My Mailchimp History
For the past four years, I've been using Mailchimp for my email marketing, but recently I quit. In this video, I'm gonna tell you why I've made the switch and what I'm using instead. (upbeat music)
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And it's true.
For most of my business, I've been using Mailchimp as my email marketing tool. In fact, when I think back of one of the things that I wish I had done earlier, that would be to have started to grow my email list that much sooner.
And the reason why I first started to choose and work with Mailchimp is that it's fairly easy to use. It's relatively intuitive and it was one of the most popular tools at the time.
It continues to be a very popular email marketing tool, a way to grow your email list. However, over the years as my list has grown, my needs have also changed and I'm not that wild about the direction where Mailchimp has gone.
So let me show you some of the things that I do like, but a number of things that really led me to move to something completely new. Now having an email list is so important because it's something that you actually own.
Unlike your subscribers or followers on social media, this list is something that you can take with you. It's also a much more direct relationship as you are sending communication and messages directly to someone's email inbox.
Rather than just having them swipe through or maybe not even see the majority of your posts through social media. Now it's pretty easy to get started here with Mailchimp and Mailchimp is relatively generous with giving you up to 2,000 subscribers in your account before you need to transition to a paid account.
Drawbacks to Using Mailchimp
However, the big thing that I felt was a major drawback for me when it came to Mailchimp was the variety of ways in which I could get people to sign up for my email list. Here under my audience tab, I'm under the sign up forms and you can see that Mailchimp gives us a few different options here including a form builder and also a subscriber pop-up.
However, here was the major drawback for me. If I open up this form builder, let's say I want to edit my current form, this is the only one that I have.
Mailchimp doesn't allow you to create multiple forms
It's gonna force you to either use another application or build something else or one of its many integrations with other applications.
But if you wanna create another form to use on a different part of your website or to add for a different group, but include them in the same audience, you can't do that here within Mailchimp and I felt that that was a major drawback.
If we go back to sign up forms, the same thing happens with the subscriber pop-up. If you want to create one, that's fantastic, but if you wanna create more than one subscriber pop-up for your page, you are out of luck.
Now don't get me wrong. I realize that Mailchimp has many larger organizations that have… And then have an entire team that is dedicated to social media marketing.
They are using other applications to build custom forms and landing pages. But if you're like me and you're running a small business, if you have a relatively small team or maybe just a team of one, you want something that can be doing this for you and doing it with ease.
Mailchimp Features I Didn't Find Useful
The other thing that I noticed over the years that I have spent with Mailchimp is that they decided to add a number of other features that just weren't that relevant to me. So in terms of creating a website, well many of us already have a website or are using another tool for that.
And if I come over here to the content studio, you see that there's a variety of different ways in which I could create, you know, social media posts, I could create product descriptions and integrate with social media.
However, none of these really fit my needs. As someone who is selling services and not physical products, many of these things fell flat and it just seemed like Mailchimp was going in a direction which was very different than my own.
But probably the biggest thing, compounding all of these things that I've shared so far is Mailchimp's pricing because once you exceed that free limit, it is not cheap.
Now for someone like myself with a relatively meager email list of under 5,000 contacts, I was paying $53 U.S. per month. Now in contrast to the other tools that I use as a part of my business, whether that's a project management tool, whether that's other add-ons for my email accounts and other productivity suites, whether that's other things just to keep a website running, this is a very expensive cost.
In fact, it's one of my most expensive business costs that is recurring month after month. $53 for a relatively small list can add up over time.
Email Deliverability Data Research
So what did I do? I went searching for something that fit my needs that much better, was of course simple and easy to use and met all of my form building needs so I could be that much more creative and hopefully acquire and more easily acquire new subscribers such as, oh, I don't know, possibly yourself.
One of the places that I turned to was a website called EmailToolTester and I came across this report that they publish each and every month. What it's about is all about email deliverability.
That's a tough word to say, deliverability. A lot of syllables in that word.
But when it talks about deliverability, this is really key when it comes to email marketing because really it is these services such as Mailchimp who are actually delivering the mail to your subscribers. You may be using your email address, that's what the receiver sees,
But it's these services that need to get through spam filters and other such things. And what I discovered here is at the very top of their rankings here, they put a product called MailerLite at 97%, even ahead of such more established products such as ConvertKit, HubSpot, Constant Contact.
And yes, a little bit further down the list is something called Mailchimp. But it gets even more interesting here. In the second factor here, you could see that when it comes to the least versus most likely to be flagged as spam, MailerLite ended up in the top three.
Meaning that only around 2% of all of their messages may be flagged as spam whereas the ones that are most likely, well, Mailchimp is in that category with nearly 13%. That's a pretty significant difference.
So I started doing my research myself and what I found is I absolutely love MailerLite.
Favorite MailerLite Features
Now I wanna be very clear. This is not a sponsored video. I have never been sponsored by either of these products, but so far two months in and I am loving everything that I'm coming across here within MailerLite.
First off, even just by looking at the dashboard here and the menu up top, it is a much cleaner feel. It's so much easier for me to navigate around and get to where I want.
Here on the dashboard, I can see my last campaign and I can see some of the statistics of my most recent subscribers and subscriber growth. And no, this wasn't just a massive change or addition of subscribers.
This is when I transitioned over from Mailchimp here to MailerLite. But the great thing as I pointed out is something that was lacking in Mailchimp is its forms ability, both pop-ups and embedded forms.
So for example here, I've got four different embedded forms which are live for different purposes on different parts of my website. This one actually is particular to Facebook.
And so I can customize them for their different areas, for their different purposes and also for people who I want to add to perhaps a different list or a different group within that list.
Over here under pop-ups, I may only have one active at the moment. I can quickly see the data that I'm interested in, but if I want to add further pop-ups, maybe a different pop-up for a different page on my website, I can do so here as well.
And when it comes to price, price is about half, half of what I was paying over in Mailchimp. Now it's true, I'm only about 2.5 months into my adventure here with using MailerLite as my primary email tool, but so far I have absolutely no complaints.
Now if you'd like to try MailerLite for yourself and explore its features, be sure to click the link in the description below. You can sign up for free and stay free up to 1,000 subscribers.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. Be sure to give this video a like and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
