If you’re signed up to several mailing lists, whether they’re newsletters, blog notifications or announcements, there’s a good chance that at least one of them will be served by Mailchimp.
It’s one of the most popular marketing automation platforms out there, and is many businesses’ go-to tool for managing their email comms. But why Mailchimp? Let’s have a look at some of the benefits.
It’s free (to start with)
As you’ll see from the rest of this article, Mailchimp lets you pick and choose features, and that helps you to grow and adapt with it. But right at the start, when you’re deciding which direction to use, or indeed whether to use Mailchimp, there’s one important incentive – it’s free.
With a list of 500 recipients, you can send up to 2,500 emails per month with the free package, which is great for learning to use it. But for many organisations and small local businesses, that’s actually all they’ll ever need, and it can remain free forever. For the rest, it’s not particularly expensive, compared to the benefits of running a newsletter.
Plenty of templates
Mailchimp comes with a host of pretty templates to give your emails a more professional look than plain emails.
As you move up through paid plans, you get more options, such as the ability to customise the templates. If the standard templates are a little too generic for you, and you don’t feel you have the design skills to customise them, you can also upload your own custom HTML templates.
That gives you 100% control over the look and feel of the emails, and if you use professional designers and coders like Gooey, it’s sure to look great on all devices, browsers and resolutions.
Integrates with other solutions
Mailchimp integrates with more than 300 other solutions, including WordPress, Salesforce and Shopify, so whatever you’re currently using to run your business and your website, you won’t have to change it – it’ll all be seamlessly joined.
Full analytics
Analytics is essential for your email marketing campaign. It shows what proportion of your emails are opened, read and interacted with and how recipients make their way around your site after they’ve left your landing page, including whether they convert into buyers. Having that 360 degree view of your customers’ actions lets you design better emails, with optimised headings and subject lines, so your campaigns get stronger the longer you keep them running.
Automation
Mailchimp is really smart when it comes to automation. That’s not just scheduling mailshots, although it of course will do that for you. It can automate the process completely by segmenting the audience into various groups based on the information you have on them and how they have interacted with previous emails.
Then, you can send out different emails to certain groups at variable times based on the logic rules you set up. It might sound complex, but it really falls into place as soon as you start grouping subscribers into categories and monitoring performance.
Most professional email marketing solutions do some or all of the above, but Mailchimp just seems to do them all, really well, and with a simple, intuitive interface. We’ll usually recommend the service to anyone who asks, wherever they are in their email marketing journey.
