I generally don’t post about Community Management, but someone specifically asked about newsletter software so I decided to write this one.
When I first started at Metaplace, I was tasked with finding a good mailing list software to use to handle our outward newsletters and communication. This was a new venture for me, and I did quite a bit of research and testing in various products to find the right one. The first we went with was PHPList, an open source product that you install on your own servers. It worked fine until our numbers grew to over 5,000 emails per newsletter, after which is promptly malfunctioned on several occasions. Malfunctioning email communication is bad news and can be detrimental to your business. This was a “no go” for us. I then researched a host of enterprise solutions, generally finding that most products either required lengthy installs to get them up and servicing on our servers or were incredibly expensive and overcharged us for what we need. That’s when I started to research web-based products and landed on MailChimp.
MailChimp is totally slick. It’s by far one of my favorite product that I use on a day to day basis. The best way to write this post is through an advantageous feature list.
- They host everything – And they do it well. Your list management and all your contacts are stored at MailChimp, no worries about liability. This is a HUGE one for companies because it takes away the maintenance of dealing with list management.
- Flexible payment plans – For my company, it wasn’t the best idea to pay per email sent because we have large lists and send multiple times per month. It made more sense to pay monthly based on our list size – meaning that we could send out as many email communications per month without increasing our expenses. They also have pay-as-you-go plans.
- Lightning fast customer service – We’ve had very few problems, but when we did – the team was very accessible through standard support and Twitter.
- Reporting – The reporting and ease of tracking important numbers like Click Through Ratio, opens, bounces, demographics, etc. have been incredibly useful. Each email sent is part of a campaign, and you can make A/B tests out of these campaigns and track each one separately from the rest.
- WYSIWYG editing and templates – Whether you have an HTML expert to design your themes or you want to use a premade theme, they have good options. I personally enjoyed using their WYSIWYG editor to modify their standard themes into something that is branded for our company.
- They are pros – They took out a lot of need for learning important mail standards. They have a previewer that lets you see how your email will look in a ton of different email clients, and they monitor things for you such as your complaint ratios. They also have great deliverability (97%) compared to other web mailer sites.
- Things are integrated and JUST WORK – They have support for Google Analytics integration, RSS support, Highrise, Salesforce, and other CMS integration, and social network integration. It’s faaaaantastic.
- Robust API – You can integrate your user database with MailChimp with their awesome API that lets you do some really advanced stuff that I don’t even understand.
Seriously there is no point in me going through all their features, they have a full impressive feature list here. We really couldn’t be happier with these guys (actually..if they let us do transactional emails with more support that would be swell). But for their really cheap price (including a free option) you can’t really go wrong.
My favorite part about MailChimp is the Chimp himself. When you log in, he tells you different quotes each time. I even got one of my submitted quotes chosen – “I kissed a chimp and I liked it.” And Mozilla uses them, so you know they don’t suck. 
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
