Mailchimp Transactional Email Reviews

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.

Overall: We can send email campaigns in real time or scheduled and we can divide these campaigns based on criterias. It lets us measure how interested people are based on the reports of previous campaigns.

Pros: I've used a lot of similar services, but Mailchimp is the best when it comes to interface and user-friendliness. There is a free plan up to 2000 subscribers if you wanna try it. You can do some A/B before actually sending emails. You get statistical reports about how many of your emails have been opened.

Cons: It does not have an integrated CRM system, nor is it prepared to help you channel your sales. You can use other programs for it, but that means you are using more programs and paying more.

Reasons for Choosing Mailchimp Transactional Email: Mailtrack. I used to use Mailtrack but unlike Mailchimp it only works as a mail tracker.

Pros: Reporting & interface - I've worked with other tools, and Mailchimp is way better (easy to understand, use to set up). I like the possibility of integrations

Cons: I'd like more flexibility with creating segments

Alternatives Considered: SendGrid, HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot Marketing Hub

Switched From: HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot Marketing Hub and SendGrid

Overall: We use MailChimp for our monthly newsletter (moved to MailChimp from a yearly printed letter) and occasional updates to our full support base. It has allowed us to get information out in a brand-conscious, nicely formatted fashion. We only use it for mass emails, it does not solve acknowledgement processing other one-constituent email transactions.

Pros: Simple yet fairly powerful editing tools for email building (drag and drop blocks) but still have the ability to tweak some HTML if needed (Some occasional glitches when adding images to text blocks.) Mostly consistent look across email clients (gmail can cause issues). Decent analytical information on opens, click rate, and other activity. AB testing support (although we have not used it.) Integration with CRM system (currently using NEON), although unsubscribes and bounces are not returned to CRM. Freemium plan was well worth it! We've been paid customers for several years now and find the price a little high as we gain users (small nonprofit), but still within budget. Ability to schedule emails helps (for those of us who work late at night but don't want to send a blast at midnight!)

Cons: Need more free templates or better ability to make changes to templates. Some limitations on layout design options. Emails go to "Promotions" folder, particularly for gmail users (although hard to avoid), so cannot guarantee receipt. Recent changes to interface have taken lots of time to get used to and do not seem to be an improvement.

Reasons for Choosing Mailchimp Transactional Email: We didn't really investigate Constant Contact or other competitors, as we were already familiar with MailChimp from other organizations. We did originally send email blast from our CRM (NEON) but the editing capabilities were no-where near on par with MailChimp. We were willing to maintain two systems to have more control over the layout and content of the emails.

Overall: We were experiencing spikes in bounce and spam rates with AWS's SES. We were able to switch to Mandrill in a single day and immediately saw dramatic improvement. As necessary, we later built out support for bulk sends and black list checking and scrubbing. All in all it was an easy process and a good product.

Pros: Mandrill provides a simple and well documented API and has libraries and integrations available for many major web frameworks and languages. Making use of it for simple email sends is a fast and easy process, and it provides additional functionality for black lists, white lists, bulk sends, static IPs, etc. Their dashboard makes it extremely simple to see all the emails sent to a given address along with full content and reasons why sends failed or were delayed, which is a great for debugging and testing. They also provide analytics and send, receive, open, click, and bounce rates.

Cons: The service used to be much cheaper, but costs went up sharply when it was reabsorbed back into Mailchimp. Still an excellent service, but harder to recommend without reservation.

Pros: A transactional email server is setup within minutes and available for you to send out content to your distribution list. The application provides - Graphs to show how many emails you're sending each day - What countries your sending the emails to - Open rates - Mail clients used (useful to optimise content) - Spam rates/unsubscribe rates - Great delivery rates Very cost effective.

Cons: A couple of years ago, Mandrill made it a requirement for you to have a Mailchimp subscription in order to use Mandrill. It would have been better in my opinion to keep the two applications independent, just like Sendgrid. Whilst it doesn't make the cost materially more expensive, it does mean that you have to log into Mandrill via Mailchimp which is annoying.

Overall: It allows us to maintain perfect email delivery for all our companies' transactional emails and easily troubleshoot instances where emails were not delivered.

Pros: This application is an addon of MailChimp and is best suited for transactional emails (automated emails, think 'forgot my password' type emails). It allows you to easily manage your sending domains , although you have to verify these before you can send emails. The best feature by far is the ability to view all emails that were sent or failed to arrive, including the contents of the emails and the reason it bounced. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot whenever we get a support ticket regarding an email that did not arrive. During our 6 months of using this feature, there has been zero downtime.

Cons: It is more expensive than some competitors, but its pricing model is very fair and easy to interpret. It does require you to have at least a monthly subscription with Mailchimp, and if you are not using this it is more expensive.

Pros: Mandrill is a powerful application that has proven useful for transactional email. They offer an API, decent reporting and storage of track/click data for 30 days.

Cons: As part of Mailchimp they now require both a Mailchimp and Mandrill subscription. I have no problem paying for Mandrill but I'm not a fan of this billing requirement as I don't need Mailchimp. Secondly, in the 2-3 years that I have been using Mandrill I have not seen a single feature release. I find this unusual. True, it works great as-is, but there are definitely areas that can be improved or features that can be added.

Overall: We're using Mandrill for all our transactional email needs, as and endpoint in our API concentrator. It's proven to be very robust and reliable over the years.

Pros: Mandrill (now interated inside Mailchimp) has been a solid and reliable transactional email provider, with great delivery rates, very slow spam scores and ultra-fast reception speed. It provides useful and flexible reports and great dashboards too.

Cons: In order to keep it's spam reputation high it takes some effort to set up a new email domain in Mandrill. You have to prove you own the DNS and configure a SPF/DKIM record.

Overall: We've been using Mandrill as our email relay of choice for all our applications and APIs, and it has been working great in every aspect.

Pros: Very fast delivery with exceptional delivery rates; Does a great job keeping reputation high; Very nice dashboards and reporting; Ability to segregate into sub-accounts; Very easy to integrate with MTA's and API clients; Great documentation;

Cons: Domain validation could be made simpler; Roles and permissions should be more flexible; Once Mandrill got integrated with Mailchimp the pricing model became less attractive;

Overall: Mentioned earlier - Mandrill is great to get a high level of reaction via emails. The developers set up customized scripts to send out relevant content to our customers and partners so they are always in the loop.

Pros: Transactional Emails is really necessary in today's world, we get a much better open rate and much better interaction when we use this system rather than a simple mass email message. Totally recommend this set up, and it has the the facilities to set up everything pretty easily. The API documentation is robust, and their service uptime is great, it does what is advertised.

Cons: The fact that I need to have a mailchimp paid account and to get into Mandrill through Mailchimp is a little weird, but it's minor in the grand scheme of things. I don't use Mailchimp, our marketing department uses an alternative, but our developers use Mandrill.

Overall: We have emails going out regularly and flawlessly, it updates constantly and adds new features which help you in your email marketing needs.

Pros: It can handle automatic workflows, integration with eCommerce, the analytics, helps you with templates and email design, everything.

Cons: It kind of hides you the users that are unsubscribed and are low value to you... While still charging you for them, to me it seems rather fishy tactic.

Overall: Overall a good experience. Easy to use and easy to set up. Easy to add on users.

Pros: Easy to import contacts. Easy to schedule emails to send out. Can customize emails easily and add buttons, photos, videos, very seamlessly. Easy to see stats after sending out emails and heat map of where people clicked.

Cons: Was unable to add sign up form directly from mailchimp onto my website. Had to use hubspot as a work around to get new email sign ups. Initially challenging to find everything but once you are familiar its very easy to navigate, copy emails, edit, and send out quickly.

Reasons for Choosing Mailchimp Transactional Email: Features and ease of use.

Overall: This is a straightforward, plug and play alternative that opens up the option to connect with a more marketing/campaign oriented Mailchimp service. I like that it's exactly what you'd expect as a developer when looking for transactional email services.

Pros: It's very powerful and as simple to use as its alternatives. Integrations make it very powerful and the pricing is fair. This is a no brainer alternative or first choice when looking for transactional email service.

Cons: There's not many improvement opportunities to talk about in transactional email. When it works it works, and Mandrill works as expected.

Pros: The pricing is good. We have been using it for years and the only reason we are keeping it is because we don't the pain of switching over to another vendor.

Cons: The reporting features are very weak and we don't like that we have to access MailChimp to get over into the Mandrill dashboard.