Mailchimp Rebrand & Plan Changes: Is it really that bad?

Mailchimp has been rolling out a rebrand for a while now. And I have been watching curiously as it is easily one of my favourite brands so far. And yesterday, when I logged into a smaller and less used Mailchimp account, I got a notification telling me I couldn’t create any more audiences. To create more, I have to upgrade my plan to a paid one. And I saw that from now onwards free plans only get 1 measly Audience allowance.

What is this “Audience” anyway, I thought. It is the same as ‘subscriber lists’ and allowing only one such list is so measly.

Moreover, I hadn’t gotten this notification on my higher usage account so I started searching for details. Will these new terms be imposed on older accounts too? Unfortunately I found that Mailchimp’s communications has been bungled so far. And many hardcore users have been very vocal about it and are considering shifting to other alternatives.

However, as I started looking out for Mailchimp alternatives, just in case.

A few recent incidents came to mind,

#1 Am I doing email segmentation right?

I wanted to create a new email chain for a few specific people on some existing lists, so I decided to create a new list of those subscribers. However, after fumbling around I realised that creating a ‘segment’ within the same ‘Audience’ is a much better alternative. It solved my problem and I didn’t need that extra list anymore. At that time, it got me thinking, that may be it was possible to maintain all my various segments within the same “Audience”. I can see clearly some advantages of the same,

– common analytical overview

– lower chance of making mistakes like what if a person unsubscribes but because I have two lists, I still end up sending him/her emails.

– it *might* be easier to work with one large Audience with multiple segments rather than multiple lists with overlapping people in it.

So, I went and checked their notes on segmentation, and they are saying something similar,

“When you keep all your contact data in one central audience and segment from there, your audience dashboard can give you a holistic understanding of who your audience is—and help you easily spot segments to send targeted messages to.

Mailchimp’s current move where it has now started charging for additional Audiences, is potentially a good move, because it pushes me to do my email marketing segmentation right. Instead of going for lazier options to create separate lists… instead I will now consciously choose to segment within the same Audience.

I raised a similar point with David whose post I linked earlier on and he replied to my comment with his views on this matter,

“Mailchimp is making top-down decisions (we want you to use just one list and then divide it up with segments and tags) for its own best interests. It doesn’t care that customers may have completely logical reasons for organizing things a different way. Or even just simple preferences. For example, I prefer to have my onboarders as separate lists for a whole bunch of reasons. Mailchimp doesn’t want me to do that. But shouldn’t I get to decide what works best for me?

I was happy to see there are no such restrictions at Mailerlite since I moved there. I can have all my onboarders as separate groups. It will even automatically move them into my main lists/groups when they graduate from onboarding – something Mailchimp forced me to do manually as yet another disincentive to organizing my account that way (the tendency of Mailchimp to penalize customers with busywork if they do things a different way was really tiresome). And separating things like this doens’t appear to affect their ability to give me the analytical picture I need – just FYI.” (refer to the blog)

#2 Multi-step marketing automation is generally NOT free

A friend of mine was looking out to create an onboarding flow for his startup. And he planned on using Mailchimp. He had assumed that he would have to opt for a paid plan. I told him that multi-sequence automations were all free in Mailchimp. As long as you stayed within the 2000 subscribers and 12000 emails/month limit.

He was stunned to find out that it was all free. He had assumed it was a paid feature!

I had taken this free feature for granted because, well, Mailchimp gave it for free!

So, after this news about their changing models and terms came around. And I started looking out for alternatives, I realised that most other tools DON’T give this feature for free. Not just that, even their subscriber numbers and monthly email limits in paid plans seem to be a lot lower than what Mailchimp is currently offering.

Here’s a Reddit thread with a few suggestions for marketing automation free alternatives but most people have kept commenting that Mailchimp is free. No other suggestions are comparable.

#3 Supporting marketing features could be useful

And if I really think about it I am happy if Mailchimp is increasing its feature base. As long as it still understands that a robust email program has to be at the core of things. Because a large number of its users are here for the email. And not for anything else. And for a lot of them landing pages, retargeting ads and other stuff is done very well by their tech and marketing teams.

I do see another bunch of users who can use these additional services Mailchimp offers. Like small businesses and startups without a robust growth engine to create their own landing pages, remarketing campaigns and such on their site. Moreover, for this group of people it does make a lot of sense to use an email nurturing program as their key marketing channel.

In Summary,

I hope Mailchimp’s fairly major shift is smoother with better communications going forward. And I am not entirely sure if they will not majorly bungle something up. Or stop being a Email-centric platform at some point of time.

But for now there are some potentially good moves they are making.

Let’s see how it goes.

And yea, even I can’t figure out why they should be charging for Unsubscribed contacts. They are usually there on the list for record-sake. And we look at unsubscribe analytics … I don’t see why they should be charging!

What do you think about the Mailchimp rebrand and plan change? Are you getting affected by it?

post pic source: Phil Goodwin on Unsplash

Disclaimer: I have used an affiliate link of Mailchimp in this article. But that’s all. All views my own.