I like to pass on to you my experience with everything related to Internet Marketing. An email service is crucial so that you can tell subscribers about your new blog posts and offers.
For my main site (www.ellenfinkelstein.com), I’ve been using MadMimi for a couple of years. (Full disclosure: That’s an affiliate link.) My list is just over 16,000 subscribers and MadMimi has handled my mailings beautifully. Their customer support is stellar. Moreover, MadMimi has very reasonable prices. In fact, it’s free for up to 2500 subscribers. But even for 15,000+ people, I’m paying well under $100 per month.
Update: My list is now over 22,000 people and still under $100 per month.
But when I started teaching my Internet Marketing. I decided to try MailChimp, because it has a free plan for up to 2000 subscribers. That’s very tempting. (But for 16,000 subscribers, it costs almost twice as much as MadMimi.)
And MailChimp offers A/B testing– a way to send one email to one-half of your group and a different email to the other half. A/B testing is an important feature because it allows you to test what text gets the best results in terms of people opening your emails and clicking on your links.
MailChimp worked fine for the most part. One frustration was the way it handles what I call segments — groups within a list, You can’t send out an email to more than one list, although you can send one out to a group within a list. Yet I found managing them difficult.
But I just ran into a snag — an important feature that MailChimp couldn’t help me with unless I was a code expert or paid someone. I wanted a second webform for my list. That’s because I created a second report and I wanted people who signed up for that report to go to a separate group.
MailChimp Support led me to a blog post on the topic, but it was too complicated for me. It involved some complex coding. I’ve coded and customized several HTML forms, but my HTML knowledge is not advanced. So I moved my list over to MadMimi.
In MadMimi, you can create as many webforms as you want. This means that I can create several free reports and sign people up to different lists. MadMimi lets you segment your subscribers into separate lists and when you want to send out an email, you just choose which lists you want to send it to. I routinely send emails to 8 or 10 of my lists at a time. Or I can send a focused email out to one list.
I’m just hoping that MadMimi starts to offer A/B testing, because I’d really like to play around with it. I can do it manually (by exporting a list, opening it in Excel, and re-importing each half to a new list), but that’s too much work for me. I want my Internet Marketing to be easy!
I now have new web forms on my website. If you are subscribed to my newsletter, you probably won’t notice much of a difference, but managing the process will be easier on my end.
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8 replies to "Why I changed my email service from MailChimp to MadMimi"
I use Mad Mimi also because of the lower cost for small start-up lists
Victor,
I’m glad to hear that someone else found MadMimi! It isn’t one of the most well-known email services.
Hi Ellen, thanks for the info.
How easy was it to transfer your list between Mailchimp & Madmini.
Having free acc. for up to 2,000 subscribers might save many months of fees, & then change to Madmini once we got over 2,000.
Could you cut & paste or did you have to enter each person’s contact details manually?
I’m not really clear, does Mailchimp lets one have several lists?
” but You can’t send out an email to more than one list, although you can send one out to a group within a list.”
Can one send out different emails to different lists?
Thanks for any help.
Jenny.
Jenny,
It was very easy to transfer my list. I just exported to CSV format in MailChimp and imported the same file in MadMimi. Most email services let you do this, but some require double opt-in even when transferring from another email list, or when you get people who sign up at a live event. Aweber is one of those and for that reason, I don’t recommend it.
Mailchipm lets you have several lists and you can send out different emails to those lists. What you can’t do easily is send out the same email to multiple lists. Instead, they let you segment a list (you have groups within the list), but getting people into the right segment is very difficult. In fact, creating a webform that sends people to a group within a list involves some coding that I wasn’t able to understand.
In MadMimi, I just create a new list whenever I want. For example, let’s say I do a webinar and offer a handout for people who want to sign up for my newsletter. I can easily create a new list for them and then a web form that sends people to that list. Then, I just check off that list along with the others when I send out my newsletter. But I still have the flexibility of sending out an email to just that group.
i searched in internet about all email marketing providers, madmimi is offering best price..so i am going for that
I found the same thing in my research. I’ve been using them for about 2 years now. I think you’ll be happy with MadMimi. Their support is superb. The only feature that I would like that they don’t have is A/B testing.
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