Mailchimp Review 2024

Edited by Amy Smith

Updated


Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported, which means we earn commissions from links on Digital. Commissions do not affect our editorial evaluations or opinions.

Bottom line: Mailchimp is a well-known marketing service provider that enables companies to create, launch, and send out email marketing campaigns.

Who should choose Mailchimp? Freelancers, startups, agencies, developers, or e-commerce store owners. Mailchimp provides all the marketing and commerce tools you need to help you launch, build, and grow your business.

What we like about 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.

What fell flat

  • 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.

Mailchimp’s Editorial Review

Mailchimp has excellent features, a generous free plan, focus on quality, and is easy to use. I found Mailchimp to be simple, easy to set up and use, with useful guides and tutorials, and unique built-in tools.

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.

“As the world’s largest and most established email marketing tool (over 10 million users), Mailchimp is one of the top tools you can use. It has an easy-to-use interface, makes it easy to create emails and manage your database. It also has a wide variety of automation options to put your marketing on auto-pilot… and recently has invested heavily in AI to give you feedback on your emails’ content and help you get more engagement and a better overall result from every email you send.”

Robin Adams, chimpmaster general at Chimp Answers

See how we rate e-commerce platforms.

Plans & Pricing

Jump to Review

  • Free plan ($0 per month)
  • Essentials ($13 per month)
  • Standard ($20 per month)
  • Premium ($350 per month)

Features

Jump to Review

  • Drag-and-drop email templates
  • Powerful subject line helper
  • Content optimizer
  • Reputable email marketing automation
  • Detailed reports
  • Predictive segmentation

Support

Jump to Review

  • Live chat
  • Phone
  • Email

Plans and Pricing

Mailchimp offers four marketing plans:

  • Free plan ($0 per month)
    • Good for: Freelancers, new marketers, startups, e-commerce stores.
  • Essentials ($13 per month)
    • Good for: Marketers, small businesses, e-commerce stores.
  • Standard ($20 per month)
    • Good for: Experienced marketers, small businesses, e-commerce stores.
  • Premium ($350 per month)
    • Good for: Advanced marketers, small businesses, e-commerce stores, enterprises.

Each plan comes with free features including contact profiles, customized labels, inbox, Mailchimp mobile app, audience dashboard, surveys, and campaign engagement and purchase behavior for behavioral targeting.

Nonprofits and charities get a 15% discount. And, if you add SMS two-factor authentication or Google Authenticator, you get a 10% discount for one month.

Features

It’s hard to argue against Mailchimp’s effectiveness as an email marketing service. The platform has evolved into a well-rounded marketing hub that solves multiple needs. Looking at its features, Mailchimp thrives thanks to these major features:

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.

drag-and-drop email templates

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.

Support

MailChimp offers an ample amount of resources to learn, not only how to use Mailchimp to its maximum capacity but also to improve your email marketing and sales operations and strategies.

You can reach out and call the sales team with any questions you have, or you can log in and reach out to the support team.

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.

Email Marketing Platform

Pricing + Basic Plan Features

Free

  • 2,500 monthly email sends
  • 500 contacts
  • 1 user seat
  • Email support for the first 30 days
  • Pre-built email templates
  • 300+ integrations
  • Creative assistant
  • Forms and landing pages
  • Basic reporting and analytics

Consider Mailchimp if:
You’re serious about email marketing and plan to scale in the future.

$9.99 per month

  • Email templates
  • Post to social media pages
  • Signup forms
  • Integrations with Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce and other popular tools
  • Phone and live chat support

Consider Constant Contact if: 
You’re just starting your marketing campaigns or small business and have a tight marketing budget.

Free

  • Email marketing
  • Website builder
  • Connect a domain
  • List for up to 500 contacts
  • Landing pages
  • Sign-up and contact forms

Consider GetResponse if:
You’re seeking features that help you empower your business as it grows.

Frequently Asked Questions About Mailchimp

What is Mailchimp used for?

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps individuals and businesses create, build, and launch email marketing campaigns, manage and reach out to their audiences or customers, and nurture and automate entire marketing campaigns.

Is Mailchimp a CRM?

Mailchimp isn’t a CRM. It’s a well-rounded marketing platform that offers multiple tools and features that help your business grow faster. Among them are all the customer relationship management (CRM) tools you need to aggregate, organize, and manage information in one place. That said, many Mailchimp customers already use the platform as their CRM.

What’s so good about Mailchimp?

Mailchimp has been around since 2001, during which it has created a fun, approachable, and relatable brand identity to meet the changing needs of its customers. You get a generous free plan, easy-to-use email editor, simple but well-rounded features, and a wide range of marketing tools and integrations.

Is Mailchimp email marketing free?

If you’re a beginner, new marketer, or startup seeking to create campaigns, test the platform’s tools and features, and grow your audience, Mailchimp offers a free plan with up to 500 contacts and 2,500 sends monthly, with a limit of 500 sends per day.

What are the best alternatives to Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a world-class email marketing and marketing automation services provider. However, some quality alternatives are Constant Contact and Brevo. Alternatively, you can create your own email using Gmail and your domain name to send and receive emails.

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.

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