If You're Wondering Whether to Use Mailchimp, This is For You

Rod, I'm just trying to raise a point that their policies make sense for the service that they offer and that for certain businesses Mailchimp is an excellent option.

Once you get past their policy re: aff marketing what is about how they run their business that is bad? Personally I haven't had to deal with support, nor have my clients as far as I know - so I can't speak to how good they are in that respect. Their support reports a 89% happiness rating, if you're willing to believe their annual report.

I've dealt with quite a few newsletter services via clients and have personally used a couple as well (before signing up to Mailchimp). I have been anything but blown away by other vendors, in fact before I came across Mailchimp my typical experience with newsletter vendors was one of boiling frustration.

I don't believe Aweber is better even though you can do more aggressive marketing with their service. I stopped recommending them years ago. They were not consistently transparent with security breaches, it's harder to import lists, when I used them their API was limited (I'm sure that's better now though), you couldn't pause a subscription and hope to get your list back. I didn't particularly like how they run their business for those reasons. Feature by feature, I would take Mailchimp all day, these guys are innovating in this space (for an idea, just have a look at their blog archives).

The truth is that sending email campaigns for a wide variety of users is not a trivial thing, all vendors have complaints, such as deliverability issues. There's a reason IM gurus are constantly switching vendors. Massive lists + aggressive marketing will stress any provider.

Anecdotal quotes about deliverability are pretty hard to judge whatever service is being used, because readers won't know the quality of the list and the type of emails that were being set. If you have traffic viagra as a byline, it says you have both a good sense of humor but you probably send the kinds of emails that trigger the occasional spam complaint. Is that unfair to say?

It's hard to find out the facts about email deliverability in that respect. Switching vendors is a pain, it sucks having to find out by trial and error, but that's a problem regarding the industry as a whole from a customer perspective. I would go with the company with the most trust indicators and for me Mailchimp's transparent blog, responsible policies, constant improvements and just the mere fact that I can see the photos of actual employees works vs the typical faceless competitor (Smtp for example).

Mailchimp has scaled well - they report having 2+ million users - in part because of their restrictive policy. I think that's a big key to their success and it applies to most people's businesses as well (being selective about clients has done well in my business).

Given the Mailchimp bashing, I think it's worthwhile to give a bit of perspective, because I think most of the 'hate' comes down to a dislike or misunderstanding with their policies, not the product itself.