Email Marketing: review of Mailchimp tool

Email marketing is one of the most known web marketing resources to convert leads into customers, thus increasing customer loyalty, and to improve the relationship with them. In fact, consumers love to receive newsletters from the brands they most appreciate, because they feel a sense of exclusivity and immediacy inherent a one-to-one communication and because they love to receive real-time updates on special offers for products and services.

In addition, email marketing is also an economic strategy, thus falling within the limited budgets of startups, as the cost of sending emails is generally low.

If you want to deepen this topic, please read our article Email Marketing is useful for your strategy and for your startup and find out the best tools Email Marketing Tools: the best 20 platforms.

But which is the most used email marketing tool? In this article, we will talk about MailChimp, seeing in detail its characteristics and advantages.

What is MailChimp: one of the main email marketing tools

Founded in 2001, MailChimp is an American company with more than 14 million users and an average of 14,000 new ones from 178 countries each week.

It was designed as an email tool, dedicated to the creation and management of email marketing campaigns and allows to keep under control the management of mailing-list subscribers, monitoring and managing registration and cancellation procedures in line with privacy regulations. 

It is useful to summarize the main benefits that you can get by choosing MailChimp as an email marketing tool for your advertising campaigns:

• It has an easy-to-use and customizable interface, making the user experience simple and enjoyable
• It has a free plan
• It has a detailed analytics system that takes email marketing metrics into account to improve performance

In addition, with MailChimp, you can create your contact list by entering the email addresses manually or by importing them from a CSV or TXT file. You can also take advantage of the following features in the contact form:

• assign tags, or labels that allow to organize contacts based on membership categories or other parameters.
• use segments, to create automated contact groups based on certain parameters (such as activity, rating, landing page activity, residence address or date of birth) and to target campaigns to those users who respond to certain characteristics.

According to these two functions, MailChimp organizes all contacts based on interactions and level of involvement and creates the user’s Customer Journey, using over 20 starting points, to choose from, which indicate the path and help to reach the business goals.

The starting points proposed by MailChimp try to build a relationship with the customer, through: 

• Welcome emails for new contacts 
• Sending personalized emails according to the needs and interests of the target audience
• Sending creative emails to interact with inactive customers
• Sending to “the most loyal customers” brand news and information directly from the blog
• Sending emails for events, such as anniversaries, birthdays, and special promotions

Besides, it is possible to: 

• Indicate order notifications: send order confirmations, invoices, shipping updates and other information 
• Recover abandoned carts: 69% of buyers, on average, leave their carts before check-out. Using the pre-built emails of abandoned carts, you can get buyers back in the cart to finish the purchase
• Propose/request purchase updates: receive feedback or recommend similar products after someone has made a purchase, rewarding the most active customers with special offers and discounts to encourage them to buy back

Short tutorial on this email marketing tool

The first thing to do is enter the MailChimp website and log in, if you already have an account, or create a new profile for free by entering your username, email, and password.

By following these steps, you will arrive on the homepage where you will find a dashboard to view your email marketing campaigns and audience activities, thus being able to have an immediate and direct view of the numbers and trends. 

But let’s act! The whole tool is manageable thanks to the commands you will find on the left. 

Let’s analyse them in detail:

• Create
• Audience
• Campaigns
• Automations
• Other sections

Create

The “Create” section can be defined as the heart of the email marketing process, in fact in this area you can give life to your campaigns by choosing from:

• Regular: create emails to keep your subscribers informed, to promote new products or to announce an event. How to do it? Very simply, enter the name you want to give to your email marketing campaign, and you will be transferred to the “campaigns” area where you can decide who to send the campaign to, define the sender and subject and design the email, choosing from the templates already created or creating it from scratch. You can also add social posts by choosing between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and share your campaign thanks to the link that is automatically generated.
• Plain Text: create a simple text-only email. Enter the name you want to give to your email marketing campaign, decide whether to target your entire audience or just certain groups and segments, customize your campaign information, tracking options and social media options, and then just launch it.
• Template: click on “get started” and access the selection of templates to choose from for your emails, look at the templates you have already saved or decide to code your own.

As for the graphic aspect, it is possible to use ready-made layouts or create customized ones, adding the available content, such as texts, images, buttons, videos, options for sharing on social networks. In addition, MailChimp allows you to customize the layout style, changing its colours, text font, and setting the mobile view.

But that’s not all! This section doesn’t stop with email marketing; you can also create:

• Customer journeys
• Websites
• Landing pages
• Multichannel branded designs
• Signup forms
• Surveys
• Ads
• Social posts
• Postcards

Audience

In this section you will find the Audience Dashboard, thanks to which you can have an overview of your contacts, growth, and tags. You can get forecasts on the demographic data of your contacts, view which geographic areas they come from and monitor email marketing engagement. 

You can also manage:

• All contacts
• Signup forms
• Tags
• Segments
• Surveys
• Preferences canter
• Inbox

Within each of these areas you will find an “overview” button; by clicking on it you will be able to view a general overview of the contacts, the audience performance, the audience growth, the numbers of contacts from the last campaign, the campaign performance, the top email clients, and the top locations.

Campaigns

To optimize the service of email marketing, MailChimp analyses every data collected, monitoring trends and keeping track of performance to create always better campaigns. In fact, it provides statistics in real time, to quickly identify what works and performs best, analysing user behaviour, such as clicks, purchases, or downloads, to create contents that are always in line with the needs of your target.

Inside you will find the following categories:

• All campaigns: you will be able to view and manage your email marketing campaigns, ads, social posts, surveys, automations, and landing pages.
• Email templates: you can view the templates already saved or create new ones.
• Reports: you can track the performance of your campaigns thanks to real-time analytics reports and you can also generate comparative reports.

Automations

In this section you can manage email marketing automation, in fact you can create automated emails and customer journey maps, choosing from the numerous templates or creating them from scratch, to always stay in touch with your customers. 

You can also create transactional emails to quickly deliver one-to-one personalized messages and, by connecting your website, you can create a Google retargeting ad to encourage your potential customers to come back to your website. Finally, by clicking on “postcards” you can schedule a postcard campaign to send your contacts reminders, coupons, and other messages at regular intervals.

Other sections

Here we are at the last three sections of this email marketing tool:

• Website: here you can create and manage a website and online store, add an online appointments service, purchase, or connect a custom domain, and view reports on websites.
• Content studio: your files, products, gifts, and logos are collected here. You will also be able to integrate Instagram and access the “Creative Assistant”, a feature through which content will be generated based on your brand.
• Integrations: you can add and manage Integrations by connecting your Mailchimp account to apps and tools to simplify marketing.

Additional functions of this email marketing tool

As mentioned above, MailChimp is not only a tool of email marketing, but offers other very useful services, such as website creation and online stores, AI features, A/B testing and more. 

Let’s see these functions below in details:

• Website builder service
• Online store creation service
• A/B Testing
• Surveys
• AI services
• Landing page creation services

Website Builder service

MailChimp offers the possibility to create websites with an essential design, quickly and easily. 

You can create a website using pre-designed themes and customize colours and style according to the brand. For each section there are several layouts, also easily customizable. 

The platform also offers an integrated archive photo library to choose from over 2 million professional quality free photos to use for your website design. 

Mailchimp includes SEO tools that optimize web pages and help drive traffic to the website. 

Besides, connected to the website, there is the data reporting and analysis service, thanks to which it is possible to view visits to the website, CTR, graphic representations of the data and new subscribers. 

Online Store creation service

In addition to building a website, it is possible to create an online store to sell your products. The service is free or included in the chosen payment plan. It is possible to take advantage of built-in marketing features to drive traffic and sales.

A/B Testing

With Mailchimp it is possible to test your target’s preferences thanks to the A/B Testing service. In fact, there is the possibility to do tests to various audiences, trying different types of texts, topics, images, and layouts to see which solution gets the best performance. By analysing the results, it is possible to edit and improve advertising campaigns and achieve goals faster. With the A/B test function, it is possible to test up to 3 variants for each campaign and build a strategy that works the best for your customers.

Surveys

Being an email marketing tool, MailChimp also has a survey service to collect contact emails to become part of the mailing list. Surveys are also connected to Mailchimp CRM, emails, and Customer Journey builder. This means that it is possible to send questions to potential or existing customers, and then turn those answers into successful marketing strategies.

AI services

Mailchimp offers its creative assistant to automatically and quickly create new designs for brands, thus building new marketing strategies and increasing leads and sales. It’s an AI-powered design tool that makes beautiful multi-channel designs for businesses and startups who want to improve their look and customer’s engagement.

Landing pages creation service

You can create effective and beautiful landing pages, in a few minutes. MailChimp configures landing pages to automatically mark contacts based on their interests when they sign up, to organize the target audience.

Subscription plans of this email marketing tool

MailChimp offers a free version, but if you want to access more email marketing features, we recommend one of the three subscription plans. Let’s see the differences:

• Free: it is the free plan, especially suitable for newborn or small businesses; it offers limited features, such as a maximum of 100.000 emails to be sent per month and no more than 2.000 contacts
• Essentials: for a cost of €8.50 per month, it allows to send 500.000 emails per month, offering greater audience targeting
• Standard: it costs €12.75 per month, with a maximum of 100.000 contacts and 1.2 million emails sent per month
• Premium: priced at €254.33 per month, it offers very advanced services and multiple roles within the account, including Owner, Admin, Author and Manager

It is also possible to access the additional services by choosing from 3 different payment plans:  

• Free: It’s the free plan that offers basic features to create your own website and launch your own ecommerce
• Core: available for €8.51 per month, offers more customization opportunities and a 24h/24 support service
• Plus: for €24.67 it offers the functions also available with the other plans but in unlimited manners

MailChimp for email marketing: conclusions

MailChimp is a versatile and easy-to-use platform. You can use this tool for different Web Marketing activities, even though email marketing is the service that most represents it. In fact, it offers advanced and customizable features to create newsletters in line with the needs of your brand and your customers. 

In this article, we provided you with all the necessary information to get started with this tool and become a real expert. However, you can learn even more with the guides and tutorials on the Mailchimp website.

What are you waiting for? Start building your email marketing strategy with MailChimp right now!

Be curious! Do not limit yourself and do not stop at our proposal of tools! Check out our article Software Discovery platforms: the top 9 for us to find the one that best suits your needs.

For more information read also the related white paper that you find on this page Digital Marketing for Startups