Mailchimp

I love this software because of the ease of use and the way it implements structure for designing newsletters. I had previously utilized Microsoft Office to build, design, and create newsletters; however, found that you could only attach it to emails rather than having a fully fleshed out designer email sent.

Mailchimp also allows the administration to show how many indviduals clicked on various links and opened the email newsletter to read it. This allows for better engagement to see weather the information being portrayed is useful or not.

While it allows for ease of use with design and implementations it lacks on available templates and themes. We've attempted to search for themes online; however, have not had much luck utilizing third party themes that say they are built for Mailchimp.

Also, while you can design newsletters these are actually listed as campaigns as the number one goal for Mailchimp is to produce campaign and marketing strategies. This can sometimes lead to confusion while navigating the platform.

MailChimp is pretty easy to use and integrates with most page builders and websites. So you can quickly have an email form set up and start driving traffic to get people on your email list. They also have good support in regards to getting back to you quickly.

MailChimp lacks features and power that make it competitive in the marketplace. I couldn't ever go back to it. The tool itself doesn't do everything I need it to. And as if that's not enough, I know of several people who have been shut down and had their accounts erroneously canceled by MailChimp for violating terms of service. So they were locked out of their account and had all of their email contacts erased without warning. And these were not "black hat" businesses. These were regular, small, mom and pop shops, including a florist.

We started using Mailchimp for our non profit so we could move from text only emails to pretty designed emails. I love the Mailchimp email templates and we were able to personalize it to reflect the branding of our organization. To be honest we only use a small part of what Mailchimp is actually capable of. Every few months as we have time to investigate we test out new features. Many areas that scared us at first (A/B testing, segmentation, etc.) were actually very easy to implement and the basic instructions provided by Mailchimp were all I needed. If I wanted more information, I found that the internet was full of great video tutorials as well.

I don't love the reporting....but I have't taken time to see if there are better ways to customize our reporting either. So that might be user problems. I also wish it was easier to adjust the template areas from 1 to 2 or 3 columns without needing to create a whole new template.

Their ability to evolve in useful ways — mobile app, education program, email to postcards, etc — is what we like most, for sure, and why we stay with and recommend Mailchimp to others.

The thing we like the least? Small issues like the inability to see Segment sizes in an overview/list view (instead of how it is currently, requiring one to click into each segment).