10 benefits of Mailchimp

We’ve been using Mailchimp and helping clients with it since 2010. It’s changed a lot, including expanding beyond basic email marketing to a more robust marketing automation platform that you can even use to build a website and launch an e-commerce store.

The best use for it is still simple, straightforward email marketing. While it’s not the best fit in every case, Mailchimp remains a pretty good option for many businesses and nonprofits.

Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits of Mailchimp.

Benefit 1: There’s a free forever option

While there are limitations to Mailchimp’s free plan—the inability to schedule emails being the biggest—it is pretty awesome that they offer more than just a 30 or 60-day free trial. If the limitations of the free plan work for you, you can use it forever.

Benefit 2: It’s easy to use

Ease of use is the biggest reason we switched to Mailchimp back in 2010. We were using another provider that shall remain nameless, and it was way too complicated to use. While Mailchimp has added more features and gotten a little more complex in the past 11 years, it’s still pretty simple to use.

Benefit 3: It gives you easy-to-understand statistics

While there is much more detailed reporting available, the simple way Mailchimp presents your open rate, click rate, and unsubscribes for your current campaign, average campaign, and your peers is pretty great. Email statistics have never been so easy to understand!

Benefit 4: Email automation is built-in

While more advanced users can create complicated email automation, something simple like a drip campaign to welcome new subscribers and get them up to speed is easy to create.

Benefit 5: The emails are mobile-friendly

It seems like all email providers would have this built-in now, but they don’t. The content blocks Mailchimp provides are mobile-friendly. They also let you customize some mobile-specific styles. Finally, their preview function lets you see roughly what your email will look like on a mobile device.

Benefit 6: Simple social media scheduling is also available

While we’ve rarely used it, it can help to have some basic social media capabilities if you want a social post to go out at the same time as your email newsletter. You can connect and schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Benefit 7: They supply popup forms

Love them or hate them, popup forms are effective. WordPress—the website CMS we use—has a million different popup options. But, Mailchimp provides a popup solution out-of-the-box that’s easy to set up, customize, and integrate into just about any website.

Benefit 8: You can see who clicked what

This is a great benefit for organizations that have at least one person doing sales. That person can check a day or two after emailing each campaign to see who clicked the links in the email, then follow up with those people to see if they have a specific need.

Benefit 9: It integrates with WordPress

Mailchimp integrates well with WordPress. Whether you embed Mailchimp’s signup form on your website or use something more sophisticated like Gravity Forms, it’s extremely easy to add a signup option for your Mailchimp list to your WordPress website.

Benefit 10: Automatic list cleaning

Many email marketing providers will tell you if an email address is bad but leave it up to you to clean up your list. In most cases, Mailchimp will automatically clean up bounced email addresses for you. If you really want to clean things up, you can go beyond the automatic function and delete inactive Mailchimp subscribers.

Mailchimp can be great. It keeps things fairly simple, which makes the platform easy to use, and even if you use a professional, that can help keep your costs down.