Man, I am on such a MailChimp kick lately! Maybe it’s their wacky sense of humour, or their great feature set, or maybe I’m just delirious from spending hours putting together a bilingual newsletter :)  Anyway, I spent some time putting together some information about MailChimp’s pricing, and some of their more useful features, so I figured I’d post it online.

MailChimp is a Software as a Service (SaaS) application which allows you to manage email mailing lists, and edit newsletters. When I say SaaS, I mean it’s a service for which you pay a monthly fee, and you get access to their many features. Actually, that’s not 100% accurate, since they also have a fully featured free plan — you only need to upgrade your plan when you need to manage more subscribers, or send out more emails. And don’t you think that’s a great business model? Start people off when their mailing list is small, give them all the tools they need to grow their list, and they will gladly pay you once they’re successful! Okay, let’s take a look at some of MailChimp’s features:

Pricing Plans

(accurate as of June 19, 2010)

Non profit discount: 15%

1. $15 / mo (discounted = $12.75)
   • 501 – 1,000 subscribers
   • Unlimited sending limit
2. $30 / mo (discounted = $25.50)
   • 1,001 – 2,500 subscribers
   • Unlimited sending limit
3. $50 / mo (discounted = $42.50)
   • 2,501 – 5,000 subscribers
   • Unlimited sending limit
4. See all plans (for more subscribers):

Features

Full feature list

Highlights:

• Metric reporting
  • All the reporting you would expect: open rates, what was clicked, who unsubscribed, bouncebacks, etc.
• Easy personalization
  • It’s possible to customize each mailout with the recipient’s first and last name. This adds a touch of personalization that may be useful in certain cases.
• Segmenting
  • Send targeted campaigns to segments of your list.
  • Eg: You could send a customized email to people within the city notifying them of a local event.
• Double Opt-in
  • By requiring users to confirm their addition to your mailing list, you ensure that all your recipients truly want to receive your newsletters.
• RSS to email
  • With some configuration on your website, it’s possible to set up mailouts to be sent any time there is an update to a page on your site. This could be used to keep people informed about information that changes quite frequently.
  • I really want to find an excuse to send emails based off an RSS feed!
• Inbox Inspector (extra cost: 3 inspections = $14)
  • Lets you see your campaign in 30+ email clients so you can make sure the template looks good for all recipients.
• A/B split testing
  • I like this because I’m a big statistics nerd.
  • It basically allows you to test out two variations of a newsletter to a small segment of your mailing list, and see which one performs better. Then you can send out the better variation to your full mailing list.
  • Great for finding out which day to send out your newsletter (by the way, I’ve heard Tuesday is the best!)
• Performance comparisons
  • This allows you to compare your statistics (such as open rates, bouncebacks, clicks) to other companies in your industry.
  • You’d be surprised how varied these stats are across industries

Overall, I consider MailChimp one of the top services for mailing list and newsletter management.