MailChimp or MailChump? You Decide.

This week in my public relations and new media class at Loyola University Chicago, we learned how to create targeted emails using the free services provided by MailChimp. Within a few hours, I quickly learned that free isn’t always better.

MailChimp claims that it can easily help you “build and manage your list, design html email campaigns, send emails with confidence and track and analyze email marketing.” If only the claims were true.

My first campaign started out great. I created a list for my first campaign in less than fifteen minutes. The template was easy to understand and populate and allowed me to copy and paste contacts from an Excel spreadsheet into the list instead of entering each contact separately. However, designing my html email campaign was not as pleasant.

I soon discovered that MailChimp was just as mischievous as a real chimp and reformatted my content repeatedly. In what should have taken me less than an hour to do, I spent at least four hours creating, reformatting, deleting and recreating the same campaign. Not cool. I eventually wound up creating the email in Word and copying and pasting it into MailChimp’s template. I still had to reformat the email but not as drastically as before when I created the entire email in MailChimp’s template. Thank goodness the third step was a little easier.

Even though designing my html email campaign left me a little uneasy about sending my campaign, the test message feature reassured me that the final product was up to my standards. I was able to send a test message to an email address of my choice and revise my campaign as necessary. Thank goodness for this feature. Without it, I may not have continued using MailChimp’s services to create my campaign.

The fourth and final step of this campaign allowed me to include tracking, authentication and social share dynamics in my campaign. Not only was my email sent to my list as intended, but it included additional features that allowed the email recipients to share the message with others and the email sender to track the success of the campaign.

Even though three of the four steps involved in creating a targeted email with MailChimp were easy, I cannot recommend MailChimp to other users. The time wasted and the frustration experienced while using this service was enough to dissuade me from trying MailChimp’s services again and recommending it to other users.

Until next time,

dp

Stayed tuned for more reports on my student adventures in public relations and new media.