Many people begin email marketing with MailChimp because it has a Forever Free account, and I am no exception. But is this the right choice for you?
Please note that I am not an affiliate of MailChimp and am not in any way being paid by MailChimp to talk about them. I like them. That’s it. As I write these tutorials, my goal is to share how I use MailChimp to grow my business so you can learn from my successes and failures and so I can become better at serving my clients by growing my expertise in email marketing.
MailChimp has four account levels:
- Forever Free
- Paid Monthly
- Pay as You Go (MailChimp Credits)
- MailChimp Pro
When to Have a MailChimp Forever Free Account
When I first decided that I would collect email addresses to which I wanted to send tips, cheat sheets, and tutorials, I had no idea what such an effort really looked like. I was interested in building a relationship with people interested in growing their business. I wanted to share my successes with them. But otherwise, I hadn’t a clue how to get people on my email list or when or how frequently I should email my list.
I literally had three subscribers on my list for the first six months and then I collected another 40-ish over the next three years.
I didn’t know what steps to take or when I, as a solo business owner, would have the time to learn them.
During the next three years, I started to learn and to budget time to learn what email marketing was all about. Yep. Sometimes I am a SLOW learner.
If you think this sounds remotely like how you do things, start with the free account and wait to switch to paid until:
- You can see a clear path to how your email outreach will grow your business
- You are sure you are ready to regularly use the paid features.
- OR your list exceeds 2,000 people, at which time you can’t have a free MailChimp account anymore.
Here’s an article I wrote that details more about MailChimp’s Forever Free account.
Researching email marketing software? CLICK HERE to download a free cheat sheet comparing the top email marketing providers!
Why I Switched to a Paid MailChimp Account
I switched to MailChimp’s monthly account when I wanted to set up automated emails. There is a way with MailChimp’s Forever Free account to send an email once someone confirms their subscription to your list, but I wanted to send a series of emails without having to manually go into my MailChimp account and do the sending myself.
And that, for me, was the biggest reason to switch to a paid account. MailChimp has other paid features, but this was the thing that put me over the edge.
Here are some other features you might want that require a paid account:
- If you’d like to run Facebook Ad Campaigns and like using MailChimp, MailChimp now has a feature that lets you set up Facebook Ads through MailChimp’s interface.
- If you are selling things on your website and you want to send emails to people who abandon their cart before checkout, MailChimp can do that for you as well.
- If your design matters to you a lot, you’ll want the Inbox Preview to check how your emails display in other email clients.
- If you want to deliver your emails based on the time zones of your recipients.
- If you want to learn about your subscribers’ social media profiles to help fine tune your content to what they are into, MailChimp’s Social Profiles feature can do this for you.
MailChimp’s Monthly Account vs MailChimp’s Pay As You Go Account
Here’s the thing: You get the same features in a Monthly MailChimp account as you do when you buy the Pay As You Go credits.
Choosing between MailChimp’s credits and MailChimp’s monthly account boils down to how many emails you will send.
I have written an article on this that should help you do the math and you can find it here: MaiChimp’s Pay As you Go Credits Explained.
When to Add On MailChimp’s Pro Account
First, MailChimp’s Pro account is an add on to your paid account. MailChimp’s Pro account costs $199 a month as of this writing.
So if you are paying $100 a month, you’ll add the Pro account to your monthly account cost. This means your total cost will now be $299 a month.
You might be able to gather just from the pricing that this account is for a business that uses email marketing heavily as a means to generate business. I don’t use the MailChimp Pro account as of now. My plan is to max out what I can with the base paid account prior to upgrading to Pro. I would advise someone to add on MailChimp Pro if:
- You are sending thousands of emails a month and have someone in your team who can take the time to dig into the demographics of your list to understand what messaging performs best with different demographic sets.
- You have an interest in testing many different variables beyond the normal testing features that MailChimp provides. For instance, you can create eight different versions of the same campaign, send all eight at the same time to a small segment of your list, and then send the remainder of your list the campaign that got the best response. Again, you’d need a list of thousands to be able to test enough people’s response to determine a true winner.
- You can segment who receives your emails based on what the user does, such as purchases they have or haven’t made or emails they have or haven’t opened, which are super powerful features enabling you to follow up with your list automatically rather than manually analyzing the behavior of your list and manually sending emails to them. So if you have a complicated funnel of follow-up messaging that goes out based on “if this, then do that” logic, you can benefit from MailChimp Pro’s segmentation.
Your Next Step
If you don’t already have a MailChimp account, you can sign up here: https://login.mailchimp.com/signup
When you sign up, you can begin with a free account and then upgrade it whenever you are ready.
The Next MailChimp Tutorial
My next MailChimp tutorial will show you how to start a MailChimp list, which you will need before you can send emails with MailChimp.
Researching email marketing software? CLICK HERE to download a free cheat sheet comparing the top email marketing providers!
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