MailChimp is quite good as a small business bulk email marketing software.
I've been using mailchimp for several years, initially with their free plan (up to 2000 contacts), then, with their paid plan. Now, I am using their free plan again.
The problem with mailchimp is, they charge you based on the TOTAL number of users/contacts.
So, say, if I have two lists and there are overlapping users on both lists, I would pay twice for those users.
As a concrete example, if I have 1000 users on list A, 800 on list B, and the two lists have 400 duplicated users...
I don't pay for 1400 users, instead, I would need to pay for 1800 users.
Anyhow, other than that, mailchimp is quite good.
Oh, there is one more thing with mailchimp...
At times, if you are not careful pruning your mailing list, you might send out a lot of email blasts and got quite some emails bounced back.
In this case, mailchimp could stop your account, since a lot of bounced emails back to MailChimp would make them look bad to the email receivers. Thus, could affect their overall email delivery for other customers.
You may think, if you got a termination letter from MailChimp for whatever reason, what are the options then?
Well, below is a list of possible alternatives to MailChimp.
MailChimp Alternatives
MailerLite.com
Simple email marketing for small business, $99/year for email newsletters.
AWeber.com
Arguably the most popular email marketing tool on the web.
Constant Contact
They've been around for quite a long time, targeting small businesses.
iContact.com
Email marketing and social media marketing software.
VerticalResponse.com
Simple and effective email marketing software, trusted by over 100,000 small businesses.
Infusionsoft.com
Marketing automation and email follow-up sequences.
SendGrid.com
This is said to be a good alternative to MailChimp. I think SendGrid is geared more towards developers and companies who want to heavily customize their emails targeting each individual customer. It is basically like a hosted smtp server so you could send email programmatically.
Email Delivered
If you are a high-end user for email services, say, you have couple hundred thousand subscribers, I heard Email Delivered (emaildelivered.com) should be a good one to use. It is a manage-your-own email service.
Amazon SES
I heard Amazon also has this Amazon Simple Email Service. And their pricing is quite cheap. So for starters, could be worthwhile to use.
Amazon is a very good brand, so I imagine that they are going to keep invest into this as part of their overall cloud computing strategy.
Conclusion
I am still using mailchimp but also have accounts with several other email service providers. It's good to always have a backup plan in case your account got banned.
If you know of any other good MailChimp alternatives, please
Contact Me. I am happy to add more services in order to provide people with choices for marketing tools.
More Thoughts On Email Marketing
I plan to write another article on email marketing tips. Below are some tips I've learned in the past (I will move these to the new post once it is ready).
1) Tips for sending out emails
Testing of email marketing should be focused on the following aspects (sorted by importance):
-open rate
-click-through rate
-conversion rate
2) Email is more effective (so customer would open it) if it is coming from a personal name with company name at the end. Something like,
From Joe at JSoftware.com.