MailChimp Review

TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE WHEN PROBLEMS ARISE!!! Until today, I had been with Mailchimp for about three years with a large account. I had to change payment methods. For mystery reasons, their credit card gateway (not my own credit card processor bank) wouldn’t accept my valid card. I had an urgent blast to get out on deadline, so I DROVE TO MY BANK AND MOVED THE CASH TO MY BANK DEBIT CARD. Drove back, tried to use that card. Same result. So I couldn’t get the blast out. But the really bad part was that THERE IS NO WAY TO SPEAK TO ANYONE AT MAILCHIMP – I REPEAT – YOU CANNOT GET ANYONE ON THE PHONE – and they did not respond to my urgent emails after saying that the problem was my card. IT ALMOST SEEMED AS IF THEY WERE TRYING TO DRIVE ME AWAY – A $2,880/YEAR CUSTOMER. . BOTTOM LINE: DON'T USE THIS VENDOR!! WHEN THERE IS A PROBLEM, YOU CAN’T REACH ANYONE. I switched today to IContact. It was very easy, and I talked to THREE helpful IContact people in the process of switching. YOUR CHOICE: NOBODY ON THE PHONE AND IGNORED EMAIL REQUESTS FOR HELP WITH MAILCHIMP or GET LIVE HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT WITH ICONTACT.COM..

One day MailChimp started to have problems with email delivery to the biggest local ISP in our country. They were solving the problem for almost three weeks trying to shift it onto the client. While they were solving the delivery problem we had to use a different ESP. Not to send emails twice to the same subscribers we decided to temporarily delete these problematic addresses from our list in MailChimp. Their support recommended to use 'remove people' option but afterwards it led to the fact that we cannot import them back now. All that MailChimp advised us to do is to delete manually one by one almost 8000 emails from the unsubscribed list now, and they actually refused to solve the problem caused initially by their delivery problem! It is a real mockery from MailChimp support team. It is pitty they treat their customers like monkeys...

MailChimp.com had much promise. But it seemed, despite the level of opt-ins and work we did to ensure that the lists our clients provided were scrubbed and cleaned, the compliance people sort of went overboard. When you educate clients, give them tools, they execute those programs, have hand written and signed permissions, double-opt-ins, and what not, and MailChimp.com STILL treats you like a Nazi War Criminal when things go awry.

We had a list of people for a small store in Houston that had a direct and clear sign-up postcard. We sent them emails from the personal email boxes of the owner thanking them for signing up and we touchpointed all of them.

Next month, when time came to send the blast, what happens.... of course, 6 people out of the small 48 complain and it makes everyone look bad. MailChimp shuts our sending off. No real-time people exist to assist you, and they make you wait far too long to get off their suspension list. They seem to forget the human nature of people with respect to how they respond to emails they signed up for. It took one week to resolve. That's an eternity in the marketing world.

Instead of forgiving, they are overly zealous and work hard to kill your business. My advice, avoid their Stalinist tactics and use other services. Their failure to help you and treat you right and see the agency side of things is just one of their many problems.

One item not mentioned above in the rating scheme is billing. They only offer monthly billing and for providers looking to bundle their service, this is a MAJOR drawback. There is also no way to prevent clients from accessing billing and service upgrades so good luck controlling costs.

A very user-oriented company that runs very clean mailing lists. This is one of the newer breed of email campaign houses. They have beautiful templates, a fully-functional API, great support and forums. Their model is the classic sender-push model where the list owner sends out a broadcast email to a list or segment of a list. They have beautiful templates which work cross-mailreader. Their reports are very eye-pleasing as well. The feature they lack that some others like awebber have is the ability to send timed followup emails when a user joins a list.

i love the chimp

The reporting that Mailchimp provides is bar none! They feed into Google Analytics so we can easily pull segmentation reports and see how well our email campaigns are working for us.

They allow multiple ways for you to grow your list, from widgets you can put on your website to an API where Joomla can automatically subscribe new website members to your mailing list - there's a plugin for that.

Give them a try, use their free account to get a feel for all the features you get, and you will see it's easily worth the money when you have them handle your full list!