MailChimp is an email service provider that is intuitive and low-cost. I have tried out MailChimp for the past few months and find it to be a solid value. I was skeptical at first, since they do not offer live support, but the live chat really has produced a live person every time I used it, typically within a few minutes and the support was great. Their site also has a very good blog and user community, as well as a sense of humor. This makes using them fun and often brings a smile to my face during my day. During our RFP process, MailChimp beat the pricing against the other major Tier 1 providers we spoke with.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, I was able to upload a list, send out an email – with no training at all – in under 30 minutes start to finish; from account creation to email deployment. The only snag I ran into was later, while managing multiple brands with multiple lists I found going across lists to be difficult. The other thing I noted was that MailChimp is not for people that are looking for a full service ESP. They do not do creative, hold strategy meetings, or other similar stuff. They are definitively do it yourself – which for an experienced email marketer that just wants to write their code and send the email they’re perfect.

MailChimp does have a lot of cool integration tools with many other low cost or free services such as Google Analytics, Word Press or Twitter. They also integrate with paid solutions such as Sales Force. They support APIs, decent reporting, a very easy to use interface and even an A/B Split Test tool for subject line testing using either opens or clicks as the variable. They offer an impressive array of merge tags within their system to insert content dynamically, with recent enhancements to include social media and video inserts. One example of theses tags is the video merge tag which allows you to post to popular video sites like YouTube and have the video tied to your email. First get the video id from your post posted video for the tag. Then MailChimp grabs an image of the first video frame then places that image from the video with a border that looks like a video player in the email. The final image links that back to a hosted copy where the video can play in a browser. The merge tags allow you to make dynamic emails with very little coding knowledge – they’re very slick.

They do offer templates, and such, but in all honesty I tried them extensively enough to pass judgment on them, I tend to use my own templates that don’t “help” me. They are ideal for DIY marketers, bloggers and other individual or small companies that need a solid tool, that’s dependable which can be obtained and used with a low budget. Plus their site and the email tool interface shows a good use of humor in marketing as an engagement tool, which makes sending emails with MailChimp fun.

You can learn more about MailChimp at http://www.mailchimp.com/