Mailchimp Review: Best AI Automation Tool in 2026?

Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of email marketing platforms out there?

Choosing the right one could be tricky, especially with industry giants like Mailchimp vying for your attention.

Making the wrong choice could lead to wasted time, frustration, and missed opportunities to connect with your audience.

In this review, we’ll dive deep into Mailchimp’s features, pricing, & ease of use so you could decide if it’s the perfect fit for your business needs.

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What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing tool.

It’s like a super helpful email marketing software that lets you create & send emails to a bunch of people at once.

Think newsletters or sales announcements!

With easy-to-use templates and a drag-and-drop editor, you can design awesome emails without any coding.

Mailchimp also helps you organize marketing campaigns by grouping your audience and sending targeted messages.

You can even see who opened your emails and clicked on links.

Need help?

Mailchimp customer service offers articles, videos, and live chat support.

Who Created Mailchimp?

Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius started Mailchimp back in 2001.

They wanted to give small businesses an easier way to create email marketing campaigns.

Their goal was to build an email marketing platform that was simple to use and affordable.

Back then, most email campaigns were boring and plain. Mailchimp changed that with fun designs and helpful tools.

Today, millions of people use Mailchimp, but there are also many Mailchimp alternatives available.

Top Benefits of Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers a ton of great features for businesses of all sizes. Here are a few of the top benefits:

• Ease of Use: Even if you’re new to email marketing, Mailchimp’s intuitive interface makes it simple to create and send professional emails. You’ll be sending email marketing campaigns like a pro in no time!
• Variety of email templates: Choose from a wide range of pre-designed email templates to get started very quickly, or build your own with their drag-and-drop editor. You can even use custom-coded templates for a truly unique look.
• Free Plan: Mailchimp offers a generous free plan Mailchimp option, perfect for those just starting out. This allows you to try all the features and explore the platform before committing to paid plans.
• Unlimited Contacts: Even on the free plan, you can have unlimited contacts! This is a huge plus for growing businesses.
• Advanced Features: Mailchimp offers powerful features like customer journeys, behavioral targeting, and a website builder, allowing you to create sophisticated campaigns and automate your marketing efforts.
• Unlimited Users: Collaborate with your team seamlessly, as Mailchimp allows for unlimited users on all plans.

With its combination of user-friendliness, robust features, and flexible pricing, Mailchimp is a compelling choice for businesses seeking to elevate their email marketing game.

Best Features

Mailchimp is a famous tool that helps people talk to their customers.

It started as just a way to send emails. Now, it is a full home for all your marketing needs.

At first glance, you might think it is only for newsletters.

But Mailchimp stands out because it does so much more.

It helps you find new people, keep them happy, and sell more things.

It is fairly easy to use, even for new users.

Whether you have a tiny shop or a big company, this site gives you the tools to grow.

1. Email Marketing

Email is the heart of Mailchimp.

You can make beautiful messages to send to your fans.

You don’t need to be a tech expert.

You can use copy-pasting to move your text into the two editors they offer.

One is for quick work, and the other is for deep design.

You can also use merge tags to put a person’s name in the email.

This makes it feel more personal.

If you want to know which subject line works better, you can try A/B testing.

2. Marketing Automation

AI Marketing automation is like having a robot assistant.

It sends emails for you while you sleep.

For example, it can recover abandoned carts by emailing people who forgot to buy their items.

You can also set up email scheduling so your news goes out at the right time.

For larger businesses, there is multivariate testing.

This lets you test many things at once to see what sells best.

It saves you a lot of time and hard work.

3. Audience Management

Keeping track of your fans is easy here.

You can build a contact list and sort people into groups.

When you get new contacts, you can tag them to remember where they came from.

Mailchimp’s pricing often depends on how many people are in your data list.

Even unsubscribed contacts can count toward your limit on some plans.

The Standard plan is great for this because it lets you use five users to manage your audience.

4. Social Media Marketing

You don’t have to leave the site to talk to people on Facebook or Instagram.

You can make and post social ads right from your dashboard.

It helps you reach people who haven’t seen your emails yet. You can even track how many people clicked on your posts.

This keeps your brand looking the same everywhere.

It is one of the new features that makes the platform more than just an email tool.

5. Content Creation Tools

Making things look good is simple with prebuilt templates.

You can choose from classic templates or newer, modern designs.

There are content creation tools that let you pull in photos and logos easily.

You can even connect to other sites to grab images.

This makes email creation very fast.

You won’t have to spend hours trying to make a button look right.

It helps you stay professional without hiring a designer.

6. AI Marketing Tools

Mailchimp now uses smart AI to help you work.

It has a tool that can write your email text for you.

It can also look at your data and give you send time optimization tips.

This means it tells you exactly when your fans are most likely to open their mail.

This tech used to be only for the Premium plan, but now more people can use it.

It is like having a smart assistant who knows what your customers want.

7. Digital Marketing Templates

If you are stuck, you can use a template to start.

There are over 100 designs for different jobs.

Some are for selling shoes, and others are for sharing news.

The Essentials plan gives you access to a lot of these.

If you are on the Free forever plan, you still get the basic ones to try out.

These templates make sure your emails look great on phones and computers.

You just fill in the blanks & hit send.

8. Lead Generation Platform

To grow your business, you need to find more people.

You can make landing pages and pop-up forms to collect names.

When people sign up, they become new contacts in your list.

You can also use the knowledge base to learn the best ways to get people to sign up.

This platform is a great way to turn strangers into customers.

If you ever get stuck, you can use email support to ask for help during your first month.

9. Analytics & Reporting Tools

It is worth noting that knowing what works is very important.

The reporting tools show you who opened your mail and what they clicked.

You can see how much money you made from a single email.

If you want to see how you compare to Constant Contact or other best Mailchimp alternatives, these reports are key.

You can see all your data in one spot.

This helps you make better choices for your next big project.

Pricing

Pros and Cons

Need help deciding? See Mailchimp’s strengths and weaknesses. This will help you choose wisely.

Alternatives to Mailchimp

Personal Experience with Mailchimp

My team and I used Mailchimp to launch a new product.

We wanted to reach a lot of people and get them excited. Mailchimp made it easy!

We used these cool features:

• Templates: We found a template we liked and changed it to match our style.
• Signup forms: We put a signup form on our website to collect email addresses.
• Automation: We set up a welcome email for new subscribers. It introduced them to our company.
• Tracking: We watched to see how many people opened our emails and clicked our links.

Mailchimp helped us reach thousands of people.

We got the word out about our new product. It helped us grow our business!

Final Thoughts

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing tool for a reason.

It’s easy to use, has helpful features, and offers a free plan for beginners.

You can create nice-looking emails, and automated messages, and organize your audience.

But, Mailchimp can get expensive if you have a lot of contacts.

It also has limits on how many emails you can send.

If you need a lot of customization or have a tight budget, you should check out other options.

Want to give it a try?

Sign up for a free Mailchimp account and see if it’s right for you!

Frequently Asked Questions

More Facts about Mailchimp

• Free Plan Limits: Mailchimp’s free plan now only lets you have 500 contacts and send 1,000 emails a month. It used to allow much more.
• Costly Contacts: You have to pay for every person on your list. This includes people who have unsubscribed or addresses that are listed twice.
• Rising Prices: Since a company called Intuit bought Mailchimp in 2021, the prices have gone up. In late 2023, prices rose by about 7% for most plans.
• Plan Options: The “Essentials” plan starts at $13 a month, and the “Standard” plan starts at $20. The “Premium” plan is very expensive, starting at $350 a month.
• Missing Features: You can no longer use helpful tools like “automated emails” or “A/B testing” on the free plan. You have to pay to get those back.

• Customer Support: Many users are unhappy with the help they get. People on the free plan only get email support for the first 30 days. After that, they are on their own.
• Bad Reviews: Mailchimp has a very low score of 1.3 out of 5 on the website Trustpilot. Many customers say the service is slow and hard to reach.
• Ease of Use: While the tool is famous for being easy to design emails, some people now find the new menus and settings hard to navigate.
• Smart Tools: Mailchimp now uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to help you write emails and sort your customers into groups.
• Working with Other Apps: It can connect to over 300 other tools, such as Shopify for online stores or Salesforce for keeping track of customers.

• Spam Issues: Even though Mailchimp tries to fix it, some users still complain that their emails end up in the “Spam” folder instead of the “Inbox.
• Better Deals Elsewhere: Because Mailchimp has become more expensive, many people are switching to other services like MailerLite, Brevo, or Moosend.