Mailchimp Transactional Mail (formerly Mandrill) Review
Email marketing is the most traditional way for brands to reach their customers with various types of messages. Customers are receiving welcome messages, helpful tips, marketing newsletters or transactional emails directly in their inboxes.
Email marketing evolved, and right now, we all can reach out to our mailboxes at any moment through our phones. But this again means that email marketing rules should change – since we are swamped with emails. Now personalisation, segmentation, A/B testing should be just part of your emailing strategy. However, all the efforts are worthed for improved conversions and better return of investment.
There are various tools out there like Mailgun, Mailjet, Mailchimp, SparkPost and more to help you with:
- Create emails that look good on a laptop and a phone
- Understand your public with detailed reports
- Segment your audience based on their interests
- Automate your flows to nurture customers and engage with them
- Personalise your emails and perform A/B testing and much more.
Some of those solutions can be overwhelming because of the massive number of functionalities they offer or hard to manipulate because they require technical knowledge. Also, some of them can be expensive for a smaller business.
This article will check Mailchimp in more detail and present nanoPost as its tiny alternative.
About Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an all one marketing platform that offers AI-powered, user-friendly tools anyone can use to succeed. They put the audience on focus and provide you with different services that can help you engage better with them. You will create automated marketing campaigns, targetted ad campaigns, send postcards or improve landing pages. All this will be backed up by detailed analytics that will provide you with valuable insights.
They have been for a long time dominant in the email marketing area, but after new competitors appeared, Mailchimp worked hard on improving their offering and adding a lot of additional services like embedded customer relationship management. For a while, they offer even website hosting and builder. Mailchimp is trying to offer everything to businesses from all sides to manage the majority of their marketing activities.
When it comes to creating an account – it is not that complicated to open an account, but you will have to provide some information about your business. When it comes to setting up your domain and verifying it, you will have some technical background to manipulate your DNS records. If you have a domain owned by Mailchimp, this might be surpassed since you will be manipulating everything in the same place.
To use most of their basic functionalities won’t require any particular skills or technical knowledge. But if you would like to take advantage of the more advanced ones like API, CRM management and others, you might need technical knowledge.
Mailchimp Pricing
Mailchimp plans are separated into three categories:
- Marketing platform
- Website & commerce
- Transactional email
Let’s have a look over the ones that include emailing.
The plans available under the Marketing platform section are billed based on the number of subscribers and include several maximum emails you can send per month. They offer a free plan, with which you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. The next plans are:
- Essentials – Starts at $9,99 per month for up to 500 contacts and 500,000 emails
- Standard – Starts at $14,99 per month for up to 500 contacts and 1.2M emails
- Premium – Starts at $299 per month for up to 10,000 contacts and 3M emails
Their free plan offers only their most basic functionalities, and each of the next includes more and more services you can take advantage of like segmentation, templates, automation and much more.
When it comes to the pricing for the Transactional email plans, they are separated under blocks. Each block is a credit for 25,000 emails, and the pricing starts at $20/block. When you need more blocks, the price goes down.
Mailchimp Features
And now let’s mention a couple of their best functionalities:
- Very detailed reporting – their reports include everything you need to know and even more.
- Variety of complimentary services for email marketing – here, we can mention their segmentation, automation, personalization, A/B testing and several other top-notch functionalities they offer.
- Template editor – their template editor is straightforward to work with, and even a person just starting with email marketing won’t struggle with it.
- API and SMTP offer very powerful API and SMTP that you can take advantage of if you have the technical skills.
Something great for MailChimp is that it is an all in one marketing platform. They can support you with almost anything with the variety of services and plans they offer. However, sometimes it becomes a bit overwhelming to manipulate their site if you have a lot of functionalities.
Since Mailchimp is offering domain and site hosting, their integration with services like WordPress is pretty basic. With WordPress.com’s Mailchimp block, you can add a signup form to any post or page and allow visitors to join your list wherever they are on your website. Or you will have to use Zapier for any more advanced integration options.