Mailchimp

Avantages

The ease of use is off the charts. Aside from that, their pre-fab templates help you get you to market quickly, amazing analytics, integrations and flexibility, and incredible resources to help you learn and become an ESP pro. They make it easy to grow your audience with pop-up forms that can be integrated on your website, or separately, and make it a good point to stick to industry regulations. They're the most robust ESP on the market, and you shouldn't use anything else. Plus, their branding is just fun, and every now and then, they'll do something special for their customers (i.e. free socks and swag).

Inconvénients

There's nothing I dislike about Mailchimp. So long as they continue to grow the integrations and capacity to link with outside vendors and applications, they'll continue to rule the market.

Avantages

What I love most about MailChimp is the amount of services you get for absolutely NO cost. There are endless possibilities of things you can do with this application, and the user interface beats all the others. It is very easy to maneuver and understand for even the most beginner email marketer. The reporting features are phenomenal and with them you are able to provide designer looking reports to clients without even touching them. As a graphic designer, the template creator is definitely the best one I've seen as fair as email marketing applications go, plus they have a variety of pre-designed templates to use that are again, COMPLETELY FREE. I could go on and on about everything I love about MailChimp.

Inconvénients

The one con I have with MailChimp is that it's been hard for me to get used to their recently updated interface, I feel like the terminology and layout makes a little bit less sense than the old interface, but I could also chalk that up to just being comfortable with what I'm used to. Also (and this is hardly a con) when you have a free version of the application, it does require your emails to be sent out with the MailChimp logo at the very bottom of the email. I say this is hardly a con because with everything they are giving you for free it makes sense that they want to try to advertise.

Avantages

I like the ease and the use of the drag & drop functionality of the elements you can add to any campaign. I also like the formatting options and features to customize each of your messages to your own look and style. Also, being able to embed links, photos, etc. directly into the campaign is of vital importance for our communications.

Managing the audience lists is also very user friendly. Tagging different audience members in group is also critical to our use of this communications tool.

Inconvénients

I wish that the uploaded files were easier to manage in that I would like to delete older versions of uploaded files that I no longer need. However, they are "layered" in the Content Manager section and I am not able to un-layer them to delete versions I do not need.

I would also like to see the functionality of embedding a simply polling tool, to send and collect feedback from your constituents to constantly better your business.

Avantages

Easy to use and intuitive for the average user
Integrates well with our pre-existing ecommerce solution
Developments over the last few years (have been using it since 2010-ish at a previous job) are very well thought through and customer centric

Inconvénients

WYSIWYG... at times. As long as what you want to do (visually) is close to its idea of what things should look like, it's great - if you need something further from the visuals/format it expects, results might vary.
Initial integration with PrestaShop was a little wonky - still not sure whether it was a PrestaShop or a Mailchimp issue, will update the review once we have it fully figured out

Avantages

What I liked most about Mailchimp was it's ease of use (for our applications) and the company's customer service. It was very easy to use Mailchimp in conjunction with our CRM, HubSpot to help our email marketing efforts. We would sort, export, and download targeted lists of customers from HubSpot and upload those lists to Mailchimp. This process was incredibly easy and allowed us to be more efficient and timely with our email marketing campaigns. Additionally, any time we had any questions or issues about Mailchimp, their customer service and sales teams were always incredibly helpful and quick to respond.

Inconvénients

What I liked least about this software was the pricing plan restrictions. My software company had a very, very large customer and prospect base. We targeted many different markets with a large number of people within each organization. Our software could be used by entire companies, so reaching out to many different decision makers or users was an effective marketing strategy. However, the pricing plans restricted us to a certain number of sends and contacts per month. We often found ourselves having to meet to discuss where we were going to make cuts to our email marketing efforts, which took away time from being productive. We essentially had to ration our sends on a monthly basis, because we did not see the value in the price increase for more sends. Although it would have helped our company operationally, it would have been too expensive. I feel they need to increase the number of contacts and sends for each pricing plan.