We all like free, right? But there is usually a catch. Not this time. A tool I’ve found indispensable for creating and managing online marketing campaigns is MailChimp.
For those of you who send out an e-zine, newsletter, group email, or current specials via email, MailChimp is a web based marketing campaign manager. Managing email groups and campaigns with Microsoft Outlook or webmail (Yahoo Mail, GMail, etc) can become tedious quickly because that’s not what they are designed to do. While they were designed to send email, and do it quite well I might add, MailChimp is designed specifically to manage email campaigns.
One serious shortcoming of using Outlook, GMail, etc, is the inability to email individual recipients directly without recipients seeing other recipients. Sure, we probably know the BCC trick, whereby you email one recipient, usually yourself, then BCC, or BLIND Carbon Copy, everyone else.
Yes, this crude method works, but you cannot easily personalize the email. Isn’t it true that we like to see and have come to expect our name in the message’s opening greeting. We might even judge our initial impression of the message on that greeting, something like:
- Dear Jonathan,
- Hello Mr. Warner,
- Jonathan,
Using the above BCC method, although recipients cannot see who else receive the message, you cannot easily manage individual greetings, so most senders will use a generic greeting, such as:
- Hello,
- Hello All,
- Dear Reader,
- or…? What have you used?
Pretty tacky. On the other hand, MailChimp allows you to send to groups or addresses as if they are the only recipient and completely personalize the greeting and message.
A second serious shortcoming of using Outlook, GMail, etc, is the inability to track how many recipients opened your newsletter. You went to all the work of creating a superb marketing campaign, so why not get the maximum benefit? From MailChimp’s online dashboard, you can view how many opened it, didn’t open it, how many clicked on the content, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but you can see how powerful and useful this data could be for your e-zine or newsletter marketing campaign.
A third shortcoming is that traditional email lists did not allow recipients to unsubscribe, well, short of emailing you asking to be removed. MailChimp provides an unsubscribe link in the footer of the message. I know, you might be thinking, ‘I don’t want it to be easy for them to unsubscribe’, but I would prefer recipients who do not find value in the newsletter to unsubscribe instead of deleting the message I worked so hard to create. I would also prefer to have a realistic number of active subscribers too, instead of active deleters.
From this comparison, I hope you can see why I use, and recommend, MailChimp for online e-zine and newsletter marketing campaign management. If you have less than 2,000 recipients and send less than 12,000 emails a month, you qualify for their free account too, without a catch.
