Last week we featured Email Service Provider Predictive Response and today it is MailChimp. Download the full report comparing 13 common solutions anytime here.

Overview

MailChimp has gotten better and better each year. Their newly re-designed user interface is a high water mark of usability and simplicity. This makes for an easy to learn platform that can meet the needs of small or large businesses and nonprofits alike. MailChimp offers many cool features alongside its core offering and publishes some great resources for email marketers as well.

At long last, there is a native Salesforce integration available called MailChimp for Salesforce or MC4SF for short. While it covers many bases it’s still a little underbaked compared to some other integrated platforms on the market. List syncing is one example: instead of using Salesforce reports you have to use a custom query builder which has limited functionality. Also, you cannot create Email Campaigns from within Salesforce, thus if you have complex segmentation to model in your database it will probably fall short of your needs. Lastly, the integration creates lots of granular email statistics, which is of course a problem for data storage limits (and a common problem among many ESPs).

An alternative to MC4SF is to use a third-party integration service such as Cazoomi or Zapier. Both charge a monthly fee for their syncing service and offer slightly different versions of the functionality described above.

Features

MailChimp offers many bells and whistles you can tap into, almost all of which are free with a paid account. Here’s a short list of what’s available:

• Discover Similar Subscribers - Find subscribers who share interests with a segment you have already defined
• MailChimp Mobile - Add subscribers, edit content, and send campaigns from your phone
• Spam Filter Diagnostics - Gain more insight into why your email might be nabbed by spam filters
• RSS-to-Email - Queue up content for your emails based on an RSS feed
• Social Pro - An add-on service which lets you target emails based on social media data

For a complete listing of MailChimp features, visit this page:
http://mailchimp.com/features

Salesforce Integration

AppExchange Rating: 3 out of 5 with 35 reviews

See above for description. You can choose between MailChimp for Salesforce (MC4SF) or a third-party integration app from Cazoomi or Zapier.

Other Integrations

MailChimp is chock full of integration options for a wide variety of platforms. Some highlights are:

• Mandrill - For transactional emails such as receipts, invoices, and account confirmations
• WordPress Analytics - Brings Google Analytics and MailChimp data into your Wordpress dashboard
• Facebook - Add a signup form to your Facebook page
• PayPal - Add PayPal customers to your MailChimp list automatically
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Sugar CRM

For a full listing of integration possibilities, visit this page:

http://connect.mailchimp.com/

Pricing

MailChimp generously offers use of their platform for free if your mailing list size and send volume are both below certain limits. From there you can either pay monthly for unlimited sending or pay for email credits to pay as you go. The pricing breakdown looks like this:

• Up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month for free
• 25,000 subscribers with no send limit for $150 per month
• 50,000 subscribers with no send limit for $240 per month

15% Discount available for nonprofits

Complete pricing information can be found here:

http://mailchimp.com/pricing/

Curious for more? Download Our full report comparing 13 common Email Service Providers here.