Mailchimp Review: When (And When Not) To Use It [2024]

Mailchimp at a Glance

More Than Just a Big Name?

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Mailchimp is one of the biggest names in the email marketing industry – and for a good reason. It’s obvious that a lot of thought has gone into making the platform easy to use, making it an ideal choice if you need a quick way to set up successful email marketing campaigns.

It’s a well-rounded tool that performs consistently well on most fronts. After signing up, I was able to import my contacts, create my first email, and send it to my subscribers in less than an hour.

If you’re new to email marketing, you can take advantage of Mailchimp’s generous free plan to send emails, create forms, and craft an unlimited number of landing pages. More advanced personalization, segmentation, and automation tools are unlocked with Mailchimp’s paid plans.

Mailchimp’s features might not be as powerful as those of other top competitors, but its email marketing tools are highly functional, easy on the eye, and a pleasure to use. Read on to find out whether Mailchimp is the right EMS for you.

Mailchimp Offers More Than Enough for the Average Marketer

Mailchimp’s set of features isn’t extraordinary, but I love how everything comes together seamlessly. From the simple email editor to the automation “journey” builder, everything looks good and makes sense.

Sure, it might not be as feature packed or powerful as some competitors, but it gets the job done – without giving you a headache. If you’ve never used an email marketing service before, Mailchimp’s a great place to start.

Email Campaigns, Templates & Personalization

Let’s start with the bad news: Mailchimp only has 6 pre-built templates and 5 more available for free in the “template marketplace.”

There are about 40 more templates available for purchase, ranging from $6.99 to $14.99. But considering I’d already paid $20.00 for the Standard plan to unlock the template marketplace, this struck me as bizarre.

The additional templates looked great – highly customizable and mobile responsive – but charging extra isn’t the industry standard. For comparison, ActiveCampaign’s 250+ high-quality templates1 are available at no additional cost.

Still, I’m glad I didn’t let that hiccup discourage me, because Mailchimp does get many other things right. Mailchimp recently revamped its email editor, making it even easier to use. You can use merge tags to personalize your email with just a few clicks, and dynamic content allows you to display different content to specific audiences.

Mailchimp also offers extensive A/B testing, allowing you to test and optimize variations of subject lines, sender name, send time, and content.

Mailing Lists and Segmentation

You can easily import your contacts by uploading a CSV or TXT file, copying/pasting, or using a third-party service like Zapier, Salesforce, and QuickBooks. Mailchimp’s warning about importing contacts you have permission to market to is a good indicator of a solid anti-spam policy.

Segmentation is all about organizing your mailing list based on who your subscribers are, so that you can create more targeted campaigns. While Mailchimp does have tags (such as opened, clicked) to help you organize your contacts, it only offers advanced segmentation with the Premium plan (and that’ll cost you).

Effectively, this means you won’t be able to move contacts between lists – Mailchimp’s audiences are siloed. But it’s not all bad news. Mailchimp’s predictive segmentation feature does a decent job of analyzing data for you. It can then use that data to automatically deliver your emails to the right people.

Landing Pages

Unlike most of its competitors, Mailchimp allows users to create and publish unlimited landing pages for free. There are 9 fully customizable templates available, and they all look modern with sleek/ minimalistic designs.

Like with the email editor, each template consists of blocks that you can edit. You can also then drag and drop elements to customize your page.

All of Mailchimp’s landing page templates are mobile responsive, and you can enter desktop/mobile preview mode with the click of a button. It took me less than 10 minutes to create a landing page I’d be happy to share with my subscribers.

Unfortunately, connecting your page to a custom domain is only possible with a Websites & Commerce plan – which costs extra.

Automation

Mailchimp offers around 45 pre-built automations (or “journeys”) to help you engage your audience. You can set up simple welcome emails, send offers to users who’ve abandoned their carts, promote cross-sell opportunities, and more. You can also create your own “journey” by specifying rules, actions, and conditions.

Here’s the caveat: Mailchimp doesn’t allow contacts to move freely between lists, so its automation capabilities are somewhat limited, especially compared to the likes of ActiveCampaign.

But that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. Mailchimp markets itself as a user-friendly, easy-to-use EMS – so it makes sense that it keeps its automation simple and manageable for the average user. If that’s you, this shouldn’t keep you from picking Mailchimp.

Your Emails Will Likely Reach Their Destination

There’s a lot of discussion around deliverability, yet I see people making the same mistake over and over again. They run some quick tests, come up with an arbitrary delivery rate (say, 87%), and call it a day.

That’s not how we measure deliverability here at Website Planet. Why? Well, when running the usual deliverability tests, you introduce too many variables, so your results can’t be replicated. The best we can do is examine certain features that can improve the odds of our emails reaching their destination.

Mailchimp’s deliverability score is a reflection of the presence (or absence) of these features, especially in comparison to similar features offered by competitors.

First, I checked to see whether Mailchimp offers DKIM authentication. Long story short, DKIM authentication gives email providers (like Gmail or Hotmail) a way to tell whether the emails sent in your name really do come from you – it’s an email signature of sorts. Mailchimp offers DKIM authentication, plus a helpful article that can help you set it up in just a few minutes.

Next, I looked at Mailchimp’s anti-spam policy. Ideally, you want your EMS to be as strict as possible regarding spam – a bad reputation affects the platform’s deliverability rate as a whole. Luckily, Mailchimp has strict anti-spam requirements that comply with the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act.

That said, Mailchimp didn’t blink an eye when I imported several spammy-looking contacts, which did affect the final deliverability score I awarded it.

Affiliate marketing can also negatively affect a service’s deliverability rate. Mailchimp doesn’t allow traditional affiliate marketing schemes (such as generating leads or sales for a third party), but it does allow affiliate links (i.e., a partnership between two independent businesses).

Lastly, I wanted to know whether Mailchimp offers private (or dedicated) IP addresses. A private IP means you don’t have to send emails from the same domain as other users on the platform, which can boost your deliverability rate.

Mailchimp offers private IPs for an additional monthly fee of $29.95. That’s a seriously reasonable price – other EMS charge hundreds of dollars for this. And unlike most competitors, Mailchimp doesn’t require that you send hundreds of thousands of emails a day to qualify for a dedicated IP.

No Complaints Here – Mailchimp’s Reporting Excels

Mailchimp’s reports are pretty advanced, even if you’re on the free plan. The dashboard will quickly tell you how many subscribers opened, clicked, or bounced, as well as how many orders were made during the campaign’s lifecycle. Everything’s laid out beautifully and is easy to read – exactly what I expected from Mailchimp.

Mailchimp also allows you to dive deeper into your campaign performance. There’s a section dedicated to links and click data, with a 24-hour performance chart that tracks clicks and opens in real time. Social performance and top geographical locations by opens are also available through the dashboard.

If you’re a Standard or Plus user, you can check how your campaigns have performed against each other through the “Email Analytics” section under “Campaigns.” All users also have access to “Campaign Benchmarking,” which compares your email performance with that of your competitors.

There’s no such thing as too much data, and based on my testing, Mailchimp knows that well!

Good Customer Support Unless You’re On the Free Plan

Since Mailchimp’s one of the biggest names in the industry, I had high expectations for its customer support. As a Standard user, I had access to all support channels except phone support – that’s reserved for Premium users.

I fired up Mailchimp’s live chat window on a Saturday afternoon to ask a question about RTL language support:

I was immediately connected with a representative who answered my question in less than two minutes. They admitted that RTL wasn’t supported by the new builder but promised that the team was working on a fix. Mailchimp’s live chat support team seems to have improved a lot since I last tried to contact them a few months ago!

On Sunday, I sent an email inquiring about Mailchimp’s bizarre template monetization, asking whether the Premium plan would come with more free templates:

Mailchimp emailed me back the next day, some 24 hours after I’d contacted them. Thomas here answered my question and even included links to explainer articles about the marketplace and Mailchimp’s pricing.

Talking about articles, Mailchimp’s extensive knowledge base is second to none. The help center’s filled with popular guides and tutorials on pretty much anything, and there’s even a smart support bot that can quickly scan the database and find relevant information for you.

I wish Mailchimp didn’t limit support for free users – you can only contact Mailchimp via email for the first 30 days on the free plan. Free support for all users would be ideal, as is the case with AWeber’s 24/7 support1 via phone, email, and chat.

Still, if you’re on a paid plan, I found support to be pretty helpful.

Not All Mailchimp Plans Are Created Equal

Mailchimp offers four tiers of service, including a free-forever plan. The free plan gives you the basic tools you need to create email campaigns and manage a small audience, but it’s pretty limited in terms of personalization, automation, and support.

The cheapest paid option is the Essentials plan, which grants access to certain core features of the platform, such as A/B testing and email scheduling. However, I’m not particularly fond of the Essentials plan, as it restricts access to numerous advanced features like custom templates, dynamic content, and send-time optimization, all of which are essential for enhancing the effectiveness of your email campaigns. These advanced features are available with the Standard plan.

If you’re willing to upgrade to a paid plan, you might as well spend a few more dollars and grab yourself the superior Standard plan – it’s worth it.

And what about the Premium plan? While this does come with some useful additions (like phone support), the huge bump in price puts it out of reach for the average marketer. Unless you need the extra 145,000 email sends/month, you’re better off sticking to the Standard plan.

Some of Mailchimp’s add-ons (like dedicated IPs) make sense, but I still don’t love the fact that I have to pay extra to access premium templates and connect my custom domain when I’m already a paying customer. Other competitors, such as ActiveCampaign, include these features with their paid plans.