| Mailchimp standout features | |
| Pre-built email templates | Customizable templates available for any occasion. |
| Content optimizer | AI-powered tool with data-driven recommendations. |
| Creative assistant | Imports elements (logos, fonts, images, and brand colors) automatically from your website. |
| Email sends | Send 2,500 to 150,000 monthly emails to your contacts. |
| Predictive segmentation | Predictive analytics tools that estimate future buying behavior. |
| Contacts | Store 500 to unlimited email addresses. |
| Integrations | 300+ integrations to save time and do more with your marketing. |
| Support | Live chat, phone, email support |
What Are the Pros and Cons of Mailchimp?
Mailchimp prides itself on its magic combination of simplicity, feature breadth, cost-effectiveness, and approachability that makes everyone know and love it.
Like any other tool, Mailchimp has its strengths and weaknesses, and works better for some people than for others.
Pros of Mailchimp
- Generous free plan: If you’re just dipping your toes in email marketing, Mailchimp’s free plan lets you create email campaigns and grow your audience while testing out some of its powerful tools and features.
- Easy-to-use email editor: Whether you’re a marketing newbie or veteran, Mailchimp makes it easy to start and customize your email marketing designs. The platform has modernized, so it was easy for me to quickly add, edit or remove sections, pick the elements I wanted change text or link colors, and more.
- Offers simple, well-rounded features: Mailchimp offers must-have features like the customer journey builder, to build different types of campaigns — simple or complex — using an intuitive process.
- All-in-one email marketing platform: I appreciated the holistic customer experience thanks to Mailchimp’s wide range of marketing tools — email marketing, e-commerce, social media, landing pages, lead forms, websites.
- Good branding experience: Mailchimp offers a fun and incredible top-of-mind brand experience that many startups and small businesses trust along their growth journey.
Cons of Mailchimp
- Expensive premium plans: Depending on how you calculate, Mailchimp offers decent value for money. But it gets a lot more expensive as you scale.
- Limited support for lower tiers: Mailchimp only offers 24/7 customer care and phone support in its paid plans. With a free plan, I only had access to Mailchimp’s knowledge base.
- No visual automation: I found Mailchimp’s extensive marketing automations a little overwhelming without a drag-and-drop visual workflow automation builder.
Beautiful drag-and-drop email templates
Mailchimp’s 100+ drag-and-drop email templates and designs help your messages stand out in every inbox and create customized experiences for your target audience. I discovered Mailchimp has a wide range of email templates, such as product retargeting emails that remind and invite people to make a purchase, transactional emails, and more.
You can code your own email templates or use Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant, which creates email marketing designs based on your brand and resizes them where necessary.
It was simple and easy for me to create eye-catching emails using the desktop version or Mailchimp mobile app with a few quick taps.
Powerful subject line helper and content optimizer
You want your marketing content to be engaging and motivate your customers to take the desired action. If you’re just starting out or don’t have the budget for an advanced in-house designer, tools can be handy. I found these two Mailchimp tools helpful:
- Creative assistant: Creates and instantly resizes your designs so you can build better email marketing campaigns and grow your sales.
- Content optimizer: Compares your content against your industry’s top-performing campaigns, then recommends what works, what doesn’t — and tells why, with personalized suggestions. You can engage your readers with great email copy, imagery, and layout, and improve on your performance.
Reputable email marketing automation
If you’ve built a subscriber list, you’ll need an efficient way to personalize and send trigger-based emails to your customers across the different stages of their customer journeys. It’s a time-consuming and tedious process, which is why Mailchimp offers marketing automation.
You can send automated, uniquely tailored messages to your customers based on their interactions with your business — without being online. Automation keeps the conversation going by ensuring more emails go out at the right time, so you can focus on other important aspects of your business.
Get your customers’ attention with Mailchimp’s 25+ pre-built journeys and customizable workflows that guide them toward conversion. I noticed one-click automation on the free plan, but you can upgrade and access more automation power with a paid plan.
Detailed reports
Any marketing tool can report on your emails’ performance, but Mailchimp analyzes millions of data points and explains the what and why of the data. These proven analytics ensure you stay informed on audience behavior with real-time feedback and get personalized recommendations to boost your marketing and revenues.
In the reporting suite, I had access to advanced analytics, conversion data, and other valuable insights so you can understand the return on investment (ROI) of email marketing across the buyer’s journey and act on them.
Predictive segmentation
One of the ways to get more revenue from your business is to ensure customers make repeat purchases from you. But how do you win repeat business with an email marketing tool? The solution is predictive segmentation.
I tested Mailchimp’s predictive segmentation feature, which helps you identify and target your most valuable customers to get them to buy from you again.
The tool, which Mailchimp claims helps marketers see up to 88% more revenues, analyzes your customers’ past purchase behavior to predict contacts with low, moderate, or high customer lifetime value (CLV) in the future.
Using these predictions, it separates your customers into pre-built segments you can reach to better target customer behavior through personalized messaging or special promotions — without hiring a data scientist.
Compare Mailchimp Alternatives
Mailchimp is in the limelight as an email marketing platform that facilitates freelancers, marketers, and business owners to send emails and newsletters to their target audiences. Despite its popularity and prowess, Mailchimp isn’t the best choice for every business.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Mailchimp, there are several tools you can explore. Here’s how it stacks up against other email marketing services.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mailchimp
What is Mailchimp used for?
Is Mailchimp a CRM?
What’s so good about Mailchimp?
Is Mailchimp email marketing free?
What are the best alternatives to Mailchimp?
How I Rated Mailchimp
I test sales and marketing tools based on the following factors:
- Sale management: Does the platform offer sales tools to help with lead management and closing deals? What are its features?
- Ease of use: Is the platform simple to set up and use?
- Customization and automation: Can you tailor the software to your business needs?
- Integrations and analytics: Does this software integrate easily with other business tools, and will its reporting features fit your needs?
- The support provided: How easy is it to get help?
- Free trial: Is a no-cost trial or demo offered?
Learn more about our review methodology.