- Email marketing has gone bananas…
An email marketing service helps Internet marketers maintain communication with customers in the form of autoresponders or newsletters. Mail Chimp is a popular email marketing service that’s slowly making its way to being one of the best brands in the industry. This isn’t your ordinary straight-faced business, it’s a hip and cool brand that looks like it’s geared for the youth of today.
Things I like about it
- Guided Campaign creation- Mail Chimp walks a user through a series of steps. It literally hits everything in one setup — from the name of your campaign up to the creation and sending of your email. The same can be said about the creation of autoresponders. I found this very helpful in case you want to speed things up a bit when creating your messages.
- Delivery Doctor & Inbox Inspector- Mail Chimp’s very own spam filter is called Delivery Doctor and it allows you to check your message prior to sending. It also lets you know why a particular message would most probably end up in the spam box. Inbox Inspector shows you how the email you’ve made would look like in different email clients and browser-based email services. This feature, too, is important because you’ll want to know whether the message you sent comes out correctly on the recipient’s end or not.
- Pricing Flexibility- Mail Chimp gives you two options with which you can issue your payment. The Pay-As-You-Go pricing plan is excellent for people who send email blasts on a non-regular basis. The other plan, which is the standard fare monthly plan, is for marketers who send messages by bulk constantly. You can choose whichever suits your budget.
- Reporting- Mail Chimp’s site Analytics360 allows you to integrate your MailChimp account to your Google Analytics account for easy tracking of conversions. The basic tracking function shows you data on open rates, bounce rates and click-through rates.
- Humor- I’ve mentioned earlier that MailChimp is hip and appeals to the younger segment of society. That’s because of the humor it interjects every now and then. Upon logging in, you’re greeted by your dashboard and MailChimp’s company mascot- a monkey- somewhere at the upper right. Every time you go in and out of a page, it brings up funny one-liners and even provides links to anything with a simian reference. Very few businesses these days lighten up, and MailChimp does a great job of providing some fresh air.
Things that Aren’t so good
- The Interface- Mail Chimp’s interface is quite confusing given the wide spaces in its layout. In my case, I prefer a more compact interface that won’t ask you to scroll up or down so much. To compensate, buttons and menu tabs represent their functions fairly well.
- Email Templates- Mail Chimp only has 59 email templates to choose from and customizing can’t go as far as choosing color themes and the layout of your table. You can still add images, but though they provide unlimited image hosting, you can only upload an image file that’s less than 10 megabytes.
As far as Internet marketing is concerned, MailChimp does its job of sending email messages to build relationships with customers. While there may be some features that are lacking, MailChimp’s flexibility in pricing and guided campaign creation is something that I would recommend to upstart Internet marketers.
