Welcome to Mailchimp
Marketing doesn’t need to be overwhelming. This guide will introduce you to all the ways that Mailchimp can help you communicate with—and grow—your audience. We’ll provide tips for managing your list, getting your first campaign off the ground, reviewing your reports, and more. Let’s get started.
Choose the right pricing plan
Mailchimp offers 4 different pricing plans—Free, Essentials, Standard, and Premium—that are designed to help businesses of any size and budget. Billing is based on usage and paid plans give you access to additional features, so consider the size of your audience, your sending frequency, and which tools matter the most to you when selecting your plan type.
Free: Start with all of Mailchimp’s basic marketing tools. Our Free plan allows you to send up to 10,000 emails per month and have up to 2,000 total contacts in your audience. Free account holders have access to basic features like email, segmentation, landing pages, Facebook and Instagram ads, one-step automations, and more. When you use Mailchimp for customer relationship management, you also get marketing analytics reports that help you put your data to work.
Essentials: Get access to everything you know and love about Mailchimp, plus the benefits of more templates, A/B testing, and 24/7 world-class support. Starting at $9.99, you have more ways to experiment with campaigns to find out what’s working and why. You can also remove our Mailchimp branding, so your business takes center stage.
Standard: Accelerate your growth. Starting at $14.99, you can create, launch, and manage multichannel marketing campaigns all in one place. Expand your reach with digital ads, improve your targeting with predicted demographics, and grow relationships with custom workflow automations. In addition to all of our templates, you also have the ability to create your own. Plus, advanced reporting gives you insights so you can attract even more customers.
Premium: For marketing pros who need advanced capabilities and customizations, we offer custom domains, complex segments, and multivariate testing in our all-in-one Marketing Platform starting at $299. You also get access to premiere phone, email, and chat support.
Every Mailchimp account, regardless of pricing plan, offers 5 different levels of access for users. In just a few clicks, you can invite other users to join your account, assign user levels, or revoke account access.
Connect your store
Mailchimp’s e-commerce features help you track visitors to your site, capture order information, and then pass all the data back to your Mailchimp account. Mailchimp integrates with a number of different e-commerce solutions, including Shopify, Magento, and more.
Once your store has been connected, your customer and purchase data syncs automatically, and you can grow your list by giving folks the option to subscribe as they’re checking out. Then, use the data you collect to learn what resonates with your customers, recommend products they’ll love, create targeted segments, send abandoned cart emails, build e-commerce automation workflows, and create helpful order notification messages.
For more about these features, skip ahead to the automation section of this guide or check out our Mailchimp for E-Commerce and Getting Started with Marketing Automation guides.
Manage your audience
The foundation of great email marketing is a clean, up-to-date list of engaged contacts and customers who have given you permission to send them email campaigns.
You can create as many lists as you’d like, but for most users, we recommend maintaining a single list and using segmenting data and groups to manage your contacts. Each of those contacts will have their own subscriber profile page, with valuable information like social data, member rating, location, activity history, and more.
Plus, if you connect your store to Mailchimp, each contact’s profile will show their purchase history too, so you’ll know which campaigns drove their purchases, how many orders they’ve made, and how much money they’ve spent.
Segments
Mailchimp’s powerful segmentation tools allow you to use the information you have about your contacts to create and send targeted campaigns. Not only will that help you increase the relevance of your email, you’ll see better results, too. On average, the click rates of segmented campaigns are about 55% higher than those of non-segmented campaigns.
You can create 3 different types of segments in Mailchimp—auto-update, static, and pre-built—and they can help you target contacts based on their interests, location, demographics, subscriber activity, purchase history, and a whole lot more. Any custom segment you create in Mailchimp can be saved as an auto-update or static segment.
Pre-built segments, however, behave a bit differently, so let’s take a closer look.
Pre-built segments
Pre-built segments are automatically generated based on list information or subscriber activity. We’ll move contacts into and out of pre-built segments for you when they meet (or no longer meet) specific segmentation conditions, so you can target folks with just one click.
Pre-built segments fall into 3 categories:
- Subscriber engagement segments —available for all Mailchimp users—are based on the signup date of your contacts and how they interact with your email campaigns. You could use these segments, for example, to send a welcome email to new subscribers or to re-engage folks who haven’t opened your recent campaigns.
- Customer behavior segments are available when you connect your store to Mailchimp and provide a quick way to reach your potential, recent, first-time, repeat, and lapsed customers. You could use these segments to send a thank-you email to first-time buyers or a special offer to lapsed customers, encouraging them to return to your store.
- Demographics segments are powered by Predicted Demographics, a powerful tool that predicts the age and gender of your contacts. Predicted Demographics (and demographic pre-built segments) are available to paid Mailchimp users who connect their store. You could use these segments to announce an event to the women on your list, for example, or target everyone over the age of 35 with a promotional campaign for a new product.
Groups
You can also create groups within your list to categorize people by their interests and preferences. Those groups can then be used for building segments and sending email to targeted audiences.
For example, if you operate an online clothing store, you might have customers interested in a variety of apparel: men’s, women’s, children, accessories. By creating groups in your list, you can give customers the opportunity to choose the clothing types that interest them, and then only send them campaigns relevant to those interests.