Mailchimp is an email service provider - which means that it enables you to send emails to your email marketing list. "Why not just use Outlook to send emails?" is a common question.
Email service providers have the advantage over Outlook by:
- Providing you with vital statistics on who opened your emails and what they clicked on.
- Automatically handling unsubscribe notifications from your email list.
- Working with major ISP's to ensure that your emails get delivered.
- Functionality to enable A/B split testing of your emails. Two versions are sent to a small sample, the rest of your list gets the most successful version.
- Providing forms for your website to automatically growing your email list of potential customers.
- You don't want your main business IP address to be marked as a spam sender.
- Ensure your emails and list is compliant with Spam legislation.
Email service providers automate the process of sending emails to your clients and prospects efficently and for only a nomimal fee. In addition, they will guide you through the process and help you to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing.
Mailchimp also integrates with Wordpress by providing a opt-in form plugin and also enabling you to send an automated email campaign based on your RSS feed.
One last thing to mention about email marketing, Mailchimp also enables you to send autoresponder emails. Lets say you write an ebook or whitepaper and have it for download on your site. Visitors can have the ebook in return for their email address. You can set up a autoresponder that collects their email address, confirms it as their correct address, provides a link where they can download the ebook and follow it up the next week with the next stage of your marketing pipeline.
Mailchimp has a free account for up to 2,000 users and 12,000 emails per month, which is ideal for understanding the process of building up your email list, sending emails. It takes some time and testing to generally understand what type of emails work best for your market - informal, formal, images, no images, sales or information.
