As stated in my one of my previous posts, I made a challenge
to myself to make a digital product and sell it cheap to increase the number of
people who are capable of purchasing in my email list. I researched on the
topic of emails listings and I decided to try to automate my email campaigns
using mailchimp.com.
So far the experience with mailchimp.com has been a pleasant
one. I have successfully imported the emails that were subscribed to me and I
have also successfully created a landing page easily.
The interface is very user friendly and integrating the
capture and landing page to my blogger blog is really easy.
- The reasons I decided to use mailchimp are:
- They are recommended by a lot of online reviews to beginner
- They have a free account for up to 2000 subscribers
- I have no need for the other packages offered by Aweber and constant contact
When I did register for mail chimp, the initial experience
was fun. Everything was easy to find and
there are guide videos to tell you how everything works. Almost all the
features that they offer are allowed in the free account.
There are some features however that will not be included in
the free account such as:
Time Warp
With
time warp you can make mailchimp send your email campaigns at time you prefer. If
your campaigns are more successful if they are sent in the morning of weekdays
for example, you can use this feature to automate the process.
Delivery Doctor
The delivery doctor is mailchimp’s way of
automating the checking of campaign if they really reach your subscriber’s
inbox. Without delivery doctor, you can do this manually but it’s faster done
when automated.
Social Pro
In my
point of view the most relevant feature that free users are missing out on is
the social pro feature which gives you an insight of what social networking
website your subscribers hang out in, gives you a report on their basic
publicly available information, and statistics on sex, age and ocupation. This can
make it easier for you to send targeted messages to your subscribers.
I have read a few pros and cons before I signed up for
mailchimp. Here are a few of them and how I find the cons so far.
The presence of their brand signature in my emails
That’s a
bummer, but considering that most of my emails so far are about feeds, it doesn’t
bother me that much. The danger here is that if you have a call to action in
your email, the presence of their brand link may divert some of your traffic to
their own website.
So far I
haven’t sent any call to action emails via email chimp and if you are like me
who only sends emails once a day, which are mostly about helpful information
and seldom talks about buying something, mailchimp is a great place to begin.
Lack of options in templates
This is
also another bummer. For now it’s great because everything is easy to do but I’m
wondering about how this may affect my future plans. Because there are no signs
that mailchimp will let us use self designed templates, I have no choice but to
live with what they have.
No real time data in reports
Just
like in the other cons, it is in mailchimp’s discretion to improve in this area
of their service. A little waiting doesn’t really bother me but if it does bother
you, mailchimp may not be for you. Watching real time updates is like watching
paint dry, anyway.
My decision for this service is to stick with mailchimp for
this particular blog for a while. Since changing isn’t really an option right
now, I will decide to become a paying member if the need arises for it.
Mailchimp are a bunch of non professional amateurs if you ask me. I've been with them for months, paid £100's and now I found out that all the autoresponders I did setup up during this time, never worked, missing on literally 100's of leads worth £10,000's because of the google analytic code they said, furthermore, on the latest version 8, they changed a fundamental feature without prior notice: we are working with account managers that needs to see their clients responses, one by one; now the open and unopened report link have been disabled for good so the share reports do not shown any more email by email who opened and who clicked, also the paragraphs have disappeared [a bug]. In all circumstances nothing but "there is not a ETA for this, ETA for that.." a complete shamble!
ReplyDeleteAnd if you are reading this, Mr Mailchimp, your reply in response to this is not welcome, unless you are willing to indemnify £20,000 in lost contracts, and don't even start with the software is provided as is, because that only means it is totally unreliable as it has been demonstrated. Good luck with that!