I switched to MailerLite (MailerLite review) because of its low cost. MailerLite is still my top choice when you’re looking for a cheap email marketing solution.

Maximum contacts and monthly emails

	Premium	Standard	Essentials
Max contacts	n/a	100,000	50,000
Max monthly emails	15X	12X	10X

Mailchimp is one of the few email tools that limit the number of contacts and emails you can send monthly on its paid plans. For example, why is it mandatory to switch to the Standard tier when our contact number is above 50,000? It doesn’t benefit the customer if they don’t need the extra features of the Standard plan.

Google Analytics UTM builder

MailChimp automatically adds Google Analytics (GA) UTM tracking codes to your website links in your emails if you enable the GA setting. Using Google Analytics is an absolute must if you’re serious about your online marketing game.

User-friendly email newsletter editor
Free plan users have access to a third of its email templates (only basic templates)
All premium email templates are available on the Essentials plan, and higher
MailChimp has around 50 to 60 email templates
Access to a great tool called Creative Assistant

Besides its templates, you can also choose to start with a blank canvas and design your own by using its easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder.

Mailchimp has one of the most user-friendly email editors, and what is more, it offers a feature called Creative Assistant that helps you create a beautiful banner/header for your email. It integrates with the free stock photo website Unsplash to help you find great photos fast. No other email tool offers a feature like Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant.

I’m a big fan of Mailchimp’s newsletter editor and its Creative Assistant!

Mailchimp also has the Subject Line Helper feature, which gives you feedback while typing your subject line. It sounds fancier than it is because it only checks four things: whether the subject line is no more than nine words, has no more than one emoji, is no more than 60 characters long, and has no more than three punctuation marks. If I enter random letters, it says my subject line is fine.

Another tool is Mailchimp’s Recent subject line performance feature which shows you the open rate of your latest five campaigns. I like this little feature, but why not list all campaigns? Only showing my latest five is a bit of a random number. It will be more helpful if I can quickly sort all my campaigns based on the highest open- and click rate.

Segmentation

All tiers, including free plan users, can segment their audience and send newsletters to segments of their audience
Mailchimp’s Advanced Segments feature is only available to Premium plan users

9 out of 10 emails you will send will probably be to a segment of your audience instead of your entire list. For example, I sent a promotional email the other day with a discount code for my self-published books. I created a segment before sending it so the people who bought my products won’t receive this email.

Mailchimp also offers a feature called Advanced Segments. Advanced Segments gives you more features to further segment your audience, that’s not possible with most other email tools. This feature is only available in Mailchimp’s most expensive plan; the Premium plan.

For more information about Advanced Segments, visit this page.

Another Mailchimp feature is Surveys. It offers this feature to all its users, including free plan users. You can create surveys to get to know your audience better, e.g., ask them their gender, age, address, or any other (open or closed) questions. MailChimp then stores that information so you can segment based on these criteria. The idea is to use this survey feature in your regular or automated newsletters. Other ideas to ask your audience:

If they want to hear from you monthly or weekly. MailChimp has an auto-tagging feature where you tag the people that select weekly or monthly so you can send them weekly or monthly newsletters.
You can also ask questions about a recent purchase, e.g., what do you like best/least about it.

Email scheduling

Email scheduling is available on the Essentials plan, and higher

Every email tool allows you to schedule your emails. Mailchimp differentiates itself from its competitors because MailChimp also allows you to send your email in batches if you have a large audience and don’t want to break the website.

The second difference is that MailChimp has a tool called Send Time Optimization, which calculates the best send time for most engagement. Not that many other tools offer such a feature like Send Time Optimization.

Email tool GetResponse (GetResponse review) also offers a similar feature called Perfect Timing. Click here to see GetResponse prices.

The third difference is that Mailchimp also offers a feature called Timewarp, i.e., delivery by timezone. An example where this tool might come in handy is when your audience lives in different timezones and you want to send your newsletter at 6am in the morning. Note that this feature only works for regular campaigns and not automated emails. AWeber (AWeber review) offers a similar feature for automated emails.

Send Time Optimization and Timewarp are available on the Standard plan, and higher.

Audiences / Email lists

Another word for MailChimp’s audiences is email lists. In a nutshell, MailChimp advises you to only create a second or third audience if you have a B2B and B2C side to your business. Another example would be if you use MailChimp to speak to your customers but also for internal communication, e.g., the employees of your company. You should not create a new audience for the people you meet at an event or for the people in different cities or different interests, etcetera. For this, you should use tags and custom fields.

Keep in mind that if one email address is in two audiences it means you’re paying for two contacts. It doesn’t matter if it’s the contact.

Ecommerce

Once you have connected your ecommerce store, e.g., Shopify, you can add products to your newsletter or personalized product recommendations. Many emails tools offer such features including the cheapest tool, MailerLite (MailerLite review).

My opinion:

Mailchimp can work fine for ecommerce but is it the best? No, it’s not the best. In my opinion, you’re better off with email tools that are 100% focused on ecommerce businesses like Klaviyo.

Klaviyo, on the other hand, allows for much more customization. For example, Klaviyo lets you create a product recommendation on products a customer recently viewed, products a customer may also like, products that the customer has added to their cart, the newest products, etcetera. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; you can add rules if the customer has limited purchase history, and you can add filters, e.g., categories, prices, and stock.

The bottom line? For the best user experience I recommend choosing an email marketing tool solely focused on ecommerce, like Klaviyo, if your emails are mainly about promoting your ecommerce products.

Do note, Klaviyo is relatively expensive compared to other email tools and also (in most cases) more expensive than Mailchimp’s Standard plan. At the lower subscriber numbers (<10,000) the price difference isn’t that much but around 100,000 contacts Klaviyo’s monthly price is somewhat double the price.

Mailchimp review: Email Marketing Automation

Understand that an automated workflow is the same as an automation sequence, or a customer journey as MailChimp calls it.

Pricing

Free plan users cannot use Customer Journey Builder (What is this?)
Free & Essentials plan don’t have access to multi-step in the classic automations builder
Essentials plan users can only create a maximum of 4 journey points (What is this?)
Want to access all its automation features you need the Standard plan

It’s important for you to understand that if you want to have access to all Mailchimp’s automation features you have to subscribe to its Standard plan, which can be hundreds if not thousands of dollars more expensive than a cheaper alternative, e.g., MailerLite (MailerLite review).

Easy way to distribute ebooks/pdfs (freebies)

Giving away something for free, like an ebook, is a terrific way to draw in new subscribers.

You can upload files directly to Mailchimp’s servers. This will be useful when sending subscribers a free ebook (pdf). Although this may seem like a basic feature for an email program, not every email tool offers this.

Depending on how tech-savvy you are, it could take you anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes to send a free ebook using the email marketing tool MailerLite. With Mailchimp, because you can upload PDF documents directly to its servers, it’ll just take a few seconds.

The screenshot below shows that you add a file as a text link inside an email. You can do the same on a landing page within the thank you message.

Mailchimp’s automation features aren’t worth its price

In a nutshell, my findings are that Mailchimp’s automation features aren’t the most userfriendly. They also aren’t the most extensive, i.e., you cannot create complex automations.

I don’t mind paying a premium for the best product but what I don’t like is paying a high price for a mediocre product. Keep in mind that I talk about Mailchimp’s automation features. Its automation features do their job but it’s not the best (not the most userfriendly and not the most extensive).

There are tools like ActiveCampaign that are more user friendly when creating an automated email sequence.

Below I’ll describe a few examples of why Mailchimp’s automation features aren’t the most user friendly nor most extensive.

Example 1

When adding a Splitter to your automation Mailchimp only allows you to randomly split your audience in two branches, i.e., there’s no option to select a winning pat.

ActiveCampaign on the other hand offers 3 options. Besides the split indefinitely option there are two more options to automate the outcome of this split test. There are unlimited options available in the specify conditions tab. For example, you could automatically choose the winning path when the total conversion value is $X.

The bottom line is that if you use many different split tests in your automations it’s almost impossible to manually go through all of them to determine winning paths. ActiveCampaign offers a user friendly solution for this.

Example 2 (in terms of user friendliness)

When you add a new email to your ActiveCampaign automation it shows a summary and an option to easily add a new automation when someone clicks a specific link or opens your email.

Mailchimp on the other hand isn’t as proactive as ActiveCampaign. Mailchimp does allow you to trigger an automation when someone clicks on a specific link but it doesn’t guide you through the process like ActiveCampaign does, i.e., less user friendly.

Another example is that ActiveCampaign shows you what URLs are available in a specific email making it easy for you to select one and trigger an automation for that email. Mailchimp doesn’t show any URL and you have to add the URL yourself making you to go back to the email to double check what URLs you added.

These are just random examples of why I feel Mailchimp’s automation tool isn’t the most userfriendly and most extensive but I can name many more examples.

See this page for different automation ideas ActiveCampaign can do for you.

My conclusion is that Mailchimp’s automation tools aren’t more user friendly or more extensive than cheaper alternatives like AWeber, ConvertKit, or MailerLite. In other words, there’s no reason to choose for the higher priced Mailchimp product in terms of its automation features.

Mailchimp review: Landing Page Features

Unlimited landing pages
7 landing page templates which you can alter with the landing page builder

Cannot connect (sub)domain without paying for a Core or Plus subscription of Website & Commerce
Free MailChimp tier has MailChimp’s branding at the bottom of the landing page

Paying extra for a custom domain

I find it odd that when I’m subscribed to MailChimp’s paid plan (Essentials, Standard, or Premium) I still can’t connect my own (sub)domain to my landing pages. To connect your (sub)domain you need to spend an additional $10 monthly for the Website & Commerce Core plan.

The default URL of a MailChimp landing page looks like this: https://mailchi.mp/robbin/kxqfgv1ksi. It obviously looks not trustworthy and unprofessional if you don’t have your brand name in the landing page URL.

Custom domain URL example: http://creatoregg.com/.

Beginner friendly landing page editor

Editing a Mailchimp landing page works straightforward. At first glance it seems there aren’t many customization options available, which is a good thing for beginners so they don’t feel overwhelmed. After knowing the ropes in the Mailchimp page editor you’ll find that you can tweak more elements than you might think. No, it’s not an editor where you can custimize every single detail.

Mailchimp review: Opt-in Form Features

MailChimp’s embedded form has a basic look and the only way to change it is to use CSS coding.

What is worse, you can only create a maximum of 3 forms with MailChimp, i.e., you can only create 1 pop-up form, 1 embedded form, and 1 form builder form.

Support

24/7 chat support for paid users

Chat support first lets you talk to a bot
You need to answer the same questions over and over again
Cannot see previous support inquiries
Free plan has email support only and only for the first 30 days

Despite others saying that MailChimp’s chat isn’t available from time to time, I haven’t experienced that issue. I contacted chat support on a Saturday morning and on working days and both times I was relatively fast connected with a support employee.

Although the 24/7 chat support is nice I’m not the biggest fan.

Here’s the deal:

When contacting you first talk to a bot. In my experience, it often can’t help you. This isn’t a big deal when contacting support once. But when you’re setting up your MailChimp account you probably run into some issues. When contacting support several times in a few hours it annoys me when I first need to talk to a bot over and over again.

What is more, you need to answer below’s questions before you can talk to an actual human being.

Is your name Robbin?
What is your email address?

Every time you contact support again it asks these same questions, which becomes frustrating after 3+ times contacting support in a short time span. Especially because they have access to our account and can see my email address and that my name is Robbin.

It’s not all bad, though. Once you speak to support they are definitely doing their best to help you.

Mailchimp review: Reporting Features

Keep track of subscriber growth

Mailchimp doesn’t offer the best experience showcasing my audience growth since I can only select the past seven days, 30 days, or year. I’ve worked for a couple of years as an online marketer, and we consistently reported monthly results to our clients, i.e., it would be better if I could select a custom timeframe instead of having only three options.

Email Reporting

When subscribed to Mailchimp’s Standard plan, you’ll get access to the email dashboard, where you can select a custom time frame to showcase the performance and engagement of your email campaigns. Remember that these statistics only show the regular newsletters and not your automation campaigns (customer journeys).

As the screenshot shows, it automatically compares it to the same custom period you entered in the timeframe, which is, in this case, eight days.

Cool is that you can customize the metrics in the performance tab.

When opening an individual email campaign, you can see how many people you have sent the email to, how many opened, how much revenue you made, how many clicked, etcetera. Every email tool offers these reports, as the one you see in the screenshot below. They all look a bit different inside every tool, but it shows the same thing.

Automation reports

MailChimp doesn’t show metrics for a journey, i.e., its automations. It only shows how many contacts started the journey, how many are in progress, and how many completed it. What MailChimp doesn’t show you is how many people/contacts are at a certain step in your journey/automation.

What I’m missing as an online marketer is an overview of all the automation metrics where I can select custom timeframes. The screenshot below shows that you can see the metrics of individual automated campaigns, but when reporting to a manager or customer, I don’t need the results of individual campaigns; instead, I need a nice overview of it all.

Landing page reports

MailChimp gives you insights into the following data for every landing page:

Number of total visits
Number of unique visits
Number of total clicks
Number of subscribers
Conversion rate

MailCimp doesn’t allow you to create a overview of your best performing landing pages.

Signup form reports

I have asked MailChimp support where to find signup form reports in my dashboard. Weird enough, there are no reports for your MailChimp signup forms. So, you can’t see how your signup forms perform.

Comparative Reports

MailChimp’s feature Comparative Reports is only accessible if you’re on the Premium plan. This feature allows you to create a report of a custom data range of your email campaigns. Instead of viewing email campaigns individually you can now see at a glance the total sends, average open rate, average click rate, unsubscribers, bounces, abuses. What is more interesting is that you also see the result of your segments. You can now compare your segments with your average campaign numbers to see what segments overperform and what segments underperform. Although this is a cool feature it comes at a high cost, since MailChimp’s Premium plan is one of the most expensive email marketing plans on the market.

Audience dashboard

In MailChimp’s dashboard, you have access to the following:

Growth of your campaigns
Tags
Customer lifetime value
Purchasing likelihood
Predicted demographics
Email engagement
Top locations.

Although some of these things are good to know, it doesn’t come close to a tool like, e.g., Google Analytics. In my opinion, most email marketing tools lack reporting features. Just a few basic examples of what’s possible with Google Analytics that isn’t with MailChimp:

Compare last month’s data with the same month the previous year
Seeing at a glance what campaign generated the highest order value
Seeing how many new eyeballs you’ve reached versus returning subs

Customer Lifetime Value & Purchase likelihood

Customer Lifetime Value is a MailChimp feature for users on the Standard plan or above with a connected ecommerce store.

The moment you have an active integration with your ecommerce store and imported all the data you’ll see an added ecommerce section to your Audience dashboard. The customer lifetime value and Likelihood to purchase again sections are split up in 3 categories: high, moderate and low. High means predicted future value is high and these contacts are likely to purchase again whereas low is the opposite. You can create segments to target these categories with campaigns.

Purchase Behavior

After someone purchases a product in your store you can automatically send them new emails IF they agreed to receive more emails from you. MailChimp has 25 prebuilt automation templates or customer journeys you can use for your business. You can use these templates for inspiration. One of the most popular and common automation is the abandoned cart email where you send one or more emails when a visitor abandons the checkout before purchasing the product.

Campaign Engagement

MailChimp automatically calculates your contact’s email marketing engagement and you can use this engagement score to segment your audience and send targeted campaigns. It calculates this score based on how often your contact opens an email and clicks on a link in an email. This feature is available in all MailChimp plans, including its free plan.

The drawback of is that you can’t change the way it calculates the scoring. Some email tools allow you to create your own scoring, like the email marketing tool ActiveCampaign (ActiveCampaign review).

App Engagement

MailChimp allows you to connect your app data to MailChimp, e.g., when you have a running app you can create an automation to send an email when the event trigger “run_complete” activates.

Website Engagement

When you create a MailChimp website you can send automatic emails when one of your contacts visits your website or clicks a link. Note that the requirement for this feature to work is that you build your website with MailChimp’s software and not with Shopify or WordPress. The only way to trigger an automation is when a contact visits a page on your MailChimp website or clicks a link on your website making this feature far less valuable, i.e., you can’t trigger an automation based on a specific page viewed or a specific link clicked.

Predicted Demographics

MailChimp has this feature called Predicted Demographics. To quote MailChimp: Mailchimp uses data science to predict the gender and age of your contacts with predicted demographics. I asked one of MailChimp’s support employees what data they use but he was unable to answer my question, i.e., he didn’t know either. If I understand it correctly this feature guesses whether contact X is a female or male and it guesses the age range. You can then create a campaign to target a specific segment. Note that I can’t tell how accurate its predictions are.

Transactional emails

A few examples of how businesses use transactional emails:

Account creation emails
Password reset emails
Purchase receipt emails
Account notification emails
Social media updates
Verification emails

MailChimp offers a transactional emails add-on to its Standard plan users and higher. To send transactional emails with MailChimp you have to purchase credits. You can’t use the normal plan for this. Each credit, also called block, equals 25,000 emails. When purchasing more blocks/credits at once you’ll receive a discount.

Frequently asked questions

What does multi-step & single-step automation mean in MailChimp?

When you are at the Customer Journey page inside MailChimp’s dashboard there’s a line at the top that says Looking for our old automations builder? Check out Classic Automations. Well, that is the multi- and single-step automation. With MailChimp’s Free and Essentials plan you can create a maximum of 1 automation (i.g. you can send one automated email) with Classic Automations. This means, for example, you can send an email with a freebie if someone enters their email in your opt-in form.

What is the Customer Journey Builder?

MailChimp’s Customer Journey Builder is what other email marketing tools call its Automation feature, or Workflows. It’s a way for you to send automated emails, perform automated actions, such as updating a subscriber’s details, adding them to groups or ungrouping them, unsubscribing them, etcetera.

What are MailChimp contacts?

Contacts are email addresses that are subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, cleaned or pending. Note that you pay for the contacts that are subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed.

What are journey points?

A journey point is a part of MailChimp’s Customer Journey Builder. A journey point in the customer journey can be an email, a specific action, a waiting trigger, etcetera. As an example, if you create an automated email welcome series of 6 emails you have at the very minimum 6 journey points. Every email is 1 journey point. But you probably don’t want to send all those 6 emails at once so you need to add a time delay between every email. Adding a 1-time delay also is 1 journey point. So, in this example, you already have around 11 journey points.

Does MailChimp offer discounts?

MailChimp offers a 15% discount to nonprofits and charities. You can contact their billing team once you signed up for a free plan. Furthermore, they offer a 10% discount for 1 month if you enable two-factor authentication.

What are Advanced Segments?

The name says it all; Advanced Segments. Advanced Segments gives you more features to further segment your audience. This feature is only available in MailChimp’s most expensive plan; the Premium plan. See this page on MailChimp’s website for more information.

What is a MailChimp Audience?

Another word for MailChimp’s audiences is email lists. In a nutshell, MailChimp advises you to only create a second or third audience if you have a B2B and B2C side to your business. Another example would be if you use MailChimp to speak to your customers but also for internal communication, e.g. the employees of your company. You should not create a new audience for the people you meet at an event or for the people in different cities or different interests, etcetera. For this, you should use tags and custom fields.

What are Comparative Reports?

Comparative Reports are only available in MailChimp’s Premium plan. In a nutshell, this feature allows you to create a report of multiple email campaigns (broadcasts or newsletters) you’ve sent and aggregates its data so you can see how, for example, 30 email campaigns performed. It shows you how many emails you’ve sent, what the average open-rate and click-rate is, how many unsubscribers, bounces, etcetera. This feature might come in handy when you want to report the results of a specific campaign to your customer or superior.

Does Mailchimp charge monthly?

Yes, Mailchimp charges you monthly if you’re on a paid plan. It doesn’t offer an annual plan.ge monthly?

What are the disadvantages of Mailchimp?

Mailchimp’s free plan isn’t the best, its paid plans are relatively expensive, and its product features aren’t the most user friendly and not the most excessive. Furthermore, Mailchimp doesn’t allow affiliate marketing.

Is paid Mailchimp worth it?

Although its newsletter features are great, its automation features aren’t the best. Because of the relatively high price I feel there are more affordable and/or better solutions available. For example, MailerLite (MailerLite review) is a cheaper alternative to Mailchimp. ActiveCampaign (ActiveCampaign review) on the other hand, might in some cases be more expensive than Mailchimp but does offer a better product.

Is Mailchimp no longer free?

Mailchimp still offers a forever free plan but it did limit the options of the free plan over the last few years.

Does Mailchimp charge for unsubscribed?

Mailchimp charges you for subscribed and unsubscribed contacts.

How many emails can I send with free Mailchimp?

Mailchimp’s free plan allows you to send 2,000 monthly emails and 500 daily emails.

Mailchimp alternatives

If you’re looking for a great free email marketing tool I suggest MailerLite (MailerLite review). MailerLite offers the best free plan in the market.

If user friendliness, the best product, and the most excessive marketing automation features are important to you I suggest ActiveCampaign (ActiveCampaign review). A cheaper alternative to ActiveCampaign with still great automation features is GetResponse (GetResponse review).

If you’re running a successful ecommerce business I recommend Klaviyo.

What is the best email marketing software? I’ve thoroughly tested the 10 most popular email marketing tools. Read out my FULL roundup review here or watch the video below.