Mailchimp Transactional Email

Overall: I manage several accounts for clients of my agency. Mailchimp is mainly used to send periodic newsletters.

Pros: Animated gifs and the tone of voice of the interface: they may seem silly things, but when you're stressing because you have to push a button and send thousands of emails to your contacts, the picture of the chimpanze clicking the button for you helps to relax. The platform has all basic features needed to manage small-medium size databases. Marketing automation features let you manage transactional deliveries and automate many tasks and communications (this is especially useful when you have an e-commerce). Web hooks and especially the direct integration with Facebook lead forms are of course a big plus.

Cons: It is a basi tool, suitable to manage small-medium size databases. Bulk operations on the database and advanced data manipulation tools are mostly missing. I like the graphical UI but you need some time and training before you really feel comfortable with it (especially, knowing where to look for the info you need)

Reasons for Choosing Mailchimp Transactional Email: Similar pricing, same features, MailChimp grants a native integration with Facebook lead forms and lets you send transactional emails more easily

Pros: I run a busy social network. Around 6,000 users total, and 300-400 online at any given time. Due to this, I needed a transactional email service that had great deliver-ability for invitations, verifications, password changes, etc. Mandrill was recommended to me, and we were completely happy with the service. Unfortunately, when they bundled Mandrill into Mailchimp, we couldn't afford it anymore.

Cons: Unfortunately, bundling services did no favors. What previously was affordable for us no longer was. While the service is great, the way the change was implemented was sudden, leaving companies little time or recourse to find other options quickly. That solidified my decision to leave- most companies would grandfather in existing members, offer a lower rate, something. They simply provided us with addresses for other services, losing customers in the process.

Overall: When we have had to make business announcement, such as price increases, this software made it easy to get that message out to all our customers.

Pros: Once everything is set up the ability to send out business announcements to all our current customers.

Cons: The ability to use custom templates. Also the cost when you have more than 5000 customers to contact.

Reasons for Choosing Mailchimp Transactional Email: Very easy to get up and running and send business announcements.

Reasons for Switching to Mailchimp Transactional Email: The NetSuite CRM was very difficult to use to send out emails. Not intuitive at all but MailChimp was very intuitive.