Their 'reverse freemium' approach is really interesting -- rather than de-emphasising the free and focusing on the [pre]mium side of their biz, they've been slowly expanding their free options and growing rapidly -- in terms of profit -- because of it.
I think the major difference here is that it's easy to have to migrate from free to paid. If your site/newsletter starts doing well, you hit a point where you HAVE to start paying them.
Yeah, and you're usually glad to as well :-) I have 8500 subscribers on my account so far and it's $75/mo well spent.
(But boy, do they ratchet the tiers up fast. Once I tip over 10k subscribers, it leaps up to $150/mo! A few more intermediate tiers please, MailChimp.. otherwise my 10,000th subscriber will cost me $75/mo alone ;-))
In the US at least, you can -- and should -- set up a bank account with a debit card. Sometimes it requires a parent to cosign, but it is quite worth it.
I've actually found Wufoo + Gmail to be the simplest way to handle e-mails. Use a Wufoo form to collect user info, then export the data to csv and import the file into a Gmail group. I haven't done anything terribly advanced (I just notify a list when a new article is posted) -- but it works for me.
I'm the developer of Direct Mail, if you have any questions. We have several customers using Direct Mail with SendGrid and they seem to be very happy with the setup.
I think most feature a "free trial" at least. I'll see about adding more info to pricing, but was more concerned with coming up with maintaining a list I could share with clients.
Well said! I'm pretty excited to use these guys again. My last job used them and I instituted the template and stuff but it'll be nice to set everything up from start to finish. Its a great product.
I've often wondered why MailChimp doesn't offer more support for transactional mails. I know there is some stuff in the API but it seems bolted on (am I wrong?). I would really like to use the standard templating for email campaigns that MailChimp has, and use it for transactional mails. An API call to MailChimp with some some arguments would then send a template, the variables (dynamically) filled in, to the user.
Email campaigns are so easy in MailChimp and I'd like to maintain the look of those mails in my transactional mails. Nonetheless, you guys provide a great service!
0.1% actually. I kid you not. (This causes me a minor issue once a year. One of my autoresponders caught a flag in January for having 6 / 4000 = 0.15% spam complaints. They were quite clear in their mail: I'm on probation.)
Have I mentioned I love MailChimp? They take deliverability seriously.
(Also, they do have actual human beings who you can talk to if you get flagged unnecessarily. For example, within 24 hours of opening my account and funding it, it was closed because I used the word "bingo" in a draft email. Their filter smacked me down for promoting gambling. I mailed them and the CS department got back with "Thanks for your explanation of what your business actually does. OK, we reinstated you. Be careful.")
I ran into an issue with Constant Contact that basically banned one of my mailing segments of around 500 emails. The rest of the list was okay to send to, just one segment was blocked. The issue was a false positive spam test by Constant Contact and they refused to unlock that segment. Even had they unblocked it, the CS experience was still bad enough to raise a warning flag.
I've since moved on to MailChimp and have been much happier with it than I was CC.
I'm glad to see them improving on an already highly functional free-tier.
They HATE HATE HATE spam. I got flagged one time because I used the word craigslist in a blog post I sent out automatically through an RSS to Email feed. Luckily customer service threw a banana at the spam team and they got me back up and running.
Apparently. Immediately got flagged when it went out. It was a blog post about how I bought & fixed up a bike for $150. I mentioned I got it off of craigslist and it set their filters off.
As someone who doesn't know much about MailChimp, the original question seems valid. A little more detailed answer (like the one by qeorge) would have helped me understand this better.
As you work at MailChimp, it would have helped if you would have given that detail.
Ben from MailChimp here. We invested a lot in abuse prevention, well before introducing any freemium plans. The problem ESPs like us face isn't so much the "evil" spam, but the "fuzzy" spam (from clueless marketers).
Probably shoulda brought that up in my blog post (it's usually the first question techies ask), but it's something our customers are pretty familiar with, so I left it out.
Thanks for your answer. I imagined so. But I could also think of some legitimate heavy-duty users who could threaten your profitability. Is there any fine print for those cases?
I don't think so. The cost of running something like Mailchimp isn't in having a couple of servers and some bandwidth, I imagine; the cost is in dealing with spammers, overzealous spam-fighters and people who'd rather hit "report as spam" than unsubscribe. Number of subscribers is not a bad metric.
ETA: Also see bjonathan's comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170619: Amazon, which probably offers something closer to "server and bandwidth", is much cheaper.
No fine-print. Our high volume plans for large email lists are not unlimited, but smaller lists are completely free to send as much as they want. In practice, you'll hit our anti-spam limits long before you hurt our profitability if you try to send lots of email to a smaller list.
Does the bulk import send everyone a resubscribe message? I've got a very small list (sub 100 people) of customers and prospects that I meet with IRL, and I don't want to annoy them by asking them to subscribe again to a list they've already subscribed to.
No, bulk importing does not send a resubscribe message. MailChimp assumes that if you have access to the address list, then you have permission to send.
Their 'reverse freemium' approach is really interesting -- rather than de-emphasising the free and focusing on the [pre]mium side of their biz, they've been slowly expanding their free options and growing rapidly -- in terms of profit -- because of it.