With the release of the Google Apps Marketplace I have decided that I will be testing out a wide variety of the products in the store to give Google Apps users an idea of what products are currently available to fill their business needs. One great product that I have been testing is MailChimp http://www.mailchimp.com/. MailChimp is basically your replacement for services such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and iContact. MailChimp can be installed directly from the Google Apps Marketplace and after being installed can be access in your Google Apps Global Navigation. Once signed into Google Apps you can easily open MailChimp without any user-name or password because it uses the Google Apps single sign on feature.
If you are looking for your first email marketing system or looking at making a change MailChimp offers a free package which allows up to 500 contacts and 3,000 sends a month and unlike most services that is not a 30 day trial it is permanent. MailChimp also offers a variety of other packages based on the number of email subscriber your have.
The Experience
The MailChimp UI Is pleasing compared to most of the other services on the market today. The starting dashboard gives you a variety of video tutorials so that you can learn more about the system. One of the most important parts of an email marketing system is its ability to connect with outside data sources for your contacts. This is especially important when just starting with a service. MailChimp connects seamlessly with a variety of services such as Salesforce, Highrise, and of course Google Contacts. You also have the old stand by options of importing a CSV or copying and pasting from excel.
After you have a list of contacts the next largest task is typically designing your email. Creating a new email design is straightforward in MailChimp and gives enough flexibility to make the design your own. In MailChimp like many other email providers you get a selection of pre-designed layouts for you to choose, from my experience these layouts seem to be a bit more modern and appealing than what you would find in other services. Besides the standard layout selector MailChimp also comes with Design Genius which allows you to really customize your email design. Design Genius allows you to upload your own header image as your starting point (or use one of theirs) and move the design along from their. Based on your header you can select a variety or colors and layouts until your find one that’s right for you.
The other great feature from MailChimp is the tools they gives you to grow your email list. MailChimp makes it easy to create forms for your website where users can subscribe to your emails. The form creator is simple but also allows you to customize the design of the form to match your branding and website.
Advanced Tools
MailChimp makes it easy and very cheap to start email marketing but MailChimp also has some features that more advanced marketers will appreciate. First MailChimp allows you to create 4 different types of campaigns: regular, plain text, A/B split campaign, RSS- driven campaign. The A/B Split testing allows you to test two versions of your email against your list to see which is performing better. This will allow you to continually optimize your campaign to create higher open rates and click through rates. The RSS – Driven campaign can be used to deliver updates to your email subscriber when you update your RSS feed. These tools allow you to go beyond simple email marketing once you get the hang of things and really start to optimize and grow your email marketing efforts.
Conclusion
MailChimp offers far more features than what I just discussed and you should check them out on their site at http://www.mailchimp.com/. My overall view of MailChimp is that it makes starting email marketing easy but also allows you some advanced tools that seasoned marketers would enjoy. The ability for you to easily add MailChimp to your Google Apps Domain makes it easy to collaborate on email campaigns and migrate contacts from Google Apps. With the Forever Free package I would highly recommend giving MailChimp a test drive and see how it compares to your current system. The other benefit of MailChimp is the how to’s and active blog. These sources of data will truly help you expand your abilities in email marketing.
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