MailChimp’s 2019 Updates – Are They Making Things Easier?

Are mailchimp's updates making life easier?

MailChimp are often cited as being one of the biggest email marketing services in the world. Their CEO has stated that in 2019 they’re likely to have 11 million active customers, with a total audience of four billion. Its revenue is also likely to be above $700 million.

To help with its recent growth, MailChimp has added in lots of updates over the past few months. These are designed to help businesses, especially small businesses, to manage their marketing all in one place. However, does this strategy make marketing easier? Here is our verdict of whether MailChimp’s 2019 updates are great for business or not.

Additional Services?

MailChimp is looking to expand horizontally. This means it is adding new marketing services to its portfolio to help grow the business. This includes lead management, domain purchasing, website building, ad retargeting on social media channels and social media management. There is also business intelligence on offer now that helps users to decide when to market to specific audiences.

These services are being helped by the data it collects from campaigns that have been delivered over the past few years as MailChimp helped small businesses to run email marketing campaigns. This is why their offer seems to be so valuable.

However, these additional services come at a cost. While there will be a free plan, the other plans are likely to increase in price with the top tiered pricing level increasing by more than $100 a month.

Do These Help Small Businesses To Win?

The question, of course, is not whether there are new services, but whether these new services help small businesses to manage their marketing campaigns. There are some aspects that suggest that using one dashboard enables better control of your marketing.

However, there are massive issues with the deployment of how some of MailChimp’s current systems operate. The popup forms, for instance, aren’t the best on the market. They can sometimes look amateurish when compared to popup forms that can be delivered by other WordPress plugins or other software. This could be partly because of the skill of the builder (i.e. user), but then will the user be able to use MailChimps web builder any better?

Another question is whether the website builder is going to be helpful to small businesses. Small businesses make up about 48% of the US economy, but they are often on tight purse strings. A builder like MailChimps might be tempting, just like Wix’s or GoDaddy’s. But the price for these can be expensive.

MailChimp’s cost for their website builder is unknown at the time of writing, but for GoDaddy and Wix, an ecommerce store is approximately $25 per month. Therefore, it is likely that MailChimp will only offer this on the $14.99 plan at least, or it could be an extra cost like their landing pages. Small businesses might find the costs are a lot less elsewhere, like with a WordPress website.

In addition, to get some of these features, you might need to pay for higher levels without using the total email subscriber count. For instance, you could have less than 2000 subscribers, which would entitle you to a free account, but have to pay $299 a month to access all the additional marketing services.

There are other services, like Hootsuite, SocialOomph, etc. that can offer social media marketing a lot more affordably.

Conclusion: Do The Updates Make It Easier For Small Businesses?

While the updates are interesting, the cost might not be affordable for small businesses. Some other bloggers are also stating that MailChimp should be dropped now. Plus, their strategy offers some risk. If MailChimp were to go offline for any reason, small businesses might find that they don’t have access to any of their marketing data, functionality that can really harm their prospects of being successful.

What do you think of the MailChimp updates? Do you think it is better to have marketing in more than one service?

Let us know in the comments.


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